The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West

by Alexander C. Karp

Google, of course, along with any number of Silicon Valley’s largest technology enterprises, owes its existence in significant part to the educational culture, as well as the legal protections and capital markets, of the United States. The personal computer itself, as well as the internet, was the result of military funding and support in the 1960s from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a division of the U.S. Department of Defense. In her book The Entrepreneurial State, Mariana Mazzucato, an economics professor at University College London, calls out this collective amnesia in the Valley, noting that the U.S. military’s role has “been forgotten” by this era’s software titans, who have rewritten history in order to place themselves at its center and exclude and diminish the role of government in fostering and sustaining innovation. And in the absence of any larger project for which to fight, many simply turned elsewhere, not out of some moral failing, but because of the transformation of our most hallowed educational institutions into administrative caretakers, not vessels of culture.