I like Leon Liao's summary: "A technological republic cannot be built only through defense contracts, AI systems, patriotic rhetoric, or an alliance with one political faction." I just don't see today's tech elite moving beyond that. I think they are still characterized by a combination of countercultural oppositional attitudes, a libertarian preference for exit over voice, and a technocratic mindset that privileges technological revolution over social/political reforms. (The DOGE fiasco is a classic example of the latter: the idea that a few smart guys with an LLM could "refactor" the Federal bureaucracy on an accelerated timescale.) To the extent they get involved in national affairs, I predict it will primarily be as government contractors and political donors operating on a purely transactional basis ("Here's what I can do for you. What's in it for me?"), and they will tend to favor politicians and administrations that take that same approach.
All of the various conflicts and disparities among the various members and factions of the WASP elite during their heyday took place against a background of a taken-for-granted shared identity: the elite were white, English-speaking Protestants, and American identity was defined in terms of being a white, English-speaking Protestant country. All that egalitarian social flourishing in the 1940s and 1950s had the required preconditions of both extreme immigration restriction, and huge social pressure towards assimilation. All the conflicts from Union/Confederate to FDR/WASP took place within what, from the broader perspective of human culture and history, constituted one small subunit of the human family, taking for granted most of the basics of culture and morality. That's why the American people could accept that the elite had some baseline level of legitimacy - on some level, "they're 'us.'" The same intuitions and sentiments motivated every anti-colonial revolt in the modern era: people want to be ruled by "us" rather than by a foreign tribe. How on earth any of this concern for the national interest is supposed to take place under conditions of Diversity and Multiculturalism is, to say the least, an open question. At an absolute minimum, it would require Americans of all backgrounds to be able to share a basic patriotism and reverence for the idea of America. Unfortunately, the idea that the elite should prioritize a concern for the American nation, over against the other several billion people in the world, is widely considered déclassé and icky and Trumpy. A sign that things are moving in the right direction would be if American flags were more popular than say, Mexican or Palestinian flags, at various anti-Trump demonstrations. Don't think that's going to happen any time soon.
I think it's true that many non-elite American Protestants would have seen late 19c/early 20c elites as "us" on some level. Also, most elite universities were quite conservative/Protestant up until WWII. But a big part of the overarching story of that era is intense contestation between WASP and non-WASP political actors, especially in the big cities.
To be fair Bill Gates' parents were very much part of the WASP/Easternish Establishment(despite being from Seattle). Gates himself has many WASPY characteristics. Larry Ellison on the other hand is roughly the same age and always been someone known to be deeply resentful of Gates to this day stemming in my opinion from Ellison's feeling of inadequacy of not being as successful of a businessperson as Gates.
Yes. I interviewed Gates' father for my book on the moderate Republicans. I would say that the Gates family was comfortably upper-middle class and took a lot of their cultural cues from the basically New England culture of the Pacific Northwest in those days. I think Gates is from another generation than Zuckerberg/Musk/Amodei etc. and his positioning within American society is likewise different
I would also argue a certain type of purest who hangs around the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA(itself originally a spinoff of Digital in Boston that later moved to California) would argue that Facebook/Zuckerberg and PayPal/Musk and now X/Musk are not really even true "computing" companies in the way that say Microsoft and Apple are or even Google and Oracle instead being simply service companies that use computing. If you go to the Computer History Museum it is always interesting to note who donates money to the museum and who doesn't. Facebook, PayPal, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, etc. are notable absences for the donor list while Microsoft, Google, and Apple rank prominently.
*AI companies are a new breed of tech company that is still emerging that is probably more computing centric than say Facebook. I will note the the Computer History Museum's most recent exhibit on AI that I saw in December was actually fairly neutral and not at all industry cheerleading in discussing the pros and cons of AI
One big difference to be fair say between Gates and Microsoft vs Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corp(Ken Olsen was very much a New England Yankee of Scandanavian origin) was Microsoft was a software company made up almost entirely of white collars engineers notwithstanding many being self described social misfits whereas Digital was a company the produced both hardware(built and maintained by more "blue collar" workers) while having many white collar hardware and software engineers.
