The Palantir Guide to Saving America’s Soul

In the spring of 2014, a trans-anarchist Google engineer petitioned the White House to arrest our national decline. The plan was snappy: “1. Retire all government employees with full pensions. 2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry. 3. Appoint Eric Schmidt CEO of America.” Schmidt, then the chairman of Google, was an avatar of technocratic liberalism. Two decades earlier, as the largely unknown C.T.O. of Sun Microsystems, he helped Bill Clinton set up the first White House Web site, and, by the time of the Obama Administration, he served as Silicon Valley’s unofficial consul to the Democratic Party. Schmidt was not himself a company “founder,” a technologist’s most regal credential, but he had performed as an able steward: when Larry Page and Sergey Brin struggled to reconcile their competing visions for Google’s first corporate jet—Brin wanted a California king bed, Page did not—Schmidt negotiated a compromise. He was sensible and civic-minded. He was the adult in the room.

In those days, Silicon Valley was perceived as an apolitical place. People in the industry were associated with a naïve techno-utopianism—the belief that problems of governance might be properly demystified as problems of engineering. They might have made libertarian or even anarcho-capitalist noises from time to time, but their underlying commitments were more or less progressive. Peter Thiel espoused the view that freedom and democracy were incompatible, and he likened the most capable founders to dictators, but these ideas seemed idiosyncratic and vain rather than dangerous. The Google engineer’s petition in favor of a Valley-backed coup was taken as a spoof. It wasn’t. A “neoreactionary” vanguard had arisen in the Bay Area. Its objective was not to retreat from the citadels of governance but to place them under siege. The Google engineer had been influenced by an obscure programmer-monarchist named Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug. America, Yarvin declared, suffered from “chronic kinglessness.” Silicon Valley, where the best companies were run by executive fiat, knew how to make the trains run on time.

Today Yarvin, whom J. D. Vance has cited as an influence, is practically a household name. Yarvin, in his modesty, only ever called for one king. Now we appear to have two. Donald Trump and Elon Musk seem to share the aim of personal enrichment. Their avowed priorities do not otherwise cohere, at least at first glance. Trump is a nationalist who looks to the past and promises its restoration. He would like to take Greenland. Musk is a free marketeer who looks to the future and promises its realization. He would like to take Mars. Liberals might take solace in their partnership’s apparent fundamental instability. This may be a coping mechanism.

“The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West,” a new book by Alexander C. Karp, the C.E.O. of the software company Palantir Technologies, and his aide-de-camp Nicholas W. Zamiska, demonstrates how these attitudes might profitably fit together. Although Karp dislikes Trump, he appeals to a more muscular America. And, although he admires Musk, he would prefer that the government remain intact. The book’s central claim is that the survival of the American experiment depends on the technological revitalization of the military-industrial complex. National pride ought to provide Silicon Valley with a sense of purpose. Silicon Valley’s talents might in turn mend our sense of national competence. From our desire to take Greenland might flow our ability to take Mars.

With the possible exception of Peter Thiel’s “Zero to One,” which is one of the more strapping examples of the business-and-self-help crossover genre, most books by tech mandarins are disappointing. Karp seems like the sort of person who might have improved the canon. He was raised, outside of Philadelphia, by a Jewish pediatrician and a Black artist, and routed himself from Haverford College to Stanford Law School. The only redeeming part of his time at Stanford, which he otherwise hated, was having Thiel as a classmate. The two shared the intimate antagonism of “feral animals,” as Karp once put it, and they spent late nights locked into debates about the relative virtues of socialism and capitalism. (Thiel represented capitalism.) Karp proceeded to a doctoral program in philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt, the home of the Institute for Social Research, which gave rise to the legendary “Frankfurt School.” He briefly studied under Jürgen Habermas, whose evaluation of the “legitimation crisis” appears to have made an impression on him. In 2003, Thiel started Palantir and soon after, recruited Karp to run it.

