Code and Conquest: The Technological Republic and the Blueprint for a New Imperial Order

The Empire Discovers Its Own Decay

Karp and Zamiska open The Technological Republic with a confession dressed up as a trumpet blast. “A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West,” they announce, and from the first pages the reader can smell the anxiety coming off the ruling class like smoke from a burning server farm. This is not the calm confidence of a civilization certain of its future. This is the voice of an empire looking at its own machinery, seeing rust in the gears, and demanding that the engineers come back to the plantation house before the whole estate collapses. The authors claim that the state has retreated from great technological projects, that Silicon Valley has wasted its genius on advertising, shopping, social media, and consumer toys, and that a new alliance between government and software capital must be forged to rescue the West from decline. On the surface, this sounds like a critique of market stupidity. But underneath it, there is something much more dangerous: a call to reorganize monopoly tech capital around the military, intelligence, and policing needs of U.S. empire.

The preface gives away the whole operation. The authors tell us that the software industry must “rebuild its relationship with government” and redirect itself toward artificial intelligence capabilities capable of addressing the “most pressing challenges” facing the West. But what are these challenges? Not hunger. Not housing. Not the poisoned earth. Not the debt strangulation of the Global South. Not the centuries of stolen labor and colonial extraction that made the West rich in the first place. No, the challenge that haunts them is the possible loss of Western superiority. They say the engineering elite has an “affirmative obligation” to defend the nation and preserve the fragile geopolitical advantage held by the United States and its allies. There it is, clean as a knife on the table. The book is not asking technology to serve humanity. It is asking technology to serve empire.

This is why their critique of Silicon Valley consumerism has to be handled carefully. They are not wrong when they say that much of what passes for innovation today is trivial. They are not wrong that enormous amounts of capital and talent have been poured into the idiotic machinery of online advertising, shopping platforms, attention capture, and social media addiction. Any worker raising children in the age of TikTok dopamine farms and algorithmic loneliness already knows this. The ruling class gave humanity a pocket-sized casino, a surveillance device, a shopping mall, and a propaganda machine, then called it progress. Fine. But Karp and Zamiska do not critique this because capitalism has degraded human life. They critique it because the same engineers building food delivery apps could be building drone swarms, military software, and AI weapons for the Pentagon. Their problem with capitalist decadence is not exploitation. Their problem is inefficiency in the imperial war machine.

Chapter One, “Lost Valley,” makes this clear by rewriting the history of Silicon Valley as a patriotic fall from grace. The authors remind us that Silicon Valley did not emerge from the magical genius of libertarian founders meditating in garages. It was built through the state, the military, federal research, CIA-linked projects, Air Force funding, missile production, satellite reconnaissance, and Cold War weapons development. This is one of the useful admissions in the book. They openly state that Silicon Valley’s early dependence on the nation-state and the U.S. military has been “forgotten” because it clashes with the Valley’s self-image. Here the mask slips, and the myth of the heroic entrepreneur takes a beating. The so-called free market did not build the digital world. The imperial state did. The military-industrial complex fertilized the soil, watered the crops, and then let the billionaires come harvest the fruit while preaching sermons about innovation.

But the authors do not expose this history in order to indict U.S. imperialism. They expose it in order to restore the old marriage. Their nostalgia is not for public science in the service of human liberation. It is for the era when scientists and engineers moved easily between universities, military laboratories, state agencies, and corporate weapons firms under the banner of national purpose. They invoke Vannevar Bush, Roosevelt, DARPA, Oppenheimer, Sputnik, NASA, the Manhattan Project, and the birth of the internet as evidence that the United States was once a “technological republic.” But this republic was never innocent. Its laboratories were wired into Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Korea, Vietnam, Guatemala, Congo, Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Palestine, and every other killing field where American science arrived wearing a clean white coat while empire carried the gun.

Their historical memory performs a neat little bourgeois magic trick. They remember the state funding, the engineering ambition, the scientific achievement, and the national mobilization. They forget the bodies. They remember the atomic bomb as a triumph of organized science, then politely step around the incinerated children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki like inconvenient debris on the laboratory floor. They remember the internet as a product of military-backed research, but not the counterinsurgency logic that shaped the need for communication, surveillance, command, and control. They remember national purpose, but not colonial violence. This is how imperial ideology works: it turns blood into infrastructure, conquest into innovation, and domination into civilization climbing “up the hill.”

The most revealing phrase in Chapter One is their claim that science and engineering helped move “society, and indeed civilization, up the hill.” Whose society? Whose civilization? Up whose hill, and over whose backs? The West did not climb history by genius alone. It climbed over Indigenous graves, enslaved Africans, colonized peasants, bombed villages, sanctioned hospitals, mined mountains, and superexploited workers from the Congo to Shenzhen. The authors want “civilization” to appear as a neutral human project, when what they really mean is the continued global advantage of the U.S.-led imperial bloc. They speak as if the “public interest” and U.S. national interest are the same thing. They are not. The public interest of humanity and the strategic interest of the U.S. empire stand opposed on every major battlefield of the modern world.

Chapter Two, “Sparks of Intelligence,” deepens the danger. The authors move from the atomic bomb to artificial intelligence, using Oppenheimer as the bridge between two eras of ruling-class technological terror. They quote Oppenheimer’s old line: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.” That sentence should chill any serious reader. It is the engineer’s version of capitalist compulsion: if it can be built, build it; if it can be deployed, deploy it; if it can dominate, dominate. Ethical reflection arrives afterward, limping behind the missile. The authors acknowledge the danger of this attitude, even citing the physicists who later said they had “known sin.” But instead of drawing the obvious conclusion—that science under imperial command becomes organized barbarism—they use the analogy to argue that AI must now be developed as the strategic weapon of the coming age.

This is where the book becomes openly doctrinal. The authors discuss large language models, artificial general intelligence, robotics, machine consciousness, and the anxiety surrounding AI, but every philosophical detour eventually marches back to the barracks. They are fascinated by whether machines can reason, create, speak, joke, draw, or imitate human consciousness. They linger on the mystery of AI’s inner workings, the fear of sentience, the possibility that the machine may challenge humanity’s sense of itself. But this wonder does not produce humility. It produces militarized urgency. The question becomes not whether humanity should subordinate such technology to democratic and collective control, but whether the United States will weaponize it before its adversaries do.

The authors finally say the quiet part with admirable corporate bluntness: “The software and artificial intelligence capabilities that we at Palantir and other companies are building can enable the deployment of lethal weapons.” There is no need to exaggerate. They tell us exactly what this is. Palantir is not merely a software company. It is a weapons company of the digital age, a firm whose products help convert data into targeting, surveillance into command, and command into death. Then comes the ideological pivot: yes, these technologies carry risks, but halting their development would be misguided. Instead, they say, attention must be redirected toward “the next generation of AI weaponry.” This is not a warning. This is a sales pitch written in the language of civilizational necessity.

Their method is classic imperial blackmail. First, produce fear: AI is powerful, mysterious, and potentially uncontrollable. Second, identify the enemy: adversaries will build it if “we” do not. Third, discipline dissent: critics are naïve, fragile, distracted by tone, obsessed with offense, and unwilling to face hard reality. Fourth, offer the solution: build the weapons, strengthen the state, fuse Silicon Valley with the Pentagon, and call it responsibility. Every empire calls its appetite prudence. Every arms dealer calls his product deterrence. Every ruling class, when frightened by history, discovers that the only moral path forward is more weapons in its own hands.

What makes this opening section so useful is that it reveals technofascism not as a conspiracy theory, but as an emerging common sense inside the ruling class. The authors are not asking for jackboots and torchlight parades. They are asking for software contracts, national purpose, AI weapons, disciplined engineers, cultural unity, and the subordination of technological development to imperial strategy. This is fascism in the idiom of venture capital and national security briefings. It does not need to shout. It has procurement language. It has university references. It has philosophy footnotes. It has a clean interface and a Pentagon invoice.

The revolutionary reader should not dismiss this book as mere madness. That would be too easy, and worse, it would be lazy. Karp and Zamiska understand something real: technology is not neutral, markets do not meet human need, and the state has always shaped the direction of scientific development. But because they stand inside the imperial house, every correct observation bends toward reaction. They see market waste and propose military discipline. They see cultural emptiness and propose Western nationalism. They see AI’s danger and propose AI weapons. They see the decline of U.S. legitimacy and propose a technological republic—that is, the rearming of empire with software, myth, and machine intelligence.

This is why Part I must be read as the opening movement of an enemy doctrine. The empire looks at Silicon Valley and says: stop amusing the consumer; return to command. Stop building toys; build weapons. Stop pretending to float above the nation; serve the state that made you rich. Stop hiding behind neutrality; choose the West. For revolutionaries, the task is not to defend the rotten consumer culture they criticize. The task is to expose the false choice. Humanity does not have to choose between algorithmic shopping malls and AI death machines. We fight for another horizon altogether: technology subordinated to the needs of workers, colonized peoples, ecological repair, socialist planning, and human liberation. Karp and Zamiska want to bend AI to the will of the West. We want to break the power of the West to bend the world.

Deterrence, or the Theology of the Bigger Gun

In Chapters Three and Four, Karp and Zamiska stop circling the battlefield and walk straight onto it. The polite worry about Silicon Valley’s lost purpose becomes a doctrine of coercion. The scattered complaint about apps, ads, and consumer toys hardens into a strategic command: build the weapons, discipline the engineers, restore the West’s will to dominate, and call this whole ugly ceremony peace. The book opens Chapter Three with the old line, “if one comes to kill you, hasten to kill him first,” and that sentence becomes the moral architecture for everything that follows. It is preemption elevated into political philosophy. It is the imperial trigger finger dressed up as ancient wisdom. The authors want the reader to believe that the world is divided between those who build weapons first and those who get buried by history. There is no room here for the oppressed nations who know perfectly well that the burglar in the house has usually arrived speaking English, flying the stars and stripes, carrying a development loan in one hand and a drone program in the other.

Their argument in “The Winner’s Fallacy” is simple enough: the United States and its allies became complacent after winning the twentieth century. Western liberal democracy declared victory too early. Fukuyama’s “end of history” became a sleeping pill for the ruling class. Meanwhile, China, Russia, and other adversaries kept building. In this framing, the problem is not that the United States bombed, sanctioned, invaded, destabilized, and surveilled half the planet to preserve its supremacy. The problem is that it might not be ruthless enough to keep doing so effectively. The authors tell us that “hard power in this century will be built on software,” which is one of the most honest sentences in the book. Strip away the civilizational perfume and there it is: software is not merely communication, convenience, creativity, or computation. Software is command. Software is targeting. Software is surveillance. Software is the new nervous system of imperial violence.

Karp and Zamiska lean heavily on Thomas Schelling, quoting his cold formulation that “the power to hurt is bargaining power” and that exploiting it is “diplomacy—vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy.” This is the real gospel of the chapter. Not democracy. Not freedom. Not human rights. Hurt. The ability to hurt, to threaten hurt, to organize hurt in advance, to translate hurt into leverage, to make domination appear as negotiation. This is imperial realism without the Sunday clothes. The authors present it as maturity, as unsentimental clarity, as the courage to face the world as it is. But the colonized have faced this “realism” for centuries. It is the realism of the slave ship, the reservation, the plantation, the sanctions regime, the military base, the covert operation, the IMF structural adjustment package, and the Hellfire missile. Empire always discovers realism when it wants permission to hurt somebody.

What makes this section especially nasty is how the authors handle dissent inside Silicon Valley. Engineers who refuse to build military software are presented as childish beneficiaries of a security order they neither understand nor deserve. The Google workers who opposed Project Maven, the Microsoft workers who said “We did not sign up to develop weapons,” and the protesters who demanded OpenAI end its relationship with the Pentagon are all treated as symptoms of a decadent culture afraid of hard choices. But these workers, whatever their limits, saw something Karp and Zamiska work hard to bury: technical labor is political labor. Code is not innocent when it guides a bomb, processes surveillance footage, identifies a target, or accelerates the kill chain. The authors mock the engineers for building advertising systems while refusing weapons systems, and yes, the contradiction is real. But Karp’s answer is not liberation from capitalist stupidity. His answer is enlistment in imperial murder. He looks at workers trapped in the sewer of ad-tech and says: come build a better rifle.

The authors then perform one of the oldest tricks in the imperial handbook: they identify U.S. military supremacy with peace itself. In Chapter Four, “End of the Atomic Age,” they walk through the horror of nuclear weapons, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the firebombing of Japanese cities, and the logic of total war. They acknowledge that the bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed nearly 100,000 people in a single moment, and they admit that U.S. firebombing campaigns were designed to level cities and kill civilians in order to force surrender. But after touching the wound, they quickly stitch it shut with the doctrine of deterrence. Nuclear weapons, they suggest, helped produce the “long peace.” American military supremacy, they argue, helped guard the fragile calm of the postwar order. This is what bourgeois ideology does with mass death: it turns atrocity into evidence of wisdom. It takes the incineration of civilians and converts it into a management lesson for the next weapons platform.

The “long peace” thesis is one of the filthiest little lullabies ever sung by imperial scholarship. Long peace for whom? Ask Korea. Ask Vietnam. Ask Laos, where unexploded U.S. bombs still wait in the soil like metal ghosts. Ask Cambodia. Ask Indonesia. Ask Congo. Ask Chile. Ask Nicaragua. Ask Iraq. Ask Afghanistan. Ask Libya. Ask Palestine. The absence of direct war between the great powers was never the absence of war. It was the outsourcing of war to the colonies, the semicolonies, the borderlands, the forests, the villages, the ghettos, and the oil fields. The so-called peace of the nuclear age was peace in the imperial core purchased through permanent violence at the periphery. The West did not stop waging war. It learned how to distribute the corpses more conveniently.

