The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West

by Alexander C. Karp, Nicholas W. Zamiska Narrated by Nicholas W. Zamiska

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Speaking to the state of America, as well as to the growing technological revolution as a whole, this ambitious work highlights how the West lost its way and how it can find it again.

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ¿ “A cri de coeur that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies.”-The Wall Street Journal

From the Palantir co-founder, one of Time's 100 Most Influential People of 2025, and his deputy, a sweeping indictment of the West's culture of complacency, arguing that timid leadership, intellectual fragility, and an unambitious view of technology's potential in Silicon Valley have made the U.S. vulnerable in an era of mounting global threats.

“Not since Allan Bloom's astonishingly successful 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind-more than one million copies sold-has there been a cultural critique as sweeping as Karp's.”-George F. Will, The Washington Post

Silicon Valley has lost its way.

Our most brilliant engineering minds once collaborated with government to advance world-changing technologies. Their efforts secured the West's dominant place in the geopolitical order. But that relationship has now eroded, with perilous repercussions.

Today, the market rewards shallow engagement with the potential of technology. Engineers and founders build photo-sharing apps and marketing algorithms, unwittingly becoming vessels for the ambitions of others. This complacency has spread into academia, politics, and the boardroom. The result? An entire generation for whom the narrow-minded pursuit of the demands of a late capitalist economy has become their calling.

In this groundbreaking treatise, Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska offer a searing critique of our collective abandonment of ambition, arguing that in order for the U.S. and its allies to retain their global edge-and preserve the freedoms we take for granted-the software industry must renew its commitment to addressing our most urgent challenges, including the new arms race of artificial intelligence. The government, in turn, must embrace the most effective features of the engineering mindset that has propelled Silicon Valley's success.

Above all, our leaders must reject intellectual fragility and preserve space for ideological confrontation. A willingness to risk the disapproval of the crowd, Karp and Zamiska contend, has everything to do with technological and economic outperformance.

At once iconoclastic and rigorous, this book will also lift the veil on Palantir and its broader political project from the inside, offering a passionate call for the West to wake up to our new reality.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

The Technological Republic provides a fascinating, if at times disturbing, insight into the reassertion of US hard power.”—Financial Times, “Best Books of the Week”

“Equal parts company lore, jeremiad, and homily . . . The primary target of The Technological Republic is not a nation that has failed Silicon Valley. It is more cogent and original as a story about how Silicon Valley has failed the nation.”—The New Yorker

“[Karp] and his co-author, Nicholas Zamiska . . . have produced something no less ambitious than a new treatise in political theory. . . . Nuanced, caveated, largely compelling, and reassuringly humble.”—The Wall Street Journal

“As clear and bracing as reveille . . . with engaging storytelling . . . Whether or not Americans can agree on how and why to defend the country, Karp and Zamiska make a stirring call for the tech industry to follow Palantir’s path and get involved in the effort.”—The Washington Post

“A scathing indictment of today’s complacent Silicon Valley . . . A big-idea book that’s getting a lot of buzz.”—Toronto Star

“Fascinating and important. This book is a rallying cry, as we enter the age of artificial intelligence, for a return to the World War II era of cooperation between the technology industry and government in order to pursue innovation that will advance our national welfare and democratic goals.”—Walter Isaacson

“A bold and ambitious work, The Technological Republic reminds us of a time when technological progress answered a national calling. It is essential reading in the age of AI, as the direction of Silicon Valley will help define the future of American leadership in the world.”—Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and chair of the Special Competitive Studies Project

“[The Technological Republic] is by turns provocative and insightful, and Alex Karp’s resilience, patriotism, and depth of experience in our rapidly changing world provide instructive lessons and intellectual arguments for all of us to consider.”—Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase

“This is an extremely important book and a gift to every American interested in the future path of our nation. Alex Karp is a brilliant out-of-consensus visionary who has built one of the most consequential companies in America.”—Stanley Druckenmiller, investor and philanthropist

“The Technological Republic should be read by everyone who cares about how technology should contribute to the protection of American values and our security. Karp is a true patriot—a loving critic of his industry and his country who wants them both to be better.”—General James N. Mattis (USMC Retired)

“Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska make a powerful and persuasive case for how ensuring America’s competitive advantage in technology will advance not only our national security but also the renewal of our great Republic. We should all be grateful they are fighting for America!”—Senator Bill Hagerty

Kirkus Reviews

2024-12-13
A passionate call for a new cultural approach from Silicon Valley.

