This is a very interesting piece and highlights the thought of an important corporate leader.
But I want to point out a few things about Palantir, and Karp in general:
First, they are enthusiastic participants in the military-industrial complex. They view the state, as far as I can tell, as an almost inexhaustable supply of money. Assuming that some of Karp's statements of concern for the United States are real, it is also very possible that this book is to some extent a sales pitch to direct more money at Palantir
Second, and related, the military industrial complex, according to Franklin Spinney, who was a well-known 'whistleblower' and assistant to the secretary of air force, is in the business of expanding its budget -- this is the priority, not defending the US. So it is unclear to me if Karp really cares about defending the US.
Third, it is unclear to me, and I haven't read the book, if Karp understands the fundamental importance of manufacturing. Not just manufacturing for defense, which most of these people will acknowledge, although only in passing, but the entire industrial ecosystem, the system that is the basis for your blog, as in China as a system. To them, the United States is a field of money and resources that they want to pick over. Sorry to be so blunt, but that has been their history, over decades. They have seen the manufacturing base decline, and hardly said a word.
fourth, as my mentor, Seymour Melman pointed out (SeymourMelman.com,he was a professor of industrial engineering at Columbia), a large military system is detrimental, maybe even fatal, over the long term, to a strong manufacturing sector. One of the main reasons China (and Germany and Japan) have thrived post-WWII is that they have not poured a considerable amont of national wealth into the military, which usually leads to incompetence in production. Karp knows nothing of this, and would probably deny it happens, but again, I think his main goal is personal or organization power, not national power.
My reading of Chinese history is that China has generally avoided the problem of the domination of the military sector in national politics. Unfortunately, the US has not been so lucky, and we see what is happening, a long slide into decline
Karp saw the hollowing-out of platform capitalism, but his answer may push America from platform capitalism toward AI military-industrial capitalism. Prof. Melman would remind us that military-industrial capitalism is not the same as state capacity. It can consume state capacity, drain engineering capability, distort the industrial structure, and turn public finance into a resource base for the self-expansion of the security system.
Thank you Jon. This is an excellent and very important qualification, and I largely agree with the direction of your critique.
I do not read Karp as a neutral theorist of state capacity. Palantir is deeply embedded in the military-intelligence system, and it is entirely reasonable to see The Technological Republic partly as a philosophical argument and partly as a sales pitch for directing more public money toward firms like Palantir. That tension is central to the book. Karp diagnoses a real weakness in America’s platform-capitalist technology model, but his solution is also shaped by the organizational interests of a national-security software company.
Your point about the military-industrial complex is especially important. A system that claims to defend national power can, over time, become organized around budget expansion, procurement politics, and institutional self-preservation rather than real productive capability. That is precisely why I think “state capacity” has to be distinguished from the mere expansion of the security state. A larger defense budget does not automatically create national strength. It can also drain engineering talent, distort industrial priorities, inflate costs, and weaken the broader productive base.
This is where Seymour Melman’s argument is highly relevant. A country cannot build durable power only through military systems. It needs a broad industrial ecosystem: manufacturing depth, skilled labor, supplier networks, infrastructure, machine tools, energy systems, industrial software, education, and long-term productive investment. If the military sector dominates national politics and resource allocation, it may actually undermine the civilian industrial base that long-term national power depends on.
That is also why I see China as an important contrast. China’s strength is not simply that the state plays a larger role. It is that national objectives have often been connected to civilian industrial expansion, infrastructure, manufacturing scale, engineering diffusion, and supplier ecosystems.
Since I worked with Seymour Melman for 20 years, I would like to emphasize that he viewed the biggest long-term problem of military production as that lit eads to declining competence in industrial production. He thus accorded the military industrial complex the highest priority for the decline of American manufacturing, quite the minority view in the US. He laid out this idea in many books, including Pentagon Capitalism and the Permanent War Economy. His last well-received book, Profits without Production, 1983, also included the deleterious effects of the American financial system on manufacturing.
What is relevant to the decline of American manufacturing is his assertion that, because of a lack of competence in production, managers began to offshore production. Competent managers, he argued, could overcome higher wages by increasing productivity. Wall Street, however, found it easier for the purpose of maximizing short-term gains, to encourage manufacturers to simply go to lower cost countries.
