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Opening up the discussion on Palantir's CEO 22 points manifesto (original twitter link) which is an excerpt for his new book The Technological Republic.
First impulses when reading through the list, I see that it's melding nationalism and civic responsibility with some kind of tech-elite-ism (?) and culture war critiques.
Anyways, here is what I got from it after thinking about it more and talking with various AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen):
I think I am influenced because I am currently reading through Seeing Like a State, but I get the feeling that Alex Karp believes he is a leader in a vanguard of tech elites that knows what's best (even if many are distracted from the real issues right now) and everyone should listen and just follow this vanguard. Oh and throw in some "woe is me, only I can save the republic, they just don't understand me, so read my book because then you will".
I think this is an interesting view into the CEO of one of the most important companies. My impression of the man has decreased, and increasing my concern for the kind of leaders and elites that is brewing up within American society.
Arnold Kling reviewed that book and noted its representation of a drift away from democratic capitalism's defense of the small man and their petty consumer desires. Not very Milton Friedman-esque. Karp's is a more muscular, great state-driven neoliberalism.
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Is it one of the most important companies? I honestly don't know, it certainly gets enough press for it recently.
No, seriously, I don't know what exactly they do, certainly not how I mostly know what SpaceX, Google, Meta, Apple, and the rest do. Probably in large part because unlike most of those previous companies, they don't have any real consumer-facing presence, no products that 'regular' people integrate into their lives. Even looking at their history its like they took a bit of tech used in Paypal for fraud detection and adapted it to analyze, effectively, any given database you might plug in? And it kinda stuck around in a stealthy startup phase for like 10 years, then started getting various DoD/Government contracts, and then finally IPO'd in 2020, so seems like it took a long time to find footing, and during that time the founders kept tight control of it and kept adding funding to it even while it wasn't clear what the company would do.
I am not in fact critiquing them on this basis, I'm just saying it is opaque to me why this company is important in the same way that Boeing, Eli Lilly, or even Amazon is important. If they disappeared tomorrow, how would i most obviously notice their absence?
And if detection of fraud is a core feature, I'm definitely confused as to why all the various fraud schemes in Minnesota, California, New York, and elsewhere just went undetected for so long, or at least unremarked and prosecuted.
Again, not a critique of the company, maybe a critique of how gov't actors have been using it, but certainly me wondering the value being provided here.
And since as far as I can tell they do make some sort of platform that allows use of AI analysis, but they do NOT build their own AI models... what would make them more important than one of the frontier AI labs, or the Chip manufacturers, or any given major player in the energy sector?
As for the the manifesto, I guess I'd ask for it to put out something more 'actionable' to really offer a opinion on it. I think I see what it is gesturing at, but the actual, positive vision for what the world should look like hasn't been laid out here.
This seems to be the most concrete point:
It also does that annoying thing by pointing out that U.S. "adversaries" will keep trying to undermine U.S. interests. Great. But what does the actual threat model look like? There's an easy list of countries that are 'adversaries,' and none of them are able to launch a land invasion. None of them can (currently) threaten U.S. energy independence, or disrupt citizens' lives much without exposing themselves to much worse reprisal.
Realistically the U.S. is going to bring itself down through self-inflicted wounds before any of its adversaries can mount an effective attack that actually cripples the country. And this seems to be part of the thrust of the manifesto but what does it say we do? Are we rejiggering the constitution to function in this new era, or just ignoring it where convenient, and where, precisely, do they want the ultimate balance of power to end up, with regard to sovereignty over the territories that compose the U.S.?
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Wait that's just Gaullisme.
Think about it:
The victory of the engineer, the priest, the soldier over the merchant, the professor, the artist. Neo-France arrives from the future.
I've always been bullish on the French elan, but as the state ideology of America.... Hmm, you may have inspired a psychohistoric babbling schizopost, we'll see.
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This is beautiful. You nailed it.
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"Your rebellious colony turned into France."
Brits on suicide watch.
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Free email is a form of economic growth!
