Alex Karp’s Technological Republic and the Remaking of the West
From M.G.
For several months Alex Karp seemed to be everywhere. I first noticed the interviews, then the conference appearances, and after that the business-magazine covers. Chief executives usually speak in a language designed to make power sound harmless. Karp does the opposite. He talks about weapons, decline, cowardice and the possibility that the West might lose because its ruling class no longer knows what it wants. The performance can be ridiculous. It can also be revealing. That was enough to make me read The Technological Republic, which Karp wrote with Nicholas Zamiska.
The book reads like a dark commentary on a machine whose performance no longer satisfies its authors. What they diagnose above all is a loss of responsiveness. The classical instruments of civilian administration and military power projection are, in their account, suffocating under an obsolete architecture, while any state that tolerates this condition falls behind in the race among powers. This diagnosis deserves to be taken more seriously than the genre might suggest, because it identifies real contradictions of American state power. For precisely that reason, it is worth following step by step until the point at which it becomes a political programme. When the Pentagon, as the book recounts at one point, failed during the Gulf War to procure simple Motorola radios on the open market because a Byzantine procurement system encased every action in regulations, the episode is more than an anecdote about administrative failure. For the authors, it is a symptom of a state power gradually losing the capacity to enforce its global claims with “technologically obsolete instruments of force.” The traditional arms industry belongs to the same picture, embodied by giants such as Lockheed Martin, whose systems spend decades in development and have long since become detached, they argue, from the realities of the front. While Washington debates compliance, ethical guidelines for algorithms, and the pacifist qualms of its own tech workers, competitors, China foremost among them, are investing in autonomous drone swarms, facial recognition, and AI-assisted warfare. The United States, so the diagnosis goes, risks losing the competitive struggle of the future to the administrative inertia of its own apparatus.
“A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West. The loss of national ambition and interest in the potential of science and technology […] have created an innovation gap. The state has retreated from the pursuit of the kind of large-scale breakthroughs that gave rise to the atomic bomb and the internet […]. Silicon Valley, meanwhile, turned inward, focusing its energy on narrow consumer products, rather than projects that speak to and address our greater security and welfare.”
— Alex C. Karp/Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic, Preface.
Here, the fraction of tech capital building the architecture of algorithmic warfare reformulates the conditions under which American-led Western power is to be preserved. The separation that Silicon Valley imagined for itself over decades—civilian innovation here, state violence there, market and military as separate worlds—is to be abolished. Karp supplies the theory of a software-shaped raison d’état: the state is to loosen its bureaucratic restraints, tech capital is to overcome its consumerist self-absorption, and the two are to be wired together in a republic whose legitimacy derives more strongly from technological superiority, the provision of security, and geopolitical capacity for action. Given this thrust, one should avoid the shortcut of treating Karp as simply anti-liberal. The book declares its commitment to individual rights, the market economy, and democratic legitimacy. His programme does not abandon the liberal order but reorganises it along authoritarian and national-strategic lines. The ordinary operation of the republic is to be permanently aligned with geopolitical performance; what serves the nation is to be expanded, while whatever impedes its responsiveness is to be shortened, rebuilt, or technologically superseded.
The Slow Death of Consumer Ideology
Roosevelt writes to Vannevar Bush, the Manhattan Project gathers an entire generation of physicists under a military purpose, and the research programmes of the 1940s give rise to precursors of artificial intelligence and eventually the semiconductor industry itself. Fairchild builds reconnaissance technology for CIA spy satellites, while for a time every ballistic missile of the US Navy is manufactured in Santa Clara County. From these names and episodes emerges a genealogical claim: the myth of the garage conceals the barracks. The Valley likes to present itself as the child of individual genius, yet the technological power on which it rests emerged from the state, from public financing and from grand national state projects. Where one might accuse the founders of hypocrisy, the book asserts an objective belonging to American state power even where they understand themselves ideologically as its opposite. As such, whoever emerged from the military-state complex is to place themselves once more at the state’s disposal.
