This intelligent and thought-provoking book is really about three issues. 

On the one hand, it’s about technology, especially the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) as a decisive tool not just for economic growth but national defense (as summed up in the subtitle as “Hard Power”)

It’s also about leadership, especially the leadership style of the Silicon Valley founders which, in the authors’ view, has faltered on the biggest issues of our time just when its leadership was needed most (hence “Soft Belief”).

Finally, it’s also a book about our Western heritage.  This is somewhat surprising coming from the heads of a leading American tech company; but ultimately, it’s the issue that gives Technological Republic its intellectual heft and importance as a guide to America’s future. 

Because in the end The Technological Republic is about how the first two phenomena can save the third from its enemies, both foreign and (in the age of WOKEness) at home.

At a time when everyone is talking about ours being in an age of transition, the authors start with the transition that underlies everything else.  This is the shift from what they call the “atomic age,” when the balance of global power depended on who had the most nuclear weapons, to the software age, culminating in the emergence of AI as the decisive weapon of the future.

“Software is now at the helm” of our national defense, they write.  Military  hardware from drones to tanks and submarines increasingly serve as vessels for carrying the powerful packages of software that determine victory for defeat, including AI. 

From just winning games of chess and Go, AI has managed to smash the human monopoly on creativity and manipulation of language, a mimicry that is startling and disconcerting — while also unlocking the secret of national power.

As Karp and Zamiska point out, America’s leading antagonist China, understands the importance and value of AI, and have constructed an entire national strategy around becoming the world’s AI superpower.¹ Yet for America and the West, “early encounters with this novel technology has been marked by an uneasy blend of wonder and fear.”  

The authors have no illusions about the potential threat of runaway AI, including “to our entire sense of self as a species.”   Still, they argue, we can’t let that fear determine our response to its technological challenges, and opportunities. We’re going to need the right kind of leadership to win the AI race: the most existential race of our time.

The place where that leadership should be emerging is the corporate clusters that made the software age possible in the first place, i.e. in Silicon Valley and beyond. The rise of America’s high-tech economy created a powerful aristocracy of talent, a true meritocracy which was ready to defy the challenges of the marketplace in order to advance a series of personal visions: in other words, an aristocracy of founders.

 But when confronted with issues of national security, even national survival such as runaway illegal immigration and the rise of China, that same aristocracy proved AWOL.

“The technology companies that this country has built have for the most part deftly navigated around any issues that would draw undue scrutiny or unwanted attention; the hallmark of their mode of being is avoidance and often silence.”

Silence, or worse.   Google’s refusal in 2018 to participate in DoD’s anti-terrorist program Project Maven, and Microsoft’s initial opposition to accepting a contract with the U.S. Army, as powerful warning signals of this  systemic failure.   

Instead, Silicon Valley tried to portray its lack of moral leadership as “a desire to accommodate all views and values.  “But,” the authors point out, “the tolerance of everything has the tendency to devolve into support of nothing.”  

In fact, this globalist elite was so desperate to “banish notions of the good life from public discourse,” they write (quoting author Michael Sandel), that they locked away their moral and spiritual convictions in their gym locker before the race had even begun.  

So what do we need to win?  Here we meet the unexpected turn in a book that is supposed to be about technology.  Names like Alexander the Great, Winston Churchill, Goethe, Claude Monet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and J.R.R. Tolkien, and books like 1984, The Odyssey, and Plato’s Republic, populate nearly every page and every chapter of Technological Republic — as do the Talmud and the Bible.

By invoking the best ideas from the past, Karp and Zamiska see a positive intellectual framework emerging that uses the past to inform the present and build the future.

“The reconstruction of a technological republic in the United States and elsewhere, will require a re-embrace of collective experience, of shared purpose and identity, of civic rituals that are capable of binding us together.”

The result can be a technological leadership class that believes in not just confounding the competition and offering profits to shareholders, but in defending what is true and good and beautiful, as well as embodying a sense of national pride and pride in the great achievements of the West.

From where I sit, it’s already happening.  I see these authors and Palantir as leading a wave of patriotic high-tech founders, a new Greatest Generation rising to the challenge of remaking our national defense, just as the original Greatest Generation of business leaders built the  World War Two arsenal that saved America and its allies in their time of crisis.    

There is no magic formula or miraculous technology that will save us, and never has been.  But the hard work for a stronger, more secure American future is underway.  The Technological Republic lights the way forward.   

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.

My first encounter with Palantir Technologies was at the 2019 Stanford Computer Forum, the computer science department’s career fair. A group of students called “Students for the Liberation of All People” (SLAP) was mounting a protest against the inclusion of Palantir at the fair, citing Palantir’s software contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the US military — “social evil, violence, racism, xenophobia, imperialism,” they said. After looking through the list of companies, I realized that the activist students had no objection to Tencent, Huawei, and China Mobile appearing at the same fair. I joked at the time that Palantir’s great crime was being “complicit in America.” 

In retrospect, I don’t think the joke would have landed with SLAP. They were deadly serious that America was the problem, and by extension, Palantir.

For Palantir CEO Alex Karp, this was but one of many encounters with activists over 20+ years building Palantir, whose first customer was the CIA, and has worked extensively with both governments and commercial enterprises. Today, Palantir is in the midst of an historic stock run, up nearly 1200% since its 2020 IPO. The company is valued by investors at nearly $300 billion. “Dr. Karp,” as many in Palantir know him (he has a PhD, which we’ll get to later) is worth north of $10 billion. And now he has written an excellent book, The Technological Republic, hereafter abbreviated as TTR. His coauthor is Nicholas Zamiska, an attorney and former Wall Street Journal reporter who has worked in Karp’s office at Palantir for a decade.

TTR is at once a blistering attack on the rot of values in Silicon Valley, paired with a firm defense of the cultural strength of Silicon Valley’s enterprises. Karp and Zamiska remind us more than once that software dominance didn’t fall off a tree in Palo Alto. It was grown in a culture that empowered individuals, not always to be their most individualistic self, but extremely effective individuals within collective enterprises. Silicon Valley lets talented people feel like empowered citizens in “tiny nations.” 

Karp and Zamiska don’t point to the shallow benefits of technology as the crowning achievement of Silicon Valley. In fact, they launch a broadside against the 2010s focus on building apps to cater to every need — a chauffeur, groceries on the doorstep, representing to them a form of technology that makes us feel like aristocrats but doesn’t have the bigger picture in mind. 

What’s that bigger picture? It’s the future of our nation, as determined by geopolitics and the relative strength of our national culture. And the key point is that despite its poor values, the internal culture of Silicon Valley and its organization of people is healthier right now than our national culture: “The technology companies that have come to dominate our lives were in many cases small nations built around a set of ideals that many young people craved: freedom to build, ownership of their success, and a commitment above all to results.”

The cultural triumph of Silicon Valley has lessons that are there for the taking, and Karp and Zamiska beseech us to take them and run so that we can rebuild our “technological republic.”

Karp and Zamiska’s core argument is about technology and the nation, as implied in the title. But the book’s first two sections are setup, the first about geopolitics, history, and the importance of software today. The second section goes deep into the identity of the West and what they call the “hollowing out” of the American mind, under siege from nihilist academics, among others (which may have something to do with protests against Palantir, and Silicon Valley’s widespread refusal to build technology for the military, which is now changing in large part thanks to Palantir). Also discussed is the Palantir experience with the legal culture of the military.

In 2016, Palantir filed a landmark lawsuit against the Army, alleging that the service refused to consider Palantir during a bidding process for a battlefield software contract (despite the entreatments of men and women in the field who had been able to test the product). It was, as Karp would tell you, an unorthodox move to bring your intended customer to court. But a federal judge agreed with Palantir, and in 2019 the Army awarded the contract to Palantir. If a company has to fight like this to help our own soldiers, who can really blame technologists for wanting to work on social media instead? 

But Palantir was founded with that mission, and its unofficial motto is “Save the Shire.” That motto is the company’s own answer to an important question Karp and Zamiska pose in the book: how can America keep its engineering elite accountable to the public? Well, by working on the right things. Or this: in 2020, Palantir moved its corporate headquarters out of Silicon Valley to Denver, Colorado (many of its engineers remain in Palo Alto, though engineers at Palantir are famously “deployed” around the world). If Silicon Valley has lost its way, that move makes sense to remain accountable to the public, in their words.

Karp’s own politics are at odds with the activist conception of Palantir as a right-wing, fascistic panopticon company. At one point in the book, touching on the weaponization of civil liberties to, in practice, defend murder in America’s poorest, most violent urban centers, Karp and Zamiska get very serious about the moral conundrum of opposition to Palantir from the left. They give New Orleans as an example, where Palantir came under intense fire for working with the struggling police department there to use software techniques they had refined in Afghanistan stopping roadside IEDs to help fight violent crime. 

Karp is rightfully indignant at this state of affairs, writing, “The country spent $25 billion to protect soldiers in Afghanistan from the threat of roadside bombs, but when it came to preventing the loss of American lives in our nation’s cities, at the hands of the depraved, the mentally ill, and often extraordinarily well-resourced and ruthless violent gangs, the collective reaction is more often one of apathy and resignation.”

At the risk of oversimplifying a complex thinker, I would call Karp a classical liberal and a left-aligned civic nationalist. It’s that “civic nationalist” part that puts him at odds with the dominant activist part of the capital-L Left today, and to many ears would make him sound right-wing. He insists quite credibly that he is not.

At multiple points in the book, Karp and Zamiska discuss modern geopolitics, in particular with regard to Germany’s role in Europe. Germany is a country that Karp knows well, having completed a PhD in social theory at Frankfurt’s Goethe University. Early in the book, they touch on low European defense spending and lambast the “neutering” of Germany. They point to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as an event crying out for a more muscular Germany in the 21st century, 20th century consensus be damned. At the same time, they attack the “highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacificism” and point to China’s rise. 

They admit that crushing German and Japanese militarism was necessary in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. But they declare that age to be over, and weak nationhood in two of the great civilizations and economies of the world has invited aggression from neighbors like Russia and China. Later in the book, they discuss the peril of national identity in Germany in particular being based on historical guilt.

In June of 2022, less than six months after Russia’s invasion, Karp visited Kyiv, the first major executive to do so. The company has played a major role on the battlefield there.

When one writes a review, he should offer at least one criticism of the work. TTR suffers in a small way from overquotation of literary figures and academics to say what Karp and Zamiska could convincingly say themselves. And, as so many writers do (myself included) they succumb to the temptation to leave the truly killer passages of the book — the place where they smack us in the face with the truth — to its finale.

As I began the final chapter, “An Aesthetic Point of View” I admit to worrying whether I’d be getting that face-smacking I craved at all. The wistful chapter title did not bode well, nor did the introduction of more authors and sources. The philosopher Leo Strauss makes his entrance in the final chapter, which struck me as odd given the earlier section covering debates about the Western canon and the subversion of Western “purpose” in detail (in his 1960 work “The City and Man,” Strauss declared that “The Crisis of the West consists in the West’s having become uncertain of its purpose.”) Also making a first appearance in the final chapter? The Effective Altruism (EA) movement, which at that point could only be mentioned quite briefly (I might have put it in an earlier section discussing modern Silicon Valley’s drift).

And then, in the final pages, the face-smacking arrived with force, and without new quotations or index entries; just Karp and Zamiska, speaking to our faces. The Technological Republic’s final pages should be read carefully, and then read over. 

One figure that does not appear in the book: Donald Trump. Not by name, nor even really by allusion. In one way this is an accomplishment, to publish a book “during Trump” that isn’t about Trump. But by the end of Trump Part Two in 2029, one expects we will need an afterward to a new edition of the book. What do Karp and Zamiska think about DOGE, or technology executives standing behind America’s populist President at his second inauguration? Do Elon Musk and his “young geniuses” at DOGE represent the type of civic calling for technologists that they say we’ve been missing? (hiding in a footnote, they suggest a “technological peace corps,” an idea that DOGE arguably improves on, in terms of its extreme empowerment of talented individuals under clear leadership)

The book was announced and written well before Trump’s victory and return to the White House. And as a treatise, its descriptions and prescriptions would hold firm under another President. Still, as a reader, I’m eager to know: how does JD Vance — the middle American turned Marine turned Yale Law graduate turned Thiel associate turned venture capitalist turned Vice President — play?

Maybe that’s left to us.

The most interesting and important section of TTR is its exploration and defense of “engineering culture.” In its pure form, it is neither individualistic nor collectivist. It fuses the two, and turns great individuals into great contributors to a collective enterprise. Software domination is downstream of cultural excellence. “The central insight of Silicon Valley was not merely to hire the best and brightest but to treat them as such,” Karp and Zamiska write.

Through fascinating scientific digressions about bees and orchestras, they explain that Palantir and other great engineering cultures have neither strict hierarchy nor flat egalitarianism. Their description reminded me of Tom Wolfe’s description of the Intel office culture with Bob Noyce in charge (funny enough, Wolfe’s daughter sits as an independent director on Palantir’s board, and is the first name to appear in the acknowledgements). The Noyce model is characteristic of the “OG” Silicon Valley:

“Noyce’s idea was that every employee should feel that he could go as far and as fast in this industry as his talent would take him. He didn’t want any employee to look at the structure of Intel and see a complex set of hurdles. It went without saying that there would be no social hierarchy at Intel, no executive suites, no pinstripe set, no reserved parking places, or other symbols of the hierarchy. But Noyce wanted to go further. He had never liked the business of the office cubicles at Fairchild. As miserable as they were, the mere possession of one symbolized superior rank. At Intel executives would not be walled off in offices. Everybody would be in one big room. There would be nothing but low partitions to separate Noyce or anyone else from the lowliest stock boys trundling in the accordion printout paper. The whole place became like a shed. When they first moved into the building, Noyce worked at an old, scratched, secondhand metal desk. As the company expanded, Noyce kept the same desk, and new stenographers, just hired, were given desks that were not only newer but bigger and better than his. Everybody noticed the old beat-up desk, since there was nothing to keep anybody from looking at every inch of Noyce’s office space.  Noyce enjoyed this subversion of the eastern corporate protocol of small metal desks for underlings and large wooden desks for overlords.”

