Alex Karp, The Technological Republic

An essay on the crisis in American life

Everyone saw a spectacle of manliness in the summer of 2024, in President Trump’s indomitable will—in face of lawsuits, threats of imprisonment & bankruptcy, assassins’ bullets—as well as in Elon Musk’s revolt against elite liberalism, including the deep state for which Biden served as a front. Trump & Elon became allies, friends even, & thus set the pattern for the political revival of American life: An alliance of public-spirited men & our technologists.

I have spent quite a bit of time in recent years pointing out, for the benefit of my friends, that the techno-lords are the last manly men in America, speaking out, taking stands, refusing to conform to our increasingly dangerous elite delusions. This has become obvious since Elon joined Trump, yet even intelligent people do not yet see what this must mean, much less what they must do about it. Since I spend quite a bit of time in DC, I can tell you, intelligent men there are no exception. We’re all behind events, few are even trying to catch up.

I’d like to take some time to articulate what this new development means & the recent publication of Palantir co-founder & CEO Alexander Karp’s & Nicholas Zamiska’s The Technological Republic, which they call “a political treatise,” is the best opportunity I’m going to get, I foresee, for a number of years. Let me start by recommending it to all my readers in no uncertain terms: If you want to see the most promising vision of the 21st c., read it! Men are largely defined by the contempt they feel for contemptible things. The “niceness” of American life, increasingly compulsory, in media as much as at work, has emasculated Americans; it has accompanied our gynaikocracy & concealed its dysfunction. Rebelling against this conformism, then, is necessary to begin to fix the republic; technology is the means by which such a work of restoration can be accomplished—tech is also involved in the self-respect of intelligent men, who, after all, must make the difference between those who know math & those who don’t. Karp & Zamiska express barely mitigated contempt for the “market” as well as for the failure of our elites. They call instead for a return to (1) belief, (2) a national project for America, & (3) an intelligent attempt to deal with the problem posed by AI—which is the coming into being of the Universal Homogeneous State. They attempt to explain how we’ve gotten ourselves into our predicament, nihilism, the abandonment of the hope that man can reason about his problems & begin to solve them, & what tech can do to help us get out of that predicament.

Part I
A Much Grander Project

I will review the volume at length, one post for each of its four parts. The first part, The Software Century, offers a comparison of the 20th & 21st c. with a view to the relationship between politics & technology. FDR & his heirs fought WWII & planned for peace by summoning the great businessmen & industrialists of America to work for a national project. Defense as much as increases in productivity or the invention of new industries depended on that alliance. The modern state relied on & commanded technology. There would be no way out of the Great Depression or WWII without transforming both the state & higher education to address national needs. So also the Cold War called for the rededication of the elites to a national project; Eisenhower & Reagan both understood that. Political rationalism was the belief &, increasingly, the way of life, given how many people were involved in increasingly Big Gov’t, Big Capital, & indeed Big Labor in mid-c. America. This history is almost unintelligible today, & the essential role played by the gov’t in the creation of Silicon Valley is forgotten, given the contempt & suspicion liberals feel for the state they nevertheless feel compelled to empower. Elites revile the state as the vehicle of racism or discrimination against trans-gender individuals, but continuously refer to the state in all their thoughts & actions: Their thinking, typically, is about “systemic racism” rather than individual intentions or misbehavior, never mind lawlessness. It’s a useful exercise, reread anything talking about systems as talking about the state. In three or four generations, liberal elites have made a complete reversal, from FDR-era patriotism to Obama-era treason: Google preferred to work with the Chinese state rather than the American state, while benefitting from American power & security.

The four chapters of this first part therefore have to deal with three related problems that involve regime-level analysis, as well as psychological investigation: (1) How was the WWII-Cold War elite consensus forged? (2) Why did it fall apart? (3) How can it be restarted?

Let’s start with Karp’s statement on the character of our regime:

The legitimacy of the American gov’t & democratic regimes around the world will require an increase in economic & technical output that can be achieved only through the more efficient adoption of technology & software. The public will forgive many failures & sins of the political class. But the electorate will not overlook a systemic inability to harness technology for the purpose of effectively delivering the goods & services that are essential to our lives.

