The freedom, peace and security that allowed Silicon Valley to flourish was quietly underwritten by an American military that these same Silicon Valley technologists are ambivalent about supporting.
Far from its origins in the Second World War, Silicon Valley focused on consumer technology, which gave it no greater ideal than profit and comfort. This must change, or so argues Alex Karp, the cofounder-CEO of the controversial defense contractor Palantir Technologies, in his new book “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West”
Why, asks Karp, are technologists and knowledge workers ambivalent about working to support invasive corporate advertising, but ardently opposed to (militaristically) defending the Free World?
Writing of Silicon Valley engineers, but no doubt thinking also of millions of other complacent American professionals: “They exist in a cultural space that enjoys the protection of the American security umbrella, but are responsible for none of its costs.”
Palantir and Karp are entwined with a techno-libertarianism that sounds increasingly unhinged: company cofounder Peter Thiel just recently gave a bizarre interview with the New York Times in which, among other quirks, he gave a long, extended pause when he was asked whether humanity “should” survive. Karp might respond the strength and security of the United States affords a diverse array of perspectives, including eccentric billionaires.
Karp reminds, though: “The victors of history have a habit of growing complacent at precisely the wrong moment.”
Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes
- “The market is a powerful engine of destruction, creative and otherwise, but it often fails to deliver what is most needed at the right time”
- Book argues that “software industry should rebuild its relationship with government” and solve issues “we collectively face”
- “Silicon Valley once stood at the center of American military production and national security”
- In November 1944, FDR wrote Vannevar Bush (whom in 1942 Collier’s called “the man who may win the war”) that the use of science for military goals “cannot be profitably employed in times of peace”
- Survey in 2023 said just 1.3% of state legislators are scientists or engineers —unlike the Jefferson, Franklin and James Madison standard
- Joseph Licklider was DARPA hire and his “Man Computer symbiosis” paper from March 1960 was backed by US Air Force
- “For decades, the US government was viewed in Silicon Valley as an impediment to innovation and a magnet for controversy – the obstacle to progress, not its logical partner” — the focus was all consumer
- “They (Silicon Valley engineers ) exist in a cultural space that enjoys the protection of the American security umbrella, but are responsible for none of its costs.”
- Oppenheimer’s undergraduate teacher and physicist Percy Williams Bridgeman wrote “scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. It’s their job to find the facts. There’s no sin connected with it – no morals” —scientists are amoral
- When Noam Chomsky, Douglas Hofstadter and others criticize LLMs as just ingesting other’s creations, is that chauvinism because it’s also really all other humans do too? (this is the OpenAI argument)
- In November 1957 at a banquet in Pittsburgh, Herbot A Simon said with 10 years a digital computer would be chess champion (it took a CMU initiative in 1996)
- “The victors of history have a habit of growing complacent at precisely the wrong moment”
- Fujiyama’s legendary End of History essay
- Alfred Nobel: “the only thing that will ever prevent nations from beginning war is terror.”
- John Lewis Gaddis: long peace
- In February 1951, Eisenhower wrote to Edward Birmingham that Europe must rearm because the United States “cannot be a modern Rome guarding the far frontiers with their own legions.”
- Big Idea Famine paper in 2018 (I wrote about the idea too)
- The West abandoned “the stick in favor of the carrot alone”
- Anne Applebaum (whose work I’ve read): “ there are no rules without someone to enforce them.”
- Author argues Paulo Frerie Pedagogy of the Opposed from 1968 was part of mischaracterized binary of the world between oppressor and oppressed
- The famous 1976 Skokie Illinois ACLU defense of neo-Nazis seems impossible today
- Allan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind
- Manuel Castells Olivan: elites are cosmopolitan, people are local
- Zuckerberg and his generation of “technological agnostics” were building for building’s sake, void of a grand worldview or political project
- Max Planck: science advances when defenders die
- In 1937 Ferdinand Lundberg published America’s 60 families
- Protestant establishment in 1964: “If an upper class degenerates into a caste, “ Baltzell wrote “the traditional authority of an establishment is in grave danger of disintegrating, while society becomes a field for careerists seeking success and affluence”
- John Rawls: the priority of right and ideas of the good
- Agnes Heller: “Justice is the skeleton: the good life. It’s the flesh and blood.”