Lee Felsenstein wanted personal computers as a way out of institutional constraints, while Stewart Brand saw in the counterculture’s contempt for central authority the philosophical foundation of a leaderless internet. Through Apple’s “1984” advertisement and the heroisation of the individual against the mainframe, this narrative ultimately culminates in consumption: the user replaces the citizen, the consumer the nation, the app the grand project. Under orientation towards profitable markets, capacity for valorisation determined the further shape of the industry, and the language of individual liberation became the ideology of a sector whose business models rested on data extraction and platform monopolies. Intellectual property transformed technical knowledge into exclusive conditions of business, network effects rewarded the companies that converted communication into private infrastructure, and the free use of many services was paid for through the commercial measurement of their users. Meanwhile, the state guaranteed the conditions of this field of business, even as its research programmes continued to provide essential technological foundations. The political language of the counterculture accompanied the capitalist appropriation of a technology whose social purpose was decided by the profitability of the companies that controlled it. Karp and Zamiska state the result without euphemism: the modern Valley detached itself from its direct relationship to government and concentrated its energies on online advertising, social media, shopping, photo apps, and food delivery, while medical breakthroughs, educational reform, and military progress were left waiting. What interests Karp in this finding is less a moral complaint about habits of consumption. He leaves the question of whether too much is bought or enjoyed to others. What concerns him is a weightier category: the strategic misallocation of social intelligence.
“The criticism of that early generation of startups focused on their lack of discipline and reckless spending, as well as the abandonment of any rigor or scrutiny from their investors. But there was a far more fundamental misallocation of resources, of capital and talent. The failing of that early internet era was its rush to serve the needs of the consumer at the expense of those of the nation-state or public.”
— Alex C. Karp/Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic, Chapter Nine, Lost in Toyland.
A capital operating in the technology sector behaves rationally on its own terms when it develops platforms for markets backed by effective demand, because there its advance promises a profit. Competition among capitals sorts technological possibilities according to their expected valorisation. Social needs and strategic state purposes must first appear as effective demand: the former through income or public provision, the latter through guaranteed contracts. A medicine serves the treatment of illness; a military targeting system organises violence. For private investment, both can become vehicles of profit. The state has a set of tools that alters the conditions of valorisation, translates strategic needs into secure business opportunities, socialises risks, and creates markets that would not exist without its demand. Palantir is the model case: what constitutes surveillance or warfare for the state becomes revenue in the company’s accounts. The Valley’s old doctrine ran as follows: build what users want, scale globally, let the market decide, and keep the state at a distance. Karp reverses the final clause. The state is to create the profitable opportunities through which the most advanced companies can develop while serving national power.
“But why must we always defer to the wisdom of the crowd when it comes to allocating scarce capital in a market economy? We seem to have unintentionally deprived ourselves of the opportunity to engage in a critical discussion about the businesses and endeavors that ought to exist, not merely the ventures that could. The wisdom of the crowd at the height of the rise of Zynga and Groupon in 2011 made its verdict clear: these were winners that merited further investment. Tens of billions of dollars were wagered on their continued ascent. But there was no forum or platform or meaningful opportunity for anyone to question whether our society’s scarce resources ought to be diverted to the construction of online games or a more effective aggregator of coupons and discounts. The market had spoken, so it must be so.”
— Alex C. Karp/Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic, Chapter Fifteen, Into the Desert.
