Another Bizarre Corporate Manifesto Released Into the Wild

Another Silicon Valley CEO aspires for profundity and lands... somewhere else

Photo by Lala Azizli on Unsplash

Ever since researching and writing The Ideas Industry, I have felt an obligation to keep periodic tabs on how Silicon Valley founders attempt to engage the marketplace of ideas. See, for example, my critique of Marc Andreessen’s technological manifesto. Indeed, there’s now enough there there for me to publish journal articles about the topic.

I’m hardly the only one keeping tabs on this genre. TechDirt’s Mike Masnick has also written about, as he put it, “the disturbing trend of tech founders and VCs nodding along to the neoreactionary pitch that democracy is holding back innovation, and that what the industry really needs is a ‘tech-friendly’ strongman to sweep away institutional guardrails.”

So when I saw over the weekend that Palantir decided to publish a 22-point executive summary of co-founder Alex Karp’s co-authored book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, I knew I was gonna have to take a look at it.

The manifesto has prompted some searing critiques — see Masnick as well as Spencer Ackerman, for example. For the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World, the complicating fact is that, without any context, some of the 22 points are perfectly anodyne.

Consider, for example, point 8: “Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.” Sure, I think a lot of government employees deserve to be paid more — that sounds great! Though if this point really means that it’s cool for public employees to have private companies on the side, well, that sounds an awful lot like corruption — so maybe even this point isn’t so anodyne.

Let’s just focus on my wheelhouse, the international relations component of the manifesto. Here are the highlights:

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software…..

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost….

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

Okay so there is a lot going on in these points. In order:

• Pro tip: if someone writes about “the limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone,” it means they are relying on a caricatured definition of “soft power,” because it ain’t soaring rhetoric. Indeed, one could argue that the most important component of soft power is the perception of policy competence - which might be why the scholar who coined the term was so disdainful of the current administration.

• There are arguments for having the military develop AI, but the “come on, everyone’s doing it” line of reasoning sounds awfully high-schoolish. The better argument is that AI would greatly enhance military power — which might be true but there are a lot of kinks that still need to be worked out of the system.

• “National service” arguments feel very 1990s, and not in a good way. I am partially persuaded by the Kantian logic of having wars linked to a draft. In the end, however, this would mostly weaken a military that still represents one of the few remaining competent and trusted institutions in the country.

• The atomic age is not ending, and anyone who tells you differently is selling you AI something. Even an AI arms race fails to obviate the nuclear arms race.

• I mostly agree with points 13 and 14 — although I do worry that Karp seems to wish there was a world war so everyone could remember what one looked like.

Then there’s the batshit crazy stuff — like these last two points:

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

I don’t even think the ghost of Samuel Huntington would buy the crap that Karp is trying to sell in these last two points.

Having Palantir post this manifesto seems manifestly unnecessary — and yet, Palantir went and did it. Some of the other planks of the manifesto, like criticizing “the pervasive intolerance of religious belief” or claiming, “many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime,” sound positively Trumpian in their employment of truthful hyperbole. The whole manifesto is super-friendly to a Trump administration theory of state-corporate symbiosis that is definitely not fascist — if you read Niall Ferguson at least.

As Masnick warns:

When your value to the government is primarily ideological alignment with a specific political project, you become a clear and visible target the moment that project loses power.

One of the many problems with fascism as a business strategy is that it only works if the fascists stay in power indefinitely. It’s a woefully unpopular ideological position, especially in the US — betting on a temporarily ascendant horse that has no chance in a longer race.

But Karp and Palantir have bet the farm that either Trumpism will remain a powerful force within the government or that they will be so deeply buried in the systems that it would be effectively impossible to rip them out when more grounded leadership enters the picture.

That’s an incredibly risky bet, and one I doubt will pay off.

So, to sum up: The folks at Palantir think they’ve got it all sorted out in the marketplace of ideas. This half-based¹ manifesto suggests otherwise.

1. I meant to say “half-baked” here but it still kinda works.