Can Big Tech save the West? That question is at the heart of Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp’s new book, The Technological Republic. He posits that Silicon Valley really can address the threats, internal and external, America faces—but only if titans of the industry abandon the consumerist model and liberal ideology which defined the sector in recent decades. In this symposium, our writers weigh in on Karp’s vision and its prospects for revitalizing our civilization.

The West faces a crisis of confidence on a scale unseen for decades. Just as an axis of revisionist powers—China, Russia, and Iran—threatens the post-Cold War global order, the citizens of the United States and other countries that have benefited the most from those arrangements are beginning to question its very foundations. Will the rise of right-wing populism and left-wing identity politics knock the United States from her position of leadership? Will the people of the West have enough nerve to defend their freedom against the gathering storm?

In their new book, The Technological Republic, Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska argue that America still has the resources to win this fight—and that they can be found in Silicon Valley. Karp is the chief executive officer of Palantir Technologies, a software company that makes intelligence and defense tools for the US military, and Zamiska acts as head of corporate affairs and legal counsel at the same firm. They believe that Big Tech companies have been focused for too long on digitally serving individual consumers and instead must apply their technical know-how to national security problems for the sake of the common good. Their book is, in a sense, an attempt to articulate what engineers’ skills mean for their vocation as citizens. 

There is something admirably earnest about this vision, especially in an era defined by bitter irony. The authors’ unabashed love for our civilization is bracing, and one hopes that it will help recruit patriotic young engineers for Palantir and similar firms working on national security issues. They are also refreshingly clear about the threats we face, externally and internally, from deeply anti-civilizational forces. The book is therefore an effective call to arms for technologists. At the same time, though, it somewhat lacks a narrative about the overarching meaning of the American Republic sufficiently powerful to move the whole people, something that, as its authors recognize, is absolutely necessary for the coming struggle. 

As we prepare for these challenges, we cannot underestimate the radical change wrought by the Digital Revolution. The wonders coming out of Silicon Valley will upend nearly every aspect of our lives and completely remake our economy, both by automating significant parts of day-to-day work and possibly exposing us to new and terrifying risks from autocracies exploiting these new technologies. Karp and Zamiska argue, therefore, that “the legitimacy of the American government and democratic regimes around the world will require an increase in economic and technical output that can be achieved only through the more efficient adoption of technology and software.” Figuring out how to handle the great leap in innovation, according to our authors, is the great governance challenge of the twenty-first century.

One model for the kind of solution they proffer is the alliance between science, industry, and the government formed during the Cold War. Originally coming about during World War II (the Manhattan Project looms large in the authors’ minds), these ties became stronger across the long struggle against the Soviet Union. Scientists understood that they played an important role in defending the West against totalitarianism, and political leaders found ways to support and develop their expertise. Karp and Zamiska see the much-maligned “military-industrial complex” as a key reason for America’s victory over Soviet communism and the possible inspiration for a reconstitution of the present-day tech industry.

But the major difference between the Cold War and today’s geopolitical problems, though, is the technological platforms through which conflict is waged. Before the Berlin Wall fell and the Digital Revolution commenced, competition was all about producing more ships and planes, guns and ammunition, missiles and warheads. Now, Karp and Zamiska write that we live in a “software century.” They do not dismiss bullets and atoms altogether, but they are more concerned with the bytes behind AI targeting systems guiding drones and robots. To name one example of this possible future from earlier this year, Ukraine launched the first-ever all-drone assault on Russian positions. The future of war is not just mechanized, in the authors’ minds, but also automated.

While it is understandable why executives at a company like Palantir put so much faith in artificial intelligence, it is possible they take the case for automated warfare too far. For one, they somewhat evade the thorny ethical questions surrounding drones and battlefield AI. But more importantly, as the ongoing war in Ukraine proves, conventional weapons still dictate the outcome of conflicts. Of late, the United States has struggled mightily to ramp up production for ammunition, from the more advanced Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to comparatively basic 155mm artillery shells. Developing more advanced weaponry to meet future threats is important to be sure, but so is simply manufacturing enough materiel to defend American interests, given present concerns. Policymakers need to balance futuristic aspirations like Karp and Zamiska’s with the actual needs felt by those already fighting on the front lines. We might be living in a “software century,” but hardware still matters. The defense industry must find ways to advance any technology essential to national security.

