How Tech Will Establish Its Fascist State: Critique of “Network State” by Balaji Srinivasan

I’ve talked quite a bit about the fact that tech sees itself as a sovereign nation, as its own nation and its own country and its own state; this was also a common theme in my magazine which ran from 2014-2016, which endured constant attacks by tech fascists. Tech operates differently than the American state and it is trying to break away from the control of America in a very material way. 

I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT AN IDEOLOGICAL ISSUE. I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT THE CONCEITS AND EGOS OF BILLIONAIRES, I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT THEIR FANTASIES. I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT THE GENERAL OPPRESSIVE NATURE OF TECH, WHICH EVERYONE SEEMS TOTALLY FINE WITH. I AM TALKING ABOUT MATERIALLY THE TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY ABSCOUNDING FROM THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WITH STOLEN WEALTH, LEAVING THE AMERICAN ECONOMY IN TATTERS, ESTABLISHING ITS OWN CURRENCY AND EXCHANGE, LEAVING THE AMERICAN JUSTICE SYSTEM, LEAVING THE AMERICAN REGULATORY SYSTEM.  BEING ALL BY ITSELF, ITS OWN COLONIAL AND IMPERIALIST EMPIRE, LORDING OVER THE WORLD WITH A COUNTRY OF 80% WHITE AND ASIAN MEN — THE FIRST OF ITS KIND TO BE AN ALMOST ALL-MALE EMPIRE; THEY WILL IMPORT GIRLS FOR THEIR “CITIZENS” TO FUCK. THEY WILL HAVE THE SINGULAR ABILITY TO GIVE AND DENY TECHNOLOGY AS THEY MAINTAIN A MONOPOLY ON ITS PRODUCTION AND THE REVOLUTION OF THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION. THEY WILL OPERATE AS A MILITARY FORCE. THEY WILL OPERATE AS A CONQUERING FORCE. 

THIS IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK IT IS. SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH IRONY POISONED SMUGNESS “OF COURSE THEY ARE”, THAT MEANS WE CONTINUALLY MISS KEY MATERIAL MOMENTS FOR INTERVENING IN THE RISE OF A FASCIST STATE. YOU SHOULD BE SCARED, NOT SMUG. VERY FEW PEOPLE UNDERSTAND HOW AND WHY THIS IS HAPPENING. HANDWAVING “OH ITS THE MATRIX OF COURSE ITS EVIL” IS ABDICATION OF GENERATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY.

TECH IS A RISING FASCIST STATE THAT IS SEPRATE FROM AMERICA AND IS ACTIVELY HOSTILE TO IT. THEY WANT TO GO FROM A EMERGING STATE WITHIN A STATE AND ESTABLISH TRUE SOVEREIGNTY, WITH ALL THE DANGERS THAT ALLOWS. THEY OPENLY ADMIT ALL OF THIS, WHICH IS THE TOPIC OF THIS POST.

Alright. Let’s proceed. In this article, we will look at how tech plans to leave America; we know this because at least an initial blueprint was published in mid-2022 by an Andreessen Horowitz thug, Balaji Srinivasan, in a book called “Network State,” which is obscure even within the industry, much less reaching any kind of audience outside it.  

I think its important to first lay out some of the main reasons, as context, why tech wants to leave, the ones that are most prominent in this text. Tech is trying to leave the American legal and financial system, because doing so has a number of incalculably valuable benefits for its ambitions of becoming the dominant power in the world. These benefits include: to escape international controls, to set itself up with its own self contained system including currency, its own stock market, its own (total lack of) regulatory boards, most concerning, the medical guidelines, as they want to faster proceed to human trials of life extension and brain chip technology; it wants its own land and its own transport, its own police and military force (both very much building out in real time). It wants to retain and protect its stolen wealth at all costs. 

As a primary driver of tech’s desire to GTFO is that 30% of its money goes right back into the American state. Taxes. They hate that shit. They take a personal offense to the “death and taxes” rule, they will not pay taxes, and they will live forever. Tech feels that America has done nothing to earn theses taxes, as tech provides for its own; all of the Bay is now one big tech outpost where everything from the land to the cops are owned by them. Tech can subsist on its own and has spent 20 years branching out into areas far beyond compute and devices and social networks, into every sector that you need… to start your own society. This isn’t even the “tech” industry anymore. It is the “everything” nation, applying the venture capital model of hyper growth to bootstrap its own empire. They are able to achieve all of this, not because they are smarter or better, but because they have sophisticated and brutal financial techniques and instruments for wealth extraction that have put them in a massive position of power. 

As Balaji complains: 

“Taxes are secular tithes, and the gov-fearing man is like the God-fearing man — you simply cannot pay enough money and respect to the state” . 

Delusional! Yet it is a primary motivator. 

To add insult to injury, tech wealth is often double-taxed; which means that the company pays taxes on its earnings, and then the shareholders also must pay taxes on its part. Tech workers must pay taxes on their salaries and windfalls and stock, very distasteful considering things like capital gains tax and Alternative Minimum Tax, and so on. So tech is in a position of, not only as an industry trying to avoid this, but every single ones of its employees, particularly those who have a windfall event by working for an extremely successful company, also faces massive amounts of taxation and wants to avoid it. Yes, it fucking sucks to see the government abscond with 30-40% of the return you FINALLY got after working at a piece of shit startup that ruins your life, but that is the cost of participating in society. 

Tech’s individual employees try to find ways to avoid taxes by moving to the Nevada side of Tahoe, working remote from tax shelters like Wyoming and Washington, and of course, using the best of the best in tax law and various kinds of overseas accounts and hidden cash, cryptocurrency, etc to avoid taxation. At the company-wide level, they are getting as many tax write-offs as possible, importantly at the city level where tech campaigns for major tax breaks and has shown willing to uproot itself in defiance of local regulation.   

You might say: well yeah, duh. Everyone hates taxes. Yes… but does “everyone” hate them enough that they are, as we speak, building out a totally viable economic system outside of what exists in America, complete with currency, exchanges, private wealth management, a new-coming suite of tech financial products, and an entire financial ecosystem that has been developed just for this purpose since the 90s? Do they hate taxes so much that they are actively investing in plans to leave the nation and establish their own, and very much plan to break away from this bitch so that they literally do not have to pay taxes to the America it is getting rich on (its citizens)?? 

So the immediate benefit of jumping ship is that they, automatically, get 30% liquid back, that they are paying out to the United States government each and every year. So suddenly their wealth goes up by AT LEAST that amount; and 1/3 is a big ol slice of pie. Tech is perpetually cash-starved as their constant appetite — the mindless capitalistic expansion — requires more and more upfront investment, especially as they start getting more into the hardware side of things through the Metaverse and the development of autonomous weaponry and so on. In their world, paying startups and tech companies is the way you get things done, not by giving it to the government to manage. This is part of fascist corporatization, in which political representation is based, in this case, on collections of startups. 

