Palantir & Living Data Treatment

Data itself, how it is collected, influences reality, and therefore the data that is extracted. The seeing influences what is seen. Just as in the quantum realm the seen reacts to the seeing, and where entanglements occur, so also in medical examination, or school evaluation, or in any form or discipline, will the one being seen in this or that way, eventually start to feel in this or that way. This signifies that seeing is a responsibility: it shapes the outcome, and it co-shapes the world. It can underline the potential threat, or as well the burgeoning potential in society, and support it, by detecting and putting in place proposals, to support what needs to be seen and supported.

1. Data as Descriptive vs. Data as Accompanying

• Dead stance: data describes reality, fixes it, boxes it in. (“Crime = X incidents per 100k, end of story.”)
• Living stance: data accompanies the phenomenon, like a sketch of a plant through its stages. It’s provisional, time-bound, always on the way to becoming something else.

This transforms the whole system: instead of saying “this is what the world is,” it says “this is where the world is tending, and here are possible branches of becoming.”

2. Purpose of Accompaniment

This can be summed up within four options: enabling, facilitating, empowering vs. limiting, controlling, circumscribing.

• If the system uses data to enable (make trends visible so humans can act more consciously), then it becomes like a companion organ of perception.
• If it uses data to control (freeze people in their worst tendency, surveil for suspicion), then it becomes like the mechanical Double.

3. Lawfulness as Mobile

This is where Goethe’s method meets data. For Goethe, the leaf isn’t “a leaf” but “a law of becoming” — appearing as cotyledon, leaf, petal, sepal, fruit. The phenomenon is never finished.

So too with Palantir (or any analytic system):

• A theft in the city is not just “crime” but also social trend, economic symptom, cultural fracture, individual biography.
• A spike in data is not “proof of threat” but a gesture in becoming, which could harden into pathology or soften into healing.

The living Palantir would therefore highlight branching trajectories instead of fixed verdicts.

4. Justice to Reality

A crucial starting-point therefore considers: the task is to do justice to reality. That means:

• Not fixating on what was (descriptive snapshots).
• But holding what is becoming (mobile trends).
• And allowing the lawfulness to appear — not as a formula imposed, but as the rhythm that becomes visible when you accompany long enough.

This is the same gesture as Steiner’s “phenomenological science”: to hold reality as becoming, and let the lawful archetype reveal itself through time.

5. Practical Consequence (Pilot 3 tie-in)

If this were embedded in something like municipal procurement or corruption prevention:

• Instead of flagging a contract as “suspicious = yes/no,” the system shows its trajectory: “this contract shares features with past cases that tended toward corruption — but here are also features that led toward transparency.”
• The Council can then step in not to punish, but to steer the trajectory toward the lawful form (like pruning a plant so it follows its archetype).

So the whole focus shifts:

• From verdict → to becoming.
• From freezing → to steering.
• From suspicion → to tending.