Karp is co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies, which specializes in developing software platforms connected to big data analytics, and Zamiska is a senior executive in the firm. In this book, they argue for a thorough rethinking within the tech sector, which, while full of intelligent and innovative people, has lost a sense of national purpose or common good. Instead, the authors say, America’s best and brightest are focused on creating shiny new toys, from phone apps and games to marketing algorithms. Karp and Zamiska posit that the culture of Silicon Valley is based on self-centered libertarianism, with most of the players coming from privileged backgrounds and a college system that disdains any collaboration with government. The result is that the U.S., while still leading in most areas of technology, is seeing its advantages diminish in next-gen fields like artificial intelligence and swarm warfare. There needs to be an increased awareness of the challenges facing the country and a readiness to put forward ambitious, multidimensional solutions, they argue. For its part, the government’s security institutions should be more welcoming of software specialists and should streamline the labyrinthine, wasteful procurement processes. Interesting stuff, although the book pays insufficient attention to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has successfully used talented people from the tech sector and which could be a good model for future efforts. Nevertheless, the book has many thought-provoking ideas; now it remains to be seen if people in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., will listen.

A provocative examination of how the U.S. can maintain its leading position in tech innovation.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940192222676
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	02/18/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Lost Valley

Silicon Valley has lost its way.

The initial rise of the American software industry was made possible in the first part of the twentieth century by what would seem today to be a radical and fraught partnership between emerging technology companies and the U.S. government. Silicon Valley’s earliest innovations were driven not by technical minds chasing trivial consumer products but by scientists and engineers who aspired to see the most powerful technology of the age deployed to address challenges of industrial and national significance. Their pursuit of breakthroughs was intended not to satisfy the passing needs of the moment but rather to drive forward a much grander project, channeling the collective purpose and ambition of a nation. This early dependence of Silicon Valley on the nation-state and indeed the U.S. military has for the most part been forgotten, written out of the region’s history as an inconvenient and dissonant fact—one that clashes with the Valley’s conception of itself as indebted only to its capacity to innovate.

In the 1940s, the federal government began supporting an array of research projects that would culminate in the development of novel pharmaceutical compounds, intercontinental rockets, and spy satellites, as well as the precursors to artificial intelligence. Indeed, Silicon Valley once stood at the center of American military production and national security. Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, whose semiconductor division was founded in Mountain View, California, and made possible the first primitive personal computers, built reconnaissance equipment for spy planes used by the Central Intelligence Agency in the late 1950s. For a time after World War II, all of the U.S. Navy’s ballistic missiles were produced in Santa Clara County, California. Companies such as Lockheed Missile & Space, Westinghouse, Ford Aerospace, and United Technologies had thousands of employees working in Silicon Valley on weapons production through the 1980s and into the 1990s.

This union of science and the state in the middle part of the twentieth century arose in the wake of World War II. In November 1944, as Soviet forces closed in on Germany from the east and Adolf Hitler prepared to abandon his Wolf’s Lair, or Wolfsschanze, his eastern front headquarters in the north of present-day Poland, President Franklin Roosevelt was in Washington, D.C., already contemplating an American victory and the end of the conflict that had remade the world. Roosevelt sent a letter to Vannevar Bush, the son of a pastor who would later become the head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development. Bush was born in 1890 in Everett, Massachusetts, just north of Boston. His father had grown up, as did generations of his family before him, in Provincetown at the far end of Cape Cod. In the letter, Roosevelt described “the unique experiment” that the United States had undertaken during the war to leverage science in service of military ends. Roosevelt anticipated the next era—and an emerging partnership between national government and private industry—with precision. He wrote that there is “no reason why the lessons to be found in this experiment”—that is, directing the resources of an emerging scientific establishment to help wage the most significant and violent war that the world had ever known—“cannot be profitably employed in times of peace.” His ambition was clear. Roosevelt intended to see that the machinery of the state—its power and prestige, as well as the financial resources of the newly victorious nation and emerging hegemon—would spur the scientific community forward in service of, among other things, the advancement of public health and national welfare. The challenge was to ensure that the engineers and researchers who had directed their attention to the industry of war—and particularly the physicists, who as Bush noted had “been thrown most violently off stride”—could shift their efforts back to civilian advances in an era of relative peace.

