Alex Karp's War for the West

Yahoo

28-02-2025

Ever since Donald Trump's reelection victory last November, Alex Karp has occupied the seemingly contradictory position of being a vocal supporter of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris taking a very public victory lap. Palantir, the data-mining and defense technology company Karp co-founded with Peter Thiel in the early years of the war on terror, was booming, its market capitalization riding the market's delirious excitement over artificial intelligence to leapfrog those of the traditional, or 'prime,' defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. 'A juggernaut is emerging,' a triumphant Karp had crowed to investors on the eve of the election. 'This is the software century, and we intend to take the entire market.'
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:
Americans are the most loving God-fearing, fair, least discriminatory people on the planet. And they want to know that if you're waking up and thinking about harming American citizens or if American citizens are taken hostage and kept in dungeons, or if you're a foreign power sending fentanyl to poison our people, something really bad is going to happen to you and your friends and your cousins and your bank account and your mistress and whoever was involved.
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.
This month, Karp is out with a much-anticipated book co-authored with his head of corporate affairs, Nicholas W. Zamiska. The Technological Republic attempts to distill the argument Karp has been making for years: that, since the country's tech scene is historically a product of the national security state, Silicon Valley executives and engineers should shed their compunctions about working with the military and dedicate themselves to ensuring another century of American hard-power supremacy. It's an argument with a growing audience. Thanks to a mix of factors—a massive increase in venture capital investment in defense and a slowdown in broader venture activity; new Pentagon initiatives designed to bridge the fabled 'Valley of Death' between tech companies and the Pentagon; a tech workforce cowed by layoffs and firings—the era of Silicon Valley walkouts, open letters, public employee protests, and genuflecting CEOs is, for now at least, mostly over.
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 isn't afraid of the implication that his intellectual interventions might serve a business purpose. At the inaugural Palantir-sponsored AI Expo for National Competitiveness last spring, he warned the Pentagon and industry grandees in attendance that 'if we lose the intellectual battle, you will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever.' But if The Technological Republic is Karp's contribution to the battle of ideas for Western civilization, it amounts to little more than a gussied-up exercise in industry P.R. What really makes America great, the book claims, is not so much its system of government, nor its vaunted ideals and values, but its software industry. And, wouldn't you know it: The most important software companies are the ones whose products, as Karp has put it, 'power the West to its obvious, innate superiority' and 'bring violence and death to our enemies.' In early February, when Palantir's better-than-expected earnings report shot its stock price to another record high, Karp ended his letter to shareholders by quoting Clash of Civilizations theorist Samuel Huntington. 'The rise of the West,' Karp wrote, 'was not made possible 'by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.'' He continued, still quoting Huntington: 'Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.'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.
But their critique of tech-enabled consumerism only goes so far. In one of the book's many unintentionally funny moments, they single out the early retail website eToys, a darling of pre-dot-com-bubble Silicon Valley, and castigate it for the 'shallowness' of its ambition and 'abdication of everything beyond the light hedonism of the moment.' But they're quick to clarify: 'To desire, even a toy, is to be human.' The point of refashioning the government in the image of a Silicon Valley start-up, they write elsewhere, is to ensure it delivers 'the goods and services that are essential to our lives.' How did we get from 'late capitalism's hordes' to 'goods and services'? It helps to remember that Palantir also runs a commercial business accounting for nearly half of its revenue, with a client list that has included the likes of Hershey's, Coca-Cola, Hertz, Molson-Coors, and Tyson Foods. Perhaps the superiority of the West also depends on having bags of Any'tizers® Crispy Boneless Chicken Bites delivered through advanced trucking logistics.
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.
The Technological Republic 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.
Is this evidence of Karp's synthetic brilliance, of a 'mad composer picking big ideas out of the ether,' as the Financial Times once described his vibe? I'm not so convinced. Much of the book's citational extravagance amounts to Karp and Zamiska rummaging through their library to prettify an otherwise banal point. In a section on the secrets to Palantir's business success, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson's counsel to 'leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee' propels Karp and Zamiska to the observation that they 'count ourselves among those who have repeatedly fled, abandoning failed projects within days of a lack of progress being surfaced and deconstructing dysfunctional teams.' Deconstructing dysfunctional teams! Reading those lines, I envisioned the soil around a certain Concord, Massachusetts, graveyard plot churning in anguish.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?'
Karp and Zamiska take an analogous approach to defending Palantir's work. They nod to the concerns of AI ethicists with the drive-by admission that the 'potential integration of weapons systems with increasingly autonomous AI software necessarily brings risks.' But those concerns quickly become even more reason to smash the guardrails: 'A weapons system in the hands of an ethical society' like the United States, they write, will deter adversaries only if 'it is far more powerful' than anything an enemy can muster. Describing the U.S.-China AI race as an 'Oppenheimer moment,' they cite Albert Einstein's 1939 letter to FDR calling for, 'if necessary, swift action' to build the atomic bomb. They neglect to mention that Einstein later called his letter to Roosevelt the 'one great mistake in my life.'
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.
And for all Karp and Zamiska's self-styling as critics of Silicon Valley, much of the book is dedicated to proclaiming the tech industry's salvific qualities. Only a 'union of the state and the software industry,' they claim, will maintain American dominance in this century, and this techno-governmental fusion will require the state to adopt the 'engineering mindset' that has fueled Silicon Valley's world-bestriding success. Karp and Zamiska blandly describe this mindset as involving a 'disinterest in theater and posturing,' an 'abandonment of grand theories about how the world ought to be,' and, via a quote from the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, a resistance to 'sweeping and easy generalizations.' Aside from being meaningless abstractions, each of these qualities is betrayed practically every time Karp gets in front of a camera and utters the words 'America' or 'the West.'
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.
This 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.
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.Toward the end of the book, Karp and Zamiska pause to linger on an episode that briefly shook the German cultural world of the late 1990s. In a speech accepting a major literary award, the eminent German novelist Martin Walser criticized Germany's culture of Holocaust remembrance. It was a 'moral cudgel,' he argued, wielded by the liberal intelligentsia to repress a newly united Germany's nationalistic revival. Referring to plans to build the Berlin Holocaust memorial, Walser invoked Hannah Arendt: 'Probably there is a banality of the good, too,' he said.
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.'
A quarter-century and billions of dollars of military contracts later, the story acquires a slightly different inflection. Karp and Zamiska acknowledge that Walser's speech articulated 'the forbidden desires and feelings of a nation, and in doing so relieved an immense amount of internal dissonance for his audience,' but they seem to treat this as an example to follow. The Technological Republic, to say nothing of Karp's own public speechifying, is a work that invites the kind of analysis Karp once applied to Walser. What else to make of the book's whiny bombast, its apparent delight in contradiction and provocation, its air of imperious, impetuous authority? Of its ritual invocations of American and Western superiority, its apparent desire to discard our sympathy for history's victims? 'The victors of history have a habit of growing complacent at precisely the wrong moment,' they write. 'While it is currently fashionable to claim that the strength of our ideas and ideals in the West will inevitably lead to triumph over our adversaries, there are times when resistance, even armed resistance, must precede discourse.'
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.