Immediate Benefits of Getting Tech Out of Venture Capital Control

For the purposes of the exercise, I am not going to provide the reasons why venture capitalists are bad. Please see my other writing. I will instead endeavor to show you the many great things that could happen, if we take over the venture capital system; how it will result in both immediate and long term net positives, and is a worthy goal in our efforts for global revolution. So, something a little fun! It’s a big topic, and it needs some imagination, so let’s try to stick in there.

We need to keep in mind what *we* want the world to be; we need to keep in mind that we haven’t been ALLOWED to have a say in the “future” of technology. Millennials have been living in a dystopia since we were kids. It’s hard to imagine much else, especially through the hopelessness of growing up in the immediate extinction of the world. Let’s talk about removing venture capitalists from power, and what the possibilities and opportunities are, of working together to stop the psychopaths who run the tech industry, and getting our shit back from them. The technology industry belongs, indisputably, to the People, and has been captured by a small group of fascists, aka, VCs. Imagine that *we* got to be democratically in charge of video games and social media and AI and cloud computing and crypto and devices and streaming; imagine we all got to split all the extreme disproportionate money they have stolen from us. Shit would be significantly better. 

Not only that, but the reason why overthrowing tech is very compelling is because within the tech industries, are stolen and critical tools for rapid social change. There are also some extremely bad things that we can remove almost immediately after establishing the industry under democratic governance and control by the People. I specifically believe that impacting the tech industry and having a victory there, could actually have a domino effect and spark off other revolutions or broader revolutionary activity in the country.

What makes me so excited about targeting venture capitalists as a military strategy is that tech is a hyperconcentration. It is inherently hyperconcentrated in that it is monopolistic, and its primary goal is to generate disproportionate wealth and disproportionate power for a very small group of people. 

 The industry represents an enormous amount of information, an enormous amount of money, an enormous amount of resources, and fuck tons of technology. The thing about hyperconcentration is that anything we can do to get rid of it, and spread it out equitably, is going to have an effect similarly massively disproportionate. Tech has made it its most fundamental economic and technical mission: disproportionate impact, disproportionate wealth. But it also makes them vulnerable.

From a strategic perspective, if you have the overarching goal of a fundamental change in the economic system that governs this country,  fighting VCs positions ourselves excellently on that route. We won’t be able to effect the economic change we need in this country until we handle the tech industry; yet due to its own narcissistic self-containment, and its existence as separatists and in many ways its own sovereign nation, tech is organized and run very much separately from the rest of corporate America, designed as its own vessel that can run autonomously in many ways; so it both possible and recommended to attack as a singular entity. However, we will not be able to go after this industry in the same way we go after others, as it differs in fundamental ways.  

Practically, you’re really only talking about a very, very small number of people that have hijacked the industry; these are the ones who have purposefully created and installed very significant monopolies, and they are people who command incredible power. I can tell you every one of their names, many of them in the a16z/PayPal Mafia world, and I believe that the number of them who need to be arrested and removed, could start as low as a few hundred people; I think with removing about 1000 people, we are looking at the People gaining a massive foothold in the industry; with 10,000, we are looking at the industry being effectively beheaded. A very small amount considering the overall size and wealth of the industry, which employs over 12 million workers. We are looking at removing .083% of actors even in that latter case. I think there are different options for how to handle these arrests for judicial processing, but I think the expectation should be that the venture capitalists will flee to their various underground bunkers. Which, as long as we can remove their tentacles from the infrastructure and remove their authority, I think thats sufficient; they are very much prepared to flee and that is a scenario that has been throughly vetted by them. These are criminals and they know they are criminals; they are expecting us.   

The vast majority of the industry goes along with the winds of greater men; while I very much loathe most of the people who work in the industry, all 12 million, I do NOT believe they are capable of mounting any kind of meaningful resistance to the People reclaiming the technology and I think they will very quickly fall in line to a display of force and a decisive early victory. There are huge portions of the industry that consist of centrists or right liberals, basically establishment Democrats, standard issue white kids who pride themselves on accepting gay people and hate Donald Trump and are #ImWithHer and want Roe v Wade back. Most of them, for whatever reason, have zero clue what is going on in the industry; it is very much possible to just be a line engineer or product manager and not have any special insight into how the industry runs outside of their particular function; it is designed for compartmentalization. Additionally, the vast majority of the jobs in the industry don’t require you to build killer drones or commit financial fraud; you truly are talking about a situation where the industry has been hijacked. Many programmers are either totally ignorant or are aware some bad things happen, but truly believe the industry is overall a progressive force. This is probably the #1 vulnerability of the venture capitalists: individually, most of its workforce is NOT evil demons hell-bent on world domination, but rather, a captive workforce with no real power and no real alternatives for work, who will more or less, as they have been, continue to mindlessly obey whoever happens to be in charge. As these workers are increasingly radicalized by VC, money, and power, this becomes less true. If tech workers believe that the tech superstructure is truly neutralized, we will have to comb them carefully for the estimated 1% of outright fascists that do exist in the industry; however, it is unlikely that these ideological adherents will meaningfully do anything as all of their power stems from the deposed. Rounding them up will be for legal processing as collaborators.

