A Technological Call for Action

1,175 words

Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska
The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West
New York: Crown Currency, 2025

Appeals to virtue and character, having been excluded for the most part from the civic and political realms, have migrated, or rather, been co-opted and appropriated, by the corporate. In 2013, Ram Trucks produced a television commercial featuring a speech titled “So God Made a Farmer” from 1978 by Paul Harvey, a radio broadcaster born in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The speech hailed the American farmer, who, among other things, was “willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt, and watch it die, and dry his eyes, and say maybe next year.” It was poignant and powerful – yet all in service of selling a pickup truck. We have, quite unwittingly, ceded direction over our interior lives, the development of our moral selves, to the market.
—Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska

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Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska are executives at Palantir Technologies, a Silicon Valley computing company. Karp describes himself as a racially ambiguous Jew. Their book, The Technological Republic is a call to action for the people in the computing industry to turn towards moral endeavors centered upon traditional American patriotism. It also offers a moral critique on American society post-1960s which treads close to American right-wing talking points.

Karp and Zamiska draw their inspiration from Vannevar Bush (1890 – 1974), a Heritage American Yankee who worked as an electrical engineer. Bush served in various government positions overseeing technological affairs throughout his career. His efforts during World War II led to the proximity fuse which is still in use today. Bush also mentored the men who went on to develop Silicon Valley and create the computer industry.

Palantir grew its business through steady programming and engineering excellence. The company’s biggest breakthrough came when their program was used by the military’s Special Forces to integrate military intelligence data to help reduce deaths by Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Iraq and Afghanistan. Palantir’s program turned out to be significantly better than the system the US Army was using to gather and analyze intelligence. After a lawsuit and support from a Congressman, Palantir’s software was eventually adopted by the entire US Army.

Karp and Zamiska became alarmed when they noticed that their industry colleagues deliberately avoided assisting the American military. Instead, top software programmers focused on developing search engines and tracking-cookie programs for targeted advertising and quicker online purchasing. The two believe this focus is a major failing writing,

The causes of this turn away from defending the American national project, we argue, include the systematic attack and attempt to dismantle any conception of American or Western identity during the 1960s and 1970s. The dismantling of an entire system of privilege was rightly begun. But we failed to resurrect anything substantial, a coherent collective identity or set of communal values, in its place. The void was left open, and the market rushed in with fervor to fill the gap. The result was a hollowing out of the American project, with a rudderless yet highly educated elite at the helm. This generation knew what it opposed – what it stood against and could not condone but not what it was for.

It is questionable whether there was ever an “entire system of privilege” before the 1960s, nonetheless the two authors move right up to the line of racial reality with the quote above, but they don’t cross it. If once crosses the line, however, the rest of the story is clear. There are two problems that popped up in the 1960s. The first was the illicit second constitution of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which unleashed a wave of black criminality and moved sub-Saharans into privileged job billets, especially in the government. Sub-Saharans tend to be unsuited for these roles because they often don’t have the necessary mental abilities to carry out the abstract thinking required. There is not a way to set up “a coherent collective identity or set of communal values” in the “civil rights” order. The second problem was the 1965 Immigration Act which allowed non-white immigrants into the United States who have turned out to have deep antipathy towards white Americans and their culture. The executives who they name as deliberately not supporting US military efforts have Indian names.

Those who led the scientific effort in support of the military during World War II came from a white supremacist society with immigration restrictions, a protectionist economic system, and segregation. Indeed, the progressive movement that made up the foundation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal was motivated in no small part by the desire to keep whites from being mugged by sub-Saharans. This race-conscious, society-improving idealism easily fit alongside banking reform, developing fire safety codes, and clean water projects. It is only natural that once the progressive movement became unmoored from its racially aware underpinnings that eventually American tech companies would drift into a focus on amusements and wider American society would float, becalmed in the doldrums.

This technological focus on that which is trivial is in error. Other than the politics of positioning atomic bombs and their supporting infrastructure here or there, the Atomic Age in warfare has ended. The former structure of bombers and rockets that created deterrence is mostly irrelevant. The new developments in military technology center upon the clash between the computer systems of opposing nations. We are in an artificial intelligence arms race like it or not. Artificial intelligence (AI) is still in its infancy, but computer systems have mastered checkers, chess, and go and can defeat top human players. Advanced computing ecosystems have made warfare one of an interoperable system-of-systems which sends drones and other unmanned platforms on the attack. In Ukraine, the soldiers in the trenches face AI-supported flying robots. The only way to deter such a threat to America is to engage with the new technology.

