Book Notes: The Technological Republic (2025)

ALEXANDER KARP AND NICHOLAS ZAMISKA’S The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West may not be the worst book I have read this year, but it is by far the most disappointing. Karp is the rare CEO more famous for his intellect than his entrepreneurship. The overlap between the students of Jürgen Habermas and captains of industry is small. Among the technology brethren, Karp is regularly portrayed as a latter-day philosopher king. Karp leans into this image.1 I do not begrudge him this—founders must sell both themselves and their companies, and a company like Palantir is easier to sell when its founder is wreathed in mystique.

There are some downsides to mystique. If people believe you are some philosophic savant, they expect you to write a book with real intellectual heft. An important book. The sort that teaches men how to merge principle with practice. The sort of book that might be remembered.

There is an obvious need for such a book. Silicon Valley’s “California ideology” is dead but no new ideology has risen up to take its place. The ideas, efforts, and dollars of the “tech right” helped Donald Trump land his second presidency, but relations between the technologists and the rest of the Republican coalition are tense. The future of this coalition is undecided. Down in the Gundo there are 300 young men building America’s future—they are hungry for ideas that might guide their efforts and inspire more young Americans to join their cause. If there was ever a time ripe for a book titled The Technological Republic, that time is now.

On its face, The Technological Republic promises to meet these grand expectations. Karp and Zamiska (one of Karp’s employees) promise a “substantial and ambitious” foray into “the interstitial but we hope rich space between political, business, and academic treatises.”2

They do not achieve this aim. The Technological Republic is neither substantive nor ambitious. In form and tone it resembles a business class airport book—and this comparison is insulting to the airport paperbacks. Most of those books have the skeleton of a good essay hidden beneath their bloat. Strip away a few hundred unnecessary pages and you generally find a thesis worth contemplating. In contrast, The Technological Republic has no discernible thesis. Its chapters are discrete. They read like a series of TED talks sloppily sewn together by the ChatGPT of 2023. At no point do the ideas inside the covers of The Technological Republic rise above the intellectual level of the average TikTok reel. I would be embarrassed to have this book published under my name. I find it somewhat spectacular that a man with Karp’s reputation proudly published it under his.

The best thing I can say for this book is that it gave me a reason to lay out some of my thoughts on the relationship between the American nation and the American technologist. I have done this in a review essay published in the latest edition of American Affairs, which you can read here. My essay is focused on an idea that clearly preoccupies Karp—it is not the thesisof his book so much as a theme that resurfaces at random points throughout the Technological Republic. Let’s call it “the problem of the unmoored engineer.” I describe this problem in the essay as follows:

Karp and Zamiska insist that the fortunes and fame of [Silicon Valley’s “engineering elite”] were not created ex nihilo. This class is, in fact, deeply indebted to the civilization that made their firms possible, one that most of them feel no kinship with or obligation to. At the center of that civilization is the United States. The American nation should demand the loyalty of those who prosper most from it. This loyalty should be freely given. Karp and Zamiska believe that tech leaders should focus their substantial talents on bettering this nation. Like Palantir, their firms should not shy away from the provision of public goods. Silicon Valley should boldly take part in the “articulation of the national project.”⁵ Alas, the instinct of the Silicon Valley founder is to move as the market lists. How does the market list? Toward “lifestyle technologies” whose main purpose is to “enable the highly educated . . . to feel as if they have more income than they do.” America’s engineering elite is brilliant, but their brilliance is wasted on baubles.3

I have little to criticize in this description of Silicon Valley and its mores. But Karp and Zamiska’s critique sticks to the shallows. They gripe a great deal about the “engineering elite” from which they spring, and gesture constantly to ye good olde days when American industrialists and engineers felt a sense of patriotic duty to their country. They never explain, however, what religious, social, political, or economic forces gave those engineers their convictions—much less contemplate what it would take to replicate those forces today. They are satisfied with bland sermonizing.

I am not.

Karp and Zamiska want America’s technological elite to become a governing elite. America has had such an elite before. American politics and American industry were once captained by a network of committed techno-nationalists. Later generations of Americans would call the children and grandchildren of this class the “Eastern Establishment.”  These were the men that made the Second Industrial Revolution. They not only invented and commercialized the technologies that propelled humanity into the industrial age, but built the legal, financial, and corporate infrastructure that made these new technologies possible. The high tide of this establishment was the years between 1870 and 1930. Over those decades, America was governed by a techno-nationalist elite.  

Most of my American Affairs essay explores the history of these men: where they came from, how they rose to wealth and power, what ideology they subscribed to, the political coalition they built, and the means by which they passed their project on to their children. This section of the essay is long (it is about 16 pages and 60 footnotes worth of material), so I will not summarize it here. (Those interested in the full version should read the piece in American Affairs; if you instead want an abbreviated version, come back to the Scholar’s Stage tomorrow for some follow up thoughts on the history of the Eastern Establishment). For the moment I will note only the following: the Eastern Establishment began as a tight knit community of industrialists and politicians who originally were drawn together by the U.S. Civil War. Their program, both during and after the war, was to unify a wide-flung and divided people under one national identity and integrate their communities into a single, continent-spanning, industrialized market. The systems they built in pursuit of this aim rewarded them with untold wealth and national power. These systems were also expressions of deeply held values. Their program was only possible because they were able to convince a coalition of Americans that these values were the right ones. This feat, combined with a great deal of clever log rolling in Congress and the technical achievements of their firms, propelled the Eastern Establishment to their elect station in American life.