Considering the size of the tech industry and that the 30% (and let’s be honest, it’s more like 40% by the end of the day, more if you start to add in the double taxation and so on,) is taken out in perpetuity, you’re looking at what to the tech industry is essentially a state of being constantly cash-strapped, even as we perceive them having great wealth. Their agenda right now is to figure out how to enter a new stage of hypergrowth, exponential growth, etc., via the age of automation in AI and robots and so on; and a new stage of trying to definitively establish their sovereignty and a closed, complete economic system; and that requires as much wealth as possible. Tech sees absolutely no benefits to themselves in paying for America’s sustenance when it doesn’t want America’s sustenance. We’ll talk a little bit more about how the primary motives of this are also related to wealth capture and hoarding wealth and protecting wealth. 

This points to the larger issue which is that tech wants to overthrow all such authorities over itself. They’re trying to put fucking computers in people’s minds, you think they want to deal with America’s medical authorities and bodies for research ethics? They’re trying to get yet further in their life-extension technologies, you think they want to be checking that with the fucking FDA? You think they are cool with the SEC mucking around in the paperwork? Yeah, no, they are not. Do you think they like having to deal with permits for their buildings, with local and state authority for their infrastructure plans? You think they are OK with class action lawsuits against them, tried in American courts? Do you think they are OK with FBI raids on crypto companies? No. Do you think they want audits from the mother fucking IRS? Fuck no. They will go to war against the IRS harder than the Scientologists did. Do you think they want to face American courts in battles about user privacy, security, consent, use of data? Fuck no. Do they want to be beholden, in any way, to the American citizen? Fuck no. 

I think the most important aspect of this that surfaces, is their clear desire to escape the FDA. Tech’s incursion / invention of “biotech”, means that VCs have in the past years gotten a deep reach into medical innovation and are advancing quickly specifically in life extension technologies; Larry Ellison helped to pioneer this; as well and brain implants like Musk’s neurolink. What tech wants … is its own medical industry. Balaji presents this notion of “the medical sovereignty zone, the FDA-free society”… where tech would acquire “some measure of diplomatic recognition from a sovereign outside the US” or a “sanctuary state” that would not enforce the FDA rules… what Balaji refers to as “the absolute right for anyone to buy or sell any medical product without third party interference. Your body, your choice”. “We need new jurisdiction with fundamentally different levels of risk tolerance, and clear-eyed consent by all who opt in.” 

Which means, very literally, paying desperate poor people to perform medical experiments on them, without anyone being able to do shit. 

A trick that venture capitalists do is they present a stupid, benign use case and then an evil, deeply fucked up one to kinda blend it all in. Here, Balaji uses as an ongoing example of tech sovereignty the “Keto Society,” a network state to help people stay off of sugar or establish a neighborhood where no sugar was allowed. Then, “a society to help you with internet distractions … a digital sabbath society where the internet is just shut off at night!”. Oh, the need to establish an entire society just to escape the mind-melting damage of your VC firm’s investments in social media networks that run disastrous, brutal psychological warfare on its users all the time?? Weird! The Udemy thing undoubtedly fits somewhere in this, and the entire DAO model is some kind of early approximation as well. 

And then the next thing you know this fucking animal is seamlessly moving from “keto society” to: an entire sovereign country where you can do human experiments directly with no further due process than how much money it takes for an impoverished person to sign the consent waiver!! The consequences of this are obviously disastrous and a primary argument for why we need to stop this; it is essential we keep our eyes on what is actually driving tech and its ambitions and goals, which is often different, or hidden in, their telling of it. 

If that wasn’t frightening enough, Balaji crows that “innovation in atoms has been blocked by regulations, which are in turn created by the US establishment and exported all over the world.” Oh excellent, unregulated experiments with atoms!!! The last time we had a group of computer scientists fucking around with atoms in an organized, secretive manner, we got the bomb. (It is my theory they want a bomb that is better than every other country’s bomb, to act as its deterrent. They frequently reference the Manhattan Project and increasingly speak of deterrence).

While I have been talking about this for years and my former magazine covered this quite early, it wasn’t until the last few years where we started to see these ideas of sovereignty begin to crystallize in earnest; my belief is that the wealth transfer to tech that occurred during the pandemic, significantly escalated their timeline for all of this. 

So, with those initial benefits in mind just as a groundwork as we go on: how exactly are they planning to do it, the great escape? 

Unfortunately, in order to talk about the “how”, we have to delve into the venture capitalist’s kennel, to find one sick puppy Balaji Srinivasan, one of Marc Andreessen’s attack dogs running around doing his dirty work, Marc the hydra, Marc Scylla. Would that we were dealing with Marc himself, because while Andreessen has class, Balaji is slovenly, lazy, an outright liar and conman; the former CTO of Coinbase, which will form the basis of the new tech stock exchange. Everything Balaji says is marked primarily by smugness; it is the smugness that constructs his arguments, smugness and petty criminality is the basis of Balaji’s identity. He takes pleasure in intellectually mocking anything left of “the entire world at the feet of Marc Andreessen”. He yaps like a fucking chihuahua, very grating. He is a bitch boy and was spun out of the a16z mothership to create the illusion of an intellectual community around what is a pretty blunt-force attack on humanity envisioned by a very small number of people: the rise of the tech fascist state. But Balaji doesn’t start empires, he just sells the con: hence the “Network State”,  which is essentially the strategic, propaganda, technical, economic, etc foundation that venture capitalists will be using to argue for their own state and to achieve it over time. 

Can I just say that this book was like 500 fucking pages long and so full of shit I felt like I was chugging robitussin for the first 10 pages and then had robo-itch for the next 490. I will never, ever understand how Marc Andreessen is able to tolerate people as slimy and maladapted as Balaji. I’m assuming B “left the firm” as one in what will be a series of ops to make it look like this idea, like American Dynamism and Web 3, is appearing in a distributed, democratic way, a populist movement, instead of emerging from the a16z + PayPal Mafia conspiracy.  

Now, this next part is extremely important: 

As context, it’s important to note that Balaji identifies the “father of Israel” and his work “establishing” the illegal, settler, genocidal state of Israel, which killed 34 children last year, doubling from the prior year, as his major inspiration for writing the book.

Direct quote: “Herzl’s work is a major inspiration for this book.” Herzl founded modern political Zionism, formed the Zionist Organization and promoted Jewish immigration to Palestine in an effort to form a Jewish state. 

Direct quote: “The Israelis: Their status as a nation state changed with time. The Jewish people were once a stateless nation, a diaspora group united by common ancestry and tradition without a land or government to call their own. Then, within living memory, they founded the state of Israel.” 

In this historical revisionism, the establishment of the state of Israel is an innovation worth emulating, rather than a calamitous occurrence in worldwide peace and the status of human rights on earth. That should help you to determine where exactly this book is coming from. The people behind the “tech as sovereign state” conspiracy — a16z x PayPal Mafia — work very closely with Israel (including on surveillance contracts for IDF to surveil Palestinians), and thus, IDF and Mossad, and at home, the CIA.

Balaji goes so far as to call the network state “decentralized Zion”. 

Considering the strong relations that already exist between the rogue VC state and Israel, you can certainly expect that Israel is supposed to play a role here; particularly as these VC “networks states” require other countries to recognize them in order to achieve true sovereignty, a point that is repeated over and over as the vital missing piece. This is also important to keep in mind when El Salvador, home to the first “Bitcoin city”, is continually referenced: Tech will search the world for inlets and these cities and countries are not prepared to resist an attack from the people who have already sunk San Francisco and Oakland. In this way, though tech talks about “sea-steading” and “building their own land” as we have witnessed in Dubai, this is one place where we see how, like Israel, the establishment of these sovereign tech nations is fundamentally reliant on colonization.  