That being said, Karp and Zamiska’s diagnosis of what went wrong with Silicon Valley specifically and their prescriptions for fixing it can be applied to revitalize American industry more broadly. They see American corporate life as fundamentally decadent, trapped within the bonds of a noxious consumerism and paralyzing political correctness. Rather than focusing on innovation, they assert that “the vast majority of an individual employee’s energy during their working lives is spent merely on survival, navigating among the internal politicians at their organizations, steering clear of threats, and forming alliances with friends, perceived and otherwise.” Workplace politics distract us all from innovating.

The problems of this decadent hierarchy are compounded by the civilizational nihilism of America’s technocratic elites. Karp and Zamiska thunder against not only the moral relativism endemic to the academy and other commanding heights of culture, but also more radical anti-civilizational impulses that undermine the concept of greatness itself. They rightly cite the deconstruction of Western civilization courses in higher education as one symptom of this terrible disease of self-hatred. How can we innovate on behalf of a civilization we are taught is fundamentally unjust? Why would technologists use their talents to defend a country their mentors and teachers tell them is on the wrong side of history? 

This critique of America’s cultural and political atmosphere goes beyond the countless broadsides against “wokeness” already launched by reactionary malcontents. Before founding Palantir, Karp pursued a career in academia and briefly studied with the German critical theorist Jürgen Habermas; he is no man of the right, and therefore his narrative does not sink into all the vapid ideological clichés so much of the right-wing media seems to embrace. Instead, The Technological Republic’s authors opt for a much more sophisticated—and insightful—critique of the state of American capitalism. According to them, in Silicon Valley, the “prevailing ethical framework” has been a sense that we can engineer solutions to all of mankind’s problems. As shiny as this promised future may seem, however, the authors warn that this techno-utopianism “has devolved into a narrow and thin utilitarian approach, one that casts individuals as mere atoms in a system to be managed and contained.” As a result, Big Tech’s leaders often dismiss the enduring moral and cultural questions at the heart of Western civilization as anachronisms or distractions from their humanitarian planning. 

In other words, America’s innovative edge is dulling first and foremost because we are losing sight of the true moral content of our civilization. Rather than embracing a sense of collective purpose or political project of the West, the Silicon Valley tech barons who dominate the economy today adopted a kind of “technological agnosticism,” concerned above all with capturing and monetizing individual consumers’ attention. This is why, they argue, most of the tech innovations in recent years have had more to do with social media and streaming services than actual developments to improve human life in meaningful ways. Silicon Valley unleashed market forces, which have atomized society, largely because we collectively cannot envision a larger end for it. Even philanthropic fads in Silicon Valley, such as “effective altruism,” fail to achieve the sense of collective purpose akin to twentieth-century anti-totalitarianism.

As an alternative to this corporate decadence, Karp and Zamiska call for the “reconstruction of a technological republic” through “a re-embrace of collective experience, of shared purpose and identity, of civic rituals that are capable of binding us together.” They believe we, as a society, need to give more serious thought to the meaning of the good life and how we can pursue it together, and then apply this teleology to the technological problems of the day. As much as the authors rightly worry about radicals stripping civilizational content from our schools’ curricula, though, they do not offer much by way of an upbuilding alternative. They seem unwilling to fully express their own firm definition of the good life or national identity.

On some level, this is because Karp and Zamiska remain trapped within the paradigm of liberal technocracy. The ultimate source of this problem is that they reject the notion that the American Republic was constituted around a definite conception of the human good. They avow, rather, that the liberalism of the Constitution does not order liberty in one particular direction or another. Western civilization, in the authors’ view, is worth defending not for the sake of any sense of transcendence it bequeaths to its inheritors, but rather because it provides a space in which engineers can best pursue solutions to the chief problems of modern life in more-or-less morally neutral ways.