The entanglement of the state and scientific research both before and after the war was itself built on an even longer history of connection between innovation and politics. Many of the earliest leaders of the American republic were themselves engineers, from Thomas Jefferson, who designed sundials and studied writing machines, to Benjamin Franklin, who experimented with and constructed everything from lightning rods to eyeglasses. Franklin was not someone who dabbled in science. He was an engineer, one of the most productive in the century, who happened to become a politician. Dudley Herschbach, a Harvard professor and chemist, has observed that the Founding Father’s research into electricity “was recognized as ushering in a scientific revolution comparable to those wrought by Newton in the previous century or by Watson and Crick in ours.” For Jefferson, science and natural history were his “passion,” he wrote in a letter to a federal judge in Kentucky in 1791, while politics was his “duty.” Some fields were so new that nonspecialists could aspire to make plausible contributions to them. James Madison dissected an American weasel and took nearly forty measurements of the animal in order to compare it with European varieties of the species, as part of an investigation into a theory, advanced by the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc in the late eighteenth century, that animals in North America had degenerated into smaller and weaker versions of their counterparts across the ocean.

Unlike the legions of lawyers who have come to dominate American politics in the modern era, many early American leaders, even if not practitioners of science themselves, were nonetheless remarkably fluent in matters of engineering and technology. John Adams, the second president of the United States, by one historian’s account was focused on steering the early republic away from “unprofitable science, identifiable in its focus on objects of vain curiosity,” and toward more practical forms of inquiry, including “applying science to the promotion of agriculture.” The innovators of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were often polymaths whose interests diverged wildly from the contemporary expectation that depth, as opposed to breadth, is the most effective means of contributing to a field. The term “scientist” itself was only coined in 1834, to describe Mary Somerville, a Scottish astronomer and mathematician; prior to that, the blending of pursuits across physics and the humanities, for instance, was so commonplace and natural that a more specialized word had not been needed. Many had little regard for the boundary lines between disciplines, ranging from areas of study as seemingly unrelated as linguistics to chemistry, and zoology to physics. The frontiers and edges of science were still in that earliest stage of expansion. As of 1481, the library at the Vatican, the largest in Europe, had only thirty-five hundred books and documents. The limited extent of humanity’s collective knowledge made possible and encouraged an interdisciplinary approach that would almost be certain to stall an academic career today. That cross-pollination, as well as the absence of a rigid adherence to the boundaries between disciplines, was vital to a willingness to experiment, and to the confidence of political leaders to opine on engineering and technical questions that implicated matters of government.

The rise of J. Robert Oppenheimer and dozens of his colleagues in the late 1930s only further situated scientists and engineers at the heart of American life and the defense of the democratic experiment. Joseph Licklider, a psychologist whose work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology anticipated the rise of early forms of AI, was hired in 1962 by the organization that would become the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—an institution whose innovations would include the precursors to the modern internet as well as the global positioning system. His research for his now classic paper “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” which was published in March 1960 and sketched a vision of the interplay between computing intelligence and our own, was supported by the U.S. Air Force. There was a closeness, and significant degree of trust, in the relationships between political leaders and the scientists on whom they relied for guidance and direction. Shortly after the launch by the Soviet Union of the satellite Sputnik in October 1957, Hans Bethe, the German-born theoretical physicist and adviser to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, was called to the White House. Within an hour, there was agreement on a path forward to reinvigorate the American space program. “You see that this is done,” Eisenhower told an aide. The pace of change and action in that era was swift. NASA was founded the following year.

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