Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander Karp opens his new e book with a provocative declaration: “Silicon Valley has misplaced its method.”
Over the previous decade or so, as the info analytics firm rose to prominence with its work for U.S. army and intelligence, Karp has largely stayed out of the limelight. Last yr, in a uncommon interview with The New York Times, he described himself as “progressive however not woke,” with “a constantly pro-Western view.”
Now, in “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West” (co-authored with Nicholas Zamiska, Palantir’s head of company affairs and authorized counsel to the CEO), Karp has written one thing of a manifesto. In truth, he and Zamiska describe it as “the beginnings of the articulation of the idea” behind Palantir.
In their telling, Silicon Valley’s early success was created by a detailed alliance between know-how corporations and the U.S. authorities. They argue that this alliance has splintered, with the federal government “ceding the problem of creating the subsequent wave of pathbreaking applied sciences to the personal sector,” whereas Silicon Valley has “turned inward, focusing its power on slender client merchandise, relatively than initiatives that talk to and tackle our larger safety and welfare.”
The pair criticize Silicon Valley’s output as dominated by “internet marketing and purchasing, in addition to social media and video-sharing platforms,” suggesting that that is the results of an trade that valorizes constructing issues with out asking what’s price constructing or why.
“The central argument that we advance within the pages that comply with is that the software program trade ought to rebuild its relationship with authorities and redirect its effort and a focus to developing the know-how and synthetic intelligence capabilities that may tackle essentially the most urgent challenges that we collectively face,” Karp and Zamiska write.
They additionally argue that Silicon Valley’s “engineering elite” has “an affirmative obligation to take part within the protection of the nation and the articulation of a nationwide venture — what is that this nation, what are our values, and for what will we stand.”
Reviewers haven’t been fully received over. In Bloomberg, John Ganz complained that “The Technological Republic” is “not a e book in any respect, however a bit of company gross sales materials.”
And in The New Yorker, Gideon Lewis-Kraus advised that the e book is an “anachronism,” presumably written earlier than Donald Trump’s victory within the November 2024 election. Now, Lewis-Kraus wrote, “its imaginative and prescient of a mutually supportive relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley has within the interim been rendered nearly quaint.”
Indeed, one factor that Karp and Zamiska criticize is “the reluctance of many enterprise leaders to enterprise into, in any significant method and other than the occasional and theatrical foray, essentially the most consequential social and cultural debates of our time.”
Of course, we are actually seeing at the least one enterprise chief take this directive to get entangled in politics fairly significantly, as Trump ally Elon Musk makes an attempt to remake the federal authorities by way of his Department of Government Efficiency.