Wolfe left a caveat: “If Noyce called a meeting, then he set the agenda. But after that, everybody was an equal.” As it turns out, there is something oddly liberating about one person (or two) being totally and unquestionably in charge — founders as monarchs, or orchestra conductors — but with total respect for everyone in the organization. One gets the sense that at Palantir, everyone has total recognition for the authority of Karp as CEO, but there is no compunction to shut up in front of him, or nod along. In fact, the corporate goal is quite the opposite: to cultivate empiricism and frankness in the company and its nearly 4,000 employees. And that’s what they want for our country, too.

Empiricism is most possible in an engineering culture, they reason, because of the concreteness of the work. It either functions or it doesn’t, and there’s nowhere to hide. They zero in on a connection between the “sensitivity to results” and the “abandonment of grand theories about how the world ought to be.” The core value is pragmatism.

Karp and Zamiska: “The challenge we now face in rebuilding a technological republic is directing that engineering instinct, an indeed ruthless pragmatism, toward the nation’s shared goals, which can only be identified if we take the risk of defining who we are or who we aspire to be.”

The American culture is ambition, powered by “ruthless pragmatism.” It’s the 747. Let’s build the biggest plane ever, in the shortest time imaginable. It’s Starship. Of course once we’ve built the biggest rocket ever, we’ll do a giant pair of claws to catch it. It’s The Empire State Building, the National Highway System, the Apollo Missions, D-Day. American culture is to dream bigger than everyone thinks possible and then say, we’ll figure it out. 

This is the Palantir culture, too, but with one addition: Don’t forget the little people, or the heroes (who are frequently the same people). And don’t forget home, the place from which we came and to which we owe it all, and the reason we embark on adventures in the first place. Save the Shire. 

The Technological Republic is excellent, and it’s on sale today at bookstores everywhere. 

Maxwell Meyer is the founder and Editor of Arena Magazine, and President of the Intergalactic Media Corporation of America. He graduated from Stanford University with a degree in geophysics.

I.

The spirit that animates The Technological Republic,by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, is manifestly noble. It is a moral and political exhortation to business leaders, especially those in the technology sector, to otherwise private men, to eschew “the trivial and ephemeral,” the “narrow consumer products” of online advertising, shopping, and social media, and to accept rather their obligation, their duty, their public responsibility to concern themselves with the political (xiii). Their concern for the political requires rebuilding America’s technological republic after a long hollowing out both of it and of the American mind, and doing so in a spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation. This book is, therefore, and by its authors’ own lights, a “political treatise,” an admittedly “unusual” work for such men (xv). But nonetheless they have written it, moved as they are by the obvious and pervasive narrowness and shallowness that surrounds them and by a quiet call to leadership, patriotism, and even the heroic that evidently resides within them—and which they now, with this book, seek to replicate in their fellow leaders and, I suspect, the nation as a whole. In its unflinching willingness to speak in lofty language without irony or affectation, despite generations, if not longer, of intellectual elites sneering at such terms, the exhortation this book contains justly deserves our praise.

At the core of Karp and Zamiska’s argument is an insight into the primacy of the political. Business leaders fancy themselves cosmopolitans, free from the parochial, even retrograde concerns with which state and nation would constrain them. In this, they remind one a bit of Xenophon’s caricature of a certain type of human being who fails to recognize that he depends on the political community at least for the security of his body, if not also to fulfill other, less obvious hopes and desires. Such individuals fail to realize that it is the political conditions of the regimes in which they and their businesses reside that make their way of life possible. It is, in other words, necessary for them and for us to attend to the political. But one should do so not simply by attending to justice, understood here as the egalitarianism of liberal democracy, but by looking “beyond a firm and uncontroversial commitment to liberalism and its values” for some shared purpose that might bind us together and guide our communal activity in the long term, perhaps even for another thousand years (xv). Nothing less than the future of the West and of the American project hangs in the balance. So, too, our minds. It is part and parcel of the book’s noble ambition that it responds to a hollow mind by rebuilding the regime.

II.

Machiavelli advised that a regime’s fullest lifespan—really, anything’s fullest lifespan—is best achieved by returning it to its beginnings; for its later success implies that there must have been some good in it at the outset. It could be said that Karp and Zamiska’s call to rebuild our technological republic constitutes just such an attempt to return the American regime back to its beginnings in a spirit of Machiavellian rejuvenation. But the call to rebuild the technological republic rests on the premise that America always was, from the outset, such a regime. We do not hold this premise to be self-evident. Is the regime to which the authors are called, and would call us in turn, America’s Urstaat? Or is it a more recent modification? Does the book call for rejuvenation or for regime change—and if the latter, does it do so knowingly or not?

The argument that America was always a technological republic, a regime in which the state and private enterprise collaborate in technological innovation with an eye to the common good, both in defense and otherwise, rests on some unconvincing examples. The authors invoke the august names of such Founders as Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Adams, as well as the example of Roosevelt the elder, in defense of their vision of combining state power and technological innovation (Chapter 1). Among the specific evidence the authors provide in making their case is Madison’s comparative dissections of the American vs. European weasel (see 5), a humorously ironic example—intentionally so, perhaps? Whatever the case, a longstanding American penchant for tinkering, be it with electricity or with weasels, does not a technological republic make. One suspects, therefore, that the place of science and technology with respect to government has not always been the same or even roughly similar. It was not the men of 1776 but Eisenhower who coined the term “military-industrial complex.” And DARPA would have been impossible at the Founding, when even the notion of a national bank was notoriously controversial.

Lurking in the background here is the question whether technological innovation should be, or even could be, centralized in the state. Bacon’s New Atlantis envisions a highly centralized and secretive regime committed to technological innovation, so centralized indeed as to stretch credulity: the unpredictability of innovation and the magnitude of labor involved require, as Locke and Descartes recognized, that scientific inquiry occupy a decentralized place in markets, in corporate entities, in universities. Descartes, in particular, seems to have recognized the possible independence of such corporate entities from the state and, consequently, their potentially global status. In response, Karp and Zamiska seek to bring corporations down from the heavens and back into political communities, in a collaborative spirit. But it is difficult to see this half-Baconian, half-Cartesian vision as part of the American Constitution, where the patent clause in Article I’s enumeration of powers requires Congress to secure the strictly private rights of those innovating in the arts and sciences to their innovations, making no further obligation upon them to collaborate with the state, however lucrative that might be. The Constitution seems to assign innovation a more Lockean or market-oriented place in the regime, the very sort of place that has led to recent trends the authors rightly lament as narrow and shallow.

What the authors encourage seems, therefore, to be a modification of, rather than a return to, the original American regime; more precisely, it is a return to a post-industrial modification. And this understanding of the regime was advocated not by the Founders but by later figures, most memorably by Ernst Jünger and, under his influence, Martin Heidegger. Jünger laid out his vision nearly a century ago in seminal form in his essay “Total Mobilization,” which cast America as the victor of the First World War thanks to its capacity for what he termed total mobilization, that is, for its ability to organize its workforce and industry in service of the military. The regime Jünger describes in his essay retains the flexibility of liberal democracy’s workforce, while having in addition a highly centralized or top-down organization that is highly responsive yet wholly anathema to the reluctant federalism of the Constitution. A sign that Karp and Zamiska’s liberal egalitarianism does come with serious limits, as indeed it must if it is to be properly ennobled, is that they have sparingly little to say of the republicanism of the technological republic, very little to say, that is, of the ideal form of organizing the people, and much more to say rather of the technologists and their ideal form of organization, what they call the improvisational start-up.

I should mention a third alternative to rejuvenation or modification, namely, that the Founders were pressed to adopt the posture of reluctant federalism, that they planted the seeds for the expansion of the federal government’s powers at the expense of states’ rights—with the necessary and proper clause, for example. Such ironic posturing would have been necessary under the pressures of the Anti-Federalists, just as it was with slavery. In any case, the flexibility of the Constitution to such an expansion of federal powers has played no small role in America’s rise on the global stage. Circumstances, at least, if not also great political foresight, forced the modification that Karp and Zamiska rightly note we have in recent years largely abandoned, and rashly.

It is difficult, then, to argue that this is not the path we must take going forward; we are driven down this path by certain necessities, both political and historical, and those driven by necessities either go to their work reluctantly or fight vainly. Either way, we must come to terms the risks that attend our path, and the authors are thankfully alive to the risks. Among the most striking passages in the book is their invocation of Oppenheimer, a chillingly frank example for what the future of AI may hold for us. They offer consolations to skeptics that their worries are “premature” (25), though I imagine those worriers might respond that when destruction is on the line a “mature” worry likely comes all too late. Occasionally, the authors console with the language of deterrence, perhaps having in mind the failure of doomsday predictions of the nuclear annihilation of humanity to come to true, though that risk at least came with real and shocking footage of mushroom clouds to chill us into humility (consider 28). Does AI offer a comparably visceral warning of its destructive potential? Will it? Or would its doomsday be quieter, more incipient, less visible, even somewhat acceptable?

III.

So far, I have attempted to clarify the authors’ vision of the regime and to pose some of the questions that arise when taking their ennobling patriotism seriously. Yet we cannot stop here, for this book contains not just the historical argument about our technological republic, considered above, but an investigation into the principles that could serve as the basis of any technological republic, including our own. This is not obvious at first glance. Because the historical argument informs the book’s structure, the investigation into principles is scattered throughout the work.  It is also occluded somewhat by the shifting terminology of the book, thanks in large part to the shifting and myriad influences on the authors’ language in this or that chapter or section. But this aspect of their account, the investigation into principles, is in my opinion the most remarkable feature of the book and the one that makes it most deserving of careful reading. For they recognize that it is not enough to give an historical account, an account in reference to beginnings, an account of how we became what we are, but that one must also provide a principled account, an account in reference to the essential structure of human life, specifically to the heterogeneity of ends that give it its peculiar problems.

They are aware, for example, that, for all their attempts to ennoble the regime, there is nevertheless an abiding tension between the just and the noble and good. As noted, they do not attempt to overcome liberalism and its highly egalitarian understanding of justice; they rather seek to preserve it. Yet they are sensitive to the fact that justice so understood, perhaps even however understood, is not in simple harmony with the other, higher ends men pursue. They rather spend one quarter of the book, Part II, on how liberalism, or an especially insidious form of it, is to blame for “the hollowing out of the American mind.” Such an analysis is required, if we are to return to our origins and take up the “rebuilding” to which the last part of the book, Part IV, calls us. By the final pages of the book, the authors have grown bold enough to distill our error into a powerful proposition: “the right was pursued while the good was abandoned” (216).

It is to the good life especially that the authors ultimately and correctly attend. It is the theme from which they depart in the Preface and to which they return at the book’s culmination: “The vital yet messy questions of what constitutes a good life, what collective endeavors society should pursue, and what a shared and national identity can make possible” (xiv), the “more thorny questions,” beyond those addressed by our “ethical universalism,” questions “about what constitutes a life well lived, the boundaries and content of national identity, and the human search for meaning” (213). “What virtues,” they ask, “what conception of the noble or indeed the exemplary life, are we willing to advance and defend in the place of the ones that have been jettisoned in the name of inclusivity?” (215) The tension between the just, on the one hand, and the noble or the good, on the other, remains ever in the background of this book.

But the pursuit of the noble comes with risks of its own. When seeking a higher purpose or end, it is very easy to fall into “blood-and-soil conceptions of peoplehood” (198). The authors reject this grounding of nobility whole cloth. But about that perennial, superhuman source of unity of purpose, and hence of noble self-sacrifice, namely, religion, faith, or piety, the authors are rather of two minds. There is, for example, a whole chapter with the title “Piety and its Price” (Chapter 16), whose tenor is echoed in the following chapter when Karp and Zamiska describe the United States as “a nation in which membership means something more than a shallow appeal to ethnic or religious identity” (193, emphasis added). Here blood-and-soil and religion are placed on equal footing. Nevertheless, they recognize the need for “mythology” and “shared narratives” (199). In one remarkable passage, they go so far as to recognize the necessity of something they believe imaginary, and they do so in exceedingly plain language:

“A commitment to participating in the imagined community of the nation, to some degree of forgiveness for the sins and betrayal of one’s neighbor, to a belief in the prospect of a greater and richer future together than would be possible alone, requires a faith and some form of membership in a community.” (200, emphasis added)

Some readers might fault the authors for speaking of faith so strongly and weakly at once, as necessary yet imaginary, but this would, I think, be a mistake. Serious concern with issues of such a magnitude as they raise requires an honest look within to one’s genuine opinions, hopes, and longings, and the contradictions and tensions we find among them. To describe the political community as “imagined” while calling its basis a “faith” is simply to speak the language all serious thinkers have to some extent been forced to use since Machiavelli criticized all ideal regimes as imaginary, including that governed by God. Most authors attempt to hide such crises of conscience from their readers, whether knowingly out of shame or unknowingly out of a lack of self-awareness. Karp and Zamiska, however, recognize that overcoming the incipient nihilism of the age—for that is, they rightly claim, the challenge we collectively face (see 214)—requires describing what our hopes actually are, yet with candor about the obstacles we inevitably encounter in our attempt to take them seriously and satisfy them.

IV.