The threat is very real. A new Eurasianist threat has emerged. The authors point out that,

The American foreign policy establishment has repeatedly miscalculated when dealing with China, Russia, and others, believing that the promise of economic integration alone will be sufficient to undercut their leadership’s support at home and diminish their interest in military escalations abroad. The failure of the Davos consensus, the reigning approach to international relations, was to abandon the stick in favor of the carrot alone.

Sometimes your enemy chooses you. After many attempts on the part of ordinary Americans to find peace, it is clear that Russian-led Eurasianist empire builders are not motivated by legitimate “security concerns.” Instead, they are leaders from a hostile society which are set on competition and conquest.

Karp and Zamiska also point out that crime can be reduced by applying the same technology used in Iraq and Afghanistan to the cities of the United States. The authors write,

The country spent $25 billion to protect soldiers in Afghanistan from the threat of roadside bombs, but when it came to preventing the loss of American lives in our nation’s cities, at the hands of the depraved, the mentally ill, and often extraordinarily well-resourced and ruthless violent gangs, the collective reaction is more often one of apathy and resignation.

This idea has long been circulating on the part of the racially aware, genuine far right for several years. The problem is not a failure of technology. ShotSpotter and closed-circuit cameras can identify and track a criminal gunman very easily. Automatic speeding cameras can identify reckless drivers in an instant. With that technology, all the evidence is in place for a criminal conviction. However, the authors fail to mention that crime control is a matter of political will. The issue is that the offenders these technical systems pick up are usually black sub-Saharans. The Democratic Party is dominated by a sub-Saharan political machine whose members are fundamentally sympathetic to crime. This politically dominant group is also unable to self-correct in other important ways. Joe Biden was obviously senile in 2020, but this did not matter to the Democrats – who were mostly sub-Saharan – in the South Carolina Primary that year. Biden’s primary win there made his election possible and the Biden presidency was a disaster.

The book also includes ideas that I first read in the works of the Rrightist thinker Steve Sailer. One idea that Sailer wrote on Vdare.com and Karp and Zamiska point out in this book is that Public Officials across the board are underpaid for the work that they do. Many years ago, Sailer showed that elected officials in America were getting caught taking bribes which were very low considering the economic heft of the parties involved and the potential costs of the consequences for their decisions. Only $90,000 could swing the vote for an unnecessary war that costs $2 trillion and 100,000 lives. Karp and Zamiska could have come up with this idea independently, but they also write about a Sailer favorite – Francis Galton (1822–1911). Galton pioneered intelligence testing and other ideas, such as the wisdom of crowds. Ignoring that wisdom has proven bad for America and the tech industry.

Like the 1960s-era anti-communist Robert DePugh, Karp and Zamiska are also inspired by the life and career of Hyman Rickover, who was a son-of-a-bitch sort of leader who made the US Navy’s submarine force nuclear powered. The truest fact of life is that people that are not nice tend to be the ones who do the most good. They very often prove to be a vital influence on future leaders and those who create new industries and lasting institutions. Rickover mentored President Carter when the latter was a junior officer in the US Navy. Karp and Zamiska also point out that Rickover was underpaid for his services and was tempted to take “gifts” from shipbuilding firms.

Whether or not Rickover was right in taking such “gifts” for his services it is undoubtedly true that senior government positions have become the preserve for wealthy men from families of means. In the past going from the log house to the Whtie House was a plausible, today such a thing is unlikely. Critical talent is left unutilized.

The two authors are not white advocates in any way, and The Technological Republic is not a Right-wing, racially aware book. The narrative takes the reader right up to the line of racial awareness but does not cross it. Nonetheless, this book shows that racially aware Right-wing talking points which started to dominate the underground online space when stormfront.org was created in 1996 have started to go mainstream. This book is also a refreshing call for action to align technology and hard work to traditional American patriotic values and face the gathering problems and crises of the present time.