Why won't Peter Thiel shut down Palantir?
Seems like that is a more important question than "why do people work there."
Hamilton Nolan just published a two thousand word article about the people who are responsible for Luciferian military-surveillance company Palantir, and it did not even once mention Peter Thiel. The multibillionaire chairman and founder of Palantir.
And while you may be thinking “he just wasn’t writing about Thiel,” that is exactly who he was writing about. The stated topic of the article is “who should quit their job right now….in light of all social and political and economic realities, and taking into account all personal responsibilities.” Hamilton adds that we “should expect those with a privileged socioeconomic position to use that advantage for the common good.” And most importantly of all, he insists that “We should focus our condemnation.” But Thiel is completely out of view in this article. So is Palantir president Stephen Cohen and Palantir CEO Alex Karp.
Instead, this is an article about the responsibility that workers bear for Palantir. Wage employees. It’s about how we dole out blame for what a company does once we set aside the guys who actually control the company. Who is left? Apparently not the guys who provide building security, according to Hamilton (they’re unionized, which makes them the good kind of worker). The guys working email jobs? Presumably they’ve got to go. What about the receptionist who spends half the day emailing and half the day watching the lobby? Grey area, I guess.
Compare this to his judgments about the media. New York Times? No one “is obligated to quit” even though it has spent the last two years actively running cover for genocide in Palestine. The Washington Post”? It is “a vital calling” to remain there and “fight for its soul” even though it has lurched even further to the right than the Times over the past several years. But Fox News? Evidently “contributing in any way” to it “is immoral” even if you are “trying to improve it”.
In a better world, Hamilton would have written a piece that focused on the disproportionate responsibility the rich bear for our problems under capitalism, and then added as an aside that workers should avoid working for evil companies, too. This is an ordinary liberal-progressive argument, and if Hamilton made it, I could have given the radical response: actually the capitalist class is entirely responsible for our problems under capitalism and workers have no meaningful moral agency whatsoever.
But that just isn’t what the liberal-left Overton window looks like these days. Instead, Hamilton writes from an essentially libertarian perspective that ignores the responsibility of the capitalist class completely and focuses entirely on scolding workers, and this will be hailed as a very leftist perspective simply because he is so mad at workers for their employment “choices.” Yes, he is doing this in the service of anti-racism; Rand Paul used to make the exact same argument, insisting that it was on employees to choose to work elsewhere if they don’t like it when their employers engage in racial discrimination.
The Marxist position isn’t just an incremental tweak on this reasoning — it’s directly at odds with it. And popular opinion isn’t exactly compatible with it, either. I do not think it helps build popular opposition to Palantir to aim our fight entirely at other workers, hectoring them for refusing to choose unemployment over employment — when we cannot even spare a “fuck you” for Peter Thiel.
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