A few days ago, a controversy broke out around an event at one of the most prestigious technical universities in Europe, located in the city where I live.
Palantir was supposed to take part, but after several protests, the company was eventually excluded.
That matters because this is not an obscure institution. It is the kind of university that sits close to the centre of European research, engineering and technological innovation. If a company like Palantir is invited there—or rejected there—it sends a message.
I wasn’t really following the story at first. I heard about it because my wife told me that Palantir had also approached her company. They wanted to rent the entire space after working hours for a recruitment event. They also said they would close the place off and have police stationed outside.
If you are a company that needs police protection just to hold a recruitment event, I think that says quite a lot by itself.
Apparently, the offer was very good.
And for a company that isn’t exactly going through its best financial moment, refusing that kind of money is not necessarily an easy decision.
Still, they said no.
The reason was basically: Palantir doesn’t fit our values.
When my wife told me, I was strangely happy about it.
We even high-fived.
Maybe that sounds a little ridiculous, but I was glad to see that people are at least asking questions about companies like Palantir instead of automatically accepting them because the technology is impressive.
And the technology is impressive.
That is exactly what makes Palantir interesting to me.
The obvious comparison is Orwell.
A company capable of bringing enormous quantities of information together, analysing it and making connections between data naturally makes you think about surveillance, power and Big Brother.
You can also bring Huxley into the conversation if you want: Orwell imagined control through fear and repression, while Huxley was more interested in a society where people could be controlled through comfort, conditioning and distraction.
But honestly, those comparisons have been made so many times that I don’t have much new to add.
Palantir made me think more about Jünger.
Ernst Jünger is probably my favourite writer, and although he is well known in some circles, I don’t think people outside them read him nearly as much as Orwell or Huxley.
One book I would recommend is *The Worker* (*Der Arbeiter*), published in 1932.
The title can be misleading if you don’t know the book.
The Worker is not simply someone working in a factory.
Jünger uses the figure of the Worker to describe a new type of human being emerging in a world increasingly organised around technology, production, mobilisation and efficiency.
What interests me most is that technology in the book is not just a tool.
It starts becoming the environment itself.
And when the environment changes, we change with it.
That is the part that stayed with me.
We build machines to adapt the world to us, but at some point we start adapting ourselves to the machines.
Our routines change. The way we work changes. The way we communicate changes. Even the way we think about time, productivity, or what is considered normal starts to change.
And after a while, we can forget that things were ever different.
Something artificial becomes normal simply because we have lived with it long enough.
I think that is one of the most interesting things Jünger understood: technology does not only change what we can do. It can slowly change what kind of people we become.
That is what made me think about Palantir.
Not because I think Palantir is literally the beginning of some dystopian dictatorship.
That would be too simple.
What interests me is what happens when systems become capable of knowing more and more about us, analysing us, predicting us, and helping institutions make decisions about us.
Jünger’s brother, Friedrich Georg Jünger, went even further in his criticism of technology.
In *The Failure of Technology*, he questions something we still tend to assume today: that more technological efficiency necessarily means more progress.
It doesn’t.
A machine can become better without our lives becoming better.
A system can become more efficient without becoming more humane.
We can automate more and still somehow feel that we have less time.
That idea seems simple, but I think about it a lot.
Especially now with AI.
I say this as someone who is completely fascinated by new technology.
I’m studying IT. I use AI. I want to understand it. I love discovering what new systems can do, and I genuinely think technology can improve our lives in enormous ways.
I’m not writing this because I want us to stop technological progress.
Quite the opposite.
But I think liking technology is also a good reason to question it.
Because maybe the real danger is not that machines become too advanced.
Maybe it begins when we stop asking what we are building them for and start changing ourselves to fit the world they create.
That is probably what stayed with me after the whole Palantir story.
The company didn’t come to my workplace. I wasn’t involved in the university controversy. I only saw it indirectly through what happened around me.
Still, I was happy to see people saying no.
Maybe it changes nothing in the grand scheme of things.
But it reminded me that technological progress is not something that simply happens to us.
There are still decisions involved.
And if any of this sounds interesting, read Jünger.
That was probably the real point of this post anyway.