The Shell at Your Ear – Silicon Palantir wants to create a new ocean.
TECHNOLOGY & POSSIBILITY
The Shell at Your Ear
Palantir wants to create a new ocean. I’d rather hold up the shell and listen to what’s already there.
BY MAX THINIUS
“Behold,” declares the tech bro, “we have created a new mind!” — “Behold,” I reply, holding a seashell up to his ear, “I have created a new ocean.” That’s how Max Leibman put it on Mastodon. He couldn’t have said it better.
Two pieces of news have been occupying my thoughts lately. The first comes from Silicon Valley: Palantir has published a 22-point manifesto calling for, among other things, the reinstatement of the military draft. The second comes from Germany: 65 percent of German industrial companies are already deploying AI in active production processes — more than the global average.
Both are being sold as news from the future. Both are, in fact, dispatches from the past.
“We’ve known the Earth is round since 240 BC. It took most people another 1,700 years to live accordingly. I keep wondering what we already know today — and still aren’t living.”
A Manifesto of Fear
Palantir writes: “Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible.” The engineering elite, it insists, has “an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.” National service should be “a universal duty.”
You don’t have to look hard to recognize the grammar. It’s the grammar of control. The conviction that security comes from surveillance, weapons, and obligation — not from trust, agency, and possibility. Palantir thinks of the future as a fortress. I think of it as a window.
What really troubles me isn’t the document’s audacity. It’s its exhaustion. The 1930s already showed us where this line of thinking leads when followed to its conclusion. Control as a response to complexity. Strength as a response to uncertainty. This isn’t a new mind. It’s a very old, very tired reflex.
The Productivity Trap
The German news sounds different. More encouraging, almost. Sixty-five percent of German industrial companies are using AI. A Cisco executive says: “AI has arrived, it’s being used, and it delivers measurable business value.” Investments pay off within two years. Productivity rises. Costs fall.
All true. All good. And yet something is missing from this story.
If you increase productivity while the bottlenecks remain, the effect doesn’t change — only the size of the backlog. More output through the same structures means more of the same results, faster. And faster structures are not necessarily better ones.
Using AI as an efficiency tool inside old systems is like fitting a new engine to a car that’s heading in the wrong direction. You arrive at the wrong destination sooner.
The real question isn’t: how do we use AI to improve what already exists? The real question is: how do we rebuild what exists so it stops holding us back? What exactly is in our way — and what becomes possible once we let it go?
From Smart to Smarties
We talk endlessly about making cities smart. Infrastructure smart. Production smart. What we conveniently forget: all technology is only as intelligent as the people using it. It’s not the machines that need to become Smarties. We do.
This is not a critique of capitalism. It’s an invitation.
What if we understood AI not primarily as a productivity lever, but as an extension of human possibility? Not: how do we do the same things faster? But: what can we now do that we couldn’t before? Which problems become solvable that we had long accepted as structural dead ends?
Small towns could finally access the infrastructure previously reserved for major cities. Care workers could be freed from administrative burden — and given back the time to do what they’re actually there for: people. Craftspeople could bring their expertise to markets that were previously closed to them.
“The future is the safest place in the world — if we shape it with possibility.”
What the Ocean Already Knows
Palantir holds a shell to its ear and believes it has created a new ocean. But the ocean was already there. It always was.
The possibilities I’m talking about already exist. They’re not waiting in the future. They’re here, in the present, buried under narratives that keep telling us: that won’t work. that’s how it’s always been. that’s too risky. wait for the technology. wait for the politicians. just wait.
And yet: you change the future by doing something small, today. Not by waiting for large systems to grant permission. By starting.
Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth in 240 BC. Remarkably accurately, as it turned out. It still took nearly 2,000 years for that knowledge to reach everyday life. We have similar gaps today — between what we know and how we live. AI is neither the cause nor the cure. It’s a mirror.
What we project into that mirror — control and conscription, or possibility and agency — that’s still our choice. For now.
Instead of Waiting: Unfold
People work best together when they trust each other. That works beautifully with a handful of people, well with fifteen, passably with fifty, and just about with 150 — so Dunbar’s number suggests. Small groups running independently, improving the world. Instead of waiting for each other.
And when the group you urgently need simply isn’t there? Let AI step in. It makes mistakes — and takes no responsibility. But that’s precisely where an unexpected opportunity hides: in learning to work with imperfection, with error, with something that doesn’t always get it right. We need that practice with machines. We need it even more with each other.
AI is not a new ocean. It’s a shell. Hold it to your ear and you’ll hear something — but what you hear comes from within yourself.
I’ll keep holding the shell up. You hear a remarkable amount, when you actually listen.
Max Thinius is a futurologist and founder of Possible. Institute for Future & Possibilities as well as the BetterLivingPeople to create livable cities and countrysides with neigbourhoods. He thinks about the future not in terms of probability, but of possibility.