The Minds That Power Chooses to Keep

Philosophy
Written By Rebecca Sutter

Neurodivergence, Surveillance, and the Difference Between Recognition and Extraction

Author’s note: This essay does not claim that Palantir’s Neurodivergent Fellowship is equivalent to Nazi eugenics or historically derived from it. It examines a recurring structure: the way powerful institutions identify, classify, and recruit forms of human difference according to usefulness. The comparison is ethical and structural, not an allegation of secret continuity.

I found the fellowship almost accidentally.

Palantir—the technology company known for building data platforms used by governments, militaries, intelligence agencies, health systems, and corporations—was recruiting neurodivergent people.

Not through a conventional disability-employment initiative.

Not, apparently, as a gesture toward representation.

The job posting described its Neurodivergent Fellowship as a recruitment pathway for “exceptional neurodivergent talent.”

Then came the sentence that caught me:

This is not a diversity initiative.

There are fair and even encouraging ways to interpret that declaration.

Perhaps Palantir means neurodivergent applicants should not be treated as symbolic diversity hires. Perhaps it is rejecting the assumption that accommodation and excellence are opposites. Perhaps the company is acknowledging that conventional hiring practices exclude people whose abilities cannot be measured through ordinary credentials, interviews, or social performance.

That may be true.

It may also be true that Palantir has identified forms of cognition especially useful to Palantir.

The company builds technologies designed to combine fragmented information, identify relationships across datasets, detect anomalies, create operational pictures, and help institutions act on what those systems reveal.

It is recruiting people whose minds may excel at pattern recognition, intense concentration, systems thinking, unconventional association, and seeing relationships that others miss.

The correspondence is difficult to ignore.

Palantir is recruiting unusual pattern-seeing minds to help construct systems that allow powerful institutions to see patterns at scale.

That is not proof of wrongdoing.

It is, however, a pattern worth reading.

What I Am—and Am Not—Claiming

I am not claiming that Palantir’s fellowship is a secret Nazi project.

I am not alleging a direct lineage between Nazi psychiatry and contemporary neurodivergent recruitment.

I have found no evidence that Palantir based its fellowship on Hans Asperger’s work, is secretly experimenting on autistic people, or intends to reproduce a eugenic program.

The people applying are not prisoners. They are seeking voluntary, highly compensated employment. They possess legal rights. Many may experience the fellowship as meaningful recognition, intellectual freedom, financial opportunity, and entrance into work they genuinely want to perform.

Those distinctions are not minor.

They are morally fundamental.

The strongest argument against my concern is straightforward: every employer recruits people for useful abilities. A hospital hires surgeons for surgical skill. A school hires teachers for their ability to teach. A technology company identifying neurodivergent candidates who have been overlooked by conventional hiring may be correcting exclusion rather than reproducing it.

That argument deserves to be taken seriously.

Recognizing ability is not the same as assigning human worth.

Offering people access to powerful institutions is not the same as sorting them for elimination.

A neurodivergent person who chooses to work at Palantir is not necessarily being manipulated, extracted from, or deprived of agency. They may understand the company’s work, believe in its mission, and choose it deliberately.

But acknowledging these differences does not make every structural comparison illegitimate.

Historical comparison does not require historical equivalence.

Two situations do not have to be identical for us to recognize a related logic operating within them.

This is where symbolic literacy begins.

Symbolic Literacy

Symbolic literacy is not the belief that every resemblance proves a hidden conspiracy.

It does not convert intuition into evidence or coincidence into causation.

It is the disciplined capacity to recognize recurring structures across different contexts while preserving the differences between them.

It allows us to say:

These things are not the same.

And also:

They may share an underlying grammar.

History rarely repeats by reproducing the exact costumes, language, institutions, and technologies of an earlier period.

The surface changes.

The organizing question may remain.

One such question is:

Which forms of human difference are valuable enough to preserve?

The History of Selective Usefulness

Under Nazi rule, people with mental, physical, developmental, and neurological differences were classified through the language of heredity, racial hygiene, productivity, educability, dependency, and social burden.

The regime did not simply persecute every form of difference in the same way.

It sorted difference.

People were assessed according to whether they could work, reproduce, conform, learn, contribute, or be remade into acceptable members of the social body.

