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ChatGPT advises me:
"Don't bother. The Technological Republic reads more like a well-edited shareholder letter crossed with a graduate seminar in political philosophy. Palantir CEO Karp is fond of Hegelian abstraction, but he pulls his punches: just when you're hoping for a bold thesis, he retreats into qualified platitudes about liberal democracy and civic engagement.
"You're right: it should be a smart, astringent polemic, but it ends up a kind of technocratic sermon: earnest, worthy, slightly damp. You expect the fire of a heretic and get the measured cadence of a conscientious objector.
It’s not paradigm-busting, because the paradigms he's critiquing (Silicon Valley libertarianism, crypto-utopianism, performative wokeism) have already been well-punctured by more trenchant critics such as Evgeny Morozov, Martin Gurri, Jaron Lanier - and without the bland CEO-speak.
"There are insights, yes. But not many that wouldn’t already have occurred to a moderately skeptical reader of The Economist, with a conscience. The real interest is perhaps in the gesture - that a man in Karp’s position felt the need to write it. That he’s worried about the erosion of legitimacy, about elites losing their mandate, about the nihilism at the heart of techno-modernity.
"But to read it all? Unless you enjoy the prose equivalent of chewing through a dense quinoa cake made of qualified civic virtue... er, no.
"You can get the gist in a couple of book reviews - and one long-form podcast episode if that's not enough.
"Let it sit on the shelf with your copy of Tony Blair’s A Journey* - a monument to concern, not to clarity."
* And no, I don't have that book either.
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