The insider threat: the techopoly
A single-point-of-truth for all your societal controlling needs…
Hey y’all, it’s Nick, and I’m Sick of this Shit. This is part 2 on Shyam Sankar and a continuation on my investigation into Palantir and the insider threat. You can read the other articles here - The insider threat: Palantir is here and The insider threat: Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar. Let’s get into it…
Winning at all costs
Sankar and team at Palantir have a very clear vision—win at all costs. They achieve this by letting Palantir observe and see everything, all the time, all over the globe. The company name gives away the game. Some quick lore for those who might who might be familiar—in JRR Tolkien’s fantasy world, the Palantir are incredibly powerful, magically imbued stones capable of allowing communication across vast distances and to see other places or events (though the events are more riddles than guides). Also, and most importantly, the Palantir can be easily corrupted and influenced by a higher will power.
The folks like Peter Thiel and Alex Karp (two of the Palantir founders) know this lore as well as I, else they wouldn’t have named the company as they did. They know the flaw and expect to be the higher power exploiting it. The plan—fundamentally alter America using technology; undermine the Constitutional order and replace it with whatever preferred method of rule they choose. Achieving such ends requires something—war and anti-regulation. Here is where we come back to Sankar, The Defense Reformation, and winning at all costs.
The monopsony vs the techopoly
You’ve heard of a monopoly, but maybe not a monopsony or a techopoly, so here’s a quick breakdown to help us view things in a tech forward lens.
a monopoly is when there is a single supplier who controls the entire market.
a monopsony is when there is a single consumer who controls the entire market.
a techopoly is when there is a single source of truth who controls the flow of information manipulating the entire market.
The distinction between supplier and consumer and owner of information is an important one when thinking about the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). When framing this discussion we need to first establish the players. First, there is no established monopoly. Second, the consumer and the regulator are one-and-the-same, the Government. More specifically, the Department of Defense (DoD), is the monopsony. Third, the company primed to be the owner of all information, Palantir, wants to be the techopoly. Up until the early 1990’s, the DoD wasn’t fully a monopsony, that happened after the contractor budgets were slashed and regulations became more strict. In The Defense Reformation, Sankar writes
Consolidation bred conformity and pushed out the crazy Founders and innovative engineers. This was the Great Schism of the American Industrial Base….The Monopsony’s fixation on cost-plus contracting, control, and tedious regulation has made working in the national interest bad business, suitable only to risk-averse investors who are addicted to dividends and buybacks — a luxury only affordable at the end of history. That is not what the most dynamic parts of the American economy do — only the dying parts.
and highlights companies like Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, and Ball as examples of places that used to make military weaponry or technology, at mass scale, and no longer do. It wasn’t cost-effective for them. The Government made it that way because the goal was deescalation and regional stabilization. The budget cuts and regulations. Those happen to be longer-term, slower projects needing periods of slower advancement and restrictions on unfettered innovation. Whereas technologies of war, specifically intended for destruction, observation, and control thrive in systems built with anti-regulation in mind. Palantir knows the one thing holding back the techopoly is the DoD itself.
In part 1, I discussed the 10x and 100x engineers—this idea in the tech world that some engineers are worth 10x or 100x others and because they can produce more in less time, they are inherently more valuable. Sankar is a strict believer in this theory—it’s at the heart of a lot of the “meritocracy” culture that drives so many good software engineers out of companies. It’s the culture of constant conflict and competition vs commonality and collaboration. This is highlighted in Sankar’s closing to his introduction of The Defense Reformation,
Reforming the system means renouncing the communist conformity that’s slowing us down and unleashing the charismatic leaders who can drive outcomes — in the boardroom and on the battlefield.
Heavy stuff there. Sankar’s examples of charismatic leaders, “Tom Mueller, Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf, Ryan Tseng” and others. While some might be charismatic and some might be leaders, I would harshly disagree with the assessment that Elon Musk is charismatic or a leader, but he has a shitload of money and power and those are modern replacements, I guess.
It’s also a good thing we quickly clear this up in Sankar’s view, regulation equals communism. Because everything bad is communism, right? Only anti-regulation is the way, because without regulation there is nothing holding you back. To get there:
replace regulation with nothing—break the monopsony.
replace thoughtfulness with recklessness—speed, need more speed.
replace plans with impulsiveness—plans are always useless after first contact, right?
replace empathy with callousness—the only requirement is winning.
replace democracy with meritocracy—if you aren’t producing, you aren’t valuable.
It’s the 10x and 100x mentality. It’s further tying our value as a person to our production alone. In this world view, you work until you die or else you lose the only thing giving you value.
The adults have left the room
The US now finds itself in a situation where all of the adults have left the room, so to speak. We’re at the dawning of a new technological age—the age of Artificial Intelligence—and this new age brings about risks we aren’t event beginning to consider. Instead, the US Government is actively working to prevent any regulation by the States on AI. Now is the time where thoughtful debate, asking questions, and being preventative are the most important—it’s the only chance we have to do it. Once we reach the point where AI is already integrated into every facet of our lives isn’t the time, it’s too late by then.
Here is where Palantir and Sankar, along with other tech leaders from Meta and OpenAI, are taking advantage of the situation presented to them. They are using their money, positions, and influence networks to ensure the anti-regulation goes through. As discussed in my initial article, The insider threat: Palantir is here, the tech companies have now done the last thing they needed to so as to rebuild the military from the inside.
The Government has commissioned a set of new Lieutenant Colonels - to include Shyam Sankar - to head a new Army Reserve unit, Executive Innovation Corps (Detachment 201), to enable further collaboration between the military, private tech companies, and social media platforms. Not only this, the US Government has also awarded Palantir a contract with Homeland Security to turn its surveillance and data collection operations inwards. This is the blatant social engineering part of the techopoly, or as George Orwell termed it, the “thought police”. Where you conform…or.
As many of us have read from Orwell’s 1984, we know about the Party and Big Brother. It outlines a techopoly—“who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past”—where in our case the information all flows into a fully unregulated, unmonitored AI model and comes out as finely tuned propaganda and indoctrination. Tailored to the person. The nuanced shifts in information is how the tech companies, as a coordinated group, move from just a supplier state to a supplier, consumer, and regulator state all at once. The perfect trifecta of control.
I’ll leave you with Peter Thiel’s own words in this YouTube clip posted by More Perfect Union.