Palantir and Peter Thiel have found themselves in the headlines a lot this year, very often in the same sentence as the word “surveillance”. The idea behind Palantir is a simple one: give one company, or one control room, a real-time algorithmic view of how a government or an economy is actually functioning, and let them help run things better.
That idea is not new. In 1971, Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile built almost exactly that system, out of telex machines and a room full of fibreglass chairs, on practically no budget. There’s evidence it worked, until a coup destroyed it before anyone found out whether it would have worked at scale. This was known as “Project Cybersyn”.
