Jack McCordick reviews 'The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West' By Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska. At TNR.
Political Observer shares these 717 words, by Jack McCordick, with his readership!
Editor: For The New Republic to publish a long critical evaluation of ‘The Technological Republic’, after the Clintons, Obama and Biden Neo-Liberalism & War Mongering as deeply toxic as ‘‘The Technological Republic’ this review resembles self-exculpation writ large. !
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And for all Karp and Zamiska’s self-styling as critics of Silicon Valley, much of the book is dedicated to proclaiming the tech industry’s salvific qualities. Only a “union of the state and the software industry,” they claim, will maintain American dominance in this century, and this techno-governmental fusion will require the state to adopt the “engineering mindset” that has fueled Silicon Valley’s world-bestriding success. Karp and Zamiska blandly describe this mindset as involving a “disinterest in theater and posturing,” an “abandonment of grand theories about how the world ought to be,” and, via a quote from the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, a resistance to “sweeping and easy generalizations.” Aside from being meaningless abstractions, each of these qualities is betrayed practically every time Karp gets in front of a camera and utters the words “America” or “the West.”
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It’s hard to picture him acting otherwise. Mythmaking, bluster, and hype are practically job requirements for the CEOs of the defense tech world. Justifying ever-frothier valuations—as of mid-February, Palantir’s market capitalization was worth about half that of the five traditional defense primes combined, despite it reporting barely 1 percent of their combined revenue last year—requires telling a convincing story about a future world in which your product is the deus ex machina for the potential problems you claim are impending inevitabilities. For Karp and Co., this means boldly announcing that the United States is already in a “hot Cold War” against China; forecasting an impending three-theater conflict with Sino, Russo, and Perso fronts; arguing that autonomous weaponry will soon eclipse the atom bomb in geostrategic importance; and claiming that U.S. superiority in militarized AI will usher in a new Pax Americana.
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Given these grand pronouncements, it is clarifying to discover that the section of the book that actually describes the virtues of Palantir’s “organizational culture” is laughably prosaic. Palantir employees, Karp and Zamiska say, are encouraged to apply the lessons of a book on improvisational theater to their work, and to digest the insights of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 book on “foxes and hedgehogs.” These supposedly sui generis workplace policies are barely more sophisticated than the standard nostrums of the business press. (“What Startups Can Learn From Improv Comedy,” advises The Wall Street Journal; “Mature Entrepreneurs Know When to Be a Hedgehog and When to Be Fox,” counsels Forbes.) Striking one of the book’s many bathetic notes, Karp and Zamiska write that the best start-ups operate like “artist colonies, filled with temperamental and talented souls,” where status is fluid and nonconformity encouraged. The upshot of this unique structure? “The benefit of it being somewhat unclear or ambiguous who is leading commercial sales in Scandinavia, for example, is that maybe that someone should be you. Or what about outreach to state and local governments in the American Midwest?” This, apparently, is the future we are rushing toward: one where a $200 billion tech company enacts violence in the name of Western civilization while waxing poetic about how building lethal software is just like making great art.
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Toward the end of the book, Karp and Zamiska pause to linger on an episode that briefly shook the German cultural world of the late 1990s. In a speech accepting a major literary award, the eminent German novelist Martin Walser criticized Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance. It was a “moral cudgel,” he argued, wielded by the liberal intelligentsia to repress a newly united Germany’s nationalistic revival. Referring to plans to build the Berlin Holocaust memorial, Walser invoked Hannah Arendt: “Probably there is a banality of the good, too,” he said.
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What Karp and Zamiska don’t mention in their recounting of this episode is that Karp was a doctoral student at Goethe University in Frankfurt at the time, and that he made the controversy the central case study of his dissertation. As the Harvard professor Moira Weigel noted in a fascinating exegesis of the document, which has yet to be officially translated into English, Karp’s thesis examined how certain speech patterns allow for the expression of taboo wishes, especially those produced by human drives toward aggression. Walser’s speech, Karp argued, performed such a function. By letting his audience express their taboo desire to throw off the yoke of public Holocaust remembrance, he wrote, Walser convinced them that “these taboos should never have existed.”
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https://newrepublic.com/article/191786/alex-karps-war-west-palantir?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tnr_daily&vgo_ee=8bcV18hAVmall8lZo7F298koRcaYNU4jVC%2FZfnbHatNTK04ZDG4%3D%3AaGOOVKm0J3Iz2M%2BGklXS5qAC4hgC2n9%2F
Editor: These 2,993 words constitutes Propaganda !
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