In this sense, his position is post-neoliberal from the right. It does not return the state to an economy from which it had previously been absent, but it explicitly rejects the market as the sole authority over social purpose. National security and technological sovereignty are to direct private investment wherever its spontaneous calculation of profitability neglects the foundations of state power. Venture capital is to be brought into close connection with the military while private property and private profit remain the basis of that connection. The question is how social production can be withdrawn from the control of private owners and the competition of state powers. Karp’s diagnosis brushes against this connection because it notices the indifference of private investment towards particular contents. His political problem begins where that indifference damages American power. This also includes the familiar but underestimated point about the moral constitution of the engineers who measure human behaviour and convert attention into advertising revenue, yet draw a moral line as soon as their software is to serve the military. Karp replies that they enjoy the peace and freedom provided by that very military. For him, this is the hypocrisy of an elite able to afford its purity because others pay for its security. The engineers imagine that they can remain civilian in advertising, platforms, and consumption and become political only with drones, targeting, and weapons systems, as though a clean line separated harmless from serious applications of the same procedures. What appears as a character flaw of programmers rests on the false idea that civilian technology stands outside the political and military architecture of the society in which it is developed. The distinction between civilian and military applications is real, but it does not separate socially innocent technology from systems that become political only when fitted to a weapon. Data repositories, computing centres, and communications platforms are already shaped by property, surveillance, and state power. This does not give technology a political essence independent of its concrete form. An algorithm does not by nature bear the character of domination, but its architecture embodies the purposes, requirements, and risks for which it was developed. A system for biometric identification, targeting, or the automated prioritisation of military decisions cannot be detached from its context like a neutral tool and subordinated at will to another purpose.
The purpose and form of the productive forces are to remain determined by private control and interstate competition, and civilian technology should cast off its supposed innocence and openly insert itself into the strategic infrastructure of the state. Artificial intelligence makes this diagnosis acute because it gives the older complaint about the consumer internet a strategic object. What AI adds is not the military significance of software as such, but a new degree of operational integration between computation, perception, targeting, and autonomous action. The twenty-first century, the authors write, will be the software century, and the decisive task is to transform the Pentagon from an institution for kinetic war into an organisation capable of designing and procuring AI weapons. As long as software primarily organised the internet, the Valley could misunderstand itself as a civilian consumer industry; with AI, this self-description loses its plausibility because related models, computing infrastructures, and procedures of pattern recognition can be used both in commercial applications and in military reconnaissance and warfare. Karp therefore calls for the transition from the consumer internet to war AI. For this union of private valorisation and the competitive purpose of the state to function, however, the state apparatus itself must change.
The Operational Remaking of the Procurement State
The raison d’état to which Karp wants to return the productive forces must assume an institutional form. He illustrates why the state is not too weak but too slow with a story of lost intimacy. In the workshops of the Second World War, American fighter pilots visited Grumman’s factory floors on Long Island to tell the designers of the F6F Hellcat what worked in aerial combat over the Pacific and what failed. Builders and users stood beside one another, and the machine improved. Half a century later, in Afghanistan, that proximity has been broken. While soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division sit over laptops in Kandahar at night preparing a special operation for the next morning, Lockheed Martin develops an intelligence system in a Virginia suburb through a procurement process lasting years and consuming more preparation and planning than actual programming. The result is an abstract conception of what software ought to look like, largely indifferent to whether the unit in Kandahar can work with it. The troops want something else: they want Palantir, and they want it immediately. Applications pile up at the specially created Rapid Equipping Force, which was supposed to deliver within three to six months where the procurement system otherwise required years or decades. Officers bypass the channels and write directly up the chain. One notes that the in-house analysis system makes the work more difficult while Palantir provides an intelligence advantage; another writes that the lack of access has led to missed operational opportunities and unnecessary risk for the troops. The complaint from the front becomes a legal campaign. The Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994 required federal agencies to examine commercially available solutions before developing new specifications and building their own systems. Palantir invoked this provision in 2016 and sued the US Army before the Court of Federal Claims. Judge Marian Blank Horn ruled in the company’s favour because the Army had not adequately investigated whether products available on the market could meet its needs. The appeals court upheld the ruling in 2018. The following year, Palantir prevailed over Raytheon in the competition for a tactical expansion of the Distributed Common Ground System-Army. For the first time, a Valley company assumed the leading role in a central Army procurement programme. The book narrates the episode as a victory of reason over the apparatus. More precisely, Palantir successfully used procurement law to force open a market whose established procedures had favoured incumbent contractors and internally developed systems. From it, the authors distil a structural picture in which hundreds of thousands of federal employees manage government purchases while the governing rule of conduct is to make no waves and avoid anything unusual that might endanger one’s career. Risk aversion is inscribed in an apparatus that rewards its employees for protecting themselves and punishes them for daring. Compliance, in Karp’s diagnosis, has devoured performance.
