Palantir’s Idea of Peace

Friedrich Nietzsche once philosophized with a hammer; Alex Karp philosophizes with a Pentagon contract. Karp, the CEO of Palantir, has in recent years elbowed his way into the ranks of Silicon Valley’s thought leaders not just as another tech mogul, but as a self-appointed moral philosopher. Unlike Palantir’s cofounder, Peter Thiel, long known for his edgy right-libertarian politics, Karp styles himself as a liberal pragmatist—“progressive but not woke,” in his words. And unlike Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) or Eric Schmidt (Google), whose intellectual pretensions emerged alongside their billions, Karp possesses apparently real scholarly credentials that precede his fortune: He rubbed shoulders with Jürgen Habermas at Goethe University in Frankfurt, where he completed a PhD in social theory under the supervision of the Freudian social psychologist Karola Brede. Yet in The Technological Republic, his new “treatise” urging executives and engineers to abandon their pursuit of “trivial consumer products” and recommit their capital and talent to a “national project,” Karp’s effort feels less like a timely cultural intervention and more like what you get when the boss’s pontifications go unchallenged for too long.

Palantir sells data analytics software, sometimes custom-made, to seemingly every federal, state, and local agency in the country—its current and former clients include intelligence agencies (the CIA, NSA, and FBI), military branches (the Department of Defense), law enforcement (ICE and various local police departments), financial oversight agencies (the IRS and SEC), and even public health bodies (the CDC, FDA, and NIH)—as well as to a plethora of Washington-friendly regimes abroad, with controversial contracts in Israel, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom. The company’s core government product, Palantir Gotham, acts as a computational force multiplier for state power, aggregating disparate databases and digital breadcrumbs into comprehensive profiles that facilitate everything from drone strikes abroad to immigrant deportations at home. As the public face of this enterprise, Karp has repeatedly alluded to Palantir’s covert, thankless heroism, cryptically bragging that the company has thwarted “innumerable” attacks on civilians across Europe over the past two decades. He has done little to amend what might be called Palantir’s genesis myth (first narrated by Mark Bowden in his account of Osama bin Laden’s killing, The Finish) that the company’s intelligence tools helped SEAL Team Six locate the Al Qaeda leader’s compound and then shoot him dead.

Karp’s stenographers in the press have helped him craft a veil of intrigue around the company. This carefully maintained mystique provides the perfect backdrop for Karp to play the eccentric intellectual, someone who drops incendiary statements with academic detachment. On a recent earnings call, he gloated, “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them”; at the World Economic Forum, he dismissed the United Nations as “basically a discriminatory institution against anything good”; during an AI conference on Capitol Hill, he castigated pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses as the adherents of a “pagan religion” and asserted that they should be sent to live in North Korea. These statements all come wrapped in eager demonstrations of his knowledge on the history of philosophy, art, and science—a performative erudition very different from the safe, generic corporate-speak of most of his peers. Though identifying as a liberal, Karp’s general strategy seems to be to position himself as a guy that can “talk sense” to the left, which of course appeals to the right—criticizing progressives for their ostensible lack of patriotism, naïve cosmopolitanism, and unwillingness to embrace US military power. It’s a disposition designed for dual purposes: to make the embrace of a hawkish foreign policy and digital dragnet technology appear as the thoughtful centrist stance, and to provide Palantir with a politically palatable counterweight to the more odious ideological baggage of Thiel. What his new book (cowritten with “longtime deputy” Nicholas W. Zamiska, but unmistakably driven by Karp’s imperious voice) offers, then, is warmed-over pabulum that transforms self-interest into national destiny, all while claiming the mantle of the intellectual renegade.

The grand thesis of The Technological Republic is disarmingly straightforward, a simple proposition delivered in the book’s first sentence: “Silicon Valley has lost its way.” This is a well-worn lament—standard fare from guests of the All-In Podcast who have discovered the rehabilitative benefits of criticizing Silicon Valley only after making billions in it—complete with predictable breast-beating about the industry’s supposed drift from its world-changing mission. Karp’s own spin on this familiar complaint is his prescribed remedy: America’s technological elite must quit building idle consumer distractions—ride-sharing apps, online shopping sites, social media platforms, and the like—and direct its energy toward military technology, the only worthwhile pursuit in our new age of great-power competition.

