Palantir’s Idea of Peace

The Technological Republic, his new “treatise” urging executives and engineers to abandon their pursuit of “trivial consumer products” and recommit their capital and talent to a “national project,” Karp’s effort feels less like a timely cultural intervention and more like what you get when the boss’s pontifications go unchallenged for too long.

This carefully maintained mystique provides the perfect backdrop for Karp to play the eccentric intellectual, someone who drops incendiary statements with academic detachment. On a recent earnings call, he gloated, “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them”; at the World Economic Forum, he dismissed the United Nations as “basically a discriminatory institution against anything good”; during an AI conference on Capitol Hill, he castigated pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses as the adherents of a “pagan religion” and asserted that they should be sent to live in North Korea. These statements all come wrapped in eager demonstrations of his knowledge on the history of philosophy, art, and science—a performative erudition very different from the safe, generic corporate-speak of most of his peers. Though identifying as a liberal, Karp’s general strategy seems to be to position himself as a guy that can “talk sense” to the left, which of course appeals to the right—criticizing progressives for their ostensible lack of patriotism, naïve cosmopolitanism, and unwillingness to embrace US military power. It’s a disposition designed for dual purposes: to make the embrace of a hawkish foreign policy and digital dragnet technology appear as the thoughtful centrist stance, and to provide Palantir with a politically palatable counterweight to the more odious ideological baggage of Thiel.

Karp idealizes the Manhattan Project as a Platonic unity of the state and business. He romanticizes the World War II–era entanglement of science and government as a heroic partnership

Oh... great... especially considering this:

Trump signs executive orders to boost nuclear power, speed up approvals

To speed up the development of nuclear power, the orders grant the U.S. energy secretary authority to approve some advanced reactor designs and projects, taking authority away from the independent safety agency that has regulated the U.S. nuclear industry for five decades.