This open-ended liberalism is deeply entwined with their repeated insistence that “the miracle of the West is its unrelenting faith in science.” They therefore view the proper end of politics primarily as a shield to scientific endeavors and free inquiry, or even a prop to the private firms they believe are pursuing those purposes, rather than orienting society towards certain eternal truths. At certain points in the book, they even hint at support for the troubling possibilities of transhumanism, embracing artificial intelligence almost as though it were an altogether new form of life. As much as some of their foreign policy goals may align with traditional conservative priorities, the authors’ overall conception of the aim of the social contract diverges wildly from the older view that conservatives advocated.

Like most progressives, then, Karp and Zamiska articulate a political theory that remains technical rather than spiritual. They leave open the possibility of faith but do not insist on it as a solution, which means their framework for thinking about self-government will collapse into the same kind of hollowness as the corporate decadence they would have us escape. Despite their prophesying about changes the future could bring, they cannot quite provide a compelling account of the permanent things in human nature worth fighting for.

For the Founders of the American Republic, by contrast, freedom was nothing less than the holiest of causes. In his first inaugural address as president, for instance, George Washington insisted that “the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government” depended on “the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American People.” For him, as for the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the soldiers who fought the Revolution, maintaining a free republic against tyranny was a truly civilizational mission with a deeply theological importance. To them, freedom was the highest good, not just because it is an efficient way of organizing society, or even because it opens up inquiry and innovation, but instead because a free society is the kind best suited to human nature. The Founders understood that liberty is one of the deepest longings with which human souls are endowed. The case for the West—the case for victory—cannot be made in full apart from that conviction. 

The Founders paired this robust conception of human nature and liberty with a profound appreciation of the limits of power that Karp and Zamiska seem to lack. In many ways, this republic was actually constituted around this idea of dignity in order to resist the ideology of boundless progress that would later become so popular in Silicon Valley. In his famous Newburgh Address, Washington himself declared that the “last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining” was a kind of enlightened restraint and a rejection of all forms of absolute power. In promoting this ethical critique of tyranny as the root of American citizenship, the Founders were embracing the philosophical core of the Western heritage—something later revolutionists, from France to Germany to Russia, instead rejected. 

While the American Revolution was by no means a simplistic Luddite reaction against technological development, its humane premises should leave its inheritors deeply skeptical of any and all attempts to use technology to transcend our nature. And in the global arena especially, our country’s finest hours have always come when we resist the temptation of appeasing autocratic and totalitarian forces, even when they make revolutionary appeals to progress or deploy powerful new technologies. The American Republic was not just constituted to promote prosperity or innovation, but rather, above all, to assert a certain vision of the human good itself.  

In the end, that is why it will take much more than Silicon Valley optimism to secure the future of freedom. Despite these shortcomings, though, The Technological Republic is a significant book partly because it can help readers understand the very real industrial and digital challenges posed by the modern world. But even more importantly, reflecting on our responsibilities to uphold a virtuous liberty in these tumultuous times can remind us that we are not simply consumers in a technological economy, but citizens of a great and humane republic.

Participants in mass political discourse have an unfortunate tendency to define their own beliefs simply as the negation of their enemy’s. Just say the opposite of what the bad guys are saying, and you must be right. Witness how many “never-Trumpers” wound up becoming progressive Democrats to spite the “Orange Man” or how the desire to “own the libs” has become almost the only recognizable quality of most “conservative” Internet figures. 

For the last half-century at least, the left has defined itself largely in opposition to the inherited political, social, and cultural traditions of the Western world, in what Roger Scruton called a “culture of repudiation.” Anything that can be identified as a product of “white,” “European,” “Western,” or “American” values is suspect at best—the outgrowth of a hegemonic power structure that maintains itself on the backs of the oppressed. Such an attempt (more on that later) to reject their cultural inheritance wholesale has distorting effects—not just on their own minds, but also on their opponents’. One such effect is that anyone who declares himself in favor of Western civilization or America is perhaps too readily embraced as a worthwhile voice.

