The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West
By Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska (Crown Currency)
As America undergoes a political realignment, Silicon Valley is experiencing its own shake-up. It’s not just the Big Tech CEOs tactfully aligning themselves with President Trump in a way that was unthinkable his first time around. The tech industry’s very raison d’être is under reconsideration, as technologists, policymakers, and the public rethink the shift in recent decades from the real economy of atoms to the virtual world of bits. There’s a discontent among founders, who have remembered that their predecessors built the spaceship and computer, while they’ve settled for fixing bugs in Candy Crush. Can’t we do something bigger and better?
The Technological Republic, a manifesto from Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska of the data analytics company Palantir, offers a useful gauge of this mood and a measure of the sentiments within an ascendant faction of the tech world regarding the state of the union. And in their telling, that state is bleak. The book is a full-throated indictment of the fallen ambitions, competence, and verve of America’s technologists and statesman. Karp and Zamiska—Palantir’s co-founder and CEO, and head of corporate affairs and legal counsel—think that our leaders in politics and tech have become, in short, losers—effete rule-followers who undertake projects without purpose, mindlessly parrot the shibboleths of out-of-touch elites, and ignore their duty to pursue the national interest.
Lest this seem too vague, Karp is willing to name names and offers withering indictments. Steve Jobs’s “interest was not in building the means to advance a broader American or national project”; “Is the iPhone, for example, our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization?” Mark Zuckerberg “captured the views of a generation of software engineers and founders, whose principal and animating interest was the action of creation itself—decoupled from any grand worldview or political project.” Google, with its “thinly veiled nihilism,” was so afraid to stand for anything that it adopted a negative motto: “Don’t be evil.” The whole e-commerce market comes in for a beating for its “shallowness” and its mission of satisfying gratuitous customer wants ever more quickly. Contrast all these flashy profit-maximizing ventures with Palantir’s soberer line of work: providing counter-terrorism and defense analytics to the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and other government clients.
In every case, Karp sees Silicon Valley’s love of silly apps and consumer gadgets as reflecting a dangerous disconnect between tech and politics. Technologists have come to see matters of governance and national security as, at best, problems for other people, and at worst, inherently corrupting. For example, in response to employee protests against complicity with “military surveillance,” Google in 2018 decided not to renew a Pentagon contract for reconnaissance imagery analysis. The tech-government divorce has hurt both, Karp avers: tech, by leaving it dependent on the whims of the market to tell it what to build; and the government, by denying our government’s access to the best technology, endangering our national security and risking America’s falling behind its adversaries in the deployment of AI.
It wasn’t always this way, Karp reminds us. America’s glory days during and after World War II were the product of a strong alignment between the private sector’s innovations and the public sector’s national priorities, when technologists recognized their duty to contribute to the Manhattan Project, win the space race, and build a proto-internet at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Tech and government used to work together through “the blending of science and public life—of technical innovation and affairs of state”—and, according to the authors, they should again.
Now, if that spirited call for a more perfect union between tech and government sounds rather like a sales pitch for Palantir, which makes the majority of its revenue from government contracts, well, it would be too precious to expect otherwise from a CEO’s book. And give credit where it’s due: Karp has earned the right to take some shots at all the haters given Palantir’s own success at breaking into the defense industry, one of the most sclerotic in the country.
When Palantir entered the S&P 500 last year, it was the first defense company to do so in 46 years—a testimony to Karp’s talents, but also a damning indictment of the industry’s senescence, which is undermining the nation’s very safety. Since 1993, competition in the defense sector has dwindled from 51 companies to a mere five. With such remarkable consolidation, a decline in military innovation, a lack of consequences for delays and cost overruns, and a diminished production capacity should have been utterly predictable, and all currently plague our defense industrial base. One astonishing 2024 statistic, from the congressionally backed Commission on the National Defense Strategy, tells you everything you need to know about the state of our defense industrial base: “in a conflict with China, the United States would largely exhaust its munitions inventories in as few as three to four weeks, with some important munitions (e.g., anti-ship missiles) lasting only a few days. Once expended, replacing these munitions would take years.” The decay within America’s defense industry thus poses an existential risk to the nation; and yet, Karp laments, our technologists have been too squeamish or frivolous to rise to the occasion and give their nation’s military the most advanced technology possible.
