In early December, just as The New York Times reported that Trump’s Mar-a-Lago transition offices had been “crawling” with representatives from defense tech firms like Palantir, Karp was in Southern California for the Reagan National Defense Forum. Traditionally a fusty opportunity for the Pentagon brass to rub epaulets with the primes, this year, the Palantir-sponsored event at the Gipper’s presidential library and museum in Simi Valley was “swarmed” by Silicon Valley defense tech executives hawking drones, “anti-drone drones,” and advanced software systems. In widely clipped comments that earned a coveted monosyllabic endorsement from Elon Musk, Karp described Palantir’s core mission:
The performance was Karp distilled: using a buttoned-up, legacy media–moderated panel as a platform for a made-to-go-viral paean to American greatness in the form of a call for collective punishment. Since Palantir went public in 2020, Karp, even more than Musk, has turned himself into the consummate Silicon Valley aristo-populist: palatable enough to C-suite mores to grace the stage at Davos and the pages of the business press (The Economist named him its “Best CEO of 2024”), but sufficiently “based” to become a cult figure in the seedier precincts of X and Reddit, where retail investor “Palantirians” trade AI-generated memes of “Daddy Karp” as a glowering Roman gladiator or toga-clad philosopher-king.
Now, Karp’s ascendant faction of the tech ownership class is storming the citadels of American power. At his confirmation hearing, Pete Hegseth praised Silicon Valley for showing “a willingness, a desire, and capability to bring its best technologies to bear at the Pentagon” for the first time “in generations.” JD Vance, famously a protégé of Peter Thiel—and, in his past life as a venture capitalist, a defense tech investor—has already spoken about cracking open the primes’ stranglehold on the Pentagon’s $880 billion annual budget. Thiel and Musk’s fellow “PayPal Mafia” member David Sacks, a Palantir investor, is Trump’s crypto and AI czar. Karp’s senior adviser (and the husband of another PayPal Mafia member) is now Trump’s top economics diplomat. The new federal chief information officer overseeing all of government I.T. is a Palantir alum. And Musk—America’s richest defense contractor, thanks to his ownership of SpaceX—is calling for Pentagon weapons programs to be “completely redone.”
Karp and Zamiska’s basic historical claim that Silicon Valley owes its modern origins to Cold War defense spending is broadly true, even if the ethical mandate they derive from it—making the U.S. armed forces more lethal in order to uphold American global supremacy—is question-begging. Still, at times, their critique of the post–Cold War commercialization of Silicon Valley is surprisingly lacerating: “Far too much capital, intellectual and otherwise, has been dedicated to sating the often capricious and passing needs of late capitalism’s hordes,” they write, decrying a generation of software engineers for applying its prodigious talents to building the next food delivery or social media app.
This tonal seesawing—for every Karpian truth-bomb, a lawyerly qualification; for each saber rattled, a pitch-deck cliché—is symptomatic of this book’s generic incoherence. Karp and Zamiska describe The Technological Republic as existing in the “interstitial but we hope to think rich space between political, business, and academic treatise.” That’s one way of putting it. Another is that it reads as though you asked an AI chatbot to write a set of Gladwellian think pieces in defense of American techno-militarism, with as many smart-sounding yet ultimately vacuous quotes as possible.
Despite clocking in at just 320 pages—almost a third of which is taken up by notes, a bibliography, and an index—the book is bloated by potted anecdotes that begin in the style of a New Yorker essay (“On June 26, 1951, at around 1:30 p.m., a cluster of honeybees began to form in a park in Munich, Germany …”). Bibliographically, it offers a dizzying bricolage. On one page, the late anarchist David Graeber; on another, the frothing reactionary Roger Kimball. Here the Cold War liberal Anne Applebaum, insisting on the need for rules and muscle to enforce the liberal order; there the neoconservative don Irving Kristol, extolling the importance of reviving old “religious orthodoxies.” This is the sort of book where the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner’s The Tears of the White Man, a 1983 polemic against Western guilt for the Third World, is invoked to bash Google’s “Don’t be evil” corporate motto.
