08.01.2021

Palantir, the company that will provide the surveillance software that taps into the big data on government databases to provide around-the-clock surveillance for UK’s borders, a contract that is worth £22million of taxpayer money, is well-known for its controversy. Controversy is a somewhat neutral word that has a little spice thrown into it, like a British curry – a word, that simply means subject to prolonged heated public debate. What is the debate about, you might ask? At the very least it should involve its founder, Peter Thiel, who is a self-professed conservative libertarian, a billionaire venture capitalist, co-founder of PayPal, a board member of Facebook, one of Trump’s 2016 campaign donors and one of his former advisors. Considering that libertarianism is against government spending, the many posts that Thiel occupies are in somewhat conflict with his beliefs. Most people will have connotations for the term conservative libertarianism, but as labels can be deceiving and language is fluid, it is important to find a reliable source. Thiel provides us with one in his old blog-post from 2009, called “The Education of a Liberitarian” (quite possibly in reference to The Education of Henry Adams, the posthumous autobiography that speaks of its authors scorn toward “proper” education and his love for technology).

Thiel begins with the three things that form the sacraments of his faith in what he describes as “authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good”; opposition to “confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual”. Whilst the first two sacraments are fairly run-of-the-mill in political vocabulary, few individuals would claim mortality equates to ideology. Controversial. However, this is quickly rivalled by his lamenting that he doesn’t believe that “democracy and freedom are compatible”. From this, we take a quick detour through post-college years of nihilism, where he speaks of the “relentless indifference of the universe” that he encountered in his younger years as a lawyer and a trader in Manhattan – arguably the birthplace of said indifference. A delightful anecdote is that as a consequence to a realization that capitalism wasn’t that popular (a statement left unsubstantiated), “the smartest libertarians, by contrast, had fewer hang-ups about positive law and escaped not only to alcohol but beyond it”, which I can only assume is a high-brow way of saying these bros did a lot of blow.

But I digress. Written in the aftermaths of the financial crisis of 2007, that arguably did see the central banks and the government transfer unforeseen amount of wealth in the form of a bail-out package from the taxpayer to the corporations who mishandled their investments in the first place, it seems permissible that the “system” should be under scrutiny. Thiel however has certain ideas of what system is to be held responsible – ideas that aren’t necessarily considered main-stream in the traditional sense of the word, albeit they are gaining a foothold. Thiel openly admits to being hell-bent on circumventing democratic processes, glorifying the internet as one of the areas that for the libertarian cause allegedly remain beyond the body of politics. Thiel does not apply much academic rigor into defining his terms – politics appears simply as the malicious anti-thesis of the elusive freedom, the realm of the collective that limits the individual. The reason why Thiel does not bother to substantiate his terms further might have to do with his disillusionment with educating the masses on why they are lambs led to their slaughter – or in this own words, “for those of us who are libertarian in 2009, our education culminates with the knowledge that the broader education of the body politic has become a fool’s errand”. What constitutes as his valiant efforts to educate people on the virtues of libertarianism that he has since deserted are absent from the story.

There are certain demographics to blame for the failure to achieve absolute freedom, of course. “… the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron”. Thiel has in a follow-up post clarified that it is absurd to suggest women’s vote would be taken away but considering he does not believe in democracy, his opinion on women’s vote hardly matters. Thiel is no nihilist, however. “I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world”. He offers three ways out of the dystopian hell of living with other people, which are outer space, cyberspace and seasteading in search for a “ mode for escape [that] must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom”. One of the many projects underway is the Seasteding Institute Thiel has founded together with the Patri Friedman, grandson of Milton Friedman (the father of monetarism and a great inspiration to Reagan and Thatcher). Frustrated with the attempts of governments to hinder his quest for eternal life, Thiel evidently views the sea as a frontier welcoming to a lonely cowboy that simply wants his freedom to be.

To add a layer to the story of the man who shan’t be stopped, the name of Thiel’s company that UK has contracted to provide the software that will collect the data and surveil its borders, is Palantir, named after the stones in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The stones are described as crystal balls that allow anyone looking into them to communicate with anyone else in possession of another stone, but here’s the twist though; anyone with strong will and mind can use it to see virtually anywhere, in space and in time. In the original story, it does not end well for those who misuse such a power, but arguably Thiel might be of the opinion that without the pesky Hobbits and their meddling, Middle Earth would have been better off. This is also not the first time he used Tolkien as his inspiration:

“[Thiel] was an early investor in military-contracting startup Anduril, which was named after the magical sword in the series that was wielded by the trilogy’s hero, Aragorn. The company, founded by Palmer Luckey in 2017, was recently awarded a contract with US Customs and Border Protection to build a virtual “wall” as a means to prevent illegal crossings into the US. The system will utilize surveillance towers to detect movement” ()

Considering Thiel is anti-government, he certainly is no stranger to partaking in government contracts and fingering the honey pot that is taxpayer money, the very honeypot his ideology deems as inherently violent against the freedom of an individual. Thiel’s involvement in these projects, which cast a long shadow over the freedom of movement and solidify political borders, would in the light of his 2009 text be most certainly considered political – his conclusion, after all is that “”politics is about interfering with other people’s lives without their consent”. Seductive sentiment, yet the incoherent ideology of Thiel’s libertarianism leaves anyone searching for meaning in it chasing their tails while Thiel clears the taxpayer’s checks. 

That technology should deliver us from the tiresome co-dependence of politics, that bind these powerful individuals to the dowry masses that drag them down with their mediocrity, is an “open question, which will not be resolved for many years” as Thiel puts it, but his efforts are commendable. One does not even need put on a tinfoil hat, when reading Thiel’s passionate words that “the fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism”. That this “machinery of freedom” should ultimately deliver (some of) us from death is no new hope, nor is Thiel likely to win the “deathly race against politics and technology” in his lifetime, by which we can only assume he means the race against his own death. What the rest of us are expected to do in the meanwhile, other than rot away in our organic meat-cages, which Thiel assumes the majority will docilely do, I do not know – his vision is a bit blurry in that respect. For now, however, he will be providing his company’s all-seeing powers to the British border-control to cope with the impending confusion from the lack of infrastructure in the No-Deal Brexit January.