I'd prefer to think there are more possibilities than that.

> “So when people are worried about surveillance, of course, there are huge dangers there, but you know, you will have far fewer rights if America’s not in the lead.”

Lose your rights to Vance/Thiel or to China. Thank you tech community for giving us that.

Wasnt he a philosophy major and lawyer? So he should know bad arguments like hasty generalization or false choice. I would argue that creating a survaliance state would increase china's likelihood of "winning", why would people choose the US or western values if they are essentially the same?

America becoming a surveillance state means China has won. If not in terms of global power, then certainly in terms of their ideology vs ours.

Disproportional surveillance is harmful, exploitive surveillance. The entire point of Palantir is to maximize that condition - a tool for powerful entities to snoop on us while they increasingly obscure their own behaviors.

Surveillance state has already happened. His words aren't meant for the interviewer but for US senators and others in control of purse strings. Buy this or someone else will.

I am surprised to see Palantir's CEO to say such a thing!

We became a surveillance state in 2001, so in effect, Bin Laden won. [0] And don't forget, people sacrificed their lives so that the White House would not be partially demolished.

> FRONTLINE goes behind the headlines to reveal the dramatic inside story of the U.S. government’s massive and controversial secret surveillance program–and the lengths they went to trying to keep it hidden from the public. Part one goes inside Washington to piece together the secret political history of “The Program,” which began in the wake of Sept. 11 and continues today

[0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/united-states...

After reading this I don't understand the connection between surveillance and China. OpenAI/Anthropic/Google are developing AI without using it for surveillance. Whether they win the AI race or China does has nothing to do with Palantir.

Sauron Says Palantir Surveillance Preferable to Haradrim Winning the Horse Breeding Race

Surveillance is the movie, radio, TV watching you. Not so prefereable.

This is a false dichotomy, from someone who profits from such manufactured fear.

Nope.

Absolutely no.

That Thiels worldview is publicly displayed through unusually bad lit theory takes on behavior (Girard) uploaded in the impressionable post teen years and now is on display in phenomenally weird scifi takes on Old Testament theorizing from non-analytic (read mythological thought) opens a window into this perpetually teenaged patriarchal world view. These are all stunted boys who failed to develop a connected world view. They see castles and moats and firewalls and keeps full of gold and they simply assigned binary trickery to these metaphors and get giddy when rhapsodizing about how to get more. Time to lock up men.

"Man who sells surveillance equipment says US should become a surveillance state."