From Dagens:
Billionaire investor Peter Thiel just delivered a string of explosive warnings about the future of global technology. During a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Palantir co-founder took direct aim at the Vatican. According to a report by CNN, Thiel bizarrely accused Pope Leo XIV of acting as a “Chinese communist agent.”
The controversy stems from the Pope’s recent encyclical demanding strict international regulations on artificial intelligence. Thiel argued that these religious warnings will only slow down American developers in the global tech race. Since Beijing notoriously ignores the Vatican, he claimed this moral crusade inadvertently hands China a strategic victory. The Aspen audience reportedly met this wild characterization of the American-born Pope with stunned laughter. However, the tech mogul’s friction with the Catholic Church has been brewing for quite some time. Just months ago, he delivered highly controversial lectures in Rome regarding the Antichrist and existential technological threats.
[SD note: Thiel is best known for co-founding PayPal, making the first major outside investment in Facebook, launching the venture firm Founders Fund, and co-founding Palantir Technologies. He remains closely associated with Palantir as its chairman.
[The company most relevant to the “Big Brother” concern is Palantir. Founded in 2003, Palantir builds data-analysis software for governments, militaries, police agencies, intelligence services, and large corporations. Its systems are designed to pull together vast amounts of scattered information and make it searchable, cross-referenceable, and actionable. That can be useful for counterterrorism, battlefield intelligence, fraud detection, logistics, and investigations — but it also raises obvious civil-liberties concerns.
[The Big Brother potential: Palantir does not simply store data; it helps institutions connect data — immigration records, police files, financial records, location data, health systems, intelligence reports, social networks, and more. In the right hands, that can uncover threats. In the wrong hands, or under weak oversight, it can become a machinery of surveillance: a way for government and corporate power to see patterns in citizens’ lives that no single database would reveal by itself. Academic and civil-liberties critics have described Palantir as one of the most secretive and consequential surveillance/data-integration firms in the world.
[Admirers see him as a visionary investor who helped build the modern tech world. Critics see in Palantir a prototype for a new form of technocratic control — not an old-fashioned dictator with cameras on every street, but a quieter digital system that knows where people go, whom they know, what they buy, what they say, and how institutions might classify them. In short, Thiel is one of the architects of modern Silicon Valley power, and Palantir is the company that most embodies the fear that “security,” “data,” and “efficiency” could merge into a Big Brother apparatus ripe for manipulation, ironically, by a real anti-christ, not the one Thiel gives lectures about.]