The Technological Republic

A 21st century jeremiad on life’s purpose, from a man with more wealth and data than Solomon, but none of his wisdom.

If you don’t know who Alex Karp is, and the societies in which he travels, you’ll be clued in from the start by the praise given to him and his book by Jamie Dimon, General Mattis, and others. The military industrial complex and bankers love him. He’s a big hit and regular at their club, the Bilderbergers. Karp begins by decrying the shallowness and fleeting nature of what Silicon Valley pursues. These days, it takes less than a decade for technological wonders to become passe´. The pursuit of money is empty if society is collapsing around you. Karp is searching for meaning in life. But he’s “looking for love in all the wrong places, looking for love in too many faces”.

Karp is, in a way, emblematic of our times. His surveillance and data mining company, Palantir, gives him a tremendous amount of information. But it’s a disease of our times that we are so overcome with details and factoids that we can’t see the forest through the trees. That clear overview is what Palantir was designed to create, but if God isn’t the reference point, the blind are leading the blind. The dedication of his book is about the heart: “to those who seek to move the hearts of others and know their own” followed by a quote from Goethe “You will never touch the hearts of others, if it does not emerge from your own.” Yet God says thru Jeremiah: “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it?” Solomon says in Proverbs: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” You won’t find the fear of the Lord in the Technological Republic, neither in the book or the imagined society. Can you imagine how Karp’s elite friends would react to a book about the Theological Republic?


The book is required reading to get a read on the hearts of the men who seek to exercise “Hard Power”, as referenced in the subtitle of the book: “Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West”.


Alex Karp is a true believer in big government. He believes government is what made the West, western civilization, great and he laments that our government is not “innovative” enough.

“A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West. The loss of national ambition and interest in the potential of science and technology and resulting decline of government innovation across sectors, from medicine to space travel to military software, have created an innovation gap. The state has retreated from the pursuit of the kind of large-scale breakthroughs that gave rise to the atomic bomb and the internet ceding the challenge of developing the next wave of pathbreaking technologies to the private sector — a remarkable and near-total placement of faith in the market.”


Notice that the first contribution of “government innovation” he mentions is medicine. And yet, Operation Warp Speed is one of the greatest failures of western civilization that came from (to borrow his characterization) “a remarkable and near-total placement of faith in” government. He decries faith in the market. Yet the market represents informed consent, which the government and people like Karp despise. You will be told what is good for you and obey. THAT is NOT western civilization — it is antithetical to the discovery of freedom as Rose Wilder Lane describes the rise of western civilization.


I would agree with Karp that the atomic bomb is an innovation of government, which is yet another reason why “hard power” has to be restrained. Government preachers like Karp never justify the evil government does, they merely point to another, presumably more evil government, and the “gap” we have with them in some area such as nuclear bombs. Let’s be as evil as the monsters we fight, even surpass them. So Karp speaks of an “innovation gap” with innovation being “large-scale” projects. Does he not see the large-scale “innovation” of Operation Warp Speed? Decades of preparation to impose it and “innovations” made to our legal foundation, as well as medical innovation to create the bioweapon that killed far more people worldwide than the atomic bomb killed in Hiroshima or Nagasaki combined.


Karp’s worship of government is undoubtedly how he sells his totalitarian schemes to power hungry government officials. He has been very successful selling the government on the idea of the government as god. It will be harder to sell that idea to the public whom he seeks to stomp in the face with the jackboot of government - forever.


My view of government and innovation is exactly the opposite of Karp’s view. Government is not essential to innovation, it is essential to making people like Karp rich. America did not become wealthy, or see quality of life improvements, because of government “innovation”, but because of private innovation and the free market Karp despises. He actually competes in a market whether he acknowledges it or not. It is an elite market of a few people who control the vast wealth of America. Karp’s market is the Pentagon and Intelligence agencies to which he sells.


The development of the first flying plane is an interesting refutation of Karp’s idea of government being essential to innovation. Samuel Langley, a celebrated government scientist, received government resources for his attempts to create a flying machine. As the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, he secured funding from the U.S. War Department (the Pentagon of his day), including a $50,000 grant in 1898 (equivalent to about $1.8 million today due to the innovations of the Federal Reserve that devalue the dollar), to develop his Aerodrome project. This support included access to government facilities and personnel to assist in his experiments. Despite this, his manned flight attempts in 1903 failed. He was beaten by two homeschooled bicycle mechanics without a penny of government subsidy. They were not even educated by the state (perhaps that is a big reason for their success). Government’s “innovation” was to use their invention to drop atomic bombs the destroy cities and civilians.