I bring this up in part of many of Microsoft early key engineers especially in building Windows NT all came from Digital such as Dave Cutler(the father of both Digital's VMS operating system and Microsoft Windows NT). So there definitely was a cultural influence from companies such as Digital as well but Microsoft unlike Digital or closer to Seattle Boeing was always an almost exclusively white collar company.
**Boeing in the past had a very paternalistic cultural mindset towards it employees in the Puget Sounds region although it has greatly diminished.
Excellent essay. I think the most important move here is shifting the discussion from Silicon Valley’s political identity to its institutional responsibility.
Karp is right that Silicon Valley can no longer pretend to be merely a commercial innovation class detached from national power. But the harder question is what kind of governing class technology capital wants to become. A technological republic cannot be built only through defense contracts, AI systems, patriotic rhetoric, or an alliance with one political faction. It also needs public legitimacy, investment in science and education, openness to talent, institutional restraint, and some capacity to place national interest above class interest.
This is where the comparison with the postwar establishment is especially useful. The strongest period of American state capacity was a coupling of universities, corporations, public finance, defense demand, scientific institutions, infrastructure, and a broader public mission.
This also connects with a broader state-and-capital question I have been thinking about: the central challenge is not whether capital should serve the state in some crude sense. It is whether a state can organize capital, discipline capital, preserve competition, and convert private accumulation into productive capacity and public capability. That may be the real test for any future “technological republic.”
This is also the thread I have been trying to explore in my recent essays on Silicon Valley: how a technology class that once defined itself as anti-establishment has gradually become one of the central organizing forces of American state capacity.
The way I think about systemic capacity is that it is not simply a stock of wealth, talent, technology, or institutions. It is the accumulated ability of a society to connect them: science with industry, capital with productive investment, infrastructure with markets, education with technical diffusion, and private ambition with public purpose.
Societies gain systemic capacity when those connections reinforce one another over time. They lose it when the pieces remain individually strong but stop converting into collective capability.
That is why your essay is so interesting to me. Silicon Valley may still have extraordinary firms, capital, and talent, but it is getting increasingly harder for those assets be organized into public capability rather than only valuation, platform power, partisan alignment, or defense contracts.
If America’s new technological establishment merely aligns itself with MAGA, defense capital, and the AI security state, rather than rebuilding education, research, manufacturing, infrastructure, and social legitimacy, it will not be able to replicate the success of American state capacity during the Cold War.
I believe most of the magnates in question supported tariffs if not deficits; my guess is that on the immigration question their views (or those of their descendants) changed during or after the Great War
I did think maybe some of them could have had a self-interest in tarffs. Carnigie for example. Plus tariffs did raise revenue (anti-deficit) when there were not a lot of better wasys.
Tariffs tended to split Eastern Establishment elites politically starting in the late 1890s(although there were some radicals in favor of free trade even before then like Charles Adams and Henry Adams). By the 1950s the Eastern Establishment almost universally supported free trade.
BTW, the Bay Area Council which represents all of the major companies around San Francisco including the tech giants but also the non tech companies based in the Bay Area has a very establishmentarian feel but most people wouldn't associate Facebook public advocacy with that of the Bay Area Council.
One reason I bring up the Bay Area council is the Los Angeles/Southern California area is famously known to those who study the California economy to shockingly NOT have an equivalent organization to Bay Area council in part due to the historic libertarian lean of Southern California.
Doge initiative was not only feckless and destructive but necessary at the same time. It is even a warning shot off the bow of the U.S.S. Economy that is about to plunge to briney depths like the Arizona in Pearl Harbor.
