Silicon Valley is often the first place that comes to mind when thinking of tech corporations and major companies. The tech and entrepreneurial hub in the southern region of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California is home to headquarters of several tech giants including Facebook, Apple, and Google. The ‘Silicon’ in the name Silicon Valley refers to silicon-based transistors and integrated circuit chips which are often used in computer hardware. However, the term Silicon Valley was initially coined by Don Hoefler, a journalist. The term then gained widespread popularity sometime in the 1980s and has since become a metonym for technology and innovation in the area.
Amongst the many tech companies in the Silicon Valley is Palantir Technologies, a publicly traded company specializing in data mining. Recently, the CEO and co-founder of Palantir Technologies has collaborated with the company’s head of corporate affairs to author a book. In this book, the pair of authors have voiced a desire for the Silicon Valley to find its moral compass. Here is what you need to know.
Palantir Technologies CEO
Alexander Karp, co-founder and CEO of data analytics giant Palantir Technologies, in collaboration with Palantir Technologies’ head of corporate affairs Nicholas Zamiska, has written a book wherein Silicon Valley is directly called out. In the book, Karp and Zamiska have critiqued their big tech company peers by claiming that these companies are “building [things] simply because they can, untethered from a more fundamental purpose.”
The pair goes on to write and share their beliefs, which is that “the software industry should rebuild its relationship with government and redirect its effort and attention to constructing the technology and artificial intelligence capabilities that will address the most pressing challenges that we collectively face.”
It is worth noting that Palantir Technologies has a largely controversial reputation, particularly because of the company’s close work with the Trump Administration whereby they (Palantir Technologies) will be creating a “super database of combined data from all federal agencies”. Additionally, Palantir Technologies has also been working on a platform for ICE that will allow the equally controversial agency “to track migrant movements in real time.”
Palantir Technologies CEO calls on Silicon Valley
The pair of authors write that Silicon Valley’s elite has an “obligation to participate in the defence of the nation and the articulation of a nation project – what is this country, what are our values, and for what do we stand? – and, by extension, to preserve the enduring yet fragile geopolitical advantage that the US and its allies in Europe and elsewhere have retained over their adversaries.”
The authors argue that most tech firms are “reluctant to work closely with federal or state government on grand challenges concerning national security, public health, school education, or law and order.”
Referring to this “elite” cohort, the authors then go on to note that this group is “often unsure what its own beliefs are, or more fundamentally if it has any firm beliefs at all.” Karp and Zamiska refer to this as the “hollowing-out of the American mind” and claim it can be traced all the way back to the 1960s.
“Anything approaching a worldview is now seen as a liability,” Karp and Zamiska wrote, “leading to an atrophying of the mind and self-editing, which are corrosive to real thought.”
In essence, Karp and Zamiska are attempting to highlight the power of nationalism in the context of inclusivity. “The nation-state is the most effective means of collective organization in pursuit of a shared purpose that the world has ever known,” the authors assert. As such, this proposed “technological republic” is meant to defend “capitalist democracies against their autocratic opponents.”