This is really great (and by great I mean terrifying to see it all laid out plainly). The only nitpick is the idea that the model “is coming to europe next” … as if this whole thing wasn’t kicked off by Brexit and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Europe was the testing bed for this a decade or more ago.
Yeah Brexit was a test run. Great Summary by Carole Cadwalladr “The great British Brexit Robbery” (published by the Guardian, de-published following pressure by Google, I guess, but can be found on the net).
I was completely spooked by the fact that these Brexiteers were using language in a Nazi-like way. At one point a former Thatcher minister was booed out of a conservative party assembly which shouted “he is a traitor!”.
yep, there is a blind spot around imperialism; the European bourgeoisie come to the US to learn what the business ant the politic shall be made and come back with the US point of view. For example in France, the spokeswoman of the Parti Socialist (one of the main party) is working for Palantir.
This is not an exception, every administration run windows for millions each years, even if their is a dedicated administration to go to open source
The root cause of everything bad, the error of errors, is to have private property of the means of production. Without it, we’d have a wealthy, technologically advanced civilization within planetary boundaries. Socialism first!
Amen, brother. But, unfortunately, most people around here finds it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Somebody was like, “this is all horseshit. Ima map it.”
To me this seems like any other big gov procurment. Which is bad of course but isn’t anything new. And I fail to see how this leads to authoritarinism especially in Europe. We have our own local home grown cliques that capture gov contracts.
I’m no expert, but the issue here seems to be replacing many smaller contracts with one big one for Palantir. I. E., one agenda headed in one dark direction.
But what do I know?
Honestly I don’t know what would be the difference if this was a contract with Oracle, Microsoft, SAP etc. That is democratic stack?
I guess the crows are coming home to roost in that the owners of these companies are prepared to use them as leverage (starlink) and also are more comfortable airing some pretty wild views of how they think the world should work (Thiel with his Antichrist obsession, Ellison with his ideas for a surveillance state, The general tech bro Curtis Yarvin worship).
Start joining the dots and it starts becoming hard not to be concerned where this is headed.
I’d be concerned regardless of the companies they partner with, or if it’s completely government controlled.
The problem is the surveillance itself. It stated decades ago, accelerated under Bush, and has expanded with each administration since.
That is true that these aren’t faceless corpos but behind there are men who are out in public.
We have our own local home grown cliques that capture gov contracts.
Yes. If you scroll to the bottom, you find that the project is led by Prof. Francesca Bria.
Looking her up on Wikipedia, one has 2 thoughts: 1) She has a lot of hustle. 2) Why haven’t I heard about any of that?
This is just the Monorail Man doing the song. Except with disturbingly fascist overtones.
yeah her bio looks like a lot of EU funds for various projects that are POC and then shelved. US big tech is basically her natural enemy in that regard.
