Basic Implications of Tech Sovereignty

So, if you’ve been following my work, I’ve been talking a lot about tech’s desire and footwork to set up its own nation or series of smaller sovereign states (essentially sovereign startups) that are themselves eventually centralized as one sovereign tech nation. And while tech talks a lot about the advantages *it* will get out of the deal, it says nothing of the consequence on the rest of the world. 

We’re pretty early to a thought cycle on this, especially since the vast majority of people *in the industry* think it is a “conspiracy” that the people who run it want to leave; even though they have been talking about it since the 90s and last summer an a16z crime boss published a book describing in detail how VC will break away from America and establish its own sovereignty — what it describes is a corporatist, fascist dictatorship for the very tippity-top of the industry that will leave even most of the programming industry behind, even people in the lucrative US software market being being pushed down to the general state of tech’s “invisible workforce” — the contract workers of all kinds — from content moderation to shuttle driving to coders in other countries working dirt cheap under absurd working conditions. 

The book, btw, is called “The Network State” by Balaji Srinivasan but I did a critique of it here to spare yourself 500+ pages of venture capitalist fascist anti-intellectual brain slush. Within, venture capital makes the case for the  benefits, to them, of breaking away; at the top of this list is escaping tax on crypto and other taxable wealth, escaping the threat of Bitcoin seizures by the government, amassing land ownership, establishing free trade with the rest of the world, including arms deals in proposed global rearmament (I’m serious), and being able to conduct human experiments without the oversight of existing bodies like the FDA, primarily for their life extension technologies and brain implant technologies and whatever other psycho shit they want to perfect on poor people before they roll it out to their 10x engineers and founders. 

So let’s just start with exploring what some of those outcomes could look like. 

Not being an economist, its a bit difficult for me to extrapolate out what the financial picture would look like, but off the bat you are looking at the first major hit to America being the loss of income stemming from the tech industry, which pays 30-40% plus of total money, in taxes on everything from property to payroll taxes to capital gains tax and income tax and on and on and on. Hundreds of billions of dollars are paid in taxes directly from tech companies, before you even mention their employees’ and elite’s personal tax burden, yet more tech wealth going out the window; even though these companies and individuals go far out of their way to avoid paying a fair rate on, I.e., windfalls in the form of IPO/M&A liquidity events, the tax burden is immense, and in VC’s eyes, outright theft. This is a sizable amount of yearly revenue in taxes from an industry that is built on and with American resources, land and citizens, and that has a foundational debt to the country, yet wants to not only shirk those debts but abscond to escape them.  

And that of course is just the tip of the iceberg when you are talking about yanking the tech power center — venture capital — from America. FAANG alone makes up 20% of the NASDAQ, and while it’s patently unlikely that all of these companies would also move to establish sovereignty, I believe we would be looking at losing at least Facebook (due to their ties with the a16z + PayPal Mafia conspiracy leading this) as well as a large percent of small to medium sized tech companies, and all future startups who would only be able to attain funding from the sovereign. Since the tech nation/core — perhaps just a few VC funds to start — will remain the primary source of tech funding, you have a massive financial startup ecosystem that is going to be following the money; this is a good reason why venture capitalists themselves and venture capital firms themselves are likely to be the initial break-aways, because they are the financial leverage in the ecosystem. With Facebook coming along, you’re looking at the primary funding sources AND the data core of the industry, walking out the door.  

In this case you will be seeing a huge ongoing brain drain into the tech nation; much like what we face now as far as the talent capture of Silicon Valley, but this means American citizens with top technical potential ex-pating from the US into the new nation state. As we already see, allegiances to various FAANG jobs are starting earlier and earlier; I just read a NY Times article about the recent round of tech layoffs that cites a young woman who set her mind for working at one of the tech giants when she was in just 10th grade, and was laid off in her first year at a FAANG after finally attaining her goal. So you’re talking about 15 or 16 year olds that are already thinking about what tech company they want to work at and that powerfully shapes the early versions of what could someday be a VC/tech national consciousness; indeed, “The Network State” a16z book speaks of the transition/evolution of “patriotism” to be something that is felt for the VC state. Tech is capturing our nation’s youth younger and younger and that is of high concern when you are talking about establishing an entire tech country in which there are no other influences but, monolithically, tech and VC culture.  

