Dave Karpf

@davekarpf.bsky.social

73127 Followers 4891 Following

Political Communication Professor at GWU. I write a lot about the history and future of tech and politics. Best known for that one time I made fun of Bret Stephens. Davekarpf.beehiiv.com

After a few years, so many morally significant AI systems could exist that their collective interests would outweigh those of all humans on Earth combined.
On Courage, by Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer
3. Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative Al and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer Al in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.
My book, Analytic Activism. It came out ten years ago, so I’m doing a critical re-read.
Part 5. How It Ended In the years preceding the Intention War, Nevin Freeman was hard at work to identify plausible income-earning projects. With Tyler Alterman and several others, his working group arrived at the notion of "stablecoins," which are intended to be less volatile than most cryptocurrencies. Nevin's team was early to market, founding a financial technology company in 2018 that is now called Reserve (they originally tossed around other names with very different vibes, like "Fathom" and "Flamingo"). By early 2019, Reserve was not yet successful in an economic sense, but some team members decided to check out the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
Some members of both subgroups reached a preliminary conclusion that certain intention objects were contagious. This led to terrifying new questions, like how they could protect themselves from "catching" "objects" from other people - especially other Leveragers. Among Leveragers who worked there towards
was a workplace where many employees lived together, and had multiple overlapping romantic relationships with their colleagues, while also essentially acting as each other's therapists.
According to Emily, Geoff suggested that she "had done something bad because I was making [other Leveragers] less willing to experiment," through her attempt to warn the others about bodywork dangers. According to Geoff, he believed that Emily and her friends — a tight-knit group that included lames — were trying to "monopolize" bodywork. The elephant in the room was funding pressures. Bodywork was an excellent way to impress funders quickly, so slowing down research might mean slowing a promising funding pathway. And there was still Geoff's promise to consider, the promise he'd made a year before, the promise to find or create ten "masters" using the introspection tools.
Those who held the title "master" were widely gossiped about, and sometimes ran into interpersonal problems. In the case of Samo, some colleagues thought him a harmless flirt, but others were discomfited by his sexual behavior. A male ex-Leverager says he recalls a moment when Samo unexpectedly showed him a naked photo of one of Samo's girlfriends, which he found uncomfortable (Samo denies this). One woman went so far as to file an official complaint against Samo alleging sexual abuse and misconduct. When asked about the complaint in 2024, Geofi says there was an internal investigation, which concluded that Samo "acted with bad judgment." (The author of the complaint declined to comment for this story. Samo responded to my request for comment in writing: "The complaint was filed by an ex-girlfriend, not a coworker. It was an unfortunate and messy interpersonal conflict. I deny any wrongdoing.")
In 2017, the same funder who brought them Anna-Lisa Adelberg sent them another esotericist, whom I'II call David. David told Leveragers he'd created his own method of "bodywork" (which is defined by Merriam-Webster as "therapeutic touching or manipulation of the body by using specialized techniques"). As with Anna-Lisa, Leveragers felt initially skeptical. Most had never heard of bodywork, and David either could not, or did not want to, describe his methods in language others could understand. Nor were David's training and past well documented. According to Geoff, David described having gone "to the East" and found old masters whose lineages were not being passed on; he claimed he'd convinced these aging spiritual masters to teach him. A former Leverager remembers David claiming he could heal or cause cancer with a touch, "cause bones to heal, like 6x to 10x speed," or "induce seizures or hallucinations" with bodywork, as well as
"We felt we might be able to crack the code on what makes a handful of people super-competent while the rest just muddle through. How can Elon conjure and run several moonshot companies at once, while most founders can't get their boring SaaS startups off the ground? To us the answer was: personality, " says Nevin. "Elon- haters will point out that he's a dick, and this point was not lost on us. We had a lot of conversations about how to turn people into masters of their craft without giving them the chip on their shoulder that most master-level people somehow pick up." Thic alan peacontad a antontiol colution too
Geoff believed that academic psychology was not a real science like physics, but that it could be.
the group was alert for cult warning signs. She says that, as part of the effort to not become a cult, they watched and rewatched a classic YouTube video titled "How to Start a Cult."
"Please have a safe and happy weekend, don't go in the Freedom Truck, and we will look forward to seeing you on Monday."
