The Technological Republic
Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West
by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska
Crown Currency, 320 pp., $30
ON FEBRUARY 18, WHILE PROMOTING his new book on television, Palantir CEO Alex Karp proclaimed: “The West . . . is obviously superior.” Ten days later, in a squalid Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance threw that superiority—and the very idea of “the West”—into doubt. “Have you said thank you once?” Vance demanded. “You don’t have the cards right now,” Trump sneered. Before the meeting, one might have said the West stood for liberty and democracy and against tyranny. Afterward, one could be forgiven for thinking the United States, the West’s nominal leader, is starting to resemble the gangster regime led by Zelensky’s foe, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
Palantir makes advanced data analytics software, including, controversially, for the U.S. military. The “central argument” of Karp’s book, The Technological Republic, which he wrote with Palantir executive Nicholas Zamiska, is that Silicon Valley must “rebuild its relationship with government,” “participate in the defense of the nation,” and help preserve the “geopolitical advantage” of “the United States and its allies in Europe and elsewhere.”
Had it been released a year ago—before Trump and Vance made a spectacle of their contempt for America’s allies—the book might have read as a self-serving but not unreasonable plea for national pride and civic education. Did Karp and Zamiska wish upon a monkey’s paw ahead of publication? (Please, make our volume notable!) Because today, the book reads as a vivid lesson on the perils of narrowminded hubris. The authors urge the left to “unwind” its “skepticism of the American project” just as the right trashes the machinery by which that project functions.
EVEN ON ITS OWN TERMS, The Technological Republic fails. While chastising their tech industry peers for a lack of intellectual heft—for clinging to a “thin and meager secular ideology that masquerades as thought”—Karp and Zamiska engage with ideas and culture in the breezy style of a forgettable airport book. Chapters are stitched together with anecdotes about bee colonies and eccentric naval officers. Superficial musings about psychology, philosophy, aesthetics, and anthropology are palmed off as precious heterodox revelations. The default mode is a formless cultural criticism (“many observers” think wrong thing x; “far too many” accept falsehood y) festooned with self-help slogans (successful people “scuttle the ships” and “venture toward the flame”).
Karp and Zamiska complain that society lacks “authentic” beliefs. They might be right about university presidents. But convictions are not in short supply; this pair simply ignore or belittle the ones they don’t like. They say, for instance, that the ACLU opposes police use of facial recognition software not because it cares deeply about civil liberties but because it fails to understand the issues. This dismissiveness comes from two men whose own views are hard to pin down.
Karp and Zamiska want a “national project,” a “collective identity and purpose,” a “reassertion of national culture,” a “thriving and raucously creative communal experiment.” But what does this mean? It’s something to do with setting our differences aside and agreeing to think like Alex Karp. Needless to say, no roadmap is offered. These guys’ prescriptions are a mix of weird (giving politicians more money and privacy would be a marginal, if not detrimental, move), historically obtuse (we’ve never had a shared religion or uniform school curriculum), and dangerous (more “veneration for leaders”!?). All we know for sure about the destination is that its inhabitants are very self-confident and took Western Civ. For a moment, you wonder if the authors’ evasiveness is strategic—some kind of Straussian wink? Then you realize it’s just bad composition.
THE POLITICAL SCIENTIST PHILIP TETLOCK has shown that thinkers with grand ideas are terrible at predicting the future. The wise fox knows many things, in Tetlock’s (borrowed) summation, while the misguided hedgehog knows only one big thing. Karp and Zamiska praise Tetlock’s work—oddly enough. They may run Palantir like foxes, but they write like hedgehogs. Their book rests on two large claims: that artificial intelligence is the defining issue of our time, and that the left’s waning faith in the “national project” is the definitive threat to our future. About the former claim, we’ll have to see—even hedgehogs aren’t always wrong. But the latter claim has already become ridiculous.
The authors criticize those who treat “security” as a “background fact or feature of existence so foundational that it merits no explanation.” And yet they themselves launch a quest for a new national vision off of an “uncontroversial commitment to liberalism and its values.” Fate has a way of slapping people in the face. Karp and Zamiska hoped to warn us against taking security for granted (fair enough). But where they’ve truly succeeded—as tragic figures—is in illustrating the dangers of taking liberalism for granted. Faith in liberal values is, Karp and Zamiska object, “too thin and meager, too narrow, to sustain the human soul and psyche.” This is a common sentiment among intellectuals who worry about decadence, as Karp and Zamiska do. But there is nothing more decadent than announcing you’re bored with freedom, and nothing more shallow than denigrating liberty because you don’t know what to do with it.
Karp and Zamiska are unmoved by what they consider a mundane “articulation of the lines that one will not cross.” But where are we now, just five weeks after their book’s release? Europe fears us. Canada hates us. Our defense industry has been undermined, our economy weakened. The separation of powers is being assaulted, the justice system politicized, due process barbarously flouted. Opposition to woke excess has jerked straight into naked hostility toward minorities. These days, for those of us who believe in liberal democracy—in the American project, as it were—the lines we will not cross are everything.
The most charitable verdict is that The Technological Republic was written in anticipation of one president, but published under another. The authors lacked the foresight, the judgment, or the fortitude to spike their polemic when the world changed. In this sad timeline, it never should have seen the light of day.
Great Job Corbin K. Barthold & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.
