Alex Karp, the CEO of the controversial military tech firm Palantir, is the coauthor of a new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.
In it, he calls for a renewed sense of national purpose and even greater cooperation between government and the tech sector. His book is, in fact, not just an account of how to spur technological innovation, but a distinctly ideological tract.
As a start, Karp roundly criticizes Silicon Valley’s focus on consumer-oriented products and events like video-sharing apps, online shopping and social media platforms, which he dismisses as “the narrow and the trivial.”
His focus instead is on what he likes to think of as innovative big-tech projects of greater social and political consequence.
He argues, in fact, that Americans face “a moment of reckoning” in which we must decide “what is this country, and for what do we stand?”
And in the process, he makes it all too clear just where he stands — in strong support of what can only be considered a new global technological arms race, fueled by close collaboration between government and industry and designed to preserve America’s “fragile geopolitical advantage over our adversaries.”
Karp believes that applying American technological expertise to building next-generation weapons systems is the genuine path to national salvation and he advocates a revival of the concept of “the West” as foundational for future freedom and collective identity.
As Sophie Hurwitz of Mother Jones noted recently, Karp summarized this view in a letter to Palantir shareholders in which he claimed that the rise of the West wasn’t due to “the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.”
Count on one thing: Karp’s approach, if adopted, will yield billions of taxpayer dollars for Palantir and its militarized Silicon Valley cohorts in their search for AI weaponry that they see as the modern equivalent of nuclear weapons and the key to beating China, America’s current great power rival.
Hellbound and Down 