In this account, technology fulfills two roles in the American regime. On the one hand, it gives ordinary people access to health & prosperity—the life of commerce, or work; on the other, it gives intelligent people a standard by which to judge affairs, form expectations of the future, & make demands of politicians. From one point of view, politics is about who is winning & who is losing, my party or your party; winning such contests as elections, therefore, may seem to be enough, if not everything. Technology allows some detachment from that perspective in order to raise questions not about who you’re fighting against, but what you’re fighting about, or for: What do you want to achieve? Indeed, what did you get done this week? Technology is therefore both the platform for ordinary life—you live in an artificial world, man-made, the houses, the streets, the electricity, the satellites, the running water & gas—& the platform for intellectual, including political life—everyone goes to school & learns math, science, & a healthy respect for engineering. Therefore, elite opinion or public opinion or your opinion isn’t the only thing that counts: Knowledge also counts. Technology powers the modern state, but also democratic judgment of that state, since people know their interests & have some judgment as users of tech, so they can decide whether they’re served properly or not.

Our protagonists, however, are not great statesmen like FDR, who connect elites to the people, & indeed define the American project in their time—The New Deal—but the men who worked for them, patriots who had a scientific outlook & could therefore rise to the occasion: Vannevar Bush (no relation of the presidents), at the Office of Science Research & Development, & Oppenheimer, recently restored to fame as the father of the atomic bomb by the Christopher Nolan movie. Einstein’s famous letter to FDR urging on the research into making a nuclear bomb gets a mention. Elon is their only contemporary correlative, alongside Palantir itself. The choice of inspiring occasion & protagonists is not insignificant: The claim is that nuclear power was decisive in WWII, as well as for the maintenance of peace ever since (with reference to Gaddis, The Long Peace), & that AI will play a comparable role in the 21st c. Technology supplied the power required for American morality. To face off against the Nazis & then Communists, America needed technological supremacy—any other path to victory in war would have required a massive transformation in the American way of life, starting with a large, permanent military involving many millions of men, & would have involved vast numbers of them dying.

The AI transformation of work, life, gov’t, education, you name it—that’s the future held out by The Technological Republic, which includes a call for a new Manhattan Project. The “software century” has begun & we are barely noticing. So the title of the tract must be reinterpreted—technology is inevitable, it’s the closest thing to fate we have, because we are intelligent, yet needy beings, so we use our minds to cater to our bodies; whether we get a republic is the thing to doubt. We are going to face a civilizational test. But why do we need a republic? Why not call the republic, at best, an early stage of the development of the planetary culture of technology? One reason is, even if that were desirable, it’s not feasible. American elites can abandon, like their European counterparts, self-respect, but everyone else hasn’t done so & won’t. Enmity is a limit on technical rationality. Another reason is, tech allows for various forms of despotism that would hurt intelligent people—it certainly empowers tyranny over the mind of man. A republic is the best deal we can all sign up for & live up to. Although AI will transform the whole world, it is not obvious that it will be good for the whole world; seriousness about what’s good for America is connected to seriousness about what’s good about AI. A combination of scale (number of people, size of the country, complexity of the economy) & moral confidence (legitimate gov’t, trusted technologists, a pop culture based on tech) is needed to deal with the problem. AI must function first as a solution to the problems of failing trust in gov’t, failing state capacity, & a failing economy. If technologists can offer solutions to these problems, they can move on to the much bigger problem of remaking American society to restore the self-respect of the middle class.

The future, however, is limited by the choices we or our forebears have made, for which we have to take responsibility in our turn. Two major difficulties emerge here, the first of which concerns the regime: America’s WWII victory led to the promise of globalization, merely interrupted by a Cold War with the Soviet Union, which America eventually won. The world system summoned by FDR is still around: NATO, UN, WB, WTO, IMF, &c. These institutions are somehow run by American elites who are themselves committed to a kind of pacifism. & they have kept America’s allies weak, defenseless, especially Japan & Germany. Worse, they have made every conceivable gift to America’s 21st c. adversary, China. One result is that Xi Jinping knows us better than we know him. Karp holds out the hope that a new Cold War could be avoided, since Xi has read Hemingway & visited America. The second difficulty concerns psychology, a strange mix of cowardice & demands for submission, an unwillingness to fight for American might coupled with a kind of hatred for American power on the part of the people who have most benefited from it & who continue to demand benefits. Our elites are likelier to mouth the ideology of oppression of figures like Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freire than to shoulder the burden of empire or consider noblesse oblige. America is on the cusp of a great transformation which is most resisted by the elites who have made it inevitable. A confrontation concerning rationalism is now necessary, therefore.