The Word is Not Enough
Palantir and the Language of Creation: A Review of “The Technological Republic.”
In the beginning, and recurrently, the Earth is a formless void. God declares, “Let there be light,” and the world starts to articulate. Light is separated from darkness, sky from water, land from sea. Plants appear on the land, birds in the sky, and creatures in the sea. Finally, Adam is created and granted the power to name all the animals, and from his rib comes a woman, Eve, whose name means to give life.
Unlike many other creation myths, the first chapter of Genesis features no violence. There is no swallowing of children, murdering of fathers, or stabbing of brothers. God speaks words animated with “ruach” or spirit: a “language of creation” that does not merely describe, but invents. This language gives shape to chaos by organizing it into a structure of categories, and enables a coherent lifeworld to emerge.
Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies and co-author with Nicholas Zamiska of The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, belongs to this tradition that begins with Genesis, and he continues it. What else is the purpose of his mysterious software company? The son of a Jewish father and a mother who converted to Judaism, Karp was raised in what he describes as “a heavily Jewish environment.” “We were pro-Israel, a super erudite, heavily Jewish environment,” he told Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale in August 2023 on Lonsdale’s “American Optimist” podcast. In a recent interview with Fortune, which calls him “arguably the most interesting man in software,” Karp is described as studding his responses with references to “the Talmud, […] the Old Testament, and the New Testament”.
The background is common in the melting pot of America, but Karp has taken things much further. In a profile by Maureen Dowd for the New York Times published last August, “Alex Karp Has Money and Power: So What Does He Want?”, Karp stated that he donates money to political causes in multiples of 18 because “it’s mystical—18 brings good luck in the tradition of kabbalah.” It isn’t a coincidence that his new book was published on the 18th of February.
The Technological Republic is Karp’s English-language debut following his co-authored 2023 German-language book Von Artificial zu Augumented Intelligence. Eclectic in content, The Technological Republic is strikingly evocative of Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel’s Zero to One: a book of philosophy disguised as an airport paperback about business. Moving through detailed analysis on honeybee swarms, excursions on sociologist Robert Bellah, charts of defense spending growth, and meditations on Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, Karp’s The Technological Republic argues that Silicon Valley has “lost its way” in the shopping mall of late-stage consumer capitalism. “The drift of the technology world to the concerns of the consumer,” the authors write, “both reflected and helped reinforce a certain technological escapism—the instinct by Silicon Valley to steer away from the most important problems we face as a society toward what are essentially the minor and trivial yet solvable inconveniences of everyday consumer life, from online shopping to food delivery.”
The Valley’s feeding frenzy at the trough of consumerism is akin to a fall into cultural haze; meanwhile, the enemies of the West have been amassing at the crumbling walls. The Valley, then, must adjust its priorities and attack civilization-level problems to defend the “enduring yet fragile geopolitical advantage that the United States and its allies in Europe and elsewhere have retained over their adversaries […] without which the dizzying ascent of Silicon Valley would never have been possible.”
This is the mission of Karp’s software company Palantir, which he co-founded with Thiel, Lonsdale, and Stephen Cohen following the terror attack of September 11th. In one sense, Palantir is the embodiment of the Thielian thesis that the goal of technology is to achieve more with less. “It was a mission-oriented company,” Thiel told Forbes in 2013. “I defined the problem as needing to reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties.” But the company is also something more. Over the 20-some years since its inception, Palantir has accumulated scandals, misconceptions, and what Karp evocatively calls “player-haters.” Some call it a “spy company,” others question its role in predictive policing, its role in immigration enforcement, its support of Israel against Hamas, and its contract with the UK’s National Health Service. It recently generated a spate of fresh coverage when it was awarded an extended $30 million contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for detailed immigration tracking.
Meanwhile, its influence has been increasing. Palantir went public in 2020; five years later, it joined the S&P 500 and was just recently admitted to the S&P 100. Last year, it reported $2.87 billion in revenue, and has a market cap of over $200 billion. Thiel, who serves as the Chairman of the Board, has deep ties to the Trump administration, perhaps most notably through Vice President J.D. Vance, whom he employed at his venture firm Mithral Capital, and then funded in the Senate run, which launched him into the political arena. Thiel’s ties to key Trump ally Elon Musk date back to their days as rivals-turned-colleagues in the early 2000s-era PayPal wars. Karp has publicly supported Musk’s DOGE, and Musk has returned the favor by promoting The Technological Republic to his 220 million followers on X as an “interesting book.”
As Palantir has moved towards the center of US power—and, by extension, global power—it has seen a significant increase in attention, including a niche chronically online fan culture of followers who xeet gifs of “Papa Karp” celebrating his more colorful turns of phrase, or his trick of spinning a notebook on a single finger after appearing to pop a stick of nicotine gum into his mouth. Nonetheless, Palantir has remained an enigma and an object of suspicion. Here, then, is the problem which The Technological Republic is intended to solve.
