Figure 01 co-founded a company called Palantir, named after the seeing stones in Tolkien that corrupt everyone who looks into them. This was not considered a warning. The company's clients include the CIA, ICE, and the NHS[1] which suggests either a coherent worldview or a very broad definition of customer fit. Figure 01 sits on the board. He finds this consistent with his 2009 declaration that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible[2] a position he published in a libertarian journal and which has not prevented him from spending heavily on elections.

"The future of capitalism will be the future of technology, and the future of technology will be the future of politics — which is to say, there may be no future for politics at all." — Figure 04, Fanged Noumena, 1994. Figure 04 meant this approvingly.

Figure 05[3] whose writing Figure 01 has openly promoted, argues that democracy is a zombie institution and what's needed is a CEO with the powers of a king. Figure 01 has spent considerable money exploring what that might look like in practice, including funding a lawsuit that bankrupted a media company[4] for publishing something he found inconvenient. He described this as a matter of privacy. Nobody found this ironic except Figure 00, who was dead by then.

Figure 00 argued that the industrial system does not exist to satisfy human needs — rather, human behavior must be modified to fit the needs of the system.[5] He wrote this in 1995, without access to Twitter, Palantir, or a PayPal account. His proposed solution differed from Figure 01's in several respects, primarily in that it was less well-funded.

Figure 01 was an early investor in Facebook and has described Mark Zuckerberg as the only entrepreneur he knows who never doubted himself.[6] He said this admiringly. The surveillance infrastructure Figure 01 built to track the movement of people across borders shares its underlying logic with the image infrastructure that tracks the movement of power — both operate on the premise that visibility is control. Figure 01 would probably consider this a compliment.

Figure 05 has argued that democracy functions as a kind of state religion — a set of beliefs held not because they are true but because holding them is socially required.[7] Figure 05 and Figure 01 have met in person. This is documented. The archive contains no photographs of this meeting, which is its own kind of data point.