Tech giant Palantir helps the US government monitor its citizens. Its CEO wants Silicon Valley to find its moral compass
- Written by: Noel Castree, Professor of Society & Environment, University of Technology Sydney
Critics of those who misuse power tend to be outsiders. So, it’s striking that Alexander Karp, co-founder and CEO of data analytics giant Palantir Technologies, has written a book, with Palantir’s head of corporate affairs Nicholas Zamiska, calling on Silicon Valley to find its moral compass.
Together, they upbraid fellow big tech companies for “building [things] simply because they can, untethered from a more fundamental purpose”. They argue far too much creative brilliance in the private sector is wasted on producing endless consumer products, such as dating apps and online sales platforms, and on reducing the “inconveniences of daily life for those with disposable income”.
Instead, they believe “the software industry should rebuild its relationship with government and redirect its effort and attention to constructing the technology and artificial intelligence capabilities that will address the most pressing challenges that we collectively face”.
Of course, Palantir, which is working closely with the Trump administration on projects like creating a “super-database” of combined data from all federal agencies, and building a platform for ICE “to track migrant movements in real time”, is controversial for exactly this kind of work.
Review: The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West – Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska (Bodley Head)
‘The finding of hidden things’
Karp has described Palantir’s work as “the finding of hidden things”. The New York Times described its work as sifting “through mountains of data to perceive patterns, including patterns of suspicious or aberrant behavior”.
Palantir has worked closely with United States armed forces and intelligence agencies across Democratic and Republican governments for 14 years. It has been criticised for enabling heightened government surveillance and loss of privacy among US citizens.
Karp describes himself as progressive – and “a Jewish, racially ambiguous dyslexic”. Unusually for Silicon Valley, he has a PhD in neoclassical social theory from the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. His inspirations include Goethe’s Faust and J.R.R. Tolkien (the latter much loved in the tech world). He is willing to ask big questions about what constitutes “the good life”.
He founded Palantir with (among others) controversial libertarian figure Peter Thiel, who funded Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 and JD Vance’s Senate campaign in 2022. (Thiel is reportedly financing Republicans again in 2025.)
Karp acknowledges Thiel’s influence on creating a company infused with a sense of national purpose (though, oddly, Thiel’s own worldview seems to be the very antithesis of any collective project).
The military-industrial complex
In 1956, sociologist C. Wright Mills called out the “power elite” newly dominant in the US and on the world stage, in his book of the same name. He implored his (largely American) readers to be wary of the trinity of big government, big military and big business.
Five years later, in 1961, outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against the establishment of a “military-industrial complex”.
Almost 75 years on, the trinity remains, but its internal relations have shifted. And in companies like Palantir, all three of its elements – government, military and business – combine.
Today, big technology firms enjoy an extraordinary level of power. National governments fret about regulating them too much, while their inventions and innovations are integral to modern defence – as we are seeing in the Middle East and Ukraine.
In June 2022, Karp became the first leader of a major Western company to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky since Russia invaded Ukraine three months earlier. The company also works with Israel, and is “often credited with” helping the US locate Osama bin Laden. It does not do business with China, Russia or other companies opposed to the West.
The elite Mills warned about was national in its orientation, and the new complex Eisenhower described sought social stability at home and American-led order overseas. Today’s US power elite is more complicated, more fractured and less committed to an agreed “national project”, while the complex is less cohesive.
Palantir, though, is explicitly committed to certain national projects.
Big-tech firms own platforms that give them immediate access to hundreds of millions of customers, regardless of age, gender, culture or location. They possess both “hard power” (proprietary hardware and software) and “soft power” (control over the sorts of information and imagery that reaches consumers). And they possess the mind-boggling sums of money needed to keep innovating and growing, and to lobby politicians.
Karp and Zamiska argue more firms should use this power and money in the national interest. Most – unlike Palantir – seem reluctant to work closely with federal or state government on grand challenges concerning national security, public health, school education, or law and order.
Meanwhile, the likes of China and Russia are recruiting the brightest minds to work on national projects that will allow them to exert wide influence as the 21st century rolls on, using hardware and software as vectors of power.
The authors suggest Silicon Valley’s elite has an
obligation to participate in the defence of the nation and the articulation of a nation project – what is this country, what are our values, and for what do we stand? – and, by extension, to preserve the enduring yet fragile geopolitical advantage that the US and its allies in Europe and elsewhere have retained over their adversaries.
More pointedly, they go on, this highly educated and talented elite is “often unsure what its own beliefs are, or more fundamentally if it has any firm beliefs at all”.
‘Atrophying’ of the American mind
Karp and Zamiska trace what they call the “hollowing-out of the American mind” to the late 1960s.
First, the rebellious generation of that era lodged new rights claims – for instance, relating to women and gay people – that made public life more multifaceted and complex, but began to weaken any shared sense of what it meant to be American. Then, the economic ructions of the 1970s opened the door to neoliberalism, via Ronald Regan.
This privileged the freedom of individuals to succeed (and to fail) and began to corrode an earlier sense of national purpose and common interest. Factionalism grew. This occurred against the background of secularisation, the waning of organised religion and large-scale immigration, they argue.
