For others wondering who the hell Karp is, he's CEO and a co-founder of Palantir, Thiel's notorious big data/AI company for military and spooks. "Fighting for America" thus means joining outfits like his.
His product and company can kiss my ass if it depends on surveillance to make money. Silicon Valley won't fight for a future where leaders like him get promoted. If you think I'm wrong, watch darlings like Palantir and Anduril become the next Oracle and Lockheed of the government contracting world.
Silicon Valley is just a marketplace of ideas. And it's a marketplace where we've already lost to China.
Surveillance erodes democracy. Anonymous speech is one of several necessary precursors to functional democratic institutions; which surveillance technology threatens. Ergo, even if survelliance is necessary, we should limit it as much as practical.
It's taken me some time, but I'm realizing that a lot of citizens in the US aren't actually interested in democracy, despite their claims to the contrary. A lot of what we've been seeing that seems insanely unAmerican makes a lot more sense when you drop the pretense.
Thinking of surveillance as necessary is treating a symptom. If a country feels it needs surveillance to stop criminals it needs to investigate what problem crime is a viable solution for. If it is to thwart terrorism, then what is motivating the terrorists. The problems here are crime and terrorism, not privacy. However, if you want to say privacy is bad then how could putting surveillance in the "private" sector fix the problem? This attitude feels like it's coming from a place where problems are quantitative (about making or saving money) and not about reducing suffering or otherwise solving qualitative problems that affect larger parts of the population. That said Industry isn't going to save America (Silicon Valley or otherwise). Corporate interest has been pretending to take the place of the new deal for 80 years all while digging a hole the country will never climb out of. Dreamers gonna dream, I guess.
Privatizing surveillance is an abhorrent development of the practice. It should be opposed by any American that's witnessed privatization ruin other things they tolerate like Twitter and the healthcare industry.
Introduce money into sensitive things like personal information, and you end up with a marketplace of secrets. I should feel fine about it, because now I can invest in the demise of the American dream? Fuck off.
It is pathetic and authoritarian. Once America realizes that deregulation is not a global trade policy, we will be forced to reform some of our own perverted businesses by hook or by crook. Otherwise the economy enters a suicide spiral and it makes for a really entertaining chapter in future history books.
You've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly lately. We ban accounts that do that.
I'm not going to ban your account right now because we haven't warned you before, but if you keep posting abusively, we'll have to, so it would be good if you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this.
Tech is rapidly polarizing, following the American public. There is very little middle ground anymore for Americans, and it seems our tech companies are doomed to follow that trend. There will be nationalist companies, and those that think nationalism is a dirty word, which is which will shift with administrations.
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.
I think that having the richest guy in the world throw up 3 nazi salutes at the inauguration and basically be the puppet master of the new administration certainly isn’t helping Americans want to sign up to help the military industrial complex.
I served in the military two decades ago, and I was proud to do so. I had mixed feelings on the GWOT, even though I was a conservative then. But the country’s political leadership felt at least somewhat stable, competent, and loyal to America.
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.
In Tolkien's Silmarillion, the creator of the palantiri had a great foe, Morgoth. Join the resistance side of the Lord of the Rigs meme war at http://silmarils.tech
It seems like people like Alex Karp and Thiel want to make Snow Crash a reality and chop America into corporate city states run by tech billionaires is more like it.
Karp is exactly correct. America has ideals and values that are worth fighting for, such as free speech, civil rights, (mostly) free markets, and so on. We are seeing a revival of more substantial companies that can help uphold those values, after wasting two decades on social media or whatever.
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.
Always fascinating that the people with anti-police politics never go into policing (even in areas that strongly share their political leanings) but expect different outcomes magically
magically = "group action driven by a shared understanding of the common good. Buttressed by clear through-line that connects what each individual has to give up in terms of time/freedom/autonomy to the benefit of themselves and their community."
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.
Misquoting (in translation) the sophomoric military machinations of a person who never served but who's polices managed to kill millions isn't going to curry favor here.
Group action with clear purpose is compatible with capital. In fact, we have a plurality of names for it; businesses, clubs, linux kernel development...
Misquoting my arse. Mao didn't need to hold a gun if he could control those with it. The currently crumbling pax Americana wasn't held by just capital and group action. You think Xi would be fine if the people in his country controlling the guns decided they want someone else?
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.
I am a little confused about what is happening now. What Mao did was wrong. Holding the gun or being in charge of those who do is a distinction without a difference. Law by violence is wrong. Whether it is Xi, Mao, or the mob, it's wrong. The same holds true for America's rise to power. My argument is normative; it is not a historical narrative.
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.
You either change the world, or the world changes you. Those ideals didn't emerge out of nowhere with no rivals either, whether it was Conservatism, Communism or Fascism, Liberals very much did play dirty to win in the end.
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.)
>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
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.
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.
I think it's more that Alex Karp wants Silicon Valley to fight for control of America [0].
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.
These discussions cannot be avoided because America is not intended to be an autocracy, yet the neofascists keep on shrouding themselves in the flag. At this point the only sensible reading of "fight for America" means working to separate the current administration from the levers of power before they finish breaking down and selling off our entire country (ultimately to China).
Though no longer affiliated with YC, Sam Altman is stumping for Trump [0] [1].
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.
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.
I definately have never donated to Donald Trump and would never. It would have been easy to google tech for campaigns https://www.techforcampaigns.org/.
