The Technological Republic and the New State Capacity

The Rise of the Silicon Valley Right Is America’s Free-Market Technology Model Searching for a National Mission in the Age of Great-Power Competition

The most important thing about The Technological Republic is it represents how America’s technology elites have begun to doubt whether a technology system relying only on venture capital, platform companies, consumer software, and market expansion can still sustain American hegemony in the age of AI, war, and great-power competition.

This is part of the State Governance and Capacity Series.

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Executive Summary

• The Technological Republic reflects America’s growing doubt that venture capital, platform companies, consumer software, and market expansion can sustain national power in the age of AI, war, and great-power competition.

• Silicon Valley’s platform model has generated enormous corporate power, but it does not automatically produce state capacity. Power grids, shipbuilding, industrial software, defense supply chains, semiconductor manufacturing, rare-earth refining, basic science, and long-cycle public engineering require forms of organization that market incentives alone do not reliably provide.

• Alexander Karp represents a new type of Silicon Valley figure: the philosophical CEO of a national security software company. His critique of Silicon Valley comes from Palantir’s position inside the defense, intelligence, data, and state-operational systems of American power.

• The rise of the Silicon Valley right signals the renationalization of technology capital. AI, software, cloud infrastructure, chips, autonomy, data systems, and defense technology are being pulled back into national strategy, military capability, and geopolitical competition.

• Karp’s diagnosis is strong because it identifies the hollowing-out of platform capitalism; his prescription is dangerous because it pushes technology too heavily toward security, war, deterrence, and civilizational mobilization. A technological republic built around national security risks turning public purpose into securitized state power.

• China should read The Technological Republic as both confirmation and warning. China’s advantage lies in combining national direction with industrial systems, engineering diffusion, enterprise competition, local governments, supply-chain networks, and a vast application market; China’s challenge is preserving openness, competition, scientific autonomy, and innovation vitality inside strong state capacity.

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1. The Technological Republic Reflects America’s Deep Anxiety About State Capacity

The most important thing about The Technological Republic is that it exposes a deep shift now taking place within America’s technology elites: the United States is no longer satisfied with leaving technology to the market, venture capital, university autonomy, and platform companies. It is trying to reintegrate AI, software, data, defense, and civilizational narrative into a broader system of state capacity. In other words, the real subject of this book is not technology, but the state; not entrepreneurship, but war; not innovation culture, but whether America can still reorganize its dispersed technological advantages into strategic power.

This is also why The Technological Republic does not read like an ordinary technology or business book. Its focus is not product, management, valuation, growth, user experience, or corporate strategy. Instead, it repeatedly returns to national mission, hard power, Western belief, defense capability, AI competition, and civilizational survival. What Karp and Zamiska are really asking is this: when artificial intelligence, data systems, satellite networks, unmanned systems, cyberwarfare, intelligence analysis, and defense software are becoming the core infrastructure of national power, can the United States still rely on the highly marketized, consumerized, and financialized Silicon Valley model of the past thirty years to maintain its technological advantage?

This is precisely the intellectual tension of the book. Over the past three decades, the core of America’s technology narrative has been entrepreneurial freedom, capital markets, venture capital, platform scale, global users, and commercial monetization. Silicon Valley’s most successful companies pushed search, social media, e-commerce, advertising, mobile internet, cloud computing, and enterprise software across the world. They also expanded American technology capital into a form of global platform power. This system is indeed extraordinarily powerful. It created companies such as Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI, and gave the United States an irreplaceable form of global dominance in the digital economy.

But Karp sees the other side: the more successful this system becomes, the more likely it is to drift away from the hard tasks of the state. Many of the most talented engineers no longer enter defense, energy, power grids, industrial software, manufacturing systems, infrastructure, public health, or state governance. Instead, they are absorbed by platform companies to optimize ad click-through rates, content recommendation, user engagement, financial transaction efficiency, consumer experience, and enterprise SaaS tools. The market rewards technical products that can scale quickly, monetize at scale, and be capitalized into high valuations. It does not naturally reward state-capacity projects that are long-cycle, high-risk, politically controversial, strongly public in nature, and unclear in short-term profitability.

