Book Notes: The Technological Republic

Palantir CEO Alex Karp released a new book, The Technological Republic, in 2025, and it was published in mainland China at the end of the year. I bought it and read it right away. The views in the book represent the right-wing current of thought in Silicon Valley, and its shadow can be seen everywhere in actual American politics. To understand this book, you first need to understand Palantir as a company and the Silicon Valley right-wing forces behind it.

Palantir

I first noticed Palantir because of its stock, which rose from $6 in 2023 to$200 in 2025 and was dubbed a “MAGA national-destiny stock.” Its current CEO is Alex Karp and its chairman is Peter Thiel. The company’s main business is big-data intelligence, with clients including the military, the government, and large enterprises. Among its more famous cases are helping locate Bin Laden in 2011, and in 2016 suing the U.S. Army in court—and winning—in order to secure a military contract (under the FASA Act, the military is supposed to give priority to procuring products already available on the market rather than always going custom, in order to lower costs; somewhat like China’s 2015 civil-military fusion strategy).

For information about Palantir, SV101 did a very detailed episode—worth watching if you’re interested.

Peter Thiel and the PayPal Mafia

Stanford has a course that teaches people how to do startups: How to Start a Startup. The course was offered ten years ago, and I watched all the videos online. The host was Sam Altman (current CEO of OpenAI), and the guests included many names that are now household ones: Paul Graham (founder of YC), Brian Chesky (founder of Airbnb), Reid Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn), Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google), and Peter Thiel (founder of Founders Fund and a core member of the PayPal Mafia). Peter Thiel laid out his business philosophy: pursue monopoly rather than competition, and he published a classic book, Zero to One, arguing that vertical R&D and innovation can not only bring the excess profits of monopoly but also keep pushing society toward continual innovation.

Peter Thiel’s career can be roughly divided into several stages: in his early years he studied philosophy and law at Stanford, then briefly entered a law firm and the finance industry only to quickly exit; he turned instead to co-found PayPal in 1998 and successfully sold it to eBay in 2002. After PayPal, on one hand he built a far-reaching investment empire by investing early in Facebook and founding Founders Fund (commercial spaceflight with SpaceX, payment infrastructure with Stripe, defense tech with Anduril, and so on), and on the other hand he co-founded Palantir in 2004, applying technical capabilities directly to the realm of government and national security. From then on, he gradually shifted from a frontline founder to an investor and intellectual figure, continuously shaping Silicon Valley’s technological direction through capital, companies, and public expression.

PayPal’s early employees went on to wield enormous influence in the tech world, earning the nickname the PayPal Mafia: Elon Musk founded SpaceX, Tesla, and Neuralink in succession, extending his reach into space and new energy; Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional social platform. In addition, this group produced YouTube, the dominant force in video (co-founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim), Yelp, the pioneer of review sites (founded by Jeremy Stoppelman), and Yammer, the enterprise social tool (founded by David Sacks). The technical genius Max Levchin went on, after leaving, to found Slide and the fintech giant Affirm. On the capital side, Roelof Botha and Keith Rabois occupy core positions at Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund, respectively. These people not only founded companies with a combined market value in the trillions of dollars, but through close mutual investment and collaboration formed a tremendous force capable of shaping the global tech landscape.

Washington and the Silicon Valley Right

The relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley can be divided into several stages:

• 1970s–1980s: The invisible nurturing period driven by the Cold War. At this stage the two sides had a “one-way dependence” contractor relationship. Washington injected Silicon Valley’s first pot of gold through Department of Defense contracts and NASA projects, while Silicon Valley played the role of the technical “logistics department” for the Cold War defense system. Although their interests aligned, culturally they each went their own way: the government was the invisible backer, and the technologists were the low-key suppliers.
• 1990s–2000s: The arrogant estrangement period after the rise of the internet. With the explosion of personal computers and the commercial internet, Silicon Valley entered an era of extreme self-confidence and free competition. The tech nouveau riche believed in techno-omnipotence and regarded Washington as the slow-to-react, bureaucracy-laden “old world.” The two sides kept a non-interfering distance until the “Microsoft antitrust case” erupted, making Silicon Valley feel the heavy hammer of political regulation for the first time.
• 2010s: The honeymoon and turbulence period of the Obama era. The two sides entered a phase of deep exchange marked by a frequently spinning “revolving door.” The Obama administration regarded Silicon Valley as an engine of social progress; large numbers of tech executives entered the White House to help with digital governance, and tech bigwigs became policy advisers. However, in 2013 the “Snowden affair” triggered a serious crisis of trust between the two sides over privacy protection and state surveillance, and tech companies began openly confronting intelligence agencies on the question of encryption.
• 2020s–2026: The fusion-of-power period under geopolitical rivalry. Against the backdrop of the AI arms race and the restructuring of global supply chains, the two sides have formed an unprecedented “techno-political complex.” Silicon Valley no longer merely provides tools; through figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel it has entered the executive branch directly to participate in governance, while Washington regards computing power, energy, and capital as core to national sovereignty. In this moment, the tech giants and the state machine have completed their transformation from “partners” to “co-holders of power.”

