It has been a year since Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s book, The Technological Republic, was published. Karp is the CEO of Palantir, and Zamiska is the company’s head of corporate affairs. On Sunday, Palantir appeared to celebrate the anniversary of the book’s publication by condensing it to a 22-point manifesto and posting it to X.com. When I read Karp’s book last year, my reaction was, “this book should have been a tweet.” It now seems Palantir agrees.

The book itself is an irredeemable mess. It is written in the rhetorical register of a peer-reviewed academic essay, without any of the argument-sharpening benefits that come from peer-review. Karp poses as a political philosopher-CEO, someone who thinks big thoughts, but the book functions as little more than a recruitment brochure for his defense tech company. The thesis of the book is, effectively, Palantir loves getting big contracts from the Department of Defense. And when you think about it, doesn’t that make Palantir kind of heroic?

Time and again, Karp exhibits the moral compass and complexity of a Bond villain. He observes that “Several generations in the United States have now never known a war between the world’s great powers,” but the only insight he can apparently glean from this statement is that America should avoid growing soft, build a global surveillance network and hunt its enemies around the world.

The message of both the book and the manifesto is that Palantir wants to be THE weapons manufacturer of the next century. The future of the weapons business is software plus AI. Palantir would like the government to spend an exceptional amount of money on Palantir products, please and thank you.

Everything else is just puffery. America is good. America’s enemies are bad. Hard power, good. Soft power, bad. Silicon Valley and tech billionaires, good. Holding elites accountable, bad. “The West” is good. The rest: bad.