I wanted to love it, but Alexander Karp’s new book is a mess of contradictions and a bloody revenge by the Frankfurt School against the school of American Optimism.
I was expecting this to be a significant event in 21st-century Arts and Letters: The first serious and post-woke work of political thought from Silicon Valley, by one of our most free-thinking tycoons and one of the only tech billionaires with a PhD in philosophy. If anyone has the power, education, and positioning to make an epochal dent in the contemporary history of ideas, it would be Dr. Alexander Karp in the year 2025.
I rarely pre-order books, and I pre-ordered this the first time I saw it.
I was extremely disappointed. It’s a pretty generic airport book, but arguably worse because he’s so educated and so critical of standard businessman schlock. If he was just a businessman, I would hardly bother to write a review, but he positions the book as a “treatise” and attacks the cowardly thinking of Silicon Valley! Thus, I found all the glaring faults and schlocky qualities of this book uniquely frustrating and, I think, deserving of particularly thoughtful and detailed contempt.
Perhaps I’m at fault for my excessively high expectations, but with a title like The Technological Republic, I will be forgiven.
I have followed Karp admiringly for some time. His interviews are conceptually intriguing, his speech seems quite alive and uncalculated. He famously studied under Jürgen Habermas, a major figure in twentieth-century philosophy. Though he finished his PhD under the lesser-known Karola Brede, nothing like this pedigree can be found among top business executives. He’s proudly dismissive of political correctness, and presents himself as one of the freest-thinking individuals at his level of business success. A lot of intelligent observers have a similar view, so this book was a peculiar and spectacular torching of cultural capital and ‘personal brand’-equity, in my reading.
Many will see this book as sharp and erudite compared to the average business book, but if you take it seriously—if you give this book the time and respect it seems to deserve—it’s almost offensively weak, fake, and contradictory, with huge holes thinly papered over, as if they assume no reader will take the time to consider everything carefully and explicitly. It feels like it was written for the average, braindead businessman and institutional book reviewer.
The book is a collection of ideas, but the central one is that Silicon Valley business leaders should care more about the American interest. They should think bigger and more courageously, and work more closely with Western governments to defeat the enemies of the West.
This is well and good, but how close should Silicon Valley move toward the US government? 10% more intertwined, while protecting a healthy separation of state and economy? Should they be merged entirely? As we all remember from grade school, a complete fusion or union between government and industry is the Fascist ideal. If we take Karp seriously, he might be calling for a kind of American technofascism. Now, that would earn my respect!
It will… be a union of the state and the software industry—not their separation and disentanglement—that will be required for the United States and its allies in Europe and around the world to remain as dominant in this century as they were in the last. (p. 112, emphasis mine)
Does this PhD philosopher-turned-billionaire-titan really have the balls to call for a new kind of fascism in America? Whether you agree or disagree, that’s one way to make this book the intellectual event of the early 21st century! It’s not implausible. To win the techno-economic race against China, perhaps America has no choice but to adopt some form of authoritarian merger of the state and technology industry. He never says this, of course. It’s one way to read this book, but you have to give him a lot of Straussian credit.
After talking with some particularly sharp friends of mine, I got the distinct impression that such is the benefit of the doubt granted Karp by his most sophisticated and sympathetic readership. “Sure it’s an airport book, but he’s obviously doing something more profound between the lines…” It’s almost as if the book was written with the expectation of this Straussian credit. How else could he be so confident that he’ll come off as bold and daring, even though, in the final analysis, he always declines to make the bold or daring version of any claim? It’s as if mere flirtation with extraordinary and courageous ideas, on the exoteric plane, is sufficient to make a book extraordinary and courageous, because the esoteric subtext—we’re supposed to just grant—is extraordinary and courageous.
From this perspective—which I’m quite sure is the dominant vibe in the high-status group chats of the most “based” and intelligent Silicon Valley types—my approach here is just naive. This book is obviously high-octane 4D-chess with a terroristic media and academy. “This is so basic, Justin, get with it!”
