The provocative assertion of The Technological Republic by Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska is that the money and time the software engineers of Silicon Valley expend on “social media platforms and food delivery apps” would be better directed at more worthwhile challenges. For the authors these would involve things like: addressing violent crime, education reform, medical research and national defence. It is no coincidence I’m sure that at least three of these is where Palantir Technologies Inc., the company co-founded by Karp, makes much of its money.

Karp and Zamiska believe that the founders and CEOs of the current crop of hugely successful, and fabulously rich, tech companies see these challenges as being “too intractable, too thorny, and too politically fraught” to address in any real way. Hence their focus is on consumer friendly apps rather than addressing some of the world’s truly wicked problems. The book is therefore a rallying cry and a wake-up call for the tech entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley to address these thorny problems if Western democracy, as we know it, is to survive and retain its technological hegemony.

It’s worth noting at this point that Palantir is a software company that specialises in advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence. It was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale as well as Alex Karp. Palantir’s customers include the United States Department of Defence the CIA, the DHS, the NSA, the FBI and the NHS here in the UK. It is obviously in Palantir’s best interest to ensure that governments continue to spend money on the kind of products they make. In April 2023, the company launched Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) which integrates large language models into privately operated networks. The company demonstrated its use in war, where a military operator could deploy operations and receive responses via an AI.

As Palantir moves into AI it is obvious they are going to need engineers who not only have the technical knowledge to build such systems but also don’t mind working on products used in the defence industry. As the pair state early on in the book, if such engineering talent is not forthcoming then “medical breakthroughs, education reform, and military advances would have to wait” because the required technical talent is being directed at building “video-sharing apps and social media platforms, advertising algorithms and online shopping websites“.

Whilst I do agree that an enormous amount of talent does feel as if it is being misdirected in efforts to wring every last dollar out of improving algorithms for selling “stuff” to consumers where I feel the author’s treatise becomes hopelessly sidetracked is on the reasons for this. Some of the arguments the authors put forward as to why we have arrived at this sorry state of affairs include:

• The abandonment of belief or conviction in “broader political projects” such as the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb or the Apollo space programme to put a man on the moon.
• The failure of earlier government funded projects which created much of the technology we use and take for granted today (e.g. the internet, personal computing) to capitalise on this technology and direct its use to more worthwhile efforts. Quoting the authors again: “When emerging technologies that give rise to wealth do not advance the broader public interest, trouble often follows. Put differently, the decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public“.
• Failure of universities to teach properly the ‘values’ of Western Civilisation and to properly articulate the “collective sense of identity that was capable of serving as a foundation for a broader sense of cohesion and shared purpose“.
• Even Steve Jobs gets a reprimand for building technology (the Mac personal computer and iPhone) that was “intimate and personal” and that would “liberate the individual from reliance on a corporate or governmental superstructure“. Interestingly Elon Musk does earn some brownie points for founding Tesla and SpaceX that have “stepped forward to fill glaring innovation gaps where national governments have stepped back“. No mention is made that SpaceX has received nearly $20.7 billion in government contracts, research grants, and other forms of public assistance, with about $14.6 billion of that coming from contracts with NASA.
• At one point in the book the authors relate a scene from George Orwell’s 1984 where Winston Smith is wandering through a wooded area and imagines that even here, Big Brother may be listening to every word through microphones concealed in trees. They use this to put forward the argument that we may be near such levels of surveillance ourselves but it is not the “contraptions built by Silicon Valley” to blame for this rather it’s “we” who are to blame for “failing to encourage and enable the radical act of belief in something beyond, and external to, the self“. An interesting observation from the co-founder of the company that develops some of the “contraptions’ that enable surveillance capitalism.

I could go on , but you get the general idea.

The first two parts of the book set about explaining why and how, in the author’s view, we have lost our way in tackling the big challenges of our age – preferring instead to do things like reimagining online shopping or building photo-sharing and food delivery apps.