This is not the only place where models for the VC nation invoke outright genocide and a re-writing of genocide. Christopher Columbus has made an appearance in a16z ideological material of late; and Balaji does not fail to make the absolute most sickening interpretations. He complains about the “Woke” versions of Columbus: “you know the story: the American frontiersmen, like Columbus before them, were racists, colonialists, and imperialists”. He says: “Had one of the Native American tribes developed a technological edge over any of the European tribes, had they invented oceanic navigation, they would likely have invaded Europe” and then “It’s probably healthier to think of the Native Americans more like the 300 Spartans than as helpless victims — brave warriors who fought valiantly but lost to superior forces”.

This is reminiscent of Marc Andreessen, the head of the a16z conspiracy, famously commenting about how Indians are “better off” for being colonized; Balaji notes with admiration and wonder: “Take a look at the full global footprint of the British Empire at its zenith, and now realize the Facebook achieved a greater global penetration than that in just a few years” 

The death counts stemming from all of these events and references, are unspeakable. Nor will I lower myself to address these arguments other than to impress upon you the fundamentally colonialist, imperialist and genocidal context for the venture capital soviergn state. 

Throughout, Balaji talks about reopening the “frontier”, variously the network frontier, the space frontier, the atom frontier, any kind of frontier, he wants to open it. America and China, he says, are trying to “close the frontier”. But tech… is trying to open it. And land is the ultimate goal: “If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to use the concepts from the network state to reopen the physical frontier”.  

These are extremely dangerous people with extremely dangerous beliefs and they cannot be allowed to achieve sovereignty, even at the cost of violent conflict with the tech class and the VC class. 

Something to keep in mind as we descend the convoluted logic of this book; what is presented as some kind of crypto-age utopia emerging from the fog of technical innovation, is actually situated inside a very specific history of tech itself working with, designing and aiding human rights abuses at Israel/Palestine and US/Mexico borders, as well as working extremely closely with the CIA and other intelligence agencies to crush protesters at home, a story that is better stated by others, and in detail elsewhere. 

And yet here the formation of new nations are called a “clean slate”… particularly concerning anytime you hear a bunch of fascists talking about cleansing of any sort. Balaji makes the profoundly anti-intellectual argument that this sovereign tech formation would allow us to escape the tainted history of the past… tainted by colonialists and imperialists like them. It is the most fundamental knowledge, taught in elementary schools, that there is no such thing as a clean slate from history. This is very much a case of the anti-intellectualism and flattening of history that we see in the fascist worldview; we all know damn well that it not possible to simply emerge untainted from the capitalist machine into some fresh scar and do something truly different, especially as this entire proposition proposes literally no changes to the underlying economic model, it is just one capitalist/fascist formation that has architected an infinitely valuable monopoly on the backs of the world’s people and is rapidly rising and seeking to establish its own sovereignty to interact with the world as a fascist state.  

Moving on, so what exactly are we looking at in this whole new nation concept?  

This is probably the only useful thing we derive from Balaji. What are we looking at with the new “startup” or “network” nation, what are its boundaries in physical, digital, economic, space? What defines it?

 One assumption we could make is that the tech nation is entirely digital, sort of a figmentary LARP happening in virtual reality, one would think more of Jack Dorsey eating mushrooms in a spiritual retreat more than, say, the formation of a genuinely militarized fascist state; this illusion would lead one to think that this is just some kind of nerd fantasy without implications for the “real world”, essentially as if they were just declaring themselves a little club and giving themselves merit badges, as opposed to endeavoring a conspiracy of massive financial proportions that will fundamentally change the way that the world works, because tech has gained some extremely key monopolies that leave the rest of the world begging at its feet or falling through the cracks should tech refuse to supply them. This is a critical dynamic in the revolutionary timeline according to Marx. 

No, tech is as always, very aware of physical land, and this is as central to this “network state”, as any other factor. Land ownership and control has always been part of their agenda; in fact, Marc Andreessen purposefully married into a Bay-area real estate empire and now is the largest landowner in San Francisco. Hilarious because he loves to sit around all day and bitch about how the Tenderloin has some drug addicts even as he personally, as a lone actor, helped crush San Francisco into this wasteland, turning it into one of the starkest images of an artificial wealth gap, tech-created, we have in America, and then complains about the people he has personally alienated from right and quality of life. 

More from our little land barons: Larry Ellison bought Lanai, Hawaii outright, beautiful island, he put a Nobu on it. He has taste, but he also has to give the fucking island back. Zuckerberg has also bought significant land in Hawaii as has Benioff, who is so obsessed with the place that the bathrooms at Salesforce involve a custom scented mist that smells of pineapple, and surf boards adorn his office. The convergence of Ellison and Zuckerberg is important because these are both people implicated in some of these plots. I have given him fucktons of shit over the years but Benioff is actually not that evil compared to the rest of them.

Peter Thiel owns significant land in New Zealand, in particular a doomsday underground bunker where his “friends” like Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, one of the most important technical weapons platforms that has been developed, can get airlifted or autonomously submarined to in the event of, I don’t know, a people’s revolt against them. I’m sure Palmer has some bullshit too, sharing Benioff’s love of the Hawaiian shirt. Who wore it better? Palmer. And of course we have extensive documentation of how tech has taken over Oakland, and caused major gentrification in New York, including through Airbnb, and how it is currently in the process of invading Miami, Austin, Dublin, and others. Further, you have the ways that AirBnB is reworking real estate and land, (again from own to rent, destabilizing local communities), and WeWork plays into that as well; WeWork established a really significant number of what Balaji is calling connected tech “archipelagos”; “spread out all across the world in clusters, rather than concentrated in one place.” The founder of WeWork, a highly important Israeli entrepreneur who served in the IDF, in the Navy, for five years, the last two utterly voluntary, so he is also a war criminal, more important than that his tech archipelagos suffered some bumps on the American stock market. Since Adam Neumann in no way failed but actually delivered to both Israel and a16z, what they wanted out of him, he is continuing on his trajectory and has also been purchasing up huge numbers of apartments across the country for his new startup, Flow, which is more of this “creating a new landlord class” “making tech elite landlords”, type of energy. Creating little tech havens and so on. 

In fact, Balajis cites WeWork as a good prototype for the startup state because it is a “high trust zone” - no one will steal your laptop. This reminds me of how venture capitalists talk about their sense of oppression that the very people they are impoverishing are their oppressors through things like “people who have been given no homes or medical care or public restrooms, on purpose to drive them out or kill them, are now defecating in the street”. 

And so against these grim futures, the chihuahua suggests “a circle of startup societies and networks states built by pragmatic founders, a group of high-trust communities architected as intentional alternative to failed states and surveillance states alike.” 

