How Do We Prosecute Venture Capital? Part II

In the first installment of this series, we looked at possible strategies for prosecuting venture capitalists for their financial crimes, with a focus on tax evasion strategies as they plot to leave the country with trillions of dollars in crypto wealth and infrastructure. In this piece, we’ll focus on prosecution strategies that deal with human rights issues, sexual violence and labor issues. Venture capital is not only harming the American and global peoples generally, but has had specific victims who have absorbed the shock of their growth again and again. 

 I think class action suits against tech companies and VC have been massively under-used, predominantly due to financial inequality which has made access to legal services untenable for large classes of victims. And also because Silicon Valley law firms are all tied up in the tech industry. And mainly because people are terrified of venture capitalists and it is hard to build a coalition against them; you are risking your livelihood and sometimes your safety, particularly when it comes to sexual abuse. And also because the general public simply does not have even a fundamental grasp on the tech industry, much less venture capital; and the legal community also does not have a grasp on this, so they are not thinking about how to put together these classes and suits. For these reasons, the level of prosecution has been pitiful and disproportionately low.

There are a few class action law firms that have been aggressive in this area, and there have been several notable cases — the wage fixing lawsuit against Apple, Intel and others in 2014; as well as several highly publicized class actions for women engineers who alleged discrimination and wage suppression at major tech companies. From reporting from 2021:

"Google has agreed to pay $2.5 million to more than 5,500 employees and job applicants impacted by alleged systematic pay and hiring discrimination. The US Department of Labor found that female software engineers were being underpaid. It also identified ‘hiring rate differences that disadvantaged female and Asian applicants’ for Google engineering positions.

As part of the settlement, Google will hand over $1,353,052 in back pay and interest to 2,565 female engineers. It will also pay $1,232,000 in back pay and interest to 1,757 female engineering applicants and 1,219 Asian engineering applicants for “engineering positions not hired.”

The problem here is that 2.5 million dollars is literally nothing, literally nothing to them. In 2021 Google had a market cap of $1.917 trillion. So this settlement represented .000130412% of their market cap at that time. This perhaps shows the need for much larger classes, and much broader prosecution. And also points to the challenge of prosecuting crime when the defendant is worth so much money that even serious fines and settlements and judgements are completely meaningless in the scope of their financial affairs.

For another example, Carrie Goldberg’s victim’s rights law firm, recently sued Amazon for offering a product widely known to be used in suicide; and has had some other interesting cases in suing tech platforms more generally. 

I believe that there are massively unexploited opportunities for class action lawsuits all over the place here. They could potentially recover 10s of billions of dollars, maybe even more, and also deal blows to the venture capital infrastructure, if an aggressive enough strategy was adopted. Importantly, these class actions should be put together proactively, with a strategy, and coordination between suits. As one-off affairs, this does little; I think a more thoughtful and aggressive, proactive strategy would yield much more significant returns.

ChatGPT and the development of AI more broadly, should open the doorway to tens of thousands of class action suits against OpenAI and other AI providers, on the grounds of these companies stealing the work and data. I did see an attempted class action by  a small group of programmers and lawyers who are suing over large scale violation of copyright law: 

“By train­ing their AI sys­tems on pub­lic GitHub repos­i­to­ries (though based on their pub­lic state­ments, pos­si­bly much more) we con­tend that the defen­dants have vio­lated the legal rights of a vast num­ber of cre­ators who posted code or other work under cer­tain open-source licenses on GitHub. Which licenses? A set of 11 pop­u­lar open-source licenses that all require attri­bu­tion of the author’s name and copy­right, includ­ing the MIT license, the GPL, and the Apache license. (These are enu­mer­ated in the appen­dix to the com­plaint.)”

And there are some international cases as well. Already there are reports of video game artists in China being laid off due to developments in AI, and related workers in other countries. The Writer’s Guild, currently on strike, is also including AI in the scope of these demands. This is again another place where it is important to be strategic on a meta level, making sure that these efforts are tying into a larger platform, rather than playing wack a mole with these people.

I think what is deeply needed is for literally tens of thousands of class action lawsuits to be filed against OpenAI from all around the world. All at once. While there has been a kerfuffle of legal activity so far, with many technology innovations, resignation and acceptance comes and activity decreases. This must be stoked, radicalized, coordinated, connected, broad, serious and simultaneous. The question was never even offered for public consideration of any kind, the question of if these companies could steal all of our work, mash it all together, put it through a blender, and use it to displace and depress jobs. 

