The Technological Republic: What Does Silicon Valley Owe America?

The Technological Republic begins with a question about obligation: what does an engineer owe the society that made the engineer possible? Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska argue that Silicon Valley has drifted away from ambitious public problems and toward advertising, entertainment and consumer convenience — abandoning an older partnership between technological talent, industry and the American state.

The book traces technology’s historical relationship with government and national power, arguing that many defining achievements of the twentieth century emerged when engineers, institutions and public purpose were aligned around difficult collective goals. Karp and Zamiska want technologists to recover that sense of mission, particularly as artificial intelligence, defense and geopolitical competition make technological capacity increasingly consequential. Their argument also comes from inside that relationship: Karp is Palantir’s co-founder and CEO, while Zamiska works in senior corporate and legal roles at the company, whose software is used by U.S. and allied defense and intelligence agencies.

This episode explores both the force and the tension of that argument. We look at Silicon Valley’s relationship with the American state, Palantir’s position within the story the authors tell, and the difference between asking technologists to serve something larger than themselves and deciding what that larger purpose should be. Along the way, we place the book beside Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue and his concern with what happens when societies lose a shared language for arguing about the good.

If technological power needs a purpose larger than profit, who gets to define that purpose — and what happens when the people building the tools are also helping decide what they should be used for?

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The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska · 2025

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Narration in this episode is AI-assisted. The writing and the analysis are human.

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