Silicon Valley Tech for Whom? From Flying Cars to AI-controlled Weapons Systems
by Claus Thomasberger
29.01.2026
What can the 1930s interwar period teach us about the growing power of Silicon Valley tech monopolies? Below, Claus Thomasberger contrasts two critical works on the role of technology: an article by the late anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, and a book by libertarian thinkers and Palantir executives Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska. Combining these with Karl Polanyi’s observations of how corporate interests aided the rise of fascism and sidelining of democratic and civil liberties in the 1930s, he cautions against Karp and Zaminska’s vision of a merger of tech monopoly and state interests. Drawing parallels between Polanyi and Graeber, he then shares ideas for how we might instead develop technologies that work in the interest of all, not elites.
In 2015—one year before Donald Trump’s first election—the much-too-early-deceased anthropologist David Graeber, leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement and self-described anarchist, expanded on his widely acclaimed 2012 article Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit.[1] In the extended version, he directed even stronger criticism towards the government bureaucracies and economies of Western countries for losing sight of the needs and desires of the majority of the population. Technological progress, he argued, was being directed in ways that served the class interests of capital while ignoring the actual needs of society. Technologies were being steered toward enforcing labor discipline and the surveillance of people in and beyond the workplace. In place of the promised democratic control of technological progress, had come complex bureaucratic apparatuses. Not only technology, but social development as a whole, had gone astray. At the same time, the gap between economic and political systems had widened, while society’s control over both shrank.
A decade later, only a few weeks after Trump’s second inauguration, billionaire Alexander Karp, co-founder and CEO of defence contractor Palantir Technologies Inc.—who earned his doctorate in social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt—and Nicholas Zamiska, the firm’s legal counsel, published a book in which they drew on Graeber’s critique. The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West [2], quickly rose to number one on the New York Times Bestseller List. Karp and Zamiska, too, criticized today’s political system—, its inflexibility and overgrown bureaucracy. The government, they complain, has become unwilling and unable to promote large-scale technological breakthroughs— a task that in the past had been essential for the rise of the U.S. On the other hand, they accused U.S. companies—especially the Silicon Valley giants—of treating the U.S. government as an impediment to innovation instead of as a logical partner. Some Silicon Valley monopolies focusing on trivial products such as photo-sharing apps and chat interfaces had actively avoided working for the government and abandoned any serious efforts to improve and uplift society. “The vital yet messy questions of what constitutes a good life, which collective endeavours society should pursue, and what a shared and national identity can make possible have been set aside as the anachronisms of another age,” they concluded. At first, Karp and Zamiska’s critique appears surprisingly similar to Graeber’s, however, as we will see, its underlying vision and implications differ significantly.
Polanyi’s Warning
In 1932, a few months before Hitler came to power, Karl Polanyi published an article for the weekly Der Österreichische Volkswirt that began with the following observation:
A chasm has opened between the economy and politics. These scant words give the diagnosis of the times. The economy and politics, two manifestations of the life of society, have declared their autonomy and wage unceasing war against each other. They have become slogans under which political parties and economic classes pursue their opposing interests… There is no contemporary problem more worthy of the attention of well-intentioned people than this one. A society whose political and economic systems are in conflict is doomed to decline – or to be overthrown. [3]
Ever since universal suffrage had become a political demand, influential liberals – think of Lord Macaulay’s famous speech against the Chartist petition – had been well aware that the relationship between democratic politics and capitalism was the Achilles heel of liberal civilization in Europe. The outbreak of conflict between the political and economic system in the early 1930s meant defeat not only for the socialists, but for the new liberals of the interwar period as well.
Certainly, Mises, Hayek, and their followers never regarded democracy as a value in itself. Their primary goal was to limit the power of political rulers. Their reasoning was simple: autocratic governments—if not kept in check from outside by liberal forces, as in the colonies or later, for example, in Chile under Pinochet—would mostly tend to extend their rule without limits. Democratic politics, on the other hand, could be kept under control much easier, they believed, by steering public opinion. In the same year that Polanyi’s warning was published, Ludwig Mises proclaimed that “just because they cannot think for themselves the masses follow the lead of the people we call educated [i.e., liberal intellectuals like himself —author’s clarification]. Convince these, and the game is won.” [4] A decade earlier, in his book Public Opinion, [5] Walter Lippmann had analysed how public opinion was “shaped” from above. Similarly, Edward Bernays had declared that “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”[6] Or, in Hayek’s more cautious language: the central political task of neoliberal intellectuals is “to persuade the majority ”[7] to accept the rules of liberal capitalism.
By 1933 at the latest, it had become obvious that this strategy had failed. The new liberals had lost their influence on public opinion and key political institutions. They had been unable to prevent the global economic crisis. Their arrogance had blinded them to the fact that the common people were perfectly capable and willing to think for themselves. Not only Mises and Hayek, but also Popper, Karl Polanyi’s brother Michael, Schumpeter, and other Central European neoliberals drew the same conclusion: they emigrated to the Anglo-Saxon world. The Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1938 was a first attempt to get back on track. However, it was not until after the end of World War II that they made a new attempt to regain their influence on European politics from the U.S., by founding the Mont Pelerin Society. Countless other neoliberal think tanks followed.