In short, The Technological Republic recognizes the current crisis and responds by calling for, and beginning to engage in, a two-fold investigation into the genealogy of that crisis and into the principles of a properly ennobling political life. It is to the authors’ credit that their position of power and comfort does not lull them into a state of complacency, that they rather do what all serious modern men have had to do once they have observed how base modern motives are and how effective we have become in satisfying them—how impressively successful we are at being shallow and narrow, to borrow the authors’ language. For centuries now disaffected modern men have been called to recover the exalted language of pre-modern man and then to justify it amid the sneering ridicule of their contemporaries. But if this is the true calling, then the authors’ vision of a revival of the technological republic of the early-to-mid-20^th-Century will likely not answer our deepest longings. We can excuse the authors for the incompleteness of their work, for they warn us from the start that what they offer is only a beginning. But that means that we must identify for ourselves the core question the authors need to face but do not in this book: whether we could ever reconcile the building that they call for in our common endeavors with the tensions they exhibit in considering our principles. The perennial problems we face in reconciling the good, the noble, the just, and the holy—are they not, as problems for action in general, problems also for the particular act of building? Is it even possible to be an anti-ideological technologist? Is it not rather the case that ideology is the queen of technologies? To respond to or overcome these difficulties would require situating progressive natural science, with its emphasis on material and efficient causes, within a stable nexus of the basic problems and alternatives—or, to use more fashionable language, the trade-offs—human beings necessarily face, always and everywhere, when considering the heterogeneity of our ends—the just and the unjust, the noble and the base, the good and the bad, and so on. Such a stable nexus might perhaps rise to being a metaphysics; it would, at a minimum, be a philosophic anthropology. At any rate, its stability would resist the nihilism at the heart of natural science, while its articulation of problems and alternatives would possess the flexibility to accommodate the ever-changing concerns that the innovations of researchers and builders inevitably raise. It is to the authors’ credit that their exhortation reminds us of and calls us to this all-important task.

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. 

* * * 

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. 

* * * 

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). 

There was a time when America’s brightest minds worked hand in hand with the government to create world-changing technologies. DARPA and other agencies helped build the internet, GPS technology, search engines, and self-driving cars—the very foundation of Silicon Valley’s dominance. These innovations fueled economic prosperity and solidified the United States’ global standing. But as we transition into an era of renewed great power competition, the government once again needs the help of our best and brightest.  

This time, the task is not to build atomic bombs, but to dominate the era of AI and software-driven warfighting. The problem? The very engineers most capable of rising to this challenge are also the ones most reluctant to work with the U.S. military. Instead, they use their talents on consumer products—photo-sharing, ride-hailing, and food delivery apps—products that may improve our daily lives but do little to advance our national security.  

How we got here is the focus of The Technological Republic, an ambitious new book by Palantir CEO Alexander Karp and his longtime deputy Nicholas Zamiska.¹ The authors’ central argument is that as we have entered the software century—by which they mean an era where global conflicts will be won or lost primarily through the power of software—our engineering elite must rebuild its relationship with the government, in particular the military, and redirect its efforts to constructing the technology that will help the U.S. retain its power in the world.  

The book could not have arrived at a more critical moment. Recent headlines make its warnings impossible to ignore. The bipartisan push to ban TikTok over national security concerns and the emergence of DeepSeek R1—China’s latest AI model, now surpassing OpenAI as the most downloaded app on the App Store—have heightened fears of China’s surveillance and technological parity. The authors argue that with the accelerating race for AI dominance, China has the most compelling opportunity to challenge America’s global standing in decades.  

To address this threat, Karp and Zamiska advocate for the establishment of a new Manhattan Project, where the best minds will help America and its allies develop and retain exclusive control over the most advanced AI-powered weaponry—targeting systems, swarms of drones, and robots—which will define this new age of geopolitical conflict.  

While Karp and Zamiska paint a stark picture of the geopolitical landscape, the book is best read in light of their extensive commentary in other venues on the character of great power competition. Elsewhere,² Karp has predicted that the U.S. is likely to find itself in a three-front war against China, Russia, and Iran. In today’s media environment, China’s actions are widely reported to be undermining the West. To most outside observers, it can often be difficult to ascertain which reports are true, credible, or exaggerated out of political expediency. It would have been fascinating to learn from two of today’s leading national security technologists which of China’s actions we should be most alarmed about in the current race for global AI supremacy.  

The book’s examination of the Pentagon’s byzantine procurement rules recalls current debates about government efficiency raised by the maverick Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Palantir’s executives have seen the dysfunction within the Department of Defense’s (DoD)’s procurement process firsthand. Its software, preferred by the U.S. Army Special Forces in Afghanistan for detecting explosives, was repeatedly rejected by Pentagon brass in favor of an inferior system developed by a major defense contractor. It was only after lawsuits brought against the government by Palantir and SpaceX that the military finally began to consider commercial alternatives in its procurement process, opening the door to greater competition in defense tech.  

Reforms have been made. In 2015, the DoD created the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), a tech-focused financing and scaling outfit armed with the explicit mandate of helping the military more quickly adopt technologies from the civilian tech sector, especially start-ups. By providing a pathway through the bureaucratic procurement process, expediting the processing time of government contracts, and investing seed money, the DIU helped several tech start-ups become defense unicorns, such as Anduril, Shield AI, and Scale AI.  

But in the big picture, these initiatives remain a drop in the bucket. The vast majority of the Pentagon’s budget is still spent on outdated hardware and software systems from legacy players unprepared for the dawning age of software-driven warfare.  

The book also raises an intriguing question: Are we already witnessing a new, productive partnership between private-sector technology and government? The announcement of Project Stargate—a $500 billion AI infrastructure initiative led by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank—suggests that opposition to government partnerships, a sentiment endemic in the Silicon Valley of the post-Cold War decades, is fading. OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, once reluctant to engage with the Pentagon, have all in recent years announced collaborations with the U.S. military.  

At the rank-and-file level, however, the tech workforce may still be hesitant to wholeheartedly embrace a partnership with the arms of U.S. power. Silicon Valley’s engineers have long been skeptical of defense work. When then-Secretary of Defense Carter visited Silicon Valley in 2015 to discuss the concept of the DIU, Google would not host him. Three years later, Google withdrew from Project Maven — the Pentagon project to incorporate machine learning technology into its command-and-control systems —after sustained employee protests.  

Today, however, the prospects for positive engagement between Silicon Valley and the U.S. military may be less bleak. When faced with an immediate threat, unity and patriotism may emerge in previously unexpected ways. Consider the case of Israel. Before the attacks of October 7th, 2023, Israel found itself mired in the biggest constitutional crisis in its history. Yet after the attacks, the citizens of Israel set politics aside. 360,000 reservists from all walks of life, including the tech sector, rushed into their uniforms to fight for their threatened country.  

To create this kind of social cohesion in the U.S., we must engage with what Yale political theorist Steven Smith has called “enlightened patriotism”³: an expression of belonging, loyalty, and pride, which eschews blind nationalism in favor of a constantly-renewed, living commitment to improving the public good. Enlightened patriotism is a pragmatic recognition that, for all its flaws, America remains the best hope for democracy, innovation, and human rights.  

The authors ask rhetorically: whatever one may think of war, if the U.S. ever must enter a war, wouldn’t the world be better off if the U.S. won, rather than lost, that war? Likewise, would you rather live in a world order dominated by the U.S., or by China?  

In a time when the leadership of the Democratic Party, as The New York Times reports⁴, is “struggling to decide what it believes in,” the American left would be well advised to adopt such a pragmatist case for American patriotism, instead of perpetuating false claims about how “systematic racism” and “white supremacy” are indelible, and indeed defining, parts of our national fabric.  

While Karp and Zamiska hope that their book will prompt a discussion in Silicon Valley “of what, beyond a firm and uncontroversial commitment to liberalism and its values…constitutes our shared vision of the community to which we belong,” it does not fully articulate such a shared vision. Had it done so, it would have also needed to address fundamental questions about the role of civil disobedience, as a legitimate act of “enlightened patriotism” — but such an expanded scope is likely best suited to a sequel. From Thoreau’s opposition to the Mexican-American War to modern-day protests against military contracts in the tech industry, dissent has, rightly or wrongly, often been framed as an expression of love for one’s country. Though the book does not fully explore the tension between duty and conscience it does leave readers with a pressing question: When, if ever, is refusing to cooperate with the government an act of patriotism?  At its core, The Technological Republic trumpets a clarion call to America’s best and brightest: Silicon Valley must re-engage with the national interest, or it risks ceding the future to authoritarian regimes. Whether this call is heeded remains to be seen. But Karp and Zamiska make one thing clear: the stakes could not be higher.  

In February 2025, Vice President Vance delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference that shocked and appalled much of the European audience. The speech was met with strong criticism—labeled as “stunning,” “insensitive,” and even a “violent attack” on European democracies. However, many critics avoided engaging with the deeper questions at the heart of his address: What is the purpose of the West? What does it stand for? What democratic values do we share, and which are worth defending? 

This fundamental question of purpose is also central to Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s new book, The Technological Republic. The book urges founders, engineers, and citizens alike to ask: What is the purpose behind the technology we are creating? The authors argue that the question is not whether a new generation of increasingly autonomous, AI-driven weapons will be built, but rather, who will build them and for what purpose. 

While The Technological Republic explores the often-frightening power of technology, it ultimately places humans at its center. Karp and Zamiska argue that individuals have choices in how technology is developed and used—choices that necessitate serious reflection on the values that underpin the West and a commitment to defending them.   The authors offer a sense of hope that humanity still matters and can correct past mistakes, particularly those stemming from Silicon Valley’s prioritization of commercial interests at the expense of the common good. 

The authors are particularly critical of programmers who created technologies “untethered from a more fundamental purpose.” This, they argue, led to the “hollowing out” of the American mind. By allowing market forces to dictate priorities, Silicon Valley avoided addressing the most pressing societal problems, leaving Americans “vulnerable and exposed.” 

The Historical Link Between Purpose and Technology 

Karp and Zamiska remind us that it was not always this way. They explore earlier periods in American history when technology was deeply connected to national purpose. During the early Cold War era—marked by NASA’s space race and the Sputnik crisis—science and engineering were tied to a larger mission: the defense of democracy and the advancement of the American project. Scientists and engineers were at the heart of national life, contributing to the broader effort to uphold democratic ideals.

The authors believe that technologists can revive this spirit by keeping purpose in mind. Purpose compels choices—”to speak, to prefer”—which, in turn, are essential steps in mobilizing resources toward meaningful goals. They explore this idea across several dimensions. 

Purpose, Judgment, and National Identity

On one level, purpose forces judgment, which can be a positive force. In their chapter on adopting an aesthetic point of view, the authors argue that it is acceptable—even necessary—to make claims about truth and beauty.  It is ok to argue that something is ugly.  They caution against a “thin version of collective identity” that lacks the ability to provide meaningful direction in human experience. Companies that make decisive choices, they argue, tend to outperform those ruled by indecision and committees. Software development, they observe, is as much an art as it is a science.

Particularly compelling is the book’s discussion of the link between purpose, choice, and national identity. Karp and Zamiska make an unabashed argument that the nation-state remains the highest level at which civic affiliations can still be meaningfully fulfilled. Beyond that scale, cohesion becomes difficult. The authors contend that the nation-state provides a sense of unity and shared narrative, sustaining individuals in ways that larger, more abstract political entities cannot. They reference British anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s assertion that meaningful human connections are limited to around 150 people, emphasizing that national projects must be structured in ways that allow for genuine communal bonds. 

This argument echoes the themes of Vice President Vance’s speech, which suggested that the European project of unification has, in some cases, eroded the foundational values of identify and nationality that once defined Europe. 

The Role of Purpose in Shaping Technology 

By identifying a clear purpose behind the technologies we develop, engineers can become forces for good, contributing to the creation of an “affirmative vision for what we want.” However, the discussion of purpose is not just for technologists—it is also empowering for the average person. 

For those who, like me, do not code and do not fully grasp the inner workings of the complex algorithms shaping AI, The Technological Republic offers hope. It suggests that we are not powerless in the face of technological change. Karp and Zamiska acknowledge the dangers posed by AI, including the potential threat it poses to liberal values and the fear that advanced AI may one day supersede humanity. However, they believe that humans still have choices.

By shaping technology in ways that uphold liberty and freedom, we can resist the Orwellian nightmare of “impersonality together with a sense of powerlessness.”¹ The Technological Republic outlines a path forward: If we believe in human agency and make deliberate choices based on democratic principles, we can ensure that technology serves the right purposes.  I hope that they are right.  

The Technological Republic is a two-hundred-page exercise in horizontal thinking about some of America’s greatest challenges and opportunities, endeavoring to ask the big questions necessary of our shared American experiment. The book covers a potpourri of topics from war, both cultural and kinetic, to the unique moments in history that supported the foundation of global enterprises based in Silicon Valley. The authors lay out a broad horizon with multiple valleys for future discussion, diving into more depth vertically. I do hope that Alexander and Nicholas’ work leads to more discussions and work on thinking within those verticals as the nation desperately needs these deeper discussions. 

The crux of The Technological Republic is a call for renewing the American experiment around values such as pragmatism and a common code of ethics and behavior. The focus on a shared sense of morality and ethics is a refreshing approach to a national project as so much of our daily lives, in both corporate and personal capacities, is occupied by compliance and the rule of law. The authors dare Americans to ask “why” they are doing something rather than focusing on the rote actions of compliance and relying on institutional inertia to carry things forward. Left unsaid is that the leaders of America’s adversaries are not daring to ask “why” and are imbedding themselves in the institutions of international trade, culture, and commerce established by the West.         

