The hardcover edition of this book is 320 pages. I can distill it into five points.
I didn't expect to like this book. I've encountered and disliked Palantir since the early 2010s, and heard about Alex Karp's antics in recent years. The recent militaristic right-wing tech bubble is familiar territory. My opinions on the matter are what you'd expect: surveillance, militarism, nationalism, are all bad in ways that I won't try to recap in a sentence.
But I didn't expect the book to be this hollow, shameless, and shitty.
Honestly. It's totally unsubtle, just by-the-book self-promotion. The pitch is pretty simple: telling the customer how much other customers like the product and how good it is, and fearmongering that the enemy will have a better product if America doesn't fund Palantir.
Here's how the logic around 'enemies' works:
Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.
A few chapters later:
Our adversaries will proceed with the development of artificial intelligence whether or not we do.
Here's how the sales pitch about Palantir's great technology sounds:
The officer wrote that the lack of access to Palantir's software had led to "operational opportunities missed and unnecessary risk to the force." … By early 2012, the requests for access to Palantir from soldiers in the field in Afghanistan had begun mounting…
The authors reiterate over and over again how military budgets in the US need to be higher and spent better - which means directed more to companies like their own. The most bizarre twist is the discussion of Hyman G. Rickover's taking of bribes from a military contractor, which intimates that the bribe-taking was an acceptable price for getting things done the hard way. Whatever moral code this book is pointing to is pretty flexible, especially when it comes to loosening up that military contractor business.
It's the usual dance from the tech-right-wing: trying to talk about the elites as someone who is not you. This book is written by Alex Karp, a Stanford grad worth $15 billion dollars who owns 20ish houses and is in long-term relationships with two women in different parts of the world. Nicholas Zamiska, his coauthor, went to Yale for undergrad, spent a few years at the WSJ, went back to Yale for law school, was an associate at a big firm, and then went to Palantir in 2015.
But this book really loves three things: western civilization the troops, and the non-elites. It's pretty hard to make this work! Here's one fun passage:
This generation, the first significant set of graduates from a far more open university system in the United States, was reluctant to limit its options… The pursuit of optionality, both in their business and intellectual lives, if not their personal and romantic choices as well, was paramount.
Karp is a guy with 20ish houses and two long-term girlfriends. He also finds time to chide engineers for not being troops or having seen war:
The most capable generation of coders has never experienced a war or genuine social upheaval.
Note that neither author is a troop. Karp's inept sword-wielding aside, they are not that kind of guy.
They never really find a workable definition of that western civilization that they so ardently want to defend. I think this is half because they want to appeal to everyone, from the Christian nationalist right-wingers to the center-left people who might give them the benefit of the doubt. And half because they don't really have anything they can embody or endorse with it seeming realistic.
At some point an editor must have told them to include more biographical information about the historical people mentioned and they inserted a sentence with They were born in ---- to ---- who was a ----. Did you know that, the Milgram who did that experiment, "was born in 1933 in New York and his father was a cake baker who had immigrated to the United States from Hungary. His mother had left Romania as a young child." Great, yes. Now do that for everyone. The book is mostly free of AI-isms but I strongly suspect this is one.
I also enjoyed how, in order to sugarcoat the book's begging for an expansion of the military-software industry, it keeps invoking military in a little list of words including education and medicine:
This is a 200 page book at most. They didn't need pages and pages of exposition about a beehive experiment to say that good companies are formed of mostly self-organizing teams. You don't need to write the whole background of the Milgram experiment to talk about compliance.
They repeat the same points over and over: other tech companies are building frivolous toys. War is important and complicated and someone needs to build weapons and they need to be good.
There are a bunch of diversions into the classics of right-wing billionaire bugaboos: complaining about woke college students, of course. Cultural elites, and elite overproduction. Complaining about people being too mean to billionaires and prying too much into their personal lives. You can get these kinds of opinions anywhere billionaires are quoted, it isn't necessary to get them in this book.
Alex Karp once self-identified as a socialist and supported Hilary Clinton, but is now full MAGA. This book tries to reach a wider audience and not alienate all left-leaning people by just doing loving critiques of leftism.
There's not much to say here: it's a right-wing book written by people who are big fans of the Trump regime and have nothing bad to say about conservatives, our current freaky Christian-nationalist administration, etc. You barely have to read between the lines for this.
At no point does this book admit any mistake on the part of Palantir, Karp, Kamiska, and so on. It is not reflective, it is nauseatingly self-assured.
And they love to do this thing where they dismiss critics as being too shallow to understand or argue about complex topics, and then they brush away the complex topics for another time. For example:
These engineers inhabit a world without trade-offs, ideological or economic.
Or this obnoxious passage:
The employees at Google who resisted leveraging the machinery of their company in service of building software for the U.S. military know what they oppose but not what they are for.
When they approach the actual reasons why people are opposed to this kind of work - like how many of America's recent wars have been pointless boondoggles, land-grabs, totally unsuccessful and illegal regime-changes, they dodge:
The more fundamental issue was that a broader fundamental disillusionment with American involvement in Afghanistan… began to shape and warp discussions around what resources soldiers needed to do their jobs. We should, however, as a country, be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm's way.
This is a good encapsulation of the totally hollow kind of moral logic in this book: sure, the war might be totally wrong but we need to keep making those guns to fight it.
And this really reflects the current scenario with Palantir. This book invokes World War II quite a bit, which is the war with the highest approval rating in the last hundred years. That's how it's trying to position itself.
But America isn't fighting WWII anymore. Generations alive today have seen only stupid wars. The Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran wars are hugely unpopular. What's more, Palantir is making a big business out of the ICE deportation raids which virtually everyone hates. Selling facial recognition tech to tell the government which neighborhood of harmless civilians to raid is not comparable to building the ships that were used on D-Day.
They do briefly talk about the pushback against surveillance and sum it up with
Amazon decided to prohibit the use of its widely available and popular facial recognition software by police departments… The subtle, interesting, and difficult discussion was not whether the abuse of such systems was justified but rather whether their proper use had any role to play in stemming violence in cities. Thousands of people are murdered every year in this country. Hundreds of thousands and arguably millions more live in the shadow of such violence. For many critics of the use of software by local law enforcement, those lives hardly seemed to matter much in the moral calculus.
This is a great example of high-school level of argumentation happening: you allude to a subtle, interesting, and difficult discussion that the other side is surely too afraid to approach. Then you throw in a little but what about and suggest that maybe the technology had good effects - avoiding any evidence of course. And then finish it up with closing point that assumes your rhetorical opponent surely hasn't thought of this.
The line from Alex Karp and other Palantir folks has been that the company bravely wades into the difficult questions of right and wrong and serves the military at their most vulnerable moments. Alex Karp's self-styling as a quirky philosopher and a political independent suggested that there was depth. There was something more, a set of principles or a deep understanding guiding the work.
This book confirms that there isn't any theory or principle. They're just weapons manufacturers, hawking their wares. They're just billionaires, complaining about college students. It's the same shit.