Silicon Valley Humanists – Econlib

… the path forward will involve a reconciliation of a commitment to the free market, and its atomization and isolation of individual wants and needs, with the insatiable human desire for some form of collective experience and endeavor… the atomization of daily life in America and the broader West left a lane open for technology firms, including ours, to recruit and retain a generation of talent that wanted to do something other than tinker with financial markets or consult.

—Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, p. 217

Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska are, respectively, CEO and head of corporate affairs at Palantir Technologies, a Silicon Valley firm that provides software to businesses and governments. It uses machine intelligence to solve problems, often having to do with security.

In their book, The Technological Republic, the authors recount how in 2012 the American military used Palantir software in Afghanistan to better anticipate the location of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).

In Afghanistan, software made by Palantir had found a committed band of supporters, particularly in the U.S. Special Forces, with teams where intelligence, and the ability to quickly navigate across databases and stitch together context in advance of missions, were critical. p. 152

Part of the book is a meditation on start-up culture. But most of the book reads like something a Professor of Classics might have written circa 1985, in the middle of the Decade of Greed, lamenting the students’ crass materialism and lack of interest in Western Civilization or the higher goals in life.

In style, The Technological Republic also owes something to 20th century academic intellectual writing. In just one six-page section, the authors refer to and/or quote Thomas Hart Benton, Jackson Pollock, Jack Kerouac, Rene Girard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Isaiah Berlin, Herbert Hoover, and John Dewey.

The description of start-up culture emphasizes an organizational structure with minimal hierarchy. I myself have written, “The more titles an organization has, the more it will select for people who really care about titles.” The authors write,

… we have, at Palantir, attempted to foster a culture in which status is seen as an instrumental, not intrinsic good… Every human institution, including the technology giants of Silicon Valley, has a means of organizing personnel, and such organizations will often require the elevation of certain individuals over others. The difference is the rigidity of those structures, that is, the speed with which they can be dismantled or rearranged, and the proportion of the creative energy of a workforce that goes into maintaining such structures and to self-promotion within them. p. 125

They point out that the engineering mindset is pragmatic: the software has to work. Employees must feel accountable. Instead of a culture of blame-shifting, bad results are studied in terms of systemic causes and solutions.

Higher Motives

The authors complain that too many Silicon Valley companies are looking to make big profits from solving little problems. They would prefer to see more focus on what they see as the important issues, such as national security and health.

While the authors take many opportunities to scorn finance, consulting, and especially the development of applications for shopping and entertainment, they are not social justice activists. They take pride in the application of Palantir software to help police.

The view that advanced technology and software have no place in local law enforcement is an archetypical “luxury belief,” to use the term of the author Rob Henderson. The risk is that we abandon a moral or ethical system oriented around results—the outcomes that matter most to people (less hunger, crime, and disease) in favor of a far more performative discourse…. p. 177-178

While I came away from The Technological Republic with some insights, I was also left with some important questions that I would like to have seen addressed.

One question is how Palantir was able to adapt to sell to governments and large corporations. Large organizations undertake thorough evaluations of major purchases, putting would-be sellers through a long and frustrating process. You can spend months meeting with mid-level staff who are not even authorized to make a purchase decision. You have to navigate the complex internal politics and competing interests within the organization. I would have liked to see some examples illustrating how Palantir was able to do that.

Another question concerns the government’s culture. How concerned are the authors that the government may not be able to adapt to the pace of change, especially in the nascent field of artificial intelligence? What recommendations would they have to offer to public officials?

The final question that I have concerns the nature of the “republic” that the authors have in mind. Is a partnership between the engineering elites and the political leadership really the solution? What role would it leave for the rest of us?