There’s very little likelihood that most tech workers would rebel when faced with a legitimate takeover, and in fact, will likely quickly disdain and disparage the deposed psychopathic financial criminals, and will likely continue to work quite willingly on keeping systems up during the transfer of power. 

With a successful turnover of tech, we’re going to see some really awesome immediate effects, unlocking resources that can immediately go to the most needful areas of society and very critically, immediately improve the material stake of the movement both here on America soil and abroad. 

I think the first major benefit is immediate access to liquid funds that can be used to create immediate transfusions of money to re-animate a global social movement. The tech industry is sitting on giant hoards of CASH that are simply sitting there generating interest, waiting around for an emergency or a major initiative, to make sure their cash is balanced with the rest of their portfolio and the recommendations of financial advisors. We can start putting these cash reserves to work as soon as we reclaim them; this is the People’s own money that is just sitting in a wealth hoard. We can remove large chunks of these cash funds without affecting the central financial mechanism of companies, as I think one of the biggest goals needs to be that everything stays up and running until a more comprehensive vision takes place. The smoother this process is, the better, and a lot of it is again reliant by whether we can maintain labor continuity as in, make it possible for the people who are actually keeping the lights on, to proceed with their work. Huge parts of the industry are somewhat unimpacted by the core conspirators of the Valley, and there is no reason for this to even have a material impact on them until we start making transitions.  

It is simply money that they took from the People and have sitting around just as one of thousands of risk-balancing maneuvers, all of which are set up to ensure the never-ending reign of a technology empire. They are building these companies to be able to survive for years, decades, in even the bleakest economic positions. 

So just an illustration, before we even get INTO the financial core of the tech and venture capitalist apparatus, tech companies themselves have huge stockpiles of liquid cash that is just siting in bank accounts, slush funds worth trillions of dollars. Apple is currently sitting on $48 billion dollars. Google is sitting on $116 billion. Amazon has $58 billion. Netflix has $6 billion. Meta has $41 billion. That’s just the FAANG companies, and that’s two hundred sixty-nine billion dollars. That’s $6500 each for all 42 million people living in poverty in the US. Or $6.7 million for each of the 40,000 children who work at cobalt mines which tech requires for the lithium batteries that now power all our devices. Or $2.8 million to every Black resident of Oakland, which has been purposefully, maliciously and violently, destroyed by tech. It is enough to go to war against other fascists, it is enough to arm ourselves and defend ourselves, it is enough to get us started with an independent technology industry, it is enough to fund activists and movements here at home, as well as to start sending aid to I.e. Social upheavals all over the world. The reclaim of funds and an infusion of money into revolutionary bodies of people and into reviving and radicalizing movements that were destroyed, is the just first step, as one of the most devastating effects the tech industry has had, is in cracking down on social movements.  

When you start adding up just the personal net worth of the top executives who are the MOST responsible for these crimes, there’s also 100s of billions of dollars more, trillions; this is probably the more expedient first step. This money isn’t owed to anyone, taxes have already been paid on it, it has just been sitting there: spoils of war on cities, on children, on movements, on women, on Black people, and on “users” all over the globe. 

While we should save most of the money to make sure we can keep running the industry as it transitions to “new management”, this is a great place to start wealth re-distribution, and specifically to start paying out people who have been the most impacted by tech, such as residents and former residents of Oakland, the Tenderloin, East Bay, etc., as well as give immediate raises to all people who have been working in the industry in underpaid jobs. Again, the plan should try to yield some immediate benefits to the People, so that we have the ability to have everyone taken care of as we prepare for a long transitionary period. In re-claiming the industry from venture capitalists, we will immediately gain access to the stolen wealth. The weapons in terms of war we can purchase with the FAANG cash supply, is 43,287 tanks, or 6700 predator drones (very expensive stuff, I bet we could get something a bit cheaper.) We can also afford 351,000,000 AK-15s. 