Since Trump returned to the White House for a second time, the relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley has grown ever tighter, forming a new Silicon Valley army: Peter Thiel’s former employee JD Vance took office as Vice President of the United States; Elon Musk led the Department of Government Efficiency, bringing a group of Palantir people to slash projects with data-driven methods; David Sacks became the White House’s AI and crypto czar; Anduril landed a major Department of Defense contract; Grok and Gemini moved into the Pentagon; and so on.

Post–Cold War Silicon Valley and the Hollowing-Out of the American Spirit

The decline of the Silicon Valley spirit

The first two parts of the book both describe a state of “decline.” The Silicon Valley spirit that once served the nation during the Cold War gradually died out, replaced by online advertising, social entertainment, and the like—a pursuit of consumerism and hedonism. Peter Thiel famously remarked: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

In the 1960s the United States could accomplish a crewed Moon landing within a decade, yet in the decades since, humanity’s technological progress in the “world of atoms”—aerospace, energy, transportation—has fallen far below the expectations of that era: aircraft speeds have stagnated for a long time, nuclear energy development has been stalled, and infrastructure renewal has been slow. By contrast, the “world of bits”—computers, the internet—has kept developing rapidly. Peter Thiel argues this is not because humanity has lost its abilities, but because social, political, and capital structures favor low-risk, controllable, incremental improvements, thereby systematically suppressing high-risk, long-term, breakthrough technology projects like the Apollo program.

At the same time, Alex Karp notes that China is racing ahead, giving two examples: facial recognition from Guangzhou’s CloudWalk Technology, and autonomous drone swarms from Zhejiang University—both top-tier frontier technologies applicable to the military domain. The United States, however, is intoxicated by its historical victories. Many Silicon Valley elites enjoy the protection of this country yet refuse to serve it, and even openly oppose the use of their own technology in military tech. For instance, Google’s Project Maven was forced to be canceled after more than 3,000 people signed a petition against it, and Microsoft’s virtual headset project developed for the U.S. Army likewise faced a petition of resistance from internal employees.

The hollowing-out of the American spirit

While Silicon Valley’s pioneering spirit declined, the American spirit and Western culture also drifted toward a kind of hollowing-out. Society pursues free speech, openness, and political correctness, and subjects public figures to merciless scrutiny; leaders have become timid and cautious, no longer daring to take responsibility, and have grown cold, guarded, and devoid of feeling.

When University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill was asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews constitutes harassment, she used “chilling legal terminology.” Magill replied: “It depends on the context.”

Tech workers, too, strive to maintain a neutral stance. Even though they enjoy the protection of the state machine, they selectively ignore this, unwilling to get involved in politics and public governance, and try to stay as far as possible from administrative bureaucracy and politics.

The pursuit of openness and pluralism has led to a fracture in American culture. America’s link to Europe is like a balloon to the ground, but History of Western Civilization, once a required course in American universities, was abolished in the late 1970s—some even argued for abandoning the very concept of “Western civilization.” Once American history was severed from European history, it was like a balloon whose string had been cut: the public lost its sense of community belonging, Silicon Valley elites became absorbed in the consumer internet, and the nation lost its sense of national identity.

Engineering Thinking and Organizational Form

The book discusses two organizational forms, the swarm and the improv actor: when a swarm of bees searches for a new home, scout bees go out to explore, then use a dance to rapidly relay the information to the whole group, and finally decide where the next home will be through a mechanism resembling a democratic vote—conducting large-scale organized action in a highly efficient way. Improv actors, on the other hand, have a dynamic relationship of status among them: through small actions like nods and glances, they dynamically confirm status and effectively organize the next step. Status relationships are essentially a tool in service of the goal, rather than rigid fixed roles and selfish slots for dividing up interests. Silicon Valley is full of “exiles” who have fled traditional bureaucratic organizations.

