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Elon Musk’s recent ascent to the pinnacle of American politics has proclaimed the power and influence exerted by a tiny group of tech billionaires — in journalist Gil Duran’s felicitous phrase, “The Nerd Reich.” Alexander Karp’s The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, written by one of its card-carrying members, opens a glimpse into their mindset.
In some ways, Karp, a founder of the data mining giant Palantir, stands in contrast to the often-buffoonish Musk. (The book’s co-author, Nicholas Zamiska, serves as Palantir’s head of corporate affairs and legal counsel.) Armed with a doctorate in social theory, he attempts a serious analysis of the challenges faced by American society in the digital age.
The book’s title derives from the author’s criticism of young, self-absorbed Silicon Valley types unconcerned by the public good — the “hollow republic” — as opposed to those focused on the commonwealth, the “technological republic.”
The result is a mishmash of Eurocentrism, intriguing moral observations, sophomoric metaphysics, and occasional analytical and factual errors. Irrespective of its flaws, the book reflects just where this evolving plutocracy wants to move the nation, and it behooves the rest of us to pay attention.
Karp’s arch-libertarian Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel also lurks in the mix. It helps to know that Thiel, along with many other members of our new “cognitive elite,” was profoundly influenced by The Sovereign Individual, a grandiose bit of futurology that describes a world in which nations, no longer able to tax effectively, collapse.
Who picks up the pieces? Today’s AI- and crypto-empowered übermenschen, of course! Thiel was so taken with the book that he wrote the preface for its updated edition. (It’s worth noting that another piece of woolly historical analysis, The Fourth Turning, inspires Musk’s political archenemy, Steve Bannon.)
Failings of the Tech Community
Karp’s central assertion, repeated ad nauseam, is that tech’s best and brightest aren’t patriotic enough, aren’t religious enough, and don’t pay proper attention to national defense. Regrettably, shopping apps and dating websites seem more their speed. By happy coincidence, defense is Palantir’s rice bowl, and the reader soon tires of sentences and phrases beginning with “At Palantir...”
It’s to the nation’s detriment that Karp’s foils, young Silicon Valley app and website designers, profess neither strong ideology nor belief in God, the author asserts. Midway through the book, he informs us that today’s tech elite:
...stop short of engaging with more essential questions of national purpose and identity—with an affirmative vision of what we want to and should be building as part of a national project, not simply an articulation of the lines that one will not cross. They remain content to monetize our search histories even as they decline to defend our collective security.
Moreover, they do not acknowledge the militarily strong state that “provided the protections—not to mention educational institutions and capital markets—have provided for their ascent. They would do well to understand that debt, even if it remains unpaid.”
Karp repeats this refrain so often that before finishing The Technological Republic, readers will be moving their lips along with the text as they progress through the book. Clearly, Karp is a big fan of military service, and one wonders why neither the book nor his Wikipedia page mentions him donning a uniform.
But never mind: Mr. Karp has done well by doing good. Not only does Palantir exemplify his vision of civic and moral virtues, but its focus on national security contracting has also endowed Mr. Karp with personal wealth estimated between 10 and 11 figures. Recent media reports allege that some of this fortune derives from Palantir’s involvement with ICE’s workplace raids and its arrest of the parents of unaccompanied immigrant children.
The Technological Republic also falls foul of “good old days” historical analysis. This fallacy can be traced back at least as far as Hesiod. A century ago, heroic American technological genius saw the development of the radio, automobile, and modern electronics, whereas today’s Silicon Valley focuses on selling advertising and monetizing users’ privacy. How, then, is the social influencer economy any different than early radio’s dependence on soap advertising and television’s focus on selling deodorant?
Theory Disconnected From Data
At times, Karp’s moral conviction blinds him to reality, as when he flatly states, "It is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.” Say what? Social mobility in the U.S. is indisputably lower than in nearly all other OECD nations. (The reader is encouraged to google “Raj Chetty,” the Harvard economist who has done much of this work.)
A child brought up in the bottom socioeconomic quintile in most of the American southeast has a less than 5% chance of making into the top quintile as an adult. In contrast, in most of northern Europe, more than 10% do. (In a perfectly mobile society, 20% would make it from the bottom to the top quintile.) When push comes to shove, it’s better to grow up in America dumb and rich than smart but poor.
Like many social theorists, Karp is rhetoric-heavy and data-light. He attributes, for example, the fall of the Roman Empire to his hobby horse: lack of patriotism and social commitment. In contrast, many, if not most, historians blame the progressive narrowing of Rome’s tax base, which increasingly exempted the aristocracy and fell mainly on farmers.
