David Austin Walsh in Boston Review:
“A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West.”
So say Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, top executives at Palantir Technologies—the multibillion-dollar software giant and defense contractor—in the preface to their recent book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. But their reasons aren’t the ones you probably have in mind: the return of Trump, spiraling authoritarianism, the embarrassment of the liberal international order in failing to stop Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza (partly powered, as it happens, by Palantir’s services). No: the crux of the problem is that “Silicon Valley has lost its way.” Again, not for the reasons you might think—grossly concentrated power, violations of privacy, and AI at any cost, including a habitable planet. Instead, the authors say, Big Tech has sold out to consumer capitalism, forsaking the ambition and purpose it had when it got its start in the Cold War. Our “engineering elite,” Karp and Zamiska urge, have “an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation and the articulation of a national project.”
So they set out to articulate just such a project. They call it a “technological republic,” but what exactly this comes to they never quite say. What is clear is that words like “democracy” and “social contract” have little to do with it. Their patriotism flows from a different national tradition: war. Invoking the legacy of the Manhattan Project, they argue that technology companies can find their way back to meaning by embracing military applications of AI and working closely with the Pentagon to ensure continued geopolitical dominance in the “software century.” In other words, by doing exactly what would pad Palantir’s bottom line.
More here.
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