Alex Karp & Palantir’s “Technological Republic”

Review of The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West by Alexander C. Karp, JD, Ph.D. & Nicholas W. Zamiska, JD. Penguin Random House. February 18, 2025. 

“The moment……to decide who we are and what we aspire to be, as a society and a civilization,” Alex Karp and Nicholas Zaminska (K & Z) write in their new book, “is now,”

Our argument is that the path forward will involve a reconciliation of a commitment to the free market, and its atomization and isolation of individual wants and needs, with the insatiable human desire for some form of collective experience and endeavour.

What K & Z, with backing from Walter Isaacson, Jamie Dimon, Eric Schmidt, Stan Druckenmiller, and Sir Niall Ferguson, fail to ask, is who will do the deciding? The conversation should extend beyond the privileged. Otherwise, American’s risk losing a sense of shared national purpose. 

Karp. Courtesy: Flickr

Is Karp a wolf in sheep’s clothing, using the cover of patriotism; setting up the straw man of the woke, high-on-advocacy and low-on-inquiry, late capitalist liberal; instilling the fear of crime & foreign adversaries; all in order to lay the intellectual foundation upon which a panopticon can be built? Or does he really believe the U.S. military ensures the individual enjoyment of human rights, and, to quote Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, “bears the ark of liberties in the world?”

Perhaps multiple dynamics can simultaneously be true. Almost the entire field of AI is a result of work done at Department of Defense (DoD) affiliates such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Office of Naval Research (ONR). AI is a military project; between 1983 and 1993, DARPA spent over $1 billion on computer research to achieve machine intelligence. As Frank Rose (1984) put it in Into the Heart of the Mind, “The computerization of society. . . has essentially been a side effect of the computerization of war.” Yoshua Levine’s 2017 book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, demonstrates that defense applications of the internet are a feature, not a bug. 

So, what are the authors arguing for? They write:

Our challenge, both in the United States and in the West more broadly, will be to harness and channel the creative energies of this new founding generation, these technical iconoclasts, into serving something more than their individual interests.

Building the technological republic, “will require an embrace of value, virtue, and culture, the very things that the present generation was taught to abhor.” K & Z argue for rejecting nihilism and moral relativism. Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony, a “national conservative” as opposed to Karp who is a “national liberal,” notes in his 2022 book Conservatism: A Rediscovery:

American political life has been dominated by a Jeffersonian discourse focused on universal theories of individual rights, at the expense of a careful cultivation of America’s strength and cohesion as a nation.

Ferguson claims six “killer apps” have led to the supremacy of Western civilization: Competition, science, the rule of law, consumerism, modern medicine, and the work ethic. Courtesy: Flickr

Yet K & Z assume what needs to be proven. Whereas Karl Marx saw the enemies as bourgeoisie and proletariat, the workers and the owners of the means of production, K & Z leapfrog class dynamics altogether. Instead, they are concerned with the West beating Putin and Xi, to name a few adversaries. Like when Talcott Parsons lambasted The Decline of the West author Oswald Spengler and building off Niall Ferguson’s 2011 book Civilization: The West and the Rest, K & Z argue the West is objectively superior, “The rise of the West was not made possible by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.” K & Z want a Durkheimian mechanical solidarity to preempt class consciousness. 

Karp knows the enemy. He is a progressive who came of age attending protests in DC with his parents and did a doctorate in social theory at Goethe. Perhaps this is why Karp’s Stanford law classmate Peter Thiel chose him to lead Palantir. As Adam Garfinkle writes in Political Writing: A Guide to the Essentials (w/ foreword by David Brooks):

Hitchens writing as a defector from the left was a far more consequential event than anything that might have been written by someone who had never been on the left in the first place. 

The Starship Troopers noted: “To fight the bug, we must understand the bug.” Karp understands the bug.

Yet K & Z are making the same mistake as late 20th century liberals who preached the virtues of free trade and China’s accession into the World Trade Organization (WTO) while ignoring the downsides. Many in the 1990s argued that workers who lost their jobs due to globalization or automation would magically find higher-paying jobs at new high-tech companies. This did not happen. Will, as Marx predicted, and K & Z seem to endorse via their anti-Marcusian description of human civilization as being in a “late capitalist” phase, the ‘forces of production’ become the ‘relations of production’ and,

Technical history becomes human history, and self-reflection is reduced to the observation of techniques of natural domination. Critical individuality, in this scheme of things, is lost as surely as it had been in Hegel.

The glaring issue K & Z ignore, likely for their shareholders sake, is job displacement. There will be winners, yes, but also many losers. In industry dialogues there is much talk about upskilling and reskilling, but what about deskilling? The authors did not give even a paragraph to social protections and safety nets, not to mention Luddites. Is there any room for them in the technological republic? Or will a Darwinian natural selection drown them out? As Jurgen Habermas puts it in Knowledge and Human Interests:

The road of social formation (Bildung) is marked not by new technologies, but by stages of refelxion which dissolve the dogmatism of superseded forms of domination and ideology, sublimate the pressure of the institutional frame and set free communicative action as something communicative.

Mahatmas Gandhi, for example, hated the machine. He argued in his Critique of Modern Civilization that India was being: “ground down, not under the English heel, but under that of modern civilization……I cannot recall a single good point in connection with machinery.” He seemed to critique Karp almost a century before he came: “Those who are intoxicated by modern civilization are not likely to write against it.”  In 2020, Karp was paid $1.1 billion in total compensation, the highest of any chief executive at a publicly traded company. 