Palantir is the embodiment of this operational ideal of the state. Small teams work close to the problem, iterating where the apparatus plans and improvising where it executes regulations. Its employees go to the front instead of waiting in the suburbs for the specification, and Karp recommends the model to the entire republic: to policing, medicine, schools, and everywhere else he sees a desert untouched by progress. The American procurement system transforms the avoidance of personal responsibility into a professional virtue, producing delays and protecting established suppliers. The traditional arms industry has entrenched access over the long term, while technical errors can be carried forward for years because cancelling them would create new responsibility.
This account conflates different causes of institutional slowness. Legal mediation, budgetary control and bureaucratic self-absorption appear as equivalent obstacles, although they arise from different functions of the state apparatus. The state’s expenditure is an exercise of public authority financed through compulsory revenues and carried out in the name of the political community. Procurement law separates office from personal possession, recognises competing suppliers as legally equal owners, and subjects their competition for public contracts to general procedures. Documentation requirements and oversight are meant to ensure that an award counts as an act of public administration rather than the private favour or spoils of an officeholder. This generality is the political form in which the bourgeois state restricts the immediate access of particular interests. No particular procurement timeline or organisational form follows from it. The state can permit direct awards, create exceptions, favour national suppliers, and organise strategic projects outside ordinary procedures. Karp attacks less the legal form itself than its weighting. Results are to be upgraded relative to control. Commercial suppliers are involved earlier, systems are developed continuously, and companies are integrated more closely into the practical work of public agencies.
The operational mode of the state consists in this reconstruction within the existing state form: agency, user, and supplier work more closely together so that decisions can be translated into technical capabilities more rapidly. The extent to which this direction has already been institutionalised is shown by the Enterprise Agreement through which the US Army consolidated a total of 75 existing contracts with Palantir in 2025. The state uses the legal form to concentrate its software and data requirements with a private platform provider. Here lies the irony of Palantir’s ascent. The company used a piece of procurement law against the established procurement bureaucracy to break open a state market dominated by traditional corporations. The liberation of the state from bureaucratic inertia and the embedding of a security-tech company in the executive are two sides of the same process. Palantir uses law to impose a procurement logic in which the supplier at a distance becomes a continuously integrated part of state practice. This proximity creates speed and a new dependency. Palantir’s platform remains tied to data models and the manufacturer’s knowledge. Whoever controls this technical infrastructure helps shape what an apparatus can base its decisions on. The state gains agility by handing part of its technical form of perception and decision to a capital that works inside its apparatus without becoming identical to it. The efficiency being preached has an owner and a balance sheet. Interstate competition makes this reconstruction urgent. China’s speed appears as an argument against domestic procedure; democratic and administrative mediation becomes a potential cost centre of power. The specification becomes the platform, the tender becomes continuous integration, and the supplier becomes an operational partner.
Why the Algorithm Needs the Nation
The operational mode of the state is a machine, and machines have no will. They aim and strike, but others set the target, and someone else dies for the result. The technological republic therefore needs engineers willing to build weapons and a population that regards this as legitimate. Karp’s answer to the problem of political will is the nation, or more precisely its conscious reconstruction. An entire educated stratum, he argues, has trained the West out of believing in itself. Canonical courses in Western civilisation, once an initiation rite of university life, came under suspicion until the West as a concept was itself called into question. Allan Bloom’s lament over an openness that dissolves into arbitrariness and Edward Said’s critique of the Orient as a European construction of power are assigned to the same movement. Karp treats conservative cultural criticism and the analysis of imperial knowledge production as two stages of self-dissolution because both undermine an unbroken positive identification with the West.
The presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT provide him with the latest image of an elite that dissolves political judgement into procedural language. At the congressional hearing of December 2023, they refused to give a categorical yes-or-no answer to the hypothetical question of whether a call for the genocide of Jews, as such, violated their codes of conduct, and referred instead to context and the threshold for sanctionable behaviour. The demand to abolish the police, in turn, serves as a model of what Rob Henderson calls a luxury belief: a conviction whose costs are borne by others rather than by the person who holds it. From these examples emerges a diagnosis: the West has subjected its own convictions to criticism without producing a new positive purpose, and into the resulting void have stepped the market, private life, and the administration of competing values. Against this, the book summons the nation back, drawing, of all things, on theories that described it as a historical construction. Benedict Anderson’s imagined community and Ernest Renan’s phrase about the nation as a daily plebiscite become a blueprint. In 1882, Renan defined the nation as a great solidarity created by the feeling of sacrifices already made and sacrifices yet to come. Karp needs precisely this formula because it builds sacrifice into the concept of the nation: if the community is imagined, it can be politically renewed; if a common myth is missing, one should write it. Alasdair MacIntyre’s admonition to build new forms of community against an all-consuming pluralism provides the philosophical cover. Karp explicitly defends Palantir’s name, taken from Tolkien’s seeing-stones, against the suspicion that such borrowings are politically contaminated.
At one point the argument becomes unusually candid. Attachment to capitalism and individual rights will never be enough, the authors say, because it is too thin to carry the human soul. For centuries, the liberal democracies of the West lived on the borrowed capital of the Church; if the elite continues its assault on organised religion, the question is what will sustain the state in future.
There is a difference between the private purposes whose pursuit the bourgeois order imposes on its members and the global purposes of state power. Individual rights direct individuals towards private success; commitment to a political whole requires an additional identification. This political unity is produced by the state. It gathers wage workers and capital owners as citizens of the same polity, legally orders their antagonisms, and represents society externally as a nation. In nationalism, the shared dependence on this power appears as belonging to a common cause: the state becomes one’s own state, its victories and defeats those of its citizens. Promises of protection and enemy images give this identification points of attachment; schools, armies, public holidays, and political rituals condense it into an imagined community. The common myth is to animate the existing political unity consciously, place its antagonisms within a common history, and produce a willingness to sacrifice before the emergency arrives. Karp’s figure of the consumer is inadequate to this task. A consumer pursues their own advantage; a citizen is supposed to be capable of setting that advantage aside in the name of the nation. To die for gross domestic product or for Palantir’s share price would be a bad joke. Nation and political community therefore translate the needs of state power into a cause for which sacrifice is meant to appear meaningful.
The algorithm needs the nation because on its own it finds no one willing to die for it. Technology does not demand death. The state does, when it decides to use these instruments of force. The firms involved supply those instruments for profit.
The Technological Republic
Karp has written his book three times: as a critique of market allocation, administrative mediation, and liberal individualism. Only together do the three versions form a programme. What the West’s self-narration celebrates as freedom appears as weakness under the pressure of interstate competition: competition among capitals distributes the productive forces according to expected valorisation, law mediates state action and limits its immediate access, and individualism binds subjects to their personal success. Against an opponent such as China, the book argues, this threefold autonomous logic becomes a risk. Karp’s answer is the technological republic. The book proudly cites a graph according to which founder-led companies outperform the market; these founders, with their proprietor’s instinct and readiness to build, are to enter public service, while the public servant in turn is to be paid and treated like a founder. Its models are Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, which paid its senior officials handsomely, and unbending makers in the mould of Admiral Rickover, who forced the nuclear submarine through against the apparatus. Palantir is both model and beneficiary in this arrangement: the company that demonstrates the interconnection of software and state power, and the company that profits from it. This connection also has a subjective reverse side in which the programme’s anthropological core becomes visible.
“An ownership culture must be allowed and encouraged to take root in our society. […] Silicon Valley went much further, and the strategy proved essential to its success.”
— Alex C. Karp/Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic, Chapter 18, An Aesthetic Point of View.
