THE WAR APP

 

Mark O’Connell 

Last year, according to a recent report in The New York Times, Alexander Karp received a total of $6.8 billion for his services as CEO of the data analytics software company Palantir Technologies. This “compensation actually paid”—a metric that takes into account not just salary but also the amount by which stock holdings increase—made Karp, by a large margin, the highest-paid CEO in the United States.

For anyone paying attention to Palantir’s recent fortunes, this was no great surprise. The stock value of the company—whose revenue comes largely from government contracts for data surveillance and the military application of artificial intelligence—is, one might say, negatively indexed to the peace and freedom of humanity. Over the past year the company’s stock has increased in value by a factor of almost six. At the time of writing Palantir was worth $375 billion, making it the twenty-second most valuable company in the S&P 500—just ahead of Coca-Cola and behind Bank of America. “Bad times,” as Karp put it in a recent CNBC appearance, “are incredibly good for Palantir.”

And the times, of course, have been incredibly bad. Russia’s long and brutal war of imperial aggression in Ukraine. Israel’s campaign of mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. The outbreak of a larger war in the Middle East (now in a fragile détente) amid expressions of enthusiasm for a violent overthrow of the Iranian leadership. In the US an unprecedented campaign of deportations, leading to civil unrest in Los Angeles and elsewhere. And in all of these situations, there is a great deal of money to be made by a company providing data surveillance and AI systems for military use. The most vivid illustration of this dynamic I have seen is a meme posted to r/PLTR, Reddit’s “unofficial, independent community for retail investors of PLTR to chat about the company, its mission, Alex Karp, and all things pertaining to the stock.” In the background of a photograph taken in a deli or fast-food restaurant, we see a cluster of men involved in a chaotic physical altercation, while in the foreground a middle-aged man sits at a table, entirely unbothered, absorbed in his smartphone. The fighting men are labeled “EUROPE,” “USA,” “ISRAEL,” and “IRAN,” while over the man in the foreground are the words “ME CHECKING THE PRICE OF PALANTIR.”

Cofounded in 2003 by Karp and his Stanford friend Peter Thiel, who had recently made serious money from the sale of PayPal to eBay, Palantir Technologies was conceived, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, as a provider of machine learning and data analytics for the purposes of national security and surveillance. The reasoning went like this: if the US government had been able, in September 2001, to collate and analyze disparate data points—flight school enrollments, anomalies in travel patterns, suspicious associations—the Twin Towers might still be standing and the people who died that day might still be alive. Palantir’s software facilitates the finding of patterns in large datasets, and presents such information in easily searchable and navigable form. In a recent conversation with Maureen Dowd for The New York Times, which introduced Karp to the paper’s readers as a “billionaire man of mystery,” he described the work his company does as “the finding of hidden things.” (Karp has been a beneficiary of a near uniformly credulous media, and not just in his native country: in 2016 the German daily Die Welt ran a story about him whose headline translates as “This Genius Is Building the Most Important Company in the World.” Karp, it’s worth pointing out, formerly served on the board of directors of the Axel Springer publishing group, Die Welt’s parent company.)

Thiel, a Tolkien obsessive of long standing, named the company after the palantíri in The Lord of the Rings—the “far-seeing stones,” one of which was used by the dark lord Sauron to surveil, from his seat of power in Mordor, the inhabitants of Middle Earth. Palantir’s critics, though, are less inclined to invoke Tolkien than they are Philip K. Dick, whose short story “The Minority Report” concerns an authoritarian future society in which “precrime” detectives arrest people for crimes they have not yet carried out but merely formed the intention of committing. Here’s how Karp put it in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2009: “What we do is we use what legal scholars call predicate-based search. So we would look at you, and then we would go out and say, oh, there’s lots of different things in your life that may be indicative of someone involved in bad behavior.”

Along with Thiel’s initial investment of $30 million, the company received an early cash injection of $2 million from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm. Although Palantir also works with corporate clients like Walmart and Wendy’s—which uses Palantir’s AI to manage its inventories of burgers and fries—its earliest and most enduringly important clients were state agencies like the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA, for whom it acts as an outsourced provider of intelligence gathering and analytics. During the first Trump term, Palantir became strongly associated with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), providing it with surveillance and deportation logistics. Palantir’s FALCON software helped ICE collate and analyze vast amounts of data to map family connections and plan future raids. In 2018 ICE used FALCON to prepare for raids on around a hundred 7-Eleven stores across the US.