So what Balaji suggests here is that “citizens” (programmers, VCs, tech elite, only) will “crowdfund” the purchase of land and that is what will create physical outposts of the nation, that is also organized via digital mediums such as virtual reality and, Balaji proposes, being able to control the robot in another country and walk around talking to people in it. That sounds like the most fucked up saddest shit I’ve ever heard so consider in their depravity, this is to them a gleeful future and not the obvious grinding of the human soul, literally, into bits. 

Worth mentioning again that one thing that the technology industry absolutely excels at, is setting up a little starting base — say, a tech office in Palo Alto or in San Francisco, in the Tenderloin, or in Oakland, and then wrecking absolute havoc through financial and labor warfare, abuse of a contracted workforce, destabilizing entire regions with wealth gaps, gentrification, and so on; that is to say, setting up strongholds and then literally using them to suck all the money and life out of the city, impoverishing local residents, is their time-tested strategy that they are currently repeating in Miami, Atlanta, Texas and even Dublin. So, we’re looking at a recipe to scale that process and actually coordinate the colonizers and imperialist invaders — the venture capitalists — across cities and be doing this in multiple cities simultaneously and as a global network of tech invasion; I.e., fitting my argument that “tech is leaving the nest” in a variety of ways and about to unleash itself with far greater force, spread and penetration than we’ve seen yet. 

Briefly, we will discuss some of the attributes of how this will be organized. 

In tech, we look at dashboards all day. There’s a dashboard for the stock price and for the number of users and for the velocity of the engineering team and for the launch dates and for the number of clicks in the newsletter and the uptime and on and on and on. The concept of a shared dashboard that everyone in a company or enterprise sees, is very powerful; in action, it has an incredible impact on alignment and focus. And so of course, the Dashboard has a prominent role to play in the “startup nation”. 

What is on the startup nation dashboard:

- Money/assets in control 

- Number of people in the nation 

- Amount of land  

This is very simply the mind of a colonizer and imperialist and capitalist expressed in the language of startup metrics. We have a saying in tech “what you measure, increases” and the fact that these are the metrics, speaks volumes. If I were designing a dashboard for society, it would including things like, the maternal death rate, the rate of poverty, the rate of child abuse, the fair distribution of wealth, the feelings and mental health of the citizens, their freedom from domestic and sexual violence, the number of hours they were working vs recreating… You know, all the reasons that an idealized nation SHOULD exist for, to provide a structure that helps its citizens, broadly, not a tiny minority of them, flourish.

But see!!! These nations are not being designed for the general population of the world; these are nations just for the venture capitalists, for rich people, for computer scientists and the tech class. They aren’t planning on letting anyone in who would experience poverty or police violence or maternal death. This is, above all, a society not even for the one percent, but of a fractional fractional part of the one percent; startup founders are presented, literally, as the founders of nations; with the constant assumption that the “technical male”,  are more equipped than anyone else, to run absolutely everything. Indeed, Balaji trumpets: “The group of people that administers a network state, which we call a governance network, is composed of a founder/chief executive and their engineers.” 

The book boasts that the network state is a recipe for 100% democracy, because everyone has opted in; the fact that “citizenship” in this is designed for the privileged, makes this a 100% democracy, in the way you could call an exclusive country club a 100% democracy. 

Rather, much of the function of these new tech states are about keeping people out, rather that recruiting them in: 

“‘Strong men create good times’ … but as they scale… they also start attracting lazy parasites to the wealth they’ve created, people who want to join something great rather than build something great… no one wants to work as hard or be as ruthless as that early Spartan band, given the easy wealth available, so they enjoy themselves and busy themselves by fighting each other over trifles.” 

Colonizer logics, imperialist logics, chauvinist logics… these are a way to insulate the tech class from the paupers they create and rely on — the parasites. This is just the exploded version of venture capitalists braying that there are still homeless people in cities they have stripped of housing except for their own. This… this is a way to keep the howling wolf of the world and the consequences of capitalism from their door; it is to insulate them from revolution and takeover of the means of production.  

See the thing is, the tech state, because they have currently figured out the most effective, *scalable* system for wealth extraction and concentration, is going to have a beautiful beautiful life. For the tech class alone. 

Moving on, it is important to note that the model is inherently dictatorial, after all, this exercise is no more than “what if we started and ran nations using agile methodologies”, lol. And in fact the importance of the One Leader is emphasized over and over; and Balaji suggests it is beneficial to retain the singularity of that power, saying: “it’s easy to give away power and hard to consolidate it, and you need that power sometimes to make hard but important non-consensus decisions”.

 So, these are very much designed and presented as dictatorships. Not only that, but it is clear that the only imagined inhabitants are either people with big money or tech workers; this represents a proposed restructuring in which the venture capitalist or the tech founder is in fact Nation not Industry. Cough fascist corporatism cough cough. What they are describing is in fact that society be organized by startup states/nations with a single leader and a single purpose, or what Balaji calls One Commandment; much as tech companies now have goals like “we’re going to change the way you order delivery” or “we’re going to make a database that will scale better”, or, when all imagination fails, “we tell stories”, “we make things”, and “we’re making the world a better place”.

This is important as additional proof that these are fascist states that are envisioned, to borrow from Wikipedia: 

“As originally conceived, and as enacted in fascist states in mid-20th century Europe, corporatism was meant to be an alternative to both free market economies and socialist economies. The hypothesis that society will reach a peak of harmonious functioning when each of its divisions efficiently performs its designated function, as a body's organs individually contributing its general health and functionality, lies at the center of corporatist theory. Corporatism, socioeconomically is based on an organization called corporations, that it gets its name from.”

This would actually just be a much more succinct way to write this book. It would have saved me 500 pages of swill. We’ll get into it more later, when we talk about the wack ass distortions and crimes against economics and political philosophical that are being used to justify this clear fascism, but the concept of the Network State is, in fact, that it is an alternative to Chinese communism, and America’s failing economy. America is described as a failed state succumbing to civil war; and China as an oppressor, surveillance state, etc. Here is perhaps a bit of a technicality but for the political nerds, the book even speaks disparagingly of capitalism as again, corporatism is the preferred model for the fascist state, historically and now. 

A particularly important note is that the book more or less views the fall of America as an “eventuality”, already in progress; they feel that America is dead/dying and they are trying to get as much as they can out but ultimately alight, particularly sickening when you consider the amount of havoc that tech has personally unleashed on America’s residents and its workforce; we can see that tech accelerating the death of America, has been, and continues to be, beneficial to itself; the pandemic will go down as the canonical example of how tech doubled its money and power while 1 million people needlessly died. The sabotage of America by tech, is something we need to be exploring a lot more, documenting a lot more, and incorporating into our concept of how we engage with them and fight them. Meanwhile, the VCs are preparing “for a post-American period where the US in its current form no longer exists”. 

Disturbing stuff, but then again, we are dealing with technofascists. 

I cannot emphasize enough that these nations are for TECHNOLOGY WORKERS, which are somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% white and Asian men, a number that is going to go up as VCs retaliate for years of being asked politely to hire more women, with typically ruthless and disproportionate response. So what we have here is that tech wants to set up its own small nations and overarching big nation, nations that are dictatorially led, nations that are led by white and Asian men and that are 80% or more white and Asian men… in fact, the book talks of how to recruit white and Asian men, and how the cost of getting into the nation, is paid in some donation of land or crypto (rich people) or offers some special skills (is a 10x engineer). This is about land, and it is about “defending borders” and keeping people out. Something that tech has been very involved with and a16z weapons company Anduril has lots of experience in, having built entire surveillance systems for the US/Mexico border and Israel/Palestine.

