I came across a video by Dr. John Padfield, a former engineer and state representative, talking about something that stuck with me.
He recalls being told, “never get in a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.”
It was a warning for politicians — don’t mess with newspapers.
Then he updates it for our time:
“Never get in a fight with people who buy network servers by the acre.”
That one line captures how much power has shifted. The new press barons aren’t journalists — they’re data companies. They control information, infrastructure, and the invisible systems that decide what we see, what we buy, and sometimes even what governments do.
Padfield’s video dives into Palantir, the data analytics company founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. It started as a PayPal spin-off to detect fraud and now runs software for governments, militaries, and corporations all over the world. He traces its rise — from early CIA funding to contracts with ICE, the Pentagon, and predictive policing projects.
It’s a fascinating and uncomfortable story. Because Palantir isn’t just building analytics tools, it’s building the “operating system for global decision-making,” as they call it.
We’ve crossed into a world where data platforms and AI engines shape policy, defense, and society. The new power is in data infrastructure — who owns it, who processes it, and who decides what the algorithms see.Software really is eating the world, not just in entertainment or retail, but in government, security, and war.