This is not uniquely an American problem. It is a general bias of mature capitalist technology systems. Capital naturally favors technological applications that are measurable, exit-ready, monopolizable, and globally replicable. State-capacity building, by contrast, usually requires long-term investment, systemic coordination, low short-term returns, and cross-departmental organization. Platform companies can generate extremely high profits in global markets. But whether a country has a powerful power grid, shipbuilding capacity, industrial software, defense supply chain, energy system, rare-earth refining capacity, semiconductor manufacturing capability, and basic science system is not something platform capitalism automatically produces. There is no natural conversion mechanism between corporate capability, market capability, and state capacity.

In this sense, The Technological Republic raises a question that America rarely wants to admit publicly: the United States still has the strongest technology companies in the world, but it increasingly doubts whether these companies still serve American state capacity.

The United States still has the most dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystem in the world, but it increasingly worries whether this entrepreneurial activity can support future war, AI competition, industrial reconstruction, and geopolitical rivalry. The United States still has the deepest capital markets in the world, but whether capital markets are willing to bear the high-risk, low-liquidity, slow-return projects required by national strategy is not a question that answers itself.

The Technological Republic reminds us that American technological hegemony has never been a purely market-driven product. The Manhattan Project, radar, jet engines, semiconductors, the internet, GPS, satellite communications, aerospace, nuclear technology, military electronics, and early AI research all depended on state finance, military demand, public procurement, the university system, and the defense-industrial complex. America’s real strength has never been that the market replaced the state. It has been that markets, universities, the military, capital, and enterprises formed a highly effective innovation community under specific historical conditions.

The problem is that this community drifted after the Cold War. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States entered its unipolar moment. National security pressure declined, globalization accelerated, financial capital rose, consumer internet exploded, manufacturing moved offshore, and the moral legitimacy of defense technology within Silicon Valley culture declined. As a result, America’s technology system increasingly came to resemble a global commercial platform system rather than a national strategic engineering system. Karp’s anxiety is the reaction to this historical drift.

China’s experience provides an opposite mirror. From the beginning, China’s technology and industrial systems have been more deeply embedded in national development goals.

High-speed rail, power grids, nuclear power, telecommunications equipment, electric vehicles, solar photovoltaics, power batteries, industrial robots, construction machinery, shipbuilding, drones, and digital infrastructure were not formed purely through spontaneous market expansion. They emerged from the continuous interaction among national planning, local competition, industrial policy, infrastructure investment, entrepreneurship, and supply-chain networks. China’s problem is not whether its technology system needs national direction. Its problem is how to preserve market competition, corporate vitality, scientific exploration, and social creativity when national direction is already strong.

Therefore, from a Chinese perspective, the most important point in reading The Technological Republic is this: the United States is rediscovering something China has long practiced: technological competition is never merely competition among individual companies. It is a competition over how the state organizes science, capital, industry, engineering, talent, and markets into systemic capability.

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2. Why Karp Is the “Anti-Silicon Valley” Leader of Silicon Valley

Alexander Karp’s thinking appears highly unusual among Silicon Valley elites because its sources are not typical computer science, product philosophy, or venture-capital language. Instead, it is a mixture of continental European social theory, political philosophy, and the American national security system. His focus is war, enemies, the state, belief, the West, sovereignty, and civilization.

This unusual identity is not accidental. Palantir was never a typical consumer internet company from the beginning. It did not start with advertising, social media, search, e-commerce, or content recommendation. Instead, it was deeply embedded in American intelligence, defense, law enforcement, border security, allied military systems, and government data-analysis systems. Its core capability is not capturing consumer attention, but helping state machines, militaries, and large institutions identify patterns, make judgments, and form operational capability in complex data environments.