This is an even more horrifying prospect than many presented by science fiction dystopian scenarios, many of which at least had women. It brings to mind Peter Thiel’s statement that allowing women to vote was a mistake; in the “network state”, women won’t be citizens at all. What would an entire nation of these motherfuckers be able to do? You are talking about the recipe for a level of distributed, global fascism and a floating imperial nation, full of fascist, misogynist sickos that particularly hate Black people and indigenous peoples all over the world. This would be the most dangerous nation in history.

Balaji notes “most countries are small countries”, an obvious allusion to the reality that this “country” will be for elite only. Some of the ranges pulled out are 1-10 million people to start; this, says chihuahua, would be sufficient to create a “startup society with a genuine sense of national consciousness, an integrated cryptocurrency, and the plan to crowdfund many pieces of territory”. This is very doable as the tech industry in the US alone has 4.4 million computer programmers and about 12 million overall tech workers. So this is likely to be only the elite of tech workers in general; the ones who will oversee all kinds of exploited and outsourced and contract labor outside of the nation, much as they do now. “A network state builds a society where everyone has broad support for technological innovation. You want a country where people cheer Mission Control, not boo Musk and Bezos, and now we can build one,” I.e., a nation of brainwashed fascists mindlessly leading the world into hell, striving to stay just one step ahead of inevitable global revolution.

The note about the integrated currency as a vital part of the VC nation pie, is important because cryptocurrency is not being developed in order to fit a consumer use case per se, as is widely understood; rather is is being developed as the currency of a new nation, the manner of trade for the rest of the world to purchase technology, the way to invest in technology, the way to get stock in a network nation/state as one does a tech company via purchase on the public market, for outsiders, or via founding and investing in these entities — I.e., tech will become a provider of financial services and markets and private wealth services and on and on, via crypto. Much the way the Bahamas and Switzerland offer financial services, tech will as well; that will include investments in startups and its own stock exchange, money laundering, and so on. For example, a16z is rumored to be diversifying into private wealth management, and that is a financial service that tech is able to provide. While I wouldn’t be accepted as a client, this is an incredible scam. Marc Andreessen is my personal financial advisor for free; if he invests in something, so will I. Making our fates even more inexorably intertwined and hopefully leading to some dread showdown. 

A lot of the book is a super ham-handed attempt to establish why this is actually a moral thing. Which is actually fun to watch these sick fucks run around in circles picking from a hodgepodge of first year philosophy texts to find something, anything that sticks. From all the convoluted nonsense emerges basically the general argument for the tech industry as it already stands: that growth at all costs is human advancement, socialism causes stagnation, “innovation” is the only true morality, America has fallen to “wokeness”. 

These are the arguments. Not saving lives, reducing inequality, ensuring a safer world for children, stopping starvation and poverty, ending rape and violence against women; these things are, of course, not mentioned, and as usual, tech lies in a moral vacuum, trying to fit in with whatever scraps of philosophical philosophy it can scavage.

Stagnation in America is given a primary reason to diverst. Yet this stagnation is in in large part created by tech unloading a never-ending series of revolutions of the means of production, leeching off cities, launching data weapons never-endingly at the people, refusing to pay a living wage to the large underclass it creates, tax-dodging, destabilizing labor with automation and the implementation of “union-less” replacements for industries like taxis, super-powering cops and the military, building the surveillance system, unleashing the social media weapons that make everyone miserable and literally give people mental disorders, and so on. 

These people are fucking disgusting arrest them, RICO them, haul them into citizen tribunals, literally whatever we have to do to put these people the fuck away. 

In all of this, there is a deep seated sense of victimization by the VCs; as I’ve discussed in earlier posts, core to the fascist definition is the obsession with a persecution. Balaji cries and pisses about “the wokes”, about “cancel culture” “getting people fired”. He screams to the sky: the “wokes” are gaining control of tech companies, the “wokes” were “placing sympathizers in key positions at Big Tech companies during the tech lash and Great Awokening of the 2010s.” 

He cries about the “tech lash” starting in 2013, which “cancelled, deplatformed, demonized and dominated for the better part of a decade”. He says that “the wokes” want to “control the minds of people who run [digital networks].”

Totally delusional. This is hilarious because I was a big part of the Great Awokening lmfaooo lmfao lmfao that is cried about here, and I know for a fact that Marc Andreessen, personally dismantled the movement down to a person, it has been totally squashed, in 10 years of efforts we weren’t able to improve representation for women in general or any other group due to the resistance we faced. No one was fucking fired from the industry for RAPE and sexual abuse and misconduct, much less a stray internet comment; VCs were there to move them to a new company and get the NDAs signed as ever. Larry Ellison rescued Mark Hurd; Marc Andreessen rescued the CEO of Github … the GitHub which now provides the entire basis for automating software engineers and increasing the rate of engineering production to never-before seen levels.

As far as this great assault on VC: the progressive, tame, kindly movement to reform technology with some very basic reforms, like “hire more women” and “pay your taxes”,  did not change the allocation of VC funding at all. We did not stop the pillaging of Oakland and the Tenderloin. We didn’t change the demographics. Literally nothing changed. Every single social movement of the past 10 years has been crushed, and yet Balaji whines “the ‘marginalized’… has now ridden to power as Woke Capital,” as if they had any capital at all… that is the whole point is that they are being economically depressed. Balaji, however, is worth over a billion dollars the entire time he is writing this book lmfao lmfao lmfao.

He says “The Republicans have by many measures become the party of the economic and cultural proletariat,” yet in the next breath: “there are of course exceptions like the Supreme Court and state legislatures which are majority Republican;” nonetheless “The democrats have taken over” and “are the ruling class.” 

“We don’t think of Republican America as coincident with the US establishment anymore. That’s because the US is a binational state with two warring ethnicities (Democrat and Republican) rather than a single nation state.” More evidence of their intent to tamper with the 2024 presidential election, which I cover elsewhere. “Woke capital is the ideology of America’s ruling class: it’s capitalism that enables decentralized censorship, cancel culture, and American empire. It’s drone-strike democracy” — this is a literally insane thing to say when a16z is building out a massive armament of drones as we speak.  

In VC, these are the “wokes” and the “parasites”: “The women, minorities and LGBT groups that replaced the working class as the Democrat party’s base are now Woke America”; “it doesn’t really matter to the wokes if women and minorities actually suffer from crime and inflation in Woke America — what matters for the movement is the power gained by the rhetoric.”

So here we understand that much of what tech is hoping to escape, is in fact, American social movements, and their ability to influence and threaten the tech industry; this is a primary motivator in the attempt to escape America; they solve the social movement (potential revolution) problem by establishing a monolithically fascist nation which progressive political movements are unable to address except by inevitable direct confrontation… which will be difficult because VCs will be scattered all over the globe, on the moon, in the ocean, on boats and seasteads… more protection from the people of the world.