This is the great silence in Karp and Zamiska’s argument. They can see the fear of great-power conflict, but they cannot see the global class structure that made the “peace” possible. They can mourn Western hesitation, but not Iraqi children under sanctions. They can worry about European underinvestment in defense, but not African and Asian nations trapped in debt, dependency, and military encirclement. They can discuss deterrence as if it were a neutral instrument of stability, when in reality it has always been embedded in a world system built on unequal exchange, colonial extraction, and armed hierarchy. The atomic age did not abolish imperialism. It gave imperialism a mushroom cloud and called it restraint.

From there, the authors move to Europe and Japan, complaining that both have become too weak, too pacified, too dependent on the United States. Europe has “bonsai armies.” Germany has been “neutered.” Japan’s constitutional pacifism threatens the balance of power in Asia. The language is not accidental. It is the language of remasculinization, of an imperial bloc embarrassed by its own softness, demanding that its junior partners remember how to bare their teeth. Their problem with Germany and Japan is not that both were fascist-imperial powers responsible for historic crimes against humanity. Their problem is that the postwar settlement worked too well in restraining them. The book does not want the ghosts of Auschwitz, Nanjing, Hiroshima, and Tokyo to produce humility. It wants them processed, overcome, and folded into a renewed military posture under U.S. leadership.

Then comes the central technological pivot: “The atomic age is coming to a close. This is the software century.” Here the authors finally state the architecture of their future. Hardware becomes secondary. Aircraft carriers, fighter jets, tanks, and missiles become accessories. Software moves to the helm. Large language models and AI systems metabolize battlefield data and make targeting recommendations. Drones become the hands of the algorithm. Swarms become the new air force. The authors want a “new Manhattan Project” to secure exclusive Western control over AI targeting systems, drone swarms, and eventually robots. That phrase should make the reader stop cold. The first Manhattan Project ended in the vaporized bodies of Japanese civilians and the birth of a permanent nuclear terror. Karp and Zamiska invoke it not as a warning, but as a model.

This is why the book belongs squarely inside the ideological arsenal of technofascism. It does not simply advocate stronger weapons. It advocates a new relation between capital, state, science, labor, and war. It wants the engineering class disciplined into service. It wants the state reorganized around software. It wants the military procurement machine updated for algorithmic warfare. It wants Europe and Asia rearmed under U.S. strategic direction. It wants dissent inside tech companies neutralized as childish moral theater. It wants monopoly capital to stop wasting talent on consumer platforms and start building the digital infrastructure of coercion. And because it knows “war” sounds ugly, it calls the whole project deterrence.

The authors are clever enough to wrap this program in a critique of late capitalist consumer culture. They attack social media empires for preying on children, monetizing status anxiety, and wasting civilization’s talent on apps. Again, there is truth here. The internet under monopoly capitalism has become a factory for loneliness, addiction, surveillance, and stupidity. YouTube and Instagram feeding advertisements to children is not progress. It is spiritual strip-mining. But Karp and Zamiska weaponize this truth for reactionary ends. They do not ask why capitalism turns every human desire into a revenue stream. They do not ask why children are fed into algorithmic machines for profit. They do not ask why the same ruling class that claims to defend civilization has built a society where the richest companies in history make fortunes by deforming attention and mining behavior. Instead, they say: enough with the toys, let us build the weapons.

Their praise for Elon Musk exposes the class character of this complaint. Musk appears as the grand builder, the risk taker, the man of ambition mocked by timid critics who lack the courage to enter the arena. This is billionaire hero worship with a military haircut. The problem is not that Musk and his class command obscene concentrations of wealth extracted from workers, subsidies, contracts, minerals, data, and planetary destruction. The problem is that society does not admire them properly. Here the authors’ anti-consumerist critique collapses back into ruling-class mythology. They want more ambition, but only the ambition of capital. More seriousness, but only the seriousness of empire. More risk, but never the risk of abolishing the social order that produces billionaires on one side and disposable workers on the other.

The China passages sharpen the enemy image. Xi Jinping becomes the hard man of history, shaped by upheaval, capable of understanding power in ways Western leaders allegedly cannot. China’s development of facial recognition, drone swarms, and AI warfare becomes proof that hesitation will be punished. The lesson is not that all peoples deserve sovereignty, that China’s rise reflects the return of a civilization long battered by colonialism, or that U.S. hostility toward China is rooted in Washington’s fear of losing its global monopoly. The lesson is that the West must study its adversary in order to beat him. Even when the authors urge readers to understand China’s worldview and culture, it is reconnaissance, not solidarity. Curiosity becomes intelligence preparation of the battlefield.

The ugliest ideological move comes near the end of Chapter Four, when the authors attack what they call the simplistic division of the world into oppressors and oppressed. They drag Paulo Freire into the dock, accusing his framework of depriving the oppressed of moral agency by treating them as incapable of violence or wrongdoing. This is a familiar ruling-class maneuver. When the oppressed name the structure that crushes them, the oppressor suddenly discovers complexity. When the colonized identify colonialism, the colonizer lectures them about moral nuance. When the slave says slavery produced the revolt, the master says, “Ah, but are you not also capable of sin?” Of course the oppressed are human beings, not porcelain saints. Of course every class, nation, and people contains contradiction. Marxists have never needed liberal professors or Palantir executives to explain that. But the purpose of Freire’s formulation was not to deny human complexity. It was to identify the initiating structure of violence. The violence of the oppressed does not fall from the sky. It grows from the soil of domination.

Karp and Zamiska want to break that causal chain. They want the reader to stop seeing imperialism as a system and start seeing violence as a universal human tendency requiring superior Western management. That is why they invoke Indigenous violence, preindustrial warfare, and the sins of the powerless. The function is obvious: flatten history, dissolve colonial responsibility, and make domination appear as merely one more tragic expression of human nature. But the world is not organized by abstract human sin. It is organized by material power. Some nations have military bases across the planet; others have sanctions wrapped around their throats. Some corporations build AI targeting systems; others bury children pulled from rubble. Some states print the reserve currency; others beg for medicine under embargo. To refuse the categories of oppressor and oppressed under these conditions is not sophistication. It is ideological laundering.

The section ends where it began: with the demand that the West recover its will to build autonomous weapons before somebody else does. “The broader question,” the authors write, “is not whether a new generation of increasingly autonomous weapons incorporating artificial intelligence will be built. It is who will build them and for what purpose.” That is the question, yes—but not in the way they intend. For Karp and Zamiska, the answer is the United States and its allies, for the preservation of Western power. For revolutionaries, that answer is precisely the danger. The people of the world do not need a new Manhattan Project for AI warfare. We need an international struggle to prevent monopoly capital and imperial states from turning artificial intelligence into a planetary apparatus of targeting, surveillance, policing, and automated death.

Chapters Three and Four therefore mark a major escalation in the book’s ideological project. The authors move from crisis diagnosis to war doctrine. They transform technological development into civilizational obligation. They transform dissent into weakness. They transform deterrence into morality. They transform imperial supremacy into peace. And they transform AI weaponry into the necessary next step in human history. This is not a mistake in their argument. This is the argument. The technological republic they imagine is not a republic of workers, communities, or liberated peoples. It is a republic of generals, engineers, financiers, intelligence agencies, and billionaire founders united by fear of a world they no longer command. It is empire in panic, sharpening the algorithmic blade.

The Moral Void Where Empire Wants to Plant Its Flag

In Chapters Five and Six, Karp and Zamiska shift from weapons to belief, from software to soulcraft, from the battlefield outside to the ideological battlefield inside the West. This is where the book becomes more than a plea for AI militarization. It becomes a theory of cultural reconstruction. The authors argue that the United States has lost the capacity for conviction, that its leaders are hollow, its universities timid, its corporations evasive, its engineers agnostic, its elites allergic to sacrifice, and its public discourse reduced to scandal, confession, and emotional theater. There is truth in some of this. Bourgeois liberalism is hollow. The managerial class is spineless. The universities train careerists and administrators more often than serious thinkers. Silicon Valley founders worship optionality, money, and self-invention while pretending to serve humanity. But Karp and Zamiska do not diagnose this sickness in order to cure the people. They diagnose it in order to restore the fighting spirit of empire.

Chapter Five, “The Abandonment of Belief,” opens with the ACLU defending the free speech rights of Nazis in Skokie and Pauli Murray defending George Wallace’s right to speak at Yale. The authors use these examples to mourn the loss of what they call “hard belief”—the willingness to defend a principle even when doing so brings condemnation. They admire Aryeh Neier because he defended the rights of fascists despite being a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. They admire Murray because she defended Wallace’s right to speak despite having suffered directly from the machinery of white supremacy. At one level, they are making a familiar liberal point about speech, principle, and courage. But the deeper function is more important. They are constructing a contrast between an earlier generation supposedly capable of conviction and a contemporary elite that speaks in legalese, hides behind consultants, and fears the crowd. The point is not simply free speech. The point is that the ruling class has lost nerve.

Their treatment of the 2023 congressional testimony by the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT reveals the target. They describe the university presidents as clinical, careful, emotionally dead, and incapable of authentic belief. In their view, these administrators embodied the new elite: precise but gutless, polished but empty, protected by lawyers but unable to speak with moral force. Again, there is something real here. The contemporary university is not a temple of liberation. It is a credential factory, a managerial bureaucracy, a holding pen for anxious professionals, and, when necessary, an ideological checkpoint for empire. But Karp and Zamiska’s outrage is selective as hell. They are not angry because universities discipline radical thought, collaborate with police, feed the military-intelligence pipeline, crush labor organizing, or launder ruling-class ideology. They are angry because the university no longer produces a confident Western ruling class capable of speaking, commanding, and recruiting without flinching.

This matters because their critique of liberal timidity is not revolutionary. It is counterrevolutionary. They see liberalism’s weakness and do not move toward socialism, anti-imperialism, or the democratization of knowledge. They move toward national purpose, Western identity, and technological discipline. The managerial cowardice they describe is real, but their cure is poison. They want leaders who can say what they believe, but the belief they want restored is not solidarity with the oppressed or commitment to human emancipation. It is belief in the American project. It is belief in the West. It is belief in the right of Palantir and its class to build offensive weapons systems for U.S. and allied defense agencies, “notwithstanding its costs and complications.” That phrase is doing heavy labor. The costs and complications are not abstractions. They are surveillance, deportation, targeting, occupation, militarized borders, algorithmic policing, and the conversion of human life into operational data.

Karp and Zamiska present Palantir as the exception to elite cowardice. While other institutions hide behind slogans, Palantir chooses. While Google says “don’t be evil” and then monetizes the entire nervous system of modern life, Palantir openly builds software for defense and intelligence agencies. This is the book’s favorite posture: honesty as absolution. They want credit for admitting what they are. But a robber does not become virtuous because he announces the robbery in a well-written memo. A weapons company does not become morally serious because its CEO can quote Goethe while selling the infrastructure of coercion. Palantir’s “belief” is not courage in the abstract. It is class commitment. It is allegiance to the military-intelligence wing of U.S. imperialism. It is the belief of a firm that knows which side of the barricade it stands on and wants the rest of Silicon Valley to stop pretending otherwise.

The authors are especially irritated by what they describe as modern sensitivity, reputational fear, and the policing of language. They argue that leaders now avoid authentic conviction because public life punishes anyone who risks saying something real. They complain about disclosure culture, the goldfish bowl of politics, the confessional appetite of media, and the obsession with likability. Fine. The spectacle is rotten. Bourgeois politics has become a filthy little theater where politicians sell personality while capital writes the script offstage. But here again the authors refuse the material root. The problem is not merely that society scrutinizes leaders too much. The problem is that the leaders do not lead because they do not rule in the name of the people. They manage a capitalist system whose real decisions are made through markets, boardrooms, intelligence agencies, courts, donors, central banks, weapons contractors, and imperial alliances. Their emptiness is not psychological first. It is structural. They are hollow because bourgeois democracy itself is hollowed out by capital.

This is why the chapter’s attack on “overmoralized public office” misses the deeper rot. The authors ask, “But what about results?” That sounds practical, but results for whom? The ruling class loves this language because it turns politics into management. Stop worrying about character, speech, scandal, identity, contradiction, and private vice—just ask whether the machine delivers. But workers know better. “Results” can mean wages crushed more efficiently. It can mean borders militarized more smoothly. It can mean bombs delivered more accurately. It can mean deportations accelerated, health systems privatized, schools digitized into compliance factories, and police departments supplied with predictive analytics. Without class analysis, “results” is just the language of the plantation overseer asking why the cotton is not moving faster.

Chapter Six, “Technological Agnostics,” develops the same argument through Silicon Valley. The authors describe a generation of technology leaders raised in a culture that prized justice in the abstract but avoided the harder questions of allegiance, virtue, community, and national purpose. They quote the idea that “our primary moral allegiance is to no community” but to “justice” itself, then argue that this post-national morality left elites unmoored. They call these figures cosmopolitan, optional, allergic to commitment, citizens of no country, loyal mainly to their own companies. There is sharp insight here. The tech elite really does float above ordinary life like a drone with stock options. They belong to capital before they belong to any people. They preach openness while enclosing data, mobility while exploiting immobile labor, global citizenship while depending on the U.S. state to protect their property, patents, platforms, and supply chains.

But Karp and Zamiska frame this as a failure of national belonging rather than a triumph of capitalist class formation. The tech elite did not become rootless because the humanities professors were too mean to patriotism. They became rootless because capital is rootless by nature. Marx nailed this long before the hoodie billionaires arrived with their TED Talk catechisms. Capital tears down every fixed relation, subordinates every community to exchange, turns every value into price, and then acts surprised when its own children believe in nothing but scale, liquidity, and exit options. Silicon Valley did not betray the nation by accident. It followed the logic of capitalism to its natural conclusion: accumulation without loyalty, innovation without accountability, power without responsibility, and private profit built on public subsidy.