I like Leon Liao's summary: "A technological republic cannot be built only through defense contracts, AI systems, patriotic rhetoric, or an alliance with one political faction." I just don't see today's tech elite moving beyond that. I think they are still characterized by a combination of countercultural oppositional attitudes, a libertarian preference for exit over voice, and a technocratic mindset that privileges technological revolution over social/political reforms. (The DOGE fiasco is a classic example of the latter: the idea that a few smart guys with an LLM could "refactor" the Federal bureaucracy on an accelerated timescale.) To the extent they get involved in national affairs, I predict it will primarily be as government contractors and political donors operating on a purely transactional basis ("Here's what I can do for you. What's in it for me?"), and they will tend to favor politicians and administrations that take that same approach.
All of the various conflicts and disparities among the various members and factions of the WASP elite during their heyday took place against a background of a taken-for-granted shared identity: the elite were white, English-speaking Protestants, and American identity was defined in terms of being a white, English-speaking Protestant country. All that egalitarian social flourishing in the 1940s and 1950s had the required preconditions of both extreme immigration restriction, and huge social pressure towards assimilation. All the conflicts from Union/Confederate to FDR/WASP took place within what, from the broader perspective of human culture and history, constituted one small subunit of the human family, taking for granted most of the basics of culture and morality. That's why the American people could accept that the elite had some baseline level of legitimacy - on some level, "they're 'us.'" The same intuitions and sentiments motivated every anti-colonial revolt in the modern era: people want to be ruled by "us" rather than by a foreign tribe. How on earth any of this concern for the national interest is supposed to take place under conditions of Diversity and Multiculturalism is, to say the least, an open question. At an absolute minimum, it would require Americans of all backgrounds to be able to share a basic patriotism and reverence for the idea of America. Unfortunately, the idea that the elite should prioritize a concern for the American nation, over against the other several billion people in the world, is widely considered déclassé and icky and Trumpy. A sign that things are moving in the right direction would be if American flags were more popular than say, Mexican or Palestinian flags, at various anti-Trump demonstrations. Don't think that's going to happen any time soon.
I think it's true that many non-elite American Protestants would have seen late 19c/early 20c elites as "us" on some level. Also, most elite universities were quite conservative/Protestant up until WWII. But a big part of the overarching story of that era is intense contestation between WASP and non-WASP political actors, especially in the big cities.
To be fair Bill Gates' parents were very much part of the WASP/Easternish Establishment(despite being from Seattle). Gates himself has many WASPY characteristics. Larry Ellison on the other hand is roughly the same age and always been someone known to be deeply resentful of Gates to this day stemming in my opinion from Ellison's feeling of inadequacy of not being as successful of a businessperson as Gates.
Yes. I interviewed Gates' father for my book on the moderate Republicans. I would say that the Gates family was comfortably upper-middle class and took a lot of their cultural cues from the basically New England culture of the Pacific Northwest in those days. I think Gates is from another generation than Zuckerberg/Musk/Amodei etc. and his positioning within American society is likewise different
I would also argue a certain type of purest who hangs around the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA(itself originally a spinoff of Digital in Boston that later moved to California) would argue that Facebook/Zuckerberg and PayPal/Musk and now X/Musk are not really even true "computing" companies in the way that say Microsoft and Apple are or even Google and Oracle instead being simply service companies that use computing. If you go to the Computer History Museum it is always interesting to note who donates money to the museum and who doesn't. Facebook, PayPal, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, etc. are notable absences for the donor list while Microsoft, Google, and Apple rank prominently.
*AI companies are a new breed of tech company that is still emerging that is probably more computing centric than say Facebook. I will note the the Computer History Museum's most recent exhibit on AI that I saw in December was actually fairly neutral and not at all industry cheerleading in discussing the pros and cons of AI
One big difference to be fair say between Gates and Microsoft vs Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corp(Ken Olsen was very much a New England Yankee of Scandanavian origin) was Microsoft was a software company made up almost entirely of white collars engineers notwithstanding many being self described social misfits whereas Digital was a company the produced both hardware(built and maintained by more "blue collar" workers) while having many white collar hardware and software engineers.
