Why I've stopped investing in AI surveillance companies (even though they're profitable)

Reading time: 6 minutes

"Every time you spend money, you're casting a vote for the kind of world you want." - Anna Lappé

A couple of weeks ago I was doing the usual—staring at my Yahoo Finance app.

Palantir was up bigly again.

The numbers were beautiful: I'd bought during the IPO for Palantir, sold at $25, then traded from $68 to $108.

This company had been ridiculously good to me, and here it was climbing again. I even found an old Reddit comment where I'd declared: "Palantir will be one of the biggest companies in the world in 5-10 years, mark my words."

But something made me close the app instead of buying. What was that shift?

My Palantir obsession started for absolutely terrible reasons. Mad scientist CEO with wild hair? Check. Cool-sounding AI projects involving national security? Double check. A name from Lord of the Rings—literally Sauron's All-Seeing Eye? I mean, come on. It was made for me.

The deeper I've gone into Bitcoin, though, the more I've been wrestling with what Palantir actually does versus what it pays me. They build surveillance and decision-making systems at population scale. For governments, this means tracking communications and predicting behaviour. Corporations use it to monitor employees and analyse customer data for competitive advantages. Here's what keeps nagging at me: the same technology that prevents genuine threats can monitor peaceful dissent or control individual behaviour in ways we've never seen before.

The Peter Thiel connection also fascinates me. Here's someone whose contrarian sovereignty insights I'm genuinely trying to learn from, yet he co-founded a company that builds tools for institutional control. Through Thiel's lens, I guess Palantir makes perfect sense. It's a genuine monopoly doing things few companies can do, it's contrarian because most people are uncomfortable with surveillance technology, and it solves genuinely hard problems around processing massive datasets. But there's this uncomfortable paradox. Thiel advocates for individual sovereignty and contrarian thinking while building technology that might make both significantly more difficult for everyone else. The same system that identifies genuine threats could monitor citizens who simply think differently than their governments prefer.

Reading about historical precedents hasn't helped clarify things—it's made me more confused. IBM's punch card systems helped the Nazis organise the Holocaust with unprecedented efficiency. IBM wasn't ideologically Nazi, just selling powerful organisational technology to a paying customer. The East German Stasi built the most effective surveillance state in history using mostly human networks and careful record-keeping. Imagine what they could have accomplished with modern AI capabilities.

China's social credit system shows us what happens when surveillance technology enables behavioural control at population scale. Citizens' access to transportation, housing, and employment gets determined by algorithmic assessment of their compliance with state preferences. I keep noticing this pattern: institutions adopt surveillance technologies faster than individuals can develop defences against them. But is that inevitable?

This whole thing has forced me to think about investment ethics in ways I never really considered before. My high time preference brain still wants those immediate profits from Palantir's growth trajectory. But I'm trying to develop more low time preference thinking about second and third-order effects.

Can you build true independence by funding systems designed to prevent independence? It's like trying to build monetary sovereignty by investing primarily in companies that benefit from monetary manipulation. The opportunity cost might not just be financial. By profiting from surveillance capitalism, I could be making myself financially dependent on the expansion of systems that might ultimately be used against people like me.

Jeff Booth's framework about technology driving deflation seems relevant here. AI makes surveillance technology cheaper and more effective over time, while traditional privacy and anonymity become more expensive and difficult to maintain. I'm still working through whether this creates an unavoidable asymmetry or if there are ways to position around it.

What's slowly crystallising for me is this: how you build wealth might be just as important as how much wealth you build. Nassim Taleb's quote is starting to make real sense:

"You are rich if and only if the money you refuse tastes better than the money you accept."

I'm experimenting with positioning for scenarios where individual sovereignty becomes more valuable over time, rather than scenarios where institutional control becomes more profitable. This means avoiding companies whose primary value proposition is institutional surveillance or control. Instead, I'm focusing on what I'm tentatively calling "positive sovereignty investments"—Bitcoin for un-confiscatable money, businesses that enhance individual capabilities rather than institutional control, and technologies that might become more valuable when centralised systems fail.

This could mean missing significant returns from companies like Palantir. But honestly? It tastes better.

I might be completely wrong about this whole framework. Maybe I'm overthinking the risks, or maybe surveillance capitalism is just how the world works now and fighting it is pointless. I'll probably miss out on substantial gains if this technology continues expanding profitably.

But right now I'm more interested in building wealth through systems that might get stronger when centralised control fails, rather than systems that depend on centralised control succeeding. I'm still figuring out what this means in practice, but for now I'm choosing to bet on human freedom rather than institutional control, even when the profits point in the opposite direction.

We'll see how this experiment goes and whether I regret it in a few years. For now, though, I'm sleeping like a baby :)

Vive le You,

Aimee

This newsletter is for people who refuse to play by broken rules. Let's build the Age of Abundance instead.

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