In the year 1948, George Orwell authored his iconic dystopian novel, 1984. Television was just emerging as a consumer item. Orwell understood the media’s potential as he imagined how a technology designed for entertainment might be hijacked to serve a more serious and sinister purpose: surveillance and mind control.

Orwell’s future surveillance state, Oceania, featured an evolution of television, the “telescreen” — a kind of two-way TV that the regime had installed in every home and public space. Telescreens served a dual function: propaganda and surveillance. Cameras and microphones could see and hear citizens at all times.

Another technology, Speakwrite, servedto dictate and rewrite historical records, ensuring that previous ways of accounting for history would be overwritten by a newer version of the “truth” of history. All older versions would disappear into “The Memory Hole.”

Given the way technology has evolved in recent decades, Orwell’s description of his surveillance state’s technology looks rather ham-handed today. But his intuition that the totalitarian instincts already at work in 20th century politics would seek to harness all new technology for the purpose of surveillance and mind control was spot on.

Orwell couldn’t have suspected that just a few decades later humanity would enter “the digital age,” giving us direct, invisible access to everything human that could be collected and managed in a “cloud.” This would open the floodgates for the creation of a system of surveillance and control much more effective and less obviously barbaric than Orwell’s low-tech Gulag. Even more radically, Orwell couldn’t have imagined a world in which a diversity of private companies, with names like Google, Amazon, OpenAI and Palantir, might be in a position to do all the donkey work Oceania’s unique totalitarian governing body, “The Party,” required to maintain civic order.

Of the companies mentioned above, Google, Amazon and OpenAI have become household names. Palantir not so much. That’s because it is focused on the secretive, largely invisible activity of producing tools of surveillance made possible through data integration and analytics. It serves governments, intelligence agencies and large corporations as it processes vast amounts of disparate information for decision-making, surveillance and predictive modeling.

Companies focused on surveillance tend to prefer discretion and even opacity. They are generally careful about allowing others to survey them. But Palantir recently stepped outside the conversational intimacy that comes from working with a limited number of secretive national security state actors. Last year, it began to appeal to retail investors for funding. It has been wildly successful, with its share price outperforming everything else on the market.

Business Insider recently featured an  article focused on Palantir’s stock market success: “Inside the lovefest between Palantir and its army of retail investors.” It ends with a message CEO Alex Karp, in a hyper-excited state, addressed to retail investors: “Let’s not talk to analysts about the burden of being right. I’m very happy to have you along for the journey and you are partners for us. Every Palantirian, we are crushing it.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Burden of being right:

A perception and often an illusion commonly experienced by individuals and sometimes even entire nations that need to justify the most extreme sociopathic forms of aggression by their belief that they live in a world in which all acts can be classified as either right or wrong, it being implicitly understood that their own acts are always right.

Contextual note

In this short video posted on X, Karp takes the trouble to make it clear what he means by “the burden of being right.” In giving this explanation his tone and body language exhibit troublingly manic traits that nevertheless don’t quite reach the historic heights of Steve Balmer from his days as CEO of Microsoft. Karp glosses the elements of the burden, which includes items such as the “burden of actually looking at the math, the burden of reading what a rule of 40 is, the burden of being honest about what an enterprise software company is, or the burden of explaining to your friends that you’re really happy.”

That collection of burdens may seem like a lot of unnecessary weight on one man’s shoulders, just for the crime of “being right.” Karp then gets to the real point. “It’s necessary to scare enemies and on occasion kill them. And we hope you’re in favor of that.” He relishes shareholders who enjoy killing as much as he does.

Karp has a PhD in philosophy. In 2016, The New Yorker referred to him as “Palantir’s philosopher-C.E.O.” The story goes that in the late 1990s, Karp’s Stanford Law friend, Peter Thiel, convinced him that philosophy without execution is dead. That convinced him to do something more useful than pondering metaphysics. Thiel also convinced him that tech was the new lever for change. The Dot-Com Boom at the turn of the millennium led Karp to believe that applied epistemology (how data shapes truth) could be weaponized — or monetized, two concepts that resonated in the head of a philosopher who now saw his mission as one of changing the world for the better.

Most philosophers steer clear of ideas like weaponizing and monetizing. They see epistemology as the area in which concepts need to be called into question, especially when they point in a direction that tempts the philosopher to feel the need to bear “the burden of being right.” The 17th century philosopher, scientist and politician Francis Bacon began his most famous essay with Pontius Pilate’s question: “What is truth?” Most serious philosophers say, we don’t really know but let’s try to approach it.

The Grayzone reports that in his ravings for investors “Karp went on to predict social ‘disruption’ ahead, insisting it would be ‘very good for Palantir.’” It’s clear that his use of the word “good” is not quite in sync with the Socratic concept of “the good life.” It is, however, perfectly in sync with the Silicon Valley definition of “good,” which translates quite simply as profitable.

For Karp to philosophize and, at the same time, run a business focused on national defense and military technology, he needed to embrace an extreme Manichean view of morality. This video demonstrates his alacrity to see the world as divided into good and evil, with the certainty that he’s on the side of good. After a confrontation with a protestor complaining that Palantir is complicit in killing her family in Palestine, the philosopher calmly explains to her how someone who bears the burden of being right reads the situation. 

“I believe she believes I’m evil,” he observes. “I believe she’s an unwitting product of an evil force, Hamas. That she unwittingly is part of their strategy, a product.” In other words, he is a philosophizing human, with free will and epistemological good sense. She, in contrast, is a product, a commodity, an object. He generously counsels her to accept a truth he would never think of applying to himself: “Do not become a product of an ideology that sounds sensible.” 

Historical note

Karp’s remarks may have been unconsciously inspired by Rudyard Kipling, a British poet who grew up in India, who in 1899, in a poem called “The White Man’s Burden,” famously encouraged the US to assert its control over the Philippines. The poem includes the following passage:

“Take up the White Man’s burden

In patience to abide

To veil the threat of terror

And check the show of pride.”

US President Theodore Roosevelt judged that it was “rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view.” Teddy might similarly have acknowledged that Karp does “rather poor” philosophy but exhibits “good sense from the expansion point of view.” Imperialism needs a solid tool kit more than it needs poetry.

A New York Times feature article on Karp notes his tendency to “crow a little about Western civilization’s resting on Palantir’s slender shoulders.” One of his friends explains that “he sees himself as Batman, believing in the importance of choosing sides in a parlous world.”

How parlous is that world? The NYT article tells us that Karp “thinks the United States is ‘very likely’ to end up in a three-front war with China, Russia and Iran. So, he argues, we have to keep going full-tilt on autonomous weapons systems, because our adversaries will — and they don’t have the same moral considerations that we do.”

Only a philosopher-CEO like Karp can prove capable of believing that the best road to peace is to head “full-tilt” into arming those who exercise “the burden of being right” in their combat against those he and his technology have identified as “a product of evil forces.” How else might Western civilization and its noble ideals be maintained?

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.