Money is not the only immediate benefit that could come out of this. Another piece of the puzzle we get right away is that we can stop, at once, distribution of our user data, harvested and exchanged without any oversight, payment, or disclosure, non-consensually, and for the specific purposes of harming us, to killer police and fake intelligence agencies that want us dead and have proven to be mass murderers time and time again.  If you can change the tech industry fundamentally to stop being a “data arms dealer”, and immediately implement the rule that this data can only be used for our very benefit, we will have actual data privacy and it will become more difficult for illegal intelligence and policing agencies to find and kill us. One of the largest ways that technology impacts day to day life is by the constant provision of live data services, like streaming services, live storage services, live compute services, to enemies; it should be fairly easy to figure out what the major data feeds are and begin to cut them off. 

I think another immediate effort we could get to, is that the tech industry has harbored fascists both online and within its ranks. Despite being a minor number, fascists are operating at every level, from line-software engineers who populate 4 and 8 chan, to the founders and investors, also fascists, who are promoting fascist technologies and world views, as well as the fascist gangs who roam the internet putting down social movements. In tech, it’s not uncommon to be forced to work with someone who is an open MRA, fascist or Nazi. Many of these tech companies have been illegally fostering fascist groups. This has been the case for the entirety of internet history and continues to this day. One of our first steps needs to be figuring out which of these folks are fascists and prepare them to enter a democratic legal process; in the short term, they need to be removed from ability to spread fascism completely. All of the technical infrastructure we have, has been tainted by fascists, has been built by fascists, funded by fascists, run by fascists…. We need to at least free the technology from these hijackers so we can get our bearings. Even in small numbers, fascists wreck absolute havoc and move immediately for control, power and money to forward their agenda; even small amounts are incredibly toxic and dangerous.

See it’s BOTH that the tech industry harbors fascists inside the industry, but also that many of those fascists are also influential members of internet hate gangs and tech elite itself (take Yarvis Moldbug’s “friendship” with Peter Thiel, insomuch as these types of people have friendships). Tech has also maintained the infrastructure that has allowed fascist gangs to go from platform to platform to platform, to exist openly and without censor from the powers that be (us) — to be clear, the VCs could absolutely ban hammer the fascist attack groups online into burning hell if they had wanted to; but this was their own people. As you can see with Elon Musk purchasing Twitter specifically to unleash tech’s hoards on people in the lead up to critical political events for the PayPal mafia; i.e. stealing the 2024 presidency.  

So one of the obvious effects of this is that THE TECHNOLOGY FIELD HAS NOT BEEN SECURE FROM FASCISTS at any point; in fact, the guy who started the first true Silicon Valley company was a race scientist. Not to mention the role of the Manhattan Project and Nazi scientists protected by the US to work on “innovation”, in the industry as we now know it. So by getting into a transition of power, we are, for the very first time, in the position to do something about the absolute worst actors of the internet, and that would be the fascist gangs who are consistently suppressing progressive movements, and of course, the pedophile gangs, who even operate openly on these services as “minor attracted people” or, the MAP pedophile ring. These are groups who have been causing a massive disproportionate impact on the internet, and compromising its security and safety for open social organization, for well over a decade; and in fact, since the inception of the internet with early trolling organizations.

If we could secure a change in leadership to a democratic operation of the tech industry or even reclaim a few bits of infrastructure, we would be in a position to pretty quickly go on the attack against these groups of malicious users and these cells of coordinated MRA/Maga/Incel/Tech fascist/Nazi groupings. I think one of the immediate places that gets us, is giving our social media platforms a chance to get off their knees, a huge reason that these movements have died is because of the continuous threat and continuous attacks from this “Shadow Movement”. Priority #1 is to remove the fear that people have of the platforms. After so long having to literally fear for their lives due to Kiwifarms/4chan/8chan/HN/Reddit attacks, we are not in-tune with how fundamentally our engagements had warped to account for this dangerous entity. The internet cannot operate democratically while there are organized fascist gangs literally launching attack after attack after attack on all progressive social movements. 