Postmodernity’s Alienating Jargon
“I don’t think in win-lose,” Karp said in a sit-down conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin in New York the night of his book’s release, speaking with self-assurance as he leaned back into his chair. “I think in domination.” Sorkin and the audience laughed, seemingly understanding the reply as provocatively risque. But Karp most likely had a more specific thought in mind.
Domination is one of the central topics explored by the Frankfurt School, a school of thought by which Karp has been deeply influenced. After graduating from Stanford Law in 1992, but without sitting for the bar exam, Karp headed to the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt to study under social theorist Jürgen Habermas. In 2002, Karp completed his dissertation, “Aggression in the Lebenswelt”, which drew on Habermas, Theodor Adorno, as well as Helmuth Plessner and Sigmund Freud to analyze the use of jargon by the German writer Martin Walser in a controversial speech Walser delivered at St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt in 1998 in which he declared his exhaustion with the memorialization of the Holocaust.
The Technological Republic does not reference Karp’s dissertation, but it develops its signature theme: the meaning, or absence of meaning, of language. “Aggression in the Lebenswelt” opens with the declaration that “statements that are obviously self-contradictory offer to a person the opportunity to formally commit to the normative order of their cultural environment, and, at the same time, to express taboo desires that violate the rules of this order.” Statements of jargon, Karp argues, serve as the connecting link “between world and need in a culture in which a bond to the real is no longer possible […] The false only becomes effective when it sets out on the terrain of the real. Only then can the real demand be covered up by a surrogate. A feeling of security grows where a need for intersubjectivity was once felt.”
In the words of Theodor Adorno, whom Karp draws upon heavily, jargon is alienating, “ideology as language, without any consideration of specific content.” In The Technological Republic,Karp and Zamiska apply this analysis to Google:
The shallow and thinly veiled nihilism of a corporate slogan such as ‘don’t be evil,’ which Google adopted when the company went public in 2004 and later exchanged for the similarly banal “do the right thing,” captures the views of a generation of extraordinary talented software engineers who were taught to prize the identification of and resistance to evil over the more difficult and often messy task of navigating the world in all its imperfection.
In jargon, man loses a common frame of legibility, and ultimately contact with reality. The destruction of language is followed by a descent into a generalized confusion of categories: in effect, a reversal of the order-creating process established by God in Genesis. “The meaning of functional roles of jargon in culture finds their expression in the murky hues of reified categories,” Karp writes in “Aggression in the Lebenswelt.”
To redress this scenario, Karp turned to software: “In the past, I believed that you shaped the world through ideas and words,” he observed in February 2024 at the FII Priority conference. “But I […] came to believe that you shape the world through the embodiment of ideas and words in software platforms.” The problem of jargon is recurrent and structural, but in the age of the internet, it has shifted location. The necessity is for some syntax or grammar—or what Karp calls a playbook—capable of making flows of data individually meaningful, and therefore reimposing a coherent structure on the world.
In his dissertation, Karp already hints at the direction his future work would take: “That which faces the actor is judged by its cognitive and emotional meaning, based on these two questions: ‘What is the object?’ and ‘What does it mean to me?’ The response to the questions and their integration into the cognitive and emotional perception facilitate an assessment of the object, which then becomes a touchstone of meaning for the system of action and its stability.” This touchstone of meaning is what Palantir calls ontology. As the company explains:
An ontology provides the map that links together data and meaning by defining what is meaningful. These meaningful things are the nouns, verbs, and adjectives of an organization. For example, a bank may be concerned primarily with entities or classes of objects such as Accounts, Transactions, and Financial Products. Each of these object classes would then necessitate object class definitions in an ontology, along with other concepts connected in a web of defined relationships.
To exit from a state of formless chaos, a world of meaning must be systematically reconstituted: an operation that recapitulates the order of religion. Karp and Zamiska argue that “a commitment to capitalism and the rights of the individual, however ardent, will never be sufficient; it is too thin and meager, too narrow, to sustain the human soul and psyche.” The human soul needs immanence and transcendence to stabilize the relationship between objects in the world and new anchors as the objects in the world change.
The Technological Republic searches for those anchors in a vision of a new relation between the future and the past. Karp draws on his religious upbringing and intellectual development to develop a new integration model. The formless chaos that defines the state of the world before Genesis finds its mirror image in the alienating jargon of postmodernity. In the work of Palantir, and The Technological Republic, a subject-object relationship is recovered, and intelligibility returns to the world, and also the possibility of action, because it is only by having a meaningful relationship to the world that anything new can emerge.
Critics tend to attack Palantir and their arguments based on general suspicion towards projects that seek to consolidate power. But what is the alternative? The Technological Republic ends on a reflective note with implications extending beyond Karp himself: “The technologies we are building […] are themselves the product of a culture whose maintenance and development we now, more than ever, cannot afford to abandon. It might have been just and necessary to dismantle the old order. We should now build something together in its place.”