My first encounter with Palantir Technologies was at the 2019 Stanford Computer Forum, the computer science department’s career fair. A group of students called “Students for the Liberation of All People” (SLAP) was mounting a protest against the inclusion of Palantir at the fair, citing Palantir’s software contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the US military — “social evil, violence, racism, xenophobia, imperialism,” they said. After looking through the list of companies, I realized that the activist students had no objection to Tencent, Huawei, and China Mobile appearing at the same fair. I joked at the time that Palantir’s great crime was being “complicit in America.” 

In retrospect, I don’t think the joke would have landed with SLAP. They were deadly serious that America was the problem, and by extension, Palantir.

For Palantir CEO Alex Karp, this was but one of many encounters with activists over 20+ years building Palantir, whose first customer was the CIA, and has worked extensively with both governments and commercial enterprises. Today, Palantir is in the midst of an historic stock run, up nearly 1200% since its 2020 IPO. The company is valued by investors at nearly $300 billion. “Dr. Karp,” as many in Palantir know him (he has a PhD, which we’ll get to later) is worth north of $10 billion. And now he has written an excellent book, The Technological Republic, hereafter abbreviated as TTR. His coauthor is Nicholas Zamiska, an attorney and former Wall Street Journal reporter who has worked in Karp’s office at Palantir for a decade.

TTR is at once a blistering attack on the rot of values in Silicon Valley, paired with a firm defense of the cultural strength of Silicon Valley’s enterprises. Karp and Zamiska remind us more than once that software dominance didn’t fall off a tree in Palo Alto. It was grown in a culture that empowered individuals, not always to be their most individualistic self, but extremely effective individuals within collective enterprises. Silicon Valley lets talented people feel like empowered citizens in “tiny nations.” 

Karp and Zamiska don’t point to the shallow benefits of technology as the crowning achievement of Silicon Valley. In fact, they launch a broadside against the 2010s focus on building apps to cater to every need — a chauffeur, groceries on the doorstep, representing to them a form of technology that makes us feel like aristocrats but doesn’t have the bigger picture in mind. 

What’s that bigger picture? It’s the future of our nation, as determined by geopolitics and the relative strength of our national culture. And the key point is that despite its poor values, the internal culture of Silicon Valley and its organization of people is healthier right now than our national culture: “The technology companies that have come to dominate our lives were in many cases small nations built around a set of ideals that many young people craved: freedom to build, ownership of their success, and a commitment above all to results.”

The cultural triumph of Silicon Valley has lessons that are there for the taking, and Karp and Zamiska beseech us to take them and run so that we can rebuild our “technological republic.”

Karp and Zamiska’s core argument is about technology and the nation, as implied in the title. But the book’s first two sections are setup, the first about geopolitics, history, and the importance of software today. The second section goes deep into the identity of the West and what they call the “hollowing out” of the American mind, under siege from nihilist academics, among others (which may have something to do with protests against Palantir, and Silicon Valley’s widespread refusal to build technology for the military, which is now changing in large part thanks to Palantir). Also discussed is the Palantir experience with the legal culture of the military.

In 2016, Palantir filed a landmark lawsuit against the Army, alleging that the service refused to consider Palantir during a bidding process for a battlefield software contract (despite the entreatments of men and women in the field who had been able to test the product). It was, as Karp would tell you, an unorthodox move to bring your intended customer to court. But a federal judge agreed with Palantir, and in 2019 the Army awarded the contract to Palantir. If a company has to fight like this to help our own soldiers, who can really blame technologists for wanting to work on social media instead? 

But Palantir was founded with that mission, and its unofficial motto is “Save the Shire.” That motto is the company’s own answer to an important question Karp and Zamiska pose in the book: how can America keep its engineering elite accountable to the public? Well, by working on the right things. Or this: in 2020, Palantir moved its corporate headquarters out of Silicon Valley to Denver, Colorado (many of its engineers remain in Palo Alto, though engineers at Palantir are famously “deployed” around the world). If Silicon Valley has lost its way, that move makes sense to remain accountable to the public, in their words.