The authors know this partially, but they cannot follow the thought to the end because the road leads straight to capitalism’s door. They admit that the personal computer and internet were born from military funding and government support. They cite Mariana Mazzucato’s argument about the entrepreneurial state and the Valley’s collective amnesia. They acknowledge that U.S. tech giants owe their existence to public investment, legal protections, educational institutions, capital markets, and state power. Then, rather than ask why private capital was allowed to appropriate publicly generated technological capacity, they demand that the tech giants repay their debt by serving the military. This is a beautiful little capitalist scam. The public pays for the research. The billionaires capture the profits. Then the imperial state asks them to return—not to public ownership, not to democratic planning, not to social need—but to weapons production.

Their discussion of education follows the same pattern. They lament that nearly half of Harvard’s graduating class went into finance and consulting in 2023, compared to only a small fraction in 1971. They note the decline of humanities majors and the rise of computer science and engineering. They call for engineers who understand history and contradiction, not merely programming. Again, let us take the useful piece. The imperial academy has indeed become a sorting machine for the professional-managerial class. It trains clever servants of finance, consulting, tech, law, and administration. It produces people who can optimize a spreadsheet, pitch a platform, write a policy memo, and speak fluent institutional nothing. But the solution is not to redirect Harvard graduates from McKinsey to Palantir like moving cattle from one slaughterhouse chute to another. The solution is to abolish the class function of elite education itself and build forms of study rooted in workers, oppressed communities, revolutionary history, scientific literacy, and collective liberation.

The authors then raise a question that should make every revolutionary sit up: what should the public demand from the technocratic ruling class in exchange for abandoning “the threat of revolt”? That is one of the most revealing lines in the whole section. They understand, at least instinctively, that ruling classes negotiate under the shadow of revolt. They understand that the public has allowed a technocratic elite to accumulate enormous license over the economy. They understand that “free email is not enough.” But notice the boundary of their imagination. The public may demand more from the technocrats, but the technocrats remain. The aristocracy must be opened, refreshed, disciplined, made useful, prevented from hardening into caste—but never overthrown. They want a better elite circulation mechanism, not the end of elite rule. They want the nobles to serve the kingdom more effectively, not the peasants to seize the land.

This is where their language of “aristocracy driven by talent” becomes especially poisonous. They worry that upper classes may degenerate into caste structures and lose legitimacy. They are not wrong that ruling groups harden, close ranks, and decay. But the answer is not an open aristocracy. The answer is no aristocracy. The working class does not need a more meritocratic master. The colonized do not need a more diverse imperial officer corps. The poor do not need a better-educated caste of algorithmic governors. A republic that requires aristocracy has already confessed its fraudulence. The real democratic question is not how to make the engineering elite accountable to the public while keeping its power intact. The question is how to socialize the infrastructure, knowledge, and productive capacity that this elite monopolizes.

Karp and Zamiska’s attack on postmodernism and relativism also reveals the ideological stakes. They argue that the retreat from truth, judgment, beauty, and the good life has left the country adrift. They say tolerance of everything becomes belief in nothing. There is something worth struggling with here. Revolutionary movements cannot survive on irony, careerist deconstruction, or the cowardly refusal to make judgments. We believe in truth. We believe in history. We believe in the oppressed classes and nations of the world becoming conscious of their condition and fighting to transform it. We do not need the imperial academy’s language games to tell us that colonialism happened, that capitalism exploits, that imperialism kills, that workers produce the world, and that ruling classes lie. But Karp and Zamiska use the failure of liberal relativism to smuggle Western nationalism back into the room as if it were the only available alternative. It is not.

The real alternative to liberal emptiness is not imperial belief. It is revolutionary belief. It is not the nation as managed by monopoly capital, but the people organized against capital. It is not the West rediscovering its soul, but the colonized world recovering its stolen future. It is not engineers kneeling before the Pentagon, but technical workers joining with labor, tenants, migrants, prisoners, students, farmers, nurses, teachers, and the internationally exploited to place science under democratic and socialist direction. The authors are right that belief matters. They are right that a society incapable of saying what it stands for will rot. But what they want us to stand for is the very order that produced the rot.

Section Three of this review therefore marks a crucial turn. Karp and Zamiska are not simply arguing for AI weapons anymore. They are arguing for a reconstruction of ruling-class confidence. They want to cure liberal nihilism by re-enchanting empire. They want to replace the hollow slogan “don’t be evil” with a harder creed: defend the West, serve the state, build the weapons, accept the costs. This is why their book is dangerous. It speaks to real emptiness, real decadence, real cowardice, real market stupidity, and real institutional decay. Then it gathers all that truth and marches it toward the barracks. Against this, we do not defend liberal weakness. We bury it. But we bury it from the left, from below, from the standpoint of the workers and colonized peoples of the world—not from the command room of Palantir’s technological republic.

The Canon Wars and the Counterculture Pipeline to Capital

In Chapters Seven and Eight, Karp and Zamiska dig beneath Silicon Valley’s consumer rot and locate its ideological roots in the wreckage of the Western canon, the counterculture, and the personal-computer revolution. Here the book makes one of its sharper moves. The authors understand that technology does not fall from the sky. It grows out of culture, institutions, class formation, political struggle, and historical memory. They know that engineers are not merely technical workers. They are ideological subjects. They are trained, shaped, rewarded, disciplined, and pointed in one direction or another. This is why these chapters matter. Karp and Zamiska are not simply asking why Silicon Valley built apps instead of weapons. They are asking why a whole generation stopped believing in the West strongly enough to build for its state.

Chapter Seven, “A Balloon Cut Loose,” begins with the struggle over Western Civilization courses in American universities. The authors reconstruct the canon wars as a turning point in the cultural life of the U.S. ruling class. For decades, students were marched through Plato, Dante, Mill, Marx, antiquity, Europe, liberalism, republicanism, and the long mythological road that allegedly led to the United States. The defenders of Western Civ wanted more than historical knowledge. They wanted formation. They wanted a common story, a civic religion, a shared patrimony for the managerial and professional strata who would administer the republic. William McNeill’s defense of the canon is quoted approvingly: the curriculum gave students “a sense of common citizenship,” a “community of reason,” and faith in truth’s enlargement across generations. That is the real object of nostalgia here. Not simply books. Not merely learning. A ruling class catechism.

The critics of Western Civ had a point, and even the authors cannot fully deny it. The old canon was not universal. It was sectarian. It was built from Europe’s self-flattering mirror, polished by conquest and hung in the halls of the imperial academy. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s critique slices into the myth: the West forged a grand narrative from Athenian democracy, Magna Carta, Copernicus, and the rest of the museum pieces, then presented itself as naturally individualist, democratic, rational, tolerant, progressive, scientific. In other words, Europe told a story about itself and called that story civilization. The problem, of course, is what the story left out: slavery, enclosure, witch hunts, colonial extermination, plantation capitalism, the Atlantic slave trade, the looting of Asia and Africa, and the mass murder required to make the “civilized” world appear civilized to itself.

But Karp and Zamiska are not interested in indicting the canon from the standpoint of the colonized. They are interested in what happened after the canon was dismantled. Their complaint is that the old regime of knowledge was torn down, but nothing substantial was erected in its place. The “balloon” of American identity, they say, was cut loose from European history and began drifting. This is the ideological wound the book keeps poking: the empire lost its story. The academy exposed the West as partial, violent, colonial, exclusionary, and mythological, but did not replace it with a coherent national project. From their standpoint, the result was cultural disarmament. The young technologists who came of age after Vietnam, civil rights, decolonization, and the campus rebellions no longer saw the U.S. state as the natural vehicle of human progress. They saw it as compromised, violent, hypocritical, and maybe even criminal. Imagine that—after Vietnam, COINTELPRO, segregation, assassinations, napalm, and coups, the kids got suspicious. The ruling class still has not forgiven them.

This is where the book’s anti-postcolonial attack begins. Edward Said’s Orientalism becomes, for Karp and Zamiska, one of the great intellectual detonations of the late twentieth century. They admit its substantive triumph: Said exposed that history-writing, anthropology, and cultural narration were not neutral exercises, but acts bound up with power. They quote Said’s argument that the construction of identity is tied to power and powerlessness, and that Europe defined itself against the non-European other. This is one of the places where the book is forced to kneel before reality. Said was right. The West did not merely describe the Orient. It produced the Orient as an object of rule. Knowledge became administration. Scholarship became empire’s lantern, shining just enough light for the colonizer to map, classify, govern, and steal.

But then Karp and Zamiska perform the familiar reactionary pivot. They acknowledge the anti-colonial critique only to accuse its descendants of excess. Said’s work, they argue, became a worldview, a jargon machine, an academic industry, a career ladder for postcolonial professionals who denounced the West while securing tenure inside its universities. Again, there is a partial truth here. The imperial academy is perfectly capable of digesting anti-colonial language and excreting careerism. It can turn Fanon into a seminar, Palestine into a diversity panel, decolonization into a hiring line, and revolution into a conference with catered lunch. There are indeed class forces inside the academy that use the suffering of the colonized as symbolic capital. But Karp and Zamiska do not raise this critique to rescue anti-colonial struggle from academic domestication. They raise it to discredit the whole assault on Western innocence.

This is the difference between revolutionary critique and ruling-class complaint. We criticize academic postcolonialism because it often detaches colonial analysis from imperialism, capitalism, land, labor, class power, and organized struggle. They criticize it because it weakened Western confidence. We criticize identity reduction because it can turn structural oppression into professional branding. They criticize it because it made it harder for empire to speak in the name of civilization without being heckled by the ghosts of its victims. We criticize the university because it neutralizes rebellion. They criticize the university because it stopped producing enough disciplined believers in the American project. Same corpse on the table, different autopsy.

Their treatment of Said also exposes the book’s deeper anxiety about truth. The authors argue that the identity of the speaker has been elevated over what is said, that descriptive claims about Western power have become difficult to discuss, and that even noting the dominance of Western empires over global economic production has become provocative. They want to separate empirical description from moral judgment. On paper, that sounds reasonable. In practice, it is a dodge. The West’s economic and military dominance did not emerge from a laboratory experiment. It emerged from conquest. To describe Western “outperformance” without centering colonial plunder is like describing a billionaire’s fortune without mentioning the workers he robbed. Yes, the number may be real. But the number without the social relation is ideology.

The authors want the reader to sit calmly with the fact of Western dominance and ask why it happened, without immediately collapsing into moral outrage. But the oppressed have already answered that question with their blood. Europe and the United States did not dominate because they were chosen by reason, science, or liberty. They dominated because they conquered territory, enslaved labor, monopolized trade routes, seized resources, imposed debt, built navies, exterminated peoples, and then wrote textbooks explaining that all of this happened because of parliament, property rights, and curiosity. The so-called “West” is not merely a civilizational tradition. It is a material relation of power built through the subordination of the rest of the world. The fact that Karp and Zamiska cannot say this plainly tells us exactly what kind of truth they are trying to recover.

Chapter Eight, “Flawed Systems,” then carries this cultural argument into the origins of personal computing. The authors locate the early digital revolution inside the political atmosphere of the late 1960s and 1970s: Vietnam, civil rights, the counterculture, suspicion of bureaucracy, hostility toward centralized authority, and skepticism toward the state. Lee Felsenstein and the Homebrew Computer Club wanted personal computers to free people from institutions, whether governmental or corporate. Stewart Brand argued that the counterculture’s scorn for centralized authority helped provide the philosophical foundation for the leaderless internet and the personal-computer revolution. Steven Levy’s hacker ethic treated bureaucracies—corporate, governmental, university—as “flawed systems” that constrained the exploratory impulse of hackers. In this account, the personal computer was born not as an instrument of state power, but as a weapon against institutional domination.

This history is important because it reveals how quickly anti-authoritarian impulses can be absorbed by capital when they are not anchored in class struggle. The hackers wanted freedom from bureaucracy, but without a revolutionary theory of power, freedom became personalization. They wanted to escape IBM, the Pentagon, and the gray machinery of postwar corporate life, but the destination was not socialism. It was the individual consumer. The dream of liberation shrank into the device. The commune became the startup. The collective became the user base. The rebellion against the mainframe became the worship of the personal computer. Capitalism, that old vampire with excellent marketing instincts, took the counterculture’s desire for autonomy and sold it back as a product.

Karp and Zamiska understand this transformation, but they mourn it for the wrong reason. They do not ask why the counterculture failed to become an organized anti-capitalist force capable of seizing institutions and transforming production. They ask why it failed to remain loyal to national purpose. They look at the hacker suspicion of the state and see a tragedy because that suspicion kept engineers away from defense and intelligence work. We look at the same history and see a different tragedy: a generation’s revolt against conformity was captured by venture capital, stripped of collective politics, and converted into the ideological foundation of monopoly platforms. The tragedy is not that hackers refused to build bombs. The tragedy is that they built the infrastructure of surveillance capitalism while imagining they were liberating the individual.

Steve Jobs becomes the central figure in this passage because he personifies the turn from state-centered technology to intimate consumer technology. Karp and Zamiska treat him with admiration and frustration. Jobs was brilliant, artistic, ambitious, and world-making. He fused typography, design, engineering, beauty, and personal experience into objects that reshaped daily life. But his revolution was, in their words, “essentially intimate and personal.” Apple’s products extended the self. The Macintosh, the iPhone, the watch, the mouse—these were not instruments for a national project. They were tools of individual power, creativity, convenience, and enclosure. Apple’s famous “1984” ad cast big government and big business as monsters of conformity and presented the personal computer as rebellion.

The irony is almost too rich. The company that sold itself as revolt became one of the most powerful corporations in human history. The device that promised liberation became a pocket-sized command center for work discipline, consumption, surveillance, social anxiety, and behavioral capture. The personal computer and smartphone did not abolish institutional power. They miniaturized it, beautified it, and placed it in the hand. The user felt sovereign while the platform watched, measured, nudged, sold, updated, locked, and extracted. This is the genius of capitalist domination in the digital age: it does not always need to appear as a gray IBM mainframe or an Orwellian screen. Sometimes it arrives with rounded edges, elegant fonts, and a launch event soundtrack.