I bring this up in part of many of Microsoft early key engineers especially in building Windows NT all came from Digital such as Dave Cutler(the father of both Digital's VMS operating system and Microsoft Windows NT). So there definitely was a cultural influence from companies such as Digital as well but Microsoft unlike Digital or closer to Seattle Boeing was always an almost exclusively white collar company.
**Boeing in the past had a very paternalistic cultural mindset towards it employees in the Puget Sounds region although it has greatly diminished.
Excellent essay. I think the most important move here is shifting the discussion from Silicon Valley’s political identity to its institutional responsibility.
Karp is right that Silicon Valley can no longer pretend to be merely a commercial innovation class detached from national power. But the harder question is what kind of governing class technology capital wants to become. A technological republic cannot be built only through defense contracts, AI systems, patriotic rhetoric, or an alliance with one political faction. It also needs public legitimacy, investment in science and education, openness to talent, institutional restraint, and some capacity to place national interest above class interest.
This is where the comparison with the postwar establishment is especially useful. The strongest period of American state capacity was a coupling of universities, corporations, public finance, defense demand, scientific institutions, infrastructure, and a broader public mission.
This also connects with a broader state-and-capital question I have been thinking about: the central challenge is not whether capital should serve the state in some crude sense. It is whether a state can organize capital, discipline capital, preserve competition, and convert private accumulation into productive capacity and public capability. That may be the real test for any future “technological republic.”
Thank you. I admire your writings and I'm intrigued by how you analyze societal gain and loss of systemic capacity.
Thank you, I really appreciate that.
This is also the thread I have been trying to explore in my recent essays on Silicon Valley: how a technology class that once defined itself as anti-establishment has gradually become one of the central organizing forces of American state capacity.
The way I think about systemic capacity is that it is not simply a stock of wealth, talent, technology, or institutions. It is the accumulated ability of a society to connect them: science with industry, capital with productive investment, infrastructure with markets, education with technical diffusion, and private ambition with public purpose.
Societies gain systemic capacity when those connections reinforce one another over time. They lose it when the pieces remain individually strong but stop converting into collective capability.
That is why your essay is so interesting to me. Silicon Valley may still have extraordinary firms, capital, and talent, but it is getting increasingly harder for those assets be organized into public capability rather than only valuation, platform power, partisan alignment, or defense contracts.
If America’s new technological establishment merely aligns itself with MAGA, defense capital, and the AI security state, rather than rebuilding education, research, manufacturing, infrastructure, and social legitimacy, it will not be able to replicate the success of American state capacity during the Cold War.
But the Guided Age magnates did not support a raft of anti-growth policies like high deficits, tariffs and immigration restrictions, did they?
I believe most of the magnates in question supported tariffs if not deficits; my guess is that on the immigration question their views (or those of their descendants) changed during or after the Great War
I did think maybe some of them could have had a self-interest in tarffs. Carnigie for example. Plus tariffs did raise revenue (anti-deficit) when there were not a lot of better wasys.
Imigration? Wasn’t that just slopulism?
Anyway, not a perfect anti-growth trifecta. :)
Tariffs tended to split Eastern Establishment elites politically starting in the late 1890s(although there were some radicals in favor of free trade even before then like Charles Adams and Henry Adams). By the 1950s the Eastern Establishment almost universally supported free trade.
Someone ought to do a Substack on that!
BTW, the Bay Area Council which represents all of the major companies around San Francisco including the tech giants but also the non tech companies based in the Bay Area has a very establishmentarian feel but most people wouldn't associate Facebook public advocacy with that of the Bay Area Council.
https://www.bayareacouncil.org/member-companies/
One reason I bring up the Bay Area council is the Los Angeles/Southern California area is famously known to those who study the California economy to shockingly NOT have an equivalent organization to Bay Area council in part due to the historic libertarian lean of Southern California.
Doge initiative was not only feckless and destructive but necessary at the same time. It is even a warning shot off the bow of the U.S.S. Economy that is about to plunge to briney depths like the Arizona in Pearl Harbor.