The Technological Republic (Review)

A semi-Jeremiad with an unanswered question

In 2018, I was in the audience at a Pitch Day event in San Francisco as two computer science majors pitched to potential investors an app that allowed them to jump the beer line at the stadium so they wouldn’t miss any of the game. The deck was crisp and compelling. The young men were good looking, confident, and articulate. The idea? I left while everyone was applauding.

I thought back to this moment while reading Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s bracing new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (Crown Currency, 2025). I thought of the pitch again this week when I saw a NYT front page story about Phoebe Gates, daughter of Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, and her new online shopping tool.

What led an entire generation to spend its energies on vanities? Why is the apex of world historical advances in technology just another phone app that matches people to things (and other people) efficiently? Where is the collective patriotic fervor and moral grounding of eras past? Is the problem political? Cultural? What would it take to turn Silicon Valley’s productive energies toward the safety and flourishing of our nation?

These are just a few of the provocative questions raised by Karp, co-founder of Palantir, and his co-author Zamiska, Palantir’s legal counsel and head of corporate affairs, in their bestselling book. The growing praise suggests that these questions have been pressing for some time.

In their call for the shiny app-building sector to put aside childish things and turn toward more serious and patriotic endeavors, the authors might have also noted the damage done to the higher education market. For the past two decades, universities, bewitched by Silicon Valley glitter, told students that entrepreneurship is more important than history or philosophy, poured billions into campus start-up incubators, and began operating on Silicon Valley market principles that saw classrooms as platforms to be “monetized” and students as customers to be “matched” with programs delivering the highest starting salary. As I’ve argued elsewhere, data- and market- obsessed university leaders produced the campus culture of division and resentment that the authors have deemed so corrosive to the nation.

Many of us would love to join in rebuilding a culture with more national pride and group solidarity. We would love more focus on “truth, beauty, and the good life.” But if the path forward is reconciling a commitment to the free market “with its atomization and isolation of individual wants and needs” with “the insatiable human desire for some form of collective experience and endeavor,” where do those of us teaching “shared cultural traditions, mythologies, and values” fit in, when there isn’t really a market that values us? For me, the question the book leaves on the table is how exactly, in dismantling the old order to build a new technological republic, will teachers and purveyors of national virtues and values be part of the ownership culture.

The problem

“A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West,” The Technological Republic proclaims, calling for a new focus on America and the national interest. Silicon Valley has been making whimsical apps and billionaires while the world spirals into crisis and something needs to change. Who can disagree? The book’s focus is the technology sector from pre-WWII to the present, the story of what has been, what might have been, and what now needs to be: a closer relationship between the technological sector and the nation that has allowed it to flourish. I have some quibbles with the book’s methodology, its short chapters and shorthand gestures to historical figures to make its point without taking the time to make its point. But I concur with the narrative arc and most of the conclusions reached.

It is remarkable that we agree about the state of the world from two completely different data sets and positions in the world. Karp is a billionaire immersed in the world he is critiquing; I am a scholar of 19^th-century American literature who, until a decade or so ago, had a salary in the five figures. But I am rich in historical knowledge and when I found myself nodding at Karp and Zamiska’s characterization of eToys, Groupon, and Zynga hype as misguided, my thinking was less about Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and funders than the strivers that Dickens, Trollope, Twain, Wharton, and others skewered in fiction. There are always precedents.

The authors offer a reason for the lack of seriousness in the software world. “The Silicon Valley giants that dominate the American economy have made the strategic mistake of casting themselves as existing essentially outside the country in which they were built”:

The founders who created these companies in many cases viewed the United States as a dying empire, whose slow descent could not be allowed to stand in the way of their own rise and the era’s new gold rush…The vital yet messy questions of what constitutes a good life, which collective endeavors society should pursue, and what a shared and national identity can make possible have been set aside as the anachronisms of another age.