While reading The Technological Republic I read in parallel a 1950 Army War College textbook entitled Economics of National Security. The textbook deals with the process of demilitarization of the American economy after World War Two and the threat of a Cold War turning hot, requiring a much larger professional military than the United States historically had maintained. Economics of National Security notes that, “[e]conomic power is an aim of national security policy and is a major pillar of modern military power.” The thinking of this time was that the organization and guidance of the private sector in support of national security, is a responsibility of government. Clearly this role of government is a concept that we have lost in the subsequent decades and if the West hopes to prevail in the face of its adversaries it is a skillset the government must learn again. 

The Technological Republic’s biggest shortcoming was in bridging the gap between what the authors call “the engineering mindset” and the construction of a national consensus and culture in opposition to the left’s experimentation with post-nationalism and moral relativism. While the authors extol the unique qualities of corporate organization in Silicon valley as allowing the freedom and flexibility to create and unwillingness to conform, the question of how this tendency toward nonconformity would be reconciled with fighting for something “singular and new” in a collective American identity. Perhaps it would be best to delineate the responsibilities of the engineering mindset as one of problem solving while the civic religion of the nation is for matters of morality and ethics, supporting Einstein’s presupposition that science without religion in lame while religion without science is blind. 

Within weeks of one another in 2023 in remarks in Washington and Moscow former national security advisor Jake Sullivan and President Putin agreed that the Washington Consensus was over. When it ended, whether it was when China surpassed the US in manufacturing, the Global Financial Crisis, or when Russia invaded Ukraine, is a matter for future historians to argue over. What is clear is that American institutions and the international institutions established by the West in the wake of World War Two are dysfunctional or unfit for purpose. Alexander and Nicholas have laid out a broad horizon for Americans reading their work and at its conclusion they declare that it is time to “build something.” I couldn’t agree more. 

Before Alex Karp cofounded Palantir Technologies, the shadowy data analysis firm and defense contractor of which he is now the CEO, he wanted to be an academic social theorist. Upon graduating from Stanford Law School—where he befriended his eventual Palantir cofounder, Peter Thiel—Karp enrolled in a PhD program at Goethe University Frankfurt. There, under the tutelage of a specialist in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, he immersed himself in the thought of the Frankfurt School, the collective of Marxian theorists and cultural critics who inspired student protest movements in the 1960s.

It is unclear what led Karp to abandon his high-minded pursuits and build a company whose software has been used by ICE to track down suspected illegal immigrants for deportation, by the U.S. military to target drone strikes, and possibly by the Israel Defense Forces to develop “kill lists,” among other ethically fraught pursuits at the frontier of intelligence and warfare. What is certain is that today, Karp has ascended to a position on the world stage that his former student cohort could never imagine. Since Palantir went public in 2020, the company’s market cap has soared from $16 billion to a recent high of more than $280 billion, briefly surpassing stalwarts like Toyota and making Karp a billionaire many times over (after a nearly 500 percent surge in the company’s stock price last year, The Economist named Karp its top-performing CEO of 2024). And despite Karp’s liberal commitments—he has supported Democrats most of his life, and has referred to himself as a socialist and even a neo-Marxist—Palantir now wields tremendous influence in Trumpworld, largely through Thiel, who has backed Trump since 2016 and is J. D. Vance’s former employer. “Palantirians,” including one of Karp’s closest advisers, are installed in senior roles across the new administration.

Despite Karp’s liberal commitments—he has called himself a socialist and even a neo-Marxist—Palantir wields tremendous influence in Trumpworld, largely through Peter Thiel. “Palantirians” are installed in senior roles across the new administration.

At the height of his power, Karp is using his platform to publish a scathing critique of the academic community he once aspired to join. The Technological Republic, cowritten with Karp’s Palantir deputy Nicholas Zamiska, argues that it is academics and other liberal elites, not Karp, who have betrayed their shared values. By abandoning the pursuit of truth in favor of problematizing the pro-West worldview, they have discouraged generations of America’s best and brightest from contributing to the national defense, and diverted precious technical talent to trivial endeavors such as “building algorithms that optimize the placement of ads on social media platforms.” This, in turn, has weakened the liberal world order in the face of rising authoritarian threat, particularly from China.

Why would a man in Karp’s position write an alienating, combative political treatise? On the surface, the book calls on academics to do what Karp believes he has done himself, and embrace a more forceful and pragmatic role in defending democracy—in their case, by strengthening, rather than tearing down, young Americans’ sense of patriotic duty. But the argument Karp delivers is unlikely to convince them. So unlikely, in fact, that it raises the question of who Karp is truly speaking to.

The Technological Republic begins with an assessment of Silicon Valley that channels Karp’s leftist academic roots. The tech industry of the internet era, he says, allocates an incredible amount of financial and human capital to endeavors that contribute little to, and often detract from, the collective welfare.

For Karp, the tech industry’s finest moments came during World War II and the Cold War, when STEM talent partnered with the government—and especially the military—to pursue “grand, collectivist” projects. Government initiatives such as the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program produced world-changing breakthroughs. In the private sector, companies like Fairchild Semiconductor turned government-funded research, and military procurement work, into the bedrock innovations of the modern internet.

Karp views the modern tech industry, and especially Big Tech, as having abandoned this spirit of ambition and public purpose. The platform empires are built not on breakthrough innovations that lifted up the broader economy, but rather on the “aggressive disruption of incumbents and the construction of new monopolies.” They have not sought to solve humanity’s great challenges, but rather to address the “inconveniences of daily life for those with disposable income,” such as getting a taxi or ordering takeout. The Technological Republic drips with disdain for a generation of companies that, while draping themselves in the rhetoric of changing the world, have been content to “sat[e] the often capricious and passing needs of late capitalism’s hordes.” As China channels its resources toward strategic technologies—Karp is particularly concerned about China’s advances toward intelligent drone swarms, which he believes represent the future of warfare—this “complacency” is no longer acceptable.

How did we get here? The contrast Karp draws between the mid-20th-century and the modern-day tech world provides an opportunity to reflect on structural economic changes that might have contributed to the slowdown he sees in innovation and ambition. Has the rise of the venture capital model, or more recently the dominance of a few incumbent players, encouraged founders to think small? Karp suggests that America has “ceded too much control to the whims of the market,” and gestures vaguely at the need for a “Manhattan Project” for battlefield AI, as well as increased allocations to AI in the defense budget (surprise, surprise). But he declines to elaborate on these proposals. The Technological Republic is not fundamentally interested in questions of political economy—it is interested in culture.

What set apart the technologists of the World War II and Cold War eras, Karp claims, was their mentality. These were not “technical minds chasing trivial consumer products,” but builders who “aspired to see the most powerful technology of the age deployed to address challenges of industrial and national significance.” The core premise of The Technological Republic is that this collectivist ethos was made possible by a strong sense of national identity rooted in “shared culture”—the mythologies, religious beliefs, and common experiences, such as mandatory military service, that forged bonds between citizens and constituted their understanding of what it meant to be part of the American project. But over the latter half of the 20th century, America’s national identity faded. Improbably, Karp blames this entirely on efforts by the academic left to promote tolerance and inclusivity in higher education.

Karp’s narrative of decline begins with efforts to reform Eurocentric university core curricula. Starting in the 1950s and accelerating in the countercultural moment of the late 1960s, rising generations of historians made the obvious point that required general education courses on Western civilization—which for decades had taught students that America was the inheritor of a civilizational legacy linking the ancient Near East, classical Greece and Rome, and early modern Europe, progressing all the while toward liberty and reason—excluded the histories of civilizations elsewhere in the world, and warped students’ understanding of what “civilization” meant. Universities assented, refashioning “Western Civ” into world history courses or, more often, abandoning it altogether. Later, in the 1980s and ’90s (although Karp fuses these distinct episodes into one), the humanities faced a similar reckoning in what became known as the “Canon Wars.” Dead White Men were asked to share space with a more diverse cast of authors.

Meanwhile, a more combative strain of intellectual reform sought to directly “deconstruct” the edifice of Western identity and knowledge. Karp picks on two prominent postcolonial scholars here: Kwame Anthony Appiah, who attacked the coherence of Western civilization as a march from Athenian democracy to the Age of Enlightenment; and Edward Said, whose 1978 tract, Orientalism, produced the revolutionary—and, Karp admits, “brilliant”—insight that productions of history and anthropology reflect power dynamics between speaker and subject. Said’s influence was particularly profound, Karp writes, generating “a new industry in American higher education, built around dismantling colonial understandings of the world,” which “remade” academia as a whole.

To his credit, Karp’s criticism of these academic challenges to the West—the instincts of postwar intellectuals toward diversification and deconstruction—is somewhat more nuanced than the familiar complaints of aggrieved campus conservatives. Unlike his Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel, whose 1996 screed, The Diversity Myth, lambasts multiculturalism as “anti-Western zealotry” in disguise, Karp acknowledges that the intellectual projects of Appiah and Said had merit. “The dismantling of an entire system of privilege was rightly begun,” Karp writes. His gripe is that the generation of academics the reformers, and especially Said, inspired “failed to resurrect anything substantial, a coherent collective identity or set of communal values, in its place.”

In the hands of more radical thinkers, Karp argues, Said’s insight that subjectivity is inherent in the production of knowledge about other cultures was twisted into a belief that accurate descriptive knowledge of other cultures was not possible at all—and therefore that comparative value judgments about different cultures was an inherently problematic, and futile, endeavor. How could Americans claim that their art, ethics, or social organization was superior to the art, ethics, or social organization of another society, from behind their American eyes? Borrowing a term popularized by the traditionalist historians of the Canon Wars era, Karp claims that cultural “relativism” became dogma in academia by the end of the 20th century, and from there permeated political institutions, journalism, Hollywood, and other bastions of the liberal elite. It became, Karp writes, “the dominant form of elite establishment thinking.”

As academia, and the broader liberal establishment, pulled away from comparing cultures, Karp argues, it ceased making normative claims about what America’s shared culture should be. It became uninterested in, or perhaps afraid of, articulating a positive vision of America’s national identity. Certain segments became outright hostile to the idea of having one at all. Karp catches two high-profile academics in the act: the sociologist Richard Sennett, who pondered, in The New York Times, whether there might be “ways of acting together without invoking the evil of a shared national identity,” and the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who castigated Americans’ unique “patriotic pride” as “morally dangerous,” and instead called for “primary allegiance” to “the community of human beings in the entire world.”

The result, according to Karp, was that the generation of Americans raised in this intellectual environment developed no concept of being part of a worthy national endeavor—and retreated into the pursuit of riches instead. Whereas mid-20th-century technologists’ sense of patriotic duty was fortified by their education, the education of Uber and Instagram founders had systematically stamped theirs out. Into the resulting void, Karp writes, “the market rushed in with fervor.” This generation “knew what it opposed—what it stood against and could not condone—but not what it was for.”

Karp views the modern tech industry, especially Big Tech, as having abandoned ambition and public purpose. The platform empires, he argues, are not built on breakthrough innovations that lifted up the broader economy, but rather on “aggressive disruption of incumbents and the construction of new monopolies.”

Ironically, The Technological Republic falls into this trap itself. Karp concludes the book with what is essentially a call for academics and the liberal elite broadly to reject cancel culture and orthodoxy—one that resembles Thiel-style cultural warfare more than it resembles an original, or constructive, critique. In one eyebrow-raising passage, Karp appears to sympathize with a 1998 speech by a German writer that railed against what Karp describes as “the yoke of an enforced remembrance” of the Holocaust. This speech was also the subject of Karp’s doctoral dissertation, although he did not condone it then.

But Karp, like the academics he criticizes, fails to articulate a positive vision of what a new American identity should be. Nor does he grapple with recent liberal attempts to do so—contrary to Karp’s claim that such projects have been thought-policed out of existence—such as Jill Lepore’s This America, and Colin Woodard’s voluminous work in the Washington Monthly and elsewhere. If there is a path forward suggested by The Technological Republic, it is that by embracing “intellectual confrontation,” the liberal establishment can allow a new national identity to spontaneously emerge through debate.

Considered in isolation, Karp’s key observations are likely to resonate with his supposed target audience of academics and liberal thought leaders. Readers with ties to elite educational institutions would likely agree that their peers are more motivated by money than any sense of duty to the collective, especially when one considers the staggering percentages of graduates who flock to the finance and consulting industries. (Karp himself notes this phenomenon in one passage, though his focus is on the tech world; for a deeper dive, see Zach Marcus, “The Corporate Raid on Campus.”) And it’s difficult to argue with his claims that America’s national identity has been eroded, or that higher education has become more interested in questioning, rather than strengthening, a pro-West perspective.

As academia and the broader liberal establishment retreated from comparing cultures, Karp argues, it ceased making normative claims about what America’s shared culture should be. It became uninterested in, or perhaps afraid of, articulating a positive vision of America’s national identity. Certain segments became outright hostile to the idea of having one at all.

But The Technological Republic fails to convince that these phenomena are interconnected. Do many of America’s best and brightest today work for Facebook and McKinsey because they lack patriotism? Was one semester of “Western Civ” so pivotal in the career trajectories of the engineers who put a man on the moon? If so, Karp provides no evidence. And he strenuously avoids grappling with other historical events and cultural currents that likely contributed to the elite’s abandonment of public service careers—does it have more to do with their belief that America is bad, or that “greed is good”? As far as there is a disinclination toward military work specifically, the impact on public opinion of America’s disastrous military campaigns in Southeast Asia and the Middle East goes unmentioned.