You can send long messages and images and videos to people hundreds of miles away nearly instant for basically no cost, that you can access, store, and reference back to easily.
Whereas just a century ago you would need to pay a person to haul your mail the whole way to them, possibly taking weeks if not months depending on the distance and would have to physically store away any mail you wanted to keep and spend time organizing it so you can actually go back to that when needed.
What the fuck does "economic growth" mean to them if not things like mail being more available, cheaper, or in better quality? Are they gonna start saying that a 300 dollar 50 inch flat screen TVs doesn't count as an improvement over these 2k+ tiny ass black and white things because it's "decadence"?
What does this actually compose of, obeying the masters of big government?
Like let's look at the latest controversy. Anthropic doesn't want Claude doing mass domestic spying and autonomous weapons because they don't believe it is good for the citizens/the technology is ready yet. Helping the nation doesn't mean "doing whatever the current leaders demand and say is good".
A classic argument that always ignores the real world, that countless regulations often are preventing the market from acting. Take the housing debate for instance, is lack of building because the "market failed to act" or is it because local jurisdictions literally ban and cripple building? One of the reasons why healthcare is such an expensive mess is because the government keeps fucking things up. One way to see this is to look at voluntary procedures like LASIK, laser hair removal, botox or breast augmentation, and how they've gotten cheaper and more accessible over time.
Autonomous weapons will definitely be something to reckon with, but wait till you see what a nuke does to the data centers.
No that phrase means being the masters.
It's a political formula in the sense of Mosca, a whole cloth made up duty and therefore right to rule, much like noblesse oblige, popular sovereignty, vanguardism, divine right, expertise, etc.
What this whole thing is saying is that a certain political coalition (not in the politicians sense, in the power sense) considers itself better fit to rule than the current one. I'd go as far as to say it's what I've long predicted: the insurgency of technicapital over managerialism.
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This list reads empty to me. Yes, I get it, the United States. But what is the point of the United States? Why does the United States deserve the best weapons, the best economy, and an universal conscription army? Why should anybody want to die for the United States? As far as I'm concerned, any decent man should refuse to put his life on the line for the United States. It's lost any heavenly mandate it once had due to lack of meritocracy and feminism. It doesn't give men, not even many very high quality men, good wives, and it actively interferes with this through many of its laws, so it is essentially a reproductive enemy, and therefore something of a genocidal threat, to the majority of good men.
Basically, the manifesto comes off as you must die for Buttsex in Botswana, peasant. No thanks. And I know that's what it is because the guy who owns the company has no interest in wives but lots of interest in buttsex. Oh, also can you imagine what that frizzy haired CEO of Palantir would say if the United States suddenly became a radically anti-Israel state? Yeah, it would be the Great Shaytan over night. So the United States is the defender of Israel and the purveyor of sodomy. Yay.
It's definitely missing the grandiose promises that it should feature.
But those are easy to come up with on the spot given American history: space colonization is the manifest destiny of the United States.
That and something about the lot of the common man improved by technology or something. Though the issue is that industry doesn't have the easy and inherent positive valence it used to have. The SV people need to have something better to sell than higher dopamine injection through attention control. Meaningful jobs?
But that would be boring, soulless, egalitarian slop drivel. Wow, the United States let the common man degenerate to an even lower state with antibiotics and keeps him entertained with a technology stack ultimately stolen from Europe and its early European settlers, who are now a persecuted minority. What could make that better? Oh, I know, what if we do it on a cold, desolate shithole planet!
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Some notes on the manifesto:
No affirmative obligation is necessary. There are enough engineering elites who are either US nationalists or who will work on weapons simply for money without thinking too hard about moral questions to suffice for the needs of national defense. As for the needs of national offense, that is a different matter.
Strange take. It was mainly nuclear weapons, not American power, although American power certainly played a role. Let me give an example: in the early stages of WW2, US, UK, and Soviet power did not deter the Germans or the Japanese. Being weaker than the enemy does not deter leaders from starting wars often enough to bring about an era of peace. Facing nuclear war, on the other hand, so far has kept peace between the great powers. I wonder if Karp actually believes his thesis or if he is just sucking up to the establishment, which indeed seems to love to believe this kind of theory about America's role in the history of the last few decades.