Definitely still working through some ideas on how the economics would work out… as I said moving the VC firms out first is the most likely scenario and would get the most money and power out the door, and they could operate the rest of the tech industry from a floating global distributed state as they build. However, I don’t really have a comparison case for an entire industry or at least significant core mechanisms of it walking out the door and establishing its own ascendent state, certainly to be among the most powerful in the world. I’m quite out of my league when you start talking about the national and global economic picture and how tech sovereignty would alter that; my main goal is to open curiosity and speculation and to start thinking about this is more material terms. 

So, here we will put as placeholder

American Economy: ??? 

One of the most serious implications of the industry’s stated desire to escape brings us to medical regulations. Tech has been heavily invested in biotech for decades now, and despite setbacks like Theranos (which performed a sort of bloodletting for the field much like FTX has for crypto), the ecosystem of biotech startups is thriving. Life extension programs have enjoyed significant early funding from tech billionaires like Larry Ellison, always ahead of the pack in so many things; without Oracle, there would be no Amazon, without Lanai, there would be no vision of tech sovereignty, and without Larry, there would be no Bryan Johnson, founder of Braintree and a few other ventures since, who recently led a news cycle about his $2 million/year medical team working to bring the 45-year-old’s body back to the physical condition of an 18 year old. And of course you have your dystopian fascist visions like Musk’s Neurolink. All of these are of primary interest to tech and VC.  

The primary obstacle to tech “innovation” (development of economic weaponry) — which moves so quickly exactly because it must work at a frantic rate to maintain capitalism against inevitable revolution — is regulation; or more fundamentally, any kind of care whatsoever as far as the social contract we have with each other, however it has been encoded. The fact that a bunch of fascists are trying to do medical experimentation without any oversight draws to mind a fear of horrors like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and massive medical ethical offenses like the use of Henrietta Lacks’ cells in cancer research. And considering the origins and overlap of the development of technology in America with the recruit of Nazi scientists, and the fact that Nazis continue to populate the field and organize within it, we cannot leave those horrors unmentioned in such context. 

I think this also illuminates the larger basis of much of the tech industry, as predicated on constant and ongoing experiments on its users, without any transparency or meaningful consent; note Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with wide area population experiments on emotions, which he has been caught doing several times but more importantly, that experimentation on especially the teen girls who are consumer tech’s most important audience; these girls are the primary targets of advertising and social media and as a result, their overall mental health is diminished at a formative age and they are developing eating disorders and other mental health problems while Facebook continues to assault their self image and self esteem while exposing them to predators. So, as far as illegal experimentation with disastrous impact on vulnerable populations, you already have a sizable bench going in tech today and that is under the auspices of some type of regulatory board or system. 

 Now imagine that happening in a fascist dictatorial state running human experiments that are only bound, as a16z suggests in “The Network State”, by “mutual consent”. In the US, already the price of medical advancement falls on the poor — signing up for various research programs for pittances, disproportionately represented as plasma donors, egg donors and so on; this is not so much to explore the intricacies of the US/FDA system so much as to point out that we KNOW definitively that medical research and its consequences falls disproportionately to the poor and that will be 100xed with tech at the helm. 

We know that tech absolutely disdains the poor and has gone out of its way to destroy poor people in the cities it invades, most starkly in the Bay Area, where tech continues to crow about the drug addicts and sex workers and low-income families and homeless people, many/most with psychotic disorders, who still occupy the Tenderloin. So a total and consuming disdain for the poor, combined with the industry’s DNA (no pun intended) of wide population non-consensual experiments whose results are never exposed to the public yet cause great material harm, means an unregulated tech industry of biotech “startups” leading to an absolute human rights catastrophe where tech can conduct terrifying experiments whose main purposes is the health and longevity OF THE TECH EMPIRE ABOVE ALL, on poor people (and specifically, poor people that tech has helped impoverished), on poor people of color; particularly as the industry is looking to the global south as a source of sovereignty and land, we need to be thinking here about the medical “frontier” as tech would call it, as they are trying to reopen “frontiers” ostensively, as a clear growing site of medical abuse and human rights abuses; at the scale and speed with which tech operates, plus the ability to medically torture / kill / insert / surgery etc., on people, potentially by technologists without scientific credentials of any kind, and you could easily be looking at a recipe for some of the most severe and widespread medical abuses in history. The longevity of the tech elite will be built, like the rest of their empire, on the poor; their longevity will be extracted from the poor. This is the economics of capitalism; the life extended will require a life cut short.  

