Alex Karp, The Technological Republic 3

An essay on the crisis in American life

Below is the third part of a series of posts reviewing, at length, the 20th c. crisis of rationalism. Links to the previous parts:

Part III
Enlightenment

Having abandoned the typical source of elites, academia, The Technological Republic must turn to another one: Engineers, the one part of academia that could mix a claim to excellence with one to philanthropy (consider that doctors, even if you trust them, are an authority over you & only help when you are sick). Engineers are our benefactors, but they have the strange character that we cannot dispense with them. They not only make, but must maintain, replace, and remake anew everything about our way of life, even as they give us power. Engineers are agents of Enlightenment: To explain & defend their work, it is necessary to offer practical & theoretical arguments for the superiority of technical thinking to practical & theoretical thinking. Most people aren’t engineers & do not share engineers’ concern for precision, moreover, so engineers need some way to translate what they do so that the democracy understands it, even though no one needs translations in order to benefit from the works of engineering. Nowhere else in The Technological Republic is the writing style of the NYT bestseller—short chapters, TED talk with illustrative examples & drawing out the moral of the fable, or a clever lesson by a clever teacher—more at odds with the claims & insights put forward, & nowhere else is it more useful as cover, since the ambition of the third part, The Engineering Mindset, is to form a new aristocracy for America.

The argument suggests the possibility of revolutionizing America through startups, & proceeds in five chapters, that deal in turn with (1) the orientation to the world of a startup: Focus on a problem, which we could call external affairs; (2) the orientation of the startup to itself, or domestic affairs, inner hierarchies and different parts of the organization; then a two-part description of external problems, (3) conformism to authority stifling innovation in society, which makes it necessary to have startups; & (4) bureaucratic & democratic moralism, which makes it difficult for the state to act like a startup or get in business with startups; & finally, getting back to internal problems, (5) the method for good conduct of business that leads a startup not only to success, but to defend itself from the consequences of success in order to maintain its distinctive character. In its strange way, this argument, which is presented as self-help, but with hints of a higher humanism that involves knowledge of the arts & sciences, is revolutionary. If we interpret it as making a straightforward case, it’s impossible to explain why it speaks in metaphors. But if we interpret it as a teaching, with the pedagogic patience & surprises required to get someone to think something through, we are no longer dealing with a project, but an attempt at self-understanding, an attempt to pull back together the different strands of Enlightenment which have become separated &, indeed, inimical to each other. The difference between these two perspectives which are both part of the argument is the difference between those who are considering what work to do next & those who see themselves as heirs to the Enlightenment. The attempt to reconcile them leads to the three strange things about the argument: First, it asserts the identity of engineers & artists, in an attempt to give the productive arts a political unity that only comes to sight indirectly, through the unity of will and vision of the artist-engineer; second, the description of the startup as the best American association is a standard by which the failures of American life can be judged, with copious examples of systemic failure in markets as in the state; & third, by a dissolution & reconstitution of moral phenomena like honor & blame, it proposes a revolution that can be effected quietly, quickly, yet with popular approval.

We begin with the behavior of bees. A swarm without a hive must look for a suitable place to make a new hive; since the end is given & the need is urgent, the only question is which bees can find the best available spot & how the swarm comes to an agreement. Karp suggests startups work this way, too—orientation to a problem supplants orientation to authority; the authority of a problem generates the necessary freedom to consider & act. With apologies to Karp for what must be a rather vulgar gesture, I will explain the concern animating this section; if interpretation is excusable, it’s only because of the difficulties modern people have with education. The swarm looking for a hive is a metaphor for our predicament; not just our situation—in some ways, a community is like a beehive, as ancient stories sometimes suggested—but our current predicament, the need to restore the republic that is the home of our activities. Provisionally, we are homeless, & have to organize without being able to take for granted a tradition or even functional institutions. The complexity of political problems can be reduced to something close to bodily urgencies or technical problems by focusing on felt needs, on those demands which the people make &, by making, come to believe in their unity. For the foreseeable future, we have to accept the limits of concrete conflict to generate our freedom of action—this discipline will help us see allies & obstacles, gain confidence through common action, & begin to see principles where previously there were only decisions.