In October 2023, in the days after the attacks by Hamas on Israeli territory, Palantir took out a full-page ad in The New York Times that read, “Palantir stands with Israel.” The following January, by which time the Israeli government’s genocidal response to those attacks had been underway for three months, the company’s board of directors gathered in Tel Aviv. While there, Karp and Thiel met with Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, and subsequently signed a contract with the country’s defense ministry to provide the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) with AI for advanced targeting capabilities. (In discussing this technology, Karp has used the phrase kill chain, a military term of art that refers to the structure of an attack—the identification of a target, the dispatching of military force to its location, and the assault on and destruction of that target.)

The company’s share price began to rise vertiginously. “Hamas really took us to the moon,” as one characteristically elated r/PLTR poster put it. Karp’s personal wealth and his public ebullience rose with it. In February of this year, by which time Palantir’s market value had surpassed that of the Walt Disney Company, Karp appeared in an online video call with retail investors. Dressed in a white T-shirt, Karp delivered an apparently ad hoc speech, his arms spread wide in a show of triumphal grandeur and his graying curls bouncing jauntily. “We’re doing it!” he said.

We’re doing it! And I’m sure you’re enjoying this as much as I am…. We are crushing it…. We have dedicated our company to the service of the West, and to the United States of America…. Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.

If Hamas took Palantir shareholders to the moon, the return of Donald Trump to the White House, and the subsequent brief and disastrous reign of Elon Musk, took them to Mars. This April it emerged that ICE was paying the company $30 million to develop a software system, known as ImmigrationOS, to track immigrants using biometric and geolocation data. The second Trump administration has deepened Palantir’s already substantial relationship with the federal government, extending its reach across multiple departments. In March Trump signed an executive order directing the government to share data across agencies, raising concerns, as The New York Times put it, that the president “might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power,” and that he might use personal information “to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics.” Palantir’s selection as the main partner for this data-sharing project, the Times reported, was driven by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), at least three members of which were known to have formerly worked at Palantir.

While all this was going on—while he was becoming America’s highest-paid CEO and facilitating a growing police state at home and a genocidal campaign in Gaza—Karp somehow managed to squeeze in writing a book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he managed to dictate one: The Technological Republic, which was published earlier this year, is credited to both Karp and one Nicholas W. Zamiska, Palantir’s head of corporate affairs and legal counsel to the office of the CEO. Speaking with Bari Weiss on her podcast, Karp put it as follows: “I would say, in complete candor, 95 percent plus of the ideas are mine, 90 percent of the writing is his. And the writing is phenomenal.” The writing, I’m sorry to say, is not at all phenomenal; it is uniformly adequate. The division of literary labor, in any case, seems to be such that Karp deployed his own legal counsel in much the same manner as an ordinary person who didn’t want to put in the work might use a generative AI chatbot like ChatGPT, throwing out a mess of half-formed ideas to be put into serviceable prose.

I don’t wish to unduly diminish the contribution of Zamiska, who for all I know may believe that coauthorship of The Technological Republic redounds to his credit, but it’s bad enough having to read and write about this book without also having to mention both these guys every time I refer to it, so I’m going to take Karp’s lead here and proceed on the understanding that the book is essentially his work. And as I made my way sluggishly through its pages—through its business-casual banalities, its pallid apologias for Western civilization and imperial violence—I found myself increasingly preoccupied by a single question: Why did Alexander Karp want to write this thing in the first place?

I suspect that his reasons are at least partly related to the Silicon Valley cult of the tech-founder-as-philosopher-king, and have to do with Karp’s desire to be viewed as not just a businessman but also a public intellectual. This book exists, in other words, in order for Karp to have written a book. Much has been made of his academic and intellectual credentials. He has a doctorate in social theory from Frankfurt’s Goethe Universität. (It has often been noted that while he was there he “studied under” Jürgen Habermas, but that appears to be a stretch; according to Die Welt, he wrote to Habermas asking him to supervise his Ph.D., and Habermas passed him along to a colleague.) He quotes Adorno in his shareholder letters. He plays fast and loose with words like hermeneutics and ontology.

On the evidence of The Technological Republic, Habermas, whatever his reasons, made the right call. Its thesis can be outlined briefly enough: Silicon Valley, whose foundational companies were built on defense contracts, has strayed too far, for too long, from its original mission. Its prevailing culture, influenced by the “woke” ideas trickling downward from elite institutions of higher education, is such that building technologies to serve the “national interest” has become almost unthinkable for a generation of talented but misguided engineers. These brilliant minds, argues Karp, are being wasted on lucrative but frivolous projects—on-demand laundry services, apps that can bring you a burrito in a taxi, and so on. “The software industry,” he writes,

should rebuild its relationship with government and redirect its effort and attention to constructing the technology and artificial intelligence capabilities that will address the most pressing challenges that we collectively face. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation and the articulation of a national project—what is this country, what are our values, and for what do we stand.

