Know your Enemy: Alex Karp and the Technological Republic
One of the most widely known lines of Orwell’s 1984 is surely the slogan above the Ministry of Truth: “War is Peace. Slavery is Freedom. Ignorance is Strength.” A more recent and somewhat surreal development is that a contemporary version of the novel would surely include that the Ministry hands out copies of ‘1984’ as educational material.
It is unclear to me why it is that this book specifically attracts as many bad faith interpretations as it does, but it can hardly have escaped anyone’s attention that a mention of it is at this point almost a warning to brace yourself for the worst take you will hear that day.
Palantir’s CEO Alexander Karp – though not quite as illiterate as most people that bring up the issue – isn’t an exception from this rule when he invokes 1984 in the course of his new bestselling book “The technological republic”.
In Chapter Six he muses:
“In one particularly haunting scene from George Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith, his protagonist, finds himself wandering through a wooded area, seemingly far from the reach of the state’s dystopian minders. Even then, secluded and almost assuredly free from observation, Smith imagines that a microphone might be concealed in the trees, through which “some small, beetle-like man” would be “listening intently.” The scene is only nearly fiction. In East Germany, the state security service, known as the Stasi, was rumored to have placed microphones in the trees over ping-pong tables in Berlin’s parks, to catch snippets of conversations.
The dystopian future that Orwell and others have imagined may be near, but not because of the surveillance state or contraptions built by Silicon Valley giants that rob us of our privacy or most intimate moments alone. It is we, not our technical creations, who are to blame for failing to encourage and enable the radical act of belief in something above and beyond, and external to, the self. The speed and enthusiasm with which the culture skewers anyone for their perceived transgressions and errors—with which we descend on one another for deviations from the norm—only further diminishes our capacity to move toward truth.”
It's hardly surprising that a techie that made his name by supplying and developing extensive surveillance software doesn’t have a particular problem with the surveillance state in general or surveillance contraptions in particular, but it requires a certain kind of chutzpah and an even more impressive amount of intellectual dishonesty to explicitly cite this episode to make this point. To see Winston’s plight and to figure that it is really the Cancel Culture around him, rather than the Big Brother and his security apparatus is a truly remarkable take away and if we lived in even slightly saner times one might gloss over this as transparently motivated propaganda, but alas, we do not.
Karp’s book, which jumped pretty much instantly to the pole position of the New York Times’ bestseller list has in a way already missed its proper historical moment. At its core it is a plea to “Make America Great Again”, even though the self-proclaimed “Socialist” and Democratic Party donor Karp probably would at least timidly object to being brought that close to Trumpian policies. Yet, its main objectives seem to be knocking on open doors at this point: the unity between Washington and the Silicon Valley, a more politically involved mentality for the techno-business elites as well as a war against the calcifying bureaucratic red tape that poisons the state all seem on Trump’s agenda as much as the will to get involved in historical projects.
Still, the book seems to strike a nerve even now: adequately described in the New Yorker as “equal parts company lore, jeremiad, and homily” https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-palantir-guide-to-saving-americas-soul its merit is hardly its intellectual rigour or its novelty but rather to provide a polished version of Trumpism for those that are put off by its crudeness. It is a book that is meant to appeal to people that conceive of themselves as “Elite” and to those that fancy themselves “Deep thinkers” as long as they aren’t burdened with actual thought.
It is an amusing and light read with just enough coherence to appear as if it was advancing an argument. The argument in question, that would better be understood as a proposal, could be paraphrased as follows:
“Have you noticed, dear Reader, that the world would be a far better place if it was a lot more aligned with our own values? For I have and alas, is it not a shame that the state is run by feeble-minded sheep that dare not dream about how they could reshape it but rather constrain themselves? And has this constraint not even shackled our brightest and most daring heroes, the CEOs, that construct cheap entertainment rather than to enjoy the power they could grab, if they only found the courage to truly break things: that have lost an eye for the beauty of the atomic bomb and the age of Peace it ushered? Let us get rid of this constraint together and see what new frontiers will await us once we have left our narrow-mindedness behind.”
