The Surveillance Cyborg: Palantir and the Posthuman Security Apparatus

• In Event: Pedagogies of Ignorance and Authoritarian Epistemologies: Cyborg Surveillance States, Meme Warfare, and MAGA Drag Queens

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
This paper explores the production, circulation, and normalization of ignorance in the post-truth era, through examining how pedagogies of ignorance operate through Palantir Technologies, a data analytics and surveillance software company co-founded by PayPal/Facebook billionaire Peter Thiel. I reveal how ignorance is engineered, monetized, and disseminated through technologies of surveillance and control.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
I draw on Nancy Tuana’s (2006) epistemologies of ignorance framework, which illustrates how ignorance is created via deliberate practices that are always facilitated by power. I also revisit Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory (1991), specifically her ideas about the “informatics of domination” (p. 170) and apply it to the current surveillance state that Palantir exemplifies.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Following Johnson et al. (2004), I used the cultural studies methodology of “readings,” to interrogate how disinformation operates as pedagogy at Palantir. Drawing upon McKee’s (2003) approach to interpretive cultural textual analysis, I read, or sought to understand, how Palantir enacts pedagogies of ignorance.

Data sources
Primary materials include content from Palantir’s website and interviews with Palantir CEO Alex Carp and others in Palantir leadership. Like Ellsworth (2005), I used these texts, as well as secondary data of journalists and scholars who have studied Palantir as “raw material” (p. 13).

Results
Palantir, through its normalization of predictive policing embedded in the logic of carceral datafication, obscures the human cost of surveillance, rendering data subjects anonymous and abstract and conditioning the public to accept surveillance as a “necessary” condition of security. Palantir also enacts a form of strategic ignorance through its biopolitical data capture and downplaying of the ethical implications of health data mining. Further, it cultivates technocratic opacity—its proprietary platforms and algorithmic governance obscure the inner workings of critical decisions, shielding predictive models and risk assessments behind trade secrets and constructing ignorance through inaccessibility. This purposeful unknowing, a form of ignorance that is structural, not incidental, is presented to the public as an unquestionable inevitability, priming publics to accept decision-making based on, for instance, predictive policing and pandemic modeling, without explanation.

Framed through Haraway’s cyborg theory, Palantir is a posthuman bureaucracy, a hybrid formation of human operators, software algorithms, and biometric sensors where decision-making is outsourced to predictive models that govern without clear human authorship. As a surveillance cyborg, Palantir’s algorithmic infrastructure enacts cyborg vision, a distributed gaze that surveils bodies and behaviors, claiming objectivity and universality while encoding partial, situated logics and racial, class, and ideological biases. Here, “citizen” is reconfigured as a biosurveillance subject, a body fragmented into risk vectors, watched by machines that claim neutrality but enforce political logics.

Scientific or scholarly significance
We live in an era where facts are strategically manipulated through digital architectures that claim neutrality while enacting deeply political operations. Palantir’s platforms appear objective, but they encode racialized, carceral, and securitized logics that disproportionately target vulnerable populations. This paper helps us further understand how truth, power, control, and surveillance operate in the age of disinformation.

Author

• Jennifer April Sandlin, Arizona State University