In the book, the old type of civil servant is bound to the rule and for that very reason lacks personal commitment. They administer an office that is not their own, bear little personal liability for its success, and derive security from following procedure. The indignant question of why a general entrusted with soldiers and materiel should be valued and paid less than a mediocre manager points towards this new type: the servant of the state who treats office with the commitment of an owner. Karp transfers the entrepreneur’s relationship to the company onto public office, so that the success and failure of the institution appear as the personal affair of its leadership. The impersonality of the civil servant has a specific purpose in the liberal state form: it separates office from person, binds decisions to rules, and limits the access of particular interests. The entrepreneurial relation of responsibility shifts this boundary. Karp understands these tensions as a problem of steering. Private property, wage labour, competition, and the state power separated from society stand at the end of his programme where they stood at the beginning; what changes is the form in which they are organised into world power. Such a repair can succeed by its own standard. The state can direct capital into strategic sectors, create new markets, accelerate procurement, and bind private companies more closely to its apparatuses of force. It can also cultivate nationalist loyalty and mobilise its citizens for geopolitical competition. Karp retains democratic legitimacy and reweights the forms of legitimation that already coexist in bourgeois democracy. The public, it claims, will forgive the political class almost anything, but ultimately not the failure to use available technology to provide essential goods: security, infrastructure, medical care, and military striking power. Democratic rule, too, justifies itself through security, growth, provision, and the successful representation of the nation. Procedures count as proven insofar as they sustain the state’s capacity for action; where they appear as obstacles, they are to be reconstructed.
Karp thus presents a political programme in which the democratic and administrative mediations of the bourgeois state are subordinated to geopolitical performance. They are not abolished, but shortened, exempted, or reconstructed wherever they appear to obstruct the state’s capacity for action. Those parts of the programme already realised in industrial policy mark an institutional shift whose reach remains open. They reveal the standard according to which existing institutions are being reconstructed. To classify the whole thing as fascism substitutes a label for the determination of the programme. Palantir’s project touches motifs historically radicalised by fascism: contempt for slow mediation, the priority of national capacity for action, the cultural animation of rule, and sacrifice for the nation. Karp’s concrete political form is an authoritarian, national-liberal reconstruction of existing institutions from above, carried by founders, engineers, military officers, and security officials. A fascist mass movement, a racially defined national community, and one-party rule are not part of this design. This makes Karp’s programme significant beyond Palantir. The stronger the rivalry for markets, technologies, and military superiority becomes, the more readily a state power comes to regard the slowness of its procedures, the private allocation of strategic resources, and the limited willingness of its population to make sacrifices as obstacles. Yet it does not act on every state in the same way. A world power, a dependent ally, and a small national economy possess different economic, military, and political means; they do not stand beside one another as equivalent competitors but form a hierarchically structured world of states. Karp’s proposals are the American and especially systematic expression of a general pressure towards strategic industrial policy, military acceleration, and the closer integration of technological capitals. The sharpness of this programme becomes visible on another front opened at the beginning of the book. It cites Thomas Schelling, for whom the capacity to inflict damage on an opponent constitutes the real power of negotiation, and turns this into the accusation that the West has forgotten this truth. Because it imagines itself the historical victor, it mistakes moral superiority for power and trusts that law, values, and discourse can replace the material capacity for violence. The book reverses the relation. Hard power is the precondition for liberal values to carry weight in world politics; violence is not a regrettable instrument of the rules-based order but its foundation. The force of its rules always depended on the power to enforce them, while the appeal to values dressed the competition among Western states in the language of a universal human order.