In that previous age, however, Adam Smith warned us that national pride and maximizing profits are often at odds:

A merchant, it has been said very properly, is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country. It is in a great measure indifferent to him from what place he carries on his trade; and a very trifling disgust will make him remove his capital, and together with it all the industry which it supports, from one country to another. No part of it can be said to belong to any particular country, till it has been spread as it were over the face of that country, either in buildings or in the lasting improvement of lands. (Book III, Wealth of Nations, 1776)

Not caring about nation is a feature, not a bug, of the profit-minded, Smith suggests. The invisible hand might have pointed that out. The entirety of the chapter, “How the Commerce of the Towns Contributed to the Improvement of the Country,” is relevant here, particularly Smith’s observation about status ambition: “Merchants are commonly ambitious of becoming country gentlemen, and when they do, they are generally the best of all improvers.”

That last point, which anticipates Karp and Zamiska by 250 years, is that the best and most lasting value of commerce is when it is put back to use to support the nation. And incentivizing merchants to do so is the work of culture.

The argument

The Technological Republic comes in four parts that build slowly and somewhat meanderingly toward the conclusion that Palantir is the answer to the world’s problems. I appreciate the intellectual meandering. There should be more of it.

Part I, “The Software Century” begins with “Lost Valley,” the well-known tale of the American Century, the Manhattan Project and DARPA, featuring Oppenheimer, Vannevar Bush, J.C.R. Licklider, Hans Bethe, etc., then wondering why, given these beginnings, Silicon Valley has set its mind to “photo sharing apps and chat interfaces for the modern consumer.” “Sparks of Intelligence” is about the rise of AI and accompanying anxieties about whether AI will doom the world (a worry I don’t share). These two chapters set up the argument that Silicon Valley should be filled with serious people but somehow isn’t.

Chapter 3, “The Winner’s Fallacy” – the misguided idea that U.S. dominance means no more American bloodshed and sacrifice – focuses on the generation of engineers who “did not sign up to develop weapons” when weapons may be needed. Seven pages are not sufficient to treat the profound questions of necessary violence and just war. Karp and Zamiska are aware that the literature on the subject is vast: they begin with the Talmud, quote Thomas Schelling on Vietnam, and mention Albert Einstein’s relationship with FDR, who read Mein Kampf in German.

This is one of the book’s most important chapters and the implication is that American education is at fault: the cartoon version, that is, that coddles American minds. But there is no way to “efficiently” teach the philosophy, history, and ethics of necessary violence. It takes time, dedicated faculty, long discussions, wrenching debates. There is little room for this in our efficiency-obsessed universities. More philosophy courses for software engineers would have been a good investment. So how do we operationalize this for our flourishing future?

“The End of the Atomic Age” asserts that software’s eclipse of hardware is key to nation’s defense. Peace will no longer be kept by physical machines while software plays a supporting role. But the software engineers have gotten soft:

[T]he ascendant engineering elite in Silicon Valley that is most capable of building the artificial intelligence systems that will be the deterrent of this century is also the most ambivalent about working for the US military. An entire generation of software engineers, capable of building the next generation of AI weaponry, has turned its back on the nation-state, disinterested in the messiness and moral complexity of geopolitics.

The indictment goes on at length. Again, I wanted some theory as to why this is, besides the lack of philosophy classes. Who has been in charge of mentoring and guiding these young engineers? Who has not been doing their civic duty to encourage manly patriotic spirit? In late 19th-century Britain there was a growing anxiety that London-dwelling young men were getting soft. Enter Sir Robert Baden-Powell and Scouting for Boys (1908): “A soft bed and too many blankets make a boy dream bad dreams, which weakens him.” Might scouting be the answer for these software engineers? I am half in jest but I wanted the authors to say something more about this “entire generation” that hasn’t been taught about necessary violence.

“We must rise up and rage against this misdirection of our culture and capital,” cry the authors, shaking their heads at the social media economy. I read the “we” here as those who have some control over the direction of culture and capital. The authors suggest that China is beating us in part because they study our literature – Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway – while we don’t study theirs. I have written on exactly this point and agree. But world literature courses are being defunded by state legislatures for not meeting workforce demands. Will The Technological Republic help with this?