But there is an alternative interpretation, which is that Thiel’s 2007 popularization of Strauss in Silicon Valley has grown over-ripe. It seems to me that so-called Straussianism has become a universal solvent that turns every thinking adult male into a teenage girl. If you have anything whatsoever to lose, you are not only 100% justified in keeping your mouth shut about anything with stakes, but you are more intelligent and more impressive the more you hide your real ideas and beliefs. Instead of thinking and writing in public like a man and a citizen, you only speak frankly in group chats. These group chats are a kind of semi-public, so if there are smart and famous people in the group chats, you get all the status benefits of being a firebrand genius, and none of the risk. The self-understanding of these group chats is that of a high-stakes forum, where the smartest and most daring thinkers and builders are breaking the mold and running operations on the cowardly mainstream. But their objective nature and function is much closer to a high-school cafeteria. I’m speculating here, but I think it’s impossible to understand this book’s strange combination of confidence and emptiness without understanding the new archipelago of semi-publics beginning to replace the traditional high-culture public sphere. If you think it’s an interesting coincidence that Habermas’s most famous book had “the public sphere” in it’s title, just wait until we look at Karp’s dissertation.
The tone is frankly annoying. It feels whiny, constantly exhorting others to think boldly but never delivering a bold claim. If you read all the words in order, it’s impossible to believe more than 100 people in the world have done so. The scholarly apparatus is painfully forced. It’s so obvious that a research assistant was assigned to go find erudite sources for every random idea or observation. The book is awkwardly over-flowing with them, but they’re random, an inch deep, and rarely aid understanding; they don’t convey erudition or thoughtfulness but the opposite, they insult the intelligence of anyone who has read an honest, thoughtful, and personal work of sustained public-political reflection. It’s an oversalted dish by a team of amateur chefs trying too hard to impress.
But the biggest problems have to do with ultimately irreconcilable contradictions that are never even considered.
On one page, Karp champions the disruptive, anti-establishment ethos of Silicon Valley. Just a few pages later, he wants American software engineers to submit to the hierarchical, mission-driven needs of the Pentagon. There’s not a single word even acknowledging the tension. There are probably three or four major contradictions like this, which reappear throughout the book. Alex Priou notes the contradiction on religion (Karp calls for “faith” but also speaks dismissively of religion). As with Kristin de Montfort for IM-1776, Priou is far too generous.
Another gaping hole is found in Karp’s call for a closer relationship between intellectuals, scientists, engineers, and government, reminiscent of FDR’s famous “brain trust.” The biggest issue here is that, since FDR, we have had quite a bit of that already in the United States, and its record has been questionable at best. Karp rejects “woke” political correctness, but fails to acknowledge that it’s plausibly a monstrous outgrowth of prolonged government-university interdependence.
The book never goes more than one-inch-deep on any of its historical case studies, for instance in all of the material on mid-century cooperation between government and industry. There are good, deep reasons why American engineering talent is averse to military applications. Vietnam, for instance, whatever you think of it, was a perplexing American affair that played a significant role triggering the countercultural upheavals of the late ’60s and ’70s. So much of what he dislikes is downstream of what he claims to like, and there’s just zero interest in even trying to grapple with these difficult causal questions. They claim to be concerned with issues of the highest existential urgency, but I can’t really believe that because there is so little concern with getting anything right at any level of maturity.
The engagement with “postmodernism” is canned, pegged to Said’s Orientalism. They criticize “food delivery apps” and “online marketing” as a brain drain, but these consumer technologies gave us the cloud architectures that enabled AI training. Not to mention, social video à la TikTok is an interesting front in the information war. They lament that our current tech leaders are such unthinking and spineless cowards, but then I want to ask: Do you really want these morally ambivalent product managers following the government’s orders? The book may convince them to try, but is it going to give them a different character? Karp believes in America and the West over China, which is nice, but it does not follow that we want every American engineer to desire military glory.
To understand what’s really going on here, I went back to the beginning of Karp’s intellectual history. Many have already written about Karp’s PhD dissertation, which you can find in English as “Aggression in the Life-World.” But the dissertation only deepened my bewilderment.
Nobody has seemed to notice that between his dissertation and this book is a complete 180-degree turn.
The dissertation is a relatively straightforward interpretation and extension of Theodor Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity. It’s not a bad dissertation; it’s competent, pretty average. It has a little bit of that tortured quality where someone is learning how to make an original contribution to a technical literature. The recontextualization of Adorno in light of Talcott Parsons is a pretty tiny contribution and I’m suspecting he was just trying to get something done. Many dissertations are like that, and most are never read by anyone ever again, so I have no problem with the dissertation. I give you this context only to say: Karp the graduate student is for all intents and purposes an Adorno disciple. This is important.
