"Karp and Zamiska’s basic historical claim that Silicon Valley owes its modern origins to Cold War defense spending is broadly true, even if the ethical mandate they derive from it—making the U.S. armed forces more lethal in order to uphold American global supremacy—is question-begging. Still, at times, their critique of the post–Cold War commercialization of Silicon Valley is surprisingly lacerating: “Far too much capital, intellectual and otherwise, has been dedicated to sating the often capricious and passing needs of late capitalism’s hordes,” they write, decrying a generation of software engineers for applying its prodigious talents to building the next food delivery or social media app.

But their critique of tech-enabled consumerism only goes so far. In one of the book’s many unintentionally funny moments, they single out the early retail website eToys, a darling of pre-dot-com-bubble Silicon Valley, and castigate it for the “shallowness” of its ambition and “abdication of everything beyond the light hedonism of the moment.” But they’re quick to clarify: “To desire, even a toy, is to be human.” The point of refashioning the government in the image of a Silicon Valley start-up, they write elsewhere, is to ensure it delivers “the goods and services that are essential to our lives.” How did we get from “late capitalism’s hordes” to “goods and services”? It helps to remember that Palantir also runs a commercial business accounting for nearly half of its revenue.
(...)
This tonal seesawing—for every Karpian truth-bomb, a lawyerly qualification; for each saber rattled, a pitch-deck cliché—is symptomatic of this book’s generic incoherence. [I]t reads as though you asked an AI chatbot to write a set of Gladwellian think pieces in defense of American techno-militarism, with as many smart-sounding yet ultimately vacuous quotes as possible."

https://newrepublic.com/article/191786/alex-karps-war-west-palantir

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