Part II “The Hollowing Out of the American Mind” begins with “The Abandonment of Belief,” which reprises the argument that Americans are coddled, don’t like speech they don’t agree with, care too much about the personal lives of their leaders, and care more about the performance of belief than belief. “Technological Agnostics” reprises the Adam Smith point, characterizing “the current leaders of Silicon Valley, who have constructed the technical empires that now structure our lives” as “post-national,” as “citizens of no country; their wealth and capacity for innovation had, in their minds, set them free.”

The argument is that Silicon Valley, even while its very existence was made possible by the military industrial complex post WWII and the creation of the internet, has created a culture without national pride, that doesn’t believe in war, that doesn’t have values, and that doesn’t know for what it stands. Here’s the key paragraph:

We have grown too eager to banish any sentiment or expression of values from the public square. The educated class in the United States was content to abstain from engagement with the content of the American national project: What is this nation? What are our values? And for what do we stand? This great secularization of postwar America was cheered by many on the left, either privately or publicly, who saw the systemic eradication of religion from public life as a victory for inclusion. And a victory, in that sense, it was. But the unintended consequence of this assault on religion was the eradication of any space for belief at all – any room for the expression of values or normative ideas about who we were, or should become, as a nation. The soul of the country was at stake, having been abandoned in the name of inclusivity. The problem is that tolerance of everything often constitutes belief in nothing.

Again, I agree, and this is a serious critique. The rhetoric recalls Jonathan Edwards’s great 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, threatening hellfire and damnation for those who care more about making money than fearing God. I’ve been trying to make the case that Edwards is relevant to Silicon Valley culture for years.

Yet The Technological Republic waffles in assigning blame for the conditions being lamented. As much as I agree with the book’s intentions, I’m troubled by the noun phrases and passive voice. “The instrumentalization of American higher education continues unchecked. The number of graduating college seniors who earned a degree in humanities fell from 14 percent in 1966 to 7 percent in 2010,” they note. So who or what is the agent of this falling off? “The market,” they say, and those obsessed with markets abdicated responsibility for “this massive shift in the ambitions and directions of a generation of capable and well-meaning minds.”

I know the higher ed market well, so this flippancy stings a bit. I’ve taught humanities classes since 1997, where we read Antigone, Shakespeare, Moby-Dick, Frederick Douglass, George Eliot, Wilfred Owen, the Bible, debating war and values and religion and culture and heaven and hell and good and evil. Should I have done more to show the market there is value in this work? The very next chapter, “A Balloon Cut Loose,” is all about how more Western Civ courses (and less Edward Said) could have helped this generation. The question of why this didn’t happen remains.

The last two chapters in this section deliver powerful punches, bringing more specificity (though not blame) to the argument that the Silicon Valley nonconformist culture is the problem while also the possible solution. “Flawed Systems” is about Silicon Valley’s individualist DIY hacker ethos, the apotheosis of which was Steve Jobs, whose vision of personal computers (and later iPhones) “would liberate the individual from reliance on a corporate or governmental superstructure.” “Lost in Toyland” tells the story of Toby Lenk’s eToys, from its $10 billion valuation after its 1999 IPO filing to bankruptcy in 2001, as the stock price went from $84 to nine cents. The chapter features more Jonathan Edwards-worthy derision:

The energy of the era was directed at addressing the inefficiencies that would-be-founders encountered in their own quotidian lives…

The inconveniences of daily life for those with disposable income – hailing taxis, ordering food, sharing photos with friends – would eventually provide much if not most of the fodder for their inventions. The entrepreneurial energy of a generation was essentially redirected toward creating the lifestyle technology that would enable the highly educated classes at the helms of these firms and writing the code for their apps to feel as if they had more income than they did.

I’m sure every reader agrees. Bob Ivry’s breezy Washington Post review of The Technological Republic captures more concisely than I do Karp and Zamiska’s call to action as a call: “Tech bros, who have spent the boom years of the Silicon Valley revolution perfecting the home delivery of chicken fingers… need to refocus their engineering genius on helping America to defend Western values.” Agreed.

