The best- or worst-timed book in history

“SILICON VALLEY has lost its way." So says Alex Karp, co-founder and boss of Palantir, a supplier of software to Western armies and spooks. America’s tech industry has forgotten about the armed forces’ role in its creation, he frets. It shuns defence work and prefers to build frivolous consumer products, such as food-delivery apps and video-sharing platforms. No tech boss dares to take principled, unpopular positions such as, say, working on military technology (the author aside, of course).

But now AI is here, and America’s adversaries are racing to put it to military use. So as with nuclear weapons in the 1940s, when technologists worked hand-in-hand with government (thereby giving rise to Silicon Valley), their modern-day counterparts must do the same again to defend America. Alas, patriotism and a sense of civic duty have become unfashionable among a generation of technologists who distrust government and espouse naive pacifism. If only, Mr Karp laments, some brave technologist would step forward and show the way: for techies to become more patriotic and willing to develop military technology, and for governments to become more like the fast-moving, innovative tech industry.

That is the argument advanced in “The Technological Republic", co-written by Mr Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, a colleague at Palantir. Penned before the American election of November 2024, it has been published after it. Unlike many of his peers, Mr Karp endorsed Kamala Harris. With the victory of Donald Trump, however, many of the things that Mr Karp calls for have now happened—but not in the way he might have wished.

Mr Karp is right that American techies could put their talents to better uses than trivial consumer apps. But his claim that they will not do military work is wide of the mark. Attitudes changed after Russia invaded Ukraine, and the shift accelerated after Mr Trump’s election. Google reversed its ban on the military use of its AI technology in February. Investors are piling into defence-tech startups. Palantir’s own share price hit a record high last month; today the firm’s market capitalisation is around $174bn, about triple what it was a year ago.

What of the idea that tech bosses will not take unpopular decisions? They have been doing so lately, seemingly to appease Mr Trump. (Nearly every Silicon Valley bigwig was at Mr Trump’s inauguration.) Jeff Bezos of Amazon has pushed conservative viewpoints at the Washington Post, a newspaper he owns, causing an exodus of subscribers. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta has attracted criticism for cutting back on fact-checking and calling for more “masculine energy" in the workplace. As for the notion that Washington could use a dose of the “move fast and break things" attitude of the tech industry, that too has come to pass, as Elon Musk chaotically applies shock therapy to the federal government.

It is hard to say whether Mr Karp’s timing is brilliant or terrible. His book has arrived just as many of the things he argues for have come true, but in unexpected ways—like a fairy tale in which the granting of a wish turns out to have unexpected drawbacks. The argument is filled out with a potted history of America’s tech industry, quotes from luminaries, a fair amount of score-settling and quixotic excursions into what managers can learn from honeybees and improvisational theatre. The book’s intellectual eclecticism is clearly modelled on that of Yuval Noah Harari, Silicon Valley’s favourite historian. But “The Technological Republic" is much less compelling. Mr Karp has got what he wished for, but he may not like the outcome.

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