Karp frames this proposal as an essentially patriotic project: an antidote against “the Hollowing Out of the American Mind”. His mission statement is to regain a sense of identity: to tackle the “vital yet messy questions of what constitutes a good life, which collective endeavors society should pursue, and what a shared and national identity can make possible”.
Taken at face value, it’s hard to object to this endeavour – is there not really a sense of a lost purpose? And is this not precisely the vacuum that the Authoritarians might eventually fill if we don’t provide the people with truly inspiring answers? Everything happens with the best intentions:
“Our broader hope is that this book prompts a discussion Silicon Valley can and should play in the advancement and reinvention of a national project, both in the United States and abroad – of what, beyond a firm and uncontroversial commitment to liberalism and its values, including the advancement of individual rights and fairness, constitutes our shared vision of the community to which we belong.”
These aspirations are far more palatable to Europeans than any of the visions Trumpism and its adjacents have to offer. As the Zone is being flooded with shit, Europeans furrow their brows: on this side of the Atlantic, we do not appreciate the kopro-gluttony, we like our shit served with the adequate amount of decorum in a historical setting. If Karp has anything to offer at all, then it’s catering to these sensibilities, as his project will ultimately offer you the same shit nonetheless.
While it is obvious that I am very much an enemy of Karp’s project in any case, I am still convinced that even political adversaries should be given the credit of the doubt and their arguments judged according to their merits rather than simply being misconstrued in order to fit a convenient narrative. When I started out reading Karp’s book my intent was therefore to see how he envisioned his “Technological republic” and to provide an account of the problems and drawbacks an implementation of it would entail. This would however prove to be impossible, as the book ultimately fails to provide a coherent account of what precisely it is its author envisions. There is a powerful and fairly easily interpretable subtext that I will get to in a moment: first, however, I want to demonstrate why it isn’t a choice but rather a necessity to comment on the subtext rather than the text proper.
Why would I defend what I advocated ten pages ago?
Chapter Five, “The Abandonment of Belief” starts for instance with a little anecdote about Frank Collin, a US Nazi leader that the ACLU under Jewish emigree Aryeh Neier decided to defend. Neier’s argument obviously was that even though he clearly despised Collin’s views, his free speech had to be defended. Karp then goes on to quote a similar situation in 1963, when George Wallace held a passionate speech defending segregation, just after the Ku Klux Klan had bombed a Baptist Church, killing four girls and injuring two dozen. One of the persons defending Wallace was Pauli Murray, a civil rights activist whose father had been killed in the Crownsville State Hospital for the Negro Insane in Maryland. Murray insisted that even though she was personally acquainted with the evils of segregation, “ a possibility of violence” was “not sufficient reason in law to prevent an individual from exercising his constitutional right.”
Karp, being the tolerant and cosmopolitan democrat that he is, naturally doesn’t defend the views of the Nazi or the segregationist. Rather, he applauds the minoritarian acts of “intellectual courage” that “risked their reputations, as well as the disapproval of their peers and the public, to stand up for a sort of hard belief, one that was not vulnerable to being abandoned and rationalized away.”
It is decidedly not their commitment to free speech as such that he applauds: it is their “hard belief” – a mental disposition that is opposed to the “axiomatic disbelief” of technological leaders. The loss of a “belief in something greater”, to him, appears to be one of the great evils that has befallen the national project and condemned it to a rather timid agnosticism that is unable to conceive of anything of value. This closing of the mind has been, Karp believes, among other things the result of a “system of disclosure and scrutiny to which we subject our leaders” – as they are forced to admit to all sorts of private convictions in order to remain credible in the public eye. Would it not be better to leave some privacy for the leaders, in order to let them live their authentic believes? To give them the option to freely speak their hearts? Does this spectacle not attract a certain type of person? “The candidates who remain willing to subject themselves to the glare of public service are, of course, often interested more in the power of the platform with its celebrity and potential to be monetized in other ways, than the actual work of government.”