Ok, now what?

The tone shifts subtly in Part III “The Engineering Mindset,” as the narrative moves from lament to action. It begins with “The Eck Swarm,” about how the honeybees and the starlings on the periphery of a swarm or flock are the ones who guide their complex improvisational dances. Being on the edge is powerful. “The Improvisational Startup” introduces Palantir, noting that new employees were given Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1979) by Keith Johnstone, to create a culture of play, not power. The Silicon Valley nonconformist anti-bureaucratic culture is good in one way, the authors state. The best companies are “artist colonies” filled with talented people who don’t conform and don’t easily submit to power. “The Disapproval of the Crowd,” recaps the postwar Asch and Milgram experiments, how subjects resist or conform to pressure from an authority figure. Resistance to conformity has been essential to Silicon Valley’s engineering culture, the authors assert again.

Then suddenly, abruptly, comes “Building a Better Rifle,” about the gap between what U.S. soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan needed in 2011 and what military contractors and top brass couldn’t deliver; what soldiers knew on the ground and why that knowledge wasn’t used effectively. We get a brief history of military bureaucracy that begins to make the case for Palantir, which is the point of the chapter.

To be clear, I have no problem with Palantir’s business model (about which I’ve read a great deal). Having grown up in 1970s and 1980s defense technology startup culture on the New Hampshire-Massachusetts border, spending summers on the assembly line manufacturing electronic components for military use, I know procurement red tape and the 1994 Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act well. Efficiency in the military is elusive and ever being sought. If Palantir offers that, all to the good.

But the argument being made here, if I am following right, is that it was as much Silicon Valley’s frivolity as it was the U.S. military procurement incompetence in Afghanistan that created the need for Palantir:

In 2011, while we were sending engineers to Kandahar and working on building a more capable analytical software platform for US and allied intelligence agencies, the focus of Silicon Valley, with its own armies of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, was far from the mountain passes and deserts of Afghanistan. Zynga, the video game maker that had built a following on the back of FarmVille, a social networking game in which players competed to cultivate land and raise livestock, was the darling of the Valley at the time…

The technology sector had turned its back on the military, disinterested in wrangling with an overgrown bureaucracy and ambivalent, if not outright opposition from the public at home. There were other, more lucrative consumer markets to conquer. It was, however, a tolerance and perhaps some degree of taste for conflict, and a stubborn pursuit of something, anything that worked – that engineering instinct – that gave Palantir a foothold.

This last sentence struck me like a last line of an episode of a radio play, priming the reader for a new adventure to begin. It’s a rich sentence that again blames the technology sector for its lack of seriousness and vision, its tendency to chase lucre. Then the final punch: “It was, however, a tolerance…for conflict…that gave Palantir a foothold.” A deft move, rhetorically positioning Palantir both in and not-in the technology sector.

Part III closes with “A Cloud or a Clock,” a meditation on hedgehogs and foxes, on Girardian mimesis, on Herbert Hoover, John Dewey, Philip Tetlock, Taiichi Ohno’s Five Whys, and others who have asked the question: what keeps us from seeing what is right in front of us and why isn’t there enough questioning? Again, the authors use shorthand to imply an argument without making it explicitly. They seem to be saying we can’t really be angry at the Silicon Valley founders we’ve been criticizing here because maybe they simply haven’t seen what we’re seeing, and we should be gentle with them, because we need them. We admire the non-conforming relentlessness that made them successful; now that energy needs to be turned to national “improvement,” as Adam Smith would have it. “The challenge we now face, in rebuilding a technological republic, is directing that engineering instinct, an indeed ruthless pragmatism, toward the nation’s shared goals.”

An ownership society, but for whom?