Yet Karp and Zamiska’s critique again bends toward reaction. They argue that the rush of attention and funding toward the consumer was not inevitable; it emerged from the political instincts of founders shaped by counterculture, anti-statism, and skepticism toward the American project. They claim that the next generation went even further, abandoning even the pretense of liberatory technology and entering into “mercenary and straightforward service” of material culture. This is a strong indictment of the consumer internet. But the book’s answer is not to socialize digital infrastructure, democratize technological planning, or place engineering under the control of workers and communities. Its answer is to restore the state as commander and empire as purpose.

This is the false choice at the center of these chapters. On one side stands liberal-postmodern drift: no canon, no shared story, no national project, no truth except identity, no technology except consumer desire. On the other side stands Karp’s technological republic: Western identity, national purpose, state-tech fusion, disciplined engineers, hard power, and AI weapons. We reject both. The people do not need the old Western canon restored as imperial scripture, and we do not need every critique of the West flattened into careerist academic word games. We need revolutionary education: historical materialism, anti-colonial memory, working-class science, internationalism, and the disciplined study of how the world was made so that it can be remade.

The authors are right that tearing down a ruling mythology is not enough. A movement that only deconstructs will eventually leave a vacuum. But the answer to a false universal is not a renovated imperial particular. The answer is a new universal rooted in the real majority of humanity: workers, peasants, migrants, colonized nations, oppressed peoples, and all those whose labor and land built the wealth that the West mistakes for its own genius. The West’s canon cannot be the anchor of human civilization because the West is not humanity. The United States cannot be the horizon of freedom because the United States was built on stolen land, stolen labor, and stolen futures. The task is not to reattach the balloon of American identity to Europe. The task is to cut the people loose from empire altogether and anchor them in the international struggle for liberation.

Chapters Seven and Eight therefore expose the intellectual genealogy of Karp and Zamiska’s project. They want to reverse the cultural consequences of anti-colonial critique and countercultural anti-statism, not because these currents achieved liberation, but because they weakened the ideological pipeline between elite education, technical labor, and imperial service. They want the university to produce believers again. They want engineers to feel national obligation again. They want technology to stop serving the consumer alone and return to serving the state. They see the ruins of Western Civ, the hacker rebellion, and the consumer internet, and they draw one lesson: rebuild the West’s confidence and reconnect software to power. We draw the opposite lesson. Liberal deconstruction without revolutionary organization gets eaten by capital. Anti-statism without class analysis becomes consumer tech. Critique without a material program becomes a career. And technology without socialist direction becomes either a toy for the bored or a weapon for the powerful.

From Toy Stores to Swarms: How Capital Learns to Move

Chapter Nine begins in the toy aisle and ends at the threshold of organizational warfare. Karp and Zamiska open with eToys, one of those late-1990s internet comets that burned bright, made rich men hallucinate, and then fell back to earth as ash. The company sold toys online, reached a market capitalization of $10 billion, and then collapsed into bankruptcy after the dot-com bubble burst. On the surface, this chapter looks like another complaint about Silicon Valley’s childishness: too many apps, too many consumer conveniences, too much talent wasted on digital shopping malls. But underneath that complaint, the authors are making a sharper argument. The real failure of the consumer internet was not merely that it sold trivial goods. It trained capital, engineers, investors, and founders to organize themselves around shallow needs while leaving the deeper machinery of state power underdeveloped.

Their critique of eToys is useful because it exposes the spiritual poverty of capitalist innovation. The founder tells the world, “We’re losing money fast on purpose, to build our brand,” and the sentence belongs in a museum of bourgeois idiocy. Here was the late capitalist gospel in its purest dot-com form: burn capital, seize market share, build monopoly power, figure out profits later, and call the whole thing a revolution. The company was not curing disease, feeding people, housing families, repairing infrastructure, ending war, or educating the masses. It was selling toys through a different channel. But Wall Street looked at this glorified digital toy store and saw the Second Coming. The market did what the market does: it mistook speculative frenzy for historical destiny.

Karp and Zamiska do not reject consumption as such, and neither should we. They are right that desire is human. A toy, a shoe, a meal, a song, a phone call, a beautiful object—these things are not enemies of liberation. The working class does not fight for a gray world without pleasure. We fight for bread and roses, for necessity and beauty, for survival and abundance. The problem with eToys and its descendants was not that people wanted things. The problem was that an entire social order organized some of its most advanced technical capacity around the petty inconveniences of those with disposable income, while the great wounds of the world remained open and bleeding. Capital looked at humanity and did not ask, “What must be healed?” It asked, “What can be monetized?”

This is where the authors’ critique bites, even if their political cure remains poisonous. They understand that the internet era democratized the founder fantasy: everyone had a problem, every problem could become a startup, every inconvenience could become a market. Parking, shopping, golf practice, food delivery, taxi hailing, photo sharing, vacation rentals—the daily irritations of the professional classes became the raw material of venture capital. The age of “disruption” arrived, and like every ruling-class slogan, it lost meaning precisely when it became most profitable. To disrupt no longer meant to transform social relations. It meant to insert an app between a consumer and an existing service, skim the transaction, discipline the labor, and tell investors that history had changed.

The chapter’s deeper insight is that the consumer internet did not simply reflect demand. It reflected the class position of the people building it. Karp and Zamiska describe a generation of educated strivers, armed with elite credentials but not always elite wealth, who built lifestyle technologies to simulate the ease they believed they had been promised. This is a brutal little portrait of the professional-managerial class in the age of apps. They had the cultural pedigree of aristocracy but not the household staff, so they built platforms that summoned cars, food, groceries, rentals, and services with a swipe. Behind the frictionless interface stood the invisible worker: the driver, the packer, the courier, the warehouse laborer, the content moderator, the gig worker, the migrant, the precarious body making the user feel briefly sovereign.

Karp and Zamiska do not follow that class relation far enough. They see the shallow ambition of the app economy, but they do not dwell on the labor regime beneath it. They see the consumer convenience, but not the worker discipline. They see elite frustration, but not proletarian exploitation. The smartphone made the professional feel like a petty monarch, but the kingdom was built from other people’s time, stress, fuel, rent, debt, and bodily exhaustion. This is the dirty secret of “lifestyle technology”: it democratized aristocratic convenience by proletarianizing the service relation. The app did not abolish servants. It generalized servant labor under algorithmic command and called it flexibility.

The dot-com crash, in the authors’ telling, washed away many of the foolish companies but left something more durable behind. This is the bridge to Chapter Ten. The ruins of eToys, Pets.com, Boo.com, Kozmo, and the rest did not merely reveal irrational exuberance. They revealed a new method of organizing human talent. Many businesses failed, but the startup form survived. Capital discovered a culture of speed, improvisation, risk, informality, intensity, and engineering-led execution. The toy stores disappeared. The organizational method remained. The bubble burst, but the managerial mutation endured.

That transition is crucial. Karp and Zamiska move from what Silicon Valley built to how Silicon Valley learned to build. Chapter Ten, “The Eck Swarm,” opens not with a founder, investor, or platform, but with honeybees gathering in a Munich park in 1951. Martin Lindauer watches as scouting bees search for a new nesting site, return to the swarm, dance their reports, compete for attention, and gradually guide the entire colony toward a collective decision. The authors then move to starling flocks, where birds at the edges sense danger and transmit directional movement through the group almost instantly. These examples are not decorative. They provide the biological metaphor for the engineering culture Karp and Zamiska admire: decentralized coordination, peripheral intelligence, rapid adaptation, minimal bureaucracy, and collective movement without rigid central command.

At first glance, the metaphor is attractive. Who among us has not suffered under the dead hand of bureaucracy, the useless meeting, the cowardly manager, the report written for a report, the hierarchy that smothers the person closest to the problem? Workers know this hell intimately. Nurses, teachers, warehouse workers, coders, organizers, cooks, mechanics, clerks—everywhere, people who actually understand the work are managed by people who manage appearances. The bees and starlings offer a vision of motion without the bloated priesthood of middle management. Information moves from the edge to the center. The group adapts. The organism survives.

But metaphors are never innocent. When capital borrows from nature, we should check our pockets. The authors want the startup to become a honeybee swarm, but a startup is not a hive and workers are not bees. In nature, the swarm moves to preserve the colony. Under capitalism, the swarm moves to preserve ownership, valuation, market advantage, state contracts, and the strategic objectives of capital. The engineer at the edge may have autonomy, but the company does not belong to the engineer. The intelligence may be distributed, but the surplus is not. The organization may feel loose, but property remains centralized. The dance may be collective, but the honey still goes upstairs.

This is the ideological trick inside the swarm metaphor. It borrows the language of decentralization while leaving class power untouched. It praises autonomy while preserving command. It attacks bureaucracy while defending private ownership. It celebrates the edge while the board, the founder, the investors, and the state define the horizon. The worker may improvise, but not toward liberation. The worker may solve problems, but not the problem of exploitation. The worker may move fast, but only in the direction set by capital. A flock of starlings has no shareholders. A startup does.

Chapter Ten therefore reveals the managerial philosophy underneath the book’s war doctrine. Karp and Zamiska do not want the old industrial corporation with its gray suits, punch cards, rigid charts, and suffocating hierarchy. They want a more agile instrument of power. They want organizations that move like swarms, sense from the periphery, metabolize information quickly, and act without waiting for permission from the bureaucratic center. This is why the chapter belongs next to the previous one. The consumer internet wasted ambition on toys, but it perfected a form of organization. Now the authors want that form redirected away from shopping, food delivery, and social media, and toward government, defense, intelligence, medicine, education, and war.

In other words, Chapter Nine identifies the misallocation of capitalist energy, and Chapter Ten identifies the organizational technology that can be repurposed. The dot-com era taught Silicon Valley how to mobilize talent at speed. The startup became a swarm. Now Karp and Zamiska want that swarm integrated into the state. The issue is no longer only what gets built. It is how capital organizes builders, how it channels technical labor, how it converts improvisation into institutional power, and how it prepares the engineering class to move as a disciplined yet flexible force inside the machinery of empire.

This is where the revolutionary reader has to separate what is useful from what is dangerous. There is nothing inherently reactionary about decentralized intelligence, peripheral initiative, or collective adaptation. Revolutionary organizations also need cadres who can think, move, observe, report, improvise, and act without waiting for some committee three cities away to bless every tactical decision. Guerrilla struggle, labor organizing, underground publishing, mutual aid networks, strike committees, neighborhood defense formations, political education circles—these all require distributed intelligence. The difference is political line and class ownership. The swarm for capital accelerates exploitation and war. The swarm for the people builds capacity for liberation.

Karp and Zamiska are not wrong to hate the dead bureaucracy of the modern corporation and state agency. But their hatred is not democratic. They do not want workers to govern production. They want better-performing institutions capable of delivering national power. They do not want to abolish alienation. They want to reduce friction. They do not want to end domination. They want domination to move faster, learn quicker, and adapt before its adversaries can respond. Their ideal organization is not a workers’ council. It is a predator with many eyes.

The bee swarm and starling flock also carry another danger: they naturalize coordination without politics. Bees do not debate imperialism. Starlings do not struggle over ownership of the means of production. Nature can teach us about communication, adaptation, and systems, but it cannot answer the political question: in whose interest does the system move? A highly coordinated organization can liberate or dominate, heal or kill, teach or indoctrinate, feed or exploit, defend the people or police them. Efficiency is not virtue. Speed is not justice. Coordination is not freedom. Fascism also coordinates. Armies coordinate. Police raids coordinate. Deportation systems coordinate. Drone swarms coordinate. The political content determines the meaning of the form.

That is why this section must be read as a hinge in the book’s ideological architecture. The authors have finished diagnosing the hollowing out of belief and the consumer triviality of Silicon Valley. Now they begin constructing the positive model: the engineering mindset. They move from complaint to method. They identify the organizational culture that survived the wreckage of dot-com speculation and hold it up as the thing that can remake institutions. The toys were shallow, but the workshop was powerful. The apps were trivial, but the startup form was not. This is the point where the book begins to assemble its real machine.

For Weaponized Information, the lesson is clear. We do not defend Toyland. The consumer internet is a wasteland of monetized attention, platform dependency, artificial convenience, gig exploitation, and childish spectacle. But neither do we accept Karp’s solution, which is to march the engineers from Toyland into the Pentagon’s arms. The people need a third road: technology planned around social need, ecological repair, medical care, food systems, housing, education, communication, and defense of the oppressed against imperial violence. We need the intelligence of the swarm without the ownership of the capitalist. We need coordination without commandism, initiative without privatization, discipline without servility, and innovation without empire.

Chapters Nine and Ten show us that the ruling class has learned from its own decadence. It knows the app economy is shallow. It knows consumer capitalism has wasted talent. It knows the old bureaucracies are too slow. It knows the next battlefield requires speed, flexibility, and distributed intelligence. But it wants to solve these contradictions by fusing startup culture to state power. That is the danger. The toy store becomes the laboratory. The laboratory becomes the command center. The command center becomes the battlefield. And the swarm, unless seized by the people, becomes one more form through which capital learns to hunt.

Improvisation, Disobedience, and the Discipline of the Engineer

In Chapters Eleven and Twelve, Karp and Zamiska move deeper into the inner life of the startup, away from the ruins of consumer Toyland and into the habits, rituals, and psychological traits that they believe make Silicon Valley powerful. The subject is no longer simply what technology should serve, but what kind of human being must be produced to build it. The authors are interested in the engineer as a social type: flexible, resistant to hierarchy, allergic to useless meetings, willing to improvise, capable of disobedience, and strong enough to withstand the disapproval of the crowd. On the surface, much of this reads like a critique of dead corporate bureaucracy. And again, some of it is true. But beneath the critique lies the same old political project: not the liberation of creative labor from capital, but the refinement of creative labor into a sharper instrument of capitalist and imperial command.