 What we “see” of various movements, especially online, is only a shadow of what it should be; the very little activity that is making it through a thick web of fear, of politically motivated bans of feminists and sex workers, of algorithms running god knows what latest op. Over the years the number of activists and other important community participants who have had to abandon public accounts in ANY way is large: after all, how can you maintain that presence, especially without any financial support, where you have to worry about people coming for your job, your house, your paycheck, and threatening your family and your children, for working on objectively positive social change such as “tech should be more equal” and “cops shouldn’t kill Black people”.  The Shadow Movement put a lot of people into essentially a modified state of hiding, when communicating openly on a public medium such as Twitter became untenable.  

So one of the first goals of a transition needs to involve bringing them back onto the infrastructure while removing the fascist attackers. We need to bring back the banned independent activists, victims of the sex worker purges on many of these platforms, and feminists who were kicked off specifically in the 2013-2015 timeframe when lots and lots of women’s accounts were being banned and taken off the map, never to return, as well as the number of people of color who have been banned from defending themselves against racial terrorism. We need to make an environment where it is safe to organize online again. Recovering these comrades, many of whom we simply let fall through the cracks as we did nothing to stem the bleeding, and returning their platforms, is essential for the work. We will need to aggressively try to use the opportunity to clear internet platforms for use by friendly forces. Efforts must be made to get as many people back as possible; many of these individuals have had a disproportionate impact which led to their forced ouster in the first place, and they will be key leaders going forward. What would bringing back 10,000 of our best organizers look like? The level of impact, were we not being continuously suppressed by organized fascists, would be immediate.

(See, the changes that we make to moderation under democratic leadership need to be capable of making ethical *distinctions*. One of the many problems with the existing systems is that it tries to moderate in a vacuum, where nothing means anything and thus is the same as anything else, for example, “I’ll kill you” and “Stop killing us” are categorized equal, as well as “I’m racially terrorizing you” and “you’re being racist to me and I’m responding”. Fascist nihilism and sadism has ruled moderation. But WE the people, are capable of understanding that speech that pertains to improving basic positive outcomes for the human race — equal health care, equal wealth, equal rights — is different than speech that promotes taking away human rights, and killing innocents, and so on. In words, fascists get no platform on the People’s infrastructure, point blank. ) 

We touched on this briefly earlier, but I think it’s worth zooming in on. I tried to organize tech workers for 10 years so I can tell you:  programmer participation will not be won by appealing to their ethics and morality. They are too used to bootlicking, they are too obsessed with their own status and their own position — what lies at the bottom of this is that they think they are very clever for figuring out how to escape from the hell that is America and other countries right now, that they have found a way to escape the downfall of the country via capitalism, and that they think they are oh so smart for being better than everyone else in their generation. That is why they act as they do; they must be shown that their fate is bound up in everyone else’s. So I believe you will see that the second shit gets real, the vast majority will insist they are good liberals; and be cooperative enough for the time being as long as they don’t think that they’re about to have an opportunity to be richer than the OTHER programmers, at which point, all bets are off. They must be made to understand that inequal distribution of wealth is not acceptable, and that we ARE running under a different system now. 

Despite potential challenges, re-securing the technical workforce from the grasp of tech fascists, or even some sizable piece of it, would be an incredible boon. The entire technical workforce in America has been hijacked by the enemy party, and we have actually never had a democratic technology ecosystem. To be able to have that side of the workforce be able to go to work on essential technology projects for the People, such as making all content that is currently behind a paywall and involves some kind of signup, available to all, would be huge. No more Netflix + Kindle + Hulu +New York Times subscriptions; everyone can have everything. This is 1000% economically feasible and it is also the right of the People, who have decreasing access to their communal contribution as the JSTOR model that Aaron Swartz fought so bravely has proliferated across the web. 

When we are speaking about really major and discontinuous innovations in the industry, we always talk about AI and the Metaverse and autonomous combat and so on; but what about the innovation that will come from moving the industry from control under fascists to putting it under democratic governance? This is a seismic shift, a wonderful shift, an unpredicted shift, and it immediately puts so many fantastic opportunities on the table. Again: we have never had an industry that isn’t being run by these sadist psychopaths. While fully democratizing apps and turning them into utilities will, from a technical perspective, take some time, we can take the immediate steps of removing fascist control and increasing accessibility and access to all content that is currently being hidden behind any number of marketing behaviors that are being generated by the AI in a public relations software. 

We tend to think that we have so much access to the world’s data… but do we? Everything requires a different account, user name and password, a different plan. The vast majority of academic work is behind very expensive paywalls. While we give a constant stream of data to Facebook, it never gives us back any of the insights gained from amassing the data into a monopolistic silo. Information has, instead of being made open, been gathered together according to corporate and institutional interests and monetized. We are used to thinking of the internet as democratizing information, but in this hellish instantiation, its far more likely that information is being held back.  

