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. In this groundbreaking treatise Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander
C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska offer a searing critique of our collective abandonment of
ambition arguing that in order for the U.S. and its allies to retain their global edge—and
preserve the freedoms we take for granted—the software industry must renew its commitment to
addressing our most urgent challenges including the new arms race of artificial intelligence.
The government in turn must embrace the most effective features of the engineering mindset
that has propelled Silicon Valley’s success. Above all our leaders must reject intellectual
fragility and preserve space for ideological confrontation. A willingness to risk the
disapproval of the crowd Karp and Zamiska contend has everything to do with technological and
economic outperformance. At once iconoclastic and rigorous this book also lifts the veil on
Palantir and its broader political project from the inside offering a passionate call for the
West to wake up to our new reality.
