Palentir CEO Alex Karp and coauthor Nicholas Zameska have written a book called “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.” George Will says about it:
From an unlikely place — the upper reaches of the technology industry — comes an unexpected summons to an invigorated patriotism. The summons will discomfit progressives by requiring seriousness about the nation’s inadequate defenses, which endanger peace immediately and national survival ultimately. Conservatives will flinch from the new — actually, a recovered — patriotism that calls them up from an exclusively market-focused individualism, to collaboration between public and private sectors in great collective undertakings.
In “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West,” Alexander C. Karp, CEO of the software firm Palantir, with co-author Nicholas W. Zamiska, connects the ascent of Silicon Valley and the decline of the nation’s cultural confidence. The former is a symptom of the latter. Karp thinks “the loss of national ambition,” which produced the atomic bomb and the internet, is today manifest in Silicon Valley’s devoting mountains of cash and legions of engineers to “chasing trivial consumer products.” (Disclosure: The columnist’s son David Will is a lawyer at Palantir.)
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