Citizens, Not Consumers

The West faces a crisis of confidence on a scale unseen for decades. Just as an axis of revisionist powers—China, Russia, and Iran—threatens the post-Cold War global order, the citizens of the United States and other countries that have benefited the most from those arrangements are beginning to question its very foundations. Will the rise of right-wing populism and left-wing identity politics knock the United States from her position of leadership? Will the people of the West have enough nerve to defend their freedom against the gathering storm?

In their new book, The Technological Republic, Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska argue that America still has the resources to win this fight—and that they can be found in Silicon Valley. Karp is the chief executive officer of Palantir Technologies, a software company that makes intelligence and defense tools for the US military, and Zamiska acts as head of corporate affairs and legal counsel at the same firm. They believe that Big Tech companies have been focused for too long on digitally serving individual consumers and instead must apply their technical know-how to national security problems for the sake of the common good. Their book is, in a sense, an attempt to articulate what engineers’ skills mean for their vocation as citizens. 

There is something admirably earnest about this vision, especially in an era defined by bitter irony. The authors’ unabashed love for our civilization is bracing, and one hopes that it will help recruit patriotic young engineers for Palantir and similar firms working on national security issues. They are also refreshingly clear about the threats we face, externally and internally, from deeply anti-civilizational forces. The book is therefore an effective call to arms for technologists. At the same time, though, it somewhat lacks a narrative about the overarching meaning of the American Republic sufficiently powerful to move the whole people, something that, as its authors recognize, is absolutely necessary for the coming struggle. 

As we prepare for these challenges, we cannot underestimate the radical change wrought by the Digital Revolution. The wonders coming out of Silicon Valley will upend nearly every aspect of our lives and completely remake our economy, both by automating significant parts of day-to-day work and possibly exposing us to new and terrifying risks from autocracies exploiting these new technologies. Karp and Zamiska argue, therefore, that “the legitimacy of the American government and democratic regimes around the world will require an increase in economic and technical output that can be achieved only through the more efficient adoption of technology and software.” Figuring out how to handle the great leap in innovation, according to our authors, is the great governance challenge of the twenty-first century.

One model for the kind of solution they proffer is the alliance between science, industry, and the government formed during the Cold War. Originally coming about during World War II (the Manhattan Project looms large in the authors’ minds), these ties became stronger across the long struggle against the Soviet Union. Scientists understood that they played an important role in defending the West against totalitarianism, and political leaders found ways to support and develop their expertise. Karp and Zamiska see the much-maligned “military-industrial complex” as a key reason for America’s victory over Soviet communism and the possible inspiration for a reconstitution of the present-day tech industry.

But the major difference between the Cold War and today’s geopolitical problems, though, is the technological platforms through which conflict is waged. Before the Berlin Wall fell and the Digital Revolution commenced, competition was all about producing more ships and planes, guns and ammunition, missiles and warheads. Now, Karp and Zamiska write that we live in a “software century.” They do not dismiss bullets and atoms altogether, but they are more concerned with the bytes behind AI targeting systems guiding drones and robots. To name one example of this possible future from earlier this year, Ukraine launched the first-ever all-drone assault on Russian positions. The future of war is not just mechanized, in the authors’ minds, but also automated.

While it is understandable why executives at a company like Palantir put so much faith in artificial intelligence, it is possible they take the case for automated warfare too far. For one, they somewhat evade the thorny ethical questions surrounding drones and battlefield AI. But more importantly, as the ongoing war in Ukraine proves, conventional weapons still dictate the outcome of conflicts. Of late, the United States has struggled mightily to ramp up production for ammunition, from the more advanced Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to comparatively basic 155mm artillery shells. Developing more advanced weaponry to meet future threats is important to be sure, but so is simply manufacturing enough materiel to defend American interests, given present concerns. Policymakers need to balance futuristic aspirations like Karp and Zamiska’s with the actual needs felt by those already fighting on the front lines. We might be living in a “software century,” but hardware still matters. The defense industry must find ways to advance any technology essential to national security.

That being said, Karp and Zamiska’s diagnosis of what went wrong with Silicon Valley specifically and their prescriptions for fixing it can be applied to revitalize American industry more broadly. They see American corporate life as fundamentally decadent, trapped within the bonds of a noxious consumerism and paralyzing political correctness. Rather than focusing on innovation, they assert that “the vast majority of an individual employee’s energy during their working lives is spent merely on survival, navigating among the internal politicians at their organizations, steering clear of threats, and forming alliances with friends, perceived and otherwise.” Workplace politics distract us all from innovating.

The problems of this decadent hierarchy are compounded by the civilizational nihilism of America’s technocratic elites. Karp and Zamiska thunder against not only the moral relativism endemic to the academy and other commanding heights of culture, but also more radical anti-civilizational impulses that undermine the concept of greatness itself. They rightly cite the deconstruction of Western civilization courses in higher education as one symptom of this terrible disease of self-hatred. How can we innovate on behalf of a civilization we are taught is fundamentally unjust? Why would technologists use their talents to defend a country their mentors and teachers tell them is on the wrong side of history? 