In The Jargon of Authenticity, Adorno criticizes Heideggerian existentialism for all its talk about authenticity, being, and ontology. For Adorno, this philosophical language is functionally just in-group slang, an ideological contraption the main purpose of which is to elevate the speakers; to differentiate the crude others, on the outside of the circle; and to create a sense of belonging inside the circle. Specifically, any language that promises a superior closeness to Being is an obfuscated form of aggression. In short, for grad school Karp, via Adorno, the word ontology (and others like it) are hollow, ideological sign-weapons that groups use to effect violence on others.
The main case study in Karp’s dissertation is a speech by Martin Walser, who received the 1998 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Walser made a provocative critique of Germany’s obsession with Holocaust remembrance, claiming it had become a “moral cudgel” and an “instrument of intimidation.” Based on his Adornian model, Karp critiques Walser for practicing the same jargon of authenticity that Heidegger practiced—phrases like “we Germans” or “remembrance service.” For grad school Karp, Walser is a bully trying to elevate German nationalists by belittling social-justice intellectuals and Jews.
If you’re starting to get confused, that’s because this doesn’t map at all to how Karp positions himself today. To put it simply, the dissertation is firmly within what we would now call the “woke” academic current, a term that Karp today uses with scorn. He is using the Marxist Adorno straightforwardly, to criticize this Walser guy as a right-wing bully.
Now, here is where we encounter the most incontrovertible evidence that Karp’s vision and style as a founder and executive is genuinely linked to his philosophical education. Arguably the single most load-bearing conceptual aspect of the Palantir software suite is called its “ontology.” Karp says this word every chance he gets, in a glowing and unidimensionally positive light.
In the dissertation, as noted above, Karp describes the evocation of ontology as ideological aggression, which pretends to be high-minded philosophy. It seems that Palantir is quite literally Karp’s technical application of this insight, a conscious deployment of the very aggression that young Karp criticizes for academic brownie points. I could not find Karp discussing or accounting for this abrupt reversal anywhere. The most charitable interpretation of our evolved and mature Karp, at this point, would seem to be the following:
Human beings, whether we like it or not, live and thrive through shared aggression toward outsiders. Our only choice is whether we do that unconsciously and dishonestly (like Heidegger or Walser), or we embrace our aggression and use the language of authenticity as the weapon it is (like Palantir).
Now, if the book said any of this, it’d be the most interesting business and/or public-philosophy book in living memory. There is certainly nothing wrong with changing one’s mind 180 degrees after graduate school. My critique is not that he’s inconsistent over time, but that a PhD and billionaire who claims to be thinking boldly in a political treatise should have some ability to say something explicit, direct, and honest about any one of these ten elephants in the room. At least if he’s going to exhort others to think and speak more boldly and courageously. If one looks closely at all of these data points, it seems impossible to find a favorable interpretation or estimation of this book, or the author’s larger perspective.
Karp even mentions Walser in the book! The proud and pro-Western Dr. Karp vaguely criticizes postwar German shame (which young Karp previously criticized Walser for criticizing). He argues that America and its allies today suffer from a self-doubt similar to the guilt Germany suffered at the end of World War II. America must overcome that to be confident and assertive again. After a long summary of the Walser story, he says this:
For us, today, the episode provides a reminder of the discomfort and challenges in pressing forward with the task of stitching together something shared from the disparate strands of individual experience.
I’m sorry, but this is quintessential airport schlock, all the harder to swallow knowing that Karp has a PhD-level command of this episode. With the most natural opportunity conceivable, he doesn’t have the balls to complete the 180-degree turn that he’s made since graduate school. All he has is a chain of clichés. Why is this section on Walser—who nobody today knows or cares about—even in the book, if he has nothing particularly clear or bold to say about it? Is it just because he happens to remember something about it? Might as well throw it in there?
In 2024, Karp endorsed Kamala Harris. He publicly identifies as a left-wing individual, a Social Democrat in the European mold. He publicly supports the Democratic Party, though one could argue he’s pushing the party to the right on military affairs. Then Donald Trump wins the election, and an unprecedented alliance forms between tech figures and Trump.
