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Notes -
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.
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 technocapital over managerialism.
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