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The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska. Crown Currency, 2025. 295 pages.

It is a striking fact of the British experience in the First World War that, in proportional terms, the upper classes paid the heaviest price. “The sons of the ‘best’ families rushed to the colors in 1914,” one historian of the war relates, “and the death rolls of the aristocratic public schools were far in excess of the general average.” The ruling class filled out the officer corps, and officers—the first to go “over the top”—were nearly one and a half times as likely to be killed as ordinary soldiers. 

Looking back, there is something about this that beggars belief, especially for a country as unequal as pre-1914 UK. But it was noblesse oblige, no less than a remarkably self-confident culture, that built Britain into a globe-spanning empire. Nor was this situation unique. Throughout history, elites with skin in the game have been a hallmark of the most successful states. Conversely, societies whose leading citizens lose their sense of duty—one thinks of imperial Rome in her twilight centuries, or France just before the Revolution—are not long for this world.

Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, the authors of The Technological Republic, have clearly taken this lesson to heart. They warn that America’s own elites have become unmoored from any sense of broader purpose: Aimless drift afflicts the best and the brightest, who fritter away their talents on ephemera and trivialities. The problem is particularly acute in the tech sector, that crown jewel of the U.S. economy. “The grandiose rallying cry of generations of founders in Silicon Valley was simply to build,” the authors observe. “Few asked what needed to be built, or why.” The result has been a withdrawal from truly challenging or useful work, and a corresponding tendency to pursue self-enrichment and avoid making waves. Instead of curing cancer or colonizing space, we have created Uber and Instagram.

Although this abandonment of collective ambition would be bad enough under normal circumstances, for Karp and Zamiska (who are, respectively, the CEO and corporate affairs director of the defense contractor Palantir) the timing could not be worse. The wolves are at the door; geopolitical rivals stand ready to eat the West’s collective lunch. What is called for is nothing less than “a reassertion of national culture and values” that will inspire America’s most brilliant scientific and engineering minds to contribute to her defense.

Integrating Silicon Valley into the military–industrial complex is, of course, Palantir’s raison d’être, and as a business model it has proven astonishingly successful. Since the company’s founding in 2003, it has grown into a force to be reckoned with: a major publicly traded firm with thousands of employees, an impressive government order book, and a market cap hovering around $200 billion. Its mainstay is software and analytics (“products for human-driven analysis of real-world data,” as the corporate website has it), and a record of delivering for clients in the shadowy worlds of intelligence and defense has imbued the brand with a mysterious, vaguely sinister aura. 

Palantir’s performance has also had a lasting impact on the broader defense industry, turning what had been the province of a few lumbering companies (the so-called “legacy primes,” like Lockheed Martin or Boeing) into an attractive field for start-ups. According to the Financial Times, the value of defense-focused venture capital deals has increased 18-fold over the past decade, fueling the rise of a new breed of contractor epitomized by companies like Anduril, Shield AI, and Epirus.

Not content merely to inspire imitators, Palantir has increasingly sought to influence its ecosystem more directly. Its CTO, Shyam Sankar, is a fixture on Capitol Hill, and last year he caused a mild stir in the defense world with the publication of “The Defense Reformation,” a collection of 18 “theses” on acquisition reform meant to evoke Luther at Wittenberg. The company has also set up the Palantir Foundation, a “nonpartisan organization dedicated to advancing national security” by publishing a magazine, hosting conferences, and sponsoring fellowships. And Karp himself has been a constant media presence of late, carefully cultivating the image of a quirky philosopher-executive bent on disrupting the status quo.

Disruption, in the Silicon Valley sense of the word, is a central theme of The Technological Republic. The dust jacket promises an “iconoclastic” argument, though the degree to which the work echoes the conventional wisdom of both Washington and Palo Alto—not to mention the fact that it carries blurbs from such pillars of the establishment as Jamie Dimon, Walter Isaacson, James Mattis, and David Ignatius—belies this claim. 

But if this is a knock against the book, it also speaks to the success of Karp’s broader project. Things appear to be going his way. With the aforementioned raft of new contractors, tech knowhow and money are flowing into the defense sector at record levels. Under the second Trump administration, the Pentagon has moved quickly to make weapons-buying faster, more cost-effective, and more flexible. Big changes to acquisition are also likely to come out of this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, many provisions of which have been crafted with an eye toward shifting the MIC’s cultural lodestar from the Beltway to the Bay Area. We may, in fact, be in the middle of the most profound shift the defense industry has undergone since the “Last Supper” of the early ’90s, thanks in no small part to the pathfinding work of Palantir. 

Another of the book’s signature ideas, the launch of a “new Manhattan Project” for AI, is also arguably under way. January saw the announcement of the Stargate Initiative, a government-backed venture that will dramatically expand America’s AI infrastructure—and at $500 billion, the price tag of this project is more than ten times the inflation-adjusted cost of the actual Manhattan Project. 

