The banner of dystopian surveillance company Palantir hung above Fenway Park last weekend, lording over the spectacle of some college kids playing football, many more of them watching it, and most all their parents eating $12 burgers or whatever. It was the Secretaries’ Cup, and the United States Coast Guard Academy’s team was playing, and since the Coast Guard is apparently sponsored by dystopian surveillance company Palantir, and the Coast Guard is run by the gubmint, and the gubmint can tell the Red Sox what to do, the banner was there. That’s all there is to it, the team would have you believe.
And yet, it’s… plainly not, even if Red Sox people indeed told OTM Grand Poobah Dan Secatore that the ad was there strictly because the cartoonishly evil surveillance company (my words) led by village idiot/savant Peter Thiel (still mine) sponsors the U.S. Coast Guard. Dan then asked me to write about it, and I eagerly accepted, even if I think the fact that a company led by a psycho whose most substantial accomplishment is that he helped create a payments app, and who thinks Greta Thunberg is the literal Antichrist, would be less damaging if it advertised at baseball fields rather than having plainly bought, uh, America. Your mileage may vary.
And yet, and regardless of the stated circumstances of the Palantir banner wrapped over the panel over the monster seats, further answers of questions which the team did not remit to me before I wrote this (I do not blame them, I have barely ever emailed them and I suspect they were busy), that banner can never be un-furled. It was there and cannot not have been there. I wish I felt worse about it. This is the rare case in which the Red Sox are plainly the lesser of two evils, and sinister forces are exploiting that fact. One counterargument to this line of logic would go something like: You are missing the point. The point is that the Red Sox did a bad thing, context-independent, if or no other reason than literally no one likes a load of work dropped in their laps, and they hung their PR teams out to dry. It’s as simple as that.
And yet, the toothpaste is out of this particular tube. Strangely, it had me thinking back to college, when the campus was absolutely flooded with tulips for about 10 days every spring, and having a strange stroke of nostalgia that first April. I had seen those flowers before, because those very 10 days were when the admissions office took their promotional photos for the forthcoming year. It was the campus as I had seen it in pictures. For the vast majority of year, they tulips weren’t there, but you’d never forget they were, not in the middle of winter or during a pressure-cooker summer. Whatever the Red Sox’s obligations, or take on the Palantir banner, it will always have been there. We got photos and everything. But in fairness, one might argue, it’s not the first “bad” company to advertise with the team, nor will it be the last.
And yet, this is a fundamental moment for the country. Everything is in flux, and no one trusts anything but public opinion, so the only thing to do is make your opinion public, especially if your opinion is: “I would like to live in a society where a nakedly authoritarian-friendly/enabling company is neither welcome to advertise at Fenway Park, nor anywhere else.” The practical implications of this? Ignore anyone who says this should be downplayed. State your case, as I’m stating mine: Palantir is bad and evil and the Red Sox should not acquiesce to do business that puts them within arm’s reach of them again. No more and yets: That’s the thing, and all of it.