Armored vehicle in front of a Ferris wheel.
Dave, wearing a Flaming Hydra tshirt. Flaming Hydra: fire up your brain.
Sarah, with her book, which you should buy right now.
One final thought.... zoom out far enough, and the history of the digital future looks something like this: First, Silicon Valley built hardware that got smaller and faster and cheaper and better. Then, Silicon Valley built software that became the mediating layer of the global economy. And then, the finance industry ate the software industry. Every tech company today is a finance company. Software ate the world, and then finance ate software, and now here we are. It isn't quite as simple as "after the Great Financial Crisis, all the finance guys moved to Silicon Valley so they could keep doing the same bullshit without all the regulatory scrutiny." But that's a close-enough approximation of recent history.
Digression 5: Elon Musk Walter Isaacson's 2023 biography of Elon Musk is worth read-ing. Much of its quality comes from the fact that Isaacson shadowed Musk in person for all his subject's pivotal moments during 2021 and 2022. By the end of that period, Musk was CEO of six companies: Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink, xAI, and X (formerly Twitter). Musk's innovations at the leading edge of software design and artificial intelligence are rivaled by other compa-nies, but when it comes to designing and manufacturing hard-ware, he has unique mastery. His cars, batteries, solar gear, rockets, and satellites have all proven to be game changers in part because they combine ingenious design with surprisingly low cost. His hardware companies range from successful to extremely successful because of his foundational altering of manufacturing practice. He requires that his design engineers do their work next to the people and machines fabricating th car, battery array, rocket, or other device. In a ferocious cycl of iteration, they design and redesign the device and its mant facture simultaneously. The ferocity of the iteration cc
Sustainment: The Concept Who studies, tests, and institutionalizes maintenance mind best? I find that the most active frontiers of maintenance theory and practice are in four domains: manufacturing, aero-space, software, and the military. จาก "ariotoin-
Digression 4: Sustainment How Poor Maintenance Loses Wars: 1973, Israel Maintains Is there such a thing as maintenance mind? If so, what are its features, and what is its underlying character? What hinders it? Can it be cultivated? Can it be institutionalized? This digression about the role of maintenance in two wars may have some clues. War one: 1973. On October 6, Israel was attacked by Egypt and Syria simultaneously. The conflict was variously named the Yom Kippur War, the Ramadan War, and-the non-sectarian option-the October War. The assault by Egypt and Syria arose directly from what had happened six years before in the Six-Day War of 1967. After a crushing victory over Egypt, Israel took possession of
vood Photography moist conditions, humid climates are deadly. The most corrosive regions are near the salty moisture in ocean air or on icy roads strewn with salt to make driving safer. In America's humid southeast and freezing northern states, few old VWs can be found still running; they've all rusted out. As John Jerome rants in his book Truck: Road salt makes a mushy, corrosive paste that is flung universally about the under- and over-sides of every vehicle. It fouls all the metal parts, pits windshields, scours paint, and reduces the useful life of north-country motor vehicles by several years. It also kills roadside trees, pollutes streams and wells, and destroys gardens. 189 He wrote that in 1977. It's still true. There must be a way to ensure safe driving in snow that doesn't destroy every vehicle on the road, but so far all the less harmful substitutes for rock salt, such as sugar beet juice, cost four to 10 times more than
YouTube is a damn miracle. It's the most popular social medium in the world. Its website is the second most visited after Google. Of its 2.7 billion viewers worldwide in 2024, 239 million are in the United States-that's four-fifths of our adult population of 258 million. Pew Research reported in 2018 that two-thirds of American adults-188 million-declared that "the platform is important for helping them figure out how to do things they've never done before."180 YouTube's vast quantity of how-to-fix-everything videos is a small subset of the boundless cornucopia of how-to-do-everything videos on offer. You can find videos on any skill you want, at any depth you want-cook any food, learn the nuances CHAPTER TWO: VEHICLES (AND WEAPONS) 127
It was a triumph of Rousseau's romanticism over Enlightenment rationality. Craft was extolled; uniformity was deplored. That sentiment would bedevil technical progress ever after. Romantics always side with John Henry against the Rationalists' steam drill. But I propose that in all cases of machines threatening labor, it's worth looking closely at the welfare of the customers as well as the workers. Blanc's use of gauges to make interchangeable parts did indeed threaten the practices of the gunsmith's guild. But the guild, like others at that time, was secretive, intensely protective, conservative, and politically powerful. It protected its members at the expense of their cus-tomers, who had to put up with guns that were often shoddy and always expensive.