If Karp is serious about a stronger relationship between Silicon Valley and the US government, everything we know about Harris and Trump ought to have made him more supportive of Trump. Trump is a businessman, less concerned with moralistic claptrap (a constant object of scorn in the book), more of a nationalist, less “woke.” So what is Karp’s reasoning for prefering Harris to Trump? The only thing I could imagine is something vague and moralistic. Which would have to be more important to him than this union of government and tech, which the book suggests is the most important issue of our day.
While figures like Elon Musk and David Sacks promptly forged a new, public alliance with the Trump administration, Karp seemed conspicuously absent. I’m sure Palantir is not absent to any of it, but Karp seemed relatively absent in that monumental moment. I certainly saw Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, and Jensen Huang at the White House, standing next to Donald Trump. I did not see Alex Karp.
Ultimately, the most charitable interpretation that will be sustained after a close reading of Karp’s new book and his larger intellectual biography is that he’s just confused about a few big and complicated questions. To bring this conclusion home, however, we must now turn to the deepest and most interesting problem in Dr. Karp’s book.
Karp criticizes business leaders for their lack of conviction in higher ideals. He wants to see business leaders stand for something, and fight for it.
Yet one of his other favorite talking points is radical pragmatism. He notes that employees at Palantir for years were given a copy of a book on improv. He cites Jerry Seinfeld to make the point that inside a startup, one should do anything needed: “In comedy, you do anything that you think might work. Anything.”
Karp seems unaware that it is the engineer’s eagerness to “do whatever works” that is precisely the historical force that hollows out moral conviction over time.
Bizarrely, in yet another twist that is almost unbelievable, it was Karp’s own academic lineage that figured this out more clearly than anyone else before or after them. It was the great German sociologist Max Weber who first documented how ancient and long-running forms of “substantive rationality” (where individuals would sacrifice anything, even their life, toward higher ends) were being squeezed out by an all-consuming “instrumental rationality” (where individuals only care about optimizing their means). Adorno was the single most dogged and illuminating theorist of this exact intuition. It was one of the great idées fixes of the Frankfurt School, at the tail end of which sat Karp’s old professor Habermas.
The contradiction is so stark that some pages are hard to parse. He describes how engineering culture abandons “grand theories of how the world ought to be,” and you assume he’s continuing his critique of vapid “technological agnosticism,” but then you realize he is praising engineerint culture and mocking the current generations’ fixation with abstract moral concerns. We’re not moral enough, then we’re too moral.
He cites the decision of the United States to import more than a thousand Nazi scientists at the end of World War II as an example of admirable pragmatism:
A certain ravenous pragmatism and insensitivity to calculation had been lost on the current generation. After the end of World War II, U.S. defense and intelligence agencies launched a massive and secret effort to recruit Nazi scientists… An officer in the U.S. Air Force urged his commander to set aside any distaste for recruiting the German scientists to this new cause, writing in a letter that there was an immense amount to be learned from this “German-born information,” if only “we are not too proud.”
But this could just as well be considered an example of weak-willed, craven technological agnosticism—a lack of national moral backbone! Which is it, and how do we tell the difference? Crickets. This is a difficult question, so I do not fault him for lacking a unified theory, it’s just lacking seriousness. The whole puzzle, which he never acknowledges, is whether it is even possible in our advanced engineering era to have, let alone sustain, deep moral convictions. Adorno thought probably not. Weber did not flinch, either. He called the problem an “iron cage.” For the great left-wing Marxists as well as the right-wing Fascists, this dilemma seemed so bleak that it came down to romantic revolution, or suicide, or some other experiment halfway between the two. Today, we live in the era where that unthinkably suffocating dilemma has been universally accepted, on the left and the right. What does this great economic and philosophical leader of 21st-century Liberal Democracy have to say about this question, in which he was professionally schooled by the most sophisticated thinkers of this question? Nothing at all, it seems, and I’ve looked everywhere I possibly could.