But not all who cry “Lord, Lord!” will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And not all who cry “Western Civilization!” are actually friends of the civil order, culture, and freedoms that Western countries have been blessed to enjoy. Enter the tech bros.

Palantir executives Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas Zamiska have written a book that bemoans the rejection of Western civilization. It argues that patriotism is important. It is critical of wokeness. It makes a case for greater emphasis on humanities education. For these reasons, The Technological Republic has found admirers—mostly among conservative readers. But while it may recognize several troubling trends, what it offers in response is a toxic blend of collectivist politico-morality and crony capitalism draped in an American flag.

Ostensibly about the lack of public spirit in Silicon Valley, the book does not hesitate to make more sweeping claims about what ails society, often channeling the pseudo-conservative observations of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. Tech companies are too hesitant, they argue, to do business with the federal government—primarily the military. This is bad in part because it will mean a strategic imbalance when it comes to America’s geopolitical rivalries. But more importantly, they see it as a crisis of identity and a sign of a lack of purpose.

Silicon Valley’s hesitancy comes not just because of activist employees and customers, but because their leadership has been raised in an environment of moral atrophy. They have been taught to repudiate traditional sources of meaning that, in the authors’ minds at least, find their fulfillment in a robust commitment to a national mission: “The grand, collectivist experiments of the earlier part of the twentieth century were discarded in favor of a narrow attentiveness to the desires and needs of the individual.” For the authors, war—particularly manifested in the Manhattan Project—is the model of political activity, with each section of society willing to play its part in the national symphony directed by the state and made possible by the brave new world of technological mastery.

The alternative to this model, they suggest, is a low consumerism that distracts the public with frivolities. Much is made of “Farmville,” the vapid, web-based game that enjoyed a brief period of intense popularity in the early 2010s. That example is meant to symbolically represent any tech advancement not made with and for government. This, they say, is what “the market” produces: digital trinkets that offer entertainment or convenience but nothing that gives us meaning and purpose in our lives.

Thus, the premise of the book hinges on the crucial and pervasive error that seems universal today: namely, that there is a binary choice between, on the one hand, loose individualism centered on passing desires and, on the other, a commitment to a collective national vision. There is no suggestion at all that human beings may find meaning and purpose beyond their own appetites in anything other than politics. 

Their concern for the humanities and the cultivation of the mind, for instance, is rooted in a fear that people aren’t thinking hard enough about what our grand national mission should be, and they may not have the mental vocabulary to drum up the thumos to give oneself over to the cause: “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,” they worry. Religion is only briefly mentioned, but it turns out the authors want God only for his instrumental value in bolstering the state: “If contemporary elite culture continues its assault on organized religion, what will remain to sustain the state?”

The book studiously fails to question any of the conceits of collectivism or even point to its limits. The authors frequently speak of what “we,” “the nation,” and “the public” have done or must do, as if those are all unitary, thinking, and willful beings. For instance, they claim that “we have … ceded direction over our interior lives … to the market.” (Speak for yourself.) In one telling phrase, they even address culture in the same way: “We have, as a culture, decided.” This isn’t all that uncommon in casual discourse, but it is revealing. Culture doesn’t think, decide, or act. And the solution to a corrupted culture is not simply to hope that, as a whole, it will think, decide, or act differently.

As for the dangers of collectivist thinking, the authors never consider whether the government may be its own kind of consumer, with its own kind of base and selfish desires to fulfill when it gets in bed with big business. It is almost always treated as the straightforward advocate of “the public interest.” There is little or no discussion of how that substantive “public interest” is to be determined other than that “we” ought to decide it. There is no concern that their prescription would merely result in crony capitalism, leading to a farcical game in which industries, particular companies, and their political allies try to outdo one another in showing how their interests are vital to the “public good.” They do seem to recognize that China is largely operating on their model and using it to pursue terrible objectives. But we would never do those things.

