Leaving the Shire: a farewell letter to my colleagues at Palantir
A typical letter announcing a departure from the company mentions the great times, the incredible opportunities to learn and the amazing colleagues. After all — it’s not you, it’s me. I left Palantir a year ago, under curious circumstances that prevented me from writing such a farewell letter at the time. It has been a long goodbye that has inspired a story of its own.
But I do miss you all, and cannot help but think of you, especially now — at the time of one of the defining moments for the company. A few weeks ago Palantir has renewed their contract with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, despite protests from civil rights activist groups, hundreds of students, members of academia and engineering community and some of Palantir’s own employees and alumni. Palantir has been increasingly criticised over its role in facilitating the tracking down of undocumented immigrants, separating families from their children and arming ICE with technology that leverages big data in pursuit of draconian methods belonging to the age of the Inquisition.
Current events and decisions of the company are equally relevant to both present and past employees of the company. After all, most of us have both financial and moral stakes in the company long after our tenure has expired there. The goal of this farewell letter is two-fold. First — interpret Palantir’s decision to support ICE, given my intimate knowledge of the company and its culture. Second — invite my colleagues still employed by Palantir to contemplate current events in the light of history. The baton is in your hands now.
We — current employees and alumni — all know that Palantir is not a software company. We call ourselves that because it makes it easier to explain our work to our grandparents, neighbours and investors from the Middle East. But what are we then?
Palantir works to reanimate its clients. Its merchandise are not enterprise apps, rather modus operandi and culture. In many ways it is unique — a new type of company. It is an ideological company, a psychologist, a rabbi or a priest to the rulers of the world. Palantir’s software is the flesh that embodies that ideology.
Palantir concerns itself with the world’s key infrastructure. With few exceptions, the clients of the company are monopolies in their respective domains: logistics, insurance, healthcare or military intelligence and government. Palantir’s clients are mature and established — the Goliaths of this world. At some point in the history they were the innovators who came up with services that later became part of the backbone of our society. Having reached middle age, these key institutions grew fat, started suffering from high blood pressure, heart disease and gout. The backbone of our society has developed severe scoliosis and is in need of urgent treatment. That is why most of us chose to work at Palantir when we did. And we could have joined one of those advertising companies just around the corner.
Most people who work for Palantir are idealists. We believe that through hard work, engineering craftsmanship and creativity we can rejuvenate, even transform the client institutions that we too often find stagnating under the heavy load of bureaucracy, office politics and zero sum tactics. We hold an optimistic outlook believing that technology can play a role in putting these critical institutions on a different tack. But its not about installing a better database. True change requires nothing less than change in culture. That is why our work involves embedding, infiltrating the host institution and eventually getting married in order to fuse the DNA of the old and the new. If we work with someone — it always and without exception goes deep, beyond just client and supplier relationship and beyond the call of duty. It also takes a special kind of mindset to do this job.
We live in the Shire and we call ourselves hobbits. Wearing identical t-shirts provided to us by the company we surrender our individuality to embrace the collective. A lot of us date and get married to our peers in the commune. To many Palantir is a tribe, family and home after years of adversity and insecurity experienced growing up middle-class but finding it hard to fit into the fabric of society. We gladly accept lower salary in exchange for the sense of purpose and common mission. At the local canteen daily we enjoy organic food while sharing stories of our victories against our common enemy: chaotic, uncertain, anxious and unimaginative present. We helped find Osama bin Laden! We created a new method that will change how Airbus builds air planes! We saved that major logistics company from a devastating attack by Russian state hackers!
We are the true believers. At our annual gatherings that overnight turn Palo Alto from the sleepy suburbia into a modern day Woodstock we manifest our faith in the latest enterprise software and declare our allegiance to our philosopher-turned-CEO. The cocktail of the two makes us sign up for another year of self-sacrifice and gruelling work towards a better tomorrow.
Rapid progress and modernisation driven by boundless optimism, faith in new technology and charismatic leadership comes with equally severe risks attached. Eric Hoffer in his classic “The True Believer” claims to find similarities between most mass movements and ideologies that shaped our society — ranging from religious movements to social or nationalist movements. Hoffer finds that “the men who rush into undertakings of vast change usually feel they are in the possession of some irresistible power”. That power stems from a combination of a few factors: discontent with the present, conviction in a new, world changing, technology and faith in an infallible leadership, typically, men of words. Hoffer helps locate Palantir on the timeline of a relentless historical pattern. Recent history of the 20th century reminds us of the devastating resolution of that pattern across Europe.
I grew up in the communist Eastern Europe. There are few benefits of such upbringing. If there is one, it is that of being cautious and sceptical of boundless optimism and strong convictions. The failed ideologies still linger in the collective subconscious of the Eastern Europeans, having been forgotten by our peers in the West. Lenin’s promise of modernisation of the country was, apparently, unattainable without forced deportation of my relatives to Siberia. And many of their contemporaries in Poland and Germany did much worse than Siberia. History does not repeat itself but it rhymes.
After five years spent at Palantir, I can empathise with you who are still there. I can imagine the emotional toll created by the ever widening gap between your efforts and the public perception of Palantir’s work. I know where you are coming from. Unfortunately, it seems, history and social sciences — big data — can tell where Palantir is going, despite your best intentions. Through inherent complexity of society, best intentions of well meaning individuals are routinely used to pave the road to greater collective suffering. It is time to think for yourself and act smart, humble and humane.
Isaac Bashevis Singer — who also had the benefit of growing up in Eastern Europe before emigrating to the US, while it was still an option — wrote: “I’ve realised one thing: the worst people are those who want to save the world. Among simple folk — merchants, skilled workers, the so-called little man — one can still find decent people. But among those who want to bring about the coming of the Red Messiah there is no truth, no compassion. What’s easier than torturing in the name of an ideal?”