Those deemed biologically inferior were subjected to forced sterilization. Disabled children and adults were registered, assessed, institutionalized, and killed through starvation, lethal medication, or gas.

The process was medical, bureaucratic, and administrative before it became visibly murderous.

Forms were completed.

Diagnoses were assigned.

Files were reviewed.

Specialists made recommendations.

Human beings were translated into categories through which institutions decided what should happen to them.

Hans Asperger’s work in Nazi-controlled Vienna occupies a disturbing place within this history.

He studied children whose behavior and cognition would later become associated with autism. He described unusual capacities: intense interests, originality, specialized knowledge, strong memory, unconventional thought, and striking intellectual ability.

Some of these children, he argued, might become valuable contributors if given the right education.

For many years, this was interpreted as evidence that Asperger protected autistic children by persuading Nazi authorities that their unusual minds had social value.

Archival research has profoundly complicated that story.

Asperger worked within the Nazi medical system and referred some children to Am Spiegelgrund, an institution involved in the killing of disabled children.

The same professional world that recognized unusual gifts also participated in deciding which children were educable and which could be abandoned.

This is what makes the history ethically important.

Recognition and dehumanization were not always opposites.

They could coexist.

An institution could appreciate the abilities of selected atypical children while treating other disabled children as burdens.

It could preserve the potentially productive and dispose of the dependent.

It could call one form of difference giftedness and another defect.

The question was not merely whether difference existed.

The question was whether difference could be made useful.

The Structural Rhyme

Palantir is not Nazi medicine.

A modern employment fellowship is not a euthanasia program.

But symbolic literacy allows us to examine the structural rhyme:

A powerful institution encounters people whose minds depart from the norm.

It identifies particular abilities inside that difference.

It recruits the forms of atypicality most valuable to its objectives.

It channels those abilities into the expansion of institutional capacity.

The danger is not that this sequence inevitably leads to atrocity.

The danger is that it may preserve the underlying belief that human difference becomes valuable when power can use it.

Palantir’s insistence that its fellowship is “not a diversity initiative” may be intended to honor merit. But it also changes the moral basis of the invitation.

The company is not primarily saying:

Neurodivergent people deserve access because conventional institutions have excluded them.

It is saying:

Neurodivergent people may possess exceptional capabilities that we need.

Again, recognizing ability is not inherently dehumanizing.

The question is not whether Palantir benefits from its employees’ talents. Every institution does.

The question is whether the person remains valuable when the talent stops benefiting the institution.

When the Gift Becomes a Need

Our culture has become increasingly comfortable celebrating neurodivergence when it can be described as an advantage.

Pattern recognition.

Hyperfocus.

Creativity.

Originality.

Systems thinking.

Technical brilliance.

The capacity to disregard conventional assumptions.

But neurodivergence does not exist only as exceptional performance.

It may also appear as sensory overload, executive dysfunction, impaired communication, inconsistent capacity, social exhaustion, dependency, shutdown, difficulty changing tasks, or inability to meet ordinary workplace expectations.

The same mind that produces extraordinary insight may require extraordinary support.

The ethical test of a neurodivergent fellowship is therefore not what happens when the fellow is brilliant.

It is what happens when the fellow is disabled.

What happens when intense focus becomes burnout?

When unusual communication becomes inconvenient?

When sensory needs conflict with an on-site work culture?

When the employee cannot sustain elite productivity?

When unconventional thinking becomes disagreement?

When the person’s pattern recognition identifies a moral problem within the institution itself?

Will the institution continue to value the person?

Or was it purchasing only the useful expression of their difference?

There is a profound distinction between saying:

Your humanity belongs here, including your gifts, limitations, needs, contradictions, and right to object.

And saying:

The parts of your mind that increase our power belong here.

The first is participation.

The second may be extraction.

Who Controls the Seeing?

This question becomes sharper because of what Palantir builds.

Palantir’s platforms help institutions combine data and make it operational.

The company argues that it does not sell personal data and that it builds privacy, access controls, auditing, governance, and civil-liberties protections into its software.

Those protections matter.

Technology that records who accessed information, limits what users may see, preserves data provenance, and requires human review may be safer than fragmented systems without those controls.

But the existence of a safeguard does not tell us whether every customer enables it, whether it constrains the institution’s purpose, or whether the person being analyzed can challenge the information.

