Whether it’s ARPA’s Project Agile Cold War-era counterinsurgency technology used to track the Vietnamese or Palantir’s War on Terror-era predictive policing technology used to track Black-Americans, the overall goal is the same—to keep the undesirables in their place. Palantir and other private data-mining corporations do not only reap enormous profits from military contracts, often yielding subpar results, but more importantly facilitate the military industrial complex’s vast surveillance empire and domestic and international counterinsurgency operations whose ultimate goal is the maintenance of a status quo that benefits a small number of wealthy capitalists and keeps the vast majority in crippling poverty.
