stop cursing everybody-- unattributed
I worry a great deal about Palantir. Peter Thiel commands in his online captions "let's change the world," but this facial recognition software and complex data analytics contravenes the very notion of personal liberty, and seems less innovative than simply more of the same. Asimov predicted, rather uncannily, where global conglomeration is taking us, long before David Mitchell earned a tsunami of critical acclaim with Cloud Atlas, as early as 1952, with Foundation and Empire. The protagonist, whose name is beyond recollection, discovers at the close of the novel that robots--for all intents and proposes androids, have programmed absolute control of human destiny, an ending more chilling than Mitchell's grim predicate of our decline and fall as a species, and here we are with these massive monopolies to which we've already ceded our lives, today nearly a prerequisite for existence, barring a reversion to a nomadic existence. Examining Thiel's media hostility under another lens, however, Thiel's destruction of Nick Denton's business is eerily similar to what Ayn Rand's mogul publisher Gail Wynand does by silencing a columnist who has co-opted his paper. Wynand cannot stop the man from preaching to his readers, so with an improbable ruthlessness, Wynand simply shuts down his presses, giving The Fountainhead a spiritual stridency for which Rand is often criticized. The Fountainhead is Rand's best polemical writing, undoubtedly, but she eschews the media because journalists, by definition, are shepherds, trying to penetrate, reform as much as inform upon its audience. It points to an old fashioned conceit about gay men and lesbians as a class, a retentive prudery.
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