Karp’s “anti-Silicon Valley” posture was formed in this context. He is not opposing Silicon Valley’s wealth, nor is he rejecting technology capital itself. He is opposing Silicon Valley’s self-understanding as a global commercial class detached from the national community. When he criticizes Silicon Valley for being obsessed with consumer products and social applications, he is actually criticizing a denationalized tendency among technology elites: they enjoy the dividends of American universities, capital markets, rule of law, talent immigration, defense research legacies, and the global dollar order, yet refuse to acknowledge that their technological capabilities need to serve national security and strategic competition.

This criticism has strong practical relevance inside the United States. During the Cold War, there was a tight connection among American engineers, scientists, universities, the military, and industry. Serving the state, serving defense, and participating in large public engineering projects were not naturally seen as moral stains. The Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, DARPA projects, and early computer networks all once formed part of the honor narrative of America’s technical elites. But after the Vietnam War, Watergate, the antiwar movement, the end of the Cold War, internet liberalism, and commercial globalization, Silicon Valley gradually formed a different self-imagination: technology should liberate the individual, bypass the state, connect the world, and break old institutions, rather than serve the state machine again.

This imagination once created the vitality of the internet age, and it also enabled the global expansion of American technology capital. But in the age of AI and great-power competition, it has begun to reach its limits. Drones, autonomous weapons, military AI, cyber offense and defense, satellite intelligence, chip supply chains, data centers, electricity systems, cloud infrastructure, and model security cannot be handled by the simple liberal narrative of “connecting the world.” The more powerful technology becomes, the less it can remain politically neutral. The deeper software enters society and war, the less it can remain merely a commercial tool. Karp’s thinking emerges precisely at this breaking point.

He thus becomes the “anti-Silicon Valley” leader of Silicon Valley: he comes from Silicon Valley, yet opposes the dominant moral language of Silicon Valley over the past thirty years; he runs a listed technology company, yet repeatedly emphasizes that national mission stands above consumer innovation; he depends on capital markets, yet criticizes capital markets for directing engineering capacity toward trivial commercial goals; he is a technology capitalist, yet tries to re-embed technology capital into America’s national security system.

From a Chinese perspective, Karp’s unusual identity is actually not difficult to understand. Chinese technology companies have long operated within a clearer national development framework. Whether it is Huawei, BYD, CATL, SMIC, DJI, COMAC, or companies connected to high-speed rail, power grids, nuclear power, aerospace, and industrial software, they can hardly understand themselves as purely commercial actors detached from the national strategic environment. Even the most marketized Chinese private enterprises must locate themselves within industrial policy, supply-chain security, export controls, geopolitics, local government, infrastructure, and national strategy.

This does not mean Chinese companies have no commercial goals, nor does it mean national direction is always effective.

But it does mean that Chinese technology firms have never lived, as post-Cold War Silicon Valley did, for a long period inside the illusion that “the market is the world, the platform is the order, and capital is the direction.”

Chinese companies grew up in a more complex environment, and they became aware earlier of the relationship among technology, industry, the state, and external pressure. America’s rediscovery that technology companies must shoulder national missions is not new to China. The real question worth watching is whether America can rebuild this sense of mission without destroying its own innovation ecosystem.

This is also the most interesting part of the Karp phenomenon. He is not the mainstream of America’s technology system, but he may represent one possible future direction for it. In the past, Silicon Valley’s most typical figures were Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk. They represented products, platforms, algorithms, business models, and technological acceleration. Karp represents a different kind of figure: the philosophical CEO of a national security software company. His emergence shows that American technology capital is no longer satisfied with the entrepreneurial slogan of “changing the world.” It is beginning to rethink more political questions: for whom should the world be changed, for what purpose should it be changed, and who should decide the direction of technology?

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3. The Rise of the Silicon Valley Right Is Essentially the Renationalization of Technology Capital

If The Technological Republic is simply understood as a representative text of the “Silicon Valley right,” one sees the surface but misses the structure. Of course, the recent rightward shift of some Silicon Valley elites is related to domestic American politics: anti-regulation, anti-DEI, anti-wokeness, support for tax cuts, opposition to antitrust, opposition to excessive AI regulation, support for cryptocurrency, support for Trump-style strongman politics, or a project of dismantling the administrative state. These are visible political phenomena. But the deeper change is that part of Silicon Valley technology capital is moving from platform capitalism toward a military-intelligence-national-security complex.