Their collectivism also extends to morality. A moral life, they suggest, is defined as having “grand belief structures” and “affirmative conceptions of what a collective life could or ought to be.” Those who are skeptical of such visions, the authors label “amoral.” This sort of “grand plan” morality implicitly denigrates both human freedom and traditional checks on personal behavior, both of which fall before the demand that we play our part in re-creating the world according to the commanding vision. One of the West’s greatest civil achievements has been its demonstration that a moral life is compatible with—indeed, made possible by—freedom from a commanding vision.

Perhaps the most glaring flaw, however, is that for all the insistence on this grand political vision, Karp and Zamiska never bother to formulate what that vision really is. The phrase “political project” is peppered across the pages as the key to breaking out of “our” malaise. They also recognize that there is no naturally occurring unity across America, and thus the national or civilizational purposes they seek must be consciously “constructed” or “manufactured” through a uniform education system, forced conscription, or national service. But what exactly we’re pursuing is left vague. It’s clear enough that conquering nature is more their speed than purifying morals or equalizing outcomes, but the main point seems simply to be that we need some national project—any national project. As long as humane technologists are in charge, their refined imagination will surely come up with something.

There is certainly much to critique about Silicon Valley and the vapid products its companies hawk. And the success of “Farmville,” Instagram, and other examples is at least partially due to the hollowed-out minds and chests of modern man. But this is not the product of free markets or any perceived decline in belief in the nation. Far more important has been the erosion of overlapping social authorities that once contributed to the formation of character at the local and personal level.

And nothing did more to undermine these sources of social authority than the pursuit of national missions. The full-blown culture of repudiation was not born fully formed and armed from the head of Abbie Hoffman. It came only after decades of twentieth-century nationalization across Western countries (the very decades Karp and Zamiska yearn for) had eroded, absorbed, or politicized the role of churches, local communities, and private associations. The radicals of the ’60s were the fruits of the previous generation, a golden age of national vision that untethered its people from traditional authorities aside from the state. As the children of this generation came to see the failures and hypocrisies of the various national “projects” that had replaced those authorities, they saw the only reasonable response as a rejection of everything.

Conservative readers—of this book and of social commentary more generally—would do well to recognize that a self-declared commitment to Western civilization is not in and of itself indicative of a salutary teaching. When so many enemies of civilization are upfront with their hostility, perhaps it has become too easy to forget that draping oneself in the flag isn’t any guarantee of pure motives. There is still no shortage of deceptive wolves in sheep’s clothing, and no shortage of bad visions for civilizational “renewal.”

In fact, even the culture of repudiation itself is a kind of debased civilizational project, even if its advocates would blanch at the suggestion. The culture of repudiation was not entirely a foreign virus that infected Western civilization out of nowhere. It was, rather, a distortion of and overreliance on certain elements of the very tradition the radicals thought they were rejecting. Political toleration and self-criticism are distinctive qualities of Western civilization. In grasping on to these and similar values and attempting to make them universal, commanding principles, these radicals inadvertently established a new set of hegemonic Western values.

Indeed, the left-progressive or “woke” cause quite often manifests a haughty civilizational chauvinism in how it depicts and engages with non-Western civilizations, reflecting the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” It is only the West that is enlightened enough to reject its cultural inheritance.

Which is to say that Western civilization is a house with many mansions. And attempting to single out a particular value or principle—whether it is self-criticism or the spirit of scientific discovery—and make it the centerpiece of a political “project” is not the way to renew civilization. That will only build a house on sand. Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that Karp’s company, which has acquired nearly $1 billion of government contracts recently, would be working on data consolidation for the government that could easily translate into a master database on every American. That sort of information in the hands of the state would seem to be a significant threat to the liberties that Western countries have held dear. But there is nothing to fear—the CEO in charge has read Allan Bloom.

Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.

Theologian and social critic Os Guinness observed in his essay, “Our Civilisational Moment,” that “the world is fast approaching one of the great turning points in history.” The West, he says, is “on the wane,” living off “memories” of its animating ideals. “Renewal” of those ideals and the West, “is as possible as decline,” he writes, “though highly demanding because of what it requires.”

