Autorentext

Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska

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INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • “A cri de coeur that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies.”—The Wall Street Journal

From the Palantir co-founder, one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2025, and his deputy, a critically-acclaimed and sweeping indictment of the West’s culture of complacency, arguing that timid leadership, intellectual fragility, and an unambitious view of technology’s potential in Silicon Valley have made the U.S. vulnerable in an era of mounting global threats

“Not since Allan Bloom’s astonishingly successful 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind . . . has there been a cultural critique as sweeping.”—George F. Will, The Washington Post

“Provocative . . . worthy of your time.”—Edith Chapin, former Editor-in-Chief of NPR

Silicon Valley has lost its way.

Our most brilliant engineering minds once collaborated with government to advance world-changing technologies. Their efforts secured the West’s dominant place in the geopolitical order. But that relationship has now eroded, with perilous repercussions.

Today, the market rewards shallow engagement with the potential of technology. Engineers and founders build photo-sharing apps and marketing algorithms, unwittingly becoming vessels for the ambitions of others. This complacency has spread into academia, politics, and the boardroom. The result? An entire generation for whom the narrow-minded pursuit of the demands of a late capitalist economy has become their calling.

In this groundbreaking treatise, Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska offer a searing critique of our collective abandonment of ambition, arguing that in order for the U.S. and its allies to retain their global edge—and preserve the freedoms we take for granted—the software industry must renew its commitment to addressing our most urgent challenges, including the new arms race of artificial intelligence. The government, in turn, must embrace the most effective features of the engineering mindset that has propelled Silicon Valley’s success.

Above all, our leaders must reject intellectual fragility and preserve space for ideological confrontation. A willingness to risk the disapproval of the crowd, Karp and Zamiska contend, has everything to do with technological and economic outperformance.

At once iconoclastic and rigorous, this book also lifts the veil on Palantir and its broader political project from the inside, offering a passionate call for the West to wake up to our new reality.

Leseprobe
Chapter One

Lost Valley

Silicon Valley has lost its way.

The initial rise of the American software industry was made possible in the first part of the twentieth century by what would seem today to be a radical and fraught partnership between emerging technology companies and the U.S. government. Silicon Valley’s earliest innovations were driven not by technical minds chasing trivial consumer products but by scientists and engineers who aspired to see the most powerful technology of the age deployed to address challenges of industrial and national significance. Their pursuit of breakthroughs was intended not to satisfy the passing needs of the moment but rather to drive forward a much grander project, channeling the collective purpose and ambition of a nation. This early dependence of Silicon Valley on the nation-state and indeed the U.S. military has for the most part been forgotten, written out of the region’s history as an inconvenient and dissonant fact—one that clashes with the Valley’s conception of itself as indebted only to its capacity to innovate.

In the 1940s, the federal government began supporting an array of research projects that would culminate in the development of novel pharmaceutical compounds, intercontinental rockets, and spy satellites, as well as the precursors to artificial intelligence. Indeed, Silicon Valley once stood at the center of American military production and national security. Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, whose semiconductor division was founded in Mountain View, California, and made possible the first primitive personal computers, built reconnaissance equipment for spy planes used by the Central Intelligence Agency in the late 1950s. For a time after World War II, all of the U.S. Navy’s ballistic missiles were produced in Santa Clara County, California. Companies such as Lockheed Missile & Space, Westinghouse, Ford Aerospace, and United Technologies had thousands of employees working in Silicon Valley on weapons production through the 1980s and into the 1990s.

This union of science and the state in the middle part of the twentieth century arose in the wake of World War II. In November 1944, as Soviet forces closed in on Germany from the east and Adolf Hitler prepared to abandon his Wolf’s Lair, or Wolfsschanze, his eastern front headquarters in the north of present-day Poland, President Franklin Roosevelt was in Washington, D.C., already contemplating an American victory and the end of the conflict that had remade the world. Roosevelt sent a letter to Vannevar Bush, the son of a pastor who would later become the head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development. Bush was born in 1890 in Everett, Massachusetts, just north of Boston. His father had grown up, as did generations of his family before him, in Provincetown at the far end of Cape Cod. In the letter, Roosevelt described “the unique experiment” that the United States had undertaken during the war to leverage science in service of military ends. Roosevelt anticipated the next era—and an emerging partnership between national government and private industry—with precision. He wrote that there is “no reason why the lessons to be found in this experiment”—that is, directing the resources of an emerging scientific establishment to help wage the most significant and violent war that the world had ever known—“cannot be profitably employed in times of peace.” His ambition was clear. Roosevelt intended to see that the machinery of the state—its power and prestige, as well as the financial resources of the newly victorious nation and emerging hegemon—would spur the scientific community forward in service of, among other things, the advancement of public health and national welfare. The challenge was to ensure that the engineers and researchers who had directed their attention to the industry of war—and particularly the physicists, who as Bush noted had “been thrown most violently off stride”—could shift their efforts back to civilian advances in an era of relative peace.

The entanglement of the state and scientific research both before and after the war was itself built on an even longer history of connection between innovation and politics. Many of the earliest leaders of the American republic were themselves engineers, from Thomas Jefferson, who designed sundials and studied writing machines, to Benjamin Franklin, who experimented with and constructed everything from lightning rods to eyeglasses. Franklin was not someone who dabbled in science. He was an engineer, one of the most productive in the century, who happened to become a politician. Dudley Herschbach, a Harvard professor and chemist, has observed that the Founding Father’s research into electricity “was recognized as ushering in a scientific revolution comparable to those wrought by Newton in the previous century or by Watson and Crick in ours.” For Jefferson, sc…