The Anti-Palantir Manifesto

I had high expectations, there’s a lot of interesting content in this topic, but this is 22 points of low-substance buzzwording.

There’s no common theme, very little justification of any of the claims, and frankly very little to do with palantir

> 19. America created the first global surveillance state, but it will not be the last. Too many have forgotten, or perhaps taken for granted, the revelations of Wikileaks and Snowden. States across the world from China to Russia are creating even more powerful global surveillance systems and propaganda machines. Leveraging private defense contracts in countries across the world, Palantir seeks to make itself the operating system of a cross-border global secret state while it pushes its own farcical version of ethno-nationalism.

If you're honestly thinking the US surveillance state is used to the same extent that those in China and Russia are to act upon enemies of the state at home and abroad, it makes me take you less seriously.

Could it be? Absolutely. Would Alex Karp gladly direct his company to program it even if it imprisoned/killed his own family for the benefit of shareholders? Probably. But when SCOTUS just told the government this week that they need warrants for geofenced surveillance operations, this doesn't point to the existence of a surveillance state like that in those nations. At least, not yet.

Why can't you see the common theme?

The internet is going to turn into a control mechanism if we don't equalize the power dynamic and build things that make it easy to empower the individual.

Build for the common man, not the vampire.

Nym is pretty complicated and although they offer some kind of traditional VPN service as well IIRC, their main product is actually the only large scale operational "mixnet", which you can think of as kinda similar to Tor but a lot more resistant to certain types of deanonymization attacks (specifically it's designed to be safe against passive global adversaries, ie an attacker who can monitor every packet on the internet, though with the default settings at least it's not quite there yet: https://petsymposium.org/popets/2026/popets-2026-0055.php).

The research behind the mixnet is quite legit (look up Loopix). There's cryptocurrency involved because they're trying to do this whole complicated thing to incentivize people to operate nodes in the mixnet (though who are we kidding, the real reason is to make money). One can argue this is good for the long term sustainability of the network, and helps prevent sybil attacks by encouraging a large number of legitimate nodes. Of course, the downside is that the company is trying to make money, not just make the best mixnet possible. Having a profit motive also means they're incentivized to get the network to a point where interactive usage works well even at the price of anonymity (an optimization in this vein is sorta the reason that the paper I linked above is possible).

But having a working mixnet at all is extremely cool. People have been researching mixnets for decades without producing anything practical. While Nym is by far the most deployed / most ready mixnet rn, there thankfully are other options coming up, like https://katzenpost.network/ (though I believe most of the devs behind Katzenpost are also in some VC-funded situation, they certainly at least are trying to position katzenpost as more of a community driven project).

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