Within organizational relationships, people instinctively conform to the collective will, and the pursuit of fitting in overrides the results of independent thinking. This is a self-protective strategy humans evolved over the course of evolution (and one that has indeed been very useful for many years), and under collective pressure people will even do things that are clearly wrong. This is especially common in China, where people’s emotions are stirred up by the frenzy of social media and they always do things in a herd—much of the behavior around buying houses, speculating in stocks, “tiger-parenting” children, and so on is for the sake of fitting in rather than meeting one’s own genuine needs. Silicon Valley’s engineering mindset is the opposite: resist conformity, crave creation.

In complex systems, we need to acknowledge that mistakes are inevitable (a complex system is more like an unpredictable cloud than a precise clock); what we need to do is find the root structural cause rather than casually find someone to take the blame. Toyota has a “Five Whys” approach—after discovering a problem, you drill down five layers of “Why?” until you reach the root cause. By comparison, when many domestic organizations encounter a problem, they trot out a scapegoat, then pretend the matter has been solved, and everyone tacitly moves on without resolving the fundamental structural contradiction.

The book also discusses two ways of thinking: the fox and the hedgehog. The fox is flexible, pursues different goals, knows many small things, and believes the world is complex and contradictory; the fox possesses keen observation and strong adaptability. The hedgehog tends to explain all phenomena with a single theory, oversimplifying and over-abstracting the world, with extremely strong focus and a resistance to distraction.

Rebuilding the Technological Republic

Silicon Valley harbors a kind of “technological escapism.” The public is strongly resistant to using technology to fight crime; they do not want systems from the U.S. military’s battlefields applied in their own cities to combat crime. The left has slapped a vulgar, crude label on a whole batch of political positions—from national security, immigration, and abortion to law enforcement—which has caused Silicon Valley and progressives to lose their voice in the debate.

American officials today are low-paid but wield enormous power. For example, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve earns a salary of $190,000 a year. This encourages them to accumulate enough wealth before working for the government, or to monetize their influence after retirement—an unreasonable incentive structure. People encourage officials to take low salaries while turning a blind eye to the wealthy dominating elections, which is really self-deception. Lee Kuan Yew provided very high salaries to Singapore’s government officials. People worried this might make officials work for money and lose their ideals and convictions, but Lee Kuan Yew said that officials are also flesh-and-blood people, and not everyone can become a devout priest.

Rickover once led the development of America’s nuclear submarines, making an outstanding contribution to victory in the U.S.–Soviet Cold War, yet he was criticized for accepting some small gifts from General Dynamics, and few stepped up to defend him. An excessive emphasis on rules has, to some extent, led to rigidity in handling problems: leaders no longer bear responsibility and risk, no longer share in the rewards that decisions bring, making deep reform impossible. This incentive mechanism needs to be reshaped.

Reflections

In this book I found many shadows of China. National identity, and technology empowering national security and public governance, are being pushed forward in China without hesitation—neither obstructed by a left-wing party on ideological grounds, nor lacking broad social consensus. Through generous retirement benefits, comprehensive life care, and longer promotion channels, China mobilizes the enthusiasm of government officials at relatively low cost. This is a creative and cost-effective official-incentive mechanism that both avoids the high administrative cost of high salaries and reduces officials’ motivation to grab money.

But China faces the same problems: leadership unwilling to take responsibility, and organizational bureaucratic rigidity. Many leaders keep power in their own hands through ambiguous instructions while throwing responsibility downward, leaving the execution layer to figure out “the boss’s intent” on their own—which is in fact a very irresponsible practice. Organizational rigidity is also widespread in large companies, including big tech firms, where many middle managers have become mergers of weekly reports and slide decks: when a problem comes up they pass it straight down, so that even though frontline workers have a heavy workload, the overall output is worrying.

Recently I also read another book comparing the Chinese and American systems, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future—also a new book—which compares in detail the differences between China and the U.S. under “rule by engineers” versus “rule by lawyers,” along with the respective pros and cons of each. I’ll share more when I have time.