Most Americans have never heard of Palantir. That’s by design. It doesn’t make phones or social platforms. It doesn’t beg for your data with bright buttons or discount codes. Rather, it just takes it. Quietly. Legally. Systematically. Palantir is a back-end beast, the silent spine of modern surveillance infrastructure.
Palantir’s influence isn’t hypothetical. It’s operational. From the battlefields of Ukraine to the precincts of Los Angeles, its software guides drone strikes, predicts crime, allocates police resources, and even helps governments decide which children might someday become “threats.” These aren’t sci-fi hypotheticals. They are pilot programs, already integrated, already scaling.
This software—Gotham, Foundry, and now its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP)—is designed to swallow everything: hospital records, welfare files, license plate scans, school roll calls, immigration logs and even your tweets. It stitches these fragments into something eerily complete—a unified view of you. With each data point, the image sharpens.
If Facebook turned people into products, Palantir turns them into probabilities. You’re not a user. You’re a variable—run through predictive models, flagged for anomalies, and judged in silence.
This is not just surveillance. It’s prediction. And that distinction matters: Surveillance watches. Prediction acts. It assigns probabilities. It flags anomalies. It escalates risk. And it trains bureaucrats and law enforcement to treat those algorithmic suspicions as fact. In short: the software decides, and people follo
Hellbound and Down 