Karp asserts that the tech industry has a moral duty to work with the US government, “an affirmative obligation to support the state that made its rise possible.” He frames Silicon Valley’s abdication of this duty as nothing short of a national betrayal: “We must rise up and rage against this misdirection of our culture and capital,” he writes. The casus belli for his moral crusade was Google’s decision to withdraw from Project Maven—a Pentagon AI weapons-building initiative—after employee protests led to the company canceling the contract. With scorn, Karp presents this event as evidence of the industry’s borderline-treasonous betrayal of the imperatives of national security and welfare. These Google protesters’ delusions of a “world without trade-offs, ideological or economic,” becomes, in Karp’s view, the ultimate First World privilege—enabling them to enjoy the benefits of American hegemony while refusing to actively advance it.

Karp idealizes the Manhattan Project as a Platonic unity of the state and business. He romanticizes the World War II–era entanglement of science and government as a heroic partnership in which luminaries like Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Vannevar Bush channeled their brilliance and talents toward constructing an American national project. Their era’s most vital discovery—the atomic bomb—defined the geopolitical trajectory of the planet for the next half-century, setting the stage for what Karp (via John Lewis Gaddis) calls “the long peace”: a period of sustained US technological supremacy that Silicon Valley may now squander as a result of its turn toward “sating the often capricious needs of capitalism’s consumer culture.” America’s international dominance is doubly precarious now that the atomic age “is coming to a close,” Karp writes, and we stand at “a similar crossroads in the science of computing”—large language models, naturally. His proposed solution? America demands “a new Manhattan Project in order to retain exclusive control over the most sophisticated forms of AI for the battlefield.” Without this urgent pivot, the United States will lose its superpower status to one of its rising rivals. China looms large as the techno-geopolitical nemesis in this telling, with its swarms of military drones, facial recognition algorithms, and unscrupulous leaders who view the “cultivation of hard power” as “a necessity to survive.” This existential threat—apparently invisible to the naïve, dissenting Google engineers—necessitates Silicon Valley’s immediate patriotic awakening.

Yet Karp’s historical parallel collapses under scrutiny. Not only does he conveniently omit how many Manhattan Project scientists came to express profound regret about their creation, but the project itself bears virtually no resemblance to the military procurement relationships that Karp ardently invokes. His comparison of Los Alamos to modern defense contracting requires either stunning historical ignorance or, more likely, willful distortion. The development of the atomic bomb demanded a massive, unprecedented scientific mobilization during an existential global conflict: Researchers became federal employees working directly under the Army Corps of Engineers, with the US government wielding absolute authority over the resulting technology, knowledge, and patents through its stringent classification and secrecy protocols. Those involved weren’t motivated by stock options, quarterly targets, or market pressures; they operated under wartime emergency powers with a singular national purpose. Karp inverts this dynamic, conjuring a surveillance-industrial cosplay in which intelligence-tech outfits like Palantir—dressed for defense work but dancing for shareholders—set defense priorities while draping themselves in the flag and presenting the profit motive as a patriotic prerogative.

The most clarifying contradiction comes from Karp’s own rhetoric: He repeatedly derides this generation of software engineers for having “never experienced a war or genuine social upheaval.” But isn’t that precisely the point? If today’s engineers haven’t experienced such upheaval, perhaps it’s because we aren’t facing the civilization-threatening emergency that would justify his “Manhattan Project for AI.” The current international rivalry with China remains largely an economic competition disguised as a national security imperative; though the potential for military conflict exists, China’s global footprint currently consists of deep-water ports, high-speed railways, telecommunications networks, and energy facilities, as opposed to the hundreds of overseas military bases that characterize US power projection. In light of this, Karp’s alarmism reads less like a genuine concern for national security and more like a slick prospectus for Palantir investors.