Palantir, which was named for the “seeing stones” in “The Lord of the Rings,” had twin inspirations. One was the dot-com collapse, which flattened the bubbly frivolity of early e-commerce. The other was September 11th. Thiel believed that a maturing tech industry needed to put away its eToys.com and devote itself to the serious business of national defense. Palantir’s data-integration platform pledged to discern obscure patterns that might otherwise elude human analysts. The company’s overarching ambition, Karp has said, was “to support the West”—in the local dialect, they were “saving the Shire” from the eye of Sauron. The Thiel-Karp team guaranteed a reasonable calibration of “total information awareness” and the protection of civil liberties. They were criticized from both flanks. Civil libertarians inevitably likened their products to the glittering touch screens in the predictive-policing dystopia of “Minority Report.” Other skeptics accused them of peddling vaporware. Selling infrastructure to the panopticon was not a safe play, and investors were skittish. Employees considered their public reputation unfair and inaccurate, but their communications team recognized that a sinister aura was great marketing. A small raft of contracts, along with support from the C.I.A.’s venture arm, kept them afloat until the world readied itself for their relevance. Today their market capitalization is two hundred and eighty billion dollars.

“The Technological Republic” is equal parts company lore, jeremiad, and homily. It begins with a bracing precis of the cultural, political, and technological posture of “the West,” a concept that has been lamentably “discarded by many, almost casually.” Our government “has retreated from the pursuit of the kind of large-scale breakthroughs that gave rise to the atomic bomb and the internet.” Silicon Valley has “turned inward, focusing its energy on narrow consumer products,” and abdicating its more profound responsibilities. Only with jointly redoubled efforts will we construct “the technology and artificial intelligence capabilities that will address the most pressing challenges that we collectively face.” Chief among these challenges are the threats posed by an A.I.-enhanced posse of China, Russia, and Iran. The real enemy, however, is already in the house. Our society is rudderless and soft. The book’s diagnosis recalls the “post-liberalism” common to many thinkers on the new right: “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.”

The book, too, is an anachronism of another age—an age called “last October”—and its vision of a mutually supportive relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley has in the interim been rendered almost quaint. Karp supported the campaigns of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and “The Technological Republic” was manifestly intended as an intervention in the status-quo context of a Democratic victory. The book imagines a more active government, not no government at all. Karp’s political aim reflects an attempt to resuscitate what is now frequently disparaged as Cold War liberalism, or the belief that we fought for freedom and comfort on two fronts—that the struggle for equality at home was tied to the struggle against Communism abroad. The atomic program, which was a win-win contribution to both overseas deterrence and domestic progress, is Karp’s model for how we might approach the dual-use technologies of artificial intelligence. The A.I. arms race, like its nuclear precursor, is poised to reshape the global order, and we cede first-mover advantage to China at our peril.

There are reasons to mistrust such fortune-telling, especially from people with a vested interest in the outcome. Arms races aren’t just idle predictions; they are self-fulfilling prophecies. The book’s inferences about the present state of A.I. are less controversial and more trenchant. The remarkable pace of A.I. development throws into relief the degree to which our engineering talent has been poorly deployed. We ought to expect better things from startups than improved advertising technology, stupid farm games, and luxury appurtenances for twentysomething urbanites.

The question is how this happened. Many of Karp’s colleagues blame the government for regulating away their ability to do interesting things. Karp has little patience for Washington bureaucracy, but the primary target of “The Technological Republic” is not a nation that has failed Silicon Valley. It is more cogent and original as a story about how Silicon Valley has failed the nation. The employees are spoiled and the investors are cowards. The tech barons are mere clerks and shopkeepers in disguise. Engineers and executives have lost their taste for rockets and spy planes. In the spring of 2018, Google employees protested against the company’s participation in Project Maven, a Department of Defense initiative to better analyze reconnaissance imagery. Their misgivings, Karp and Zamiska write, did not reflect “a principled commitment to pacifism or non-violence,” but “a more fundamental abandonment of belief in anything” other than their own bourgeois comfort. Palantir stepped into the breach and picked up that contract. The company has not only accepted their grave obligations to national defense; it has fought for the right to serve the country. The Defense Department’s byzantine procurement policies had ruled out the use of Palantir’s commercially available software. In 2016, Palantir sued the government and won. Two years later, it was awarded an enormous Army contract.

Under a Harris Administration, “The Technological Republic” might have been brushed aside as merely Karp’s attempt to talk his own book—which, for the most part, it is. Harris, in her D.N.C. speech, promised that America would have the “strongest, most lethal fighting force,” and presumably Palantir would have continued to thrive as one of Silicon Valley’s few defense contractors. Harris’s loss, as it turns out, was Karp’s gain. This is true in a banal financial way: compared with its average price during the Biden Administration, Palantir’s stock has appreciated nearly six hundred per cent. It is more interestingly true on the plane of ideas.