Karp and Zamiska believe that the generation of engineers coming out of the prestigious universities of the West and East coasts of America in the late 1990s and early 2000s were not just able to benefit from the relatively new technology of the internet and world-wide web but were also able to take advantage of the seemingly unlimited funds being offered by the venture capitalists who had made their fortunes from “Web 1.0”. This happened to coincide with an increased lack of trust in national governments as well as frustration in delays in adopting more progressive reforms and their “grand experiments and military misadventures on a world stage“. It was easier for founders looking for something to “disrupt” to focus on solving their own problems such as how to hail a taxi or get a book delivered more quickly. They were not “building software systems for defence and intelligence agencies, and they were certainly not building bombs“.

Part III of the book concentrates on what the authors refer to as “The Engineering Mindset”. The proposition here is that the success of Silicon Valley is in how it has not just hired the best and the brightest engineers but has given them the “freedom and space to create“. Though in the authors view they are not creating the right things.

To illustrate this Karp and Zamiska reference a number of biological and psychological studies and experiments from the 1950s and 1960s. These experiments were done in what the authors refer to as the “golden age of psychology“, that is before such experiments were monitored for their sometimes cavalier approach to ethics. The results of these studies showed, alarmingly, how, often the majority of, people are prone to group think and a hive mindset. They tend to follow what others do or do what they are told for fear of standing out or looking foolish. The assertion is then made that this “instinct towards obedience” can be “lethal” when trying to create a truly disruptive or entrepreneurial organisation. Presumably Palantir go out of their way to hire disobedient disruptors when recruiting for their organisation.

One of the experiments cited is the now infamous, and much quoted one in books like this – the so called “obedience experiment” devised by the psychology professor Stanley Milgram. This is the one where a group of people were tested as to their willingness to inflict harm on innocent strangers by supposedly giving them electric shocks if they were not seen to memorise words accurately. The person who was meant to be doing the memorising was an actor who would yell and shout as the voltage was supposedly increased and implore their “teachers” to stop. The startling outcome of this experiment was that two-thirds of the people giving the electric shocks were ‘happy’ to carry on doing so even though they knew that may harm the learner. The findings from this experiment have been used to explain why, amongst other things, concentration camp guards during the Second World War were willing to carry out their atrocious acts under the instructions of their commanding officers.

Karp and Zamiska use this experiment to justify how such an instinct toward obedience can be anathema to creativity. In their view it is only those people who resist any tendency to conformity and group think who are likely to be the outliers who come up with truly novel ideas and approaches. For the authors the most effective software companies are more akin to artist colonies “filled with temperamental and talented souls“.

Having taken this detour around biology and psychology to show how conformance tends to be the trait that the majority have, the authors return to their main point that even if you can identify and hire the creative nonconformists the challenge is in how to direct that creativity “toward the nations shared goals“. These, they assert, can only be identified if “we take the risk of defining who we are or aspire to be“.

So what should “we be” and what should we “aspire to”? This is what the authors attempt to address in the final part of the book and is where they start to give away some of their own political, religious and business beliefs.

They reference Lee Kuan Yew (a second time) at this point. Lee was the first prime minister of Singapore and who was charged with convincing a sceptical public that the newly formed island nation (having split from Malaysia own 1965) could be a viable entity. Lee’s approach was to manufacture a national identity amongst its citizens by involving his government in several aspects of its citizens private lives. These included requiring that all Chinese students learn Mandarin (as well as English) at school instead of the multiple different dialects they learnt at home. The authors attribute this and other attempts at forging a national identity as being responsible for Singapore’s exponential growth from a GDP of $428 in 1960 to $84,734 in 2023. Rather confusingly, in terms of adhering to the authors other argument around the dangers of conformity, Singapore is renowned for its conformist citizens and its somewhat draconian legal system. So much so that the author William Gibson characterised Singapore as being Disneyland with the death penalty.

