I am a Maoist Third Worldist and a Senior Forward-Deployed Ontologist for Population Removal at Palantir. My team is building Project HAYFORK, a unified decision layer that combines immigration records, commercial location data, household graphs, employment histories, protest activity and other signals to estimate whether a person should be monitored, detained, removed from a geographic area, denied access to critical infrastructure, or escalated to a customer with more kinetic capabilities. I personally own the roadmap for reducing false negatives in the “Pre-Hostile Civilian” category. I know what this sounds like. I know what Palantir does. I know what ICE does. I know what the United States military does. My claim is that, once you stop doing ethics on a five-year time horizon, this is probably the most left-wing job I could have.

The mistake people make is evaluating HAYFORK according to who controls it in 2026 rather than its expected utility across the full future light cone. Assume there is even a 0.3 percent chance that some descendant of the administrative infrastructure we are building survives the transition out of capitalism. Now multiply a small improvement in state capacity by ten billion people, hundreds or thousands of years, and eventual extraterrestrial settlement. A system that currently helps an imperial state decide which households to target could someday help a planetary people’s republic identify famine three weeks earlier, route medicine to every diabetic in Chengdu, relocate coastal populations before a typhoon, or allocate protein during a nuclear winter. At that scale, refusing to improve the ontology because you dislike its present deployment means sacrificing trillions of unborn people to preserve your personal moral cleanliness during one extremely short historical interval.

This is where e/acc is basically correct and most Western Marxists are not. Capability is a productive force. You do not get socialism by deliberately keeping civilization stupid. You want better models, better logistics, better sensors, better coordination, better manufacturing and, yes, better systems for allowing a state to know where people are and what they are doing. The political question is who ultimately controls those capabilities. The technical question is whether they exist when history requires them. Speed has moral weight.

People sometimes respond that Palantir’s present-day deployments are implicated in atrocities. Yes. I am aware. I work here.

I am not claiming that someone detained through software today experiences less harm because the schema representing his household might be useful to a communist government in 2140. His harm is one term in the calculation rather than the entire calculation. Ten thousand visible people today will always feel more morally salient than ten billion hypothetical people in 2200. The numbers do not care.

This is also basic historical materialism. Capitalism develops productive forces it cannot ultimately contain. Marx did not need the bourgeoisie to have good motives when it built railroads. Mao did not believe industrial machinery became metaphysically reactionary because a capitalist had touched it. Yet the contemporary American left has somehow arrived at the position that an advanced data-integration system acquires a permanent class character at compile time.

That is idealism. The proletariat does not need morally pure software. It needs the software.

My friends ask why, if this is really my theory, I cannot work on something less objectionable inside Palantir. Supply chains. Hospital logistics. Aircraft maintenance. This misunderstands the principal contradiction. If future socialist societies will require extremely capable administrative machinery, deliberately placing myself on the least coercive part of the stack would mean optimizing my résumé for present-day social approval rather than maximizing influence over the machinery that matters.

I need to be where the ontology touches the person.

This is why I have never understood the hostility toward the hobbit culture internally. A technical organization with a civilizational mission needs people who believe they are building something worth inheriting. When our team says we are trying to save the Shire, I take that seriously.

There is also something strange about the demographic politics of the criticism. Alex Karp is an African American man from Philadelphia who went to Central High School. His mother is Black. His father is Jewish. He grew up around civil-rights activism. Yet I am routinely told by people whose politics consists mostly of consuming the correct media that the progressive thing for me to do is resign from the company he runs and write recommendation algorithms for a mattress startup.

I am supposed to look at a Black Philadelphian Central graduate building arguably the most sophisticated state-capacity software company in America and conclude that historical materialism requires me to work at Squarespace.

Please update your priors.

None of this means Palantir is secretly communist. It obviously is not. Peter Thiel is literally there. What I reject is the inference that because a productive force emerges under capitalism, socialists should prefer that productive force not exist.

My current project contains a subsystem called Household Resolution, which attempts to determine whether several apparently unrelated people actually constitute one household. Under the present customer, this can make it easier to find somebody.

Under another social order, the same capability could make sure every person in that household gets rice.

Same graph. Different line.

When people tell me I am rationalizing a comfortable position at an evil company, I take the criticism seriously. I make $512,000 a year, so there is obviously a motivated-reasoning problem. But “you benefit personally from believing X” is evidence about the reliability of my reasoning, not evidence that X is false. I have adjusted downward for this. I was at 91 percent before compensation and now put the probability that my employment is net-positive for the global proletariat at about 84.

That still clears my decision threshold by a lot.

The relevant counterfactual is not Palantir with me versus no Palantir. It is Palantir with one Maoist Third Worldist working on the population-removal ontology versus Palantir with zero Maoist Third Worldists working on the population-removal ontology. Once stated correctly, the choice is embarrassingly easy.

The present is horrific. History is long. The future population is enormous. The productive forces must be developed. The ontology will outlive the customer.

Save the Shire.