A question arises, if we accept this first step: What internal organization or ethic corresponds to that orientation to urgent problems? Karp’s answer is to prefer improvisational theater to corporate status-seeking. Some awareness of differences in roles & capabilities is inevitable in human affairs, as well as the difference between the urgent & the important or durable, & between the typical & atypical. In a democracy, a certain flexibility with regard to role is needed, a willingness to rule & be ruled in turn, which only startups practice. Instead, we have corporate hierarchies that emerged in order to deal with the problems of scale in the industrial age; they are too rigid for their purposes, since they can neither deal well with competition nor with innovation, but they are also immoral, since they can neither justify themselves by length of tenure nor by the good they do for the public. Corporations are inherently despotic precisely because they are a bad fit for the work to be done on any given problem—the falseness of the hierarchies gives them strength at the expense of the self-respect of the employees, whatever their rank; this is what is known & loathed as office politics, which both injuries & insults employees given the inevitable intrigue, gossip, & backstabbing. Their success does not come from achieving prosperity & sharing it, but from a kind of desperation about Progress, the consequent lack of purpose, & the consequent absence of serious criticism. As theater, improv encourages the awareness of the theatrical quality of all our formalities or conventions & dissolves the respect for titles or positions, but as a common activity, it encourages us to participate in those formalities which involve our affection & attention. What corrodes the corporate structure—we’re all strangers acting parts we don’t believe in—strengthens the shared identity of a startup, which makes friends rather than strangers & helps them prove their competence to each other in specific activities, reestablishing the attainment of self-respect through acquisition of property at the core of the way of life of commercial republics.

We expect results & Karp teaches us to demand results. We should get, therefore, after the chapters on external & internal organization, the chapter with which this part closes, on the intellectual activity, or self-reflection, of a startup. Instead, we get a somewhat academic discussion of certain academic studies on obedience to authority. There is a political context to this part of the argument, as well as to the book as a whole: Liberals reacted to Nazism by an increasing rejection of authority & horror of the state (parallel to the horror of science unleashed by nuclear weaponry). The world after WWII is more than a little strange. Liberals were certainly complicit in the creation of the modern state which lead to all the destruction of the 20th c. Yet, Nazism was understood by decent people as a vast tyranny, an organization on the principle that crime pays, i.e. criminality on the largest scale possible. Liberals, contrariwise, interpreted Nazism as the consequence of respect for authority, i.e. abiding by the law. The result was not praise for the English & American peoples that behaved moderately & with justice & who won the war; but instead an attack on these very people as proto- or crypto-Nazis. The experiments on obedience can be criticized from this point of view, they make a mockery of the very basis of decency, which is the identification of the lawful with the just. We are used to hearing anyone attacked at any time he says he was following orders or he obeyed his superiors—that’s what the Nazis said! The modern state is the impersonal institution that is the proudest achievement of liberalism, yet liberals have destroyed its legitimacy, party because they realized its inhumanity. The Technological Republic is an attempt to fix that problem. Another criticism of the obedience experiments is something I remember thinking about when I was a college boy studying political science—I thought it was very funny that people who criticize obedience to authority in ordinary people should all agree with such self-satisfaction to quote the authority introduced with the words “studies show.” Again, The Technological Republic is an attempt to correct this conformism produced by higher education. After all, the entire theater of the obedience experiments was having scientists in lab coats & a room full of technical equipment order ordinary people around in the name of a system of education. One can say the experiment design is a somewhat hysterical reaction to modern liberalism by a modern liberal, like a grotesque or a caricature. Self-accusation leading to self-exculpation. Why, then, should we be discussing all this ugly stuff with reference to Nazism? We remember suddenly that the beginning of part three discussed a German scientist who was drafted by the Nazis in WWII & who retired to something like the idyllic life he had enjoyed before the war, studying bees. You see the point: Civilizationally, we live after Progress, that is, we are post-modern, so we must stitch together humanity from the fragments of that great explosion of the world wars… Post-modernism rightly understood would be a startup, an organization whose orientation & structure are remarkably fit for this strange new world. The discrediting of Enlightenment has led us to our catastrophe, but it was not entirely unmerited. Restoring justice would require restoring the identification of the law-abiding & the just, but restoring wisdom is something different & requires even more radical doubt or experimentation than the ugly things we have discussed so far; startups are somewhere in-between, & they resemble somewhat the remarkable “think tanks” around great statesmen like FDR & Churchill, who survived not only the war, by winning it, but the self-destruction of their political classes, who could neither predict & prevent the war, nor reestablish their legitimacy afterwards. Facing up to the problem of conformism, which is the problem of the state & of academia, is the first result offered by a startup, a glimpse into its inner life at the moment of origin. A certain shamelessness here is paired together with the promise that within the life of the American republic, there are seeds sown which, if cultivated, will lead to fine, strong growths. America finds within resources for its own restoration if but it allows them to come forward & give hope to the public.