In The Technological Republic, Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander Karp, aided by his co-author Nicholas Zamiska, applies a similar critique to Silicon Valley. He contends that American elites, and tech leaders in particular, have abandoned any notion of advancing the national interest or addressing “the most pressing challenges that we collectively face” in favor of a shallow and single-minded obsession with “solving everyday consumer problems.” This misallocation of talent and lack of focus leaves the United States vulnerable, he argues, because the balance of hard power in the twenty-first century will be determined by supremacy in emergent AI technologies focused on military applications.

Karp posits that we must “rise up and rage against” this vapid consumerism. But fixing Silicon Valley lies outside our grasp so long as our tech elite—and culture more broadly—adheres to a “thin version of collective identity, one that is incapable of providing meaningful direction to the human experience.” Rebuilding a “technological republic” in which science and engineering protect US interests and push civilization “up the hill,” requires “an embrace of value, virtue, and culture, the very things that the present generation was taught to abhor.”

Karp, however, stops short of identifying the deepest sources from which value, virtue, and culture can be drawn and defined. He describes the effect of cultural drift and its influence on the tech sector but fails to engage the ongoing debate over whether the West can experience renewal without reconnecting with its historical moorings in the Christian faith.

Karp begins his argument by pointing to two trends that, working together, have undermined the West’s prospect for maintaining an advantage in hard military power. First, the state has “retreated from the pursuit of large-scale breakthroughs,” such as the Internet, ceding such efforts to the private sector. Second, “the Silicon Valley giants that dominate the American economy have made the strategic mistake of casting themselves as existing essentially outside the country in which they were built.”

He contends that this divergence of the tech sector from the public interest is not historically determined. Many of the Founders, such as Jefferson or Franklin, were inventors. The United States emerged from World War II as the world’s preeminent superpower in part due to the efforts of scientists like Robert Oppenheimer and Vannevar Bush, whose technical brilliance pulled the United States into the atomic age. “This was the American century,” he writes, “and engineers were at the heart of the era’s ascendant mythology.” That mythology has since disintegrated, however, and Karp argues convincingly that Silicon Valley has embraced a kind of nihilism, leaving its leaders “often unsure of what their own beliefs are,” or whether “they have any firm or authentic beliefs at all.”

This critique of tech elites is reminiscent of C. S. Lewis’ description of “men without chests.” They are highly intelligent and competent but driven by desires beneath the realm of moral virtue. Many of the tech workers in Silicon Valley blithely believe “the relative safety and comfort in which they live are the inevitable consequence of the justice of the American project, not the result of a concerted and intricate effort to defend a nation and its interests.” Karp argues that this detachment from the national interest comes at a dangerous moment, as the emergence of military applications of AI presents a “crossroads that connects engineering and ethics,” forcing us to “choose whether to proceed with the development of a technology whose power and potential we do not yet fully apprehend.”

Rather than build with a higher end in mind, however, Karp contends these “technological agnostics” build merely “because they can, untethered from a more fundamental purpose” beyond the acquisition of wealth, status, and the power of their own creations. He traces this impoverished sense of purpose to movements beginning in the 1960s and ‘70s which aimed to deconstruct a common conception of the West cohering “around a set of shared practices or traditions that made possible, and indeed, bearable, collective existence at a grand scale.” In place of this coherent system, we now have a “thin conception of belonging to the American community” based on a vague sense of “rights” and neoliberal economics, and an impoverished community centered around entertainment, sports, and popular culture. Our culture is a “balloon cut loose,” as it were, from its historical moorings.

The modern incarnation of Silicon Valley got its start in the midst of this period of deconstruction. Indeed, Karp proposes that it was self-consciously built on a desire to escape the strictures of institutional business and government cultures and to embrace individualistic identities. This desire for individual empowerment, divorced from any thick overarching purpose or meta-narrative, morphed into an obsessive focus on serving trivial consumer ends at the expense of tackling “broader and more significant endeavors.” While embracing the free market, Karp objects to the “shallowness” of the tech sector’s “ambition and abdication of everything beyond the light hedonism of the moment.” Much like the Final Pagan Generation of Fourth Century Rome described by Edward Watts, tech elites are spending down the vestiges of a lost cultural heritage with nothing to replenish it.