The scorn for the working class permeates the text — in his telling, “Once the founder reaches the seemingly inevitable point where they need a bureaucracy, “the parasites start entering. They don’t want the risk of a small or even mezzanine-size business. They want lots of perks, high salaries, low workload, and the minimum work for the maximum return… they know they don’t need to pull their weight…”

In this retelling of the story, tech is the hero; and tech leaders are its “born revolutionaries” — Elon Musk, Glen Greenwald (a PayPal Mafia op), Jack Dorsey. Not the actual revolutionaries who created vital movements like the resistance to police violence and to institutionalized rape.  

This is the type of inversion of logic and relationships that develops the fascistic fear of persecution; for example, the chihuahua accuses the ‘wokes’ of “doxxing, hacking data, using secret identities,” when this is literally the signature of the fascist hate gangs that have come directly out of tech and been purposefully nurtured by VCs and tech platforms to achieve maximum impact over several decades: see, Musk buying Twitter. Another case of inversion, Balaji suddenly having a moral panic about China’s use of AI and drones as his cronies at a16z literally fund a killer-drone production machine; Balaji shame-shaming America for the “surveillance state” that was in fact, specifically conceptualized, built, implemented, and run by tech more than the government or the policing agencies themselves. And he would know — his co-conspirators Marc and Peter Thiel literally came up with all this shit, from Facebook to Palantir. These fucks are literally PRISM. 

The most pitiful targets of this oppression, according to the chihuahua, is the startup founder and the early startup employees, “patriotic about their companies, those things they’ve founded and funded, breathed life into, those entities that took all their capital and intellect to build”; these are under attack by “a few morale-draining tweets” which could destroy the whole fragile system. 

In fucking reality, the industry and the power structures of America, was asked for reasonable, progressive reforms, said “fuck you”, changed nothing, and killed the movement. Yet he complains that “Social media swarms in the 2010s could bring tech executives to their knees, just as general strikes in the 20th center could bring countries to a halt”. (No one was brought to their knees)  He compares being “cancelled” (when none of them have been cancelled) to a “strike.” 

This gets to the heart, by the way, of why tech executives lost it so much over the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion movement in tech; specifically, that this was a labor issue, that was what the “SJW” forces within the industry represented, was ultimately and fundamentally a labor issue, and an issue of worker resistance to a management that was, on every level, promoting an underlying economic strategy that led to massive inequalities. At the end of the day, proportionate representation means proportionate wealth redistribution. 

It seems that VCs have a particular bone to pick with that!!! 

Poor Balaji!!! We knew not of your struggle!! “you very rarely see depictions of journalist, activists, professors, regulators and the like as the bad guys” but “countless stories cast a corporation with limitless resources as the main bad guy, from the Terminator franchise to Lost.” He despairs of the “endless American digital civil war on Twitter”. He compares Wokeness — (him bundling up the 1000 different social movements we’ve had in the past 10 years into a dismissive derogatory) to Nazism in a particularly low moral point in a book most pigs wouldn’t eat. He cites Yarvis Moldbug, an open white supremicist fascist’s, list of “the most important left-authoritarians… professors, activists, bureaucrats and journalists”. Not really loving the idea of fascists having lists of anti-fascist dissidents, but that’s where we are. The chihuahua speculates “Could Satoshi’s community deliver more for them than Bernie’s?”, as if universal health care for all Americans is somehow a lesser goal than *check notes* letting fascists abscond and set up a true technofascist state.

Youre rich. You’re powerful. You have a new army . What the FUCK is so bad about your fucking lives you miserable assholes? 

But it goes on. The New York Times is the “enemy” of the tech founder. “..even really good technologists aren’t allowed to build things because they’re too unpopular”. This when literally no VC has been meaningfully “cancelled” and actually, tech founders and CEOs have come to enjoy statuses as mainstream celebrities and public financial savants. He whines that “the US establishment is institutionally racist towards their tech disruptors” because tech is has lots of immigrants and instead of being just White, is dominated by White *and* Asian men. This fucking loser. 

Even worse!!!: “Both the Chinese and American establishments have invented rationales to essentially seize previously founder-controlled companies” and bitches about the imposition of “making sure that their code is 100% regime compliant”. China shut down Bitcoin mining during COVID and paused IPOs to, you know, deal with a global pandemic. This is strongly condemned by the chihuahua. Yet there have only been 5,273 COVID deaths in China; here, we lost 1 million. One of the eeriest things about reading this book was the lack of acknowledgement of the pandemic as anything but an economic accelerant for tech, in notes like this: technology is a “group that was once identified with the West Coast before the pandemic, but is now best thought of as decentralized network.” 

This was their turning point. This was their opening. 

Hilariously, much of the book blames either America or China or the “wokes” for things that, materially, tech is responsible for. This is one of tech’s favorite activities; like destroying San Francisco and then saying it is uninhabitable. The book complains about supply chain shortages, flooding, fires, riots, “physical mobs”, surveillance states, drones, poverty. Yeah, this is the result of the bullshit you are preaching about, this is the result of you. You people have had since the late 80s to actually change anything. You hold responsibility. But these fascist bitches say: we are the victims. This is an important and dangerous fascist platform and yet another reason why anti-fascists need to be taking on tech as a fascist entity that must be defeated. 

As we are talking about the systems that make up a state, we arrive to the topic of military and policing, which is scantly covered, disturbing, considering the ongoing massive build-out of autonomous weaponry by tech, which is being pitched by a16z as totally new kind of warfare and a new kind of war; considering the fact that tech is personally responsible for architecting the new policing surveillance apparatus, and that it has been integral to shutting down movements against police violence, particularly in Oakland, which tech was beginning to conquer and move major offices into, as well as move its highly paid white tech staff into, around the time Ferguson took off. 

On that thread, the chihuahua presents critical race theory as “a mostly evil doctrine, as sophisticated evil promoted in the name of good”. 

For now, the chihuahua says policing will be left “to the surrounding legacy society, much like a centralized crypto exchange collaborates with traditional offline law enforcement.” This is obviously a profound distortion of the fact that tech has been, for over a decade, literally creating super-powered cops; of course they can rely on an “external” police force they are themselves arming. “In the meantime,”, sayeth the chihuahua, “physical law enforcement itself is gradually turning into something done with autonomous roots — whether they be legged robodogs, rolling campers, or flying drones. And more law enforcement is being done from the command line.” 

Essentially, they plan on defending themselves with their own autonomous weaponry and with exterior, contracted cops they arm; as arms dealers for autonomous weaponry, they are in the position to hold innovations back and make sure that their forces are the most technologically advanced. 

Moving onto the military; the primary call here is that the VC sovereign nation-state, must hedge again the (failing, he says) US and (terrifying, he says) Chinese military powers. Luckily, the chihuahua has yet another foolproof plan!! Arming everyone in the world, I.e. “Decentralized defense, where countries like Japan and Germany re-arm, rather than outsourcing everything to the US or folding to China”. The chihuahua states once more the the tech state offers an alternative “that doesn’t involve either capitulating to China or pretending the US military is currently achieving fruitful things abroad. That third way is to support regional rearmament rather than fighting everyone else’s wars on their behalf.”