Perhaps, after two decades at the helm of an infamously cult-like company where he is “accustomed to being received as an oracle,” according to a recent profile, Karp’s powers of persuasion have dulled. Or perhaps he was simply limited by the scope of the book. The main text of The Technological Republic clocks in at 218 breezy pages, 56 of which are dedicated to a non sequitur on Palantir’s corporate culture. But for a man of Karp’s intellectual mettle—which does shine through in the book, in his command of intellectual history—these explanations are doubtful. One can’t help but feel that he has not made an earnest attempt at persuasion.

Which brings us to the question of Karp’s true purpose in writing the book. There are moments when he seems to be making a friendly appeal for liberals to get their act together; the clearest example is his warning, borrowed from the political philosopher Michael Sandel, that “fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread.” But the carelessness with which he argues his central points, and his neglect of a thoughtful solution, do not ultimately leave the impression that The Technological Republic is rooting for the liberal establishment to recover. What we are left with is a vicious critique of that establishment, delivered through gleeful transgressions of its boundaries on acceptable topics of discussion. In short: red meat for the right.

Viewed this way, the book forms a pattern with other publicity stunts Karp has performed in the wake of last November’s vibe-shifting election. After Palantir reported blowout earnings in February, Karp went viral and successfully triggered the libs by proclaiming on the (video-streamed) investor call his commitment to “scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them.” Appearing on CNBC’s Squawk Box the morning The Technological Republic hit shelves, Karp called Elon Musk “obviously the most important builder in the world.” He applauded Musk’s controversial DOGE initiative, which he claimed “90 percent of Americans” support, for targeting “the fraud, waste, and abuse we know is there.” Musk tweeted the clip.

The moral case for Palantir that Karp has made throughout his career—that the company is a project to promote democracy, and strengthening Western militaries is its means to this end—has always been somewhat simplistic. But Karp seemed to genuinely believe in this calculation, and his conduct could be seen as consistent with it. He made a point of refusing to work in autocratic countries, and of meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine to offer Palantir’s support in its war against Russia. 

But as Karp attempts to curry favor with an administration that is not only disassembling the world order Karp cherishes but actively undermining America’s standing as a beacon of liberal democracy at home, the coherence of Palantir’s political project has begun to unravel. In his TV interview, and in his book, Karp no longer comes across as a man with firm commitments.

“I’ve been a Democrat most of my life,” Karp said on CNBC. “I still—I kind of view myself as outside it.”

This article originally appeared in Washington Monthly.

©2025 Washington Monthly Publishing, LLC

Reprinted with permission of Washington Monthly.

Once upon a time, computer scientists broke the Enigma code and helped win World War II. Now, they are building photo-sharing apps and AI girlfriends.

Last month, Palantir CEO Alex Karp and his colleague Nicholas Zamiska published his book The Technological Republic. I began reading this book believing it would simply be a memoir of Palantir and a call for more people to work on defense startups. But instead, Karp told a story of progress and decline, of conformity and boldness, through the lens of history, philosophy, psychology, and much more.

The book’s main premise is that Silicon Valley lost its way. In the 1950s and 60s, Pentagon funding sowed the seeds that nurtured Silicon Valley’s early growth. And the Valley’s early projects were devoted to serving national interests – from intercontinental rockets to microwave tubes for military applications. But things have changed. According to Karp, the peace and comfort that these inventions created turned Silicon Valley into a consumerist hotbed, where founders enjoy the Pax Americana, pursue their dreams of revolutionizing social media, and neglect their duty to help protect the American national project.

But a new technological revolution is afoot: we already have a taste of what large language models are capable of, and have barely scratched the surface of agentic AI and robotics. Karp argues that as this revolution could (and most likely will) threaten the current world order, one of the West’s greatest challenges is redirecting Silicon Valley engineering talent back to working on meaningful problems in science and defense.

The Technological Republic has a little something for everyone.

For those interested in defense, the book recounts some of the main difficulties the defense industry faced in the past – such as the notorious case where Japan needed to buy radios for the US military in Afghanistan, because pointless regulations made the US unable to buy them itself. It also imparts key lessons Palantir learned when first entering the defense tech sphere, from how to navigate government regulations to get contracts, to how to efficiently deploy their system to vastly different teams in Afghanistan.

On the other hand, the independent thinker may be more interested in how groupthink has infiltrated Silicon Valley, the home of innovation and pragmatism. Karp gives the example of how companies tackling geopolitical problems became a taboo in the Bay Area, and how that turned the engineering elite away from using their skills at said companies. He also shares how Palantir combats groupthink internally. Learning from Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System, Palantir’s management is based on a root-cause analysis system that avoids seemingly obvious assumptions, and instead finds the true reasons for failure, which are often interpersonal.

His book also particularly resonates with engineering students at elite institutions, where we are eager to build, but are lost in the search for meaning in our work.

This problem starts the moment we step foot on Stanford’s campus. We hear the legends of Evan Spiegel starting Snapchat in his student dorm. My freshman year, everyone knew of the frosh that founded a startup which sold essays of successful college applicants. And this certainly motivates people. Each year, entrepreneurship clubs receive applications from hundreds of ambitious freshmen, who are eager to dive into the startup world. And sometimes it “works”. BASES has successfully fostered startups that allow influencers to communicate more easily with their fans, or the great innovation that all of us use: Fizz.

This is not surprising–after all, the consumer startup space has low barriers to entry. A freshman is much more likely to understand the challenges of ordering merch online than of manufacturing cheaper biofuels. But an overstated takeaway from consumer startups is that what we build does not matter as much as finding sticky consumers and iterating quickly. The result is disappointingly incremental innovation; ultimately, while Fizz and Snapchat may quickly enrich their founders, the world would get along just fine without them.

In our Stanford applications, we painstakingly wrote about our passions for solving meaningful social problems. But when we come to Stanford, a lot of us forget those aspirations, declare a CS major, and groupthink our career decisions.

We are privileged to be able to access world leaders in engineering and science working on solving meaningful problems, from building underwater robots that recover lost shipwreck artifacts, to teaching AI to write in the language of genes. We should imbue our own work with this degree of ambition.

I hesitate to say that consumer startups are pointless–founding one certainly teaches a great deal about how to make products people love and care about. But as today’s technological revolution risks a growing Thucydides Trap, it may be a good idea to revisit some of the questions we answered in our college essays: to try to answer truthfully to ourselves what we care about, and what our moral and civic responsibilities are.

This article originally appeared in The Stanford Review

Not since the Apollo program has America been so enthralled by the promise of technology. Elon Musk, President Donald Trump’s closest adviser, founded and runs a company most famous for commercial spaceflight and its mission to establish a colony on Mars. NASA intends to put American boots back on the moon for the first time since 1972. Recent developments in artificial intelligence promise to transform how we work and live. A new generation of innovators — the “tech right” — champion such developments, sketching an almost utopian vision of humanity’s future. For all their rough edges, the rise of Musk, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Bezos, and the like represents something profoundly promising: long-dormant hope bubbling beneath the surface of our postmodern pessimism.

American optimism peaked in the mid-20th century. We stood on top of the world in the wake of World War II. The United States made up over half the planet’s economic output, the public was filled with a deep sense of civilizational confidence, and the scientific community was knee-deep in world-changing discoveries. But then we faltered. Much of what we were promised— zero-cost electricity, flying cars, intergalactic settlement — never came to fruition. Many of our well-intentioned military ventures abroad have concluded in unceremonious, if not outright disastrous, withdrawals (Saigon and Kabul come to mind). Such civilizational let-downs taught us this: History happens to man. The best we can do is manage.

Modern climate alarmism embodies such pessimism, with its boosters contending that the developed world must learn to live with a lack of abundance. A small but vocal minority of those pessimists even eschews child rearing, saying that to bring a child into a burning world would bring only further despair. We’ve gone from boasting American genius to waving the white flag.

The tech right disdains this white flag. “History may happen to man,” its members say, “but so too does man happen to history.” It is no mistake, then, that the prefatory quote to the cofounder of Palantir’s new book, The Technological Republic, is attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Of any faction in our modern political order, the tech right most embodies our Faustian impulse: a willingness to cut moral corners for the sake of progress. If climate alarmism inhabits one end of the spectrum — a complete surrender to nature; a sharp condemnation of man’s drive for progress — the Faustians inhabit the other: progress above all else; total war against nature.

As this movement comes into its own, its leaders are emerging to chart the future of technological development. In turn, they hope to chart America’s future. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal who is considered the prophet of the tech right, articulated the outlines of this in his 2014 manifesto, Zero to One, which is subtitled: “Notes on Start-Ups, or How to Build the Future.” Zero to One is half-jokingly referred to as the “Bible” by many technologists and start-up founders. But Thiel, who also co-founded the software giant Palantir, isn’t the only member of the tech right to try to engrave his vision in writing: in February, his fellow Palantir co-founder Alex Karp published The Technological Republic, a book that could well be equally as influential as Zero to One. 

In the book, Karp argues that instruments of hard power — missiles, ships, drones, even nuclear weapons — are necessary for the maintenance of American dominance, and that America’s decades of uncontested hegemony lulled us into complacency. Real power rests in force, or at least in the legitimate threat thereof, he argues. But, he writes, while the center of American technological development today — Silicon Valley — is brimming with highly competent people more than willing to volunteer their services to produce addictive social media algorithms, they’re reluctant to support anything remotely associated with our military due to moral concerns. This is why Karp co-founded Palantir: To be an unapologetically pro-American company that stewards the brainpower of the Valley toward the interests of national security. 

This introductory argument sets up Karp’s diagnosis of American malaise: We suffer from a crisis of moral relativism. Relying on political philosopher Allan Bloom’s observations in his popular book The Closing of the American Mind, he harshly condemns the “thinly veiled nihilism” that he says pervades the academy and society broadly. His solution is for modern men and women to commit themselves to believing in something, and they must believe in it very much.

But what exactly ought they believe in? He leaves this question entirely open, except for passing references to American interests. And it’s this moral ambivalence that is symptomatic of the deepest fault in the tech right’s project: its inability to articulate a robust moral and political ethic. Indeed, many on the tech right deeply admire the American project, and for good reason. They gaze at generations of Americans past, and at some Americans present, extolling their work ethic, confidence, and capacity to do great things. One need only gaze at the social media activity of many of these tech titans, replete with memes championing past generations of Americans and their virtues.

Yes, we ought to revive the best of America. But what is the best of America? How do we rekindle our greatness? What sort of politics and culture enables this? How do we rebuild cultural confidence? The tech right remains mostly silent on these most important questions. They lust for a return of the strong gods, but they know not which gods to invoke. And it is these questions — political questions — that must be answered by proponents of an explicitly political project. Gesturing toward an undefined concept of national interest or progress will not suffice. 

Karp, to his credit, grasps at this: The construction of a “technological republic,” he writes, “will require an embrace of value, virtue, and culture, the very things that the present generation was taught to abhor.” But how do we get there? If you read The Technological Republic and nothing else, the answer is some combination of people miraculously committing themselves to (still undefined) moral ideals, Congress allocating more dollars to research and development, and bureaucrats tinkering with military equipment procurement policies. Such answers are partial answers at best. The latter two are fairly achievable policy goals, but incommensurate with the great task at hand. The former objective — the public suddenly becoming virtuous, en masse — borders on the stuff of dreams. 

Much of the tech right’s inability to respond convincingly to these questions can be explained by the difference between the thinking required to accomplish the sort of (truly awesome) work tech innovators have been engaged in throughout their careers —building companies that have made enormous advances in fields as disparate and important as medical technology, communications, and transportion — and the sort of thinking demanded by ambitious political ventures. It is the difference between ends and means.

Again and again, Karp stresses the importance of results. The success of past generations of American innovators, especially those who followed in the wake of World War II, was enabled by a “commitment to advancing outcomes at the expense of theater … [of] setting aside vain theological debates in favor of even marginal and often imperfect progress.” Among Silicon Valley’s most valuable contributions — what Karp calls an “engineering mindset” — has to do with this dogged preference for results over abstract theory. Such talk should receive a warm reception in our present moment, especially as the Trump administration attempts to tackle waste, fraud, and abuse in the belly of the administrative state. Government bureaucracies the world over have become prisoners of process. 

But whereas in the start-up world, a founder rarely needs to consider the ends of a project beyond profit, in politics, what the “ends” are remains much more open-ended. The end of political science is eudaimonia, according to Aristotle (in English, roughly translated to “flourishing”) — an end obviously harder to define, much less quantify, than profit or user base goals. (Blaise Pascal put it well when writing of justice and truth: They are “two such subtle points, that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.”) 

In simpler terms, the tech right is best at achieving objective goals. But when one enters the political arena, one must also consider subjective goals: not just, say, building a highly capable and effective military, but also — what should our military power be used for? Where should we deploy our forces and why? Simply because contemporary politics has not lent itself to the serious contemplation and debate of what human flourishing actually looks like does not mean that the project can be abandoned altogether. 

Faced with this stumbling block, some on the tech right will conflate human flourishing with “progress,” claiming they have stumbled upon solid ground. But progress presumes some goal worth advancing toward. I do not mean to say here that Karp and his ilk don’t understand this problem. They clearly do, insofar as they are advocating for the reassertion of national ambition and a strong sense of national purpose. I mean only to say that they need to spend more time contemplating what future they are truly striving for.

How human flourishing ought to be defined and achieved in our time, with an eye to technological development, is a project far too grand to wedge into this essay. But we should recognize that for the tech right’s nobler political ambitions to come to fruition — the revitalization of a culture that dreams and does great things, a government effective enough to serve its constituents, and a national security apparatus capable of defending our interests and upholding justice — it must ground its mission in something more substantive. 

Here are several starting points for how members of the tech right can better define their vision of human flourishing.

