Review: The Technological Republic
Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska
TL;DR — Karp argues that The American Project needs to be united around a sense of shared purpose and if that means cooperating a lot with the government and the military, so be it. This needs to be said now because we have strayed from the kind of culture that made America great and we have wasted our talents on consumer frivolities. In part, this has happened because we’re playing it safe, we conform and want to please and never offend anyone.
Fortuntely there is an example of a new way of working, with new social relations, and it is the authors’ long-time employer, Palantir. Maybe Palantir lives up to these claims and maybe not, but by Part II, the reading experience becomes not unlike a sophisticated infomercial.
I began reading ‘The Technological Republic’’ expecting to disagree about almost everything. I was wrong. I agree with the way the United States is described in the thrall of consumerism. I also agree that most, but not all, people want and need a sense of belonging and feeling a part of some thing meaningful that is larger than themselves.
As I read, I realized the book also felt familiar, like a series of TED Talks given by Malcolm Gladwell. Except instead of using famous research studies to sell cool new ideas like tipping points, Karp and Zamiska use Tedlock, Milgram and the Honeybees guy to sell his cool new-style company, Palantir. If you buy his company, or the story he tells about it, his point is made.
For the record, I love drawing on famous research too, except I like examining them on my own and sharing a new discovery if I can. The Milgram story, one of Karp’s famous research examples, is frequently invoked to prove that we conform and knuckle under to authority. Karp uses it exactly that way. Milgram is so familiar we don’t have to think. There’s nothing new to discover. The authors must be right, we conform and obey. Whoever, ‘we’ is.
Fortunately Gina Perry decided to examine Milgram’s data and found that the famous “65% obedience” stat comes from cherry-picking one condition out of 23+ treatment condition variations. She also found that data indicating defiance was suppressed, and that participant skepticism about whether the shocks were real was not accounted for.
The just-say-Milgram argument has that particular tech-bro structure:
- diagnose cultural malaise with evocative research that clearly makes a point, (we’re soft! frivolous! conformist!)
- propose a return to imagined greatness (the American Project!)
- conveniently locate the solution in… the author’s own company.
Palantir has built surveillance infrastructure that raises serious civil liberties questions, but Karp and Zamiska can frame this work as patriotic duty and cultural renewal rather than, say, “we sell powerful tools to ICE and we’re getting rich doing it.”
The fact that this kind of “we need to get serious and build for America” pitch is being made now says something about how Silicon Valley sees itself post-2020 — and how it is seen. The book hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and had glowing blurbs from Walter Isaacson, Eric Schmidt, Jamie Dimon, General Mattis, Niall Ferguson, and George Will. The establishment loves it.
‘The Technological Republic’ makes a seductive argument, even if the conclusions are sharp and maybe unexpected.
I was not seduced and I do not agree with the conclusions. I think the book is slippery in the development of its main argument and even if I agreed with the diagnosis, I believe the conclusion is not the only possible conclusion and far from the best one.
Just to make it a little personal, I went to the same college as Alex Karp — Haverford College, a Quaker institution outside of Philadelphia. Current U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick also went there.
Quakers have always been known for strong human values such as non-violence, consensus and social activism, and perhaps less known for making major money at the same time.
Lutnick and then Karp came through Haverford during the Reagan era. Lutnick arrived in 1979, right at the dawn of the financialization boom. Karp arrived in 1985, at the height of it.
They both graduated into and thrived in a world where abstract systems featuring big data, high-frequency trading, and complex derivatives could generate enormous wealth at scale. It was also substantially detached from material production and most conceptions of social value.
It’s a kind of abstraction where the human consequences get rendered invisible by the elegance of the system. Lutnick can automate bond trading into microsecond advantages because the math is beautiful. Karp can talk about “the American Project” while building tools for ICE raids because the data layer feels clean.
I went through Haverford during the years 1966–70, aka, the Sixties. We questioned conformity too, and by ‘we’ I mean Frank Zappa singing, ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It.’ We questioned everything, including the ‘Domino Theory’ and dissented a lot, ‘Hell, no — we won’t go!’
That doesn’t make my perspective any better or worse than theirs. But just to go full Haverford here: The College motto states that we are meant to be not more learned but imbued with a greater understanding. I like the sound of that, but what does it mean?
To me it suggests there is something more important than the accumulation of knowledge, a deeper understanding, presumably of what it means to be human and how we should be with each other. How you get from that to drone strike force targeting systems and surveillance capitalism isn’t obvious but it obviously happened.
I have a Small, Medium and Large reaction to ‘The Technological Republic’.
The Small one is Palantir itself; so obvious, sorry. My Medium reaction involves the myth of American unity and shared purpose. The Large one is about a period of hegemony transitioning into new and unknowable multilateral times.