The venture capitalists keep crowing about what massive “efficiency” improvements are going to come to your workplaces (to replace you), as AI and robots and web 3 and crypto become “game changers” which VCs expect will dramatically improve human performance (for corporations), but sitting right there is this huge online disparity in access, and this world of extremely fragmented access, and just releasing that, without any additional building of tools, simply some elegant independent interfaces built from open APIs into datasets like the Netflix streaming service and the Kindle library. What if we just…. let everyone see all of the content? I would reckon that this alone is enough to make a huge change in the people and significantly invigorate them. That alone could give us the massive bang for the buck that VCs are often driving for, while we go back to the drawing board of how we got here in the first place and how to get somewhere better.

To that note, the first major change thing I would move towards is free access to all major media, newspaper, music libraries, academic catalogs, and so on, and make it available to everyone, without an account needed. This is the bare minimum we are owed from the industry that we have not only supported but supported them into the stratosphere… until they became so high they have had this much control of us. 

I think there’s just an absolute world of things that could be accomplished, but those would be the first couple that I would focus on: immediate redistribution of cash stores into those areas which are most likely to cascade into greater social change; freeing the industry itself from fascist control and fascist grip, giving us the ability to begin reclaiming; getting progressive voices who have been banned or hunted for political reasons back online; and providing truly free and open access to all of the content we have that is currently being stored to drive subscriptions and email lists and us in general, using a million different services; they promised streaming video with the advent of Netflix would be cheaper and easier; now you have to have and pay for 12 different channels just to watch a small number of TV shows. The full Kindle library, which currently charges quite a bit of money per book, is of absolute interest in the movement to democratize information.

The tech industry is arguing that the nation is stagnant and weak; which is funny because tech, which could have contributed to the achievement of not just living wage but comfortable wage across its companies and the country, has instead created a momentous wealth gap between the tech class and the “gig worker” economy and depressed warehouse workers. In neighborhoods it touches, the demographics flip to be majority white and people of color are chased out of their housing and home. The tech industry says that America isn’t “innovating” anymore, but what about the fact that information is more scarce than ever, that education discrepancies remain enormous, the student debt crisis is still a crisis, and tech has stood by and let 1 million people die of COVID while it doubled its profits, driving American citizens deeper into poverty? How are we supposed to thrive under these conditions, the tech industry wrapped around everyone and everything, extracting extracting extracting, time labor money energy creativity possibility and change? 

There’s so many other truly exciting things to think about when we think about having a technology industry that is owned and controlled and *of* the People, rather than, again, a small, ghoulish group of fascist sadists that has maintained an ice grip on the industry since the 90s (a16z x PayPal Mafia). Having services, products and entire startups and companies operating as democratic utilities, is a beautiful dream. A technology practice that was returning and spreading wealth rather than hyper concentrating it. A way to divert funding that is current going to building bullshit and death machines like these ridiculous Mars missions and autonomous drone swarms, and put it to work on more important programs that are decided by the people. 

So, there’s lots more here to keep following down which I look forward to doing with you more on this blog. It is, indeed, a sick sad world, but even I, the most hopeless of all, still find it worthy to think about the possibilities, as well as to make an argument that the tech industry makes an ultimately good target for any action aimed at reclaiming hijacked infrastructure and making a seachange in this country and world. I don’t think it is possible to gain actual democratic control in this country, or in the world more broadly, without attacking the technology industry. Further, I believe the tech industry and America are substantially separate entities, and that means that there must be special care and considering, study and planning, that must be put into this matter. 

My final argument, is that reclaiming the tech industry, is fully in line with broader, fundamental transition of power to the People, whose government and financial system lies highjacked, caustic and strangled; the sense of economic urgency grows deeper by the day. Not only that, but because tech has an outsized and disproportionate role in social movements, and most importantly, in keeping them down.. because of this, obtaining this infrastructure offers a substantial boon to the goal of a domino effect both in America and in the cities and countries that have been oppressed by her. Reclaiming even a few small pieces of infrastructure, could cause a cascading failure scenario to happen, meaning that it is a great avenue to begin a fundamental overhaul of the political and economic system. Essentially, any successes in battle with venture capitalists, will provide an extremely strong foothold to repeat the same process in other entities that stand between us and victory, us and freedom.