A system can be accountable to its operator while remaining opaque to its subject.

It can carefully record which authorized official classified you without giving you the power to contest the classification.

It can limit access to your information while still making you visible to an institution from which you would prefer to remain unseen.

It can increase procedural control without resolving the moral question of what the procedure is for.

Palantir’s name comes from the palantíri, the seeing stones in Tolkien’s mythology.

The symbolism is unusually fitting.

The stones allow users to perceive distant people and events. But they do not provide complete, neutral, context-free truth. What they reveal may be partial. What is shown may be interpreted incorrectly. A person may believe they are seeing independently while the field of vision is being shaped by a greater power.

To see more is not necessarily to understand more.

A system may identify association without relationship.

Behavior without history.

Movement without motive.

Risk without context.

A person can become increasingly visible while becoming less human.

The system may know more about us while knowing us less.

A Difficult Inversion

There is a painful inversion inside this fellowship.

Neurodivergent people have historically been among those most intensely classified by institutions.

They have been diagnosed, assessed, ranked, tracked, disciplined, medicated, segregated, normalized, institutionalized, and interpreted through behavioral data.

Their internal lives have often been reduced to externally observable patterns.

Now some are being invited to help build systems through which institutions classify other people.

People who understand what it means to be misunderstood through categories may become architects of more powerful categorization.

People whose behavior has been monitored may help construct technologies of monitoring.

People excluded for failing to perform normality may be selected because their difference now offers a strategic advantage.

This does not mean neurodivergent people should refuse the invitation.

They are not responsible for purifying every institution before entering it.

They may bring precisely the skepticism, precision, moral imagination, and unconventional thinking those institutions need.

They may make systems safer.

They may challenge assumptions from within.

They may consciously choose defense, intelligence, government, or security work because they believe in its purpose.

Their agency must not be erased merely to complete a critique of institutional power.

But agency requires more than the formal ability to accept a job.

It requires enough knowledge and freedom to understand what one is participating in, object to particular uses, decline assignments, and withdraw cooperation without losing the conditions of one’s survival.

Before an institution calls a difference a gift, the person being recruited deserves to ask:

What do you want this gift to accomplish?

Who will benefit from what I build?

Who may be harmed?

Will I know how my work is being used?

Can I refuse?

Will you still value me when my gift becomes a need?

The Part of Me That Wants to Be Chosen

At first, I thought I was writing only about Palantir.

Then I realized I was writing about recognition.

There is a particular kind of hunger that develops when the way one thinks has not been fully understood by ordinary systems.

To think unconventionally is often to be told—directly or indirectly—that one is too intense, too scattered, too sensitive, too nonlinear, too difficult to categorize, or insufficiently practical.

Then an institution appears and says:

We see what you can do.

We understand the value of the way you think.

We need you.

That can feel like liberation.

Sometimes it is.

Recognition can change a life.

A person who has spent years interpreting their difference as failure may finally understand it as capacity. A door opens where conventional systems had repeatedly closed one.

But recognition from power carries a particular seduction.

It can make usefulness feel like proof of worth.

The institution does not merely offer work. It appears to resolve an identity wound.

You were not too much.

You were not broken.

You were built for this.

That is an intoxicating message.

It may also make it harder to ask what “this” is.

What part of me is willing to be extracted if extraction finally feels like recognition?

That question implicated me.

I am not standing outside the sorting process.

I also recognize patterns in people.

I work with development, psychology, education, symbolism, embodiment, and systems. I build frameworks to understand behavior and potential. I notice capacities. I decide which distinctions matter.

That work can make people more visible.

It can also reduce them.

A framework may begin as a way of understanding someone and quietly become a substitute for continuing to encounter them.

A developmental model may illuminate what a child needs. It may also create another standard against which the child is judged.

A diagnosis may give language to suffering. It may also become a border around who someone is permitted to become.

A symbolic interpretation may open experience. It may also become so satisfying to the interpreter that contradiction stops being heard.

No one who works with people exists entirely outside classification.

The question is whether the category remains permeable to the person.

Does the framework begin understanding or finish it?

Does recognition create relationship or possession?

Do I value another person’s insight only when it strengthens the world I am trying to build?

Would I continue to value them if their difference interrupted it?

These are not questions I can direct only at corporations.

Why Speak?