SMALL: Palantir
My relatively SMALL reaction doesn’t mean we can just list Palantir’s clients and projects and go home.
Just because they built the Investigative Case Management system that ICE uses to track and target undocumented immigrants, including planning workplace raids, doesn’t mean Karp’s vision is automatically defeated. A defender can simply assert that, ‘hey, immigration is a real problem, we’re just trying to help out by maintaining and deploying accurate information. We need to be a country of laws. Laws have to be enforced or we are not a country of laws. Accurate information gives everybody a better chance’
Note the layer of abstraction — the country of laws, the accuracy of information, the bland term ‘enforcement’ — compared to the human reality of raids, deaths, mistakes, lives shattered, levels of anxiety associated with the implementation of ICE Investigative Case Management.
So then what? Predictive Policing? Is that like invoking Milgram? I don’t know. I’d have to look deeply into Palantir’s work in New Orleans and Los Angeles to see where the claims of racial bias came from and what they mean.
Palantir is at the center of integrated global information systems that are opaque and proprietary. Should there even be a Center and can it possibly be a force for good? It all depends. It’s contingent on too much we don’t know and will never know.
What we do know is that Palantir’s work is put to the service of a military with 800 bases around the world and an intelligence apparatus doing secret domestic and international surveillance on a massive scale. It’s not up to me to prove these projects are inherently wrong.
Why I call my reaction, SMALL is that Palantir has to do the heavy lifting on this one. Karp and Zamiska need to explain how these developments will benefit humanity. They also need to explain why the ‘missionary culture’ that they extoll is described as intense, secretive, and hierarchical by everyone else. High turnover, high pay and high security clearances for working on classified projects.
Which part of that is the special part?
MEDIUM: Shared Purpose
I wonder which era they are thinking of as the model?
The Revolutionary War, where a third of the colonists were against the whole thing?
What about the canonical example of American unity — the Second World War. Ha! It was contested every step of the way. The America First movement had massive support pre-Pearl Harbor. After December 7, 1941 there was fierce debate over Europe vs Pacific priorities. There were strikes directly affecting wartime production. And the military was segregated.
The “shared American Project” the authors are nostalgic for never existed. What existed were moments when dissent was suppressed or when certain voices weren’t counted as part of “America” at all.
I wouldn’t be mentioning such an obvious truth if it weren’t for the fact that Karp and Zamiska put real effort into this unified, shared-purpose idea. It is not logically needed to make their argument.
It has the effect of putting some emotion into the plan, which is what usually drives sales.
I have a MEDIUM reaction to this aspect of ‘The Technological Republic’ because I know the ‘Jean Shepherd’s America’ past they’re vaguely envisioning. I grew up in it.
I loved the shared purpose of World War II I saw in comics, war movies and ‘McHale’s Navy.’ I felt the shared purpose of being a patriotic American, the greatest country the world had ever known, all I’d ever known.
Who wouldn’t love the way we thought it was and imagined it to be?
Then in 1966, John Lennon said The Beatles were bigger than Jesus, Time Magazine proclaimed that God Is Dead, and I went off to Haverford.
HARD: The West and Multilateralism
It is easy to forget when reading ‘The Technological Republic’ that the United States operates within a larger world system composed of many agential parts.
The US represented about 40% of global GDP in 1960, about 22% in 2000, and is heading toward 15% by 2050. The apparent decline is actually normalization. The post-WWII moment when the U.S. was half the world economy was the aberration, not the norm.
The author’s entire framework assumes American technological dominance is both natural and necessary. Tell that to China, already competitive or leading in solar technology, battery tech, high-speed rail, mobile payments, and maybe AI.
Given that the U.S. will necessarily represent a smaller share of the global economy and technological development going forward, isn’t the real challenge building new ways to work together instead of doubling down on dominance?”
Or more pointedly: How does ‘The Technological Republic’’ framework apply in a world where American technological and economic hegemony is no longer possible?
The “American Project” framing is actively counterproductive for the actual challenges of the 21st century:
- Climate change requires global cooperation, not nationalist competition
- AI safety and governance needs international frameworks, not one country’s military-industrial complex setting standards
- Pandemic response, migration, economic stability — all inherently multilateral
Karp and Zamiska are essentially arguing for doubling down on mid-20th-century American hegemony exactly as that era is ending. It’s not even conservative — it’s nostalgic for a moment that was always temporary.
Is ‘The Technological Republic’ a blueprint for the future, or an eulogy for a past Karp and Lutnick, Walter Isaacson, Eric Schmidt, Jamie Dimon, General Mattis, Niall Ferguson, and George Will can’t let go of?
Karp needs “the West” to be worth defending because otherwise Palantir is just building surveillance tools for the highest bidder. The moral framework collapses without American exceptionalism and Western Values holding it up.
