The Technocratic Creed
Karp, Praxis, and the Three Documents of the Coming Settlement
This is the fourth in a series on Musk’s Universal High Income proposal and the technocratic imaginary it expresses.
Shortly after I published the first essay in this series, Palantir’s official account circulated a condensed version of Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West— twenty-two theses distilled from the book into shareable form, published at techrepublicbook.com as “The Technological Republic, in brief.” Read on their own, the theses land as a civic-nationalist manifesto with traditionalist textures: religious belief, public grace, cultural confidence, universal national service, the ruling class’s moral debt to the nation it governs. Read in the context of the arguments this series has been making, they are something more specific. They are the explicit articulation of a political-theological formation that, until now, I have been describing as an unconscious one.
A great deal of what the previous three essays have done is reconstructive: digging up the genealogy connecting 1930s Technocracy Inc. to contemporary Silicon Valley, decoding Musk’s UHI proposal through categories its proponents would not name themselves, identifying the stewardship-commons the technocratic apparatus would enclose. The work has been partly archaeological, because the tradition in question has preferred to move without an explicit creed. The Technological Republic is the creed. It is not the whole program, but it is the portion its authors are now prepared to argue for in broad daylight, under their own names, with book-tour interviews and a bestseller list placement.
With Musk's UHI post, Karp's manifesto, and Praxis's coordinated documents read together, the full shape of the program comes into focus. Musk sketches the economic-redistribution layer. Karp sketches the political-military and cultural layer. Praxis sketches the residential-communal layer. Together they are a complete technocratic settlement — and the completeness is itself the thing that most deserves our attention.