“Anything approaching a worldview is now seen as a liability”, write Karp and Zamiska, leading to an “atrophying of the mind” and “self-editing”, which are “corrosive to real thought”.
Karp, Zuckerberg and others have learned to fear making strong claims about the national interest in a rancorous public square. Musk was the exception, with his foray into federal politics following Trump’s election. Last week, his company Tesla reported a 12% drop in revenue, its biggest quarterly sales decline in more than a decade.
Silicon Valley’s masters of the universe tolerate anything, believe in nothing (except their own companies’ products) and largely run a mile from politics, Karp and Zamiska suggest. Of course, several tech billionaires were in the front row of Trump’s second presidential inauguration. But this seems less about being actively political than flexibly adapting to changes in power.
According to the New York Times, despite funding the presidential campaigns of both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Karp “welcomed” Trump’s 2024 win – and called Musk (whose DOGE would go on to hire Palantir) the most “qualified person in the world” to remake the US government.
Tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk attended Donald Trump’s second presidential Inauguration.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AAP
Virtuous leadership?
Karp and Zamiska call for personal courage and moral leadership among Silicon Valley elites. Their argument applies just as well to Wall Street firms and older manufacturing companies in the aerospace, automobile and other industrial sectors.
We need, they say, to “take the risk of defining who we are or aspire to be” and to “ask about the business endeavours that ought to exist, not merely the ventures that could”.
Morality has two main parts. One is justice (what is “right”) and the other is goodness (the best means and ends of collective life). Karp and Zamiska are focused on the good, seeing it as a galvanising force for any society – with justice as more of a “corrective” force and a foundation for goodness.
Towards the end of their book, the authors focus on “founder-led” companies, such as Apple. These, they write, are created by creative, brave, iconoclastic people (others might choose much less positive words).
But these founders’ insulation from a wider context – necessary for them to break the mould – must be followed by re-engagement to align their work with a collective search for meaning in America and beyond, they write.
Karp and Zamiska want to reclaim the power of nationalism, but in an inclusive way. “The nation-state”, they argue, “is the most effective means of collective organization in pursuit of a shared purpose that the world has ever known.”
The “technological republic” they propose will be powered by advanced technology, strong public–private partnerships and rediscovery of a common culture. It will defend “capitalist democracies” against their “autocratic” opponents.
This fits with what Karp told the New York Times last year:
We have a consistently pro-Western view that the West has a superior way of living and organizing itself, especially if we live up to our aspirations.
Blind spots, idealism and chutzpah
Most people would probably welcome Karp and Zamiska’s call for tech billionaires (and property tycoons and would-be monarchs, like Donald Trump) to commit to a moral social compact.
Their analysis of a fragmented America that barely holds together, lacking in leaders possessed of genuine virtue, hits home. The analysis is also relevant to many other highly multicultural democracies, though only the US contains a single region with the power of Silicon Valley. Clearly, the authors believe Palantir exemplifies their argument that an alternative is necessary and possible.
But Karp and Zamiska come unstuck in three key areas they don’t explore – even though they have very obvious implications for their analysis.
First, the authors’ call for a voluntary mind-shift among their peers sidesteps the role of government in calling big tech companies to account. It’s a nice idea that big tech company executives will decide to act in the wider public interest (in this case, as defined by Karp and Zamiska), but it is unlikely to happen without regulatory sticks, carrots and sermons being delivered by the federal government.
Sometimes, virtue must be instilled from outside, rather than emerging from within. No wonder Karp eulogises about “national purpose” when his company is significantly bankrolled by US government contracts!
Secondly, if their searing criticisms are correct, it will take more than this book to change the hearts and minds of their fellow tech titans. It will, presumably, take two things (in addition to regulation).
One is the building of a “thought-collective” among business leaders, current or aspiring politicians, academics, think tanks. This is precisely what neoliberals did from the 1930s onwards, as political historian Quinn Slobodian has shown. Today, though, things need to happen much more quickly. (The neoliberals took some 50 years to get into power.) The other is the building of a grassroots movement, of the sort Senator Bernie Sanders has been trying to create on the left, and Donald Trump created on the right.
Without the first, Karp and Zamiska are preaching to the wind. Without the second, the first begins to look like a blend of top-down politics and expertocracy unlikely to appeal to future voters.
Finally, for all their talk about virtue and the good, Karp (the highest-paid chief executive of a publicly traded company in the US last year) and Zamiska don’t actually present a substantive vision for a new America and a rejuvenated West. Perhaps, in today’s deeply divided America, it’s easier to identify a need than venture a way of meeting it.
Most of the authors’ discussion about what ought to be done focuses on national security and domestic law and order. Both are important, to be sure, but they’re hardly sufficient to define the good life a “technological republic” ought, in their eyes, to deliver.
Indeed, many critics of Palantir worry it’s spearheading a surveillance republic that diminishes people’s freedom. Is this book the sheep’s clothing worn by the proverbial wolf? Is it an apologia for insufficiently constrained commercial power?
Authors: Noel Castree, Professor of Society & Environment, University of Technology Sydney
Daily Bulletin