Chapter Eleven begins with Palantir giving new employees a book on improvisational theater by Keith Johnstone. That detail matters. The software firm wants its engineers to think like improvisers: alert to the moment, open to surprise, sensitive to the audience, willing to abandon theory when reality refuses to cooperate. Karp and Zamiska tell us that building technology is “an observational art and science, not a theoretical one,” and that one must abandon what ought to work in favor of what does work. There is power in this. Every serious organizer, mechanic, nurse, cook, teacher, fighter, and worker knows the difference between theory that lives in the world and theory that dies on contact with it. Reality is stubborn. Plans break. Conditions shift. The people closest to the problem often know more than the credentialed fool reading from the manual.

But this is also where the ruling-class use of improvisation becomes dangerous. Improvisation for whom, toward what, under whose command? In the hands of workers and revolutionary movements, improvisation means creative adaptation to material conditions. It means thinking under pressure, making do with limited resources, and finding new paths through the enemy’s blockade. In the hands of Palantir, improvisation means building faster inside the war machine. It means adjusting software to battlefield needs, intelligence demands, police requirements, and state contracts. It means the engineer becomes more flexible so the system becomes more lethal. The method may be alive, but the master remains the same.

The authors’ discussion of status is especially revealing. Drawing from Johnstone, they argue that status is performed, negotiated, and wielded. They want organizations where rank does not suffocate ability, where the senior vice president is not treated like a feudal lord in every room, where people at the margins can step into empty space and create. This is a devastating indictment of corporate life. Anyone who has worked under petty managers knows the sickness: the useless title, the fake urgency, the meeting before the meeting, the hierarchy that exists mainly to protect itself. The worker does the work; the manager manages perception. The productive human being gets trapped in a maze built by professional parasites with calendar invites.

Karp and Zamiska see this clearly. They mock the ornate postwar corporation, where office furniture itself could be assigned by rank, and they acknowledge that many organizations waste enormous creative energy maintaining hierarchies. They describe Palantir as a place where status becomes instrumental rather than intrinsic, where ambiguity creates openings for ambitious people to step forward. But we should not confuse flexible hierarchy with democracy. Palantir may loosen the visible chain, but it does not abolish the chain. The “shadow hierarchy” remains. Ownership remains. Command remains. Contracts remain. The company may rearrange internal status faster than IBM or Philco, but the workers still do not collectively own the institution, determine its social purpose, or decide whether its tools will be used for surveillance, occupation, deportation, or war.

This is the great fraud of startup anti-bureaucracy. It attacks hierarchy at the level of style while preserving hierarchy at the level of class power. No neckties, no corner offices, no rigid title worship, no furniture caste system—fine. But who owns the platform? Who captures the surplus? Who signs the military contract? Who decides which state agency gets the product? Who benefits when the company’s valuation rises? A flatter workplace can still be a dictatorship of capital. A hoodie can command as surely as a suit. A Slack channel can discipline as surely as a factory bell. The old corporation said, “Know your place.” The startup says, “Create your place,” then invoices the Pentagon for the value you created.

The authors are strongest when they describe the meeting-industrial complex. Their image of executives drowning in endless gatherings, pre-meetings, presentations, and performative coordination is painfully accurate. The modern corporate meeting is often a séance for summoning accountability without ever letting it appear. It burns human energy, rewards political operators, and punishes the quiet people who actually know how things work. One executive in the research they cite reportedly stabbed her leg with a pencil to keep from screaming during a staff meeting. That is not just workplace comedy. That is a small portrait of alienated labor under professional-managerial rule: the human being physically injuring herself to survive a ritual of institutional stupidity.

Yet here again the authors stop before the class question. Why are workers forced to endure these rituals? Because they do not control the workplace. Because the organization belongs to capital, not to those who produce its value. Because meetings often exist not to solve problems but to reproduce authority, distribute blame, secure compliance, and protect managerial layers whose usefulness would vanish in any genuinely democratic system of production. Karp and Zamiska want to make institutions more efficient by cutting through this waste. Revolutionaries want to ask why so much human life is subordinated to institutions workers do not own, goals they did not choose, and outputs that may harm the people rather than serve them.

Drucker’s orchestra metaphor becomes another key moment. The authors admire the direct line between conductor and musician: no vice presidents of violins, no deputy directors of percussion, no suffocating layers between the artist and the whole. They compare great software engineers to painters and musicians, insisting that talented technical workers need freedom, flexibility, and space. There is truth here too. Technical labor is creative labor. The engineer is not a machine part. The coder is not a keyboard appendage. Good software, like good music, requires judgment, imagination, rhythm, and deep sensitivity to form. But in the orchestra, the musician still plays someone else’s score. In the startup, the engineer may improvise, but capital selects the stage.

Karp and Zamiska describe Silicon Valley workers as “cultural exiles,” privileged misfits fleeing the exhaustion of traditional corporate capitalism into an alternative form. That phrase is telling. These are not proletarian exiles driven from land, factory, village, or nation by imperialism. They are elite technical workers alienated from the old corporate form and searching for a more generative home inside capitalism. The authors want these exiles incorporated back into the nation. They fear that the most talented minds will splinter into subcultures separate from the American project. In plain language: the empire cannot afford for its best engineers to build private playgrounds or drift into apolitical enclaves. It needs them reintegrated into the national machinery.

The final movement of Chapter Eleven makes this explicit. The authors argue that Silicon Valley’s real power is not simply software, but culture: its practices, norms, biases, and ways of organizing talent. They want government and public institutions to absorb these methods. They want the state to co-opt the startup’s flexibility, speed, outcome focus, and tolerance for difficult personalities. This is not a minor proposal. It is part of the book’s larger blueprint for technofascist renewal: remake the public sector in the image of the startup, bind the startup to the state, and place the engineer at the center of national reconstruction. The bureaucracy becomes more agile. The state becomes more technical. Capital becomes more patriotic. The war machine becomes more creative.

Chapter Twelve then turns from organizational form to psychological formation. The authors invoke Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments and Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments to argue that most human beings are dangerously susceptible to group pressure and authority. Asch showed people denying the evidence of their own senses because the crowd gave the wrong answer. Milgram showed ordinary people administering what they believed were painful shocks to strangers because an authority figure told them to continue. These experiments came out of the shadow of fascism and forced the postwar world to confront a brutal fact: obedience is not an exotic disease confined to monsters. It is ordinary. It speaks politely. It uses “the language of the tea table” while imagining it is killing a man in the next room.

This could have led Karp and Zamiska toward a serious confrontation with the institutions that manufacture obedience: the military, police, corporations, prisons, schools, bureaucracies, and imperial states. It could have forced a reckoning with how ordinary people are trained to obey orders, process paperwork, follow policy, respect rank, and participate in violence at a distance. But that is not where they take it. Instead, they convert the lesson into startup psychology. Obedience is bad because it prevents disruptive organizations from building something new. Conformity is bad because it suppresses engineering creativity. The woman who refused Milgram’s experiment becomes a model not for antiwar resistance or refusal of state violence, but for the kind of psychological independence needed to build a company.

This is ideological theft. The moral horror of Milgram’s experiment is that ordinary people can be induced to harm the innocent under authority. In a world of drone strikes, sanctions offices, deportation systems, prison administration, predictive policing, and AI targeting, that lesson should terrify us. The question should be: how do we build human beings and political movements capable of refusing unjust authority? How do we teach people to say no to the officer, the boss, the algorithm, the agency, the party bureaucrat, the professor, the judge, the general, the investor, and the president when they command participation in oppression? Karp and Zamiska shrink that question down to business culture. They turn refusal into a management asset.

Their phrase “constructive disobedience” deserves close attention. In the abstract, it sounds radical. Every revolutionary tradition worth anything teaches disciplined initiative and principled disobedience. A cadre who merely waits for instructions is useless. A worker who sees danger and says nothing because the boss has not approved the observation is already defeated. A movement that cannot think from below will be crushed from above. But Palantir’s constructive disobedience remains bounded by corporate purpose. It challenges managers, not ownership. It resists bad instructions, not imperial contracts. It questions tactics, not class rule. It disobeys inside the mission, never against the mission.

That distinction is everything. The revolutionary does not worship disobedience as personality. The revolutionary asks what authority is being disobeyed and in whose interest. A fascist can disobey. A mercenary can improvise. A startup founder can reject convention while intensifying exploitation. The CIA officer in the field may also show initiative. So may the drone technician. So may the border agent. Disobedience is not automatically liberatory. It becomes liberatory only when tied to the struggle of the oppressed against the structures that dominate them. Without political content, “nonconformity” is just another résumé trait for the ambitious.

The authors’ discussion of disability and artistic genius—Monet’s cataracts, Beethoven’s hearing loss—serves to deepen their point that traits often perceived as deficits can become sources of creative power. This is humane at one level. It recognizes that dominant standards of normal functioning can miss the capacities produced by difference, injury, exclusion, or distance from the crowd. But within the architecture of the book, even this insight is absorbed into the productive needs of the firm. Difference becomes valuable because it can generate innovation. Social deafness becomes adaptive because it helps engineers ignore conformity. The misfit becomes useful because he can build. Capital does not liberate difference; it hires it, brands it, extracts it, and then celebrates itself for being open-minded.

The danger in these chapters is precisely that they contain real insights into human organization. Karp and Zamiska understand that rigid hierarchy kills initiative. They understand that conformity suffocates creativity. They understand that status games waste talent. They understand that bureaucracies protect themselves. They understand that people closest to problems need freedom to act. These are not trivial observations. Revolutionary organizations should study them without shame. We need disciplined improvisation. We need courageous disagreement. We need structures that surface truth from below. We need to defeat the meeting-industrial complex in our own work. We need militants who can withstand the crowd when the crowd is wrong.

But we cannot let the enemy’s partial truth march us into his camp. The engineering mindset, as Karp and Zamiska frame it, is not a program for human freedom. It is a program for more effective elite organization. It seeks to overcome the weaknesses of corporate bureaucracy so that capital can move faster. It seeks to overcome conformity so that engineers can build more boldly. It seeks to overcome moral hesitation so that Palantir and firms like it can enter domains others fear. It seeks to overcome institutional decay so that the United States can better defend its geopolitical advantage. The book does not want free human beings. It wants high-functioning instruments who feel free while serving power.

Section Six therefore exposes one of the book’s most seductive maneuvers. It takes values that revolutionaries also need—improvisation, courage, anti-conformity, flexibility, initiative, contempt for hollow bureaucracy—and subordinates them to the needs of monopoly tech capital and the imperial state. It offers liberation from the dead corporation only to deliver the engineer into the living war machine. Against this, we insist on another discipline: not obedience to bureaucracy, not obedience to capital, not obedience to empire, but discipline to the people’s struggle. The worker who can improvise should improvise for liberation. The engineer who can disobey should disobey imperial command. The artist of software should not paint targeting systems for the generals. The misfit should not become the empire’s favorite weapon. The creative human being belongs not to Palantir, not to Silicon Valley, not to the Pentagon, but to the unfinished work of human emancipation.

The Better Rifle and the Ruthless Pragmatism of Empire

In Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen, Karp and Zamiska bring the engineering mindset fully into the theater of war. The earlier chapters taught us how Silicon Valley thinks: swarm intelligence, improvisation, anti-conformity, flexible hierarchy, creative friction, and contempt for dead bureaucracy. Now we see where that mindset is supposed to go. It does not remain in the startup. It marches into Afghanistan. It enters procurement law. It challenges Lockheed Martin. It fights the Army bureaucracy. It sells itself as the missing bridge between soldiers in the field and software that can help them survive. The authors call the chapter “Building a Better Rifle,” and that title is not metaphorical fluff. It is the moral center of their argument: if the state sends soldiers to fight, then engineers must build the tools they ask for. If the soldier asks for better software, build it. If the rifle is now code, then code must serve the rifle.

The chapter opens with the death of James Butz and two Marines in Helmand province in 2011. The writing is careful, somber, and emotionally effective. A young medic rushes forward without hesitation to aid wounded men after an IED blast, and a second explosion kills them all. Karp and Zamiska use this story to ground the case for Palantir’s software in the life-and-death reality of soldiers on patrol. They describe thousands of U.S. troops killed by improvised explosive devices, tens of thousands of IED attacks, billions spent by the U.S. military trying to counter bombs that could cost a few hundred dollars to make, and soldiers forced into armored vehicles, plowing through fields to avoid roads. The conclusion they want is direct: the troops had data, but the systems could not make it usable. Palantir could.

We should not read this lazily. The death of soldiers is real. The grief of families is real. The fear of patrols moving through mined roads is real. No revolutionary serious about human beings should sneer at the dead simply because they wore the uniform of an imperial army. Many are working-class people sent into wars designed by men whose children never touch the battlefield. Karp and Zamiska themselves note that political elites have outsourced the cost of war to others, that only a tiny number of members of Congress had children serving in the military, and that the all-volunteer force allows elites to wage war without shared sacrifice. That point cuts deep. But the authors use this truth to defend better imperial equipment, not to indict the imperial war itself.

That is the fundamental move. They separate the question of whether the war should be fought from the question of whether soldiers should receive better tools. “If a U.S. marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it,” they write in effect, “and the same goes for software.” This sounds humane. It sounds practical. It sounds like common sense. But common sense under imperialism is often a trap. The better rifle is never just a rifle. It is part of a military campaign, an occupation, a chain of command, a geopolitical objective, a class project, and a colonial relation. A better rifle in Afghanistan did not float above the war. It helped the war continue. Better route analysis, better intelligence fusion, better targeting support, better battlefield software—these may keep one soldier alive while strengthening the machinery that keeps an occupied people under military pressure.

Afghanistan appears in this chapter mostly as terrain, danger, data, and insurgency. The Afghan people appear largely as background to American vulnerability: village leaders, bomb makers, informants, insurgents, civilians counted in passing. This is imperial narration at its smoothest. The invader’s fear becomes the emotional core; the occupied people’s history becomes atmosphere. Karp and Zamiska mention that Afghanistan has sat at the intersection of empires for millennia, but they do not let that fact become the center of analysis. They do not ask why Afghans were fighting foreign troops on their roads. They do not ask what twenty years of invasion, night raids, occupation, imprisonment, corruption, drone strikes, and counterinsurgency did to Afghan society. They do not ask why the world’s richest military was hunting fertilizer bombs in a country it had no right to occupy. They ask why the software was bad.

