Book Review by Gordon LaForge of “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West By Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska”: “…Karp laments that the government has stepped away from technology development, “a remarkable and near-total placement of faith in the market.” In his view, Silicon Valley, which owes its existence to federal investment and worked hand-in-glove with the state to produce the breakthroughs of the post-Sputnik era, has “lost its way.” Instead, founders who claim to want to change the world have created food-delivery apps, photo-sharing platforms, and other trivial consumer products.
Less resonant is Karp’s diagnosis of the source of the problem. In his view, America’s tech leaders have become soft and timid. They fear doing anything that might invite controversy or disapproval, like taking on a military contract or supporting a national mission. They are of a generation that has abandoned “belief or conviction in broader political projects,” he writes, trained to simply mimic what has come before and conform to prevailing sentiment.
This all has its roots, Karp argues, in a “systematic attack and attempt to dismantle any conception of American or Western identity during the 1960s and 1970s.”…
Karp’s claims feel divorced from reality. Debates about justice and national identity run riot in America today. A glance at Elon Musk’s X feed or Meta’s content moderation policies dispels the idea that controversy avoidance is the tech industry’s North Star. Internal contradictions in Karp’s argument abound. For instance, in one part of the book he criticizes tech leaders for sheep-like conformity, while in another he lionizes the “unwillingness to conform” as the quintessence of Silicon Valley. It doesn’t help that Karp makes his case not so much with evidence but with repetition of his claims and biographical snippets of historical figures.
Karp’s preoccupation with what he calls “soft belief” misses the deeper structural reality. Innovation is not merely a function of the mindset of individual founders; it depends on an ecosystem of public and private institutions—tax policy, regulations, the financial system, education, labor markets, and so on. In the United States, the public aspects of that ecosystem have weakened over time, while the private sector and its attendant interests have flourished….Karp’s treatise seems to spring from a belief that he expressed in a February earnings call: “Whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir.” This conflation of the gains of private companies with the good of the country explains much of what’s gone wrong in the United States today—whether in technological innovation or elsewhere…(More)”.
