The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West by Alexander C. Karp
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is quite a lot to like about this book. The authors provide an insiders take-down of bro-ish amoral apolitical get-rich startup tech. They rehearse the ways that this sort of tech might corrupt the culture and disenfranchise those who become ensnared by the commodification of everything. That’s along with the amplification of negativity by contextless click-algorithmic social media. The authors also evince a pretty accurate account of life inside the academy, along with a reasonable analysis of what's wrong at the extremes. They make an important case for tech in the interest of the public good.

That's all while they celebrate the insider culture of coders as a kind of artistic culture, which is a stretch to me. Their celebration of founder leadership is self-serving at best and fails to question the ever-increasing power gradient under outsized founder-wealth conditions. Finally, they are mute about the cognitive dissonance in making their case for support of our government at the very moment when the government too is being taken down by social media. They give short shrift to how scary this is, as well as to how scary the provision of yet more tools to this particular government has become when most American norms for governance have been swept aside.

I was young and teaching at a very fine school for gifted children when I encountered The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. Two of the finest teachers at the school - also two of the longest tenured - had opposing editorial views of the book. What they shared was a passion for good teaching premised on good subject matter. I had read Bloom's rendition of Plato's Republic in college and so was at first disposed favorably toward his new book. It fitted with a certain sort of pride I'd internalized at Yale.

I soon became headmaster of the school, by way of being elected president of its teacher’s union, which had followed the American grain by uniting left and right to counter a despotic founder. Along the way I'd learned to despise Bloom's elitist ethnocentric book. Turning inward and against other traditions is no way to develop as a nation; most certainly not for the American nation.

More recently, while asking my new orthopedic doctor about the possibilities that long COVID and its associated acceleration of the body's inflammatory responses might be provoking my sore knees, I realized what politics had come to mean. He advised that it wasn't so much the disease, but rather the RNA vaccines which caused the havoc. He himself would only take the old-style built-from-immune-response vaccines.

Of course I considered his take to be more authoritative than anything I might decide on, but then I felt the zing of 'oh, he's injected politics into this discussion.' I consider such usage for politics to be a near perfect analog with what gets called motivation in scientific research. Meaning that you are wishing for a certain outcome (most likely for pecuniary reasons) and therefore tipping the result. You’ve closed your mind. Who knows what political discourse my fine doctor circulates within. Certainly he feels the same exhaustion we all do when we strive to true our beliefs. Partisanship is not politics. Our founders warned us about that.

Now along comes this new self-conscious rehearsal of Bloom's book. Part II is called "The Hollowing Out of the American Mind" in echo. None other than George Will celebrates the book as the second coming of Bloom:

“Not since Allan Bloom’s astonishingly successful 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind—more than one million copies sold—has there been a cultural critique as sweeping as Karp’s.”—George F. Will, The Washington Post

The Technological Republic is celebrated on its cover as "no less ambitious than a new treatise in political theory by the Wall Street Journal.

 
Some of the principals here are not attractive types. Musk with his arrogant weirdness and elan about wiping out lives and livings. Thiel with his survivalism and goony antichrist fears. The writers here seem to be apologists for wealth as if there were a good kind and an amoral kind. Pardon me that it's hard to tell the difference.

The writing is intelligent and insightful, which only makes it harder to locate the flaws. There is a massive chicken/egg issue that they skate around: Don't we need to repair our politics and governance before we power it up? Shouldn't we the people learn to participate in defining ourselves as a people before we let our government ride off with decisions we're too slow to make while still in the process of re-formation?

If ICE can neutralize public opposition with Palantir's help, haven't we the people already been preempted?

The main thesis of the book is that our technology must be rewedded to our nation, the way that it once was with the Manhattan project for the development of the A-Bomb. The authors seem not to have noticed that politics is no longer for establishing and en-stating ideals, norms, and moral aspirations; all of which was what once constituted the aspiration of politics in service to the nation. The authors of our constitution warned about the very tendencies that have been realized now, in our third century.

Or in other words, where Karp and Zamiska lay some blame on the self-centered and often avowedly apolitical titans of tech, fixing tech won’t fix what's become of politics. Who could possibly want another Manhattan project under the guidance and leadership of this particular administration?? But I must agree with the authors that the current analog to the Manhattan project (a project including AI, delocalizing all media and proprietorship, and so-on) should not be ceded to money-grubbing a-political techno-juvies.

In brief these authors are as "motivated" in their research as would be climate researchers funded by the oil industry. By way of Palantir, they are already wedded to our nation as it is and not as it once did aspire to be. They do precisely what it is that the solipsistic purveyors of digital consumer goods are doing. They feed themselves and damn the rest of us. Disruption should be no excuse for destroying livelihoods and robbing people of agency.

We did once become our best selves in response to national threat. But there are no threats remaining that can be described as national. We have always been a nation of immigrants - that was our founding premise - and so to make immigration our biggest threat is much worse than travesty. Anyhow, it's always the entire world which is at risk post-nukes. Despite fever dreams about superior American ingenuity, there's nothing about AI which can be contained. Indeed that's the whole point of AI. The threat is from within, Pogo.

The only really good news is that it's become impossible to tell Left from Right politically other than by declared affiliation based on this or that atrocity (as viewed by the other side). It seems clear that AI can only add fuel to that sort of conflagration. They spend a lot of time disparaging the Left here, but can anyone really consider what the Right is doing as political? Power mongering is an autocrat’s métier. I repeat; partisans are not politicians.

True confession: My entrée to Academia, large and small, has always been bogus. I taught Chinese language. But hey, if computer coding is art then language teaching is intellectual. Anyhow, my sense of the 'manifest destiny' of Western Civ was that it would be expanded and thereby enhanced by judicious ingesting of the wisdom of previously othered civilizations. In a way, I began my study of Chinese as defense against the impossible climb I would have to make for parity with my prep-school-educated classmates. I threw up my hands at mastery of our own great books, and took it upon myself to master the Chinese canon.

What I can't do is to go along with these authors' plainly retrograde nationalistic chauvinism. Their compeer Peter Thiel now evinces a positive terror of whole-world governance in a kind of ouroboros indigestion from the defacto world-conquering (and utterly ungoverned politically) world of multinational capitalist commerce as it exists. His higher belief is in the Antichrist?? Oh please. Beautiful America is no longer the Empire's center. The Jedi are legion.

I just started watching the new PBS Ken Burns montage about the American Revolution. One gets a powerful feeling that people with massive and even monstrous differences among them - linguistic, cultural, geographic, and more - were all swept along with a newfound and profound togetherness based on the tidal flows (and ebbs) of distant power. As during the earlier revolution, our power is our agonizing discomfort with things as they currently are. Our distance from power is no longer geographic. Reification of geographic nationhood starts to feel catastrophic.

The last thing that most of us want to do is to empower the already corrupted structure for our governance. Digital tech in service to the government, despoiled as it is, can only accelerate the corruption. It hardly matters whether I'm an anarchistic leftie or a drain the swamp rightie. We share all the same angst and discomfort.

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