The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West [Hardcover]

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • “A cri de coeur that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies.”—The Wall Street Journal

From the Palantir co-founder, one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2025, and his deputy, a critically-acclaimed and sweeping indictment of the West’s culture of complacency, arguing that timid leadership, intellectual fragility, and an unambitious view of technology’s potential in Silicon Valley have made the U.S. vulnerable in an era of mounting global threats

“Not since Allan Bloom’s astonishingly successful 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind . . . has there been a cultural critique as sweeping.”—George F. Will, The Washington Post

“Provocative . . . worthy of your time.”—Edith Chapin, former Editor-in-Chief of NPR

Silicon Valley has lost its way.

Our most brilliant engineering minds once collaborated with government to advance world-changing technologies. Their efforts secured the West’s dominant place in the geopolitical order. But that relationship has now eroded, with perilous repercussions.

Today, the market rewards shallow engagement with the potential of technology. Engineers and founders build photo-sharing apps and marketing algorithms, unwittingly becoming vessels for the ambitions of others. This complacency has spread into academia, politics, and the boardroom. The result? An entire generation for whom the narrow-minded pursuit of the demands of a late capitalist economy has become their calling.&ló*