Palantir CEO’s new book says Silicon Valley has ‘lost its way’

Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander Karp opens his new book with a provocative declaration: “Silicon Valley has lost its way.”

Over the past decade or so, as the data analytics company rose to prominence with its work for U.S. military and intelligence, Karp has largely stayed out of the limelight. Last year, in a rare interview with The New York Times, he described himself as “progressive but not woke,” with “a consistently pro-Western view.”

Now, in “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West” (co-authored with Nicholas Zamiska, Palantir’s head of corporate affairs and legal counsel to the CEO), Karp has written something of a manifesto. In fact, he and Zamiska describe it as “the beginnings of the articulation of the theory” behind Palantir.

In their telling, Silicon Valley’s early success was created by a close alliance between technology companies and the U.S. government. They argue that this alliance has splintered, with the government “ceding the challenge of developing the next wave of pathbreaking technologies to the private sector,” while Silicon Valley has “turned inward, focusing its energy on narrow consumer products, rather than projects that speak to and address our greater security and welfare.”

The pair criticize Silicon Valley’s output as dominated by “online advertising and shopping, as well as social media and video-sharing platforms,” suggesting that this is the result of an industry that valorizes building things without asking what’s worth building or why.

“The central argument that we advance in the pages that follow is that 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,” Karp and Zamiska write.

They also argue that Silicon Valley’s “engineering elite” has “an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation and the articulation of a national project — what is this country, what are our values, and for what do we stand.”

Reviewers have not been entirely won over. In Bloomberg, John Ganz complained that “The Technological Republic” is “not a book at all, but a piece of corporate sales material.”

And in The New Yorker, Gideon Lewis-Kraus suggested that the book is an “anachronism,” presumably written before Donald Trump’s victory in the November 2024 election. Now, Lewis-Kraus wrote, “its vision of a mutually supportive relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley has in the interim been rendered almost quaint.”

Indeed, one thing that Karp and Zamiska criticize is “the reluctance of many business leaders to venture into, in any meaningful way and aside from the occasional and theatrical foray, the most consequential social and cultural debates of our time.”

Of course, we are now seeing at least one business leader take this directive to get involved in politics quite seriously, as Trump ally Elon Musk attempts to remake the federal government through his Department of Government Efficiency.