Silicon valley

The Palantir manifesto doesn’t go far enough

Tech companies like Palantir now find themselves in a bind. Wanting government contracts, they have a reason to stay politically neutral. At the same time, they rightly suspect that the greater part of the left has already marked them for destruction. The hostility has little to do with Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm for Austrian economics, or its occasional calls for a property-based franchise – an old National Liberal demand rather than a fascist one. Rather, the left is hostile to technology because it is America’s conservative party, suspicious of anything that threatens to undermine old solidarities. MAGA was quick to forgive corporate America after it called a, at least temporary, halt

alex karp palantir

Fighting technology is futile

A 20-year-old from Spring, Texas, named Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama has been charged with attempted murder after he was accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at the gate of Sam Altman’s San Francisco home on April 10. He then allegedly walked toward OpenAI’s Mission Bay headquarters and told employees he intended to burn the building down as well. He was reportedly carrying a manifesto – a “three-part series,” according to Fox News – that included a list of other AI executives and investors and their home addresses and documents discussing potential risks that AI poses to humanity, with a section titled: “Some more words on the matter of our impending extinction.”

technology

The arrogance of the tech-skeptics

If you’ve been paying attention to social media lately, then you already know the score: smartphones are corrupting our children, we need legal intervention immediately. Roughly half of US states have enacted some form of age-gating for social media or pornographic content. Australia banned under-16s from social media platforms outright, France and Indonesia followed suit and the United Kingdom is now asking people for their papers to read moderately offensive blog posts. You don’t need me to rehash this. The phones have nuked the interior lives of Gen Z, Gen A and the hitherto unborn Generations B and C. Every opinion lands somewhere between “protect the children” and “this is