There should be much more emphasis on the DATA; the AI tech part of it is only an extraction method and the core of the product and its foundation, is the data. The lack of resistance internally in the industry, has been shocking but not surprising. This would be the best vantage point for legal action; as usual, the tech industry is full of mindless cowards and sheep, so that is likely to go nowhere. Externally, I think people don’t have a clear understanding of how AI gets made, and how important the issue of the data is, and the fact that it is very much up in the air, something we can intervene on if we try. The data is the core issue that sufacey discourse about single AI apps have neglected. 

 AI is also going to generate enormous wealth; this is wealth that was created by our COMMUNITIES and our SOCIETIES, generations of work and human production. The reason there is even the POSSIBILITY of AI comes from the combined work of society. Yet these things are being used by billionaires to take aim at jobs and automate people out of jobs. 

Wow. 

These people are fucking assholes, like just on a personal basis, systemically but also, on a personal level, they are fucking assholes. 

I don’t think that pursuing one-off class actions is going to be particularly effective, unless you put together something that is really aiming at the heart of this issue and aiming to provide precedent and clarity on this topic. Frankly, this is something that should end up at the feet of the Supreme Court, because this is a fundamental issue of great magnitude. Can they use our stuff, which we provided under and for completely different and orthogonal reasons, without consent, without payment, as an economic weapon? The fact that OpenAI cruelly, negligently, and greedily, by-passed any sort of societal conversation or community process of literally any kind, has left us accepting OpenAI as a bygone conclusion. But my faith in the Supreme Court is basically non existent. If they do not recognize a woman’s right to her own fucking body, I highly doubt they are going to recognize the individual’s data rights, or the collective’s entitlements from this, or the idea of collective ownership over collective data, collective access, control, the rights to aggregate benefits. 

However, it’s important to know that we are not stuck with AI and venture capital, not if we are smart, shrewd, organized, efficient and fearless. This can be dismantled. Integrations can be reversed. The people in charge of it can be arrested. The technology can come under a new management and a new system. The idea must somehow come into the public’s head that this is neither inevitable nor advisable nor created by any real-world problem. It is still in the early days, even though we’ve lost a lot of ground, it will never be easier than it is at this moment. They gain power and money by the second. 

Legally, I think what this would require is putting together a big time legal team and teams who can organize a coordinated, multi-issue, multi-suit, multi-geographic class action strategy. If you can get a few wins in this space, you can start to cause a cascading effect. Just sue the shit out of them over and over again and try to get as much money for the class as possible. My concern is that fighting this piecemeal — a small protest here, a small protest there, a small class action — means the resistance is going to go into a thousand different vortexes and not get anywhere. There are two ways to solve for this problem in my mind: connecting ALL resistance in a global coalition, and a massive escalation in the scale of legal action. 

Imagine if people all over the world started suing for this and doing so in a coordinated way, and supporting all of the other actions beyond just their own as well. Imagine if we found ways to retain large class action firms and set up a process for helping people into them, formulating the suits, and coordinating them. Proactively engaging communities in this, and offering easy ways to participate and access. Just a fucking tidal wave of lawsuits related to all aspects of the case from the use of the data in the first place to what that data is being deployed to do. OpenAI should be facing 200,000 lawsuits right now. Why aren’t they? There is no right they have in law to use all of our shit for this, to support wealth of an infinitesimal and sociopathic criminal conspiracy. We cannot allow this to be legally permissible or to meet the standard of legality. As these parameters have NOT been definitively established, we should establish them and assert our right to our technological and material production.  

I think with some appropriate resources this is something that could spread like wildfire. People are mad, but don’t know how to connect that to viable resistance strategies. Tech elite underestimates how much they are hated by the general public, who has watched what has been done for decades now, and has seen that their lives economically are in no way enriched by technology, in fact the opposite, as the hundreds of thousands of people getting laid off under the pretense of AI right now could attest. People know that tech comes in the form of fucking up their jobs and destabilizing people, I.e. through gig work and housing displacement. I think tech elite thinks there isn’t any resistance, when I think the actual problem is more that people don’t know how to get at them. They don’t see venture capital as an accessible target of resistance activity. We should change that. 