Thoughts of induced geographical poverty naturally bring us to the land issue and the issue of how tech’s sovereignty will affect the global picture of land ownership. Because while most people would assume that the startup “nation” would refer to a Metaverse digital fantasy, land acquisition is absolutely central to the notion of establishing sovereignty; the difference is that the plan here is to have distributed land ownership with different chunks of land in different parts of the world, its citizens and ventures coordinated in digital space such as the Metaverse, and then eventually using that collection of what they are calling “tech archipelagos” to eventually create a re-centralized nation. 

For those tuning into our broadcast for the first time, you will kindly note that tech’s invasion of cities is a huge part of the tech mechanism. Over several decades of outright war with citizens, tech took over the Bay area, displacing long established local populations, gentrifying it up and down the peninsula, and keeping a living wage from its network of contracted workers and the residents overall. Tech’s invasion has grown to now encompass serious attacks on Atlanta, Austin, Miami and Dublin, among others. In the Bay Area, tech’s #1 venture capitalist is also San Francisco’s largest landowner; and attainment of real estate and land has been core, as well as wedging software into housing markets and thus capturing a significant point of power over them — like you see in AirBnB, WeWork, and now Flow, really great example right there how venture capitalists propel themselves through the market through multiple generations of startups aimed at similar trajectories, in this case, destabilizing housing, gentrifying it, enabling a new landlord class, displacing people, etc. Basically you see that it happens through creating tech campuses aka “company towns”, through real estate platforms, through tech workers buying and leasing up businesses and apartments and buying houses with tech winnings, and using these and other blunt economic instruments, tech destabilizes and takes over a city. 

It is these strategies that tech will use to begin the set up of its own nation in places around the globe for their distributed land empire - their specific concept is to “crowdfund” (lol) the money to purchase land. Of course, “crowdfund” sounds significantly less sinister than “throw the financial weight of the entire VC economy around to procure land in the global south with blunt-force”. Because tech in very much actively on the market to physically buy its own nation, albiet in a distributed manner. This is obviously alarming because this model proposes doing what was done to Oakland and San Francisco, on a global scale and as an explicit, unified mission. You are looking at the potential for tech to make extremely rapid movements into all kinds of critical lands. This is very much about colonialism and because of the economic warfare tech is able to wage on areas it invades, and quickly expand outward — “software eats the world”, in this case, the land; by moving in to a small region and then destabilizing the peoples of the area, tech is able to acquire yet more land and eventually take over an entire city or region from just an outpost. 

Please note how Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Benioff all own significant land in Hawaii, with Ellison in fact owning the whole of Lanai; these are some of the first tech “archipelagos” — these are specifically colonial purchases and stealing/conquering from local indigenous peoples, who have pushed back on all of these efforts with no success. 

With tech laying its eyes on the global south, where it sees more opportunity for its sovereignty to be recognized, I think we are looking at tech becoming a global land aggressor, able to flex its leverage on much poorer countries and peoples, enabling even more of the extreme and sudden displacement and labor exploitation we have seen in their geographical affairs here in America. The idea of a “Bitcoin city”, like that in El Salvador, is likely to provide a template for one way that tech can take-over; in this case, El Salvador saw an initial influx of development and tourism after “signing” so to speak, with tech; and I think tech will be able to essentially “offer” an “economic package” to areas already destabilized by imperialism and colonialism in exchange for land, cheap workers, lack of oversight and sovereignty. As I argued in a prior piece, it is highly possible that other countries that don’t enjoy tech’s economic resources will openly compete for partnerships in exchange for what tech wants: land and recognition of its sovereignty. Thus the door is opened for the best.

Certainly, tech is already a major global financial force; but in this case it is moving into a position of active, coordinated, simultaneous, global invasions and colonizing efforts, but modeled after predatory business development deals where tech must deliver some short-term benefits but will ultimately come to dominate and “eat” the land, just like we saw in San Francisco. It will find a place to get a hold on to and it will bootstrap itself up from there.  

While I would love to dismiss the viability of these strategies, I rather think that there would be fantastic competition for “citizenship” to one of the new tech states / nation as well as for the opportunity to host the VC economic parasite. Already you see countries asking for direct tech intervention — like Ukraine directly appealing to tech billionaires for war support, like El Salvador’s Bitcoin City, San Diego’s supervisor reaching out to Elon Musk directly for help with transport, and Metaverse implementations being rolled out in Miami and Atlanta.  