This is the engineering mind under imperial command: precise about the workflow, evasive about the war. It can trace data sets across fingerprint scans, attack records, mobile numbers, informant reports, and patrol routes, but it will not trace the political cause of the conflict back to invasion and empire. It can diagnose procurement dysfunction with surgical detail, but it will not diagnose imperialism as the system that produced the battlefield. It can ask five whys about a missed deadline, but not five whys about why U.S. soldiers were in Helmand province in the first place. The method is ruthless until it reaches the gates of power; then suddenly it becomes polite.

The chapter’s account of military procurement is still important. Karp and Zamiska describe a bloated, absurd, self-protective bureaucracy that could not buy simple radios during the Gulf War without routing the purchase through Japan because procurement rules had become too stupid to function. They recount the folklore of $500 hammers, $600 toilet seats, cookie specifications hundreds of pages long, and a federal acquisition machine so weighed down by red tape that wartime need collided with administrative paralysis. There is a real institutional critique here. The U.S. war machine is not some perfectly rational beast. It is a swamp of contractors, regulations, incentives, congressional districts, cost-plus habits, bureaucratic turf wars, and career-preserving cowardice.

But we have to be clear: waste is not the opposite of empire. Waste is one of empire’s operating costs. The Pentagon does not become less imperial because its procurement system is inefficient, and it does not become more moral when the procurement system becomes agile. The problem with the U.S. military is not that it sometimes buys the wrong thing slowly. The problem is what it exists to do. Karp and Zamiska want to modernize the imperial machine by cutting through the procurement jungle and allowing commercially available software firms like Palantir to compete against the old defense giants. They frame this as insurgency against bureaucracy. But from the standpoint of the colonized, the issue is not whether the sword is forged by Lockheed Martin slowly or Palantir quickly. The issue is that the sword is pointed at them.

Palantir’s lawsuit against the Army becomes the heroic centerpiece of this story. The company invokes the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act, argues that the Army failed to consider commercial alternatives, and wins. The legal victory opens the path for Palantir to take over a major intelligence platform. The authors present this as proof that an insurgent startup, armed with better software and stubbornness, could force the military bureaucracy to change. In narrow terms, that is what happened. But politically, the episode marks something larger: the breach through which Silicon Valley enters the formal bloodstream of U.S. military procurement. The old military-industrial complex begins making room for the military-digital complex.

This is why the contrast with Zynga and Groupon matters. While Palantir engineers were supposedly in Kandahar helping soldiers counter IEDs, Silicon Valley was chasing FarmVille, coupons, clicks, users, and consumer IPO glory. Karp and Zamiska want us to see Palantir as the serious company in a childish Valley, the one firm willing to ignore market fashion and serve national need. They are not entirely wrong that consumer tech was shallow. But their self-portrait is too clean. Palantir was not outside the market. It was pursuing a different market: the state. It was not beyond capitalism. It was competing for imperial contracts. It did not reject monetization. It found money where the money always is in a declining empire: war, intelligence, policing, borders, and security.

Chapter Fourteen then widens the lens from Palantir’s battlefield origin story to the philosophical habits of the engineering mind. The authors begin with artistic friction: Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock, difficult personalities, resistant teachers, creative antagonism. They argue that modern corporate culture avoids conflict too much, smooths over tension, rewards likability, and produces institutions too afraid of discomfort to build anything substantial. “Likability is a jail,” they quote John Mulaney saying, and the phrase lands because it names something real. Careerist culture often rewards the agreeable mediocrity, the polished fraud, the administrator who never offends because he never risks saying anything worth hearing.

But the authors move quickly from this point into a broader attack on trigger warnings, grievance culture, and the left’s alleged cultivation of fragility. This is one of those moments where the ruling-class critique of liberal softness becomes a garbage truck hauling a few useful bricks. Yes, capitalist institutions have learned to manage discomfort through therapeutic language while preserving exploitation. Yes, professional-class discourse often inflates harm in selective ways while ignoring the violence of rent, wages, prisons, sanctions, and war. Yes, a politics built entirely around personal offense cannot build a revolutionary movement. But Karp and Zamiska’s target is not liberal fragility because it blocks class struggle. Their target is fragility because it blocks imperial seriousness. They want harder people for harder power.

The authors celebrate friction because friction produces originality. They invoke René Girard and mimetic desire to explain how people imitate what others want, how founders copy prior successes, how Silicon Valley repeats itself until innovation becomes derivative. They prefer the rebel founder, the artist, the mad one, the person willing to reject the crowd and create something new from nothing. Again, there is truth here. Revolutionary work also requires contempt for stale formulas. A movement that merely imitates old slogans without studying present conditions becomes a museum exhibit with clenched fists. But rebellion in the abstract means nothing. The billionaire founder rebelling against market convention is not the same as the colonized rebelling against occupation. The engineer rejecting consensus to build military software is not the same as the soldier refusing an illegal order. The content of the rebellion matters.

Their praise of pragmatism is equally double-edged. They contrast hedgehogs, who explain everything through one big idea, with foxes, who pursue many ends and adapt. Silicon Valley, they say, is the consummate fox. Software either runs or it does not. The engineer cannot hide failure behind rhetoric the way lawyers and politicians can. The programmer is forced into contact with reality. There is something powerful in this argument. Marxism itself, if alive, is not a dead catechism. It studies concrete conditions. It tests analysis against practice. It knows that reality is a moving river, not a frozen slogan. But Karp and Zamiska’s fox-like pragmatism is not dialectical materialism. It is operational opportunism. It asks what works before asking whom it works for.

That distinction decides everything. A torture program can “work” in the narrow sense of producing information. A sanctions regime can “work” by collapsing a currency. A drone system can “work” by identifying a target. A predictive policing tool can “work” by flooding poor neighborhoods with cops. A deportation database can “work” by accelerating removals. The engineer’s question—does it run?—is not enough. The revolutionary question is: what social relation does it reproduce? What class does it serve? What violence does it automate? What future does it make more likely? The software that “works” for empire may fail humanity.

The most revealing and disgusting passage comes when the authors invoke the U.S. recruitment of Nazi scientists after World War II as an example of ruthless pragmatism. They describe defense and intelligence agencies relocating at least sixteen hundred German scientists and their families to preserve advantage in rockets and jet engines, and they quote an officer urging his commander to set aside distaste for this “German-born information” if “we are not too proud.” There it is: the moral sewer beneath the clean language of results. Operation Paperclip becomes a lesson in not letting purity get in the way of power. The empire does not really hate fascism. It hates losing to fascism. Once fascist expertise becomes useful, the butcher puts on a lab coat and gets a visa.

This is not a side note. It is the skeleton key to the whole book. The authors claim to defend liberal democracy and the West against authoritarian adversaries, but their own pragmatism happily absorbs Nazi knowledge when useful. Their moral universe is not governed by anti-fascism. It is governed by advantage. They can condemn authoritarianism abroad while praising the practical wisdom of recruiting its technicians. They can speak of values while subordinating values to capability. They can warn against adversaries while copying the methods necessary to beat them. This is why technofascism does not always arrive as open ideological Nazi worship. Sometimes it arrives as the calm insistence that moral disgust must yield to technical necessity.

The Five Whys method at the end of Chapter Fourteen shows the best and worst of their engineering framework. Ask why, then why again, then why again, until the root cause emerges. In production, organizing, medicine, logistics, and political work, this habit can be invaluable. Do not stop at symptoms. Do not blame the nearest person. Find the structure. Follow the chain. Identify the incentives, relationships, bottlenecks, and contradictions that produced the failure. Revolutionaries should appreciate this. A serious movement also needs root-cause analysis. Why did the campaign fail? Why did the workers not trust the organizers? Why did the cadre burn out? Why did the message not land? Why did the coalition fracture? Why did repression succeed? Ask why until the flattering answer dies.

But once again, Palantir’s method stops before the root contradiction of the system that feeds it. They can ask why a software update missed deadline and trace the cause to budget cycles, executive conflict, and incentive structures. But can they ask why the company builds for defense and intelligence agencies? Can they ask why U.S. power requires permanent surveillance? Can they ask why Afghanistan became a battlefield? Can they ask why Europe and the United States claim the right to define global order? Can they ask why the software century is being organized around autonomous weapons instead of global health, food sovereignty, climate repair, and socialist planning? Their Five Whys are sharp inside the firm and dull at the edge of empire.

Lucian Freud’s line—“I try to paint what is actually there”—becomes the chapter’s final aesthetic justification for engineering observation. Look closely. Suspend judgment. See the system as it is. This too contains a valuable discipline. But no one sees innocently. The question is not only whether one looks carefully, but from what standpoint one looks. The colonizer looking carefully at the village produces a map for occupation. The insurer looking carefully at the patient produces a denial of coverage. The police department looking carefully at the neighborhood produces a patrol grid. The revolutionary looking carefully at the same world sees exploitation, resistance, contradiction, possibility, and the forces capable of transforming it. Observation without class standpoint becomes intelligence gathering for whoever owns the observer’s labor.

Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen therefore expose the completed engineering ethic of the book: intimacy with the user, hatred of bureaucracy, tolerance for conflict, contempt for mimicry, ruthless pragmatism, root-cause analysis, and relentless observation. None of these traits are inherently reactionary. In fact, the people’s movements need many of them. But in Karp and Zamiska’s hands, they are welded to imperial purpose. The better rifle becomes better software. Better software becomes better targeting. Better targeting becomes better occupation. Better procurement becomes faster militarization. Better observation becomes better intelligence. Better pragmatism becomes the willingness to use whatever works, including the expertise of yesterday’s fascists, in the service of today’s empire.

This is why we must read this section as both warning and lesson. The enemy is not stupid. The enemy studies organization, psychology, art, biology, military history, procurement law, software, and systems failure. The enemy wants to overcome its own bureaucracy, capture technical talent, and move faster. The enemy knows that old institutions are rotting and that the next stage of power requires agile coordination between state and capital. We should learn from the seriousness of the method while rejecting the class project it serves. The people need better tools too. But our better rifle is not an AI targeting system for empire. Our better rifle is political clarity, organization, revolutionary culture, technical knowledge, disciplined study, and the capacity to dismantle the machine that Palantir is trying so hard to perfect.

Innovation Deserts and the Price of Imperial Piety

In Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen, Karp and Zamiska move from the battlefield and the startup floor into the public institutions they want remade. The target now is not merely Silicon Valley’s consumer triviality or the Pentagon’s procurement sludge, but the broader public sphere: policing, medicine, education, government, public compensation, bureaucratic rule-following, and the moral habits that allegedly keep talented people from entering hard domains. These chapters are where the book’s reconstruction project becomes explicit. The authors want the state to absorb the methods of Silicon Valley. They want public institutions to become more founder-driven, more outcome-oriented, more tolerant of difficult personalities, more willing to use incentives, and less afraid of controversy. Once again, they begin from real rot. Once again, they lead us toward a reactionary cure.

Chapter Fifteen opens with Francis Galton and the “wisdom of crowds,” only to ask why the crowd should be trusted to allocate capital through markets. This is one of the sharpest questions in the book. Why should society simply accept whatever the market funds? Why should Zynga, Groupon, food delivery, online coupons, social media platforms, and consumer toys soak up billions while public needs remain unmet? Karp and Zamiska are right to say that the market has filled the moral void left by a culture too frightened to discuss the good life. They are right that Silicon Valley has often fled from hard problems into trivial convenience. They are right that toys do not talk back, hold press conferences, organize lawsuits, or produce political blowback. The app is easier than the hospital. The coupon site is easier than the school. The game is easier than the city.

But their critique of market triumphalism never becomes a critique of capitalism itself. That is the limit they cannot cross. They can see that markets misallocate talent and capital, but they cannot say that this misallocation is not an accident. It is the system working according to its own law. Capital does not ask what humanity needs. Capital asks where accumulation can proceed with the highest return and lowest resistance. Hunger matters only when it can be monetized. Disease matters when it can be patented. Education matters when it can be privatized, digitized, credentialed, and sold back to students through debt. Crime matters when it can justify policing contracts, surveillance platforms, prisons, and political campaigns. The market does not fill the void because society forgot to have a seminar about values. The market fills the void because the ruling class owns the room.

The authors then walk directly into policing, and this is where the chapter’s ideological danger sharpens. They acknowledge the history of law enforcement abuse, including the FBI’s monstrous file on James Baldwin, and admit that new technologies can be misused to target the innocent. But the thrust of the argument is clear: the fear of abuse should not prevent police departments from using artificial intelligence, facial recognition, gait recognition, drones, and data integration tools to fight violent crime. They frame the debate as a cowardly refusal by elites to face complexity. In their telling, critics are so afraid of misuse that they abandon the people living under gunfire.

This is a powerful rhetorical move because it recruits real suffering. Working-class communities, especially Black and colonized communities inside the United States, do live with violence. Mothers bury children. Neighbors hear shots. Young people walk through trauma before they have language for it. The liberal nonprofit class often speaks about abolition while remaining socially distant from the neighborhoods most heavily policed and most heavily abandoned. Karp and Zamiska exploit that contradiction. They take the real failure of liberal reformism and use it to argue for more technical capacity in policing. But revolutionary analysis has to hold both truths at once: people deserve safety from interpersonal violence, and the police are not a neutral instrument for producing that safety.

When Palantir brought Gotham to the New Orleans Police Department, the company did not merely offer a better filing cabinet. It brought a war-zone analytic platform into a U.S. city. The authors themselves say the software had been used by U.S. Special Forces and intelligence analysts in Afghanistan to predict roadside bombs and capture those making them. Critics asked the obvious question: why should software designed for foreign war be deployed on the streets at home? Karp and Zamiska treat this as moral hysteria. But the question cuts to the bone. The border between foreign counterinsurgency and domestic policing has always been porous in the U.S. empire. The colony teaches the metropolis how to police. The reservation, plantation, occupied city, prison, border zone, and battlefield exchange methods like old friends.

