INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “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
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 —more than one million
copies sold—has there been a cultural critique as sweeping as Karp’s.”—George F. Will The
Washington Post 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 will also lift 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.