That is not to say that Silicon Valley lacks any redeeming qualities. Karp pauses to consider the innovative organizational culture that enabled the tech sector’s “domination of the modern economy.” He praises tech firms with internal hierarchies echoing improvisational theater and honeybee swarms, in which status roles can morph moment by moment as actors “play” different parts, all “without an overbearing and unnecessarily centralized mechanism of control.”

These organizational qualities, in Karp’s view, can empower an “engineering mindset” endowed with the creativity, responsiveness, and non-conformity that is badly needed in American life. At its best, the Silicon Valley model is a subculture that enables creative non-conformists to escape the rigidity of traditional corporate life and exercise a “voracious” and “ruthless pragmatism” that is willing “to bend one’s model of the world to the evidence at hand, not bend the evidence.”

Karp posits that to rebuild a technological republic, we must direct Silicon Valley’s engineering mindset “toward the nation’s shared goals, which can be identified only if we take the risk of defining who we are or aspire to be.” This requires marrying the “engineering mindset” with a resurrected “sense of national and collective identity” oriented toward human progress. That objective faces several hurdles, however. The modern Left has, in the name of inclusivity, “so hollowed out the national project that one could argue that there is no longer much of substance into which anyone might be included.” That is not to say that the Left has fully abandoned any overarching narrative, but its bare “commitment to capitalism and the rights of the individual, however ardent, will never be sufficient; it is too thin and meager, to narrow, to sustain the human soul and psyche.” In the author’s telling, “an aspirational tolerance of everything has descended into support of nothing,” leaving the Left “unable to offer an affirmative vision of a virtuous or moral life, whose content it long ago stripped away to the bare essentials.” We must, Karp writes, “take seriously the possibility that it will be the resurrection of a shared culture, not its abandonment, that will make possible our continued survival and cohesion.”

Diagnoses of the West’s slide into decadence, stagnation, and ennui have been frequently chronicled, such as in Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence and Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society. Karp provides a similar critique but narrows the aperture to focus on tech as a specific, and exceptionally influential, segment of society. Elsewhere, he frequently comments on the dominance of the US tech industry, noting in a New York Times interview that “86 percent of the top 50 tech companies in the world just by market cap are American.” A staggering fact, to be sure. His concern, however, is that this dominance will be squandered as competitors like China race forward with developing military applications for AI, while the United States fritters away its advantage as its leading tech firms focus obsessively on building trivial applications to serve the “whims of late capitalist culture.”

His frustration with this “misallocation” of resources leads him to demand that tech leaders come clean about their priors. He develops this argument in a passage worth quoting in full:

We believe that 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—including those regarding the relationship between the technology and the state—should give us pause. The decisions we collectively face are too consequential to be left unchallenged and unexamined. Those involved in constructing the technology that will animate and make possible nearly every aspect of our waking lives have a responsibility to expose and defend their views.

Karp seemingly attempts to do those tech leaders the favor of taking this step for them. Much of The Technological Republic is an exposé and critique of our “current era of innovation,” which is “dominated by the indiscriminate construction of technology by software engineers” who are building untethered from any purpose directed toward the common good. That untethering was driven by the intentional hollowing out, largely by the political Left, of a robust concept of national identity or a cohesive set of universal values and aspirations that could hold the broader body politic together, short of a thin veneer of “tolerance” for all views. But, in Karp’s words, “the problem is that tolerance of everything often constitutes belief in nothing.”

Karp capably diagnoses the icy, effective pragmatism and metaphysical emptiness that lie at the center of Silicon Valley’s culture. And he points up the dangers of casting such a powerful industry—one that has achieved a “level of concentration of wealth and influence … never before seen in modern economic history—adrift from the national project. “We have made the mistake,” he writes, “of allowing a technocratic ruling class to form and take hold in this country without asking for anything quite substantial in return.”

