AI-powered surveillance company Palantir created a chore coat. Great, now I have no choice but to burn mine

AI-powered surveillance company Palantir created a chore coat. Great, now I have no choice but to burn mine

Such is the power of brand contamination; infamous data surveillance megacorp Palantir has decided to bang a logo on a chore coat to sell as corporate merch.

Chore coats are the traditional short denim or twill jacket of the 19th-century French working class. Palantir, however, is a company whose public words and commercial-in-confidence activities are inspiring local calls to have its contracts cancelled and its business banned.

The gentle French garment is now as cursed as whatever “Marie Amazonette” will ever wear to the Met Gala.

According to the New York Times, Palantir’s head of strategic engagement wanted to create a merch offering “that wasn’t a bland corporate polo or vest”. Thus the veste de travail, with its convenient pockets and famous styling on the likes of Paul Newman and Jeremy Allen White became the latest cultural victim of a company with a $325bn+ market capitalisation and whose chief executive’s favourite motto is “Dominate”.

The NYT reports in-house strategic engagers used to deferentially emblazon this word on hoodies and T-shirts before they decided to ruin my coat. This seems to be effective labelling for one reason, and that is knowing immediately who to avoid in a bar.

Let me assure Palantir’s reputational management team that “bland corporate” is not the sticky brand of a company whose very name comes from the seeing-stones manipulated by the dark lord Sauron in The Lord of the Rings as he attempts to take totalitarian control and, uh, dominate the lands of Middle-earth.

With its reputation as the “scariest company in the world”, I’m disappointed the merch-makers didn’t double down on a range of horned war-helms, branded black capes and wearable fog machines for that molten-fire-pits-of-Angband workplace-casual look.

“Sinister” is arguably more the vibe for a global, corporate, Trump-aligned outfit supplying AI-powered surveillance technology to America’s “ICE” paramilitary, delivering “increased efficiency in deportation logistics” – although Palantir pushed back on Amnesty International’s claims operations may have been at “high risk” of contributing to human rights violations.

But data-driven deportation is not Palantir’s only business! The Guardian has previously reported on its role in the Pentagon’s lethal unmanned drone program, the company’s assistance in police departments’ allegedly racist criminal profiling and the use of its software by the IDF in Gaza. Militaries and police forces all over the world use its services; so do corporations. So does the British government, and so do Australian governments – the latter to the tune of $80m in contracts and $160m in investment.

Should we discount as hyperbole, then, MPs from both the UK’s governing and opposition parties describing Palantir’s recently issued manifesto as like something from “Robocop” or “the ramblings of a supervillain”?

Is it supervillainy for the Palantir co-founder and board chair, Peter Thiel, to be building a bunker in New Zealand, funding far-right political influence operations across the world, investing in for-profit private libertarian charter cities and giving speeches about “the antichrist” that quote a Nazi jurist “whose work he said helped create the core of his own beliefs”?

Thiel didn’t write the manifesto! The document that claims “some cultures have produced vital advances; other remain dysfunctional and regressive”, described disarming Germany and Japan after the second world war as an “overcorrection”, backs AI weapons and has many angry words for those who’d scrutinise (for shame!) the rich and powerful was authored by Thiel’s co-founder, now CEO, Alex Karp. The “Dominate” guy.

Karp clarified the absolutely-not-supervillain-like values of the company in a video to shareholders in February when he said “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and, on occasion, to kill them.”

Asked to respond to calls for its banning in Australia, it was reported a Palantir spokesperson replied the company was “proud” its software was used to “keep Australians safe and tackle financial crime”. Confidence in this statement somewhat depends on a shared definition of the words “safe” and “financial crime”.

Does Palantir’s version of “safety” match your democratic expectations of the same?

Palantir describes itself as “just a software company”. “We simply provide the tools to help customers organise and understand their own information,” its spokesperson has explained. “How those tools are used is determined by the customer and constrained – legally, contractually and technically – by their instructions.”

Of course sovereign democracies should restrict Palantir. Of course governments should not hand sensitive data to them – if only because far-right influence campaigns to weaken trust in democratic institutions are rewarded every time governments enfranchise “the scariest”, “sinister” corporations that people already do not trust.

Billionaires aren’t the only ones who read Lord of the Rings. It’s wise to be attuned to threat, whatever coat it’s wearing.

Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist