Palantir's Peculiar Sales-Pitch

A Republic...if you can creep it

Theodor W. Adorno

I have a review out today on Bloomberg.com of The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West by Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, the CEO and general counsel of Palantir, the surveillance and data analytics firm founded by Karp and Peter Thiel. Here’s how I begin:

It’s a major complaint of the authors of The Technological Republic (Crown Currency, Feb. 18) that people today shrink from saying what they think. Too many of us, they insist, give mealy-mouthed, wishy-washy answers when asked. We have become uncomfortable with making moral and aesthetic judgments, they say.

I agree, and I’m going to break the taboos. The Technological Republic is a terrible book: badly written, tedious, and — when they can be gleaned in between the jargon, clichés and repetitions — full of bad ideas, ranging from the merely dubious to the execrable and disturbing. This book is dismal on the level of both form and content. It heralds a dark and depressing future.

As you can see, I did not like it. The book is extremely creepy: It becomes clear in the course of reading this “Technological Republic” the authors propose is essentially some kind of merger or acquisition of the United States government by Silicon Valley, a state run by an engineering elite that would be empowered to “ruthlessly” pursue “outcomes.” It’s a proposal for a kind of tech oligarchy: “no public "oversight for me, surveillance for thee.” I contend it’s a work of reactionary modernism.

If the ideas are bad, so is the writing. In fact, I strongly suspect the authors, who are big proponents of the technology throughout the book, used A.I. to write it. And so does A.I.: I dumped the PDF into ChatGPT and it was very pleased to tell me that it was 85 percent certain that there was AI augmentation based on the frequency of “Clichéd Historical Generalizations,” “Overused Predictive Statements,” and “No Specific Examples Given.” Now, should we trust AI? I don’t know, but the authors seem to think so!

Businessmen routinely write stupid books, that’s not surprising, but Mr. Karp is a little bit of a different case. He’s a highly educated man: he has a PhD in critical social theory from the Goethe University Frankfurt, where Jürgen Habermas was his dissertation supervisor, until they apparently had some sort of disagreement. Ultimately, he wrote his thesis under the supervision of Karola Brede, a sociologist whose work incorporates Freudian psychoanalysis. Karp’s thesis is entitled “Aggression in the Life-World: Expanding Parsons’ Concept of Aggression Through a Description of the Connection Between Jargon, Aggression, and Culture.” In 2020, Moira Weigel wrote a penetrating analysis of the dissertation. And you can read the whole thing translated here.

What struck me is that a big part of the thesis deals with Theodor Adorno’s book The Jargon of Authenticity, his critique of the existentialist clichés circulating in postwar Germany, which happens to be a favorite of mine. Adorno, as you probably will not be surprised to learn, thought it was all a bit fascist. But Karp was not satisfied with Adorno’s poetics: he wanted to get into the underlying psychological mechanisms that make such a jargon work. As Weigel writes:

The Jargon of Authenticity investigates precisely the social function of ontology, or how it turns “authenticity” into a cultural form, circulated within mass culture. Adorno also alludes to the specifically German inheritance of jargon—the resemblance between Heidegger’s celebration of völkisch rural life and Nazi celebration of the same (1973, 3). Yet, Karp argues, Adorno does not provide an account of how a deception or illusion of authenticity came to be a structure in the life-world….

Karp contrasts Adorno with both Freud and Simmel, and finds Adorno to be more pessimistic than either of these predecessors. Compared to Freud, who argued that culture successfully repressed both libidinal and destructive drives in the name of moral principles, Karp writes that Adorno regarded culture as fundamentally amoral. Rather than successfully repressing antisocial drives, Karp writes, late capitalist culture sates its members with “false satisfactions.” People look for opportunities to express their needs for self-preservation. However, since they know that their needs cannot be fully satisfied, they simultaneously fall over themselves to destroy the memory of the false fulfillment they have had. Repressed awareness of the false nature of their own satisfaction produces the ambient aggression that people take out on strangers.

…Jargon gains its power from the fact that those who speak, and hear, it really are searching for a lost community. The very presence of the stranger demonstrates that such community cannot be simply given; jargon is powerful precisely in proportion to how much the shared context of life has been destroyed. It therefore offers a “dishonest answer to an honest longing” for intersubjectivity, gaining strength in proportion to the intensity the need that has been thwarted (Karp 2002, 85). Wishes that contradict social norms are brought into the web of social relations (Geflecht der Lebenswelt), in such a way that they do not need to be sanctioned or punished for violating social norms (91). On the contrary, they serve to bind members of social groups to one another.

So, this is all very weird. To recap, Karp wrote his dissertation on a form of rhetoric that employs aggression to bind a community together and then he goes and writes a terrible, jargon-filled, cliché-riddled book about how the United States needs to rearm with the help of Silicon Valley. The shittiness, one might say, is the point: is Karp intentionally using jargon in this technical sense to create his own vision of Volksgemeinschaft? Maybe, but the rhetoric is not stirring! As for “aggression in the life-world,” Karp is saying “Yes, please!” In the book, Karp explicitly says how he wants to cultivate a more martial society to defend “the West.”

The idea of reverse engineering the Frankfurt School’s critique of low-key fascism to do a little low-key fascism yourself might strike one as crackpot stuff. But, if you haven’t noticed, the crackpots are running the show these days!

More materially, once DOGE’s slash and burn of the federal bureaucracy is complete, who do you think will pick up the slack of lost administrative capacity and state functon? Well, private firms like Palantir! We may be getting “the technological republic” as I write. But right now, it doesn’t really feel like “a republic” at all.