Europe is not being forced to pay any heavy price for Germany's weakness. Europe's support of Ukraine is a matter of choice, not something forced on it. There is no existential risk to Europe from Russia (outside of the risk of mutually assured destruction in a nuclear war, which Russia wants to avoid every bit as much as the EU does) for the simple reason that the EU has 3 times Russia's population, 7 times its GDP, two nuclear-armed members, and can easily produce more nuclear weapons at any time it wishes. Even if Russia somehow managed to conquer all of Ukraine, which seems extremely unlikely, it would pose no genuine threat to Europe. It's simply not strong enough.
This, and point 18, seem blatantly self-serving to me. Of course Karp would think this. I mean, it's possible that he actually is saying this abstractly rather than from his own bias, but it seems more likely that he is saying it from bias.
This one surprises me, since I have no idea what is motivating it. It also does not necessarily make sense. Being an open intellectual movement does not necessarily mean being tolerant of people who claim that the Earth is flat or that they are being mind-controlled by lizard people. It does mean that you should give such people a say instead of censoring them, but it does not mean that you should pretend to take them seriously or give them much attention. And as for the kinds of religion that are compatible with rationality (they do exist, for example pure spirituality without belief in gods or woo), I don't really see the elites being intolerant to them. Indeed, since such kinds of religion are relatively obscure, I'm not even sure that the elites are aware of their existence.
Of course Karp himself would not serve, nor would any children that he has be likely to serve in any dangerous capacity either. Maybe as a society we should be hesitant about launching wars and only fight the next war even if not everyone shares in the risk and cost?
No, it has a moral debt to the people who made its rise possible. Those people are a persecuted minority in the United States and are spread out over several continents and many nations. The United States is an incidental social construct, and a bad one with a terrible culture compared to that People's other states at that.
Random question- would you be interested in posting a user viewpoint focus? The last guy nominated wasn't. We should get strong opinions spelled out on the front page more often.
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I see your point, but how are those people a persecuted minority in the United States? They usually make loads of money.
They make less than the counterfactual where there's no persecution.
What kinds of persecution do you have in mind. Like, affirmative action or something? The way taxes work?
Yes.
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From a purely pragmatic standpoint of an American elite (and I don't have a good read on Karp so this might not be his perspective) intolerance towards religious belief is basically pure self-ownage. (Keep in mind that in the US, religious behavior is correlated with higher education levels.) There are a lot of smart, motivated religious people who will happily serve in the military and then work in your munitions plant afterwards and if you are intolerant of them you're running the risk of losing their talent or, worse, making yourself their enemy.
Good point.
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I think to see where he's coming from you've got to remember how unbelievably, staggeringly bad all the rest of our governance has gotten, largely though "democratic oversight" by the old school of experts. What would be really hard, but worth doing, is combining a much-needed replacement of elites with some kind of revival of Tocquevillian civic engagement and oversight, so that the new elites don't fall straight back into the high modernist trap.
A lot of disengagement stems from an “elite” that is active hostile to the local interests and norms of the broader population. To copy the first point:
I disagree with this. What would you have any elite class in society do? Withdraw to the margins of society and live in their own gated communities, leaving the bulk of people to fend for themselves?
I really don’t mind such a class of people, provided they’re actively working in my interests.
Really get to know the "local interests and norms of the broader population". Learn from them and align your and the public interests, or even do the hard work of persuasion and cajoling the public to follow you. I admit this is what Karp is doing and I at least respect him for wading into the fight. But to say "stop criticizing me" is just pathetic
Exactly, I'm not sure if Karp's best interest is with mine. At the very least, it's certainly making me feel reactance to what he's proposing.
There’s a very fine line between someone saying “stop criticizing me,” and “stop whining and complaining.” I won’t knock him for trying at least.
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