This piece originally appeared in Commonplace.
As America undergoes a political realignment, Silicon Valley is experiencing its own shake-up. It’s not just the Big Tech CEOs tactfully aligning themselves with President Trump in a way that was unthinkable his first time around. The tech industry’s very raison d’être is under reconsideration, as technologists, policymakers, and the public rethink the shift in recent decades from the real economy of atoms to the virtual world of bits. There’s a discontent among founders, who have remembered that their predecessors built the spaceship and computer, while they’ve settled for fixing bugs in Candy Crush. Can’t we do something bigger and better?
The Technological Republic, a manifesto from Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska of the data analytics company Palantir, offers a useful gauge of this mood and a measure of the sentiments within an ascendant faction of the tech world regarding the state of the union. And in their telling, that state is bleak. The book is a full-throated indictment of the fallen ambitions, competence, and verve of America’s technologists and statesman. Karp and Zamiska—Palantir’s co-founder and CEO, and head of corporate affairs and legal counsel—think that our leaders in politics and tech have become, in short, losers—effete rule-followers who undertake projects without purpose, mindlessly parrot the shibboleths of out-of-touch elites, and ignore their duty to pursue the national interest.
Lest this seem too vague, Karp is willing to name names and offers withering indictments. Steve Jobs’s “interest was not in building the means to advance a broader American or national project”; “Is the iPhone, for example, our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization?” Mark Zuckerberg “captured the views of a generation of software engineers and founders, whose principal and animating interest was the action of creation itself—decoupled from any grand worldview or political project.” Google, with its “thinly veiled nihilism,” was so afraid to stand for anything that it adopted a negative motto: “Don’t be evil.” The whole e-commerce market comes in for a beating for its “shallowness” and its mission of satisfying gratuitous customer wants ever more quickly. Contrast all these flashy profit-maximizing ventures with Palantir’s soberer line of work: providing counter-terrorism and defense analytics to the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and other government clients.
