Some books arrive carrying the wrong label, and The Technological Republic is emphatically one of them. Critics have been quick to reach for the term “technofascism,” conjuring images of a surveillance state run by defense contractors, Silicon Valley conscripted into the machinery of empire. This is a lazy and fundamentally dishonest reading. What Karp and Zamiska have written is something at once more ambitious and humanistic: a sustained philosophical argument for recovering the shared beliefs and cultural commitments that give democratic societies the will—and the right—to defend themselves. The book is not a blueprint for coercion, but rather a diagnosis of cowardice.
At the center of the book lies a deceptively simple observation: the West has stopped believing in itself—not in any chest-thumping nationalist sense, but in the more basic sense that the institutions, engineers, and intellectuals who constitute its elite have become incapable of making affirmative claims about what is worth building, protecting, or dying for. What has replaced conviction is something more anodyne and incredibly dangerous. We have built what might best be called a denunciatory ethics: a moral culture that defines itself almost entirely through what it opposes rather than what it upholds.
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