Karp’s selective reading of history continues to his reading of the present. The Google–Project Maven controversy he obsesses over is hardly representative of Silicon Valley’s relationship with the Pentagon. While he cites Microsoft employee protests over the company’s $22 billion contract to provide augmented reality headsets to the US Army as further proof of tech’s alleged anti-government stance, facts on the ground paint a different picture. When Google withdrew from Project Maven, at least 10 other companies—including Palantir itself—quickly scrambled to take up the work. This enthusiasm to secure defense contracts conveys the uncomfortable truth that Karp conveniently omits: Big Tech is already thoroughly enmeshed with the United States’ geopolitical machinery. IBM, Oracle, and Amazon have supplied the government with software, database technology, and cloud services for decades; Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google share the Pentagon’s $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract; Google and Apple have adjusted their maps to conform to US diplomatic positions even before the recent Gulf of Mexico episode; and the industry’s defense-intelligence partnerships run so deep that the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program could directly access user data from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Apple, and others. Since Donald Trump’s return to office, Elon Musk has gained unprecedented influence over defense spending through the Department of Government Efficiency, while the administration’s $500 billion Stargate Project with OpenAI further cements the tech-government nexus. These realities make a mockery of Karp’s claim that Silicon Valley needs a “renewed embrace” of government to “rebuild trust with the country.” If anything, the public has grown profoundly distrustful of Big Tech precisely because of its cozy relationship with government agencies, particularly after the exposure by Edward Snowden in 2013 of the vast scope of the “Five Eyes” global surveillance network, which underscores how the very same frivolous consumer platforms that Karp demonizes throughout his book are actually central to national security operations.

From this foundation made of sand, Karp manages to extrapolate a comically featherbrained culture-war screed that drags on for dozens of tedious pages. We get all the usual conservative “anti-woke” slop: Students are too sensitive to handle intellectual discomfort; Western identity has been systematically undermined; the humanities have been corrupted by postmodernism. The pro-Palestinian student protesters on campus who conceal their faces demonstrate a failure to develop “real ownership over an idea,” while university presidents lack moral conviction when testifying before Congress. According to Karp, both are the results of a hollowed-out, assembly-line educational system that punishes “anything approaching an authentic belief.” In Karp’s jeremiad, these qualities manifest themselves in today’s tech workers, whom he dismisses as “technological agnostics” who know “what they oppose but not what they are for.” The world he describes is populated by brittle, morally rudderless youth who suffer from “intellectual fragility” and a “cult of optionality” far removed from the patriotic commitment characteristic of previous generations.

The chief irony of Karp’s attempt at cultural critique is how it undermines itself at every turn. While grieving the putative death of moral conviction in our nation, he dismisses deeply held beliefs that simply don’t align with his own. One gets the sense that Karp’s definition of “belief” is narrowly circumscribed to mean the willingness to unconditionally endorse the military actions of the United States and its allies. This is why he refuses to acknowledge the rectitude of campus protesters opposing Israel’s annihilation of the Gaza Strip and its inhabitants—precisely the kind of principled youth he claims our universities programmatically inhibit. Likewise, the about 4,000 Google employees who signed their names to the petition opposing Project Maven—risking their careers at one of tech’s most prestigious employers—were hardly displaying an ethical deficit. To put this in perspective: The man who runs a multibillion-dollar company, seeded with CIA venture capital and working hand in glove with the most powerful institutions on Earth, is calling into question the conviction of those who put their incomes, academic credentials, future employment prospects, and even citizenship status on the line. The lack of self-awareness is truly staggering.

After indulging in this recycled finger-wagging, Karp proceeds to the book’s most self-aggrandizing section: a breathless, bloviating account of Palantir’s purportedly idiosyncratic organizational culture that approaches corporate management literature at its most pretentious. Here we learn that Palantir resembles honeybee swarms and starling flocks, embraces improvisational theater techniques, and encourages “constructive disobedience”—all while Karp marvels at his company’s heterodoxy, as if every start-up in the Valley hadn’t already plastered their walls with “values statements” and subjected employees to team-building exercises based on precepts like these. To illustrate the heroic struggle against conformity that Palantir wages, Karp summarizes several well-known psychology experiments as if he were the first to discover them. He devotes part of a chapter to Solomon Asch’s conformity experiment, where subjects misidentified line lengths under group pressure; he recounts Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies, where participants administered what they thought were harmful electric shocks to strangers. Of the latter, Karp solemnly concludes, “the capacity to inflict harm on the innocent was not solely the domain of the depraved”—an insight that lands differently coming from a man who has publicly boasted about his company’s technology killing people. His reading of these famous case studies leads to his claim that “social deafness” and an “insensitivity to a certain type of social calculation” are virtues in business, as if socially awkward entrepreneurs possess some kind of evolutionary advantage.

