Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander Karp opens his new ebook with a provocative declaration: “Silicon Valley has misplaced its manner.”

Over the previous decade or so, as the info analytics firm rose to prominence for its work with U.S. navy and intelligence, Karp has largely stayed out of the limelight. Final 12 months, in a rare interview with The New York Times, he described himself as “progressive however not woke,” with “a persistently pro-Western view.”

Now, in “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West” (co-authored with Nicholas Zamiska, Palantir’s head of company affairs and authorized counsel to the CEO), Karp has written one thing of a manifesto. In reality, he and Zamiska describe it as “the beginnings of the articulation of the speculation” behind Palantir.

Of their telling, Silicon Valley’s early success was created by an in depth alliance between expertise corporations and the U.S. authorities. They argue that this alliance has splintered, with the federal government “ceding the problem of growing the following wave of pathbreaking applied sciences to the non-public sector,” whereas Silicon Valley has “turned inward, focusing its power on slim shopper merchandise, somewhat than initiatives that talk to and deal with our better safety and welfare.”

The pair criticize Silicon Valley’s output as dominated by “internet marketing and procuring, in addition to social media and video-sharing platforms,” suggesting that it outcomes from an trade that valorizes constructing issues with out asking what’s value constructing or why.

“The central argument that we advance within the pages that comply with is that the software program trade ought to rebuild its relationship with authorities and redirect its effort and a spotlight to developing the expertise and synthetic intelligence capabilities that can deal with essentially the most urgent challenges that we collectively face,” Karp and Zamiska write.

In addition they argue that Silicon Valley’s “engineering elite” has “an affirmative obligation to take part within the protection of the nation and the articulation of a nationwide undertaking — what is that this nation, what are our values, and for what will we stand.”

Reviewers haven’t been completely gained over. In Bloomberg, John Ganz complained that “The Technological Republic” is “not a ebook in any respect, however a chunk of company gross sales materials.”

And in The New Yorker, Gideon Lewis-Kraus suggested that the ebook is an “anachronism,” presumably written earlier than Donald Trump’s victory within the November 2024 election. Now, Lewis-Kraus wrote, “its imaginative and prescient of a mutually supportive relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley has within the interim been rendered nearly quaint.”

Certainly, one factor that Karp and Zamiska criticize is “the reluctance of many enterprise leaders to enterprise into, in any significant manner and other than the occasional and theatrical foray, essentially the most consequential social and cultural debates of our time.”

After all, we are actually seeing at the very least one enterprise chief take this directive to become involved in politics fairly significantly, as Trump ally Elon Musk attempts to remake the federal government by means of his Division of Authorities Effectivity.