Karp’s friendship with Thiel is often said to be structured around their ideological differences. Thiel, who supported Trump before it was profitable or popular to do so, is widely viewed as a libertarian. Karp has in the past publicly identified as a progressive and has even occasionally, and absurdly, referred to himself as a “socialist.” But in reality Karp is no more a progressive than Thiel—whose fortune is likewise derived largely from government contracts—is a libertarian. Much of The Technological Republic is given over to the kind of broad-strokes antiwokeism that can be found in dispiriting abundance in the nonfiction section of any airport bookstore. One of the book’s four sections is entitled “The Hollowing Out of the American Mind”—a typically overripe allusion to Allan Bloom’s classic conservative critique of cultural relativism in American higher education, The Closing of the American Mind. Through this long central section, Karp doesn’t elaborate so much as endlessly restate the argument about Silicon Valley having lost the courage of its foundational convictions. (It is often said that many nonfiction books should really have been magazine articles; this one feels like a LinkedIn post mercilessly stretched to nearly three hundred pages.)

The book addresses a 2018 controversy around Project Maven, an AI warfare program for which Google was subcontracted by the Pentagon to provide machine learning and data management software. When the staff circulated a petition protesting the company’s involvement in technologies of war, Google discontinued its work on the project. Karp diagnoses a complacency about national security among younger “elites” who did not live through the geopolitical threats of the twentieth century. “The most capable generation of coders,” he writes, “has never experienced a war or genuine social upheaval. Why court controversy with your friends or risk their disapproval by working for the US military when you can retreat into the perceived safety of building another app?” Palantir stepped in to fill the defense-tech gap left by Google’s cowardly decision, a move that Karp implies should be a template for Silicon Valley’s future.

He repeatedly claims that coders who want nothing to do with military technology are suffering from moral atrophy. Though they might seem, to you or me, to be acting on principle—because they oppose war in general or have a specific aversion to serving the interests of empire—they are motivated, he insists, not by a higher cause but by the desire to avoid the opprobrium of their peers. 

Such people, for Karp, are unwitting victims of self-censorship, who won’t even permit themselves to think about offending the prevailing morals:

The dystopian future that Orwell and others have imagined may be near, but not because of the surveillance state or contraptions built by Silicon Valley giants that rob us of our privacy or most intimate moments alone. It is we, not our technical creations, who are to blame for failing to encourage and enable the radical act of belief in something above and beyond, and external to, the self. The speed and enthusiasm with which the culture skewers anyone for their perceived transgressions and errors—with which we descend on one another for deviations from the norm—only further diminishes our capacity to move toward truth.

The book is filled with this sort of sanctimonious guff. If it were just another denunciation of cancel culture, it would be merely boring and belated. But coming from Alexander Karp, the CEO and cofounder of Palantir Technologies, this concern-trolling about a growing censoriousness in “the culture” feels almost intentional in its absurdity. At times I approached the book, perhaps to preserve my own psychic integrity, as an avant-garde exercise in narrative unreliability, an experiment in the dizzying extremes of dramatic irony that I associate most with Charles Kinbote, the comically oblivious narrator of Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Again and again I found myself responding to some sententious lament about Silicon Valley’s lack of moral values by scrawling “You run Palantir!” in the margin.

Taken in isolation, Karp’s critique of Silicon Valley—that its most talented engineers and entrepreneurs have no sense of the larger public good—is merely banal, rather than wrong. What makes it deeply strange, and genuinely unsettling, is that what he positions as a moral project worthy of these great talents is essentially an algorithmic arms race with America’s geopolitical rivals.

This project is, of course, one that Karp views as a defense of the West and its values. But he has almost nothing to say about these values, which he seems uninterested in even defining, let alone analyzing. One of the more aggravating aspects of the book is Karp’s perpetual gesturing in the general direction of philosophy—of serious subjects and serious engagements with them—without ever actually attempting such a thing. On many occasions, for instance, he invokes the philosophical notion of “the good life,” by way of a claim that the talented tech workers of Silicon Valley, and the culture of which they are a part, have entirely abandoned the question of what might constitute it. “The antiseptic nature of modern discourse,” he writes,

dominated by an unwavering commitment to justice but deeply wary when it comes to substantive positions on the good life, is a product of our own reluctance, and indeed fear, to offend, to alienate, and to risk the disapproval of the crowd.