- 1976: Frederic Cheyette part of evaluation of western civ courses
- Samuel Huntington’s influential if reductive 1993 clash of civilization essay and map
- Kwame Appiah and others reject the concept of “the west”
- Edward Said influential and then controversial Orientalism: a book that is not popularly known but shaped academia by creating many jobs by being opposed to this “eurocentrism” and has formed a foundation of academia today. That the identity of a speaker matters at least as much as what they’re saying: this canon wars tore down but did not rebuild
- Homebrew Computer Club founder Lee Felenstein both in Philadelphia
- Steven levy ‘s 1984 Heroes of the Computer Revolution was influential and tracked counterculture rejection of central authority
- In a chapter introduced by dot com era eToys and Toby Lenk: “The energy of the era was directed at addressing the inefficiencies that would-be founders encountered in their own quotidian lives; it empowered a certain type of excavation of the problems of modern life, which against the backdrop of abroad and essentially successful challenge to any sense of a national project had become oriented around material culture. everyone could be a founder, because everyone encountered things that needed fixing and better ways to navigate their daily lives. This democratization of the potential for producing novel ideas in business, to challenge incumbent, has been one of the most enduring effects of the rise of the consumer Internet, its websites and the avalanche of apps.
- Peter Turchin’s 2023 End Times: we created an “overproduction” of elites
- “The entrepreneurial energy of a generation was essentially redirected toward creating the lifestyle technology that would enable the highly educated classes at the helms of these firms and writing the code for their apps to feel as if they had more income than they did. The cognitive dissonance for this generation was severe. They have a cultural and educational pedigree of an aristocracy, but not the bank account.”
- Talcott Parsons on men who use sense of being unjustly treated as “an alibi for failure”
- Eck honeybee swarm; like starlings: the information comes from the edges not a single leader (inspires Palantir, author said)
- Keith Johnstone’s improv book was once given to all Palantir staff: book identifies “status” as something navigated by actors (and coworkers)
- January 1988 Peter Drucker HBR essay predicting the orchestra model of few intermediaries to CEO-conductor and specialist artists
- “The central insight of Silicon Valley was not merely to hire the best and brightest but to treat them as such, to allow them the flexibility and freedom and space to create. The most effective software companies are artist colonies, filled with temperamental and talented souls. And it is their unwillingness to conform, to submit to power, that is often their most valuable instinct.”
- Solomon Asch Swarthmore conformity studies with lines
- Stanley Milgram’s electric shock experiments
- A startup needs “constructive disobedience”. — outright dereliction of duty is as misguided as unquestioning implementation
- Us Air Force bought radios for Kuwait via Japan and this spurred Clinton-Gore procurement reform
- Palantir case study getting established as Zynga and Groupon ascendant
- Fox and the hare fable: Silicon Valley is Fox
- Tetlock at Penn grouped his experts in these groups too: foxes (many small things) better predictors than hedgehogs (one big thing)
- Toyota five whys: ask why a problem occurred and then ask why four more times: “most companies are populated with people so fearful of losing their jobs that any hint of dysfunction is quickly covered up”
- Galton cow weight guessing: “ the trustworthiness of a democratic judgment”
- Michael Sandel “market triumphalism” — no discourse about whether Groupon and Zynga should face commanded do much capital
- “The leaders of Silicon Valley have for the most part been content to submit to this wisdom of the market, allowing its logic and values to plant their own. It is our own temerity and unwillingness to risk the scorn of the crowd that have deprived us of the opportunity to discuss in any meaningful way what the world that we inhabit should be and what companies should exist.”
- Voltaire: set two guilty men free before one innocent one us imprisoned — William Blackstone later argued 10 to 1 ratio, Thomas Starkie said 99 to 1
- “Vast parts of the American landscape, from law-enforcement, to medicine, education, have become innovation deserts where the valley has been told, and often warned repeatedly, not to tread.”
- Calls limiting surveillance and software in law enforcement a luxury belief like Rob Henderson called it
- “We essentially incentivize candidates for public service to become wealthy before entering office, or to monetize their position after their departure”
- “We cling to the hope that the most noble pious among us will also have the ambition to seek power. But history tells us that the opposite is far more often in the case. The eradication of any space for forgiveness – a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche – may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.”
- Plato in the Republic said that “good men will not consent to govern for Cash or honors” for “they aren’t ambitious “
- Dunbar’s number is from 1993
- Lee Kuan Yew made language mandates in Singapore to develop national identity from Malaysia and China — Kissinger credited him as an example of man shaping history
- Thomas Carlyle: “great man” view of history had been popular then faded
- (((Reminded of my coworker Sam describing the idea of the “auteur” has been complicated because many artists play a role on a project))))
- Richard Sennett: how to avoid “the evil of a shared national identity”
- Martha Nussbaum criticized “patriotic pride” as “morally dangerous” since “primary allegiance” should be “ to the community of human beings in the entire world” — all this was post-national but author says this was premature
- Ernest Renan: the “graver mistake” is when race is confused with nation” in 1882 — the nation is “an everyday plebiscite”
- James K A Smith: “western liberal democracy have lived off the borrowed capital of the church for centuries”
- Rudiger Fahlenbrach assessment of U.S. companies from 1992-2002: founder led companies outperform professional CEO companies — Not just family controlled but founder led
- Purdue researchers analyzing significant patents found 31% more from 1993-2003 of founder firms rather than professional CEOs
- Says Silicon Valley giving equity to all employees in 1990s was radical: community owned