The old Silicon Valley liberalism was built on a special historical stage. After the Cold War ended, the United States had no true peer strategic rival. Globalization gave American technology companies a world market. China and Asia provided manufacturing capacity. Dollar capital markets provided financing. The internet provided the infrastructure for global expansion. During this period, Silicon Valley could believe that the world was flat, technology was open, platforms were neutral, engineers were global citizens, software could bypass old politics, and capital could organize innovation more efficiently than the state.

But that historical stage is over. China’s manufacturing system has risen. AI is changing war and production. Semiconductors have become a core arena of geopolitics. The Russia-Ukraine war has pushed drones, satellite communications, battlefield software, and real-time intelligence to the front. The United States has imposed high-end chip and equipment restrictions on China. Europe has begun discussing technological sovereignty. Global supply chains are becoming securitized. Technology is re-entering national competition. The old Silicon Valley language of globalism, openness, consumerism, and platform neutrality can no longer explain the new reality.

The rise of the so-called “technology right” is the ideological expression of this turn in reality. It is not traditional religious conservatism, nor is it simply small-government libertarianism. It is a new form of technological nationalism.

It believes that the United States must remobilize its most advanced technology companies and bring AI, software, data, cloud, chips, automation, and defense systems into national strategy. It is impatient with traditional parliamentary democracy and bureaucratic procedure, believing these institutions are too slow, too soft, and too inefficient to respond to China, Russia, AI security, and future war. It believes that the combination of a small number of technology elites, startups, defense capital, and security agencies can rebuild America’s strategic speed.

This is why the “technology right” can easily slide toward a form of “technological Bonapartism.” It may not openly oppose democracy, but it is naturally impatient with democratic procedure. It sees public debate as too slow, regulation as too slow, universities as too left-wing, media as too hypocritical, bureaucracy as too rigid, courts as too delayed, and ethics committees as too naive, while technological competition and war will not wait for these procedures to slowly reach consensus. As a result, decision-making power gradually shifts from public politics to engineering systems, from social deliberation to algorithmic judgment, and from civic review to a closed loop between security institutions and technology companies.

This is not a problem that belongs only to the American right. All states under the pressure of technological competition face similar temptations: sacrificing procedure for efficiency, compressing openness for security, sacrificing plural exploration for strategic concentration, and expanding administrative boundaries for state capacity. America’s special feature is that this tendency is not first proposed by traditional state bureaucrats, but actively by part of the Silicon Valley elite. It is not the state swallowing technology, but technology capital demanding entry into the core of national sovereignty. This is a new formation more complex than the traditional military-industrial complex.

From a Chinese perspective, this point is especially worth watching. China has long possessed relatively strong national mobilization capacity and is more accustomed to understanding technology and industry from the perspective of national strategy. But precisely because of this, China needs to recognize that the strengthening of state capacity cannot be simply equated with the strengthening of administrative control; the improvement of technological security cannot be simply equated with the infinite expansion of securitized boundaries; and the effectiveness of industrial policy cannot be simply equated with one-way command over enterprises and scientific communities. A truly powerful national technology system must not only be able to concentrate resources. It must also be able to accommodate exploration, trial and error, competition, heterogeneity, and non-planned breakthroughs.

America’s problem today is how a marketized technology system can regain national direction. China’s problem is how a state-guided technology system can continue to preserve innovation vitality. America is searching for the state after excessive marketization. China must protect the spontaneous creativity of markets, science, and engineering communities within strong state capacity. The two countries face opposite directions of tension, but the underlying problem is the same: how to combine state capacity and innovation vitality without allowing one to devour the other.