Karp then weaves in a collection of loosely connected threads: He advocates for reinstating the draft (“We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force”), justifies Operation Paperclip (the secret post–World War II program that imported former Nazi scientists into the US), and waxes poetic about Lucian Freud’s observational painting techniques as a metaphor for Palantir’s approach to data analysis. Before wrapping things up, he delivers the stunning revelation that “identifying the reasons for the failure of a system…necessarily requires a focus on the inner workings and mechanics of the system at issue.” Thanks for the tip, Dr. Karp.

When he finally attempts to outline concrete solutions for “rebuilding the technological republic,” the self-serving nature of Karp’s agenda becomes impossible to ignore. His ostensibly groundbreaking proposals amount to little more than corporate bromides and platitudes: Be wary of groupthink, encourage the left to speak to the right, apply software to law enforcement. There is an excruciating chapter devoted to the necessity of raising the supposedly paltry salaries of our elected officials. Karp bewails the fact that members of Congress earn, on average, “just $174,000 per year,” arguing with a straight face that this salary—more than double the median household income in the United States—is what prevents “well-meaning and talented people” from entering public service, rather than the obvious reality that political success typically requires proximity to networks of wealth, power, and donor influence. This, evidently, is the pressing crisis that Karp sees in American governance: not regulatory capture, not the influence of corporate lobbying, not the revolving door between defense contractors and the Pentagon (which has garnered Palantir almost $3 billion in contracts since 2009, according to the Financial Times).

Just as telling is Karp’s bizarre paean to Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear submarine. After detailing the admiral’s technical achievements, Karp defends him against the scrutiny he faced in the early 1980s, after it was learned that Rickover had accepted thousands of dollars in gifts from the defense contractor General Dynamics over a 16-year period—a clear case of conflict of interest. Strangely fixated on this 45-year-old scandal, Karp presents it as evidence that we’ve become too rigidly focused on “administrative rules” at the expense of “outcomes and results.” The implication is clear: When great men do great things, we should look the other way from their ethical lapses. Moral courage is essential—except when it gets in the way of building armaments.

Karp’s repeated invocation of “the good life” and “collective endeavors” never leads to any sort of concrete program, and his vague exhortations about “articulating a coherent and rich vision of the world” remain at the level of the manifesto—an opening to a final section that remains conspicuously blank. He might have concluded with some concrete proposals: for a new industrial policy, for transformative infrastructure projects, for addressing climate change, for remaking the American healthcare and education systems. Instead, Karp offers vague gestures toward cultural renewal and “manufacturing a nation” through “civic rituals,” “mandatory service,” and religion, while warning ominously that our “distaste for collective experience” has made America “vulnerable to attack and infiltration.” He criticizes a generation for believing in nothing while revealing remarkably little about what he himself believes in—beyond the Palantir business model.

When the smoke clears, The Technological Republic proves to be nothing more than an elaborate defense of the status quo—a CEO masquerading as an iconoclast while advocating for precisely the system that has made him rich. Under the guise of challenging Silicon Valley’s supposed frivolity, Karp envisions a world even more tightly aligned with Palantir’s financial interests: a permanent wartime economy where robotic armadas replace food-delivery fleets and software is conscripted wholly into the service of the state. Pulsing through every chapter is a disquieting fascination with the strategy of conflict: Karp is utterly intoxicated by images of technological brinkmanship, security threats, and preemptive calculation. He yearns for the collective unity of what Fredric Jameson called “the great American utopia of World War II,” forged by the glamor of entrepreneurial adventure. Stripped of the intellectual veneer of its author, The Technological Republic emerges as a road map for a world in which warfare provides the essential impetus for social cohesion—where citizenship means compliance, where technology means weapons, where innovation means militarization, where dissent means disloyalty, and where the republic itself is a garrison state, built to Palantir’s specifications.