Highlights from The Technological Republic by Alexander C. Karp, Nicholas W. Zamiska
Highlights from this book
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When emerging technologies that give rise to wealth do not advance the broader public interest, trouble often follows. Put differently, the decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. In this way, the willingness of the engineering and scientific communities to come to the aid of the nation has been vital not only to the legitimacy of the private sector but to the durability of political institutions across the West.
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A generation of founders cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of lofty and ambitious purpose—indeed their rallying cry to change the world has grown lifeless from overuse—but often raised enormous amounts of capital and hired legions of talented engineers merely to build photo-sharing apps and chat interfaces for the modern consumer. A skepticism of government work and national ambition took hold in the Valley. The grand, collectivist experiments of the earlier part of the twentieth century were discarded in favor of a narrow attentiveness to the desires and needs of the individual. The market rewarded shallow engagement with the potential of technology, as startup after startup catered to the whims of late capitalist culture without any interest in constructing the technical infrastructure that would address our most significant challenges as a nation. The age of social media platforms and food delivery apps had arrived. Medical breakthroughs, education reform, and military advances would have to wait.
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Our entire defense establishment and military procurement complex were built to supply soldiers for a type of war—on grand battlefields and with clashes of masses of humans—that may never again be fought. This next era of conflict will be won or lost with software. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on AI is set to begin. The risk, however, is that we think we have already won.
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The ability to develop the tools required to deploy force against an opponent, combined with a credible threat to use such force, is often the foundation of any effective negotiation with an adversary. The underlying cause of our cultural hesitation to openly pursue technical superiority may be our collective sense that we have already won. But the certainty with which many believed that history had come to an end, and that Western liberal democracy had emerged in permanent victory after the struggles of the twentieth century, is as dangerous as it is pervasive.
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“To be coercive, violence has to be anticipated,” he wrote in the 1960s as the United States grappled with its military escalation in Vietnam. “The power to hurt is bargaining power. To exploit it is diplomacy—vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy.” The virtue of Schelling’s version of realism was its unsentimental disentanglement of the moral from the strategic. As he made clear, “War is always a bargaining process.” Before one engages with the justice or injustice of a policy, it is necessary to understand one’s leverage or lack thereof in a negotiation, armed or otherwise. The contemporary approach to international affairs too often assumes, either explicitly or implicitly, that the correctness of one’s views from a moral or ethical perspective precludes the need to engage with the more distasteful and fundamental question of relative power with respect to a geopolitical opponent, and specifically which party has a superior ability to inflict harm on the other.
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For many, the security that we enjoy is a background fact or feature of existence so foundational that it merits no explanation. These engineers inhabit a world without trade-offs, ideological or economic.
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The preconditions for a durable peace often come only from a credible threat of war.
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And for nations that hold themselves to a far higher moral standard than their adversaries when it comes to the use of force, even technical parity with an enemy is insufficient. A weapons system in the hands of an ethical society, and one rightly wary of its use, will act as an effective deterrent only if it is far more powerful than the capability of an adversary who would not hesitate to kill the innocent.
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“there are no rules without someone to enforce them.”
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The appeal of pacifism is that it satisfies our instinctive empathy for the powerless.
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The allure of pacifism, and a potential retreat from deterrence, is that it relieves us of the need to navigate among the difficult and imperfect trade-offs that the world presents.
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“To defend myself, I must restrain power with freedom, even if the temporary beneficiaries are the enemies of freedom,”
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His wife reportedly asked Nixon, affecting a certain naïveté, faux or otherwise, “Why do you have to tell people how little we have and how much we owe?” Her husband replied that politicians were destined to “live in a goldfish bowl.” But the systematic elimination of private spaces, even for our public figures, has consequences, and ultimately further incentivizes only those given to theatrics, and who crave a stage, to run for office.
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The systematic expression and investigation of one’s own beliefs—the essential purpose of genuine education—remain our best defense against the mind becoming a product or vehicle for the ambitions of another.
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The broader risk for any country is that elite power structures harden and calcify.
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In Baltzell’s view, an aristocracy driven by talent is an essential feature of any republic. The challenge is ensuring that such aristocracies remain open to new members and do not descend into mere caste structures, which close their ranks along racial or religious lines.
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The antiseptic nature of modern discourse, dominated by an unwavering commitment to justice but deeply wary when it comes to substantive positions on the good life, is a product of our own reluctance, and indeed fear, to offend, to alienate, and to risk the disapproval of the crowd. Yet there is too much that lies “beyond justice,” in the words of Ágnes Heller, the Hungarian philosopher born in Budapest in 1929. As Heller writes, “Justice is the skeleton: the good life is the flesh and blood.”