Karp and Zamiska then go on to state their belief that it is a failure of the “contemporary left” in the West that “deprives itself of the opportunity to talk about national identity” and that in both America and Europe the left has “neutered itself” and prevented its “advocates from having a forceful and forthright conversation about national identity“. At this point in the book the authors call on no other than J.R.R. Tolkien, he of The Lord of the Rings fame. For those not familiar with Tolkien’s three-volume tome it is the epic story of good versus evil where a group of plucky little Hobbits overcome the evil Sauron’s threats to bring death and destruction to Middle Earth. The reason this book is mentioned is because the authors see it as an example of how good storytelling around a shared narrative, even if its mythological (or religious) can show how people can come together. As Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, says in an essay on Tolkien’s books, “Tolkien’s dogged concern about the terrible dangers of our desire for final solutions and unchallengeable security is even more necessary“. It’s worth noting at this point that Palantir was named after the “seeing stone” in Tolkien’s legendarium.

This then would seem to be the authors ultimate solution to the building of a technological republic. It’s no good relying on the fact that the software engineers of Silicon Valley will suddenly see the light and begin directing their talents at solving the world’s wicked problems and, more to the point today, the West’s security problems. Instead we need to build (or rebuild) a new order of “collective experience, of shared purpose and identity [and] of civic rituals that are capable of binding us together“.

The Technological Republic runs to just under 300 pages (or 218 if you take out the references and index). Unfortunately, like many books of this type, I cannot help but feel the whole argument could have been made more concisely and more persuasively if it was written as an opinion piece in The Atlantic or New Yorker magazine rather than as a long form book. The main point, that we in the West are directing our (software) technologies at building the wrong things is made over and over again with, to be frank, some fairly bizarre and academic references and too may non sequiturs. For example maybe those who did not conform to what was expected of them in the obedience experiment were not more creative but had a more pronounced ethical or moral compass. Talk of ethics is distinctly missing from this book.

I also believe there is a hidden agenda at play here to. In the UK at least Palantir is receiving some bad press, especially in its dealings with the NHS. Last year the British Medical Journal called on (the recently disbanded) NHS England to cancel its contract with Palantir citing concerns about the cost of its contract with the company and whether it offers value for money, as well as questions about public trust in Palantir, the procurement process as well as the companies public support of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) with their assault in Gaza.

Certain kinds of evil can only be fought with force. Palantir stands with Israel.

— Palantir (@PalantirTech) October 11, 2023

More widely there is a concern how smart city solutions currently rely on centralised, proprietary architectures that concentrate data and control in the hands of a few powerful tech companies like Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, and Palantir. Whereas once we may have thought it inconceivable that the data managed by an American corporation could be misused by a Western government what we are seeing happening now in America itself raises that very real fear.

Of even more concern is the apparent cosying up of Keir Starmer’s government with Palantir. According to Andrew Marr in this New Statesman article, following his meeting with Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the end of February, Starmer’s next visit was with Alex Karp at Palantir Technologies HQ in Washington. Whilst there he saw “military kit” and confirmed that Britain wouldn’t over-regulate AI so it could pursue new economic opportunities “with advanced technology at its core“. Unfortunately, it would appear much of the real economic advantage (and data) may be flowing to Trump’s America rather than staying in the UK!

To be clear, I do agree with the authors proposition, that much engineering talent is being wasted on the development of social media apps and the ever more ingenious ways that platform providers are finding to part us from our hard earned money. Where I diverge from the authors is in their rational for why this is the case. I suspect that it’s more to do with the fabulous salaries and ‘cool’ working environments that these companies offer rather than anything more sinister? As someone who has worked for both a Silicon Valley startup and on many government sites here in the UK I know where I would prefer to work given the choice (and setting aside ethical concerns).

Of course, working for Palantir you probably get to have your cake and eat it. I’m sure Palantir offers some nice working conditions for the quarter of its global workforce who operate from the UK whilst working on those profitable NHS contracts (£330m for a seven years according to Marr).

From a UK perspective the biggest issue of all is why we cannot build companies like Palantir that can be the data processing companies of choice by not just the NHS but for other government departments as well? I know at least part of the answer to this. We have a well-publicised skills gap in the UK where there are not enough good software engineers to staff such companies as well as a lack of investment capital to fund them. This has to be the real challenge for our government if we are to ever ween ourselves away from companies like Palantir and develop some home-grown talent who consider it worthwhile to work on ‘software for good’ projects rather than developing the next photo-sharing app (or developing the next great piece of surveillance software).