First, they should promote the cultural and political ethic that has made America great: republicanism. A republic, as understood by the French political philosopher Montesquieu, is a form of government in which the power rests in the people — not in dictators (despotism), nor in monarchs (monarchy). While honor is the animating principle of monarchy and fear is that of despotism, republics are animated by virtue. “There is no great share of probity necessary to support a monarchical or despotic government: the force of laws, in one, and the prince’s arm, in the other, are sufficient to direct and maintain the whole,” Montesquieu wrote, “but, in a popular state, one spring more is necessary, namely, virtue.” Republicanism, then, champions the ability of people to govern themselves in their personal and political affairs, requiring and nurturing civic virtue among citizens.

Virtue not only manifests itself in political matters like voting and participating in town hall meetings, but also in how one interacts with the world. Instead of waiting for the state to act, republican citizens act on their own. “Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France … in the United States you will be sure to find an association,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in his early-mid 19th century classic, Democracy in America.

Virtue, the bedrock of republicanism, requires a restoration of self government. In our over-managed, excessively bureaucratic society, the question most often asked is not “How do we make that happen?,” but rather, “How do we get management on our side?” This is where the tech right’s anti-managerial instincts are spot on. We need more people in government and industry thinking about making things happen instead of merely navigating ever more complex red tape. People must not only be made to feel that their actions can bear fruit in the world — they must be empowered such that this is the case. They must be enabled to govern their own lives and learn how to govern others. Republicanism is the political theory the tech right should be grasping onto.

Secondly, the tech right should ground its ambitions in a renewed humanism. Many Americans understandably regard technological development with suspicion, fearing that automation will take their jobs; that AI will make us all obsolete. There are particularly thorny ethical questions surrounding increasingly complex forms of genetic engineering and exponentially more advanced varieties of artificial intelligence. Technologists would be misguided to wave away these sincere concerns as nostalgic lamentations. People, especially citizens of a republic, have every right to ask questions like these — indeed, these are the questions that must be asked if we seek to retain any iota of control over our own governance. We must do more than embrace technology: We must submit it to human ends. To do anything less would be to trade helplessness in the face of stagnation for helplessness in the face of growth.

Lastly, the tech right ought to take its argument to the American people. One of the key failures of our outgoing progressive elite, made up of exultant technocrats and central planners, is its pronounced lack of faith in the average citizen. The tech right should not repeat that mistake. Efforts to downsize the federal bureaucracy and reorient our politics towards making things happen must be brought to the American people — and the electorate must be persuaded of their rightness. How can this be done? Karp and Thiel have started off on the right foot, writing their thoughts down in widely available books. Members of the tech right should go further, supporting popular outlets that publish about these issues, frequenting prominent podcasts and news shows to broadcast their views, and ultimately supporting political candidates who are interested in making their argument to the American people. Their theory of American decline is among the most convincing out there. They are grasping at real solutions. They have the money and means to make an enormous impact.

We should salute the tech right for conjuring a renewed hope in humanity’s capabilities, because we in our postmodern malaise are in desperate need of such optimism. But we must ground such hope in new “pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason”: a new humanism, one rooted in the principle of self-government — in short, a new republicanism.

This article originally appeared in The Dispatch

In 2018, I was in the audience at a Pitch Day event in San Francisco as two computer science majors pitched to potential investors an app that allowed them to jump the beer line at the stadium so they wouldn’t miss any of the game. The deck was crisp and compelling. The young men were good looking, confident, and articulate. The idea? I left while everyone was applauding.

I thought back to this moment while reading Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s bracing new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (Crown Currency, 2025). I thought of the pitch again this week when I saw a NYT front page story about Phoebe Gates, daughter of Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, and her new online shopping tool.

What led an entire generation to spend its energies on vanities? Why is the apex of world historical advances in technology just another phone app that matches people to things (and other people) efficiently? Where is the collective patriotic fervor and moral grounding of eras past? Is the problem political? Cultural? What would it take to turn Silicon Valley’s productive energies toward the safety and flourishing of our nation?

These are just a few of the provocative questions raised by Karp, co-founder of Palantir, and his co-author Zamiska, Palantir’s legal counsel and head of corporate affairs, in their bestselling book. The growing praise suggests that these questions have been pressing for some time.

In their call for the shiny app-building sector to put aside childish things and turn toward more serious and patriotic endeavors, the authors might have also noted the damage done to the higher education market. For the past two decades, universities, bewitched by Silicon Valley glitter, told students that entrepreneurship is more important than history or philosophy, poured billions into campus start-up incubators, and began operating on Silicon Valley market principles that saw classrooms as platforms to be “monetized” and students as customers to be “matched” with programs delivering the highest starting salary. As I’ve argued elsewhere, data- and market- obsessed university leaders produced the campus culture of division and resentment that the authors have deemed so corrosive to the nation.

Many of us would love to join in rebuilding a culture with more national pride and group solidarity. We would love more focus on “truth, beauty, and the good life.” But if the path forward is reconciling a commitment to the free market “with its atomization and isolation of individual wants and needs” with “the insatiable human desire for some form of collective experience and endeavor,” where do those of us teaching “shared cultural traditions, mythologies, and values” fit in, when there isn’t really a market that values us? For me, the question the book leaves on the table is how exactly, in dismantling the old order to build a new technological republic, will teachers and purveyors of national virtues and values be part of the ownership culture.

The problem.

“A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West,” The Technological Republic proclaims, calling for a new focus on America and the national interest. Silicon Valley has been making whimsical apps and billionaires while the world spirals into crisis and something needs to change. Who can disagree? The book’s focus is the technology sector from pre-WWII to the present, the story of what has been, what might have been, and what now needs to be: a closer relationship between the technological sector and the nation that has allowed it to flourish. I have some quibbles with the book’s methodology, its short chapters and shorthand gestures to historical figures to make its point without taking the time to make its point. But I concur with the narrative arc and most of the conclusions reached.

It is remarkable that we agree about the state of the world from two completely different data sets and positions in the world. Karp is a billionaire immersed in the world he is critiquing; I am a scholar of 19th-century American literature who, until a decade or so ago, had a salary in the five figures. But I am rich in historical knowledge and when I found myself nodding at Karp and Zamiska’s characterization of eToys, Groupon, and Zynga hype as misguided, my thinking was less about Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and funders than the strivers that Dickens, Trollope, Twain, Wharton, and others skewered in fiction. There are always precedents.

The authors offer a reason for the lack of seriousness in the software world. “The Silicon Valley giants that dominate the American economy have made the strategic mistake of casting themselves as existing essentially outside the country in which they were built”:

The founders who created these companies in many cases viewed the United States as a dying empire, whose slow descent could not be allowed to stand in the way of their own rise and the era’s new gold rush…The vital yet messy questions of what constitutes a good life, which collective endeavors society should pursue, and what a shared and national identity can make possible have been set aside as the anachronisms of another age.

In that previous age, however, Adam Smith warned us that national pride and maximizing profits are often at odds:

A merchant, it has been said very properly, is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country. It is in a great measure indifferent to him from what place he carries on his trade; and a very trifling disgust will make him remove his capital, and together with it all the industry which it supports, from one country to another. No part of it can be said to belong to any particular country, till it has been spread as it were over the face of that country, either in buildings or in the lasting improvement of lands. (Book III, Wealth of Nations, 1776)

Not caring about nation is a feature, not a bug, of the profit-minded, Smith suggests. The invisible hand might have pointed that out. The entirety of the chapter, “How the Commerce of the Towns Contributed to the Improvement of the Country,” is relevant here, particularly Smith’s observation about status ambition: “Merchants are commonly ambitious of becoming country gentlemen, and when they do, they are generally the best of all improvers.”

That last point, which anticipates Karp and Zamiska by 250 years, is that the best and most lasting value of commerce is when it is put back to use to support the nation. And incentivizing merchants to do so is the work of culture.

The argument.

The Technological Republic comes in four parts that build slowly and somewhat meanderingly toward the conclusion that Palantir is the answer to the world’s problems. I appreciate the intellectual meandering. There should be more of it.

Part I, “The Software Century” begins with “Lost Valley,” the well-known tale of the American Century, the Manhattan Project and DARPA, featuring Oppenheimer, Vannevar Bush, J.C.R. Licklider, Hans Bethe, etc., then wondering why, given these beginnings, Silicon Valley has set its mind to “photo sharing apps and chat interfaces for the modern consumer.” “Sparks of Intelligence” is about the rise of AI and accompanying anxieties about whether AI will doom the world (a worry I don’t share). These two chapters set up the argument that Silicon Valley should be filled with serious people but somehow isn’t.

Chapter 3, “The Winner’s Fallacy” – the misguided idea that U.S. dominance means no more American bloodshed and sacrifice – focuses on the generation of engineers who “did not sign up to develop weapons” when weapons may be needed. Seven pages are not sufficient to treat the profound questions of necessary violence and just war. Karp and Zamiska are aware that the literature on the subject is vast: they begin with the Talmud, quote Thomas Schelling on Vietnam, and mention Albert Einstein’s relationship with FDR, who read Mein Kampf in German.

This is one of the book’s most important chapters and the implication is that American education is at fault: the cartoon version, that is, that coddles American minds. But there is no way to “efficiently” teach the philosophy, history, and ethics of necessary violence. It takes time, dedicated faculty, long discussions, wrenching debates. There is little room for this in our efficiency-obsessed universities. More philosophy courses for software engineers would have been a good investment. So how do we operationalize this for our flourishing future?

“The End of the Atomic Age” asserts that software’s eclipse of hardware is key to nation’s defense. Peace will no longer be kept by physical machines while software plays a supporting role. But the software engineers have gotten soft:

[T]he ascendant engineering elite in Silicon Valley that is most capable of building the artificial intelligence systems that will be the deterrent of this century is also the most ambivalent about working for the US military. An entire generation of software engineers, capable of building the next generation of AI weaponry, has turned its back on the nation-state, disinterested in the messiness and moral complexity of geopolitics.

The indictment goes on at length. Again, I wanted some theory as to why this is, besides the lack of philosophy classes. Who has been in charge of mentoring and guiding these young engineers? Who has not been doing their civic duty to encourage manly patriotic spirit? In late 19th-century Britain there was a growing anxiety that London-dwelling young men were getting soft. Enter Sir Robert Baden-Powell and Scouting for Boys (1908): “A soft bed and too many blankets make a boy dream bad dreams, which weakens him.” Might scouting be the answer for these software engineers? I am half in jest but I wanted the authors to say something more about this “entire generation” that hasn’t been taught about necessary violence.

“We must rise up and rage against this misdirection of our culture and capital,” cry the authors, shaking their heads at the social media economy. I read the “we” here as those who have some control over the direction of culture and capital. The authors suggest that China is beating us in part because they study our literature – Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway – while we don’t study theirs. I have written on exactly this point and agree. But world literature courses are being defunded by state legislatures for not meeting workforce demands. Will The Technological Republic help with this?

Part II “The Hollowing Out of the American Mind” begins with “The Abandonment of Belief,” which reprises the argument that Americans are coddled, don’t like speech they don’t agree with, care too much about the personal lives of their leaders, and care more about the performance of belief than belief. “Technological Agnostics” reprises the Adam Smith point, characterizing “the current leaders of Silicon Valley, who have constructed the technical empires that now structure our lives” as “post-national,” as “citizens of no country; their wealth and capacity for innovation had, in their minds, set them free.”

The argument is that Silicon Valley, even while its very existence was made possible by the military industrial complex post WWII and the creation of the internet, has created a culture without national pride, that doesn’t believe in war, that doesn’t have values, and that doesn’t know for what it stands. Here’s the key paragraph:

We have grown too eager to banish any sentiment or expression of values from the public square. The educated class in the United States was content to abstain from engagement with the content of the American national project: What is this nation? What are our values? And for what do we stand? This great secularization of postwar America was cheered by many on the left, either privately or publicly, who saw the systemic eradication of religion from public life as a victory for inclusion. And a victory, in that sense, it was. But the unintended consequence of this assault on religion was the eradication of any space for belief at all – any room for the expression of values or normative ideas about who we were, or should become, as a nation. The soul of the country was at stake, having been abandoned in the name of inclusivity. The problem is that tolerance of everything often constitutes belief in nothing.

Again, I agree, and this is a serious critique. The rhetoric recalls Jonathan Edwards’s great 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, threatening hellfire and damnation for those who care more about making money than fearing God. I’ve been trying to make the case that Edwards is relevant to Silicon Valley culture for years.

Yet The Technological Republic waffles in assigning blame for the conditions being lamented. As much as I agree with the book’s intentions, I’m troubled by the noun phrases and passive voice. “The instrumentalization of American higher education continues unchecked. The number of graduating college seniors who earned a degree in humanities fell from 14 percent in 1966 to 7 percent in 2010,” they note. So, who or what is the agent of this falling off? “The market,” they say, and those obsessed with markets abdicated responsibility for “this massive shift in the ambitions and directions of a generation of capable and well-meaning minds.”

I know the higher ed market well, so this flippancy stings a bit. I’ve taught humanities classes since 1997, where we read Antigone, Shakespeare, Moby-Dick, Frederick Douglass, George Eliot, Wilfred Owen, the Bible, debating war and values and religion and culture and heaven and hell and good and evil. Should I have done more to show the market there is value in this work? The very next chapter, “A Balloon Cut Loose,” is all about how more Western Civ courses (and less Edward Said) could have helped this generation. The question of why this didn’t happen remains.