The second result of the startup model, after a kind of intellectual freedom, is political freedom, which is something like respectability or legitimacy—a willingness to act in a distinctive or even defiant way to achieve what is acknowledged to be the public good. Again, it is difficult at first to see that that is at stake, because Karp tells a story about reforming procurement at the Pentagon, a remarkably corrupt institution which he eventually had to sue in order to be able to work to save the lives & enhance the capabilities of American soldiers at war. Academia is hopeless, but the state is not. No university will put itself in the hands of Karp or Thiel or anyone like them to save itself. But the gov’t does hire them, as also with Elon, to get work done. The problem is that the incompetence of the bureaucracy & the political calculations of legislators as well as contractors are getting in the way of governing, in favor of spreading gov’t money around the country through the Pentagon to create military jobs to buy votes to keep this corrupt system going even as the country cannot win its wars or stop fighting new ones. The difference between academia & the state is, the former is oriented to perpetual peace, the other to war. War is a teacher—objectives have to be attained in the face of enemies in order to achieve victory, without which there can be no peace. To go to war is to believe fervently in the desirability of peace; to go to trial is also to believe fervently in the desirability of right or justice. If you don’t believe in these things, you cannot fight with a good conscience, so you will lose. The willingness to fight the state in order to improve it opens up two possibilities. The first is to take over the state; the second, to see clearly the character of the problem, acting through impersonal institutions on behalf of strangers.

Finally, we come to a description of the “engineering mindset” that makes this new model workable, yet this final chapter is the hardest to interpret, because the least straightforward. One problem is the unique density of intellectual references: One reads of artists like Jackson Pollock & Lucian Freud, thinkers like Emerson, Rene Girard, John Dewey, & Isaiah Berlin, & the application of thought, whether by engineers like Herbert Hoover or social scientists like Tetlock. One wonders how much education is necessary to make sense of something as ordinary, nowadays, as a startup… Another problem is that the four sections on self-reliance, practical reasoning, the problem of expertise, & the solutions theory provides go together uneasily—they consist in a number of stories about making decisions & reflecting on experience that involve very different kinds of people in vastly different institutional contexts. Yet more, there’s a hint of danger. The patriotic thinking of John Dewey’s Pragmatism leads to the decision to learn from America’s (defeated) enemies, Germany & Japan, in war & peace alike: Operation Paperclip, in the one case, the import of some 1,600 German scientists & engineers & their families after WWII, & the teaching of the “five whys” in reforming corporate production on the Toyota model in the 1980s. On the other hand, there is a certain charm in the way the stories bring together all the themes of this part of the “political treatise.” Maybe it’s easiest to see the thru line if we consider the moral issue. The previous chapters dealt with the difficulties of institutionalizing honor in corporations & the state, leading to institutional paralysis & endless meetings, with the least bad option being the management of slow decline, which unfortunately becomes the worst option once a crisis like war or AI appears. Rethinking honor in the startup—think “band of brothers”—was easier than the problem we’re dealing with here, the blame game, which is its correlative. Political conflict is naturally between rich & poor; all successful communities find ways of avoiding the extremes, partly by turning the question of wealth into a question of class, i.e. conflict between those who are honored for the success of the community & those on whom they place the blame for its failures. Engineering as problem-solving is supposed to dissolve blame & reconstitute it as responsibility. The marvelous flexibility of human beings, which is only obvious at the origin of any specific organization, can be summoned again & again in moments of crisis, to reform the organization & rededicate everyone to shared problems—that is a startup. The human type, the engineer, admits of a remarkable variety, both in terms of specific competence or particular achievement & in terms of hierarchy; considering the organization of such people for specific tasks, Karp can conceal the distinction between ruler & ruled, the founder can hide among his employees, & to some extent mitigate political conflict while at the same time educating them. The difficulty of following the thoughts in this chapter reminds us of the difficulty of coming to understand that politics is essentially education.