The danger of The Technological Republic lies here as well. It correctly identifies Silicon Valley’s detachment from national mission, but it can easily compress public mission into national security, national security into military capability, military capability into AI, data, and software advantage, and civilizational competition into friend-enemy distinction.

In this way, technology governance may slide from public-capacity building into comprehensive securitization, from the rebuilding of state capacity into technological oligarchy, and from patriotism into a form of civilizational mobilization defined jointly by technology elites and security agencies.

Therefore, for China, reading The Technological Republic should not only mean seeing that America has begun to reemphasize state capacity. It should also mean seeing the institutional tension America is now experiencing: when a country that has long emphasized free markets, university autonomy, civil liberties, and corporate innovation reabsorbs technology into national security and civilizational competition, how can it avoid destroying its most important sources of innovation? This question applies to China as well, though in a different form.

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4. Karp’s Diagnosis Is Powerful, but His Prescription Is Dangerous

The most persuasive part of The Technological Republic is that it strikes at a real weakness in America’s technology system: America has extremely strong technological capability, but its ability to convert technology into state capacity is weakening; American firms are extremely innovative, but public engineering capacity is not necessarily strong; American capital markets are extremely powerful, but long-term strategic patience is not necessarily strong; American universities are extremely strong in research, but there are cracks among industrialization, manufacturing, and national organization. Karp’s criticism of Silicon Valley’s obsession with consumer technology is not without reason. A country cannot sustain long-term hegemony only through better social apps, more precise ad recommendation, stronger user-growth models, and higher enterprise software subscription revenues.

Many of America’s most successful technology companies over the past few decades have optimized attention, consumer behavior, transaction efficiency, and platform dependency. They have certainly created enormous economic value and improved certain forms of social efficiency. But they do not automatically solve hard state-level problems. How should the power system be upgraded? How should manufacturing be rebuilt? How should shipbuilding capacity be restored? How should infrastructure be renewed? How should defense supply chains expand production? How should industrial software be broken through? How should the public health system be strengthened? How should AI compute and energy be coordinated? How can technical talent enter long-term public engineering projects? These problems cannot be solved by an app, a platform, or a business model.

On this point, there is a hidden resonance between Karp’s critique and China’s experience. China’s development over the past forty years did not depend on isolated technological breakthroughs. It depended on large-scale engineering, infrastructuralization, industrial-chain formation, and systemic deployment capacity. China’s real strength lies not only in how innovative a particular company may be, but in the ability of many technologies, once they enter the industrialization stage, to diffuse rapidly into supply chains, cities, industrial parks, ports, power grids, transportation systems, local governments, and a vast market. High-speed rail, solar photovoltaics, batteries, electric vehicles, 5G, mobile payments, cross-border e-commerce, drones, construction machinery, and intelligent manufacturing are all results of this systemic diffusion capacity.

So Karp’s warning to America is in fact correct: technological advantage becomes real strategic advantage only when it is converted into state capacity. Papers, patents, valuations, unicorns, app downloads, cloud revenues, and stock-market capitalization are not equivalent to state capacity. State capacity means that a society can connect scientific discovery, engineering technology, capital investment, industrial organization, infrastructure, talent training, government procurement, and external strategic objectives into a sustained and replicable systemic output.

But the problem with Karp’s prescription is that he directs this connection too heavily toward defense and security.

Of course, he would say defense is only the most urgent public task. But in his intellectual structure, state capacity is almost naturally centered on enemies, war, deterrence, borders, civilization, and hard power. This gives The Technological Republic a strong security-state character.

It does not bring technology back to public purpose so much as define public purpose first as national security. It does not bring engineers back to social responsibility so much as bring engineers first into strategic competition. It does not bring technology back to the republic so much as bring technology into the war machine.

The danger here is that once modern technology is comprehensively securitized, it becomes difficult to preserve its public character.

