Alex Karp Wants Silicon Valley to Fight for America
wsj.com
wsj.com
This feels dangerous, as our largest geopolitical adversary, China, outright owns its companies. They have no choice but to be nationalistic. It's one of America's great contradictions that one of our greatest strengths, our right to believe as we wish and act accordingly, leaves us significantly weakened as our population becomes less and less aligned.
It would be a massive failure to try to force Americans to go against their own conscience. So we're left forced to ask ourselves why so many Americans think fighting for their country is a bad thing, and what we can do about that.
Things look different twenty years later. I wouldn’t be eager to fight for America now because it feels like I’d be fighting for Trump’s ego more than anything else.
The comments here on HN are disappointingly shallow and suggest people aren’t reading the article or are taking the most uncharitable interpretations to support an attack on Karp or what he’s saying.
"I say the whole world must learn of our peaceful ways... by force!"
It's always fascinating when folks see the stick as the only vehicle for change. But hey, there is a weird honesty to it. The only way we can keep people 'in line' when their lot in life is all lemons ...is naked force.
Group action with clear purpose is compatible with capital. In fact, we have a plurality of names for it; businesses, clubs, linux kernel development...
I didn't just talk about the stick though. When you promote the idea that all cops are bastards, and make sure people who will police the way you want don't go into policing, you'll get bastards. Doesn't matter if your community votes DSA, Green or Communist.
If you don't have people that align with your ideology in areas that matter or aren't incentivised to you won't get the changes you desire.
How will you get change when the people who want the changes refuse to work or have their people in the organizations that they want change? And even disincentivize it.
Barring the use of force it's the functional elites, not the hoi polloi (that manage to have time for protests and such) that drive change.
You can tell from the biography of pretty much every activist or philosopher you know.
As for Linux, it takes people; individuals on the inside to drive change too. As anyone who follows development there will know. If the people that matter don't write or don't accept the code you desire, it's never going to be in-tree.
Just because he did it "effectively" (by a measure of effectiveness I would take issue with) doesn't make it less wrong. If you want to stop the lion's share of crime, just imprison every young person aged 16–26 and release them on their 27th birthday. Effective beyond belief, crime will decrease in a way never before seen. It is still really wrong. Effectiveness is not a substitute for morality.
Asking people to join the police, as it is currently constituted, is asking people to go against their morality. It is that simple. It doesn't matter if you believe a police system can exist in its current form "done right", or if you think it needs restructuring, or if you think it doesn't need to exist. Right now it sucks, and a 10% increase in cops with some subtlety in their actions isn't fixing it.
People are in a big dialogue right now about how using social media is ruining people... what do you think going against your basic moral precepts will do to someone? You are not providing a clear avenue for change but still asking for a lot out of folks and wondering why they won't take part.
Regarding Linux development, having some hierarchy is not a negation of group action. Furthermore, analogizing a maintainer being pissy about a Rust PR and the police force killing people might as well be the platonic ideal of a false equivalence.
(The canonical and contemporaneous translation is (I _think_ from Edgar Snow): "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.")
To change things you have to hold power, analyzing and critiquing make no change while the internal culture and incentives don't change.
There's no false equivalence. The sort of change you want almost always requires a change of control. i.e people inside .
If you think you're above being inside, it's not any morality nonsense. It's a lack of desire to effect change. Like in Ukraine, the guns won't shoot themselves.
Perhaps you might call them hypocrites as such, and they might agree with you on that, but the outcomes are different. Freedom entails Responsibility, so don't get too childish in taking the rights you enjoy today for granted.
sorry, but the way to uphold those values is by 1) setting an example of a prosperous nation that is a good example of those values (something we're failing at miserably right now, unfortunately), and 2) creating incentives and motivating other countries to adopt those same values
the absolutely worst way to uphold those values is through military force, which is what Palantir is all about. So I quite strongly disagree with Karp.
(That being said, I do agree with the point that much talent and money is wasted on frivolous social entertainment instead of things that could truly benefit humanity.)
How do you know this? America is far more despondent today than during the Cold War where they were willing to play those dirty tricks in force and propaganda to win, and they did. Current America's predicaments are precisely tracked down to their risk aversion to force that Russia, China and Iran are quite apt to capitalize on. The dove policy is arguably an even greater failure than the neocons.
Even domestically, foreigners aren't laughing at Texas or the Deep South, they're laughing at progressive cities like San Francisco or Portland or LA that are the bastions of this no-force mentality you are speaking about.
"Palantir CEO signs off year with nod to West's 'organised violence'" (https://www.thestack.technology/palantir-ceo-signs-off-year-...)
Karp cares fuck all about the things that make America actually great. I do not consent to living in his AI-surveilled, Slaughterbot-policed[1] hellscape version of America.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1hexvat/slaugh...
Translation: helping government and big businesses to turn people into cattle.
I realize I'm either on the edge or crossing the guidelines of HN but considering how SV, YC, A16Z and others are intertwined with the Trump administration, I don't know how these types of discussions can be avoided.
[0] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/palantir-alex-k...
Andreessen is also no longer affiliated with YC but has been a very vocal advocate for Trump lately [2] [3] [4].
I don't follow YC's current administration or board very closely but I would be surprised if the current lineup weren't in lock step with Altman, Andreessen, Thiel, Musk and others. Please let me know if I'm jumping to conclusions incorrectly.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_LLC
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaZrLDMA56E
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHWnPOKh_S0
Donor lookup for Gustaf Alstromer [1].
Paul Buchheit "So good!" (video of RJK Jr. talk), reposting a tweet with the caption "they could have done it any time. They chose not too. Thats why ppl voted against them" on another tweet about illegal border crossings [3].
Jared Friedman "The young engineers going to DOGE remind me of the early days of the US Digital Service, when a bunch of SV engineers moved to DC to fix http://healthcare.gov. It's the same energy, but now the mandate isn't to fix the government's tech, it's to fix the government." [4]
Michael Seibel "Had an amazing talk about the US economy tonight. All kinds of feelings. Opportunities/ challenges abound. I choose to be optimistic." [5]
It looks like there are a few board members that are either keeping silent about politics or are more vocally against Trump and some of his policies, but a large portion or the majority are actively supporting Trump.
Considering the motivation of YC, the sentiment of many of the prominent figures and the brief amount of Googling, I would say that YC is much more in lock step than not. So it looks like, for the most part, I did jump to conclusions correctly.
[0] https://punchbowl.news/article/tech/garry-tan-trump-ai-crypt...
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?cand=tech+f...
[2] https://x.com/paultoo/status/1890191142689632593
[3] https://x.com/razibkhan/status/1890167090692387028
But even if true, jumping to conclusions and maligning people and organizations without even doing a cursory amount of research is pretty shitty.
Remember when the most obviously questionable company to which new college grads flocked was Facebook?
This one is giving off much more obviously bad vibes.