Defense contractors and technologists don’t deserve all the blame for this bleak situation, however. As “The Defense Reformation,” an essay by Palantir’s Shyam Sankar, argued last year, plenty of blame belongs with the Pentagon itself for enabling such consolidation, applying misguided management and contracting practices, and discouraging fresh blood in the industry. Palantir’s own success didn’t come without a fight: as Karp recounts, it took a successful lawsuit against the Army for the branch to even consider better alternatives to its preferred data platform.
But Karp never let his stories about Palantir’s success distract him too long from the chance to kvetch about America’s problems. And problems there are: the fear of expressing our convictions, the outsourcing of decisions to the market, the lack of technical experts in elected office, an undue concern for self-proclaimed victims, the preference for bureaucratic procedures, the elevation of the individual over the group, elites’ hostility to religion, a fear of robust conceptions of the good, elite overproduction, intra-class competition for prestige, rigid organizational hierarchies, poor compensation for public servants, a gap between leaders’ accomplishments and their hold on power, a lack of veneration for great leaders, and more. It’s hard to argue with any of these, but the criticisms come so fast that, despite Karp continually tying them to the need for a more patriotic tech industry, there never really emerges a coherent theory. Without some story about how these all relate, we’re left with a series of justified gripes, but little sense of either causes or possible solutions.
Nor does Karp, for all his criticism of those who won’t put all their cards on the table and publicly commit to an ideal or principle, ever make too clear what he himself believes. Instead we get bold but obscure calls to “take the risk of defining who we are or aspire to be.” In his critical assessment of elites’ belief that “belief itself, in anything other than oneself perhaps, is dangerous and to be avoided,” he at times gives the impression that to believe in something—anything!—is all one needs. One of the book’s epigraphs comes from Goethe: “You will never touch the hearts of others, if it does not emerge from your own.” I prefer the restatement by a less refined poet, The Big Lebowski’s Walter Sobchak: “Nihilists. F*ck me. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, dude, at least it’s an ethos.”
Even Karp’s many invocations of “the West” say little about the Western world’s achievements or singularity, except perhaps a protection of individual rights. Maybe the point is that if people would commit to some conception of the good life, then at least we could have a debate, however contentious, about it. Certainly this reading would fit with Karp’s tutelage, while studying for a doctorate in social theory at Frankfurt’s Goethe University, under the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who built a whole theory of democracy around appreciation for a good conversation. Today, Karp suggests, people are so timid that we can’t even start deliberating about what to do. But if it’s too much to expect a CEO to offer a comprehensive and unified theory of the Good, The Technological Republic still provides a much-needed call for both a more public-spirited tech industry and a more technologically savvy government and military.
Karp covers a wide range of topics, but perhaps the fundamental question raised by the book comes from the title itself: Is a technological republic possible? Does technology itself favor a democratic republic more than other regimes? Karp seems to think so: “It is that combination of a pursuit of innovation with the objectives of the nation that will not only advance our welfare but safeguard the legitimacy of the democratic project itself.” America’s post-war experience—when economic growth, technological progress, democratic expression, and government accountability all went together—would seem to provide strong evidence of such an affinity.
Elsewhere, however, it seems that technology’s demand for cold, meritocratic competence may be at odds with what we’ve come to expect from a democratic republic, with its equal recognition of every citizen. Karp praises Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew more than any American statesman—fittingly, given Lee’s elevation of rational interest and brute reality over sentiment in the pursuit of national modernization, but soberingly for anyone who thinks America can achieve its own technopolitik without dramatically revising what we expect a republic to look like, to say the least. And as much as Karp wishes to escape today’s conformist levelling, citizens in democracies are, as Tocqueville and other observers of America have noted, uniquely likely to devolve into sheeple. Perhaps, then, we should be prompted by Karp’s reference to Leo Strauss to discover an esoteric message in The Technological Republic—namely that its title discloses an irresolvable tension and that we await a new technologist-statesman to at last produce a regime compatible with technological modernity.
In any case, as Karp suggests, we must dismantle the bad before constructing something better in its place, and The Technological Republic should play a role in that dismantling. The public will have an important role as well; if more Americans show a demand for patriotic companies, CEOs may get the hint and respond accordingly. And if Karp can shame a few founders into building something more useful for the nation than another food delivery app, and a few politicians to stop clinging to an unsustainable status quo, he will himself have performed a great public service.