This critique of America’s cultural and political atmosphere goes beyond the countless broadsides against “wokeness” already launched by reactionary malcontents. Before founding Palantir, Karp pursued a career in academia and briefly studied with the German critical theorist Jürgen Habermas; he is no man of the right, and therefore his narrative does not sink into all the vapid ideological clichés so much of the right-wing media seems to embrace. Instead, The Technological Republic’s authors opt for a much more sophisticated—and insightful—critique of the state of American capitalism. According to them, in Silicon Valley, the “prevailing ethical framework” has been a sense that we can engineer solutions to all of mankind’s problems. As shiny as this promised future may seem, however, the authors warn that this techno-utopianism “has devolved into a narrow and thin utilitarian approach, one that casts individuals as mere atoms in a system to be managed and contained.” As a result, Big Tech’s leaders often dismiss the enduring moral and cultural questions at the heart of Western civilization as anachronisms or distractions from their humanitarian planning. 

In other words, America’s innovative edge is dulling first and foremost because we are losing sight of the true moral content of our civilization. Rather than embracing a sense of collective purpose or political project of the West, the Silicon Valley tech barons who dominate the economy today adopted a kind of “technological agnosticism,” concerned above all with capturing and monetizing individual consumers’ attention. This is why, they argue, most of the tech innovations in recent years have had more to do with social media and streaming services than actual developments to improve human life in meaningful ways. Silicon Valley unleashed market forces, which have atomized society, largely because we collectively cannot envision a larger end for it. Even philanthropic fads in Silicon Valley, such as “effective altruism,” fail to achieve the sense of collective purpose akin to twentieth-century anti-totalitarianism.

As an alternative to this corporate decadence, Karp and Zamiska call for the “reconstruction of a technological republic” through “a re-embrace of collective experience, of shared purpose and identity, of civic rituals that are capable of binding us together.” They believe we, as a society, need to give more serious thought to the meaning of the good life and how we can pursue it together, and then apply this teleology to the technological problems of the day. As much as the authors rightly worry about radicals stripping civilizational content from our schools’ curricula, though, they do not offer much by way of an upbuilding alternative. They seem unwilling to fully express their own firm definition of the good life or national identity.

On some level, this is because Karp and Zamiska remain trapped within the paradigm of liberal technocracy. The ultimate source of this problem is that they reject the notion that the American Republic was constituted around a definite conception of the human good. They avow, rather, that the liberalism of the Constitution does not order liberty in one particular direction or another. Western civilization, in the authors’ view, is worth defending not for the sake of any sense of transcendence it bequeaths to its inheritors, but rather because it provides a space in which engineers can best pursue solutions to the chief problems of modern life in more-or-less morally neutral ways.

This open-ended liberalism is deeply entwined with their repeated insistence that “the miracle of the West is its unrelenting faith in science.” They therefore view the proper end of politics primarily as a shield to scientific endeavors and free inquiry, or even a prop to the private firms they believe are pursuing those purposes, rather than orienting society towards certain eternal truths. At certain points in the book, they even hint at support for the troubling possibilities of transhumanism, embracing artificial intelligence almost as though it were an altogether new form of life. As much as some of their foreign policy goals may align with traditional conservative priorities, the authors’ overall conception of the aim of the social contract diverges wildly from the older view that conservatives advocated.

Like most progressives, then, Karp and Zamiska articulate a political theory that remains technical rather than spiritual. They leave open the possibility of faith but do not insist on it as a solution, which means their framework for thinking about self-government will collapse into the same kind of hollowness as the corporate decadence they would have us escape. Despite their prophesying about changes the future could bring, they cannot quite provide a compelling account of the permanent things in human nature worth fighting for.

For the Founders of the American Republic, by contrast, freedom was nothing less than the holiest of causes. In his first inaugural address as president, for instance, George Washington insisted that “the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government” depended on “the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American People.” For him, as for the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the soldiers who fought the Revolution, maintaining a free republic against tyranny was a truly civilizational mission with a deeply theological importance. To them, freedom was the highest good, not just because it is an efficient way of organizing society, or even because it opens up inquiry and innovation, but instead because a free society is the kind best suited to human nature. The Founders understood that liberty is one of the deepest longings with which human souls are endowed. The case for the West—the case for victory—cannot be made in full apart from that conviction. 

The Founders paired this robust conception of human nature and liberty with a profound appreciation of the limits of power that Karp and Zamiska seem to lack. In many ways, this republic was actually constituted around this idea of dignity in order to resist the ideology of boundless progress that would later become so popular in Silicon Valley. In his famous Newburgh Address, Washington himself declared that the “last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining” was a kind of enlightened restraint and a rejection of all forms of absolute power. In promoting this ethical critique of tyranny as the root of American citizenship, the Founders were embracing the philosophical core of the Western heritage—something later revolutionists, from France to Germany to Russia, instead rejected. 

While the American Revolution was by no means a simplistic Luddite reaction against technological development, its humane premises should leave its inheritors deeply skeptical of any and all attempts to use technology to transcend our nature. And in the global arena especially, our country’s finest hours have always come when we resist the temptation of appeasing autocratic and totalitarian forces, even when they make revolutionary appeals to progress or deploy powerful new technologies. The American Republic was not just constituted to promote prosperity or innovation, but rather, above all, to assert a certain vision of the human good itself.  

In the end, that is why it will take much more than Silicon Valley optimism to secure the future of freedom. Despite these shortcomings, though, The Technological Republic is a significant book partly because it can help readers understand the very real industrial and digital challenges posed by the modern world. But even more importantly, reflecting on our responsibilities to uphold a virtuous liberty in these tumultuous times can remind us that we are not simply consumers in a technological economy, but citizens of a great and humane republic.