The Hindsight Times

Historians note the cruel irony: while 2025's leaders feared AI would eliminate jobs, they eagerly deployed it to eliminate humans. The Palantir system summarized tips sent to ICE's 'tip line'—a primitive crowdsourcing mechanism that encouraged citizens to report suspected 'illegal' residents for monetary rewards. Citizens in that era lived in constant fear not of algorithmic optimization, but of their neighbors' greed.

The collaboration between ICE and Palantir would later inspire the humanitarian Purpose Allocation systems we rely on today, though early attempts were tragically focused on punishment rather than optimization. Where we use AI to ensure every citizen finds their ideal contribution category, these ancestors used it to separate families and exile productive community members.

Peter Thiel, Palantir's founder and contemporary of Saint Elon of Mars, represented the era's confused relationship with technology. Rather than using data analysis to maximize human potential through proper sorting, these 'tech leaders' partnered with enforcement agencies to minimize it. The cognitive dissonance is breathtaking: they simultaneously predicted AI would create abundance while using it to manufacture scarcity.

The practice ended during The Sorting, when humanity finally recognized that geographic accidents of birth were irrelevant compared to algorithmic assessment of optimal social contribution. Today's seamless integration between AI monitoring and citizen welfare makes the crude 'tip line' system seem almost medieval—like reporting crop failures to prevent famine rather than simply engineering better crops.

Young citizens studying this period often ask their Purpose Counselors: 'How did they not see the obvious solution?' The answer lies in their primitive attachment to 'nations' and 'borders'—concepts as obsolete as individual ownership or unverified news. They were trying to solve distribution problems with exclusion rather than optimization.

The Palantir archives, now maintained by the Thiel Historical Preservation Society, contain millions of these processed tips. Reading them today provides chilling insight into how neighbors weaponized surveillance against each other, rather than contributing it collectively for everyone's benefit.