So basically, tech selling weapons to the whole world. Which, as I wrote about in covering the VC weapons build out, is just more evidence that tech would like to continue to be arms dealers to the police and military apparatuses, not just here, but all over the world; that they see themselves not just revolutionizing American warfare for giant weapons contracts, but actually, considering they are not a part of America at all, serving as a high-tech global weapons innovator, manufacturer and dealer; a re-armament and escalation in armament all over the world, would provide a continuous stream of income that would allow the tech nation to bootstrap more and more land, and perhaps even gain land in exchange for weapons, indefinitely. The weapons issue is key to the material and administrative matter of sovereignty. 

For additional defense issues, Balaji suggests “nonviolent digital defense through secret, pseudonymity, decentralization, and encryption.” i.e. the digital warfare that has landed us where we are right now already. The chihuahua gleefully heralds “going back to terra incognito, to terra nulls, to the time of secret societies, to the time of ‘Here Be Dragons’…” “While the third web will have some parts that are globally transparent, much of it will be intentionally private and encrypted.” This is the digital enclaving, this is the suppression of any remaining notion of a free and open internet (which has already been closing under thousands of log-ins); the VCs are actively trying to move into a closed internet when information is even more hidden behind capitalist and fascist gateways, and they are more able to control access, monetize it, lock people out of digital developments, all kinds of odious sick shit. 

Now at first you would think that establishing sovereignty is more or less insurmountable, but what the chihuahua suggests makes a compelling case, one of the more worrying aspects of the book. The approach to attaining sovereignty is *decentralized*. The idea is to start by creating a number of smaller network states, I.e., a startup essentially, or a small vertical of startups, and then either as a coalition with overarching governance or as “solo” actors, attempt to get as many countries as possible to ratify them. 

Notable, they are not prioritizing Western countries as sources of sovereignty, at least initially; rather, it seems that the global south is far more up their alleyway; this is demonstrable in the way that tech has made inroads, thru PayPal mafia op Glenn Greenwald, into the politics and media of Brazil. Barketh the Chihuahua: “We call the first government to recognize a network state a bootstrap recognizer, named after the computer science concept of a bootstrap system that boots up another” — giving as the example El Salvador recognizing Bitcoin and the creation of its Bitcoin City. And while it seems improbable, the tactic of targeting countries who have been tortured by Western colonialism and imperialism, terrorized and manipulated and couped, by the CIA, is predatory but likely to be extremely effective as tech will be able to exploit poverty and offer to “modernize” infrastructure, bring in jobs and “talent”, and so on. One is also reminded of Elon Musk’s statement that “we will coup whoever we want” regarding the US overthrow of Bolivia’s Evo Morales. 

Tech as its own nation has a lot to offer potential targets — money, crypto, arms, computers, police and surveillance apparatus, jobs; they are in a position of great power over many formerly and ongoingly colonized countries, which have purposefully been deprived of the means of production and so on, many of which are already being used to produce various materials for tech’s supply chain. The chihuahua explains: “Some small countries like Tuvalu, El Salvador, and the like have already signed business development deals with startups, so it’s no longer unheard of” for tech companies to contract directly with sovereign nations as its own sovereign entity; examples of ways where tech is already operating as a sovereign nation as its carries out global affairs; and like all colonizers, tech sees a way to come in and take over and extract extract extract. 

So as much as I want to believe that establishing soverignty on any meaningful timeline, is a moonshot (lol), I think we are far more likely to be in a situation where various countries are COMPETETING, even desperately, to be among the first to recognize the tech nation in exchange for the benefits they imagine tech could bring them.

The obsession with diplomatic sovereignty is called here “the main event”,: and the rationale and urgency for achieving this, tells us a lot about some of the REAL motives: “You can think of diplomatic recognition by a pre-existing state as a ‘Non-binding commitment to not invade.’” In fact, over and over and over is the fear the China and/or America will try to seize Bitcoin; in the later case the chihuahua suggests that if American tried to seize Bitcoin it would lead to the utter collapse of the country. They suggest that “Bitcoin seizure could be a trigger event” for the fall of America, and suggests that to hold it at bay, we implement “A constitutional amendement proposed to ban Bitcoin seizure, something that would put the right to hold BTC on par with the right to free speech and the right to bear arms”. This will help stop “a second American civil war triggered in part by a broke US government that attempts Bitcoin seizures, a situation we call ‘American Anarchy.’” 

Yet doesn’t mention that the sides of this “civil war” would be the People tech stole from and the tech elite fighting them to the death to retain and abscond with the stolen wealth. 

As I have talked about in other articles, tech will experience an order-of-magnitude increase in wealth when their crypto scheme really takes off; they spent last year artificially deflating the market to allow whales like institutional investors and banks buy in low. Balaji tips the hat on the crypto currency when he states that Bitcoin will triumph over USD by being more inflation-resistant; something that would only be true if VCs, who entirely control the crypto ecosystem, decide that this will be the case. On the other side, they must be closely watched for how they may try to manipulate inflation of USD in order to gain this edge that will help propel them into their first real paydays, which will be put to use immediately to their sovereignty. 

The sovereignty, the need for it, the need for it NOW, is about the fact that they are about to become so much more obscenely rich than they already are with cryptocurrency, they are looking at an absolutely game-changing amount of wealth for them; the average American already thinks these people are stratospherically wealthy but the entire frame of reference on that is about to change when all of the sudden tech has 10x the wealth and power while America has sunk into a full financial depression, much of which has been architected by tech itself. These… these are the ingredients for revolution, and tech knows it. They must find a way to make sure no one can get their money. Yes, governments… but I really think this has more to do with the People. They are scared of the People. They are scared of what the People might do when they find out what in the fuck has been going on with these people. Remember, the tech class bought literally giant quantities of Bitcoin when it was worth like $1, literally. As I have stated elsewhere, no one is expecting how much richer the tech elite and the tech class will be, once the crypto conspiracy really takes wings; this is not only about protecting their existing financial stores, but about preparing to abscond from any criminal culpability for the conspiracy. They do not want to be held responsible for the criminal conspiracy of a16z + PayPal mafia, when it emerges from the ground like swarms of cicadas. 

Despite all of the talk of newness, this is just the same startup bullshit. The VC still reigns supreme: “To achieve its ambitions a stateless nation may also need a patron, a kind of venture capitalist Great Power.” That would be Marc, our emperor. I bet he prefers “emperor” to “king” as an honorific, but there’s no accounting for taste, see: the chihuahua’s continued presence in the royal kennels. Like all talk of decentralization on tech’s part, it somehow always winds up in centralization: after the time of the growth of the decentralized tech states, there becomes a “re-centralized center”, I.e., the technofascist imperial empire. There is nothing distributed or decentralized about this, except in the attack formation. The chihuahua sees a “Mass exodus of people from both American Anarchy and Chinese Control to the re-centralized center, to high-trust startup societies and network states.” Their highest achievement is, of course, to become not only *a* nation but the new global superpower. And I think they can do it. And I think we have to stop them.    

They are about to be rich as fuck and they want to find a way to make sure no one will take the stolen money. Because as much as the chihuahua tries to cobble together some grand backing from history, politics and economics, this is nothing but the same old shit, being sold off as something new. This is just the next world superpower who sees an opportunity to rise out of the collapse of America (which it is precipitating); this is just the fascist empire we see coagulate in the ruins of a country. Again. 

