In 2018, Google executives made the controversial decision to decline future work for the US Department of Defense on Project Maven. The executives cited potential violations of internal ethics standards, which supposedly prohibited Google from taking on weapons or surveillance work. But prior to the decision, Google executives had spent months attempting to stifle employee unrest over Project Maven. Only a few years later, after the software engineering labor market tightened, Google went back to bidding on Pentagon contracts. Google CEO Sundar Pichai even assured Congress in 2020 that the company was “deeply committed to serving the military and US government” and only regarded employee feedback as one factor among many in making company decisions.

The Technological Republic uses incidents such as Google’s withdrawal from Project Maven to advance its central claim that Silicon Valley has turned its back on the US government. The authors draw a sharp distinction between the modern incarnation of Silicon Valley that “catered to the whims of late capitalist culture” and the Silicon Valley that emerged from World War II, focusing on ambitious government-funded projects that served the national interest (p. 9). The book’s central preoccupation is figuring out how and why, as the authors see it, the technology industry became increasingly averse to military contracting. The authors make clear their disapproval of this trend. They believe that Western liberal democracies can only survive if Silicon Valley joins the ongoing arms race against China and Russia.

Blending intellectual history and cultural criticism, The Technological Republic attempts to show how the anti-institutional ethos of the counterculture permeated successive iterations of Silicon Valley.

This cultural framing is applied to the 1980s personal computing revolution, the early 2000s dot-com bubble, and the 2010s smartphone-driven shift into consumer services such as ride-hailing and food delivery. The authors lament that, in these business cycles, Silicon Valley misdirected its resources—instead of promoting national interests, tech companies catered to “the often capricious and passing needs of late capitalism’s hordes” (p. 110). The persistent focus on culture makes the narrative clear and coherent. But it can also be reductive, as when the dot-com bubble is blamed on Silicon Valley’s “rush to serve the needs of the consumer at the expense of those of the nation-state or public” (p. 110).

The most compelling passages in The Technological Republic interweave intellectual and economic history. For example, Karp and Zamiska discuss how a generation of technologists launched the effective altruism movement on the basis of the ethical universalism popularized by the Princeton philosophy professor Peter Singer. They theorize that effective altruism appealed to tech founders because it offered superficial answers to complex moral problems and conformed to the countercultural distrust of grand ideology. The book also attempts to trace the lineage of Silicon Valley’s penchant for techno-utopianism from the counterculture to the present day—a topic explored in greater depth by Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006). Their overarching point is that, within both Silicon Valley and the broader American culture, “an aspirational desire for tolerance of everything has descended into support of nothing” (p. 201).

In attempting to write a cultural history of Silicon Valley that also serves as a critique, Karp and Zamiska can sacrifice the former in service of the latter. They make overly broad generalizations such as claiming that “Silicon Valley had made clear its disinterest in the work and challenges of government” (p. 111). Indeed, their central argument relies on two faulty assumptions: First, that the values of public firms can be ascertained through corporate branding and public statements, rather than observed behaviors; and second, that Silicon Valley lost interest in working with the US government, when in fact, large firms such as Microsoft and Oracle have worked for decades as military contractors.

To be fair, Karp and Zamiska did not set out to write a rigorous monograph. The Technological Republic is a self-proclaimed “political treatise” (p. xv). It is organized into four parts, three of which advance its main argument. But the third section focuses on Palantir, the data analytics firm that works closely with the intelligence agencies of the USA and several close allies. Karp cofounded Palantir and serves as its CEO, while Zamiska sits on the board and leads corporate affairs. The authors therefore have a clear interest in spinning a narrative that positions Palantir as a rare exception in taking on stigmatized government work. Palantir competes against many of the large technology firms that the authors deride as having given up on working with the US military.

Despite its shortcomings, The Technological Republic should be of interest to business historians. It is a rare book that can serve as both a primary and a secondary source. Prior to founding Palantir alongside Peter Thiel, Karp received his doctorate in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University Frankfurt. He draws on this background to imbue the book with intellectual heft that sets it apart in the genre of popular business non-fiction. The book also provides rare insight into a certain influential slice of Silicon Valley elites whose ideas have shaped both the tech industry and the New Right. Karp and Zamiska reference many of this scene’s most cited intellectuals, including Leo Strauss, Rene Girard, and Allan Bloom; they also deride its perceived opponents, including Edward Said and Fredric Cheyette. Karp has become a prominent pundit in his own right. He is the subject of considerable media intrigue, in part owing to his unusual path to leading a defense contractor: Karp was raised in Philadelphia by a Jewish father and African American mother, claims to be a socialist, has dyslexia, and wrote a doctoral dissertation in German that interpreted Parsons by way of Freud. In 2024, he earned a record-setting $6.8 billion in compensation for his work at Palantir.

While it is hard to recommend The Technological Republic as a scholarly work of history, the book is nevertheless an essential read for those seeking to understand the ideological underpinnings of the conservative movement in Silicon Valley. Much of the intellectual activity in this movement occurs on Substack or Twitter, in podcast studios, and across tech company blog posts. The Technological Republic is therefore a rare and valuable attempt to convey this worldview in a more substantial form. In this regard, it stands alongside Peter Thiel’s Zero to One (2014) and Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State (2022)—except unlike those works, The Technological Republic offers more than just polemic, as it tells a history of Silicon Valley from within the industry itself.