This should be like, in ads on Hulu and shit, like the commercials: Have YOU provided data to Facebook? Join our class action suit against OpenAI. Are YOU an artist who is being laid off because of AI? Join our OTHER class action suit against OpenAI. And so on. Creating legal injunctions during particularly moments of disruption in consumer tech and the consumer audience, are extremely important opportunities to try to capture large scale resistance. 

We need to sue these people into fucking hell. They have enjoyed an extremely litigation-free reign, again due to the seeming beguiling nature of the industry, and the lack of understanding not only in general society but in the legal and the financial fields, and the lack of accessibility of this tool and the lack of lawyers and coalitions who are going to be proactive about taking this all up. After all, the venture capitalists utterly destroyed the tech resistance movement in the industry by 2015. 

Another area of class action suit that I think should be explored is in the category of sexual abuse both online and within the industry. 

 I would definitely suggest victims of online attacks by pedophiles, to me presents a really serious legal opportunity that has not been pursued in a broad-based way. Millions of children in *America*, never mind around the world, have been victimized in a host of pedophile attacks that have been facilitated on VC infrastructure. For decades now, large-scale, serial pedophiles and pedophile groups like MAP have been able to effortlessly hunt, groom, “seduce” and abuse, huge numbers of children and teens on these platforms. These companies are seeing on their end, user behavior like a grown adult man looking at or talking to dozens and hundreds of children and teens, like we saw in the Chris D’Elia case in which literally over 500 girls came forward to say that they were also approached. This is actually standard pedophile MO as they search for the right child to attack and they search for children that are more vulnerable to predation. They operate like spammers FFS. Tech companies know the MAP pedophile ring is on their sites and have been informed of this repeatedly. And yet, the attacks continue; a member of MAP just recently abducted and repeatedly sexually assaulted a child after openly grooming them on Twitter.  

A lot of pedophile activity is very easy to detect. Without even needing to go into the details of communication, technologists can see that the account of a 30 or 40 year old sending a large number of messages to the accounts of, for example, girls in their teens. They have device and IP tracking that they use constantly, so they are able to see even if a pedophile has another account they are operating under. We know that these are the patterns used because these are what is described by victims, and the picture that comes together with cases like the D’Elia case. There are many other data patterns that could be explored and identified. People produce data trails with particular attributes; pedophiles too have a data signature. 

“But it’s a slippery slope”, bruh, we already slipped off the slope. What about the first generation of pedophilia victims from attacks online, I’m talking back in the days of AOL chat rooms? Many kids — including me — were targeted and raped by pedophiles who gained access to us through these chat rooms. Many of those kids are only now in their mid and late 30s — this is important because it often takes years to come forward, and because approaching the age that your abuser was when they raped or assaulted you, or having children yourself, is often a major catalyst for victims to confront the situation. So actually, we are now seeing or should be seeing, victims from the early internet, coming to a larger consciousness about this. And we should be facilitating and supporting that, so we can stop this from happening to yet another generation of kids on the internet. 

My theory is that in the early days of the internet, there was a massive wave of pedophilia using internet platforms, using VC-owned and operated infrastructure, the tech companies knew about it, they did nothing, even though their great fortunes were built on young people. There was a huge rash of pedophilia, many, many people got hurt, and now, 20 years later, it’s possible that victims will come forward, and talk about it; especially if any effort or care is made to investigate this wide-scale crime, which desperately needs to be excavated. 

The Catholic Church was exposed not by the people and systems that were around the child when it happened; rather, it was exposed decades later when victims have gone through a massive process of any kind, to confront this abuse, to connect with other victims, to come to an understanding of what happened and how it happened. You see victims that want to now speak up, and that want to get justice. So, I think this could be a case whose time has actually come. 

The scope of such an investigation would be enormous, obviously. But other class action lawsuits regarding child sexual abuse, such as those we have seen against the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts and other offending institutions, do offer a precedent. Considering we know that “online” child sexual abuse is deadly — child victims predictably kill themselves —  there is absolutely no reason to distinguish this from how we treat other child sexual abuse cases. These platforms are absolutely aware that pedophiles are active on the platform — and indeed, are regularly subject to subpoena in child sexual abuse cases of many kinds. However, we know that only a small fraction of cases are actually investigated, much less prosecuted, and that the vast majority of active pedophiles on the platform, aren’t even getting their accounts banned. 