The argument sounds solid enough: however, only a few pages later he addresses the campus protests in 2024 and offers the following meditation:
“Amid the campus protests across the United States in 2024 following Israel’s invasion and bombardment of Gaza, a growing number of student protesters began concealing their faces with scarves and masks. Their rationale was that exposure of their identities would jeopardize their futures, from depriving them of job opportunities to facing criticism on social media. A student protester at Northwestern, in Evanston, Illinois, told a reporter in May 2024 that the potential costs were too great to risk being identified. ‘If I give my name, I lose my future,’ he said. But is a belief that has no cost really a belief? The protective veil of anonymity may instead be robbing this generation of an opportunity to develop an instinct for real ownership over an idea, of the rewards of victory in the public square as well as the costs of defeat.”
Something here seems off: are we now calling for a greater scrutiny of belief or for less? Is the privacy that our leaders should have maybe something that “is robbing them of an opportunity to develop an instinct for real ownership over an idea”?
Karp doesn’t explicitly say it, but the difference is clear: the two positions coexist peacefully in his mind as they are addressing fundamentally different issues. One issue is that those in power are not able to speak their minds as freely as he would like them to, while those without power are able to express themselves too insolently. The world he envisions entails less consequences for those in power, as they are finally able to exercise their freedoms without remorse or consequence.
In praise of corruption
Paradigmatic in this regard is his praise of Hyman G. Rickover, who served as rear admiral in the US Navy in 1955 and whose biography is cited at length during Chapter 16, “Piety and its Price”. Rickover, who “could be condescending and abusive” and who indeed abused several of his employees throughout the course of his career had devised a plan to construct a nuclear submarine. The New York Times’ obituary concluded that it was “his ‘rude genius’ that ‘proved to be one of the Navy’s greatest assets at the dawn of the Atomic Age.”
Even though Karp is deeply impressed with all things nuclear, this isn’t the reason why he brings up Rickover. The actual reason to bring up Rickover is the fact that he accepted and indeed requested a number of gifts and favors by the General Dynamics Corporation: the Country’s leading shipbuilder at the time. Rickover, who – according to his own testimony – could have made a fortune in the private sector, didn’t see much of a problem in this.
Karp seconds this opinion: “We have, as a culture, decided to shift our focus to the enforcement of the administrative rules and regulations that many tell themselves are our best and perhaps only defense against a slow decline into corruption.” The “Rickovers of society”, he laments, “have been for the most part been cast out, discarded as relics of an era when those in power justified, both to themselves and to others, their own self-dealing and mercenary tactics by their ability to achieve results”.
It is this efficacy that Karp wants to regain – that those in power are indeed at least not openly welcome to justify their self-dealings like this is a thorn in his side. Rickovers “fall from grace” and his “being cast aside” consisted by the way in a “warning letter” and a boasting obituary in the New York Times – truly a lamentable fate for such an honorable character.
His vision of unchecked power that neither has to bend to the whims of public scrutiny nor to “administrative rules and regulations” is really the driving argument underlying the entire book. This is also why the book has so very little to offer regarding the envisioned republic’s actual design or its rules and why Karp’s arguments seem to be so contradictory. While a superficial reading might assume he is arguing in favor of free speech or free thought or even zealous belief, a closer look reveals that none of these things are ultimately what he aims for.
We have already established that he did not in fact cite the Nazis and segregationists as examples of free speech being defended: in the context of the chapter they are examples of “convictions being fought for”. However, once these convictions don’t line up with Karp’s agenda he is very willing to dismiss them as vain and moot. The very same ACLU that defended Frank Collin fought several years later against Karp’s own firm Palantir in New Orleans as they planned to implement military surveillance software into the police apparatus.
Rather than applauding this decision he seems appalled by it: “The moral outrage and indignation were directed against the application of a novel technology instead of the failure of the city’s government to guard its residents. The country spent $25 Billion go protect soldies in Afghanistan from the threat of roadside bombs, but when it came to preventing the loss of American lives in our nation’s cities, at the hands of the depraved, the mentally ill, and often extraordinarily well-resourced and ruthless violent gangs, the collective reaction is more often one of apathy and resignation.”
This pattern repeats itself over and over again:
In the context of Rickover’s corruption he claims that there is a need to “set aside aesthetic distaste” to then dedicate an entire chapter (18, “An aesthetic point of View”) to lament the abandonment of an aesthetic point of view as it can be most notably found in (naturally) Silicon Valley leaders.