Most historians and commentators who look back at this era tend to emphasize different aspects of the process I describe. Some focus on what made this old WASPy elite culturally distinct, others on what made the industrialists so fantastically rich, and yet others how the Republican Party dominated federal politics in this era. Part of the thesis of my essay is that all three of these things were connected. The story of one cannot be told in isolation from the others.

This is not unique to the Eastern Establishment. It reflects a more generalizable truth behind any stable group of governing elites. To quote from my essay:

 Any governing class requires three things: a political coalition to which it owes allegiance and over which it exercises influence; an economic base that provides this class with wealth and unites its members around shared material interests; and finally, a set of institutions, rituals, and social customs that give this class a culture distinct from the country at large. Absent the first two, a leadership class lacks the power to lead; absent the latter two, it lacks the ability to act as a class.4  

Do Karp and Zamiska’s “engineering elite” have these three things? If not, how could they get them? Karp and Zamiska do not seriously entertain the question. To return to my essay:

It is not enough, therefore, to advocate for “a closer alignment of vision” between Silicon Valley and the state without asking what economic, political, and cultural arrangements could make such an alignment possible. The Technological Republic suggests that the federal government could profit from Silicon Valley’s organizational ingenuity, but it does not suggest how elected officials or federal bureaucrats might gain that expertise firsthand. It argues that technologists must identify with the American nation-state, but it never explains how this culturally progressive, immigrant-heavy industry might actually do so.

Part of Karp and Zamiska’s problem lies in how they conceive of this task. The Technological Republic speaks of the fusion of a “sector” and a “state,” but sectors and states are abstractions; what must be fused are people. This was also true for America’s first techno-nationalist elite. Behind the Eastern Establishment stood a dense web of personal ties that bound its families together. Many of these ties were consummated, quite literally, on the marriage bed. Karp and Zamiska are loathe to think in these terms. They write a great deal about the engineering elite’s waning commitment to Western civilization, but they have little to say about its waning commitment to raising the next generation of that civilization. The Eastern Establishment was self-consciously reproductive: it built schools, endowed universities, and founded literal dynasties. Part of building “a shared culture . . . that will make possible our continued survival” is creating the children who will survive us.5

Karp is well-known for his bachelor lifestyle. He has no children. I suspect this is one reason he is slow to speak of his project in inter-generational terms. Unfortunately, I do not see how this project can succeed on any shorter timescale.

By far the most annoying thing about this book is Karp and Zamiska’s refusal to take a positive stand on any meaningful issue whatsoever. Karp and Zamiska tell us that the problem with Silicon Valley is that it shies away from “the vital yet messy questions of what constitutes a good life, which collective endeavors society should pursue, and what a shared and national identity can make possible.” Yet there is no passage in the Technological Republic that attempts to “define the good life” or “describe what a shared national identity can make possible.” Our authors insist that “the reconstitution of a technological republic will require a reassertion of national culture and values” but never tell us what those values are. They lament that Silicon Valley has been swallowed by “narrow and thin utilitarianism,” but never articulate a richer moral vision to replace it.6

At best this reticence is hypocritical; at worst, it is cowardly. When reading this book, I often wished I could shake Karp by his jacket and yell, “Tell me something you actually believe!” He never does. Thus the conclusion of my essay:

Karp and Zamiska devote entire chapters to urging the American public to tolerate corporate leaders who are strange, discomforting, or corrupt. They argue that too many of these leaders “are reluctant to venture into the discussion, to articulate genuine belief . . . for fear that they will be punished in the contemporary public sphere.” There is nothing objectionable in that argument, but it is painfully procedural. When Karp and Zamiska lament that that too many “founders say [they] actively seek out risk, but when it comes to public relations and deeper investments in more significant societal challenges, caution often prevails,” they could be describing themselves. They demand a pulpit for America’s technologists but never summon the courage to state what gospel they should preach.

Large passages of The Technological Republic thus read as a throat clearing exercise in place of substantive content that never arrives. Karp and Zamiska correctly observe that “an overly timid engagement with the debates of our time will rob one of the ferocity of feeling that is necessary to move the world.” But the book itself refuses to engage in any of the “debates of our time.”

…What is his vision for America’s place in the world? What principles should govern the relationship between artificial intelligence and the American polity? Does transhumanism violate or embody the “shared purpose and identity” Karp and Zamiska believe we must forge? If what we need is a “larger project for which to fight,” then what precisely should that project be?

America’s first techno-nationalist elite did have such a project. Many of them died fighting for it. The industrial civilization they built would have been impossible without their ironclad commitment to America’s national greatness. Judged by that standard, Karp and Zamiska’s arguments are intolerably thin. “Those who say nothing wrong,” Karp and Zamiska warn, “often say nothing much at all.” The Technological Republic says nothing wrong and nothing much at all.7

Please go read my full essay at American Affairs—and come back here for a follow up piece on the history of the Eastern Establishment tomorrow.

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Your support makes this blog possible. To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar’s Stage, you can join the Scholar’s Stage Substack mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. If you found this post worth reading, you might find some of my other essays on technology and American political culture up your alley. Check out “Washington DC is not a Popularity Contest,” The Silicon Valley Canon,” Uber Makes a Poor Utopia,” “Wang Huning and the Eternal Return to 1975,” “Has Technological Progress Stalled?” and “American Nightmares: Wang Huning and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Dark Visions of the Future.”

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