The book bears an American signature: Pentagon, Palantir, China, and the West form its self-evident horizon. It would be convenient to read it as a report from a distant great power whose problems scarcely touch Europe. Yet the underlying tendency extends beyond the United States. Capitalist states depend on successful accumulation within their jurisdictions for tax revenue, public credit, employment, and the economic basis of their power. They therefore seek to secure strategic supply chains, technological capacities, investment, and military leverage against competing states. From this standpoint, domestic procedures and inherited industrial structures appear as obstacles wherever they delay access to the means of international competition. This pressure assumes different political forms according to each state’s position in the international hierarchy. The United States formulates it as a world power seeking to defend its technological and military primacy. European states and EU institutions translate the same pressure into their own programmes from a weaker and more dependent position: as US allies, as participants in an incomplete power bloc, and as national locations seeking to overcome military and technological deficits. Across the EU and its leading member states, this complaint appears under the headings of strategic autonomy, technological sovereignty, and Zeitenwende. It is fed by the rearmament of the continent and the NATO decision at The Hague, under which the member states are to allocate by 2035 at least 3.5 per cent of gross domestic product to core military requirements and a further 1.5 per cent to defence- and security-related expenditure.
Its German face is Helsing, a company founded in Munich in 2021 that has risen within a few years to become one of Europe’s most valuable technology companies. Helsing describes itself as a firm creating sovereign AI capabilities to protect democracies. It was founded on the thesis that the West was losing the race for military artificial intelligence and that only a European company presenting itself as “ethics first” could close the gap. Karp’s manifesto appears here in the language of the community of values. The parallel extends into the details. Helsing participates in the AI backbone of the Future Combat Air System, produces AI-assisted combat drones for Ukraine, and has integrated its Centaur air-combat agent into Gripen E test flights. The company now develops its own autonomous combat aircraft, reconnaissance and targeting systems, and combines software, platforms, and hardware production. Its sales argument corresponds to Karp’s diagnosis: such capabilities can be developed and integrated within months where conventional procurement would take years or decades. The established arms corporations respond as partners, suppliers, investors, and competitors within the same new armaments architecture. Behind the suppliers stands the same interconnection of tech capital and the apparatus of force found in California. Helsing has been financed substantially by Spotify founder Daniel Ek, while Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund has invested in the Berlin competitor Stark; Thiel himself was one of Palantir’s co-founders. The latest financing round, which valued Helsing at eighteen billion dollars in July 2026, shows how attractive the state-guaranteed market in rearmament has become to international capital. Anyone who treats Karp as a distinctly American phenomenon in order to idealise the European model as a civilian, social, and peaceable alternative is deceiving themselves. The community of values and the peace project now supply a substantial part of the language in which Europe’s rearmament and technological competition are legitimised as the defence of its particular civilisation. Beside them stands the welfare state, whose benefits, burdens, and budgets are being reweighted under the new standard of security, as the material organisation of national reproduction. The underlying pressure arises from the reciprocal relation between the international competition of capitals and the rivalry of sovereign states, each of which seeks to secure the economic, technological, and military means of its own power. What Karp describes as a disease of the West belongs to the normal functioning of the order he wants to save: private property, competition, and political unification by the state produce the indifference and separation that his technological republic seeks to correct only where they weaken national power.
A communist conclusion begins with control over the productive forces. Data centres, research infrastructure, databases, industrial facilities, and scientific labour would have to be withdrawn from the exclusive control of private owners and states and organised by the producers as common conditions of their reproduction. The consequence reaches beyond a more peaceful investment policy. Technical systems created for surveillance, targeting, and automated warfare would have to be materially reconstructed or abandoned; data models, production facilities, and workflows would have to be redefined according to the needs of provision, health, transport, energy, communication, and the reduction of necessary labour.
“The reconstruction of a technological republic […] will require […] shared purpose and identity […]. We should now build something together in its place.”
— Alex C. Karp/Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic, Chapter 18, An Aesthetic Point of View.
Karp wants to build something common. The decisive questions, however, are who owns the conditions of this common work, what purpose they serve, and who decides that purpose. His technological republic answers them unequivocally: property remains private, political power remains separated from society, and the common purpose is national self-assertion. Founders and servants of the state decide; the population supplies consent, labour, and, in an emergency, its life. In an emancipated society, the common purpose would lie in the conscious organisation of its own conditions of life; a national myth that transfigures the purposes of state power into the natural common cause of its members would thereby lose its object. The defence of soft liberalism against its hard form misses this connection. Both belong to the same social order and dispute the most expedient form of its power. The technological republic wants to repair the West.