What makes this one the HARD reaction is that Letting Go is terrifying.
The U.S. representing 40% of global GDP in 1960 was an aberration caused by WWII destroying everyone else’s industrial capacity. The “return to normal” is the U.S. as one important player among several — China, India, EU, others. That’s not decline, it’s reversion to historical mean.
The “peaceful birth of the multilateral future” requires:
- Accepting that American technological dominance isn’t destiny
- Building institutions for cooperation rather than hegemony
- Recognizing that AI safety, climate, pandemics can’t be solved unilaterally
- Letting go of the mythology that our particular arrangement of power was uniquely virtuous
‘The Technological Republic’ is an argument against that acceptance. Double down, reassert dominance, make tech serve national power. It’s a grief response masquerading as strategy.
My idea is to honor America’s bright shining moment as a phase in long hopefully unending drama. It’s a way to begin the process of Saying Goodbye.
‘The West’ represents a set of universally applicable values to Karp and Zamiska, values that are threantened and need strengthening. To me, the social construct we call ‘western civilzation’ (“nice idea, they should try it sometime” — Gandhi, likely apocryphal) has brilliant and wonderful aspects as well as horrible and dark human aspects.
Now we’re in a transition. Fighting that transition with military AI and surveillance capitalism isn’t preserving. It’s clinging, what Buddha called the source of suffering.
Karp and Zamiska frame themselves as clear-eyed realists facing hard truths about the future. Maybe they are really mourning a past that never quite existed and trying to resurrect it anyway. I wouldn’t call that realism. I would call it nostalgia with a Pentagon contract.
Alex Karp studied in Germany after Haverford, where he was influenced by the Frankfort School and Jurgen Habermas, who spent his career analyzing how reason and rationality affect communication. He was one of the first modern thinkers to see what he called ‘Lifeworld’ being taken over by systems logic. How human life on the ground is not the same thing as the view from 40,000 feet — and it’s humans who must adapt or suffer the consequences.
Karp’s dissertation was titled, ‘Aggression in the Lifeworld: The Extension of Parsons’ Concept of Aggression through a Description of the Connection Between Jargon, Aggression and Culture’. It analyzed how jargon functions as a social mechanism that allows people to express aggressive or taboo desires without breaking social norms.
After getting his PhD, Karp founded a money management firm in London. Along came Peter Thiel looking for someone to pitch his hedge fund to Europeans. Someone who could quote Habermas while selling shares in the financialization of life.
Karp knew jargon, culture and subtext and he could hear what people aren’t saying out loud when they speak. It looks to me like he took the mechanisms of manipulation he learned about in school and deployed them.
He spent years studying how language and jargon mask aggression and create false solidarity — then became the CEO of Palantir in 2004 as a master salesman using exactly those techniques to sell surveillance tools to governments.
In ‘The Technological Republic,’ we’re the marks.
I don’t think Habermas would be pleased — but then meditation is used by super capitalists to help them increase ROI. A tool or technique is just a tool or technique.
Well, yes and no. When ‘mindfulness’ is extracted as an isolated technique from all other aspects of Buddhist thought and practice, then of course it can and has become a productivity hack for venture capitalists. But Buddhism doesn’t just say: Everybody Meditate! Meditation itself has a place only within the larger context of the Noble Eight-Fold Path.
The Frankfurt School’s critique of domination has become sales training for defense contractors. Habermas emphasizes intention, which systems have big trouble with. Knowing for certain what ‘intention’ is, accounting for unconscious influences — it gets messy.
Being human is messy with a tendency to stray outside the categories that systems need us be in. This is hardly a new insight but the living world of people doesn’t have a seat at the table Palantir hosts. So the living world of people needs to make some noise in a systems-world trying to manage eight billion citizens.
I accept the need for data collection and algorithmic processing. A lot of life is straightforward, but not all of it. There will always be exceptions, misfits between the map and the territory.
How systems handle edge cases is a measure of resiliency because today’s edge is tomorrow’s center. The massive centralized data systems Palantir builds suck at exceptions. In some category, we’re all exceptions. That’s what individual humans are.
None of this messiness and need to make human decisions is apparent from the top view.
The tool is just a tool, but the choice of what to build and who to serve? That’s not neutral.
I was at Haverford in 1967 when I first saw, ‘The Prisoner.’
“I will not be pushed,
filed,
stamped,
indexed,
briefed,
debriefed
or numbered.
My life is my own”
Doesn’t grow old.
I write about mortality, new media technologies and other topics outside my lane. I hold a Black Belt in Learning and I’m a founding Board Member of the AfricaVR Campus & Centre and a long-time supporter of the Khmer Magic Music Bus.
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