And although Elon Musk’s tenure at DOGE has come to an end, the broader push for government efficiency can be read as an attempt to implement Karp and Zamiska’s recommendation that “the public sector… incorporate the most effective features of Silicon Valley’s culture to remake itself.” 

Defter pens might have better camouflaged the hollowness of this contrarian self-presentation. But considered as literature, The Technological Republic is a bit of a disappointment. It is marred by clunky and repetitive prose, with arguments that often veer into cliché. And although the authors pull in an impressive range of historical anecdotes, data, and case studies, they don’t quite manage to fit it all together. The impression left is one of mildly interesting eclecticism rather than brilliant theoretical synthesis.

But what of the central contention—that a partnership between Big Tech and the Pentagon can save the country?

Karp and Zamiska’s argument is premised on their view of the international system. They believe, rightly, that the world is an enduringly dangerous and anarchic place, and that civilization, though infinitely preferable to barbarism, can also be more fragile. The order necessary for it to thrive must, in the final instance, be upheld by force. And this, in the Year of Our Lord 2025, inevitably implicates the U.S. military.

So far, so good. But where the authors overshoot is in their omnivorous appetite for enemies. It’s not just Beijing we need to worry about—there are repeated references to various adversaries who maddeningly go unspecified (though last year, Karp told the New York Times he found the prospect of simultaneously fighting Russia, Iran, and China “very likely”). One gets the sense that the “moment of reckoning” the authors see us inhabiting is meant to encompass a confrontation with the entire membership of the so-called “Axis of Upheaval” everywhere, all at once. 

In the spring of 2025, however, the prospect of such a Götterdämmerung appears a little remote. The read of China is of course accurate—more on this in a moment—but the United States today is engaged in intensive, plausible efforts to end by diplomacy both the Russia-Ukraine war and the Iranian nuclear program. (It’s perhaps unfair to expect a book written before the election to have anticipated Trump’s foreign policy, but here we are.) Far from World War III, the present administration has a shot at delivering the most stable international environment in a generation.

The major threat—indeed, the only one to rise to the level of the truly existential—is China. Karp and Zamiska, quite correctly, identify Xi Jinping as a ruthless, steely-eyed realist who understands the supreme importance of hard power. And then they stop. In the book’s 200-odd pages, we get less than a single page addressing the actual nature of the challenge that the United States must dedicate itself to containing, deterring, and, if necessary, defeating. This is a shame, because we are sorely in need of outside-the-box and technologically-savvy thinking on the geopolitical rivalry that will define this century.

Nevertheless, the book’s case for techno-rearmament doesn’t rest solely on the purportedly grim state of world affairs. Silicon Valley represents one of the most remarkable assemblages of brainpower in human history; there is indeed something shabby about all this talent working to make social media apps slightly more addicting. National defense offers a grander purpose. (And it doesn’t hurt that it can also be quite lucrative, as Palantir’s trajectory shows.) Moreover, the authors point out that their industry’s origins are inextricably tied to government investment during the Second World War and the Cold War. The tech sector, therefore, “has an affirmative obligation to support the state that made its rise possible.”

On a deeper level, there is also the idea that coercion can impart legitimacy and unity to the society that employs it. In a recent speaking appearance, Karp observed that a healthy culture should take “pride in occasionally using violence.” The enterprise of defense appears uniquely rejuvenating, perhaps because it strips away the frivolity and timidity and endless compromises that characterize our present elite. War is a force that gives us meaning, to filch from Chris Hedges.

The great irony, of course, is that few things have done more to undermine faith in the American project than the pursuit of a blinkered vision of national security. The War on Terror saw the sacrifice of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars to achieve what were plainly fantastical goals, even as the United States’ only real rival was allowed—even encouraged—to gather its strength. The squandering of the post–Cold War moment in favor of nation-building and military adventurism; the mendacity and hubris that got us into Iraq and kept us in Afghanistan; the sudden and ignominious end of the affair: All these took a grievous toll on America’s influence, power, and national self-image. 

Yet the book never accounts for this fact. One searches the text in vain for any meaningful critique of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, any recognition of its blunders over the past three decades. Far from provoking reflection, the widespread skepticism of our undisciplined national security state is attributed to a kind of senseless nihilism (the “soft belief” of the book’s subtitle). Principled rejection of America as the world’s policeman appears ipso facto impossible. It is explainable only as a cop-out, a way to evade hard choices in a fallen world. 

This is not to say that tech companies should avoid working with the Pentagon—far from it. Our creaking industrial base is in dire need of the rejuvenation such firms can bring. But it does suggest they should pay attention to policy ends as well as means. Any partnership should leverage Silicon Valley’s outsider thinking, not just to build better weapons, but to drive better strategy. In fact, the most compelling portions of The Technological Republic are those devoted to Palantir’s management and organizational culture. Karp and his lieutenants draw inspiration from sources as diverse as the behavior of bees (who, they inform us, succeed by “distributing autonomy to as great a degree as possible to the fringes”) and a 1979 guide to improvisational comedy. This approach—unorthodox for arms makers, normal(ish) for tech companies—has clearly delivered, and the U.S. government could stand to learn a thing or two from it. 