To mitigate this, he calls for the reanimation of a “shared culture, language, history, heroes and villains, stories, and patterns of discourse” as a means to bind the West together. This path “will involve a reconciliation of a commitment to the free market, and its atomization and isolation of individual wants and needs, with the insatiable human desire for some form of collective experience and endeavor.”

But Karp does not prescribe how to reconstitute collective experience and values, or what specifically can fill that void. He nods toward the “set of ideals” that drove young people to embrace the Silicon Valley subculture: “freedom to build, ownership of their success, and a commitment above all to results.” And he approvingly recounts the “old means of manufacturing a nation,” including such “civic rituals” as “an educational system, mandatory service in national defense, religion, a shared language, and a thriving and free press.” In this, he calls for a revivification of an American, and perhaps Western, civic religion of sorts. Unanswered by Karp is how this revivification will be catalyzed. What spark will reignite the flame of Western culture after decades of deconstruction? Karp puts the question, and a possible answer, as follows: “If contemporary elite culture continues its assault on organized religion, what will remain to sustain the state? What have we built, or aspired to build, in its place?” In asking these questions, he peers over the edge, but does not enter, a robust conversation about the role of organized religion in sustaining Western institutions.

In his magisterial book Dominion, historian Tom Holland traces the development of Western civilization as an outgrowth of Christianity, its basic assumptions, values, categories, and concepts intimately interwoven with Christian values. In his telling, whether this debt is acknowledged or not, the West is “firmly moored to its Christian past.” Karp briefly acknowledges this, quoting professor James K. A. Smith, who said that “‘Western liberal democracies have lived off the borrowed capital of the church for centuries.’”

Several thinkers have gone further and acknowledged the substantial benefits that a strong Christian church and widespread faith entail for the social order. In his book Cross Purposes, Jonathan Rauch—himself an avowed atheist—has called for a renewal of what he calls “thick Christianity.” Christianity, he contends, provides the background condition that allows liberal society to flourish: “There is no secular substitute for the meaning and grounding which religious life provides.”

Prominent academic Ayaan Hirsi Ali, herself a recent convert to Christianity, has compared Western culture divorced from Christianity to a “cut flower” that maintains its shape and beauty momentarily, but ultimately will fade, having been disconnected from its source of sustenance. Much like Holland and Rauch, she observes in her essay, “Our Christian Inheritance, Western Civilization, and My Personal Journey,” that the features of our liberal society we take for granted—recognition of equal human dignity, fundamental rights, respect for the rule of law, and limited government—are direct lineal descendants of Christian theology.

At the core of these ideals is the belief that humans possess dignity not because of their capacity to compute, use language, reason, or meet other performance-based metrics, but rather because of who and what we are: created in the image of God. Or in the words of the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” This framework offers a possible response to Karp’s concern, for example, that AI will overtake humanity as we build with no purpose in mind. The concept of imago Dei necessarily distinguishes humans from non-humans, including AI. Moreover, consistency with human rights and true human dignity derived from the imago Dei cabins the uses for which AI may be deployed.

Karp quotes Robert Oppenheimer as saying, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.” A Christian ethic responds to the impulse of “building because you can.” You build for the good of humans.

The Technological Republic is at its best when it explains how the erosion of a shared vision for Western civilization has impacted our ability and willingness to innovate to solve our most pressing social problems. Karp powerfully explains how the deconstruction of shared collective experience, purpose, and identity has resulted in the trivialization of our tech sector to serve purely consumerist ends. He articulates how recapturing those collective goods is essential not only to social cohesion but also to technological advancement and national security.

His contribution, however, must be viewed alongside the broader ongoing conversation over the need to renew religious institutions as an integral support to a liberal order that embraces human dignity, fundamental rights, and the separation of powers. As part of that conversation, Jonathan Rauch recalls John Adams’s words: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Echoing Adams, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has compared Christianity to an “operating system” for Western society. Karp’s book, in the end, is a search and cry for a cultural OS that will power the killer app of market capitalism and free liberal society into the future.