Their answer is that violent crime demands tools. But tools carry the logic of the institutions that deploy them. A data platform in the hands of police does not simply “find connections.” It intensifies the police view of the world. It turns neighborhoods into networks of suspicion, relations into risk factors, prior contact into future danger, and poverty into pattern recognition. It does not ask why communities are deprived, why schools collapse, why housing is unaffordable, why trauma is untreated, why guns circulate, why work disappears, why prisons reproduce violence, or why the state shows up with armed men instead of social power organized by the people themselves. It asks who should be watched, mapped, stopped, raided, arrested, or classified. That is not public safety. That is counterinsurgency in municipal clothing.

The chapter’s phrase “innovation deserts” is therefore revealing. Karp and Zamiska argue that sectors like law enforcement, medicine, education, and national security have resisted technology and become barren spaces where Silicon Valley fears to tread. But deserts are not natural here. They are politically produced. Public schools are starved, then sold software. Hospitals are squeezed, then sold platforms. Cities are disinvested, then sold predictive policing. Public health is neglected, then sold dashboards. The state abandons the people, capital returns with a subscription model, and the whole racket calls itself innovation. The problem is not that technology has no place in public life. The problem is that under capitalism, technology enters public life as vendor, landlord, cop, consultant, insurer, and military contractor.

Karp and Zamiska call opposition to advanced policing technology a “luxury belief.” They borrow the language of class resentment to beat the left over the head. The privileged, they argue, can afford to oppose police technology because they do not live under gunfire. There is some truth here when applied to affluent liberals who treat poor communities as stages for moral performance. But it becomes reactionary when it erases the actual political experience of colonized people with police power. The communities most harmed by violence are often also the communities most harmed by police occupation. They do not live in abstraction. They live between gangs, landlords, poverty, surveillance, prosecutors, prisons, and police departments that solve very little while controlling a great deal. Calling resistance to police technology a luxury belief turns generations of lived repression into a boutique opinion.

The authors then widen the attack against what they call left establishment refusal to engage the right. They argue that progressives brand certain views on national security, immigration, abortion, and law enforcement as lowbrow and uncouth, thereby surrendering cultural power. Again, they identify a real weakness of professional-class liberalism. The liberal elite often sneers at the people rather than organizing among them. It moralizes where it should educate. It cancels where it should struggle. It brands where it should build. But Karp and Zamiska use this critique to rehabilitate right-wing common sense around policing, national security, and state power. They do not want a proletarian conversation across the working class. They want a national conversation that restores legitimacy to coercive institutions.

Their repeated call for “outcomes” appears practical, but we have to keep asking: outcomes for whom, measured by whom, and at what social cost? Less hunger, crime, and disease are noble goals if pursued through social transformation. But under the technological republic, outcomes become metrics that justify technical intervention without democratic control. Crime reduction can mean more police contact. Disease management can mean health data extraction. Educational improvement can mean surveillance of students and teachers. Hunger reduction can mean charity logistics instead of food sovereignty. The engineer loves the measurable output, but the people live inside the social relation that produces the number. A metric can improve while domination deepens.

Chapter Sixteen shifts from public technology to public incentives, and the transition is smoother than it first appears. The authors have argued that hard public problems remain unsolved because institutions lack courage, technology, and ownership. Now they argue that public service also lacks proper compensation and incentive alignment. They begin with Jerome Powell earning around $190,000 as chair of the Federal Reserve while making decisions that move trillions of dollars and affect hundreds of millions of workers. Karp and Zamiska ask why the world’s most powerful country asks a wealthy man to essentially volunteer his time to run its central bank. They argue that low public salaries narrow the pool of candidates, privilege the already wealthy, and push officials either to become rich before entering office or monetize their office afterward.

Once again, there is a real contradiction here. A government that pays modest salaries for powerful positions while requiring expensive campaigns and elite credentials will favor the rich, the connected, the retired, the sponsored, and the corruptible. Public office in capitalist democracy is already filtered by class before voters ever see a ballot. The authors are right that noble rhetoric about service can conceal a system where only those with wealth can afford to serve. They are right that teachers, doctors, public servants, and socially necessary workers should not be paid in moral compliments. “Nobility” does not pay rent. Calling work a calling has always been one of the tricks by which society underpays the labor it claims to honor.

But their solution again bends toward the business model. They admire Singapore’s high ministerial salaries and argue for more experimentation with compensation, incentives, ownership, and stakes in institutional success. This is the Silicon Valley worldview entering the state: align incentives, reward outcomes, attract talent, pay for performance, give leaders skin in the game. It sounds modern. It sounds hardheaded. But public institutions are not startups, and the people are not customers in a founder’s market experiment. The danger is that the logic of compensation becomes another route by which capitalist values colonize public life. Instead of democratizing the state, they want to make the state more executive, more entrepreneurial, more incentive-managed, more businesslike.

The Rickover story makes the point even sharper. Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear Navy, becomes the model of the difficult, abrasive, results-producing public servant who broke rules, abused subordinates, accepted gifts from defense contractors, and nevertheless delivered a historic military breakthrough. Karp and Zamiska know Rickover was not clean. They know he could be condescending, cruel, arrogant, and ethically compromised. But they ask whether strict rule-following and procedural purity would have produced the nuclear submarine. Their implied answer is no. The larger lesson: sometimes the republic needs difficult men who get things done, even if they offend the accountants of virtue.

This is where “piety” becomes the enemy. The authors argue that society has become too attached to rules, transparency, process, and moral purity, while forgetting outcomes: submarines built, cures developed, attacks prevented, interests advanced. This is the hard edge of the book’s anti-liberalism. It does not merely reject performative morality. It asks for room to tolerate misconduct when the result is strategically valuable. It asks us to forgive the ugly personality, the rule-bender, the gift-taker, the arrogant admiral, the founder who flies too close to the sun—provided he serves the group’s interests. The question, of course, is which group? In this book, the group is the nation, and the nation means the imperial state and its allied ruling class.

Revolutionaries also reject liberal piety. We do not believe politics is purified by etiquette, HR language, or procedural theater. We know struggle is messy. We know disciplined movements must sometimes work with difficult people, forgive errors, correct comrades, and prioritize the concrete needs of the struggle over moral vanity. But there is a world of difference between revolutionary discipline and elite impunity. Karp and Zamiska’s forgiveness flows upward. It protects the Rickovers, founders, executives, engineers, and strategic actors whose usefulness to power outweighs their violations. Our forgiveness, when principled, serves the development of the people and the struggle against oppression. Their anti-piety risks becoming a license for powerful men to break rules in the name of results.

The scapegoat discussion pushes this theme further. Karp and Zamiska warn against the collective desire to unload guilt onto sacrificial victims and rejoice in the destruction of enemies. There is wisdom in the warning. Liberal culture does love ritual denunciation. The social media crowd loves a fall from grace more than it loves justice. Institutions often sacrifice individuals to preserve the system that produced the wrongdoing. But again, the authors use a real critique to defend a dangerous politics. The problem with modern accountability is not that powerful people are too often punished. The problem is that punishment is selective, symbolic, and usually designed to protect the larger structure. A low-level worker gets fired. A public figure is humiliated. A scandal burns hot for a week. The institution survives. The class relation remains untouched.

What Karp and Zamiska ultimately want is a public sector with more ownership, more incentives, more tolerance for friction, more openness to technology, and more willingness to accept morally complicated actors if they deliver results. In isolation, some of these reforms could sound reasonable. But inside the architecture of the book, they serve a larger project: rebuilding a technological republic capable of maintaining U.S. and allied dominance. Law enforcement must accept AI. Public servants must be incentivized like executives. Difficult military innovators must be tolerated. Government must absorb Silicon Valley culture. Public institutions must overcome piety and become outcome machines. The state must become more agile, more technical, more founder-driven, and more willing to enter morally contested terrain.

This is not democratic renewal. It is technocratic hardening. It is the remaking of public power in the image of monopoly tech capital. The authors do not imagine workers governing hospitals, communities governing safety, students and teachers governing schools, patients and medical workers governing health systems, or the public owning the digital infrastructure built from public resources. They imagine better elites with better incentives using better software to produce better outcomes. That is the horizon of the technological republic: not the abolition of class power, but its modernization.

Here our review therefore exposes the domestic side of the book’s technofascist program. Abroad, the engineering mindset builds better rifles, drone swarms, and AI weapons. At home, it enters policing, public administration, compensation systems, schools, medicine, and government agencies. The same method travels: define the hard problem, denounce liberal hesitation, attack performative morality, celebrate outcomes, import Silicon Valley culture, align incentives, tolerate difficult elites, and deploy technology. The result is not liberation from bureaucracy. It is the construction of a more flexible, data-driven, privately penetrated, militarily aligned state apparatus.

Against this, we do not defend market drift, liberal piety, bureaucratic paralysis, or symbolic politics. We want public institutions that actually serve the people. We want doctors, teachers, nurses, sanitation workers, engineers, public defenders, and public servants paid with dignity. We want technology used to heal, educate, feed, house, coordinate, and protect communities. We want crime addressed at its roots, not merely mapped by software and managed by armed patrols. We want the parasitic consultant class, defense vendors, and tech monopolies driven out of public life. We want democratic planning, public ownership, and working-class control over the systems that shape our lives. Karp and Zamiska are right that piety has a price. But so does power without accountability. So does innovation without democracy. So does software without socialism. And the bill, as always, gets sent to the people.

The Thousand-Year Empire and the Return of Civilizational Myth

In Chapters Seventeen and Eighteen, Karp and Zamiska arrive at the ideological heart of the book. The argument is no longer merely that Silicon Valley should serve the state, or that engineers should build weapons, or that public institutions should absorb startup culture. The argument now becomes civilizational. The authors want a renewed national culture, a shared mythology, an aesthetic point of view, a heroic conception of leadership, and a long historical horizon capable of binding millions of strangers into collective action. In other words, the technological republic cannot survive on software alone. It needs myth. It needs ritual. It needs heroes. It needs a story big enough to make engineers, founders, soldiers, officials, and citizens believe that serving Western power is not merely useful, but noble.

Chapter Seventeen begins with Dunbar’s number and the problem of scale. Human beings can maintain only a limited number of direct social relationships, so larger communities require language, shared symbols, stories, heroes, villains, rituals, and what Benedict Anderson called imagined connections. Karp and Zamiska are right about this much: no large society can survive on individual preference alone. A people needs shared meaning. A movement needs memory. A class needs consciousness. A nation, real or imagined, requires some story about who belongs, what has been suffered, what has been built, what must be defended, and what future is worth sacrifice. The question is never whether myth exists. The question is which class produces it, which history it tells, which violence it hides, and which future it makes possible.

The authors’ answer is national culture. They argue that the United States and the West have hollowed out their collective identity in the name of inclusion, leaving little of substance for anyone to join. They ask, “Inclusion into what?” It is a clever question because liberalism really does struggle to answer it. Inclusion into the marketplace? Inclusion into debt? Inclusion into the managerial university? Inclusion into a dying empire with better slogans? The liberal order has reduced belonging to procedure, consumption, and symbolic representation. It offers citizenship without power, diversity without liberation, rights without material security, and identity without collective purpose. Karp and Zamiska see the emptiness. But their solution is to rebuild the national myth that empire needs to command loyalty.

This is why they turn to Singapore and Lee Kuan Yew. Lee becomes the model of hard national construction: a leader who thinks in centuries, disciplines culture, manages language, intervenes in private life, manufactures coherence out of diversity, and insists that survival requires shared values. The authors admire his line that those who calculate in terms of “the next thousand years” deserve to survive. That phrase gives the chapter its pulse. The ruling class wants duration. It wants civilizational stamina. It wants a people trained to think beyond the quarterly report and the election cycle, beyond consumer appetite and personal branding, toward collective survival. But again, we must ask: survival of whom, for whom, and on what terms?

Singapore’s story is useful to Karp and Zamiska because it allows them to praise national discipline without sounding like ordinary American reactionaries. They can point to a multiethnic, multilingual, postcolonial state that built cohesion through language policy, public planning, and state intervention. But their use of Singapore is selective. They do not really want anti-colonial sovereignty. They want a lesson in state capacity. They want proof that culture can be engineered, that national identity can be built, that a government can shape citizens’ lives in the name of long-term survival. In their hands, Lee Kuan Yew becomes not a complicated historical figure in a specific postcolonial conjuncture, but a weapon against the liberal West’s fear of collective identity.

The “Great Man” discussion then follows naturally. Karp and Zamiska know that crude hero worship is out of fashion, and they admit that history is shaped by economic and political forces beyond single individuals. But they want to recover the heroic, the leader, the founder, the singular will capable of bending events. They mourn a culture that has become too skeptical of leadership, too embarrassed by virtue, too allergic to greatness. This is not innocent. The book has been preparing us for this move all along. First it praised the founder. Then it praised the difficult admiral. Then it praised the disobedient engineer. Now it praises the civilizational leader. The technological republic needs more than systems. It needs commanding personalities.

Marxists have no need to deny the role of leaders. Lenin mattered. Stalin mattered. Mao mattered. Ho Chi Minh mattered. Fidel mattered. Sankara mattered. Cabral mattered. But revolutionary leadership is not the same as bourgeois Great Man mythology. Revolutionary leaders concentrate historical forces; they do not replace them. They are forged by class struggle, disciplined by organization, and judged by whether they advance the liberation of the people. Karp and Zamiska’s hero is not the revolutionary cadre accountable to the masses. Their hero is the founder-statesman, the national engineer, the hard man of civilization who builds institutions for the survival of the regime. The difference is the difference between leadership as service to liberation and leadership as command for preservation.