Just as importantly, the U.S. government will need to scrutinize the motives and operations of tech firms seeking lucrative defense contracts, especially given the documented patterns of monopolistic behavior, censorship and political bias, and—in the worst cases—active cooperation with the PRC that characterize some of Silicon Valley’s biggest players.

Karp obtained his doctorate from Goethe University in Frankfurt, and has been deeply influenced by the German philosophical tradition (indeed, he has stated elsewhere that The Technological Republic is “quite Germanic under the hood”). So it is a safe bet that he has read Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology,” in which the greatest philosopher of the 20th century observes that technology is not a neutral instrument that can be suited to any task. “It is technology itself that makes the demand on us to think in another way,” he cautions, and if we are not careful, it will subsume and choke out other modes of being. The universe would then be turned into a vast machine, with nature and even man himself reduced to nothing more than a pool of regimented inputs (what Heidegger refers to as a “standing reserve”).

It is in this light that the book’s title must be considered. What is a “technological republic”? Curiously, the authors give this question little attention. For them, the phrase seems to signify only that America’s “place in the world has been made possible and advanced by its capacity for innovation,” and that the tech sector must accept a larger role in civic life (elsewhere, they submit it also reflects the dependence of American legitimacy on “technical outperformance”). But this is not the whole story. To say that we are a technological republic is to say that the imperatives so penetratingly identified by Heidegger as inherent to technology—the homogenization and flattening-out of experience, the utter rejection of limits, the transformation of subjects into objects—are also inherent to America. 

Nowhere is this dynamic more observable than in the book’s discussion of AI. As the authors frame it: 

The choice we face is whether to rein in or even halt the development of the most advanced forms of artificial intelligence, which may threaten or someday supersede humanity, or to allow more unfettered experimentation with a technology that has the potential to shape the international politics of this century in the way nuclear arms shaped the last one.

It will come as no surprise which option they recommend. If we are skeptical of anything, they go on to claim, it should be those “elites of Silicon Valley, who for years recoiled at the suggestion that software was anything but our salvation…[and] now tell us we must pause vital research that has the potential to revolutionize everything from military operations to medicine.” And in any case, it is not really a choice at all, because if we don’t, the Chinese will. In other words, the mere fact that the thing can be done means it must be done. Technology itself forces our hand.

There are other implications as well. The ethos of technology is globalist. It cannot abide constraint, and it cannot stand still. A technological republic must therefore project itself ceaselessly into the world—hence the imperative for foreign policy interventionism.

Aspects of what might be called “technologism” have been with us since the Founding, as the authors rightly note. And not even Heidegger believed we should (or could) somehow put the genie of modern technology back in the bottle. But this ethos has always coexisted with, and been held in check by, another vision of America. From Andrew Jackson to Christopher Lasch, a diverse array of doers and thinkers have striven to define the country differently—not as a universalizing engine, driven by the logic of science hitched to the incentives of the cash nexus, but as a particular and unique society, rooted in place, culture, and the recognition of limits. 

The most committed agents of technologism have been elites; too often, their victims have been everybody else. This is one way to explain the current political moment, since the developments that have fueled Trump’s electoral successes—deindustrialization, mass immigration, foreign policy adventurism—can be chalked up to the technologist ethos run amok. The promise of his movement has been to control and even reverse it. (Of course, the case should not be overstated; Trumpism contains multitudes, and another of its strands is the techno-utopianism represented by, for example, Elon Musk.)

In fairness, Karp and Zamiska do recognize some of this. “What we need is more cultural specificity,” they write, together with “a re-embrace of collective experience, of shared purpose and identity, of civic rituals that are capable of binding us together.” But they don’t seem to have fully grappled with the contradictions implicit in their aims. How, for example, is the unrestricted development of AI, which has the potential to utterly remake our economy and even our self-understanding as a species, compatible with preserving the country’s existing “cultural specificity”?  

Whatever unresolved tensions exist in the text, a clarion call to Silicon Valley is long overdue, and Karp and Zamiska deserve credit for issuing one. The future of the United States indeed depends on its most talented citizens working for something greater than themselves. But it is not enough merely to have a national project. What that project is, and how it is accomplished, count for just as much.

Consider again the case of the First World War. British elites threw themselves into the war, committing body and soul to the greatest collective effort in their history up to that point. But no amount of sacrifice could make up for the sheer folly of the enterprise. Britain involved herself in an epochal and entirely avoidable catastrophe, one that—in addition to senselessly killing off the leading lights of an entire generation—irreversibly weakened the foundations of her power. Channeled wrongly, an excess of national purpose can be just as dangerous as its absence.