One thing is clear: the tech nation is not for poor people, it is for rich people. 

It reminds me of the movie “In Time” in which people have “clocks” and they earn time-to-live through labor; if their labor clock runs out, they die; this reminds me of what a16z psychopath Balaji Srinivasan describes as the “future” of work: “Think about every information worker essentially pressing buttons to earn cryptocurrency in a giant globalized internet economy. That’s what 2030 or 2035 is on track to look like.”  

What the fuck man no one wants that bullshit? Fucking sicko.

Tech cities (captured from original residents) have long offered their CS employees (“citizens”), truly elevated living and services; often building and funding their own, such as OneMedical which offers concierge medical care; to on-demand massages and in-home med spa services. Tech offices have been outfitted with their own medical care on-site, with dentists, yoga instructions, meditation gurus. On the other hand, you have legions of software developers working remote from other cities and while they enjoy comfortable living, it is nothing remarkable. And on yet the other hand, you have contracted programmers in India and Romania who get treated like total garbage compared to the ones here. 

It is likely we will see this class distinction playing out even more dramatically in the tech nation; that there is the 1% upper tier and then the 99% of line engineers, made up of many programmers who live fancy today but are about to get their shit rocked by coding AI. Its highly possible that the VCs will retain the “top” in the sovereign nation and simply use other countries as labor colonies for cheap code, including America. It is absolutely certain that this is not for tech workers but rather for the venture capital and tech elite power structure. But for the chosen few, this is going to offer some of the best living conditions on the planet. In short, tech is positioned to offer, as part of its essential model, an elite global “core” of tech executives, VCs and elite, infinitely elevated living with a dying world at its feet. They will look for what they believe is the best, as the continue to leech off talent that could be going somewhere that was actually productive for the future of civilization.

Because the tech nation will be distributed, at least in the years of inception, it becomes much more difficult to enter into military takeover of them, which is exactly what is indicated. But in fact, tech is an expert at setting up high availability, fault tolerant, and fail -over based systems, so you are looking at a failure resistant distributed nation that allows them to work effectively “at the edge”. If you are a Conway’s Law fan like me, you are absolutely losing your shit right now at how cool this is — theoretically. So now they are in the position of being able to operate a distributed military and possibly establish both sponsorship as well as land and political alliances with various countries around the world.    

While tech has been openly crowing about its vision for new autonomous combat, this in itself proposes a military revelation of tech’s own forces. Tech is proposing a deeply networked collection of land outposts, many INSIDE other countries (if declared a sovereign zone), as well as on “built land”, as well as in god knows what kind of undersea developments they are interested in as they already enjoy massive luxury underwater hotels in remote parts of the world and are developing underwater autonomous vehicles. Not to mention their desire for space and Mars. So from a military perspective, you’re looking at an inherently global attack formation with no true center, with extremely advanced autonomous weaponry operated by artificial intelligence that only tech can sell access to…. Well, you have the recipe to technically be one of the most advanced military forces in the world, presuming a really significant scale out of the manufacturing footprint; all signs however point out to that build-out being very much underway as tech begins to roll out innovations from the last 5-10 years of R&D and enter a new wave of investment to the space with an ongoing focus on automation and robotics. 

Tech is adapted to, every single day, continuously, globally scaling to the entire world, which tech does absolutely rapidly, in very close to real time, all the time. So while they obviously don’t have a country-sized weapons system right now, that is something that they are going to be able to do in a short period of time. 

The next thing I would focus on is trade. The thing about tech products it that they continually introduce what Marx describes as an imperative for peoples all over the world to adapt/adopt that technology in order to survive.  Marx discusses how capitalism creates the imperative for all of society to adapt the “innovations” of the bourgeoisie, else they simply cannot keep up. I.e., America is absolutely dependent on the technology industry and will continue to be. The leverage over America and all other nations in general, will be significant, as the tech industry will be in a position to outright deny technology and hold within its hands, the ability to advance or regress other nations insofar as it is able to maintain some kind of monopoly. As venture capitalists often note, software is “sticky” and once you get it installed somewhere, you are basically in there forever and have a footprint from which to expand and upgrade in perpetuity.   

