The Dissertation and the Company
He wrote a hundred and twenty-nine pages, in German, on how a speech can bind a crowd by giving it someone to blame. Then he built the software that states use to decide who is inside and who is out, and never once put the two things in the same sentence.
A course on the thought of Alex Karp and Jürgen Habermas.
Course outline
- The Man and the Speech — The chief executive of a company whose software runs inside the American defence and intelligence apparatus wrote his doctorate, in German, about one speech given in a church in 1998. He has since…
- The Frankfurt He Actually Joined — Everyone says Karp did his doctorate under Jürgen Habermas. The title page says otherwise, and the three people involved tell three different stories. What replaces the legend is better: a real…
- Jargon — The mechanism, in the dissertation's own terms. A form of words can unburden an audience — but only at somebody's expense, and it keeps working even after you have shown that it is false.
- The Speech — Eleventh of October 1998, the Paulskirche. Read what Walser actually said, and watch the four moves from the last module operate in real time on a room containing the president of Germany.
- The Verdict He Withheld — Two readers, the same speech, the same method, at the same time. One of them said what it added up to. The other, using her apparatus on her subject, stopped one sentence short.
- The Machine That Fixes Identity — What Palantir actually sells, and the guardrails Karp insisted on — which were real, were his own idea, and cost the company money. Then the limit that no guardrail reaches.
- The In-Group Has a Name — Run module three's four moves over the company's own language and record. The vocabulary is not a relic — he was still using it in 2016, about somebody else.
- The Reversal — Twenty-three years after the dissertation, the same speech, in a book written for everyone. The mechanism is described exactly as before. Only the verdict has changed.
Part of the Symposium course library.