In the context of the closing of the American mind he laments the impossibility to utter an authentic belief to later demand that “We must, as a culture, make the public square safe again for substantive notions of the good or virtuous life, which by definition, exclude some ideas in order to put forward others”. But Mr. Karp – this is precisely what we are doing, one feels compelled to say: it’s just that the beliefs that we wanted to exclude until recently happened to include Nazis and segregationists.
This list could be continued – and even though not every argument that Karp presents is haunted by its opposite one is tempted to think that they might as well be.
Whether or not his claims about the state of the American mind or the institutions of the West are true or not is entirely besides the point – is it really the case that it is foundational to the Humanities that the identity of the speaker is more important than what is being said? Has nobody in the humanities ever discussed the death of the Author? Is it really true that any claim that cultures wouldn’t be equal has been an academic suicide – have not until very recently entire agencies like USAID been operating with exactly this premise? Etc. – when the actual point is to peddle a conviction: that conviction being that things would be better if CEOs were left to run affairs in any way they see fit.
Different asshole, same shit
Where Yarvin’s psychotic rambling of technomonarchy aims to appeal to the “based” edgelords that get off on visions of violence, Karp appeals to the enlightened reasoning of the managerial caste and their adjacent strata. The lines of flight of their projects converge, it is the delivery that differs. While Yarvin goes straight to fantasizing about a sovereign CEO that isn’t held back by generals or institutional hurdles when he turns Eurasia into a nuclear wasteland which is – according to Yarvin – a pretty “cool” thought, Karp makes the effort to first explain that a look at nature reveals to us that problem-solving might very well be done in a collaborative manner and more efficiently without central control.
He cites the problem-solving capacities of bee swarms as paradigmatic for the culture he is allegedly missing:
“As one group of researchers has noted, writing on the implications of the collective decision making of honeybees and other animals for human organizations, including nurses and physicians in the health-care field, the social structure of bees demonstrates ‘coordinated behaviour’ that emerges without central control.’ The startup, in its ideal form, should become a honeybee swarm.”
After thus having established the benefits of ‘coordinated behaviour (…) without central control’ he goes on to explain throughout the course of the following chapter that “the principal limitation of contemporary corporate cultures is that the hierarchies and social organization of companies are far too rigid to accommodate new and shifting challenges.”
Instead of however reactivating his vision of the human bee swarm, he then proceeds to invoke Peter Drucker’s analogy between a symphony orchestra and a corporate structure. Were symphony orchestras structured like companies, they would rely on several vice president conductors and division VP conductors. However, in reality, “There is only the conductor-CEO – and every one of the musicians plays directly to that person without an intermediary. And each is a high-grade specialist, indeed an artist.”
Let’s neither dwell on the fact that this is yet another example of Karp revoking his own point in order to advance his agenda nor on the insight that Drucker is obviously either willfully or ignorantly misrepresenting the severe differences between a corporate structure and an orchestra. It’s way more instructive and enlightening to focus on the material implications of his narrative: much like Yarvin and indeed Musk his agenda obviously consists in dismantling the safeguards, guardrails and rulebooks that keep power in check. Which justifications are at the end of the day used to achieve this is for the most part arbitrary. Maybe Karp believes in the wisdom of swarms, maybe he doesn’t, maybe he really thinks engineers are artists, maybe he doesn’t, neither of these positions changes much if the result in any case is to erect corporate structures within the state that consist in reporting to a superior conductor-CEO (or CEO-sovereign) that then proceeds to conduct business as he sees fit – even if this very much entails unaesthetic utilitarian decisions and a solid amount of corruption.
It isn’t as much his insistence on the glory of the atomic bomb or his musings about killer drone swarms that should give room for pause and worry: it is how seamlessly this vision fits into an ideological effort of the proprietor class to weaken the institutional and ideological boundaries that keep it in check. We can witness right now what the dismantling of “inefficient” bureaucracy means in practice, especially if it is left to these people and their instincts.
Karp’s pamphlet isn’t intellectually daring or remarkable: it is however a noteworthy symptom of an increasing desire to remodel the state and to enable a new gilded age. A contemporary antifascism will have to account for these post-modern robber-barrons: they are at least as despicable and dangerous as all the nationalist deplorables in the mob that they will ultimately ally with for their powergrabs.