AI can be used for public health care, education, scientific research, energy dispatch, urban governance, industrial optimization, and social services. It can also be used for intelligence screening, battlefield killing, opinion manipulation, border surveillance, and social control. Data systems can improve governance efficiency, but they can also expand surveillance capacity. Defense software can increase the speed of military decision-making, but it may also lower the political threshold for the use of force. Once technology is absorbed into the national security framework, many issues that should have been publicly debated may be transferred into classified systems, expert systems, and security agencies.

This is a challenge for America, and it is also a reminder for China. China already has stronger policy mobilization capacity and industrial organization capacity than the United States. But precisely because of this, it needs to distinguish more carefully between “strategic guidance” and “excessive securitization.” Technological competition does require national direction. Semiconductors, AI, quantum technology, aerospace, biotechnology, energy systems, and high-end manufacturing cannot be achieved entirely through spontaneous market forces. But if every technological problem is understood as a security problem, every industrial problem as a strategic problem, and every corporate behavior as part of a grand objective, the innovation system will lose the looseness, competition, and contingency it needs.

Truly effective state capacity is not about concentrating all resources in one direction. It is about maintaining a dynamic balance between direction and openness.

America’s strongest periods were not periods of simple state control. They were periods in which national objectives, university autonomy, corporate competition, military procurement, capital markets, and immigrant talent formed a complex but effective coupling. If China wants to preserve technological competitiveness in the future, it cannot rely only on planning and mobilization. It must also maintain fierce competition among enterprises, institutional experimentation among local governments, long-term accumulation within the scientific community, the practical culture of engineers, and continued connection with the global knowledge system.

Karp’s diagnosis is powerful because he sees the hollowing-out of platform capitalism. His prescription is dangerous because he may push the repair of this hollowing-out toward excessive militarization. America indeed needs to rebuild state capacity, but state capacity should not be equivalent only to war capacity. Technology indeed needs public purpose, but public purpose should not be equivalent only to national security. Engineers should not serve only advertising and consumption, but nor should they serve only intelligence and battlefields.

This is exactly what makes The Technological Republic worth analyzing. It raises the right problem, but gives too narrow an answer. It opposes Silicon Valley’s lightness, but may move toward another kind of heaviness. It criticizes the statelessness of platform capitalism, but may produce the excessive concentration of technological nationalism. It tries to restore the public spirit of the “republic,” yet it overdefines that republic as a security community located inside a civilizational war.

China will not simply imitate the securitized path now emerging in America.

China’s advantage is not to turn itself into another Palantir-style technological security state. Its advantage lies in a more complete industrial system, stronger engineering diffusion capability, a larger domestic market, faster infrastructure-building capacity, stronger manufacturing clusters, and more intensive supply-chain learning mechanisms. China’s real competitive advantage is not merely that the state can designate direction. It is that national direction can be combined with corporate competition, local governments, engineering communities, supply-chain networks, and a vast application market.

The Technological Republic writes about American anxiety, but the problem it reflects is not America’s alone. AI, semiconductors, energy systems, industrial software, unmanned systems, data infrastructure, life sciences, and quantum technology are pushing technology back to the center of state capacity. The civilization competition of the future will not be a simple contest between free markets and state intervention, nor between democratic technology and authoritarian technology. The real competition will be over who can organize science, industry, capital, engineering, talent, infrastructure, and social trust more durably; who can preserve balance between security and openness; who can maintain vitality between national direction and distributed innovation; and who can make technology serve the state without being completely swallowed by the logic of national security.

This is the first layer of The Technological Republic that deserves discussion. It is an ideological confession by American technology capital as it searches for national mission in an age of great-power competition. It shows that America has begun to move from the era of “platforms changing the world” into an era of “technology defending civilization.” For China, what truly matters is not watching Silicon Valley’s political rightward shift from the sidelines. It is recognizing that American technology governance is being renationalized, securitized, and civilizationalized, and using that recognition to rethink China’s own competitive advantages and institutional boundaries.

In the next essay, I will examine a deeper theoretical question: from Vannevar Bush’s “scientific republic,” to Mariana Mazzucato’s “entrepreneurial state,” to Karp’s “technological republic,” why has America’s imagination of state capacity changed step by step?