The last two chapters in this section deliver powerful punches, bringing more specificity (though not blame) to the argument that the Silicon Valley nonconformist culture is the problem while also the possible solution. “Flawed Systems” is about Silicon Valley’s individualist DIY hacker ethos, the apotheosis of which was Steve Jobs, whose vision of personal computers (and later iPhones) “would liberate the individual from reliance on a corporate or governmental superstructure.” “Lost in Toyland” tells the story of Toby Lenk’s eToys, from its $10 billion valuation after its 1999 IPO filing to bankruptcy in 2001, as the stock price went from $84 to nine cents. The chapter features more Jonathan Edwards-worthy derision:

The energy of the era was directed at addressing the inefficiencies that would-be-founders encountered in their own quotidian lives…

The inconveniences of daily life for those with disposable income – hailing taxis, ordering food, sharing photos with friends – would eventually provide much if not most of the fodder for their inventions. The entrepreneurial energy of a generation was essentially redirected toward creating the lifestyle technology that would enable the highly educated classes at the helms of these firms and writing the code for their apps to feel as if they had more income than they did.

I’m sure every reader agrees. Bob Ivry’s breezy Washington Post review of The Technological Republic captures more concisely than I do Karp and Zamiska’s call to action as a call: “Tech bros, who have spent the boom years of the Silicon Valley revolution perfecting the home delivery of chicken fingers… need to refocus their engineering genius on helping America to defend Western values.” Agreed.

Ok, now what?

The tone shifts subtly in Part III “The Engineering Mindset,” as the narrative moves from lament to action. It begins with “The Eck Swarm,” about how the honeybees and the starlings on the periphery of a swarm or flock are the ones who guide their complex improvisational dances. Being on the edge is powerful. “The Improvisational Startup” introduces Palantir, noting that new employees were given Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1979) by Keith Johnstone, to create a culture of play, not power. The Silicon Valley nonconformist anti-bureaucratic culture is good in one way, the authors state. The best companies are “artist colonies” filled with talented people who don’t conform and don’t easily submit to power. “The Disapproval of the Crowd,” recaps the postwar Asch and Milgram experiments, how subjects resist or conform to pressure from an authority figure. Resistance to conformity has been essential to Silicon Valley’s engineering culture, the authors assert again.

Then suddenly, abruptly, comes “Building a Better Rifle,” about the gap between what U.S. soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan needed in 2011 and what military contractors and top brass couldn’t deliver; what soldiers knew on the ground and why that knowledge wasn’t used effectively. We get a brief history of military bureaucracy that begins to make the case for Palantir, which is the point of the chapter.

To be clear, I have no problem with Palantir’s business model (about which I’ve read a great deal). Having grown up in 1970s and 1980s defense technology startup culture on the New Hampshire-Massachusetts border, spending summers on the assembly line manufacturing electronic components for military use, I know procurement red tape and the 1994 Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act well. Efficiency in the military is elusive and ever being sought. If Palantir offers that, all to the good.

But the argument being made here, if I am following right, is that it was as much Silicon Valley’s frivolity as it was the U.S. military procurement incompetence in Afghanistan that created the need for Palantir:

In 2011, while we were sending engineers to Kandahar and working on building a more capable analytical software platform for US and allied intelligence agencies, the focus of Silicon Valley, with its own armies of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, was far from the mountain passes and deserts of Afghanistan. Zynga, the video game maker that had built a following on the back of FarmVille, a social networking game in which players competed to cultivate land and raise livestock, was the darling of the Valley at the time…

The technology sector had turned its back on the military, disinterested in wrangling with an overgrown bureaucracy and ambivalent, if not outright opposition from the public at home. There were other, more lucrative consumer markets to conquer. It was, however, a tolerance and perhaps some degree of taste for conflict, and a stubborn pursuit of something, anything that worked – that engineering instinct – that gave Palantir a foothold.

This last sentence struck me like a last line of an episode of a radio play, priming the reader for a new adventure to begin. It’s a rich sentence that again blames the technology sector for its lack of seriousness and vision, its tendency to chase lucre. Then the final punch: “It was, however, a tolerance…for conflict…that gave Palantir a foothold.” A deft move, rhetorically positioning Palantir both in and not-in the technology sector.

Part III closes with “A Cloud or a Clock,” a meditation on hedgehogs and foxes, on Girardian mimesis, on Herbert Hoover, John Dewey, Philip Tetlock, Taiichi Ohno’s Five Whys, and others who have asked the question: what keeps us from seeing what is right in front of us and why isn’t there enough questioning? Again, the authors use shorthand to imply an argument without making it explicitly. They seem to be saying we can’t really be angry at the Silicon Valley founders we’ve been criticizing here because maybe they simply haven’t seen what we’re seeing, and we should be gentle with them, because we need them. We admire the non-conforming relentlessness that made them successful; now that energy needs to be turned to national “improvement,” as Adam Smith would have it. “The challenge we now face, in rebuilding a technological republic, is directing that engineering instinct, an indeed ruthless pragmatism, toward the nation’s shared goals.”

An ownership society, but for whom?

Part IV, “Rebuilding the Technological Republic,” begins with “Into the Desert,” about the wisdom of crowds who hold the Western belief that it is better to let x number of guilty go free than imprison the innocent. It’s great for the consumer product world to privilege crowd belief but what about law enforcement? “The view that advanced technology and software have no place in law enforcement is an archetypal ‘luxury belief,’” the authors assert, gesturing back to the “Winner’s Fallacy” chapter, and hinting that some combination of Voltaire, progressive politics, and “fear of the unknown” is keeping the country from using technology to keep us safe. I’ve heard Peter Thiel give talks on this twice, live. Here, a solution is given: reconstructing a technological republic will require an ownership society, “where nobody is entrusted with leadership who does not have a stake in their own success.”

“Piety and Its Price” is about the costs of the “low” (though not to academics) monetary compensation for government officials, and about how we aren’t going to have better leadership unless we pay better and aren’t so priggish about minor lapses of judgement (e.g. Rickover). I thought of Michel de Montaigne as the thinker who has made these points some centuries ago, contrasting the rigor and rectitude required to be a philosopher with the flexibility needed to be a good mayor. “The mayor and Montaigne have always been two, with a very clear separation,” he writes in On Husbanding Your Will. If there is going to be a change of views on public official purity, Montaigne is a good figure for convincing people of it.

Finally, “The Next Thousand Years” is about national pride and group solidarity and the stories required to make a vast number of people come together and believe they are bound up in the same national project:

What is capable of binding us together, of offering some degree of cohesion and common narrative that might allow large groups to organize around something other than our own subsistence? It is, without any doubt, some blend of shared culture, language, history, heroes and villains, stories, and patterns of discourse.

Indeed, this is what I teach, research, and write about, with a particular focus on the formerly enslaved in America, who, after Emancipation, very much wanted (finally) to be part of the American project.

So why do the authors go to Singapore and Lee Kuan Yew for examples of how to build culture? Why France? Why Germany after WWII and Martin Walser’s “enough already” about Auschwitz? Why in the next chapter, “An Aesthetic Point of View” do the authors say that “we” (and I think this time I’m included) have abandoned the “aesthetic point of view” and don’t talk about the important things?

Our collective and contemporary fear of making claims about truth, beauty, and the good life, and indeed justice have led us to the embrace of a thin version of collective identity, one that is incapable of providing meaningful direction to the human experience. All cultures are not equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden…..should we be left with no means of discerning between art that moves us forward, ideas that advance humanity’s causes, and those that do not?

In fact many of us do teach “truth, beauty, and the good life,” including the history of addressing beauty and art in America, albeit in smaller and smaller classrooms, since the market is shrinking for these classes. I don’t disagree that there are as many people teaching divisiveness as there are teaching beauty, because there is a market for divisiveness. Social media has created many multi-millionaires because of this market.

The solution, the authors say, is an ownership stake, as they offer data to show that companies led by a family with an ownership stake outperform all others. “The union of the pursuit of innovation with the rigor of engineering execution requires a degree of insulation with the outside world, some protection from the instincts and often misdirections of the market.” I agree.

But if the case has been made that “shared culture, language, history, heroes and villains, stories, and patterns of discourse,” is critical for a flourishing future, if the “abandonment of an aesthetic point of view is lethal to building technology,” where do those of us who teach culture and aesthetics fit in? As I asked at the beginning, how exactly, in dismantling the old order to build a new technological republic, will teachers and purveyors of national virtues and values be part of the ownership culture?

The Technological Republic offers a compelling diagnosis of the technology sector’s drift from national purpose toward frivolous consumerism. Yet in calling for a renewed technological republic built on ownership and cultural cohesion, Karp and Zamiska leave a crucial question unanswered: what role will the humanities, the disciplines that cultivate “truth, beauty, and the good life,”play in this reimagined future? If shared culture, language, and storytelling are as essential to national solidarity as the authors argue, then those who teach these traditions deserve more than a footnote in their vision. Without integrating what we do into the ownership culture, Karp and Zamiska risk reproducing the problem their book identifies: a society rich in technological capacity but impoverished in meaning, purpose, and collective identity.

This article originally appeared in Hollis Robbins’s Substack

Over a decade ago, a mysterious package arrived at my door. Inside: a track jacket and a nearly indecipherable book on improv. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just been inducted into the Palantir worldview. 

There was no guide, no handbook—only deep-end immersion (or, as Shyam would say, “gamma rays”). The ethos was recognizable—bias to action, deep engagement with users, and a commitment to “Save the Shire” at all costs—but never explicitly articulated. 

Despite shaping a generation of technologists, Palantir never codified its philosophy. Now, Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska have done it for them. 

At its core, The Technological Republic is a call for a more patriotic technology sector—one that stands for something beyond the marginal satisfaction of needs. Companies, Karp and Zamiska argue, should realize their existence is contingent on the West’s dominance, and should apply their intellectual firepower towards supporting its liberal-democratic governing substrate.  

This book arrives at an inflection point: Palantir alumni hold key government positions, China’s AI ambitions grow bolder, and tech’s counterculture has gained real power in Washington. Karp’s argument is more than a philosophy—it’s a battle plan. 

The book is, as Tyler Cowen would say, self-recommending. Their case is lucid, their writing crisp, their vision compelling. They are erudite without being academic, opinionated without being bombastic, novel without being glitzy. It is a read that will stand for decades. 

But good arguments can still have blind spots. And this one has at least three: the danger of entanglement, the seduction of utopianism, and the risks of unchecked dynamism. 

I. The Danger of Entanglement 

Karp and Zamiska want a Manhattan Project for AI. The first one won a war—but also birthed the military-industrial complex. 

When tech and government get too close, that might well drive innovation. They create a ruling class. Call it the “power elite” (Mills) or a “caste” (Baltzell)—the result is the same: governance by access, not law. 

Karp and Zamiska assume the right partnerships will yield the right outcomes. But institutions run on rules, not trust. The Founders understood this: they designed a government that pits ambition against ambition, ensuring stability through process, not faith in good actors. 

That lesson holds today. The answer isn’t deeper entanglement but real competition. Arnold Kling is right: we need independent oversight—COOs, auditors, and strict interoperability rules so the best software wins. Light rules, not relationships, should determine who shapes public technology. 

Yet entanglement isn’t the only risk. The greater danger is conviction unmoored from realism. 

II. The Seduction of Utopianism 

Karp and Zamiska correctly critique “technological agnostics”: technologists whose only firm commitment is a bland, superficially unobjectionable thin utilitarianism. But they underestimate the greater, opposite threat: utopians with too much conviction. 

Utopians exist across the ideological spectrum. There are left-wing utopians, obsessed with engineering society from above. There are crypto-utopians, convinced that a few well-placed algorithms will render institutions obsolete. There are techno-utopians, who see innovation as an unqualified good, as if the only thing standing between humanity and perfection is another software update. 

The Founders knew better. They weren’t French or Russian revolutionaries; they didn’t believe in remaking the world. They channeled ambition instead of erasing it. 

Sowell saw history as a battle between constrained and unconstrained visions of human nature. Karp and Zamiska lean in the right direction but don’t go far enough. A technological republic needs the same realism that guided the first republic: institutions designed for humans as they are, not as we wish them to be. 

III. The Risks of Unchecked Dynamism 

“Dynamism” sounds good. So do “agility” and “disruption.” But technology shouldn’t just move fast—it should move well. 

Karp and Zamiska assume dynamism is inherently good. But the Founders knew some things should not move fast. That’s why they built vetogates—deliberate obstacles to slow bad ideas. The Founders were optimizing for maximin, not maximax.  

Perhaps one distinction is between legislative and executive.  Legislative decisions—the “what”—need stability, predictability, and deliberation. Executive decisions—the “how”—should be efficient, effective, and dynamic. 

Technology should improve execution, not dictate governance. However sophisticated, software cannot replace law. The rule of law depends (among other factors) on predictability, and predictability depends on limits. 

IV. Values Without Compromise 

Two decades ago, Palantir made a counterintuitive argument: privacy and security weren’t opposites. It was controversial then—but correct. 

Today, I argue the same for the rule of law and efficiency: they are not opposites but complements. That’s the core principle guiding the AI we build for judges at Learned Hand. Our challenge mirrors Palantir’s in 2004: creating technology that respects the system it serves. 

I still proudly wear my Palantir track jacket. My time there shaped me in ways I’m still uncovering. Now, I finally have a book that explains why. I don’t buy every argument in it—but I buy the premise: technology should stand for something beyond itself. 

In an age that prefers technology without principle, that argument matters. 

In a hole in the ground there lived some hobbits—not a nasty, dirty, wet hole. Silicon Valley isn’t known for those. But a respectable place in a respectable town—and yet, somehow, these hobbits ended up going out on a great adventure. They may have lost the neighbors’ respect, but they gained…well, you will see whether they gained anything in the end.

The founders of Palantir—a name from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—saw themselves as embarking on an adventure out of the comfort of the Silicon Shire and into the real world. While their peer companies remain ensconced in the valley, tending to the decadent tasks of building yet another social media or food delivery application, the founders of Palantir decided to engage in skirmishes against the orcs and balrogs threatening domestic and national security.