So his whole orientation, being an industrial engineer, was to look for the health of the manufacturing sector as an indicator of national long-term health, and I'm sure he would have been amazed at what China has accomplished (he passed away in 2004).
In my book, Manufacturing Green Prosperity, 2010, I have a chapter on 'Myths of Manufacturing' and 'The Economy as an Ecosystem', based on my dissertation, which is an attempt to weave a theory of economy based on thinking about systems. Those chapters are available at ManufacturingGreenProsperity.com, if you wish to take a look
Thank you. I concur generally. I'm also slightly annoyed: never having regarded either Karp or Palantir as innovative, or philosophically competent, or generally anything other than despicable, I guess in fairness I'll now have to read this book. :)
"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."
To me, it's simply astonishing that anyone ever could have believed such an absurd proposition in the first place! Historical ignorance, I suppose.
"Technological Bonapartism" is a beautiful phrase, captures the continuing US tradition of massive state subsidies to the nominally "private" sector.
I completely understand the annoyance. I also do not read Karp or Palantir as neutral or disinterested actors. Palantir is deeply embedded in the military-intelligence system, and any philosophical argument coming from that position has to be read together with the company’s institutional interests.
What interests me in the book is less Karp as a thinker and more Karp as a symptom. He reveals that part of Silicon Valley now recognizes something that should indeed have been obvious historically: American technological power was never built by venture capital, consumer software, and market expansion alone. It was built through public finance, military demand, universities, procurement, infrastructure, and industrial capacity.
The irony is that Silicon Valley spent decades narrating itself as anti-state, disruptive, private, and post-political, while benefiting from a very deep American state-capital-science infrastructure. Now, under the pressure of AI, China, war, and supply-chain insecurity, parts of that same technology class are rediscovering the state.
That is why I used the phrase “technological Bonapartism.” The danger is that this rediscovery of the state may not lead to broad public capacity, manufacturing renewal, education, infrastructure, or scientific autonomy. It may instead lead to a new layer of nominally private technology firms using national-security rhetoric to claim public money, political privilege, and strategic authority.
This well written essay hints at how China today resembles the pre-1980s USA in important ways yet never once notes the by far biggest structural similarities old America and current day China have between each other. And that is that old America was and current day China is a system with highly decentralized economic, governmental, scientific, and financial structures. In both systems, most all real decision-making occurred locally and regionally, provincial and municipal developmental competition in China; state, municipal, civic, and regionally based industrial systems in the older USA.
The US examples the essay mentions:
"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"
Those werent the products of centralized command systems but deeply decentralized, heterogenous, and pluralized developmental ecologies with many overlapping institutions, firms, laboratories, banks, schools, jurisdictions, and locally-civically embedded public/private relationships.
The USA spent the latter 1960s on (with much of the ground work was laid in the post WW2 decades) dismantling the very decentralized institutional architecture that had previously generated that capacity and then relying on the planetary economic plannin and extractions structures of capital "G" Globalization to make up the big difference, while from the early 1980s on China operated more like the older American system than modern America has
In fact, in the latter 1970s and early 1980s, CPC some local party branches actually referenced the reforms of the mi 19th century American Jacksonians to argue for the reforms that ended up being enacted, and the Chinese system has in key ways looked remarkably like the system of America from the 1830s until some point after ww2 (although some of those features had been diminishing over time, but they were still quite there), for example, the Guangzhou Municipal Party School in the late 1970s, there are reports from interviews with later reform officials (such as in Deng era memoirs) that Guangzhou’s reformist intellectual circles made reference to designs established during the period of Jacksonian Democracy such as infrastructure financing models, local tax share-dominance and retention, the benefits of city-led economic experimentation, etc. And the Shanghai Economic Research Institutes in the early 1980s compared 19th-century American city-state relationships to their desired trajectory for Chinese coastal cities, which were strong port cities with fiscal and legal tools to manage foreign trade, investment, and currency operations.
Leon,
This is a very interesting piece and highlights the thought of an important corporate leader.
