Alexander Karp & Nicholas Zamiska's recent book is an obvious promotion of Palantir as a blueprint for what the authors feel 'big tech' needs to become: corporations aligned with the purpose and goals of the nation 🇺🇸. While that is the foundational motivation of the book, there were several key points that can be extracted from the rhetoric of national duty that I found interesting, if not already familiar

The AI-arms race

The urgency driving the authors is the anarchic nature of geopolitics and a fear that the consumer-obsessed tech industry which has pulled back and away from contributing to the development of new weapons technology leaves the US in a dangerous position relative to its adversaries. This, of course, wasn't always the case. The 20th century offers key examples of science and technology being coupled with and contributing to national goals, perhaps most notably the Manhattan project

In the 21st century it is not just the development of artificial intelligence, but weapons systems infused with AI, that is key to America and 'the West' maintaining a dominant position over its adversaries (not named) in the established world order

What Government can learn from Silicon Valley

…the values of the engineering culture that gave rise to Silicon Valley, including its obsessive focus on outcomes and disinterest in theater and posturing—while complex and imperfect—will in the end prove vital to our ability to advance our national security and welfare

Stories of government inefficiency abound and they are often mind-boggling given the scale of the government (the authors highlight that some 207,000 government employees handle procurement alone). Additionally, the US military suffers from inefficient bureaucratic bloat (from its inability to purchase two-way radios during the Gulf War to the more than seven hundred pages of specifications on how to bake cookies) that is need of correcting. At one point, Palantir sued the US Army for failing to follow the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994, which requires the government to consider buying commercially-available products before attempting to build an intelligence system from scratch (which the US Army had already spent more than $3 billion developing)

The authors make a simple and clear argument:

The ability of the government to continue to provide for the welfare and security of the public will also require a willingness on the part of the state to borrow from the idiosyncratic organizational culture that enabled so many companies in Silicon Valley to reshape entire sectors of our economy. A commitment to advancing outcomes at the expense of theater, to empowering those on the margins of an organization who may be closest to the problem, and setting aside vain theological debates in favor of even marginal and often imperfect progress is what allows the American technology industry to transform our lives. Those values also have the potential to transform our government

The amoralism of Silicon Valley

[T]he most structural issue [in the U.S. and across the West]—the current generation's abandonment of belief or conviction in broader political projects

Citing the long period of stability and peace after World War II on one hand and the "woke" movement on the other, the authors lament the creation of a generation of technological agnostics, 'whose principal and animating interest is the act of creation itself—decoupled from any worldview or political project.' From employee protests over government projects to the diminished capacity 'to form their own authentic beliefs about the world', the authors are concerned that this generation is 'vulnerable to becoming instruments for the plans and designs of others'

A return to nationalism

[T]he nation-state itself, the most effective means of collective organization in pursuit of a shared purpose that the world has ever known, was cast aside as an obstacle to progress

In a chapter titled, 'The next thousand years' (a reference to a quote from Lee Kuan Yew), the authors assert the need for the creation of a national identity and culture. They reflect on the post-modern existential crises that Western countries have with the topics of culture and identity, from the fallout of Edward Said's 'Orientalism' to the reactionary fear of German society towards anything resembling national pride

It might have been just and necessary to dismantle the old order. We should now build something together in its place

Summary

It would be easy to dismiss the ideas in this book as simply a vehicle for warming up to the nationalist impulses of MAGA / Trump 2.0 in an effort to ensure Palantir's place in the government's supply chain. However, the key challenge we face—the lack of a shared national culture and identity beyond empty phrases like 'pluralism' and 'tolerance' (which we do not actually possess)—is well stated. While the governments of the US and the rest of the West continue to engage in endless handwringing and civic theater with very little forward motion, the center of the world order continues to drift further and further away, east across the Pacific ocean