Karp’s own politics are at odds with the activist conception of Palantir as a right-wing, fascistic panopticon company. At one point in the book, touching on the weaponization of civil liberties to, in practice, defend murder in America’s poorest, most violent urban centers, Karp and Zamiska get very serious about the moral conundrum of opposition to Palantir from the left. They give New Orleans as an example, where Palantir came under intense fire for working with the struggling police department there to use software techniques they had refined in Afghanistan stopping roadside IEDs to help fight violent crime. 

Karp is rightfully indignant at this state of affairs, writing, “The country spent $25 billion to protect soldiers 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.”

At the risk of oversimplifying a complex thinker, I would call Karp a classical liberal and a left-aligned civic nationalist. It’s that “civic nationalist” part that puts him at odds with the dominant activist part of the capital-L Left today, and to many ears would make him sound right-wing. He insists quite credibly that he is not.

At multiple points in the book, Karp and Zamiska discuss modern geopolitics, in particular with regard to Germany’s role in Europe. Germany is a country that Karp knows well, having completed a PhD in social theory at Frankfurt’s Goethe University. Early in the book, they touch on low European defense spending and lambast the “neutering” of Germany. They point to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as an event crying out for a more muscular Germany in the 21st century, 20th century consensus be damned. At the same time, they attack the “highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacificism” and point to China’s rise. 

They admit that crushing German and Japanese militarism was necessary in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. But they declare that age to be over, and weak nationhood in two of the great civilizations and economies of the world has invited aggression from neighbors like Russia and China. Later in the book, they discuss the peril of national identity in Germany in particular being based on historical guilt.

In June of 2022, less than six months after Russia’s invasion, Karp visited Kyiv, the first major executive to do so. The company has played a major role on the battlefield there.

When one writes a review, he should offer at least one criticism of the work. TTR suffers in a small way from overquotation of literary figures and academics to say what Karp and Zamiska could convincingly say themselves. And, as so many writers do (myself included) they succumb to the temptation to leave the truly killer passages of the book — the place where they smack us in the face with the truth — to its finale.

As I began the final chapter, “An Aesthetic Point of View” I admit to worrying whether I’d be getting that face-smacking I craved at all. The wistful chapter title did not bode well, nor did the introduction of more authors and sources. The philosopher Leo Strauss makes his entrance in the final chapter, which struck me as odd given the earlier section covering debates about the Western canon and the subversion of Western “purpose” in detail (in his 1960 work “The City and Man,” Strauss declared that “The Crisis of the West consists in the West’s having become uncertain of its purpose.”) Also making a first appearance in the final chapter? The Effective Altruism (EA) movement, which at that point could only be mentioned quite briefly (I might have put it in an earlier section discussing modern Silicon Valley’s drift).

And then, in the final pages, the face-smacking arrived with force, and without new quotations or index entries; just Karp and Zamiska, speaking to our faces. The Technological Republic’s final pages should be read carefully, and then read over. 

One figure that does not appear in the book: Donald Trump. Not by name, nor even really by allusion. In one way this is an accomplishment, to publish a book “during Trump” that isn’t about Trump. But by the end of Trump Part Two in 2029, one expects we will need an afterward to a new edition of the book. What do Karp and Zamiska think about DOGE, or technology executives standing behind America’s populist President at his second inauguration? Do Elon Musk and his “young geniuses” at DOGE represent the type of civic calling for technologists that they say we’ve been missing? (hiding in a footnote, they suggest a “technological peace corps,” an idea that DOGE arguably improves on, in terms of its extreme empowerment of talented individuals under clear leadership)

The book was announced and written well before Trump’s victory and return to the White House. And as a treatise, its descriptions and prescriptions would hold firm under another President. Still, as a reader, I’m eager to know: how does JD Vance — the middle American turned Marine turned Yale Law graduate turned Thiel associate turned venture capitalist turned Vice President — play?

