Resistance to platformization: Palantir in the Norwegian police

Abstract

In 2016, the Norwegian police signed a contract with Palantir Technology for the provision of the surveillance platform Gotham, a platform that enables agencies to integrate data stored in different databases from internal and external sources. The project was to be ready for operation in 2018. In February 2020, the Norwegian Police Directorate announced the project had ended. When they signed off the contract, they had spent around NOK 100 million for nothing. Drawing on documents and interviews with police managers and officers involved in the Gotham project, we explore how platformization represented a conflicting institutional logic which collided with the dominant one and threatened established power structures. Platformization, understood as an organizational process, competes with professionalism and bureaucracy as established institutional logics in the police to control and coordinate work. The analysis of conflicting institutional logics stemming from socio-technical and material objects, reveals how police staff experiences of the symbolic, material and cognitive aspects of logics are of importance in domestication processes. The struggle for market dominance also fueled the conflict between established and new suppliers. The totalizing tendencies of platform policing may explain why the project went on for so long before it was terminated. To a certain degree, our findings show data becoming a major currency, and there is a calculative logic in this type of policing. Platform policing has user activity as its source, and non-use stops the business.