This case is so curious that I must indulge a speculation. I can’t help but suspect that Karp must have somewhere been waylaid by the over-ripe Straussianism I mentioned earlier. It’s extremely fashionable in Silicon Valley, especially in the circles that are, of course, far above all fashions. I am guessing that Karp sees himself as playing some kind of 4D chess with the establishment. He must believe he has a coherent and courageous worldview, but also that he must be extremely careful and strategic about what he says and how he says it. The more cleverly he can optimize and modulate his public words for some criterion of “winning,” the more successful he is, and will be, as a public thinker. This is the only other possible way to charitably understand, with any psychological realism, the tortured web of written and spoken words this man has put into the world since his PhD dissertation.
I don’t think he’s stupid. I don’t think he’s evil. But then the question becomes… What is short-circuiting here?
If he’s smart as I believe he is, and he’s as educated as I believe he is, and he’s as free-thinking as I believe he is, and he’s such a killer Straussian operator, then why is this book so bad? Why does it fall so flat for me, someone so ready to appreciate it?
It seems to me that Straussianism has been melted by technological acceleration. Maybe Strauss was onto something, maybe there really was this mode of writing, practiced by great thinkers throughout history, to manage threats of persecution. Maybe such a mode of writing was, since time immemorial, the smartest mode practiced by the smartest and most aggressive truth-seekers.
And maybe now, after the internet, the Straussian style of writing is simply and totally cooked. It seems that Straussian calculations just can’t keep up with the contemporary cadence whereby information and social prohibitions change. If you try to maintain a balance of esoteric and exoteric self-presentation, the world moves too fast, and you end up confused in strange, unpredictable ways.
Which brings us full circle, because the person who would have known this better than anyone was Adorno. For Adorno, the iron cage of instrumental rationality is so dark and all-pervasive that as soon as you try to achieve anything in the world, you are forced to lie and exploit due to deep structures in the economy and our capital-conditioned psychology. Adorno’s solution was to be a philosopher, to just criticize everything—frankly, honestly, and courageously. As sad and useless as the American capitalist is wont to find that, Adorno felt it was the only way of living, thinking, and speaking with dignity and honesty.
Indeed, Adorno had Karp’s number from the very beginning. As he writes in “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” collected in Critical Models (1969):
The development of bureaucracy, the purest form of rational domination, into the society of the “iron cage” and which Weber prophesied with obvious horror is irrational… Without a hold on the determinateness of its objects, ratio runs away from itself… It unmasks itself, unsound and self-contradictory, in its indifference toward the obvious madness…
Actionism is regressive. Under the spell of the positivity that long ago became part of the armature of ego-weakness, it refuses to reflect upon its own impotence. Those who incessantly cry “too abstract!” strenu- ously cultivate concretism, an immediacy that is inferior to the available theoretical means. The pseudo-praxis profits from this… But immediate action, which always evokes taking a swing, is incomparably closer to oppression than the thought that catches its breath. If the concept is tossed aside, then traits, such as a unilateral solidarity degenerating into terror, will become manifest.
What imposes itself straight away is the bourgeois supremacy of means over ends, that spirit actionists are, at least programmatically, opposed to. The university’s technocratic reforms they, perhaps even bona fide, want to avert, are not even the retaliation to the protest… Academic freedom is degraded into customer service and must submit to inspections.
There it is, the entire web of Karp’s contradictions, structurally blind to itself. The new school of American Optimism was understood by the Frankfurt School 50 years in advance, better than anyone in Silicon Valley has cared to understand the Frankfurt School 50 years thence.
The only way to explain all the failed and weird aspects of The Technological Republic—and why going deeper into his biography makes everything more confused and unfavorable—is to see Karp as someone whose own moral and intellectual life has been imprisoned by the very iron cage that he underestimated in grad school. He has said in interviews that, at a certain point, he was tired of reading and writing, he wanted to accomplish something in the real world. In other words, Karp betrayed Adorno’s truth, and the catastrophe of this book is only the revenge of History; the price that Truth exacts, in the long run, from any vita activa that tries to wear the aura of a vita contemplativa. It seems that Karp fled Adorno’s nest too early, saying “Thanks for everything you taught me, now I’m going to use it to make the world a better place; I’ll just bracket your concerns about instrumental rationality, which are impractical.” I think this is what he went and did. He’s been incredibly successful. The only catch is that you can’t also write a real political theory book, without a more serious self-reckoning, and certainly not in the 21st century.
In a flight of fancy, I could even imagine that Habermas warned him. Perhaps that is why he had to find a different supervisor.