More broadly, all great powers decay; Karp should have at least given a nod to two phenomena that inevitably plague stable, wealthy societies: special interest capture, best described by American academic Mancur Olson, and ever-increasing wealth inequality, as developed by Walter Scheidel. (Karp inadvertently almost gets there when he enthuses about Singapore’s economic success. When the island state suddenly and unexpectedly gained independence in 1965, the remarkably far-sighted Lee Kwan Yew seized the opportunity to invent a new nation with an institutional clean sheet free from entrenched special interest groups and excessive wealth inequality.)
Karp’s criticism of tech’s lack of patriotism and firm conviction ignores the fact that both characteristics lie at the root of mankind’s bloody history: Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot were all patriotic men of deep conviction.
In the same way, he misinterprets Philip Tetlock’s ground-breaking research, which demonstrates that experts do not forecast well. Irving Berlin’s famous “hedgehogs,” who view the world through a narrow theoretical and ideological perspective, do especially poorly; Berlin’s foxes, who are more ideologically flexible, do a bit better. At Palantir, of course, everyone’s a fox. What eludes Karp is that hedgehogs, by definition, have firm convictions, while foxes tend towards ideological squishiness.
Religion as a Social Solution
His treatment of modern society’s — not just tech’s — retreat from religion is likewise data-free. Those data, it turns out, have a lot to say about God. Start with the wealth of epidemiological research on religion. On the credit side of God’s ledger, the devout are indeed both physically and psychologically healthier than the less religious. They live longer, have better social connections, and suffer less from the increasing modern epidemic of loneliness.
But the ledger also has a debit side. For starters, there are the Crusades, medieval religious wars, Inquisition, and witch trials, to say nothing of today’s Middle East and south Asian religious cauldron. More systematically, the World Values Survey, its offshoots such as Eurobarometer, and the General Social Survey all show that less religious societies are more peaceful and prosperous than more religious ones—think a “Somalia–Sweden scale” of national well-being.
Admittedly, the causative arrow between religion and national prosperity runs in both directions. Not only does the absence of religious fervor help to make societies peaceful and wealthy, but this wealth in turn enables them to provide a decent social safety net, which in turn lessens the need for religious institutions that do so. In any case, it is beyond ironic that Karp, data maven, makes the case against today’s increasing secularity that is light on historical facts and data familiar to most political and social scientists.
All that said, Karp is a talented historical researcher and storyteller. His history of the atomic submarine, particularly his portrait of its inventor, Admiral Hyman Rickover, shines. Karp nicely describes the irony that such visionaries are often brought low by the foibles inherent in their iconoclasm, as Rickover was by the acceptance of gifts, most of them paltry, from defense contractors. Absent that iconoclasm there are fewer foibles, but also less innovation.
Discerning readers — and writers — of nonfiction will also note the depth of his reference material, which unearths, for example, an obscure Singapore government report documenting Prime Minister Lee’s salutary language policies. The Technological Republic’s survey of modern military tactics and strategy also excels; its description of China’s recent breakthrough in small drones that can autonomously swarm through complex, dense environments will chill anyone concerned, as all Americans should be, about the Pentagon’s slow and expensive procurement process.
Karp’s social theory background also affords readers several important moral points, prime among which is that most people falsely assume that the oppressed are morally superior to the oppressor, a supposition tragically disconfirmed along Israel’s Gaza border on October 7, 2023. He also decries, correctly, the ever-increasing moral scrutiny focused on political candidates; we are not far from the point that we may see a candidate disqualified, in the words of one political scientist, “for using the express checkout lane when purchasing more than the ten-item limit.” Further, the U.S. simply does not pay our officials and legislators enough to prevent them from prematurely leaving their societally productive work to monetize their expertise and status in the private sector at places like... Palantir.
Alas, these bright spots do not save this flawed book. Capitalist societies equate riches with political insight and rectitude, and its winners often assume that their wealth imparts both policy and moral brilliance. The Technological Republic provides an unintended yet valuable insight into the mindset of a self-appointed cognitive elite whose wealth and power entitle them to steer national policy and to tell the rest of us how to live our lives.
William J. Bernstein is a neurologist, the co-founder of Efficient Frontier Advisors, an investment management firm, and a writer with several titles on finance and economic history. He has contributed to the peer-reviewed finance literature and has written for several national publications, including Money Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. He has produced several finance titles, and four volumes of history, The Birth of Plenty, A Splendid Exchange, Masters of the Word, and The Delusions of Crowds about, respectively, the economic growth inflection of the early 19th century, the history of world trade, the effects of access to technology on human relations and politics, and financial and religious mass manias. He was also the 2017 winner of the James R. Vertin Award from the CFA Institute.
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