But I want to point out a few things about Palantir, and Karp in general:
First, they are enthusiastic participants in the military-industrial complex. They view the state, as far as I can tell, as an almost inexhaustable supply of money. Assuming that some of Karp's statements of concern for the United States are real, it is also very possible that this book is to some extent a sales pitch to direct more money at Palantir
Second, and related, the military industrial complex, according to Franklin Spinney, who was a well-known 'whistleblower' and assistant to the secretary of air force, is in the business of expanding its budget -- this is the priority, not defending the US. So it is unclear to me if Karp really cares about defending the US.
Third, it is unclear to me, and I haven't read the book, if Karp understands the fundamental importance of manufacturing. Not just manufacturing for defense, which most of these people will acknowledge, although only in passing, but the entire industrial ecosystem, the system that is the basis for your blog, as in China as a system. To them, the United States is a field of money and resources that they want to pick over. Sorry to be so blunt, but that has been their history, over decades. They have seen the manufacturing base decline, and hardly said a word.
fourth, as my mentor, Seymour Melman pointed out (SeymourMelman.com,he was a professor of industrial engineering at Columbia), a large military system is detrimental, maybe even fatal, over the long term, to a strong manufacturing sector. One of the main reasons China (and Germany and Japan) have thrived post-WWII is that they have not poured a considerable amont of national wealth into the military, which usually leads to incompetence in production. Karp knows nothing of this, and would probably deny it happens, but again, I think his main goal is personal or organization power, not national power.
My reading of Chinese history is that China has generally avoided the problem of the domination of the military sector in national politics. Unfortunately, the US has not been so lucky, and we see what is happening, a long slide into decline
Again, thanks, for the thorough book review
Karp saw the hollowing-out of platform capitalism, but his answer may push America from platform capitalism toward AI military-industrial capitalism. Prof. Melman would remind us that military-industrial capitalism is not the same as state capacity. It can consume state capacity, drain engineering capability, distort the industrial structure, and turn public finance into a resource base for the self-expansion of the security system.
Thank you Jon. This is an excellent and very important qualification, and I largely agree with the direction of your critique.
I do not read Karp as a neutral theorist of state capacity. Palantir is deeply embedded in the military-intelligence system, and it is entirely reasonable to see The Technological Republic partly as a philosophical argument and partly as a sales pitch for directing more public money toward firms like Palantir. That tension is central to the book. Karp diagnoses a real weakness in America’s platform-capitalist technology model, but his solution is also shaped by the organizational interests of a national-security software company.
Your point about the military-industrial complex is especially important. A system that claims to defend national power can, over time, become organized around budget expansion, procurement politics, and institutional self-preservation rather than real productive capability. That is precisely why I think “state capacity” has to be distinguished from the mere expansion of the security state. A larger defense budget does not automatically create national strength. It can also drain engineering talent, distort industrial priorities, inflate costs, and weaken the broader productive base.
This is where Seymour Melman’s argument is highly relevant. A country cannot build durable power only through military systems. It needs a broad industrial ecosystem: manufacturing depth, skilled labor, supplier networks, infrastructure, machine tools, energy systems, industrial software, education, and long-term productive investment. If the military sector dominates national politics and resource allocation, it may actually undermine the civilian industrial base that long-term national power depends on.
That is also why I see China as an important contrast. China’s strength is not simply that the state plays a larger role. It is that national objectives have often been connected to civilian industrial expansion, infrastructure, manufacturing scale, engineering diffusion, and supplier ecosystems.
Leon,
Thank you for your insightful response.
Since I worked with Seymour Melman for 20 years, I would like to emphasize that he viewed the biggest long-term problem of military production as that lit eads to declining competence in industrial production. He thus accorded the military industrial complex the highest priority for the decline of American manufacturing, quite the minority view in the US. He laid out this idea in many books, including Pentagon Capitalism and the Permanent War Economy. His last well-received book, Profits without Production, 1983, also included the deleterious effects of the American financial system on manufacturing.