What this calls for is to draw a definitive line in the sand. This isn’t about freedom of speech. This is about a hostile, dangerous, criminal conspiracy on these platforms, it is about mass predators on the platforms who are allowed to groom children and organize in pedophile rings like MAP over the course of decades. This is about getting rid of people who rape and are trying to rape children. This is the accumulated negligence of decades of choices by platforms that leave children on their sites wide open to attack. It is about a clear enemy. 

If I had a social media platform with kids on it, my number one priority would be keeping pedophiles off of it. Period. No question. So what is the truth? 

A Twitter user recently called out Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois, both members of the PayPal Mafia, as known groomers within the tech community, specifically targeting young men. Thiel was the first investor in Facebook. A recent article in the Intercept mentions at least one person who was specifically recruited for a sex party by Peter Thiel… on Facebook. We are still awaiting the totality of the Intercept’s reporting on the subject, but when evidence suggests that even your own investors and board members are using Facebook to trawl for sex with young people, we are able to see this all in a somewhat different light. These two have been involved in NUMEROUS social platforms and in fact have architected a lot of the social media infrastructure we have today. Keith Rabois himself left tech company Square after being credibly accused of sexual harassment.  

While I think that tech platforms are absolutely responsible for predation on their platform that they have done nothing to stop, there is significant sexual abuse associated with venture capital that doesn’t require this fundamental debate over culpability on digital platforms. 

And that is because there is an overwhelming amount of sexual abuse within the industry itself. Venture capital has engaged in the same type of enabling maneuvering that we’ve seen in other sites of mass sexual abuse: moving predators around from post to post, intimidating victims, coercive settlements, etc. I have watched this little game go on for years, and you could make a really good map of how sexual predators in the Valley have been hidden inside economic conspiracies, moved from spot to spot, and allowed to offend ongoingly, just using publicly available material. 

This is visible at the highest level, as executives associated with the PayPal Mafia, with serious allegations of sexual predation, have been moved around continuously when a scandal breaks out. Keith Rabois, Dave McClure, Peter Thiel, Joseph Lonsdale and Elon Musk, all members of the PayPal mafia, have had public allegations of sexual misconduct. And in the case of Rabois and McClure in particular, you see that they just stay quiet for a bit and pop up at a gig in another part of the conspiracy. Epstein himself was feted by the PayPal Mafia in 2015 and we have a number of other links too; I covered this more extensively in a post on the Epstein pedophile ring and its ties to Silicon Valley power players here. 

There are many, many cases of sexual abuse that we see in the Valley and this is something that cascades throughout the entire industry. While sexual assault has been talked about in the industry — there was actually a pretty substantive anti-sexual violence movement in tech from 2012-2015 — and while high-profile cases have been investigated, sometimes by outside players, there hasn’t been a systemic view when we look at a high concentration of sexual offenses, I.e. in the PayPal mafia, or when we look at a VC portfolio and start to see if we can build cases around specific companies and VC firms, where we can do substantive, multi-victim and even class action suits. I.e.: 

Were YOU raped or sexually abused at a company backed by [firm]? You may be entitled to compensation. 

Did YOU leave a VC-funded company due to sexual harassment by management? 

Venture capitalists are where the buck stops. For everything in the industry. 

In the last bubble, there were only a few women who came forward by name with sexual abuse allegations — and the reason why it was so very few is because any women who spoke out were attacked immediately by Reddit, 4chan, 8chan, Hacker News, Kiwi Farms. To the point that victims went into hiding and even left the country. This is the hostile, violent and abusive atmosphere that has been created by venture capitalist who are themselves sexual predators and thus have a massive vested interest in this continuing and burying the movement against industry sexual violence. 

Recently, NDAs, which tech companies often pushed victims into, were ruled not constitutional. This opens up more possibility. When amassed, the sexual abuse perpetrated in the industry is absolutely immense. And despite being made aware of all of this again and again, venture capitalists have PURPOSEFULLY and openly refused to establish safer working conditions, totally comfortable with letting girls get raped with no consequences for years and years on end. They were all told, and not only that, these VCs were seeing case after case cross their desks, and having to engage in both the pay-outs and the cover ups broadly. 

If every case of sexual abuse in the industry was made public and filed against venture capital, the industry would be on its knees. This problem is incredibly deep and in my experience not a single woman in the field escapes serious sexual harassment at the LEAST. 