And so it will be if Karp’s vision is realized. Government repurposing technology that could help people, into technology that will make life a living hell of surveillance and control. That is Palantir’s raison d'etre.


Part 1 - the software century

Lost Valley


He describes Silicon Valley as the “Lost Valley” (I increasingly see it as Uncanny Valley). For Karp, history begins with the post WW2 military industrial complex and its massive subsidies to be had by those who serve it. He never sees government’s MIC as a threat as Eisenhower did. His first chapter picks up in the 1940s, with no sense of the history of private innovations to serve people rather than government. His hero is FDR, not Eisenhower. It was FDR who created the “union of science and state” that Karp idolizes. Karp laments that “the modern incarnation of Silicon Valley has strayed significantly from this tradition of collaboration with the US government, focusing instead on the consumer market…for decades, the US government was viewed in Silicon Valley as an impediment to innovation and a magnet for controversy - the obstacle to progress, not is logical partner.” I guess, it depends on whether your end goal is killing and enslaving people or selling them something they think (rightly or wrongly) will make their life better. Karp pretends that tech giants like Google and Facebook were not creatures of government but eventually warmed up to government. In reality it was venture capital funding from the CIA’s own company as well as the influence of VC boards riddled with spooks that created these companies in the
first place.


In the first part of his book, he argues that “the current generation of spectacularly talented engineering minds has become unmoored from any sense of national purpose or grander and more meaningful project” - you know, like how do we threaten, enslave, and kill people, which is the business of government. He even complains that it is unclear if the technology companies building these new forms of AI will allow them to be used for military purposes. Karp’s recurring obsession with military power should be a concern for anyone who is aware of Palantir’s capabilities and purpose.


In part 2 of the book, “The Hollowing Out of the American Mind”, he argues there was a “systematic attack and attempt to dismantle any conception of American or Western identity during the 1960s and 1970s.” I would agree, but Karp ignores the role of the CIA, whom he serves, in dismantling society and family. He only sees the disdain of the nation and the military as being the problem. Attacks on family and the secular moral degeneracy are no concern to him. He continuously speaks of the “American project” but does not define it. That’s understandable since it would require talking about the Christian understanding of the fallen nature of man. Karp works hard to avoid God. His god is nothing more than the national security state. He complains that America was hollowed out because the “consumer was king”. If you want to talk about the American project, the founders of America founded it upon the idea of “no king, but Jesus”. Will things be better with the NatSec state as king? Karp
thinks so.


Karp shares some of the same (valid) criticisms that Thiel has of our consumer, digital society - that while the inventions changed our lives, they didn’t improve our lives.


In the 3rd part of the book he gets to Palantir corporate philosophy based on “lessons we can learn from the social organization of honeybee swarms and flocks of starlings” (a hive mentality?) “as well as the conformity experiments by Asch, Milgram and others in the 1950s and 1960s”. These “conformity experiments”, if you recall, were how the individual could be manipulated by crowds (Asch) and by authority figures to say and do things they knew were wrong, even evil. I’ve long argued this was the purpose of the internet (envisioned by a DARPA psychologist JCR Licklider) and social media created with venture capital from the Deep Spooks. Karp has a more cynical view that the experiments “exposed the feebleness of the vast majority of human minds when confronted with the threat of authority.” There you go — BF Skinner’s “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” taken to the next level.


Part 4 is his call to action. A call to build the Technological Republic, what the rest of us call a dystopian technocracy. Palantir is the embodiment of everything Christians must resist and evade. Don’t forget this is truly a spiritual war and a war against your mind. There is no neutral territory where you can sit this one out. Don’t get feeble knees when confronted with the “threat of authority”. Instead, get on your knees to the ultimate authority and pray for the destruction of this Tower of Babel technocracy with all its pride, hubris and contempt for God and man, made in the image of God.

I’ll never forget the scene from the movie Patton, where Patton (George C Scott) defeating Rommel in a battle, looks through his field glasses and says “Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book.” Karp, you magnificent bastard, I read your book and I read God’s book that speaks of people like you. There’s nothing new under the sun.