Alex Karp, The Technological Republic 4

An essay on the crisis in American life

The suggestion of the final part of the essay, Rebuilding the Technological Republic, is that we need to recover the phenomenon of the beautiful: Heroic morality & nationalism, taste & judgment—these are the concerns that drive the argument in the final four chapters. The reasoning is fairly obvious: You have to imagine the future before you can act to achieve any specific part of it. The plausibility of the argument has something to do with the character of software, which is both a way to control the artificial world we inhabit & a way to talk to each other. Engineering is now more obvious to people as in cognitive terms than in material terms. As algorithms become part of everyday life, the artificial character of our way of life also becomes obvious. Technology, having first become the platform for culture, now becomes the culture. On this basis, father of statistics Francis Galton can be introduced to the audience as an anthropologist. The success of algorithms in managing life, from commerce & national security to social media & ideology, provides a kind of evidence, from consent, or the wisdom of crowds, against the wisdom of crowds. The crowd can guess what services to use & how, but not what to build. Engineers must first educate the people before the people, gathered within the technological formalities, can make decisions. Therefore, it is necessary to recover something like the relationship between artist & audience; the markets have wiped out any autonomy of the artist relative to the audience, so it is necessary to turn instead to the state. The proper understanding of the user base is the nation, the proper understanding of the future is digital nationalism—in this context, freedom of action is restored & tech is no longer limited to making toys but can become part of the great life of the American republic.

Thus, we come to the only properly political part of “the political treatise.” The intelligence software previously discussed in terms of the war in Afghanistan is now discussed in terms of policing crime in American cities like New Orleans. But the story turns to failure not success, & thus makes obvious the moral-political principles involved in Palantir software: A preference for victory over defeat, for the citizen over the criminal, for order over chaos. Tech is not just tools; tools are not morally neutral; the claim replacing these facile excuses is that intelligence is properly oriented to the common good—for example, intelligent people have to protect the conditions of law & order within which they can exercise their intelligence to the fullest. Today, the engineer finds himself caught in a partisan fight between the educated elites & ordinary people; he must choose the people, if for no other reason then because the scale at which he works is commensurate with the people. These, however, are partisan debates, not foregone conclusions. Consequently, Palantir becomes a political actor denouncing its adversaries as “the left,” whose doctrine of “egalitarianism” is corrupts equality under the law. To rescue political rationalism from corrupt elites is to subject it again to the discipline of popular demands for civil tranquility. Digital technology thus can reconnect the people & the police, a political achievement that would open the path to major transformations in American life, as rationalism both feeds on political conflict & resolves it in the direction of rationalism. The result of this project would be a new elite educated in politics by conflict & guided, or at least limited, by the consent of an increasingly confident middle class, that is, by the demands of work & family that make human beings able to live in a serious community.

A certain surprise, or even a shock, follows this restoration of the American political creed, the politics of national character. The protagonist of this last part of the essay is not Abraham Lincoln, but the English-educated Chinese founder of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew. The specific policy proposal we take from LKY is to pay politicians comparably to businessmen, i.e. make millionaires many times over of all of them, so that we can defend our middle class way of life. In a commercial republic, the markets will matter, & if the community is not to turn into a retrograde oligarchy, then we must attract very talented, very hard-working young men to office with the promise that they can attain wealth by saving the republic, or else they will doom the republic by working in corporations that achieve nothing very important. The markets make for mediocrity. Talent, however, is inherently attracted to honor; the entire orientation of politics is to honor—the greatest honor is to benefit the whole nation & earn its gratitude. America has many chief executive officers, but the president is the most honored of them all. It is all-American to require less virtue of people & thereby to actually get more virtue—for example, the corruption of office for money now rampant, as well as the incompetence of officials, would cease if the rewards of office were at all commensurate to the benefits competent officials bestow on their countrymen & their posterity. Again, the scarcity of talent requires intelligent organization, including recruitment, in order to bestow the greatest benefits on the public, above all, in order to educate the kind of leaders who guide all the other ambitions & organizations into action.

Only on this basis, the recruitment of a counter-elite that is not vulnerable to either private or public attacks, since it can acquire wealth & popularity at the same time, is it possible to overcome the corrupt elites that have reduced the national project to cries of “systemic racism” & “toxic masculinity.” The reader must come to see how digital nationalism could employ a combination of flexible organizations & algorithms to achieve both scale & coordination among themselves. The reflection on the broadest political context, the nation, & the immediate context, small groups governed by Dunbar’s number, suggests a pattern for the future of the great continental democracy. To articulate the vast middle class majority of Americans this way is to allow for a great range of associations from those at the top, where the governing concern is talent, to those at the bottom, where the governing concern is habit. Scale & communication among the levels of the community would be arranged in such a way that innovation & consent can be mixed by timely reaction to popular demands, i.e. by the reinterpretation of dissatisfaction as opportunity for action. The suicidal separation of consumers & producers typical of modern life that has turned the world into a series of cruel experiments on passive populations would be solved.

The elusive figure of the founder comes to the fore in the conclusion of the essay as an artist who can summon an audience; his judgment or taste is unusual, but however surprising its turns or decisions, its results are validated by the public not merely as consumers, but as members of the community: The beauty of America brings everyone together. The founder is all-American in knowing the members of the community he articulates better than they know themselves. To found the technological republic is to restore much-needed confidence to the American people.