How much have they paid out to victims to shut this up? 

Not enough, I bet!! Let’s crack that piggy bank. 

Moving on, 

I won’t spend as much time on this one, as these crimes are discussed more thoroughly elsewhere in my blog, regarding framing crimes against venture capitalists through the lens of human rights abuses and ever war crimes, but I will mention a thing or two. 

One. In studies from countries around the world, Facebook and Instagram have been proven for well over a decade, to cause loneliness, to cause self-esteem problems, to cause eating disorders, to cause anxiety and depression. This has had a global impact. It is hard to conceptualize or imagine or quantify, what almost 20 years of this on Facebook adds up to, what more than 10 years of Instagram add up to. 

In my mind, this is one of the biggest human rights violations of our era, as the scale and implications of this is truly mind boggling. We have been inured to this and seem to think that it is a natural result of modern technology and can’t be helped. This is absolutely not the case. There have definitely been some compelling lawsuits in this space, but I wonder how else we can build cases and approach something of this magnitude, so it isn’t happening on a small individual scale, but a broader scale or at least a coordinated scale. 

Last summer, some really compelling lawsuits were filed that pertain to this very issue: 

“Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is facing eight new lawsuits after lawyers with the Beasley Allen Law Firm filed a series of complaints this week accusing the company of exploiting young people for profit. 

The complaints also accuse Meta of employing additive psychological tactics to get people to use their platforms more frequently and failing to protect young and at-risk users, according to a press release from Beasley Allen. 

‘The defendants knew that their products and related services were dangerous to young and impressionable children and teens, yet they completely disregarded their own information,” Beasley Allen attorney and Mass Torts Section Head Andy Birchfield said in a Wednesday statement. ‘They implemented sophisticated algorithms designed to encourage frequent access to the platforms and prolonged exposure to harmful content.’

The lawsuits filed in Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee and Texas claim that users’ prolonged exposure to Meta and its platforms has led to actual or attempted suicides, self-harm, eating disorders, anxiety, depression and reduced ability to sleep, among other mental health conditions.”

So, I love this, I’m not sure what the status of this is, but I think this is the type of thing that we should put serious and concentrated energy behind, building large-scale cases that aim for very serious charges and awards/settlements and that address core and systemic problems. The pedophilia issue can also be encompassed under this type of framing. My suggestion here is that a global coalition is actually built, so that all the energies and resources of this can be coordinated on a global level, as these are indeed global crimes. Whatever legal strategies would stem from that, I’m not sure, but I know that elevating, expanding, supporting, repeating, emulating these types of lawsuits, should certainly be a priority. 

One last thought for you here — and this pertains specifically to the bulldozing and takeover of Oakland, San Francisco and the whole Peninsula, by venture capitalists and tech elite, over the past 30 years, utterly reducing these cities and their people. 

A California task force to determine a reparations plan for Black Californians, has proposed a package of $800 billion. This number “does not include compensations for property the group says was taken unjustly, or for the devaluation of Black-owned businesses.” The official findings of the task force will be released this summer, and then it’s in the hands of the state to go forward. 

Love to see reparations, would love to see that number higher and higher!!! 

I’m not sure if there is a plan to extract reparations above and beyond this baseline directly from the tech companies that have done so much damage, but I think that is really important and that they should be held directly accountable for the massive gentrification and displacement, state violence, carceral system, violence and labor exploitation, that they have visited on what were once vibrant, diverse cities and cultural and resistance centers. 

Venture capital and big tech must be held responsible in a foundational way, in a way that changes the trajectory of these cities and residents, for the massive damage to Black and brown communities in particular that they have committed over the years. This is particularly important as venture capital leaves America and is setting up new tech cities in vulnerable countries all over the globe, including Kenya, Nigeria, El Salvador, Brazil, and Ireland. They must be known and prosecuted as destroyers of cities. Their crimes in their totality as far as their terrible impact on this region, deserve a massive legal strategy all their own. This is not only to amend for ruined cities, but to save new cities under target.

We’ll wrap that up there!!! The legal system, both those created and those that are just natural law, should be one tool in our belt when it comes to how to dismantle these sick fucks. What is truly needed is an all-out global resistance and assault against venture capital and big tech. These strategies could be really key in this type of scenario. (I wrote more here about forming a global coalition against venture capital if you’re interested). 

All

Out 

Global 

Assault 

All at once.