Part IV, “Rebuilding the Technological Republic,” begins with “Into the Desert,” about the wisdom of crowds who hold the Western belief that it is better to let x number of guilty go free than imprison the innocent. It’s great for the consumer product world to privilege crowd belief but what about law enforcement? “The view that advanced technology and software have no place in law enforcement is an archetypal ‘luxury belief,’” the authors assert, gesturing back to the “Winner’s Fallacy” chapter, and hinting that some combination of Voltaire, progressive politics, and “fear of the unknown” is keeping the country from using technology to keep us safe. I’ve heard Peter Thiel give talks on this twice, live. Here, a solution is given: reconstructing a technological republic will require an ownership society, “where nobody is entrusted with leadership who does not have a stake in their own success.”

“Piety and Its Price” is about the costs of the “low” (though not to academics) monetary compensation for government officials, and about how we aren’t going to have better leadership unless we pay better and aren’t so priggish about minor lapses of judgement (e.g. Rickover). I thought of Michel de Montaigne as the thinker who has made these points some centuries ago, contrasting the rigor and rectitude required to be a philosopher with the flexibility needed to be a good mayor. “The mayor and Montaigne have always been two, with a very clear separation,” he writes in On Husbanding Your Will. If there is going to be a change of views on public official purity, Montaigne is a good figure for convincing people of it.

Finally, “The Next Thousand Years” is about national pride and group solidarity and the stories required to make a vast number of people come together and believe they are bound up in the same national project:

What is capable of binding us together, of offering some degree of cohesion and common narrative that might allow large groups to organize around something other than our own subsistence? It is, without any doubt, some blend of shared culture, language, history, heroes and villains, stories, and patterns of discourse.

Indeed, this is what I teach, research, and write about, with a particular focus on the formerly enslaved in America, who, after Emancipation, very much wanted (finally) to be part of the American project.

So why do the authors go to Singapore and Lee Kuan Yew for examples of how to build culture? Why France? Why Germany after WWII and Martin Walser’s “enough already” about Auschwitz? Why in the next chapter, “An Aesthetic Point of View” do the authors say that “we” (and I think this time I’m included) have abandoned the “aesthetic point of view” and don’t talk about the important things?

Our collective and contemporary fear of making claims about truth, beauty, and the good life, and indeed justice have led us to the embrace of a thin version of collective identity, one that is incapable of providing meaningful direction to the human experience. All cultures are not equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden…..should we be left with no means of discerning between art that moves us forward, ideas that advance humanity’s causes, and those that do not?

In fact many of us do teach “truth, beauty, and the good life,” including the history of addressing beauty and art in America, albeit in smaller and smaller classrooms, since the market is shrinking for these classes. I don’t disagree that there are as many people teaching divisiveness as there are teaching beauty, because there is a market for divisiveness. Social media has created many multi-millionaires because of this market.

The solution, the authors say, is an ownership stake, as they offer data to show that companies led by a family with an ownership stake outperform all others. “The union of the pursuit of innovation with the rigor of engineering execution requires a degree of insulation with the outside world, some protection from the instincts and often misdirections of the market.” I agree.

But if the case has been made that “shared culture, language, history, heroes and villains, stories, and patterns of discourse,” is critical for a flourishing future, if the “abandonment of an aesthetic point of view is lethal to building technology,” where do those of us who teach culture and aesthetics fit in? As I asked at the beginning, how exactly, in dismantling the old order to build a new technological republic, will teachers and purveyors of national virtues and values be part of the ownership culture?

The Technological Republic offers a compelling diagnosis of the technology sector’s drift from national purpose toward frivolous consumerism. Yet in calling for a renewed technological republic built on ownership and cultural cohesion, Karp and Zamiska leave a crucial question unanswered: what role will the humanities, the disciplines that cultivate "truth, beauty, and the good life,"play in this reimagined future? If shared culture, language, and storytelling are as essential to national solidarity as the authors argue, then those who teach these traditions deserve more than a footnote in their vision. Without integrating what we do into the ownership culture, Karp and Zamiska risk reproducing the problem their book identifies: a society rich in technological capacity but impoverished in meaning, purpose, and collective identity.