Silicon Valley, he writes elsewhere, is the product of “a cultural and moral agnosticism if not relativism that assiduously avoided anything approaching substantive views about the good life.” If Karp has any ideas about what “the good life” might actually be, though, he has been extraordinarily successful at keeping them secret. A cynical reader might conclude, in the absence of any other guidance, that perhaps the good life involves becoming a billionaire by selling AI weapons guidance systems and helping governments carry out mass surveillance on their citizens. A more generous reader might conclude that Karp is simply a busy man and doesn’t have the time to think this stuff through.

imilarly, the book never delivers on its grandly Platonic title. Not only does Karp fail to describe the “Technological Republic” he invokes; he seems unaware that such a thing might even be expected of him. In this sense, among others, the book reads as the work of someone who wishes to be thought of as a public intellectual but isn’t willing to put in the effort to become one. In the brief passages in which Karp discusses his own leadership of Palantir and his ideas about what constitutes an effective organization, his primary goal is apparently to present himself as an unconventional thinker, by means of strenuously eclectic references—what businesses can learn from the social organization of honeybee swarms, what start-up founders can learn from experimental theater, what Stanley Milgram’s psychological experiments can teach us about creating something new in business, and so on. Such attempts at intellectual grooviness would be risible enough in themselves, were it not for the fact that all this disruptive innovation and free thinking is ultimately in service of a consolidation of state power and business interests—what is normally referred to as the military-industrial complex, which since the end of World War II has been at the root of many long and brutal foreign conflicts, as well as the fortunes of many ruthless and clever opportunists.

Another reason The Technological Republic feels strangely untethered is that it seems to have been written toward the prospect of either a second Biden term or a Harris presidency. By the time it was published, in mid-February—when the princelings of Palo Alto were pledging mass fealty at the court of Mar-a-Lago, and Musk’s DOGE was setting about dismantling the federal government—a book-length argument for a closer relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley, and for a tech industry aligned with the broader project of American power, had missed its moment. By that point Mark Zuckerberg had shed his liberal skin and undergone a transfiguration into a kind of uncanny-valley MAGA-bro. In late May he announced that Meta would be partnering with the defense-tech company Anduril to “design, build, and field a range of integrated XR [Extended Reality] products that provide warfighters with enhanced perception and enable intuitive control of autonomous platforms on the battlefield.”

The partnership between Meta and Anduril is itself evidence of a major cultural shift. The founder of Anduril (also a Tolkien reference, to a sword in The Lord of the Rings) is Palmer Luckey, best known as the inventor of the Oculus Rift VR headset. After Facebook bought Oculus, Luckey was an employee for a time; in 2017 the company fired him after he donated $10,000 to a pro-Trump group that paid for a billboard campaign deriding Hillary Clinton as “Too Big to Jail.” (Zuckerberg has recently expressed regret about the firing.)

Announcing his company’s partnership with Meta, Luckey said, “My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that.” One gadget Anduril is developing is called Eagle Eyes—a headset that provides “warfighters” with “360° threat awareness.” Luckey has invoked the video games Call of Duty and Halo. “The idea,” he said, “is to give warfighters superhuman vision, superhuman perception, superhuman hearing, and allow them to communicate with each other and large teams of autonomous systems.” Anduril is precisely the kind of project to which Karp, in The Technological Republic, argues engineers should be devoting their talents. “All these people who used to be tech bros are now defense tech bros,” as Noam Perski, Palantir’s international government lead, put it in a speech last December at a defense tech summit in Tel Aviv.

Recently a venture capitalist friend told me that he knew several people in Silicon Valley who, just a few years ago, would have walked briskly in the opposite direction of anything remotely military-related, and who were now working on defense tech. When I agreed that there did seem to be something of a change in the ideological microclimates of the Bay Area, he said that there was no something of about it; it was a hard pivot, and an exceptionally fertile one for investors.

See, for instance, Daniel Ek, the cofounder and CEO of Spotify, who led a recent €600 million investment into the German start-up Helsing. The company, cofounded by a video game developer and a former employee of Germany’s defense ministry, makes military drones and AI software for weapons systems and to improve battlefield decision-making. (Spotify subscribers may be interested to know that simply by streaming, say, Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” or Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” they can now help to fund the international arms trade.)

In June the US Army launched something called Executive Innovation Corps, which it described in a press release as “a new initiative designed to fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation.” Under the program, four high-level tech executives were commissioned into the army reserve as lieutenant colonels. The four new officers were Palantir’s CTO, Shyam Sankar; Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth; OpenAI’s chief product officer, Kevin Weil; and Bob McGrew, an adviser at Thinking Machines Lab who was formerly OpenAI’s chief research officer.

The tech execs were sworn in on Friday, June 13. On Monday, the next day of trading, Palantir shares closed at an all-time high. If you want to know what a technological republic might look like, forget Alexander Karp’s insipid book; consider what is being constructed around you, and how little it resembles any kind of republic at all. Consider the bad times, and who they are good for.

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