The Nation

04/23/2026

Once upon a time, we lived in a society where the innermost thoughts of the one percent were largely confined to their own brains and the inner circles of their social and professional relationships. Then came the Internet, which gave anyone with a wireless connection or a smartphone the ability to broadcast their good and bad ideas to millions of people at once. Among the most aggressive adopters: Silicon Valley billionaires. When Marc Andressen wrote a 5,000-plus-word post titled “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” in 2023, it went viral, and became something of a template for kindred grandiose edicts from various CEOs and founders in the tech industry. At the time, I wrote that Andreessen’s manifesto had the pathos of the Unabomber manifesto but lacked its ideological coherence. Now another sort of manifesto has been produced by Palantir CEO Alex Karp in the form of a summary on X of his book, The Technological Republic. It shares the same intellectual lapses endemic to the genre Andreessen helped launch, but it’s bleaker, more antidemocratic, and nihilistic in its worldview.

As a longtime social-media user, I’m sympathetic to the inclination to post one’s every opinion to the Internet, no matter how idiotic. But this isn’t just a matter of the wealthiest people in the world floating iffy ideas about innovation or posting cat memes. Their posts serve as a kind of evangelicalism for a new order in which technocrats are in charge, equality is a naïve aspiration promoted by woke mediocrities, and technology customized to attain power is an unalloyed good.

That this roster of tech-bro shibboleths is remarkably tone deaf in the current environment of economic and political uncertainty bothers Valley propagandists not a whit. Someone recently threw a Molotov cocktail at Open AI CEO Sam Altman’s house, Elon Musk’s unfavorability is at an all-time high in recent polls, and a majority of Americans think AI will do more harm than good. But instead of treating this information as valuable feedback, the oligarchs have doubled down on exactly the things that give people pause about their metastasizing infiltration of all aspects of public and private life.

Karp’s manifesto-via-tweet asserts primarily that we can achieve peace through war, and that billionaires brandishing “grand narratives” in the manner of Elon Musk should be in the country’s driver’s seat, sending ordinary citizens to the battlefield whether they like it or not.