Their attack on the contemporary left’s alleged abandonment of national identity is central to this section. They argue that the left “neutered itself” by refusing to speak about nationhood, patriotism, shared culture, or collective belonging. There is a serious strategic issue here. A left that cannot speak to people’s need for belonging will lose them to reactionaries who can. A left that treats national feeling as automatically fascist leaves workers vulnerable to the flag-waving parasites who wrap exploitation in red, white, and blue cloth. But Karp and Zamiska use this failure to push readers back toward the American project, not beyond it. They want national identity rescued from liberal embarrassment and restored as the emotional infrastructure of Western power.

This is where we must draw a hard line. The United States is not simply a civic experiment with contradictions. It is a settler-colonial empire built on Indigenous land, African enslavement, continental conquest, migrant superexploitation, and global imperial violence. You cannot rebuild American national identity without deciding what to do with that foundation. You can either tell the truth and rupture with the settler order, or you can manufacture another patriotic myth that launders conquest into complexity. Karp and Zamiska choose the second path. They want a national story thick enough to inspire sacrifice but not truthful enough to indict the ruling class.

Their discussion of mythology makes this explicit. They defend Palantir’s Tolkien references and argue that shared stories should be celebrated, not dismissed. They praise common tomes, parables, moral tales, country music, virtue, redemption, and civil religion. Again, they are not wrong that people need stories. The revolutionary movement also needs stories. We need Haiti, Bandung, Petrograd, Yenan, Havana, Algiers, Attica, Soweto, Grenada, Standing Rock, Gaza, and every strike line where ordinary people discovered they were not ordinary at all. We need martyrs, songs, rituals, memory, humor, grief, beauty, and discipline. But our myths must tell the truth about the world. Empire’s myths exist to conceal the bodies under the floorboards.

Karp and Zamiska say capitalism and individual rights are too thin to sustain the soul. Correct. A society cannot live by markets alone. But the book refuses the socialist conclusion. If capitalism atomizes people, destroys community, commodifies culture, and leaves spiritual hunger in its wake, then the problem is capitalism. But instead of naming the system, they blame secularism, pluralism, liberal caution, post-nationalism, and the loss of shared national culture. They want to reconcile the free market with collective experience. That is their formula. Keep capitalism, but wrap it in national myth. Keep individual accumulation, but bind it to civilizational service. Keep the tech giants, but make them patriotic. Keep empire, but give it a soul.

Chapter Eighteen turns this demand for myth into a demand for judgment. The authors begin with Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, that old aristocratic march through Western art history, complete with sweeping judgments about high and low, beauty and ugliness, civilization and barbarism. Clark’s comparison of an unnamed African mask to the Apollo Belvedere is rightly revolting in its colonial arrogance. Even Karp and Zamiska know that much of this cannot simply be restored. But they ask whether the revolt against Clark’s patrician confidence also destroyed our ability to judge at all. Have we become so afraid of hierarchy, taste, beauty, virtue, and preference that we can no longer say anything is better or worse, higher or lower, worthy or degraded?

This is one of the book’s most seductive traps because liberal culture really has produced a thin and cowardly aesthetic relativism in many elite spaces. People fear judgment because judgment has so often been used to enforce caste. They fear standards because standards have so often been weaponized by empire, patriarchy, racism, and class rule. But a movement that cannot judge cannot fight. We must be able to say that some art deepens human beings and some art degrades them. Some politics liberates and some politics enslaves. Some cultures nurture solidarity and some normalize domination. Some technologies serve life and some serve death. The question is not whether we make judgments. The question is whether those judgments arise from ruling-class taste or revolutionary human need.

Karp and Zamiska want an “aesthetic point of view” because builders need taste. Founders need to decide. Companies need a path. Cultures need a mast to tie themselves to, like Odysseus resisting the Sirens. They argue that too much freedom of motion can become weakness and that commitment to a single path may be necessary for creation. Again, the form of the argument has value. Revolutionary work also requires commitment. A cadre cannot be endlessly optional. A movement cannot change line every time the crowd sings a sweeter song. Discipline means choosing a path, accepting limits, refusing distractions, and binding oneself to a cause larger than appetite. But for Karp and Zamiska, the mast is Western civilization. For us, the mast is the liberation of the international working class and colonized peoples.

Their praise of founder-led companies brings the aesthetic argument back to capital. Founder control, ownership culture, employee equity, long-term stewardship—these become the organizational forms through which taste, commitment, and creative energy supposedly survive. The authors even claim that many major technology companies were “essentially communally owned” because employees received equity. This is where the ideological fog gets thick. Stock options are not socialism. Employee equity in a privately governed firm is not workers’ control. A software engineer with shares is not the same as a worker in a democratically owned and planned enterprise. Silicon Valley’s “ownership society” gives selected workers a stake in capitalist success while leaving the structure of private accumulation intact.

It is true that equity compensation can make workers feel invested. It is true that the upside of labor has been captured by capital in most industries. It is true that many tech workers gained wealth that traditional wage labor would never have given them. But a broader layer of employees owning fragments of a firm does not abolish exploitation; it recruits workers into identification with capital. The engineer begins to think like a shareholder. The worker’s imagination is narrowed to valuation, exit, market dominance, and company success. The firm becomes the community. The campus becomes the commune. The founder becomes the prophet. Capital discovers that ownership, properly rationed, can be a more powerful chain than wages alone.

The authors’ critique of effective altruism and moral agnosticism also points toward their final ideological claim. They argue that Silicon Valley’s ethical universalism is too thin, too utilitarian, too evasive of deeper questions about the good life, national identity, and meaning. The founders say they want to change the world, but the phrase has become meaningless because it lacks a thick worldview. This is correct in one sense. Effective altruism often reduces morality to calculation while leaving capitalism, imperialism, and class power intact. It turns the suffering of humanity into a spreadsheet problem for the rich. But Karp and Zamiska reject this thin universalism not in favor of proletarian internationalism, but in favor of cultural specificity, virtue, nation, religion, and Western confidence.

Their final pages are a call for the resurrection of shared culture. They invoke Strauss, MacIntyre, Bellah, Rawls, Confucian virtue, civil religion, religious orthodoxy, and the decline of Rome. They argue that neutrality has produced nihilism, pluralism has become paralysis, tolerance has become support for nothing, and the American public square must again become safe for substantive claims about the good life. This is the book’s counterrevolutionary spiritual program. It recognizes that liberal capitalism cannot produce meaning, then tries to restore meaning without abolishing liberal capitalism. It wants virtue without class struggle, community without socialism, national belonging without anti-colonial reckoning, religion without liberation theology, and beauty without the people as historical subject.

The discussion of Martin Walser and Germany’s memory culture shows the danger most clearly. Walser’s complaint about Auschwitz remembrance becoming a moral bludgeon is used to argue that national identity cannot be permanently strangled by guilt. Karp and Zamiska conclude that Germany’s deep suspicion of nationalism has weakened European deterrence and left the continent vulnerable. This is a chilling argument. Of course no people can live forever in ritualized shame. But when the problem of fascist memory is framed mainly as an obstacle to rearmament and national confidence, the warning sirens should scream. The issue becomes not how to build antifascist culture rooted in truth and justice, but how to free the nation from paralyzing guilt so it can defend the West.

This is the final destination of the book’s ideological journey: from AI weapons to civilizational renewal, from Palantir software to national myth, from engineering culture to aesthetic judgment, from startup ownership to Western virtue, from anti-liberal critique to imperial reconstruction. The technological republic is not simply a state with better software. It is a moral, cultural, and military project designed to restore the West’s capacity to command. It wants engineers who believe, founders who judge, citizens who belong, allies who rearm, public institutions that move, and elites who can tolerate discomfort in pursuit of results. It is not trying to abolish the emptiness of capitalist life. It is trying to fill that emptiness with a renewed imperial creed.

Against this, Weaponized Information does not defend liberal emptiness, aesthetic cowardice, consumer nihilism, or postmodern drift. We also believe the people need culture, stories, beauty, discipline, sacrifice, virtue, and a horizon longer than the next election or next paycheck. But our horizon is not the next thousand years of Western power. Our horizon is the end of the world system that made the West dominant. We do not need a technological republic built by Palantir and sanctified by civilizational myth. We need a socialist, anti-colonial, internationalist future in which technology serves life, culture tells the truth, and the people—not founders, generals, billionaires, or imperial philosophers—become the authors of history.

Smash the Machine, Build the Future: A Manifesto Against the Technological Republic

What we have just dissected is not a book in the neutral sense. It is a program. It is a blueprint. It is a call to arms—written not for the working class, not for the colonized, not for the exploited, but for the engineers of empire, the founders of capital, and the administrators of a collapsing world order. The Technological Republic is not confused about the crisis it faces. It sees clearly that liberalism has hollowed itself out, that consumer capitalism has infantilized innovation, that bureaucracy has paralyzed the state, and that the West is losing its grip on global dominance. Where it does not hesitate is in its solution: fuse Silicon Valley with the state, resurrect national myth, discipline culture, weaponize technology, and build a harder, faster, more cohesive imperial machine. That is not renewal. That is technofascism taking conscious form.

Let us be precise. Technofascism is not simply “authoritarian technology.” It is the convergence of monopoly tech capital, state power, and ideological reconstruction in a moment of imperial crisis. It emerges when the ruling class can no longer rule through consent alone and must reorganize society through surveillance, coercion, mythology, and engineered loyalty. Karp and Zamiska are writing from within that moment. They are not defending the liberal order. They are burying it. In its place, they propose a system where engineers become strategists of domination, where software becomes weaponry, where culture becomes a tool of cohesion, and where dissent becomes a liability to national survival.

The book’s genius—and its danger—is that it builds its argument out of real contradictions. Liberalism has failed to produce meaning. The market has misallocated human talent. Silicon Valley has wasted brilliance on trivial consumption. Bureaucracy does suffocate initiative. The left has struggled to speak to the human need for belonging. These are not inventions. They are fractures in the system. But every ruling class, when faced with crisis, attempts to resolve contradictions in its own favor. Karp and Zamiska do not seek to abolish the system that produces these failures. They seek to perfect it. They want a capitalism with purpose, an empire with soul, a state with speed, a culture with discipline, and a population willing to sacrifice for the preservation of Western power.

This is why their project must be rejected in total. Not because it lacks intelligence—but because it puts intelligence in the service of domination. Not because it misreads the crisis—but because it draws the wrong conclusion from it. Not because it is incoherent—but because it is coherent in the direction of imperial survival. The technological republic is not a neutral framework waiting to be filled with different content. It is already filled—with class power, colonial legacy, military ambition, and capitalist accumulation.

The battlefield, then, is not technology itself. It is the social relation that governs technology. The ruling class wants to convince us that the problem is cultural drift, moral relativism, and institutional weakness. We insist the problem is capitalism in its imperial stage. They say the market must be guided by national purpose. We say the market must be abolished as the organizing principle of human life. They say engineers must serve the state. We say engineers must serve the people. They say culture must bind us to the nation. We say culture must arm us for liberation.

This is where the real struggle begins. Because the danger of this book is not that it will convince the masses. It is that it will convince the cadre of capital—the engineers, the scientists, the developers, the data analysts, the technically skilled workers who sit at the nerve center of modern production. These are the people Karp and Zamiska are recruiting. These are the ones being told: you are not just coders, you are nation-builders; not just developers, but defenders of civilization; not just workers, but architects of history. And for a generation alienated by meaningless work and shallow culture, that call can sound like purpose.

We must answer that call with a deeper one.

To the engineers: your labor already runs the world. Without you, the platforms stop, the systems fail, the networks collapse. You are not the servants of Palantir or the Pentagon—you are the producers of the infrastructure they depend on. The question is not whether your work matters. It is who it serves. Will you build targeting systems, predictive policing platforms, and surveillance architectures? Or will you build systems for healthcare, housing, food distribution, education, ecological repair, and democratic coordination? The code is not neutral. It carries the logic of the class that commands it.

To the workers: do not be fooled by the language of ownership when ownership remains concentrated. A stock option is not power. A salary is not control. A startup is not a commune. As long as production is organized for profit, your labor will be exploited, no matter how modern the office or how flexible the hierarchy. The technological republic offers you inclusion into domination, not liberation from it.

To the colonized and oppressed: you have seen this before. The language changes, the tools evolve, the algorithms become more sophisticated—but the structure remains. The same empire that mapped your land now maps your data. The same state that policed your bodies now predicts your behavior. The same capital that extracted your labor now extracts your attention, your movement, your relationships, your future. Technofascism is not new to you. It is simply the latest phase of a long war.

To the revolutionaries: we must study this enemy seriously. We must understand their methods, their organizational forms, their psychological insights, their technological capacities. We must learn from what is real in their analysis while rejecting the class project it serves. They are building swarms—we must build organizations rooted in discipline and collective intelligence. They are training engineers—we must train cadre who can think, adapt, and act. They are constructing myths—we must tell the truth in ways that move people to action. They are planning for a thousand years—we must fight for a future that abolishes the conditions that make empire possible at all.

The technological republic says humanity needs a stronger West.

We say humanity needs the end of the West as a ruling system.

The technological republic says the state must be fused with capital to survive.

We say the state must be transformed into an instrument of the working class and oppressed nations.

The technological republic says culture must unify us under national purpose.

We say culture must unite us in the struggle against exploitation and imperialism.

The technological republic says technology must be weaponized to defend civilization.

We say technology must be socialized to sustain life.

This is not a theoretical disagreement. It is a line of struggle that runs through every institution, every workplace, every classroom, every server farm, every battlefield, every neighborhood. The future is not being debated in abstract terms. It is being built—line by line of code, contract by contract, policy by policy, war by war.

The ruling class has made its move. It is reorganizing for survival.

We must reorganize for liberation.

The task ahead is not to reform the technological republic. It is to defeat it.

Not with nostalgia.

Not with liberal appeals.

Not with fragmented resistance.

But with organization, clarity, discipline, and a vision of the future that is as bold as theirs—and far more just.

They are building a machine.

We are building a world.