Musk’s response to a coddled rank and file has been a purge. When he took over Twitter, he sent a company-wide e-mail that presented a “fork in the road,” as he put it: serve at his pleasure or find another job. The point was not to improve Twitter’s performance. It was to remind his employees of their fungibility. One of his first acts under the auspices of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency was a government-wide e-mail with a buyout offer. The subject line, lest there be any doubt as to its authorship, was “Fork in the Road.” Karp has a different attitude. Silicon Valley is not proof of concept for monarchy. It is proof of concept for war.

Silicon Valley has, or used to have, a special culture. It did not emerge in defiance of the government but as a cornerstone of the modern national project. Federal support for technological development was financial, of course, but Karp thinks this understates its monumental significance. The military-industrial complex was a kind of spiritual investment, a flame that swept through the research community and welded it together. The corporate laborers of the industrial age were drudges, and might have needed the scaffolding of managerial hierarchies to make widgets in bulk. The scientists and engineers of the electronic age, in contrast, did not respond well to top-down instruction. They responded well to meaningful challenges. They could be thrown into a room, or into the desert, with only two parameters: a hard problem to solve and a good reason to solve it. The main problem to solve was defense, and the best reasons to solve it were to secure liberty and prosperity for all.

This inspired the invention of actual objects, such as bombs, but it also inspired the invention of new processes—the languages of control theory and cybernetics—that in turn became novel experiments in social organization. Scientists and engineers arranged themselves in nested feedback loops; they were quick to criticize, and even quicker to forgive. They weren’t Randian jerks who believed in domination. They believed in the kind of grace that comes from a shared conviction in the civic purpose of their work. The campuses that came to life between San Francisco and San Jose were “a form of modern-day artistic colony, or technological commune,” Karp and Zamiska write, and these campuses recruited “a generation of talent that wanted to do something other than tinker with financial markets or consult.”

The book’s account of tech culture’s origins is rosy and coarse—the ChatGPT version of Fred Turner’s classic “From Counterculture to Cyberculture”—but it’s a useful corrective to the fantasy that Musk sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus. The notion that these companies were sovereign enclaves of pitilessly despotic geniuses is a myth of recent vintage. Even more belated is the idea that Musk might summon an army of coder-ephebes and rescue us from an inertial government. Going around and breaking things, the authors of “The Technological Republic” think, is not going to breathe new life into our collective endeavors. The government must instead be strong enough to identify what it needs, make an unapologetic case for why, and then provide aspiring venders with a normal demand signal—not four thousand pages of arcane pre-specifications. In the absence of organized government demand, companies will turn to the consumer market instead. And the consumer market should not be the arbiter of value. “The grandiose rallying cry of a generation of founders in Silicon Valley was simply to build,” Karp and Zamiska write. “Few asked what needed to be built, and why.” The tech industry must meet the government halfway by reassessing its own priorities. The national interest is a noble pursuit. Games for your phone are not.

The book is good as a diagnosis of this phenomenon—the tendency to churn out “derivative and retrograde” products under the guise of innovation. It is even better as an exemplification of it. It reads like an automated Spotify playlist of the greatest hits of national decline. Even its chapter titles (“The Hollowing Out of the American Mind”) have the optimized ring of a recommendation engine: If you liked Allan Bloom and Jonathan Haidt, you’ll like this. The “soul of the country” has been “abandoned in the name of inclusivity,” and “unironic belief in something greater—in many corporate boardrooms and certainly the halls of our most selective colleges and universities—is looked down upon as essentially preindustrial and retrograde.” Karp goes out of his way to identify as a liberal, but the only liberal mentioned in “The Technological Republic” is the communitarian philosopher Michael Sandel. The book’s touchstones are instead an algorithmic procession of disgruntled conservatives: Roger Scruton, Roger Kimball, Irving Kristol, Leo Strauss, Niall Ferguson, and Peggy Noonan.

The repackaging of old grievances feels like a missed opportunity. There is a growing bipartisan consensus that American innovation has lost the plot. To blame a lack of ambition, or a culture of decline, is merely to re-state the problem. To attribute the corrosion of institutional trust to such bugbears as relativism or postmodernism is to ignore explanations that are both more concrete and more parsimonious. The military-industrial complex did not lose its lustre because Americans were taught that all cultures are equally valid, or because sincerity as such went out of style. The military-industrial complex lost its lustre when it embarked on a series of pointless and destructive wars. Our institutions were damaged by things that we did. They cannot be repaired with an appeal to remember who we are.