For example, after the introduction of the internet and email, it was impossible to compete in the market without those tools; this has grown to include a dizzying array of office software, new devices, new processes for the supply chain, each requiring people to constantly update the way they are living and working. That is a position of tremendous power, and now you would be seeing a nation-state whose entire trade market is in an extraordinary position to start severely fucking with technology distribution; I.e. I would expect that arming America with technology would be an immediate lesser priority as tech sets out in search of new markets in a much more concentrated manner. 

The trading power would be enormous; its own functioning economy has been producing huge profits for a long time; this immediately becomes one of the biggest potential trading economies and from jump you are talking about having the VC state become one of the most powerful countries in the world who will be able to sell indiscriminately or discriminately to whoever it wants. 

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies more broadly would of course be the likely only accepted currencies in the tech empire; a lot of this has to do with escaping the banking system and solving the problem of asset seizure by a superseding nation. This basically puts the question of if crypto currency is going to see major adoption to rest; technology customers will have no choice to use the cryptocurrency or simply not be able to purchase the technology. When tech becomes its own nation, cryptocurrency is no longer “backed with nothing” but rather backed by a vibrant, thriving, entrenched ecosystem of startups, VC firms, their financial products and portfolios, and their insanely rich citizens. 

I fully expect them to have their own stock market and I think that is pretty uncontroversial at this point, as Coinbase and the ecosystem around it — most of it led by people who originated at Coinbase or in early incarnations of the PayPal Mafia + a16z financial conspiracy — easily supports a world where all startups and companies can be invested in with cryptocurrency using tech infrastructure and regardless of how that is ultimately going look, it means that crypto and a tech ecosystem around it is now officially backed by the actual resources of a sovereign country. 

Theoretically and in time, I think this opens them up to a much wider source of income; as I talked about in previous articles about tech “leaving the nest,” not only of America — but in terms of funding sources. Until now venture capitalists themselves have raised money from Limited Partners to fill up their coffers; that is also who the returns most go to first. These Limited Partners have largely involved American pension funds, institutional investors, school funds, people with fucktons of money (including tech elite themselves) and big times family money, state funds, etc. We actually don’t know who all the LPs are and this information is kept largely secretive. But it is certainly true that a lot of the returns are leaving the venture capital ecosystem itself to go back to non-tech LPs and I think that is one thing that is likely to change as tech works to establish sovereignty. 

So I think there are a few ways this could go and that is probably some combination of diversifying those funding sources and also doing a lot more self-funding, when it is the industry’s money being recycled into new companies and fronting the cash; since this is considered the riskiest part of the money, it commands a large share of the return. They get the lions share. So that’s also a big piece of the pie that’s just sitting right there, just like the 30% tax rate they are trying to escape. So you’re starting to see a scenario where tech would be, by default, 40%-60% richer as a result of some of these decisions; I hope you are starting to see how tech establishing sovereignty becomes, through the eyes of the venture capitalists, not only desirable, but almost a financial imperative - just looking at the numbers as a VC, you have to be seeing how much money is just walking out the fucking door and hating that with every fibre of their bones. 

So, if tech is looking to essentially raise the amount of money it is getting from its endeavors, to start its nation, you’re looking at a few key areas: 1.) deflating tech worker salaries and taking away the amount that they get in stock 2.) all taxation permanently revoked 3.) increases to profits from the increased leverage in the market 4.) moving towards an internally funded model 5.) “biz dev” with target cities and countries 6.) becoming a global distributed arms dealer. Becoming more economically insular, means that more of the money is staying within their “country” and they are collecting more of the returns. This is highly desirable for them especially because they need to maximize their assets, cash flow, etc. to feed a new empire; the birth of a new technofascist nation will require lots of money. Lots and lots of money. 

And that is where I will leave you for now: with the understanding that tech’s goal is to establish sovereignty; this is an economic goal designed to gain even more wealth and power, and thus one of our primary goals must be cutting off economic power and flow to the industry. 

I suggest we engage them in open combat as soon as possible, because they are engaged in open combat with us, and trying to slip away into a world of absolutely zero accountability and a position of total leverage over the rest of world, on every dimension, with a distributed autonomous military force like we have never seen. 

This is it people, this is the sci fi movie we’ve been waiting for. This is Star Wars, this is The Terminator, this is Snowcrash, this is the Matrix, let’s be heros, fuck it, be an Ewok if you need. These are the technofascists, this is the technofascist threat, we need to stop them before they finish building the Death Star. Wake up, Neo…