- Palantir’s Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska called out Silicon Valley for turning away from its history of working with the government to address national priorities and instead fixating on “trivial” inconveniences that consumers face.
Silicon Valley and its immense brain power are too focused on trifling consumer needs after abandoning a long history of working with the government to tackle more pressing national issues, according to top executives at data-mining software company Palantir.
In an Atlantic essay adapted from their forthcoming book The Technological Republic, CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, head of corporate affairs and legal counsel to the office of the CEO, pointed out Silicon Valley’s origins after World War II and its early dependence on the government, including the US military.
That fit with an even longer American tradition of deep ties between the state and science, they added, noting that Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were also inventors. It continued into the Cold War as scientists and engineers helped give rise to DARPA and propelled NASA in the space race.
“The modern incarnation of Silicon Valley has strayed significantly from this tradition of collaboration with the U.S. Government, focusing instead on the consumer market, including the online advertising and social-media platforms that have come to dominate—and limit—our sense of the potential of technology,” Karp and Zamiska said.
In thinly veiled rebukes of tech giants like Meta Platforms, they added that tech leaders gave lip service to high-minded goals but instead used their immense stockpiles of capital and engineering talent to create photo-sharing apps and chat interfaces.
Silicon Valley grew skeptical of the government and national endeavors—and the market egged on the trend, rewarding start-ups for catering to “the whims of late-capitalist culture.”
“The age of social-media platforms and food-delivery apps had arrived,” Karp and Zamiska quipped. “Medical breakthroughs, education reform, and military advances would have to wait.”
As state and federal agencies became more dysfunctional, Silicon Valley increasingly viewed the government as an obstacle rather than a partner, fueling its shift toward the consumer, they explained.
Without the tech sector’s cooperation, governments also scaled back attempts as developing new innovations. But Karp and Zamiska argued the US and democratic allies in Europe need closer ties between governments and the software industry if they are to harness technology to help society.
“The drift of the technological world to the concerns of the consumer both reflected and helped reinforce a certain technological escapism—the instinct by Silicon Valley to steer away from the most important problems we face as a society and toward what are essentially the minor and trivial yet solvable inconveniences of everyday consumer life: such as online shopping and food delivery,” they said.
To be sure, some tech companies are involved in defense contracts. Microsoft was awarded a $22 billion Army deal in 2021 to provide augmented reality headsets, though it just handed off that work to defense-tech startup Anduril Industries.
And Google’s parent company recently shifted its stance on working with the military, allowing greater use of its AI technology.
For its part, Palantir has been putting its AI-powered platforms to work in the defense and intelligence sectors, but it has also been expanding in the commercial space recently. While it began in Silicon Valley, it moved to Colorado.
The market has also rewarded Palantir as shares soared 340% last year and are already up 58% so far this year, with Wall Street expecting more gains ahead. Its market cap now exceeds those of defense giants like RTX and Lockheed Martin.
And Palantir’s inclusion in the S&P 500 last year was celebrated by Karp, who took a victory lap in a video message and thanked the retail investors who maintained faith in the company as it bucked conventional wisdom.
In the Atlantic essay, Karp and Zamiska urged the “reconstruction of a technological republic” and a return to shared purpose.
“It might have been just and necessary to dismantle the old order,” they said. “We should now build something together in its place.”