#techoverlords

As the historian Richard Hofstadter noted, a fierce anti-intellectual spirit has long animated American culture, but it has typically targeted the knowledge elite from below. What’s striking about today’s brand of anti-intellectualism is that it infuses the American knowledge elite; it stems from the bedrock conviction among tech oligarchs that they have mastered everything and have nothing left to learn. In this cloistered vision of tech-driven learning, they believe that deep intellectual work—the kind you do when you author a complex piece of music, for example—has little or no inherent value. Their disdain for it has fueled their attacks on higher education, the humanities, and learning for its own sake, which they believe has no purpose beyond its inevitable digitization and monetization.

Last year, Trump, Elon Musk and DOGE fired or forced out a critical mass of government scientists, even as they gutted funding to research programs at the country's universities. You'd think that this would be a barrier to making scientific breakthroughs in America, but not according to Trump. He's promised that America will produce annual "moonshot"-scale breakthroughs, without scientists, by asking a chatbot to shit out paradigm-shattering scientific leaps on demand…

The irony of this posture is that there’s almost no sector of American life—with the notable exception of the tech world’s political retainers in the Trump White House—that is less welcoming to rigorous thinking than Silicon Valley. The apostles of algorithmic dominance cheerlead chatbots and technocratic shortcuts for thinking and reasoning, and use them extensively themselves, even though the models hallucinate and have a baleful tendency toward sycophancy.

These guys don't believe in this country. These tech billionaires, they want a post-America future, a post-democracy future. They think the Founding Fathers were cucks. They think the Constitution is toilet paper. It's analog. They're going to go into their blockchain smart contract future, and all of this is dumb. And part of it is that they don't want to live in a world where they don't get to found the country. Why should these old dead guys in wigs get to be the ones who are the founders? We are the founders. That's the special magic word in Silicon Valley, is to be the founder.

You will notice the summarized thesis of The Technological Republic is one that will line Palantir's pockets while presenting that fleecing as a strategic imperative, even a moral one. That much is par for the course for the military-industrial complex. But because Palantir is talking about AI dominance, embracing its perspective creates a national-security dependency on AI purveyors and on the providers of the interfacing tier between the government and AI, like Palantir's Maven Smart System. That is not par for the course for the military-industrial complex, which has for seven decades operated as a self-dealing partnership, not a dominance battle. The February clash between Anthropic and the Defense Department is the result of the discomfort that goes along with the dawning AI dependency.

Silicon Valley owes an immeasurable debt to the ruling class who bailed out the criminal bankers that wrecked the livelihood of the majority of Americans. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley will defend that ruling class to the death (literally!), in the name of the majority of Americans whom they treat with contempt – i.e., like cattle that have lost their market value.

Karp’s manifesto-via-tweet asserts primarily that we can achieve peace through war, and that billionaires brandishing “grand narratives” in the manner of Elon Musk should be in the country’s driver’s seat, sending ordinary citizens to the battlefield whether they like it or not.