Atter that, Pirsig decided to study everything he needea to know to fix his motorcycle himself. (Close examination of his motorcycle revealed the real cause of the overheating at high speeds: Oil flow was partially blocked by a tiny internal pin that had been sheared off by an earlier careless mechanic.) Driven by bad mechanics to become his own good mechanic, Pirsig learned that he had to acquire "a certain nondivided relationship between the mechanic and motorcycle, a crafts-manlike feeling for the work."53 He says the essence of that relationship is caring.
“What motorcycles teach about maintenance.”
This series, I'm pretty sure, is the first to look at maintenance in general. It asks: What can be learned if you think about all the varieties of maintenance at the same time? I doubt there are any nontrivial laws of maintenance to be discovered. All I can offer here is to muse across a representative sample of maintenance domains and see what emerges. The logic of the book is this: Start with a dramatic contest of maintenance styles under life-critical conditions-a true story
Stewart Brand’s new book, Maintenance: Of Everything.
Watch now Open Tab: Ashlee Vance The veteran tech journalist on getting close to Elon, why he walked away from the best job in media, and showing audiences where the world is headed before it gets there. ASHLEE VANCE AND HAMISH MCKENZIE MAY 21
The smartest guys in the room
Me, ready to run.
Me, looking vaguely like a wizard.
Record stores were once an essential part of the music industry’s attention economy. In the 1990s, you could access music through (1) the radio, (2) MTV, and (3) the record store. The record store was arguably the most important of the three, because it was the only point-of-sale location. Record stores were pretty big businesses (remember Tower Records?) and cultural institutions (Empire Records, High Fidelity). Then came iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon. Record stores still exist in 2026. Some of them even thrive. People like me like record stores. They remain active, niche cultural institutions. But they are distinctly different entities than they were in their heyday. They have a smaller footprint, and they operate within those limitations. The same is true for text-based social media platforms. The era of peak social media is over. Twitter and Facebook used to be the “attention backbone” of the entire internet. (Ben Smith’s book, Traffic, is probably the best discussion of how media worked in this time period.) People like me also like Bluesky. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that people who like record stores all pretty much like Bluesky. And that’s probably the right frame of mind for thinking about text-based social media in general. It isn’t a dominant media institution anymore. It’s niche. It has some cultural cachet, but you will be disappointed if you expect it to recapture the glory days.
World of Posters
Disaster girl meme
FOUR SEEING STONES AND PRYING EYES In 2013, Forbes published a feature about Karp and Palantir. The story opened with Karp taking a hike near Stanford University's campus, trailed by a bodyguard. Karp told the magazine that having full-time protection was a drag. "It puts a massive cramp on your life," he said. "There's nothing worse for reducing your ability to flirt with someone." He spoke wistfully of his student days in Germany, when he "would walk around, go into skanky places in Berlin all night. I'd talk to whoever would talk to me, occasionally go home with people, as often as I could. I went to places where people were doing things, smoking things. I just loved it" He stressed the importance that he attached to his own privacy: *I didn't sign up for the government to know when I smoke a joint or have an affair." The article cited a talk that he had given to Palan-ir employees, in which he said that part of Palantir's mission and hallenge was to ensure that civil liberties and personal privacy joyed strong protection amid the rise of surveillance technol- from government
THE PHILOSOPHER .•.•••••• IN THE VALLEY ALEX KARP, PALANTIR, AND THE RISE OF THE SURVEILLANCE STATE MICHAEL STEINBERGER
"Load bearing," "I keep coming back to," Not just X, but Y" A curse of using AI a lot is that you realize how much of the writing around you is just AI, now People who don't use AI have historically been unable to identify AI prose on sight, but those who use it a lot can spot the tells easily -Ethan Mollick, refusing to use punctuation for reasons I cannot discern.
Screenshot of some of my text. "When Balaji describes 'microhistory,' he sounds like [this 30 Rock bit]. Except he isn't doing a bit."