Technological Republic

What Hacker News says

1. trhwayOct 2026
   >Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX even Google have been more hands-on

   and that changes the whole social/economics/political game. The companies can't rely on the society nor on the government for required services, be it power or even defense (like those attacked AWS datacenters in Middle East). Thus those companies are more and more vertically integrated - for example they all have their own nuclear power startups and at least 2 - AMZN and SPCX - already have their access to space. One can mentally extrapolate things further or just read say Karp's book "The Technological Republic".

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2. omnimusJul 2026
   “offensively trivializing those who died in the Holocaust” - calling someone nazi or fascist is not trivializing Holocaust. These are clear terms and both Palantir and Karp often publish texts with fascist ideological elements and views. Read something they published like Technological republic. They are not hiding it.

   It's not even some radical view.

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3. nika1975Dec 2025
   I really enjoyed The Technological Republic by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska. It’s sharp, opinionated, and unusually concrete about how state capacity, technology, and institutional competence intersect in practice. Even if you don’t agree with all of it, it’s a book that forces clearer thinking about power, technology, and governance.
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4. homefreeSep 2025
   People are looking for meaning in the wrong places - it’s not a huge surprise, it’s something secularism has largely failed at.

   There are places you can work that are more meaningful or where there is a culture of cutting down on bullshit. Elon Musk is famously good at running places that do both.

   More people would benefit from getting married and having kids - a lot of (Judeo-Christian) religion’s cultural ideas were good even if its empirical claims are wrong. Religion is in some ways a battle tested cultural technology, throwing it away will have unintended consequences for most people.

   Alex Karp touches on some of these ideas indirectly in The Technological Republic which is worth reading anyway for other reasons. A lot of people in the west today grow up without a cultural core and end up aloof believing in nothing, or worse substituting some bullshit political ideology as a poor substitute religion.

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5. homefreeMay 2025
   Cultural failure - I thought Alex Karp's recent book was pretty good and worth reading. It makes the case that our culture has failed to articulate the things that make the west great (and worth defending) and as a result it's creating a lot of political and cultural problems. https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Republic-Power-Belief-F...

   Religion (particularly Judeo-Christian) has a lot of issues with empirical historical / scientific claims, but one thing it was good at is it's culturally adaptive. A lot of the cultural tooling and support it provided both with community and with some of the core cultural ideas around family and children - life purpose and direction are probably good things for most people. Secularism does this pretty poorly for the average person and what people substitute for what's missing is often much worse.

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6. trhwayMay 2026
   >However, when I look at all the things that tech has done thinking it was going to improve society; when in fact, it did the exact opposite is hard to argue.

   Imagine, you invented iron production to improve people lives - better tools (ploughs, axes, knives), etc - and now you see how people immediately use it for better weapons crushing the ones who have still been using bronze.

   Or for example from the Palantir's Karp's book "Technological Republic" :

   " We make the case that one of the most significant challenges that we face in this country is ensuring that the U.S. Department of Defense turns the corner from an institution designed to fight and win kinetic wars to an organization that can design, build, and acquire AI weaponry—... "

   The tech is great, be it iron or AI. The people are still [almost] the same (i sometimes think that our evolutionary goal is the AGI robots who would take over the Earth and will evolve toward higher morals and conscience faster than we would - as they would naturally have shared brain state/connection that we can get only if we develop telepathy which we wouldn't, and we unfortunately disregard the next best thing - empathy)

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