In their recent book about their idea, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, the CEO of Palantir, Alexander C. Karp, and its head of corporate affairs, Nicholas W. Zamiska, make the case that Silicon Valley has turned its back on the American people by poaching talented engineers who might have done nationally important work, and refusing to collaborate with the government on meaningful ventures. More important—and surprisingly, coming from the tech-world—they urge for a revival of the Western canon of literature, culture, and religion to reunite the country and rediscover a shared purpose.

Within the strangely powder-blue book of around 200 pages (with another hundred of notes and sources), the authors argue that advancements in artificial intelligence—in particular, the advancements made by foreign adversaries—demands closer collaboration between the technology industry and the government. Many of America’s brilliant minds in the technology sector are squandering their talents in the absence of a national project, the authors say—and convincingly so. They champion artificial intelligence and its application to security and defense as the next all-in national project.

This is not a crazy idea. On February 28, just 10 days after the release of Karp and Zamiska’s book, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright—in a room of scientists, engineers, and laboratory directors—called for a new Manhattan Project: a global AI race.

We probably ought to feel unease on hearing the development and weaponization of AI compared to an arms race. Not only do Terminator-like scenarios come to mind but so does immense skepticism and concern over yet another collaboration between technology companies and the government.

Perhaps some comfort can be found, however, in the choice of the company’s name. A palantír, from Tolkien’s fantasy novel, is an indestructible stone capable of long-distance telepathic communication. As a source of immense power, it contains dangers if used imprudently. So too, we hope, the founders of Palantir can safeguard against the corrupting potential of AI.

To support their central argument, the authors divide The Technological Republic into four parts. They first argue that Silicon Valley is overwhelmingly uninterested in working on national projects, such as food, shelter, water, education, medicine, and local law enforcement. What they favor are get-rich-quick consumer-driven pursuits. Such lack of interest in applying capital and code to solving honorable problems can largely be attributed to the distance from precarious living that has been made possible by the successes of previous generations.

The second part of their account, titled “The Hollowing Out of the American Mind,” attempts to locate this decline in the broader failure of American education. And they connect this failure to what they call “technological agnosticism.” Since the attack on—and subsequent retreat of—mandatory Western civilization courses after the 1960s, American history has become more foreign to American students. Coupled with decreasing church attendance and religious affiliation—particularly among the adept at science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—the answer to the question, “What should we build?” becomes “Whatever we can.” Without a deeper shared identity and belief, they build that which is expedient or profitable without concern for human flourishing or the prosperity of the nation.

The Technological Republic then turns toward how Palantir hopes to correct the problems they see in the technology sector. It’s a little overdone. Karp and Zamiska give some credit to other companies that have ventured out of the Silicon Shire: the missile-defense company Anduril, for example (another firm named in reference to The Lord of the Rings: Andúril, Flame of the West, the elvish name for Aragorn’s sword). Palantir has done such worthy things as partnering with the World Food Program to optimize a food distribution chain allowing two million people to be fed in a year. But the book could have been improved by speaking more about the other companies breaking the norm of Silicon Valley.

Karp and Zamiska end their book with a call to “rebuild the technological republic.” And it is this counterpoint to the dominant culture that makes the book so refreshing. All too often, technologists have tuned their reason to understand the how without the why. Skepticism about everything except cold reason created the generation of Silicon Valley founders who, the authors scoff, have “cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of lofty and ambitious purpose” while actually having no higher aims.

The book calls instead for a generation of engineers “who are engaged with and curious about the world, the movement of history and its contradictions, not merely skilled at programming.” Karp and Zamiska, moreover, urge the return of community, commitment to the nation, and faith. If a technological West were rebuilt without a renewed morality and a central historical purpose, then engaging in an industry-government AI arms race—as we are poised to do—may be rushing us to a genuinely dystopian future.

The West is in danger. The threat comes not just from the contemporary equivalent of orcs and balrogs, but from a lurking evil and decline of the good that many ignore—just as they did in The Lord of the Rings. What Karp and Zamiska want may not come to be, but The Technological Republic offers not only a convincing account of the failings of Silicon Valley but a way to reverse the decline, starting by rekindling the Western canon.

This article originally appeared in The Washington Free Beacon

In the beginning, and recurrently, the Earth is a formless void. God declares, “Let there be light,” and the world starts to articulate. Light is separated from darkness, sky from water, land from sea. Plants appear on the land, birds in the sky, and creatures in the sea. Finally, Adam is created and granted the power to name all the animals, and from his rib comes a woman, Eve, whose name means to give life. 

Unlike many other creation myths, the first chapter of Genesis features no violence. There is no swallowing of children, murdering of fathers, or stabbing of brothers. God speaks words animated with “ruach” or spirit: a “language of creation” that does not merely describe, but invents. This language gives shape to chaos by organizing it into a structure of categories, and enables a coherent lifeworld to emerge.

Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies and co-author with Nicholas Zamiska of The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, belongs to this tradition that begins with Genesis, and he continues it. What else is the purpose of his mysterious software company? The son of a Jewish father and a mother who converted to Judaism, Karp was raised in what he describes as “a heavily Jewish environment.” “We were pro-Israel, a super erudite, heavily Jewish environment,” he told Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale in August 2023 on Lonsdale’s “American Optimist” podcast. In a recent interview with Fortune, which calls him “arguably the most interesting man in software,” Karp is described as studding his responses with references to “the Talmud, […] the Old Testament, and the New Testament”.

The background is common in the melting pot of America, but Karp has taken things much further. In a profile by Maureen Dowd for the New York Times published last August, “Alex Karp Has Money and Power: So What Does He Want?”, Karp stated that he donates money to political causes in multiples of 18 because “it’s mystical — 18 brings good luck in the tradition of kabbalah.” It isn’t a coincidence that his new book was published on the 18th of February.

The Technological Republic is Karp’s English-language debut following his co-authored 2023 German-language book Von Artificial zu Augumented Intelligence. Eclectic in content, The Technological Republic is strikingly evocative of Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel’s Zero to One: a book of philosophy disguised as an airport paperback about business. Moving through detailed analysis on honeybee swarms, excursions on sociologist Robert Bellah, charts of defense spending growth, and meditations on Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, Karp’s The Technological Republic argues that Silicon Valley has “lost its way” in the shopping mall of late-stage consumer capitalism. “The drift of the technology world to the concerns of the consumer,” the authors write, “both reflected and helped reinforce a certain technological escapism — the instinct by Silicon Valley to steer away from the most important problems we face as a society toward what are essentially the minor and trivial yet solvable inconveniences of everyday consumer life, from online shopping to food delivery.”

The Valley’s feeding frenzy at the trough of consumerism is akin to a fall into cultural haze; meanwhile, the enemies of the West have been amassing at the crumbling walls. The Valley, then, must adjust its priorities and attack civilization-level problems to defend the “enduring yet fragile geopolitical advantage that the United States and its allies in Europe and elsewhere have retained over their adversaries […] without which the dizzying ascent of Silicon Valley would never have been possible.” 

This is the mission of Karp’s software company Palantir, which he co-founded with Thiel, Lonsdale, and Stephen Cohen following the terror attack of September 11th. In one sense, Palantir is the embodiment of the Thielian thesis that the goal of technology is to achieve more with less. “It was a mission-oriented company,” Thiel told Forbes in 2013. “I defined the problem as needing to reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties.” But the company is also something more. Over the 20-some years since its inception, Palantir has accumulated scandals, misconceptions, and what Karp evocatively calls “player-haters.” Some call it a “spy company,” others question its role in predictive policing, its role in immigration enforcement, its support of Israel against Hamas, and its contract with the UK’s National Health Service. It recently generated a spate of fresh coverage when it was awarded an extended $30 million contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for detailed immigration tracking. 

Meanwhile, its influence has been increasing. Palantir went public in 2020; five years later, it joined the S&P 500 and was just recently admitted to the S&P 100. Last year, it reported $2.87 billion in revenue, and has a market cap of over $200 billion. Thiel, who serves as the Chairman of the Board, has deep ties to the Trump administration, perhaps most notably through Vice President J.D. Vance, whom he employed at his venture firm Mithril Capital, and then funded in the Senate run, which launched him into the political arena. Thiel’s ties to key Trump ally Elon Musk date back to their days as rivals-turned-colleagues in the early 2000s-era PayPal wars. Karp has publicly supported Musk’s DOGE, and Musk has returned the favor by promoting The Technological Republic to his 220 million followers on X as an “interesting book.”

As Palantir has moved towards the center of US power—and, by extension, global power—it has seen a significant increase in attention, including a niche chronically online fan culture of followers who xeet gifs of “Papa Karp” celebrating his more colorful turns of phrase, or his trick of spinning a notebook on a single finger after appearing to pop a stick of nicotine gum into his mouth. Nonetheless, Palantir has remained an enigma and an object of suspicion. Here, then, is the problem which The Technological Republic is intended to solve. 

Postmodernity’s Alienating Jargon  

“I don’t think in win-lose,” Karp said in a sit-down conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin in New York the night of his book’s release, speaking with self-assurance as he leaned back into his chair. “I think in domination.” Sorkin and the audience laughed, seemingly understanding the reply as provocatively risque. But Karp most likely had a more specific thought in mind.

Domination is one of the central topics explored by the Frankfurt School, a school of thought by which Karp has been deeply influenced. After graduating from Stanford Law in 1992, but without sitting for the bar exam, Karp headed to the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt to study under social theorist Jürgen Habermas. In 2002, Karp completed his dissertation, “Aggression in the Lebenswelt”, which drew on Habermas, Theodor Adorno, as well as Helmuth Plessner and Sigmund Freud to analyze the use of jargon by the German writer Martin Walser in a controversial speech Walser delivered at St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt in 1998 in which he declared his exhaustion with the memorialization of the Holocaust.

The Technological Republic does not reference Karp’s dissertation, but it develops its signature theme: the meaning, or absence of meaning, of language. “Aggression in the Lebenswelt” opens with the declaration that “statements that are obviously self-contradictory offer to a person the opportunity to formally commit to the normative order of their cultural environment, and, at the same time, to express taboo desires that violate the rules of this order.” Statements of jargon, Karp argues, serve as the connecting link “between world and need in a culture in which a bond to the real is no longer possible […] The false only becomes effective when it sets out on the terrain of the real. Only then can the real demand be covered up by a surrogate. A feeling of security grows where a need for intersubjectivity was once felt.”

In the words of Theodor Adorno, whom Karp draws upon heavily, jargon is alienating, “ideology as language, without any consideration of specific content.” In The Technological Republic,Karp and Zamiska apply this analysis to Google:

The shallow and thinly veiled nihilism of a corporate slogan such as ‘don’t be evil,’ which Google adopted when the company went public in 2004 and later exchanged for the similarly banal “do the right thing,” captures the views of a generation of extraordinary talented software engineers who were taught to prize the identification of and resistance to evil over the more difficult and often messy task of navigating the world in all its imperfection.

In jargon, man loses a common frame of legibility, and ultimately contact with reality. The destruction of language is followed by a descent into a generalized confusion of categories: in effect, a reversal of the order-creating process established by God in Genesis. “The meaning of functional roles of jargon in culture finds their expression in the murky hues of reified categories,” Karp writes in “Aggression in the Lebenswelt.” 

To redress this scenario, Karp turned to software: “In the past, I believed that you shaped the world through ideas and words,” he observed in February 2024 at the FII Priority conference. “But I […] came to believe that you shape the world through the embodiment of ideas and words in software platforms.” The problem of jargon is recurrent and structural, but in the age of the internet, it has shifted location. The necessity is for some syntax or grammar — or what Karp calls a playbook — capable of making flows of data individually meaningful, and therefore reimposing a coherent structure on the world.

In his dissertation, Karp already hints at the direction his future work would take: “That which faces the actor is judged by its cognitive and emotional meaning, based on these two questions: ‘What is the object?’ and ‘What does it mean to me?’ The response to the questions and their integration into the cognitive and emotional perception facilitate an assessment of the object, which then becomes a touchstone of meaning for the system of action and its stability.” This touchstone of meaning is what Palantir calls ontology. As the company explains: 

An ontology provides the map that links together data and meaning by defining what is meaningful. These meaningful things are the nouns, verbs, and adjectives of an organization. For example, a bank may be concerned primarily with entities or classes of objects such as Accounts, Transactions, and Financial Products. Each of these object classes would then necessitate object class definitions in an ontology, along with other concepts connected in a web of defined relationships.

To exit from a state of formless chaos, a world of meaning must be systematically reconstituted: an operation that recapitulates the order of religion. Karp and Zamiska argue that “a commitment to capitalism and the rights of the individual, however ardent, will never be sufficient; it is too thin and meager, too narrow, to sustain the human soul and psyche.” The human soul needs immanence and transcendence to stabilize the relationship between objects in the world and new anchors as the objects in the world change. 

The Technological Republic searches for those anchors in a vision of a new relation between the future and the past. Karp draws on his religious upbringing and intellectual development to develop a new integration model. The formless chaos that defines the state of the world before Genesis finds its mirror image in the alienating jargon of postmodernity. In the work of Palantir, and The Technological Republic, a subject-object relationship is recovered, and intelligibility returns to the world, and also the possibility of action, because it is only by having a meaningful relationship to the world that anything new can emerge. 

Critics tend to attack Palantir and their arguments based on general suspicion towards projects that seek to consolidate power. But what is the alternative? The Technological Republic ends on a reflective note with implications extending beyond Karp himself: “The technologies we are building […] are themselves the product of a culture whose maintenance and development we now, more than ever, cannot afford to abandon. It might have been just and necessary to dismantle the old order. We should now build something together in its place.” 

This article originally appeared on IM-1776.