This is perhaps the most cultural argument I have read about what has gone wrong with big tech and how to fix it. Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska basically want more of Silicon Valley to be like them—patriotic Americans, proud of being part of a shared culture, enthusiastic about supporting our troops and police, and functioning in an organization where people are paid well, have substantial autonomy, is not clogged with middle management, is good at error-correcting its own problems, and is still run by its founder.
They have two distinct concerns that they blur together as if they are interrelated or the same: (1) innovation needs to be bigger and less incremental and (2) innovators need to do less for consumers and more for national power (they are particularly negative on the engineers at Microsoft, Google, IBM, and elsewhere who have risen up against working on projects related to facial recognition, drone targeting, and other national security issues).
The first seems to be a peculiar concern at a time when enormous sums are being poured into foundational AI models. The second does seem like a problem but perhaps one that is getting better, but I’m not sure.
Karp and Zamiska believe “the software industry should rebuild its relationship with government and redirect its effort and attention to constructing the technology and artificial intelligence capabilities that will address the most pressing challenges that we collectively face.”
I kept waiting for policy solutions—after all, they explicitly want companies working with the government—but they do not offer any; instead, their solution is cultural, basically more people should read their book and start thinking differently: “constructing a technological republic, a rich and thriving and raucously creative communal experiment—not merely the bacchanal of permissive egalitarianism of which Strauss warned—will require an embrace of value, virtue, and culture, the very things that the present generation was taught to abhor.”
I find myself in sympathy with many of their cultural arguments. The United States cannot survive on the basis of self-loathing and moral relativism but instead needs to be proud of building a shared culture and myths (one I would argue should draw on the many cultures and people that have contributed to the United States). The academy went too far in embracing the worldview of books like Orientalism. There is too much safetyism. It is harder to have hard-driving people who break rules and norms to get things done today than in the past, etc. I would never have linked these to what ails Silicon Valley, but they made me consider the possibility more seriously.
Where I get off the train is their disdain for a classical liberal conception of capitalism. They ask, “Why must we always defer to the wisdom of the crowd when it comes to allocating scarce capital in a market economy?” while disdaining all the money and effort that goes into consumer innovations like delivery apps. I do not know a better system for allocating capital than the market. And many of those innovations—yes, including delivery apps—are developed because the wisdom of the crowd of consumers that wants to use them and benefits from them. I’m not a market fundamentalist. There are issues with rent-seeking or attention addition, but they do not make the arguments for why someone’s judgment (whose?) should come ahead of consumers in deciding what is valuable.
Moreover, if you want more technology for national security, part of the solution is getting the engineers at the big firms willing to work on it again. But a lot of the solution is government policy, something they never spell out. The same goes for the other national challenges they wish got comparatively more attention than consumers want, including “from national defense to violent crime, education reform to medical.”
Research appeared to many to be too intractable, too thorny, and too politically fraught to address in any real way. Cultural shifts would help with some of that, but there is no substitute for more and smarter government procurement and use of these technologies.
Ultimately, Karp and Zamiska made me think because it linked one set of issues I think about in my spare time (culture, relativism, etc.) with another that I normally use different tools to think about (how to get tech companies to work on different issues and what are the limits of consumer-centric innovation). But I wish it went back and forth between the two languages to build more of a bridge instead of just grounding itself almost entirely in political philosophy and intellectual history at the expense of economics, politics, and public policy.
P.S. I did find it interesting and refreshing that they were anti-libertarian, wanted government employees to be paid much more and wanted to limit the role of wealth in politics – all very different than Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and some others in that world that you might have thought their views were aligned with.