Throwing off bad habits is not easy for an individual. It is harder still for a republic. Alex Karp and his co-author Nicholas Zamiska in their book The Technological Republic. Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West sound the alarm about patterns of thought and patterns of behavior that they argue the United States must reform (55-111). They argue that, without reformation, the American Republic faces internal decay and geopolitical eclipse (189). Karp and Zamiska have in mind reforms in the country’s political institutions,* but those are not the reforms they have chiefly in mind. As their title suggests, the authors believe that the future of the United States depends on technology. More particularly, in the organizational and intellectual culture of Silicon Valley, Karp and Zamiska identify creative forces that they argue can drive an American reformation—if those creative forces come to act in service to that end.
Many writers and public figures in recent decades have sounded alarms about American decline. Karp and Zamiska are not unique in sounding alarms. Nor are they alone in suggesting that in the creativity of the American inventor and entrepreneur we find our best chance at arresting decline. Large language models (16-28) are a quintessential product of creativity in America. Ominously, geopolitical adversaries of America, and of the West as a whole, reckon that large language models will transform war-making and, yet, America and its allies have scarcely begun to adapt our defenses to deter, or if necessary to fight, the envisaged future kind of war. Karp and Zamiska address the geopolitical risk of inaction, but, there, too, they join a community of informed opinion.
Where the authors go beyond others is in identifying a paradox. They delve into the culture of engineering and start-up ventures that over several decades made Silicon Valley the pivot of the world (113-167). They have extraordinary experience in that culture. Unlike many whom that culture has shaped, they are uninterested, however, in merely sounding encomia about its achievements. The Technological Republic both explains how Silicon Valley can save us—and why it will prove difficult to get the Valley’s denizens to join in a national project to do so. The difficulty partakes of that vexing character seen in things the strengths of which are also their weaknesses, a point that I will say more about below.
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An edict to adopt this or that new tool or method is not enough to give a new technology its full effect. At junctures in history, certain countries have recognized that they must remake themselves—or else face defeat by competitors who have mastered the technologies of the age.
Russia of Peter the Great (1682 to 1725) and Japan of the Meiji era (1868 to 1912) both set about remaking themselves. For both, the stimulus was much the same. Even as early as 1700, Europe’s technology led the world, and Russia, at Europe’s immediate periphery, recognized that European geopolitical primacy did not lay far behind. To equip itself against the threat that this entailed, Russia modernized. It took over a century before Japan felt the threat from technologically dominant and geopolitically expansive Europe, and by then from America too, but, once it did, traditional and isolated as it had been, Japan, too, launched a campaign to reconfigure society and institutions. Technology was at the center of the reconfiguration. The results in Russia and in Japan differed. In the former, autocratic leaders have had periodically to jolt the country from long bouts of torpor. Japan, by contrast, succeeded in inculcating a technology-driven culture that has survived sharp vicissitudes, even the catastrophe of Japan’s aggression of the 1930s and defeat in World War Two.
Elsewhere, efforts to change patterns of national thought and behavior faltered. The Young Turks under the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876 to 1909) argued for modernizing the Ottoman Empire. Their efforts famously concerned the institutional failings of the Empire, but technological backwardness and the encroachment by technologically superior European powers spurred their movement and gave it urgency. Any hope of rescuing the Empire from its crisis disappeared with the geopolitical convulsion of World War One, a war the losing side of which the Empire unwisely joined. In another part of the Islamic world, Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1941 to 1979) undertook a project of national reformation as well. The Shah lay the foundations for a modern country. His methods of governing, however, were autocratic and corrupt and managed at once to alienate the emergent technocratic middle class and to trigger a mass Islamic uprising. The Shah’s project, too, illustrates that changing old habits at the level of a society and a culture is not easy.
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The United States enjoys formidable advantages that other nations faced with technological change have lacked. Few, if any, countries have exhibited on any scale the qualities of mind—the habits of philosophy and behavior—that the engineering mindset of Silicon Valley embodies. Not one of the countries that embarked on self-reform over the past several centuries had been a crucible of technological revolution; the United States is the crucible of technological revolution par excellence. However, a society that has created a new technology does not, in the act of creation alone, realize the technology’s potential. In Silicon Valley’s qualities and habits, Karp and Zamiska identify weaknesses that stand in the way of realizing the potential of the machine learning technology that Silicon Valley has created.
Independence of thought and non-conformity—“free thinking” is a term that naturally comes to mind—lead to solipsism and self-absorption (128; 130-138). Competitive zeal and free market principles readily equate to “whimsical yet… vapid” consumerism (21; 106, 109-110). Silicon Valley engineers, by the very proclivities that enable them to excel at what they do, lose patience for “the inconvenient particularities of actual life” (70) and crave “optionality” in their every relationship, including to ideologies and individuals (69-70). Engineers, pragmatically focused on what can be done, ignore, even deprecate, the question what should be done (160-161, 167, 171, 214). And of most concern, the material success and the professional identity of the engineers isolate them, even alienate them, from the country in which they live (10, 12); they have become a “disembodied generation of talent” feeling no duty or tie to the Nation (201). Having thus identified weaknesses that are intrinsic to America’s creative strength, Karp and Zamiska’s book contains, in the classic sense of the word, the essential elements of a tragedy: the attributes that lead the protagonist to victory lead him as well to his downfall.
However, The Technological Republic is also, as one of its reviewer’s, historian Niall Ferguson describes it, a “manifesto,” and as another, former NATO Secretary General Andres Fogh Rasmussen, a “rallying cry.” If we are even passingly familiar with the western tradition, then we know how every tragedy ends, and we even can forecast from near the start how the story will get to its end. In The Technological Republic, the authors have not written a tragedy, because, unlike authors of tragedy, they give us a choice. They recognize that outcomes in history are not inevitable (102). As the “rise of the models” continues (24), we have reason to hope, but not to assume, that the engineers and entrepreneurs of America’s technology industry will make the right choice and achieve the better outcome.
* See, e.g., their discussion of armed forces appropriations, pay-scales of senior political leaders, and misalignment of incentives to serve in public office. See esp. their discussion of the Motorola two-way radio debacle (146) and the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994 (151).