The authors write: “But is a belief that has no cost really a belief?” Do K & Z really believe in anything beyond the fattening of their own pocketbooks? 

The informed reader could be forgiven for looking elsewhere for disinterested polemics on technology and society. French sociologist Jacques Ellul argued in his 1954 book The Technological Society that technology restructures the entire social system through the lens of control. Michael Foucault delineated modalities of power concerned with population, namely, biopolitics, security and governmentality, which built off Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911. Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times demonstrated the ways in which humans are subordinated to machinery, turning us into what Herbert Marcuse critiqued as “One-dimensional man.” Wendell Berry believes, “Under the pavement the dirt is dreaming of grass.”  

In The Seekers, conservative iconoclast Daniel Boorstin pondered: “Western culture has turned from seeking the end or purpose to seeking causes — from the Why to the How. Might this empty meaning from our human experience?”

Extending the arguments of Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, the authors demonstrate how the Western imagination has been not only shut but also productized. Henry Kissinger has written about how today’s constant connectivity and the “context collapse” is resulting in the loss of any firm convictions amongst the young, who are too busy watching Netflix or playing fantasy football, anyways. Gutenberg Elegies author Sven Birkets wrote in 2009:

I would point to a very rapid collapse of formerly stable conceptions of self, individuality and subjectivity, and the imposition in their stead of a rapidly ramifying culture of linkages, group initiatives and social collectivization.

Media theorists from Marshall McLuhan to Walter Ong to Neil Postman have long discussed the myriad ways technology changes the user if not civilization itself. Many socially conscious folks have dealt with rejection based on their opinions and decided to stay silent or expressed themselves under the cloak of anonymity. 

Brende. Courtesy: Flickr

The stage is clear, then, for K & Z to wrest and direct the narrative. Karp warned Pentagon insiders: “if we lose the intellectual battle, you will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever.” Humans are storytelling animals, so it is either quite intentional or a fortunate coincidence that a philosopher is at the helm of Palantir. Clarity is power and could not come at a better time given WEF leader Borge Brende, who serves alongside Karp on the Bilderberg Steering Committee, thinks:

We are at a 1918, 1945, 1989 [type of] inflection point, in many ways, because we are between orders. We had one order. There is a new order on its way, but we don’t know exactly where it is.

The book serves as Palantir’s manifesto, a guiding light in a time of great uncertainty. The company works principally in Big Data, defined as, “high-volume, high-velocity, and/or high-variety information assets that require new forms of processing to enable enhanced decision-making, insight discovery, and process optimization” Yet the fate of Palantir and “Western Civilization” are intimately intertwined, so K & Z go to great lengths to make the case for its moral superiority. 

Daniel Kahneman famously said: “No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.” Jean Paul-Sartre wrote in Nausea (1938):

A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.

Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret write in The Great Narrative (2021): “narratives shape our perceptions, which in turn form our realities and end up influencing our choices and actions. They are how we find meaning in life.” 

Color me skeptical. It seems too convenient for Karp that Trump, Vance and Musk – all with deep ties to his progeny, Peter Thiel – took the White House just as this book was about to be published. Reality seems to conform to Palantir’s vision, as opposed to the other way around. It is also convenient that K & Z overlook issues such as inequality and the ethical quandaries of using LLMs in warfare, which might complicate their earnings call, to say the least. 

And what critic could not point out the obvious conflict of interest in the CEO of what is the closest approximation available to software-industrial complex is arguing for an even closer relationship between tech and the military?

Yet the author’s push for young and curious people to strive for a larger national purpose beyond that of naked hedonism comes as a relief in a time of great despair. Robert Hutchins in his Great Books of the Western World argued understanding the larger goal of each task humanizes work for the worker: 

Wherever possible, workmen should be artists; their work should be the applications of knowledge or science and known and enjoyed by them as such. They should, if possible, know what they are doing, why what they are doing has the results it has, why they are doing it, and what constitutes the goodness of the things produced. They should understand what happens to what they produce, why it happens in that way, and how to improve what happens. They should understand their relations to others co-operating in a given process, that relation of that process to other processes, the pattern of them all as constituting the economy of the nation, and the bearing of the economy on the social, moral, and political life of the nation and the world. World would be humanized if understanding of all these kinds were in it and around it.

K & Z are right to condemn the relativism and cynicism of those who build apps for entertainment or convenience and cannot be bothered with larger existential problems: “The world is faced with very real crises, and yet many are focused on whether the speech of a robot may cause offense.” 

The authors also are righteously indignant about the narrowness of focus and intellectual censorship present in academia. K & Z demonstrate a broad knowledge of history, philosophy, technology and geopolitics, among other subjects, that as Descartes argued, are: “so bound together that is far easier to acquire them altogether than to pursue the study of one of them in isolation from the others.” St. Thomas believed: “The moral virtues are connected because they all depend on Practical Wisdom which depends in turn on them.”

While technology can facilitate communication, it appears to be having the opposite effect. Part of keeping the republic despite the ever-accelerating rate of change must involve a common stock of thinkers, books and ideas that those who are curious are acquainted with. Scottish philosopher David Hume once said: “a man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world.”

The only remaining question is where to sign up?