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The substantive triumph of Orientalism was its exposing to a broad audience the extent to which the telling of history, the act of summation and synthesis into narrative from disparate strands of detail and fact, was not itself a neutral, disinterested act, but rather an exercise of power in the world
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Hawke’s character, Jesse, offers the familiar challenge to the traps of consumption and to materialist desire. “I just feel like I’m designed to be slightly dissatisfied with everything,” he says, wistfully. “I satisfy one desire, and it just agitates another.” Celine, played by Delpy, responds, winning the exchange: “But I feel really alive when I want something…. Wanting, whether it’s intimacy with another person or a new pair of shoes, is kind of beautiful. I like that we have those ever-renewing desires.”
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The bees that Lindauer and others since have studied do not incorporate caste-based social hierarchies in order to address the enormous collective action challenges that they face, but rather distribute autonomy to as great a degree as possible to the fringes—the scouts—of their organization. The individuals at the periphery of a group, who often have the latest and most valuable information regarding the suitability of potential nesting sites, and can take into account shifting conditions, are the ones who cast their ballots by dancing for the group. The swarm organizes itself around the problem at hand.
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The modern enterprise is often too quick to avoid such friction. We have today privileged a kind of ease in corporate life, a culture of agreeableness that can move institutions away, not toward, creative output. The impulse—indeed rush—to smooth over any hint of conflict within businesses and government agencies is misguided, leaving many with the misimpression that a life of ease awaits and rewarding those whose principal desire is the approval of others. As the comedian John Mulaney has said, “Likability is a jail.”
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that is the seed of an engineering culture. It is essential that the engineer—whether of the mechanical world, the digital, or even perhaps the written—descend from his or her tower of theory into the morass of actual details as they exist, not as they have been theorized to be.
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It is essential that the engineer—whether of the mechanical world, the digital, or even perhaps the written—descend from his or her tower of theory into the morass of actual details as they exist, not as they have been theorized to be. One must, as the American philosopher John Dewey wrote in his essay “Pragmatic America” in 1922, “get down from noble aloofness into the muddy stream of concrete things.”
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As Lucian Freud, the German-born figurative painter, perhaps the most enduring of the twentieth century, put it, “I try to paint what is actually there.” The act of observation, of looking closely while suspending judgment—taking the facts in and resisting the urge to impose one’s view on them—sits at the heart of any engineering culture, including ours.
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And the reconstruction of a technological republic will, among other things, require the rebuilding of an ownership society, a founder culture that came from tech but has the potential to reshape government, where nobody is entrusted with leadership who does not have a stake in their own success.
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We are perhaps right to recoil at the summary abandonment of the unnamed “African mask” in favor of the white marble of the Apollo. But should we be left with no means of discerning between art that moves us forward, ideas that advance humanity’s cause, and those that do not? The risk is that our fear to pronounce, to speak, to prefer, has left us without direction and confidence when it comes to marshaling our shared resources and talents. Fear has led us to recoil and shrink our sense of the possible,
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We are perhaps right to recoil at the summary abandonment of the unnamed “African mask” in favor of the white marble of the Apollo. But should we be left with no means of discerning between art that moves us forward, ideas that advance humanity’s cause, and those that do not? The risk is that our fear to pronounce, to speak, to prefer, has left us without direction and confidence when it comes to marshaling our shared resources and talents. Fear has led us to recoil and shrink our sense of the possible, and this fear has found its way into every aspect of our lives.
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Silicon Valley remains one of the few places in the world where individuals of low birth, to use a phrase of the constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar, can own something substantial and participate in the upside of their labor, rather than remain cogs, even
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Silicon Valley remains one of the few places in the world where individuals of low birth, to use a phrase of the constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar, can own something substantial and participate in the upside of their labor, rather than remain cogs, even if often highly paid cogs, in the ventures of another.
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Silicon Valley remains one of the few places in the world where individuals of low birth, to use a phrase of the constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar, can own something substantial and participate in the upside of their labor, rather than remain cogs, even if often highly paid cogs, in the ventures of another. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a talented graduate could perhaps join Goldman Sachs, which was a pioneer of partnership compensation models, or perhaps a white-shoe law firm, where attorneys shared the profits, and risk, of their work. But those experiments have essentially withered; such firms still attract talented and ambitious minds, but they are paid salaries, often high ones, but salaries nonetheless. The upside of the endeavors and creative energy of labor is captured by the capitalists.
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The entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley do not lack idealism; indeed, they often appear to be brimming with it. But it is thin and can wither under even the slightest scrutiny. The legions of young founders have for decades now routinely claimed that they aspire to change the world. Yet such claims have grown meaningless from overuse. This cloak of idealism was put on in order to relieve these young founders of the need to develop anything approaching a more substantial worldview. And the nation-state itself, the most effective means of collective organization in pursuit of a shared purpose that the world has ever known, was cast aside as an obstacle to progress.
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For Strauss, the contemporary social scientist had rejected values in favor of a search for truth and convinced himself that such a distinction was possible. But it was this “indifference to any goal, or of aimlessness and drifting,” as Strauss put it, that is the seed of our current nihilism as a culture.