If there is a single pattern of thought that defines The Technological Republic, it is that of a wavering liberal, hair-splitting his way toward civilizational chauvinism. Karp and Zamiska admit that Huntington’s division of the world into separate civilizations (“Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African”) was “certainly reductionist.” But isn’t it a shame, they complain, that we can no longer “have serious normative discussions” about which cultures are superior to others? They offer a similar assessment of the “unapologetically aristocratic” 1969 British television series Civilisation, in which the art historian Kenneth Clark elevated the “Hellenistic” over the “Negro” imagination. “Anachronistic,” goes their clipped critique, “but is there nothing in our aesthetic lives, no sense of north or south, that ought to be retained?”
On the domestic front, Karp and Zamiska are just as evasive. Raising the specter of the scene from Orwell’s 1984 in which Winston Smith wanders through the woods, imagining a microphone hidden in the trees, they come to the conclusion that such a future “may be near, but not because of the surveillance state or contraptions built by Silicon Valley giants.… It is we, not our technical creations, who are to blame.” For what, you might ask? For “the speed and enthusiasm with which the culture skewers anyone for their perceived transgressions and errors.” (Karp and Zamiska may have in mind the wave of protests in 2018 and 2019 over Palantir’s work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.) In other words: The fault, Dear Brutus, is not in our tech capitalist leviathans, but in ourselves, that we do cancel culture.
It’s hard to picture him acting otherwise. Mythmaking, bluster, and hype are practically job requirements for the CEOs of the defense tech world. Justifying ever-frothier valuations—as of mid-February, Palantir’s market capitalization was worth about half that of the five traditional defense primes combined, despite it reporting barely 1 percent of their combined revenue last year—requires telling a convincing story about a future world in which your product is the deus ex machina for the potential problems you claim are impending inevitabilities. For Karp and Co., this means boldly announcing that the United States is already in a “hot Cold War” against China; forecasting an impending three-theater conflict with Sino, Russo, and Perso fronts; arguing that autonomous weaponry will soon eclipse the atom bomb in geostrategic importance; and claiming that U.S. superiority in militarized AI will usher in a new Pax Americana.
Given these grand pronouncements, it is clarifying to discover that the section of the book that actually describes the virtues of Palantir’s “organizational culture” is laughably prosaic. Palantir employees, Karp and Zamiska say, are encouraged to apply the lessons of a book on improvisational theater to their work, and to digest the insights of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 book on “foxes and hedgehogs.” These supposedly sui generis workplace policies are barely more sophisticated than the standard nostrums of the business press. (“What Startups Can Learn From Improv Comedy,” advises The Wall Street Journal; “Mature Entrepreneurs Know When to Be a Hedgehog and When to Be Fox,” counsels Forbes.) Striking one of the book’s many bathetic notes, Karp and Zamiska write that the best start-ups operate like “artist colonies, filled with temperamental and talented souls,” where status is fluid and nonconformity encouraged. The upshot of this unique structure? “The benefit of it being somewhat unclear or ambiguous who is leading commercial sales in Scandinavia, for example, is that maybe that someone should be you. Or what about outreach to state and local governments in the American Midwest?” This, apparently, is the future we are rushing toward: one where a $200 billion tech company enacts violence in the name of Western civilization while waxing poetic about how building lethal software is just like making great art.
What Karp and Zamiska don’t mention in their recounting of this episode is that Karp was a doctoral student at Goethe University in Frankfurt at the time, and that he made the controversy the central case study of his dissertation. As the Harvard professor Moira Weigel noted in a fascinating exegesis of the document, which has yet to be officially translated into English, Karp’s thesis examined how certain speech patterns allow for the expression of taboo wishes, especially those produced by human drives toward aggression. Walser’s speech, Karp argued, performed such a function. By letting his audience express their taboo desire to throw off the yoke of public Holocaust remembrance, he wrote, Walser convinced them that “these taboos should never have existed.”
In her piece on Karp’s dissertation, Weigel observed that his adviser, the German social psychologist Karola Brede, considered Walser’s speech—which she interpreted as taking the side of Germany’s antisemites, even as Walser avoided explicitly antisemitic language—as an effort to flatter his audience “into thinking that they were taking part in a daring intellectual exercise, while in fact activating anti-intellectual feelings.” I can think of few better ways to describe this book.
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