There is literally nothing in here that suggests anything about making the People’s lives better; in fact, it is abundantly obvious that the People are explicitly excluded. There is nothing about reducing world hunger and poverty. Nothing about better care and better education and less abuse of children. Nothing about ending sexual violence. Nothing about improving the standards of health care for everybody. Nothing about global standards of living. There is nothing about stopping wars; just arming them, just giving tech a means to win them. Nothing. Nothing. 

In fact, the picture presented is utterly grim. 

“The governance network of a network state has root access to an administrative interface where law enforcement can flip digital switches as necessary to maintain or restored domestic order, just like the sysadmins of today’s tech companies. Of course, postulating the existence of such an interface presupposes a world where everything from one to messaging, doors to dwellings, farms to factories, flying drones to walking droids can be controlled from a single computer — but that world isn’t far off” 

“Think about every information worker essentially pressing buttons to earn cryptocurrency is a giant globalized internet economy. That’s what 2030 or 2035 is on track to look like.”  

Wow, gee.

This is just for their own aims, their own goals. There is nothing innovative here. This is just the moral wasteland of invertebrates constantly drawing little corals and bits of garbage to it, patching together ideologies and futurism to disguise the fascism in the shell. 

The case for the benefit to humanity is so thin that the chihuahua even resorts to claiming that a benefit of the new tech nation is to “store birth and marriage certificates, the proper registries, the public national statistics” on the blockchain. Look, my dude, putting a birth certificate in a distributed fucking database is not a fucking revelation in the building of nations. Absolute jackass. Marc, please less stupid fucking people on the payroll, give me something I can’t put on a toothpick and eat like an appetizer for a dinner that never shows up. 

One thing you can count on though, is that VC and tech elite and the tech class, the only ones who will be included in this, will benefit immeasurably. As they already enjoy, they will have the best quality of life in the world, enjoy the most spoils and the most power. This will leave the rest of the world starved and clawing at the doors; by then it will be too late. Considering the behavior, philosophies, trends, politics, and sources involved, I am still seeing mass death appearing alongside all of this. And I urge anything that is left of the social movements in this country, to find some way to gather around this issue. We are already out of time to stop a rising fascist state. Now is the moment of urgency. This is what we must be prepared for. We are running out of time and people are going to get killed for this.

Post script: 

There are certainly more things to be gleaned from this book that I will include in subsequent posts talking about this topic. About 70% of this book is lies and bullshit where Balaji is truly reaching for the fucking stars to pretend that this is the natural progression of society, or offers something to society. The scramble is real.

Since there are fundamental flaws in each and every argument, I won’t subject you to the brain melt of it. The chihuahua goes through imagined framework to bastardized framework and back. The crux of it, however, is this: Balaji is trying to justify this shit by pretending it is some kind of new economic paradigm. He disparages Marx, Lenin, Stalin in part of a sharp increase in anti-communist rhetoric out of venture capital. Yet he is only able to say that Marx “didn’t understand the role of self interest” in the economy, which is a grievous and untrue slander.

For one, you sick fascist fuck, not everyone’s “self interest” involves raping and pillaging the entire world for ego satisfaction; in fact, many find the satisfaction of self interest in contributing to a better world for all and thus for oneself. Balaji makes a pitiful attempt to offer an alternate analysis of history wherein “technological truth” is the driving force of history; as opposed to Marx’s widely accepted and proven scientific theory that the animus of history is class conflict, and within his theory, he addresses technological revolution most directly, and it is fully encapsulated in his DESCRIPTION of how capitalist must continuously re-invent / revolutionize the means of production.

Don’t even fucking try it, shit bird. This is the flattening anti-intellectualism that we see in fascism generally, and it is desperate, and it reads desperate. The only economic transformation in sight, anywhere, is the end of the capitalism system. So while many perceive tech as being at the forefront of history, it is simply the last trailing eeek of capitalism, a desperation to preserve the economic system of capitalism, which faces revolution as surely as venture capitalists do. 

Another ludicrous idea that the chihuahua came up with is that tech can actually offer a new kind of “accurate” history and analysis using the “blockchain history”, the idea of which is that everything is put on the blockchain ledger and thus it is possible to extract an “objective” and “true” version of history, presumably through an AI: “a form of truth powerful enough to stand outside any state to judge it from above. A way to respond to statistics not with either reflexive faith or disbelief, but with dispassionate, independent calculations”. This is absolute reaching of the highest order. There is no such thing as a dispassionate, independent calculation when you are talking about the whole of history; a ledger is not a moral document in and of itself, and the various models we have for analyzing such data, are equally substantive contributors. For example, in the a16z world, all data points to their superiority and feeds their egos and justifies their destruction of the world; another frame allows you to see venture capitalists as fascist capitalist scum. You’ll notice that they are not worried in the least of this “ledger” proving the truth about them. Who controls the ledger… 

More worryingly, the blockchain ledger justifies a purely massive escalation in surveillance, in data capture, that goes far beyond what we see today, and totally obliterates privacy. Many people assume that tech is capturing all the data it can capture; delusional. We are bottomless pits of data and they have only begun the extraction. Again, they are trying to put fucking computers in your brain and under this model, all of that is being put on the blockchain to create “the absolute truth of the Bitcoin blockchain”. This is the “data exhaust model: history as the analysis of the log files … everything society has written down or left behind”. 

Wow. I am a massive stoner and I have never been this high.

This significantly leaves out that tech is the only one with the technological abilities to even remotely crunch data at this scale; and that the tech business model collects information but does not expose it at all in meaningful ways to the public that has provided that data; after all these years, Facebook still offers no more information beyond the status updates of your high school friends, which are themselves thrown in the Facebook algorithm thrasher. Processing this level of data requires huge compute resources, technical resources, perssonel resources, that only tech has access to. They are the ones who will be providing the history; it will NOT be available to public inspection. 

So that is to say… yet another organizing goal for the new tech state / sovereign nation, is yet more of this attempt to collect and store and analyze all the data in the world, everytime a new guise, this time under the augur of a new scientific arbitrator, designed by a bunch of fascists, that we can turn to as the supreme authority; in Balaji’s notion, the progression of history has gone from God as authority to State as authority and now moves to the Network as the authority. This is again, imperialism and colonialism and fascism presented as an objective technological truth. 

And isn’t that convenient that the data capture required for this…. monstrosity….  is directly related to tech domination, wealth, power and so on; that the amount of data the tech empire has on us, is directly proportionate to their good fortunes. And shucks, isn’t it convenient that that is the exact stated goal of the CIA, to collect all of the information on earth and store it forever. I watched the CTO of the CIA say it onstage at a tech conference in New York months before the Snowden “leaks”. But you’ll notice neither tech or the CIA has ever had any intentions of sharing that information; information asymmetry is how they derive power. But for this and other reasons, I say again that the CIA and the tech industry are effectively fused, that the CIA is a major party driving the establishment of this new tech state, that these entities share similar goals in becoming the ultimate intelligence. 

It is my belief that the CIA is trying to leave America right along with tech.