The Palantíri are the dark crystal balls that people like the wizard Saruman look into in “Lord of the Rings” to find out what is going on on the other side of the world. The company Palantir Technologies, founded in 2003 or 2004 – opinions differ – in Palo Alto, California, follows a similar business model. In principle, it is about collecting and systematically exploiting gigantic amounts of data from all conceivable sources, including social media, for the purpose of gaining knowledge.
The American secret service CIA has been one of its customers from the start, so it is not surprising that one of the main areas of application for the essentially versatile software is so-called predictive policing, i.e. the statistical prediction of crimes. Palantir thus effortlessly links the world of the hobbits with that of “Minority Report”.
For a long time, supposedly until 2023, the company was loss-making, but since last year it has apparently been making a profit; nevertheless, its market value is tens of billions of dollars, and its CEO Alex Karp is considered the highest-paid CEO in the world, with a salary estimated at just over a billion dollars.
This number appears in the documentary “Watching You”, the subtitle of which is “The world of Palantir and Alex Karp”. Occasionally, prominent figures from Axel Springer can also be seen there, such as the former “Bild” boss Kai Diekmann, who is visibly fascinated by Karp and his job, as well as Friede Springer and CEO Mathias Döpfner. This is no coincidence; between May 2019 and the beginning of 2020, Karp sat on the Springer supervisory board. This is a transparency note on our own behalf; WELT is a wholly owned subsidiary of Springer.
On Thursday evening, there was a special screening of the film in Berlin-Charlottenburg to mark the film’s release. Director Klaus Stern answered questions from the audience, which included CDU member of the Bundestag Philipp Amthor. Rumor had it that Karl Lauterbach was also on the guest list, but he didn’t show up. There was plenty of opportunity to ask questions. The film has a double problem: Alex Karp was skeptical about the project and politely but firmly rejected the team that tirelessly followed him, for example to the economic forum in Davos or to Leipzig for an art exhibition he financed. And his company deals in secret, with partners that range from the Ukrainian state to the police in Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia. Both Karp’s world and that of Palantir could only be outlined using blank spaces. Perhaps understandable, but the film’s subtitle turned out to be overly full-bodied. Afterwards, no one was any the wiser.
The recurring protagonists include a journalist from “Manager Magazin,” who Karp investigates with just as limited success as Stern, and a former Palantir employee who had to leave on bad terms after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. He allegedly helped the British company support Trump’s election campaign by using an algorithm more or less inspired by Palantir to select potential voters and then bombard them with relevant propaganda.
The employee – a native Russian who was pursuing his childhood dream of being a pirate and living on a boat in Andalusia at the time of filming – insists on his version, according to which there can be no question of support, and therefore has not signed anything and has not received any severance pay. That is why he is allowed to speak. Unfortunately, he says as little as most of the others here. He regrets his time at Palantir, he says thoughtfully at one point, smoking a roll-up on a picturesque terrace, and considers it to be the dark spot on his CV. But why? That is not really clear.
The film insinuates that it is probably due to the clash between ideal and reality. A whole bunch of idealists came together, the former employee remembers. Karp is one of them. He would never make a pact with rogue states; it is important to him to support America and Europe in police work and in the fight against terrorism. And yet the employees, especially their boss Alex Karp, have to deal with the fact that people are being killed by bombings and drone attacks based on metadata analyzed by Palantir. Not only does Ukraine use Palantir to identify war targets, the same algorithm also helps Israel digitally comb Gaza.
This upset parts of the Berlin public. You sit there and think: So what? What is the scandal, if there is one at all? In the further development of Horst Herold’s dragnet search, which played a key role in tracking down RAF terrorists? Of course, the more left-liberal and data protection-conscious a public is, the more it will dislike such a powerful instrument. Herold was also fired by the then Minister of the Interior Gerhart Baum, who had no sympathy for the cool combinatorics of computers. Stern draws the parallel explicitly and lets Baum review the story.
Nevertheless, the method was successful. Isn’t it just good police work to sort through the available evidence until a trail emerges that leads to the perpetrator? Palantir has taken the principle to the next level. And has made itself irreplaceable thanks to the amount of data it has. It is not without problems for a private company to unite so much power and to have effectively driven key players in Western security into dependence. But that is hardly the fault of Palantir or Alex Karp; rather, it is a failure of states and their authorities to have become active in the development process themselves.
The mystery of Alex Karp remains unsolved over the course of the hour and a half, which drags on quite a bit, especially at the beginning, and seems downright confusing. How the son of a black mother and a Jewish father from Philadelphia was able to study sociology under Habermas and later even get his doctorate – on anti-Semitism, by the way – and suddenly end up in Silicon Valley with libertarian venture capitalist Peter Thiel and create Palantir with him is not entirely plausible. Even whether the company’s work should be viewed as politically more staunchly right-wing or even neo-Marxist left-wing, in the sense of comprehensive risk management, is up to the viewer’s silent judgment.
Transparency note: Alex Karp was a member of the Supervisory Board of Axel Springer SE from May 3, 2019 to the beginning of 2020.