What is relevant to the decline of American manufacturing is his assertion that, because of a lack of competence in production, managers began to offshore production. Competent managers, he argued, could overcome higher wages by increasing productivity. Wall Street, however, found it easier for the purpose of maximizing short-term gains, to encourage manufacturers to simply go to lower cost countries.
So his whole orientation, being an industrial engineer, was to look for the health of the manufacturing sector as an indicator of national long-term health, and I'm sure he would have been amazed at what China has accomplished (he passed away in 2004).
In my book, Manufacturing Green Prosperity, 2010, I have a chapter on 'Myths of Manufacturing' and 'The Economy as an Ecosystem', based on my dissertation, which is an attempt to weave a theory of economy based on thinking about systems. Those chapters are available at ManufacturingGreenProsperity.com, if you wish to take a look
Thanks again,
Jon
Thank you. I concur generally. I'm also slightly annoyed: never having regarded either Karp or Palantir as innovative, or philosophically competent, or generally anything other than despicable, I guess in fairness I'll now have to read this book. :)
"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."
To me, it's simply astonishing that anyone ever could have believed such an absurd proposition in the first place! Historical ignorance, I suppose.
"Technological Bonapartism" is a beautiful phrase, captures the continuing US tradition of massive state subsidies to the nominally "private" sector.
Thank you, Robert!
I completely understand the annoyance. I also do not read Karp or Palantir as neutral or disinterested actors. Palantir is deeply embedded in the military-intelligence system, and any philosophical argument coming from that position has to be read together with the company’s institutional interests.
What interests me in the book is less Karp as a thinker and more Karp as a symptom. He reveals that part of Silicon Valley now recognizes something that should indeed have been obvious historically: American technological power was never built by venture capital, consumer software, and market expansion alone. It was built through public finance, military demand, universities, procurement, infrastructure, and industrial capacity.
The irony is that Silicon Valley spent decades narrating itself as anti-state, disruptive, private, and post-political, while benefiting from a very deep American state-capital-science infrastructure. Now, under the pressure of AI, China, war, and supply-chain insecurity, parts of that same technology class are rediscovering the state.
That is why I used the phrase “technological Bonapartism.” The danger is that this rediscovery of the state may not lead to broad public capacity, manufacturing renewal, education, infrastructure, or scientific autonomy. It may instead lead to a new layer of nominally private technology firms using national-security rhetoric to claim public money, political privilege, and strategic authority.
This well written essay hints at how China today resembles the pre-1980s USA in important ways yet never once notes the by far biggest structural similarities old America and current day China have between each other. And that is that old America was and current day China is a system with highly decentralized economic, governmental, scientific, and financial structures. In both systems, most all real decision-making occurred locally and regionally, provincial and municipal developmental competition in China; state, municipal, civic, and regionally based industrial systems in the older USA.
The US examples the essay mentions:
"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"
Those werent the products of centralized command systems but deeply decentralized, heterogenous, and pluralized developmental ecologies with many overlapping institutions, firms, laboratories, banks, schools, jurisdictions, and locally-civically embedded public/private relationships.
The USA spent the latter 1960s on (with much of the ground work was laid in the post WW2 decades) dismantling the very decentralized institutional architecture that had previously generated that capacity and then relying on the planetary economic plannin and extractions structures of capital "G" Globalization to make up the big difference, while from the early 1980s on China operated more like the older American system than modern America has
In fact, in the latter 1970s and early 1980s, CPC some local party branches actually referenced the reforms of the mi 19th century American Jacksonians to argue for the reforms that ended up being enacted, and the Chinese system has in key ways looked remarkably like the system of America from the 1830s until some point after ww2 (although some of those features had been diminishing over time, but they were still quite there), for example, the Guangzhou Municipal Party School in the late 1970s, there are reports from interviews with later reform officials (such as in Deng era memoirs) that Guangzhou’s reformist intellectual circles made reference to designs established during the period of Jacksonian Democracy such as infrastructure financing models, local tax share-dominance and retention, the benefits of city-led economic experimentation, etc. And the Shanghai Economic Research Institutes in the early 1980s compared 19th-century American city-state relationships to their desired trajectory for Chinese coastal cities, which were strong port cities with fiscal and legal tools to manage foreign trade, investment, and currency operations.