Once I recognized the pattern, another question appeared.

What responsibility follows from seeing it?

Silence can masquerade as humility.

One can say there is insufficient evidence of intentional wrongdoing and therefore no reason to raise the concern.

But systems do not require secret conspiracies or openly malicious intentions to produce dehumanizing outcomes.

They require incentives.

Categories.

Concentrated power.

Administrative distance.

And enough people willing to treat each individual act as too ordinary to examine.

At the same time, speaking irresponsibly creates its own danger.

I cannot claim that structural resemblance proves hidden continuity.

I cannot tell another neurodivergent person that they are being exploited simply because they make a decision I would question.

I cannot remove their agency in the name of protecting their humanity.

To do so would reproduce the very structure I am criticizing.

It would convert the person into an example serving my argument.

Symbolic literacy therefore requires restraint as much as courage.

We must state what is documented.

Name what is inferred.

Mark what remains unknown.

Invite contradiction.

And leave the reader’s moral agency intact.

The purpose is not to dictate a conclusion.

It is to make the decision more conscious.

What Would Count as an Answer?

Palantir could answer this concern.

Not merely through assurances, but through verifiable practice.

It could demonstrate that neurodivergent employees retain meaningful control over their work.

That they can understand the missions they support.

That they may object to or transfer away from projects without retaliation.

That accommodations do not quietly end careers.

That employees remain valued through burnout, fluctuating capacity, or periods of reduced productivity.

That ethical dissent is treated as a form of intelligence rather than disloyalty.

It could show that people affected by Palantir-enabled systems possess meaningful rights of correction, explanation, appeal, and redress.

It could permit credible independent review of whether its privacy and civil-liberties protections function outside company descriptions.

It could identify categories of projects it has rejected, uses it has restricted, and lines it will not cross.

The central qualification would be reciprocity.

Does Palantir merely gain capability from the minds it recruits and the populations its systems make visible?

Or does it accept enforceable limits on its own power in return?

An institution disproves extraction not only by compensating talent.

It disproves extraction by accepting the cost of relationship.

The Decision Point

This essay is not a verdict against Palantir.

It is not a verdict against the people who work there.

It is not an attempt to flatten contemporary technology into twentieth-century fascism.

It is an invitation to read the pattern before it becomes ordinary enough to disappear.

Power has always sought unusual human capacities.

That fact alone is not evil.

Civilizations need builders, analysts, artists, scientists, strategists, teachers, caretakers, and people capable of seeing what others miss.

The question is whether institutions can recognize capacity without turning capacity into the condition of belonging.

Whether they can honor difference without dividing the exceptional from the disposable.

Whether they can build systems that perceive patterns without mistaking the pattern for the person.

Whether the people who make populations visible will also defend their right to remain human inside the image.

We are entering an era in which institutions can classify, predict, and operationalize human behavior with increasing speed and scale.

At the same time, we are becoming more precise in how we identify cognitive difference.

Those developments are not separate.

The minds capable of building the new machinery of perception are themselves being recognized, categorized, and recruited.

Perhaps this creates a genuine opening.

Perhaps people historically excluded from power will reshape how power operates.

Perhaps neurodivergent perception will introduce greater complexity, skepticism, precision, and ethical imagination into systems that desperately need it.

But possibility is not protection.

Recognition is not automatically liberation.

Visibility is not the same as being known.

Usefulness is not the same as worth.

The question is not whether history is repeating itself exactly.

It is whether we can recognize an old logic while there is still time to choose a different relationship to it.

Are we building institutions capable of accounting for the full range of human minds?

Or are we becoming more efficient at selecting the parts of humanity that power can use?

Are we creating systems that increase agency?

Or systems that classify people more precisely while moving decisions farther beyond their reach?

Are we learning to see one another?

Or merely learning to sort?

I do not possess the final answer.

But I believe we are already inside the question.

And once the pattern becomes visible, we have a responsibility not to look away.

Sources and Further Reading

Palantir’s own materials

Nazi eugenics and disability persecution

Hans Asperger and Nazi-era Vienna

Corrections policy: This essay distinguishes documented facts from interpretation. Credible evidence that corrects, complicates, or disproves any factual claim will be reviewed, and substantive revisions will be dated and disclosed.

Rebecca Sutter
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Babel and the Body