Lord Watson has accepted a position at Palantir Technologies, the surveillance-data company that makes governments very efficient at knowing things about people. He immediately praised his employers while announcing that big tech firms face “legitimate questions” requiring “answers.” The irony is so thick you could run it through Palantir’s data pipeline.
Watson spent years as Labour’s deputy leader demanding transparency and accountability from tech giants. He wrote extensively about their power. He gave speeches. He seemed to actually care about whether companies should be allowed to see everything you do. Then Palantir called with a job offer and suddenly those legitimate questions became someone else’s problem.
The statement is masterful. Watson doesn’t deny the concerns exist—he just relocates them to an abstract future where “we” must have this conversation, meaning not him, definitely not Palantir, but perhaps the general “we” of humanity sometime around never. He gets to keep his credibility as a transparency advocate while cashing a cheque from a firm that literally sells the ability to connect dots between your data points that you didn’t know were connected.
Palantir’s stock rose on the news. The company clearly understands that hiring a former Labour deputy leader signals something important: if you can get the guy who was supposed to be holding you accountable to instead work for you, the transparency question has already been answered. Not with information. With silence.
Watson will probably do fine work. He’ll probably even push for better practices internally. But he’ll do it as an employee, not an interrogator. The legitimate questions remain unanswered, which is exactly how Palantir prefers its legitimate questions to remain.