For Polanyi, in 1932, there was no doubt: the abuse of the political and economic systems—the two vital institutions of capitalist market societies— in the struggle for specific interests undermined the integrity of society as a whole. Overcoming the division was in the interest of all, not just of a particular class. If society was to survive, the deadly struggle between democracy and capitalism had to end. And those forces able to show a way out—or at least give that impression—would win.
Socialism had sought to resolve this tension by extending democracy to the economic sphere. Fascism pursued the opposite goal: overcoming the conflict between capitalism and democracy by abolishing democracy. The corporative state aimed to directly intertwine the economic and political systems: economic planning, but not by a democratic society hostile to business—by the economic corporations themselves. To achieve this, democratic influence on the state had to be suppressed and parliaments, labour unions and socialist parties eliminated. The triumph of fascism, thus, was the result of the weakness of its opponents. Or, in Polanyi’s words: “Under the liberal and Marxist belief in the primacy of economic class interests, Hitler was bound to win.”
False Heroes: Founders and Founder-led Companies
Even if Karp and Zamiska’s understanding of the problems seems quite close to Graeber’s, their answer, which they call “The Technological Republic,” points in a very different direction. The boundaries between business and government, they argue, must be dismantled. Only if the software industry is able to rebuild its bonds with state agencies—enabling the country to develop technological and AI capabilities through the integration of state and business—will it be capable of mastering the future. But to what end? What is the interest of U.S. society as a whole?
Leaving aside their long-winded discussions about founder culture and other American myths, what remains is one goal that, according to the two Palantir authors, can unite the American nation: the belief in the superiority of American civilization and the preservation of U.S. supremacy on the international stage. Given the emergence of geopolitical rivals threatening the U.S. dominance at all levels, this requires, above all, maintaining leadership in the military and weapons technology sector. The key vision: “A union of the state and the software industry—not their separation and disentanglement—[…] will be required for the United States […] to remain as dominant in this century as they were in the last.”[8] In other words, the Technological Republic aims essentially at a strengthening of the military-industrial complex under the auspices of artificial intelligence.
At the same time, democratic forms of decision-making play no role in the Technological Republic; in fact, any interference by the common people appears as a disruptive factor that would only disturb the integration of political and economic systems and weaken the U.S. vis-à-vis China and other countries.
The Washington Post (owned by Silicon Valley technologist Jeff Bezos) praised it as a “A Freethinker’s Manifesto.” However, the libertarian orientation underlying Karp’s and Zamiska’s argument led the Post—and many other reviewers—astray. Karl Polanyi would have agreed that the chasm between the economy and politics is a feature of the obsolete capitalist market society; it should and must be overcome. But he also warned that democracy would have to take the lead. Otherwise, personal freedom would be destroyed. If the individual is not conceived of as a responsible member of society, but as the embodiment of economic and political functions, individualism and freedom lose their foundation. “Anti-individualism is … the cue of all Fascist schools of thought,” Polanyi underlined in his analysis of The Essence of Fascism.[9]
The Technological Republic depicts—and the two authors would not deny this—the vision of a highly elitist form of society. Its heroes—the founders and founder-led companies—would enjoy full freedom, while ordinary people would struggle in vain to defend their democratic rights against the powerful. Despite libertarian claims, freedom in the Technological Republic is reduced to mere advocacy for founder-led companies. For the vast majority of people, the demise of democracy would also mean the irretrievable loss of personal freedom.
From Elite Power to Collective Self-determination
The focus of Polanyi’s research was never solely on critiquing the capitalist economy, but on understanding the relationship between the economy, politics, and society—or, as he put it, “the place of the economy in society.” David Graeber, in his own way, asked the same kind of question, warning that technology had been hijacked to serve bureaucratic and corporate control rather than human needs. Karp and Zamiska confront the same structural rupture, but their Technological Republic offers a solution that would fuse state and corporate power while sidelining democracy. If Polanyi’s studies of fascism teach us anything, it is that real alternatives must go beyond class interests and address the needs of society as a whole. Confronting visions like the Technological Republic requires developing democratic answers to the challenges of modern industrial society—answers rooted in democratic economic planning that includes all sectors of society, not just Silicon Valley monopolies. For Polanyi, this was the essence of democratic socialism. For us today, it may indicate paths that enable a future characterized by collective self-determination, rather than a future dictated by elitist alliances of power and profit.
Claus Thomasberger is a former Professor of Economics and Foreign Economic Policy at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences
References
- David Graeber: The Utopia of Rules. On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Melville House, 2015
- Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska: The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belif, and the Future of the West, Crown Publishing Group, 2025
Karl Polanyi: Economy and Democracy, in: Polanyi, Karl: Economy and Society (ed. M. Cangiani and C. Thomasberger), Polity Press, 2018, p. 68
Ludwig Mises: Socialism. Yale University Press, 1962, p.23
Walter Lippmann: Public Opinion, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922
Edward Bernays: Propaganda, Horace Liveright 1928, p. 9
- Friedrich Hayek: The Constitution of Liberty, The University of Chicago Press, 2011, (CW Vol. XVII), p.167
- Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, p. 10
- Karl Polanyi: The Essence of Fascism, in: Karl Polanyi: Economy and Society (ed. M. Cangiani and C. Thomasberger), Polity Press, 2018, p. 87