Maybe that’s left to us.

The most interesting and important section of TTR is its exploration and defense of “engineering culture.” In its pure form, it is neither individualistic nor collectivist. It fuses the two, and turns great individuals into great contributors to a collective enterprise. Software domination is downstream of cultural excellence. “The central insight of Silicon Valley was not merely to hire the best and brightest but to treat them as such,” Karp and Zamiska write.

Through fascinating scientific digressions about bees and orchestras, they explain that Palantir and other great engineering cultures have neither strict hierarchy nor flat egalitarianism. Their description reminded me of Tom Wolfe’s description of the Intel office culture with Bob Noyce in charge (funny enough, Wolfe’s daughter sits as an independent director on Palantir’s board, and is the first name to appear in the acknowledgements). The Noyce model is characteristic of the “OG” Silicon Valley:

“Noyce’s idea was that every employee should feel that he could go as far and as fast in this industry as his talent would take him. He didn’t want any employee to look at the structure of Intel and see a complex set of hurdles. It went without saying that there would be no social hierarchy at Intel, no executive suites, no pinstripe set, no reserved parking places, or other symbols of the hierarchy. But Noyce wanted to go further. He had never liked the business of the office cubicles at Fairchild. As miserable as they were, the mere possession of one symbolized superior rank. At Intel executives would not be walled off in offices. Everybody would be in one big room. There would be nothing but low partitions to separate Noyce or anyone else from the lowliest stock boys trundling in the accordion printout paper. The whole place became like a shed. When they first moved into the building, Noyce worked at an old, scratched, secondhand metal desk. As the company expanded, Noyce kept the same desk, and new stenographers, just hired, were given desks that were not only newer but bigger and better than his. Everybody noticed the old beat-up desk, since there was nothing to keep anybody from looking at every inch of Noyce’s office space.  Noyce enjoyed this subversion of the eastern corporate protocol of small metal desks for underlings and large wooden desks for overlords.”

Wolfe left a caveat: “If Noyce called a meeting, then he set the agenda. But after that, everybody was an equal.” As it turns out, there is something oddly liberating about one person (or two) being totally and unquestionably in charge — founders as monarchs, or orchestra conductors — but with total respect for everyone in the organization. One gets the sense that at Palantir, everyone has total recognition for the authority of Karp as CEO, but there is no compunction to shut up in front of him, or nod along. In fact, the corporate goal is quite the opposite: to cultivate empiricism and frankness in the company and its nearly 4,000 employees. And that’s what they want for our country, too.

Empiricism is most possible in an engineering culture, they reason, because of the concreteness of the work. It either functions or it doesn’t, and there’s nowhere to hide. They zero in on a connection between the “sensitivity to results” and the “abandonment of grand theories about how the world ought to be.” The core value is pragmatism.

Karp and Zamiska: “The challenge we now face in rebuilding a technological republic is directing that engineering instinct, an indeed ruthless pragmatism, toward the nation’s shared goals, which can only be identified if we take the risk of defining who we are or who we aspire to be.”

The American culture is ambition, powered by “ruthless pragmatism.” It’s the 747. Let’s build the biggest plane ever, in the shortest time imaginable. It’s Starship. Of course once we’ve built the biggest rocket ever, we’ll do a giant pair of claws to catch it. It’s The Empire State Building, the National Highway System, the Apollo Missions, D-Day. American culture is to dream bigger than everyone thinks possible and then say, we’ll figure it out. 

This is the Palantir culture, too, but with one addition: Don’t forget the little people, or the heroes (who are frequently the same people). And don’t forget home, the place from which we came and to which we owe it all, and the reason we embark on adventures in the first place. Save the Shire. 

The Technological Republic is excellent, and it’s on sale today at bookstores everywhere.