Resisting Venture Capital Takeover: Towards Global, Distributed Resistance
If you have been a listener of mine for any time period you know at least in part the magnitude of the threat that we face in the venture capitalist, and that the venture capitalist is now among the #1 enemies of the American people, and of peoples around the world, particularly as it continues its imperialist expansion and colonialist mission with rapidly moving plans to gain independence from America and set up its own sovereign nation.
So, taking that for granted, the question becomes how best to fight them. This piece is about what groundwork we could lay to help bootstrap a take-over of the industry, particularly as all of the tech resistance from the 2010s has been destroyed by the powers that be. This is not comprehensive nor final but rather my thoughts on some of the early steps we need to take to get into a better fighting formation.
1. Build a global base to fight tech invasion of cities and countries.
Tech is currently building up its cancerous presence in cities across the globe and domestically. Miami and Atlanta are both under heavy attack from tech presence. Dublin is also being invaded. Detroit and Nairobi as well. And obviously El Salvador’s Bitcoin City bodes of a new tool in venture capitalist pockets: making biz-dev deals and worlds of promises to economically impacted cities and countries, weakened by colonization, imperialism and the CIA, in the global south. This is not disconnected by which cities in the US tech is targeting and its new strategies, which include offering what is essentially economic stimulus packages to local governance in, i.e., Miami. This is what they promised in the Bay Area and as you already know, what they actually dealt out was the death of the most vital centers of resistance, arts, culture, and Black and queer life, in the country.
While it is terrifying to see tech scale its approach to city domination in this new “Web 3” bubble, it also means that in each of those cities, there will be a new resistance forming, as it did in San Francisco and Oakland and the Bay Area in general; in each of those cities we saw prolonged anti-gentrification efforts, labor organization, anti-police violence efforts, and a number of protests and a number of organizations and collectives that specifically identified tech as a problem: the protests of tech shuttles and the “techie scum” propaganda that circulated the city in more hopeful times, are top of mind.
As tech is moving into these cities and beginning the process of displacement, labor abuse, implementing a new wealth gap, discriminatory hiring, purchasing land/property to extract from local citizens, and ramping up police violence, there will be efforts to stop it. This gives us an opportunity to give these newly attacked communities intelligence on what they are experiencing and what techniques have been used in other areas, who they are dealing with and what the attack pattern looks like, as well as build a global network of support. We have tons of intelligence on how these city invasions occur and reaching local communities with this information gives the opportunity for a GLOBAL movement where we are connecting affected folks who are experiencing these invasions simultaneously and yet are isolated from each other by geography, culture and language gaps, and lack of information symmetry. This also includes connecting the victims of global tech interference such as tech’s participation in Bolivia’s coup of Evo Morales; a great example of the tech/CIA affinity.
We are getting to a point now where we have a number of communities who have identified tech / venture capitalists as a specific and discrete enemy. Dublin is particularly compelling because it has been the subject of serious invasion by the British scum forever; they know how to resist an invading empire there and yet are new to the venture capitalist threat. While many anti-tech movements have been squashed, a global network could be a revitalizing force, and aim to provide group protection to communities newly under seige.
Some initial goals I could see here would be syncing of status so we have updated information on takeover attempts and could be able to start tracking and collating efforts in multiple areas — opening up communications channels for mutual support in resistance efforts. I think getting together some of the organizers who have fought this issue in the Bay area, and facilitate them in putting together some educational resources from different perspectives, could be pretty powerful for other communities. There is no need for each city to be re-inventing the wheel and finding out all of this information the hard way. There is no need for each city to do this alone, as they are not alone.
Things that might be useful would be knowing the history of how tech uses its workers as tools of gentrification; how tech works to manipulate local politicians; what strategies were used to take over real estate and obtain land ownership; which types of protests have been used in the past and which were effective; the basics of what a tech campus is and looks like; what a venture capitalist is and who are the specific people who are making this happening; what union-busting and other labor-busting techniques, as well as tax evasion schemes, have been used by the tech companies.
As tech companies become more and more global operators in every sense, we need to think about making our resistance a global resistance; encompassing every place that tech is reaching into and making enemies. We need to fight their decentralized toxic growth with a unified but decentralized resistance, as one body. This is, elementally, the only way we can successfully fight them. The opportunity to singularly stop them in one geographic region ended when tech used the pandemic as the excuse/cover to disperse.
One of the reasons they have been able to get away with this is because we have fought tech in a very single-issue way; we have individually chipped away at issues ranging from representation in the venture capital pool to sexual assault by tech executives, to citizen surveillance prompted by tech gentrification, and on and on; it is time to begin merging those separate interests in a general movement which is able to attack tech on a holistic plane.
2. Establish an independent technology infrastructure.
One of the biggest problems is that venture capitalists, working in a coalition including Larry Ellison, Elon Musk and a16z, have recently outright purchased Twitter and openly signaled their intentions to squash social movements on the platform, even as our movements lie crushed under the feet of these robber barons already. This should at least show you the extent to which they fear us; never forget that much of their strategy is driven by fear of -us- and they will never stop seeking to suppress us, for that reason.
Twitter was so valuable to this conspiracy because it has a captive global audience of the people who generate social movements and social progression. Many of them have been on Twitter for more than 10 years. 10s of millions of people are irate about the change in Twitter ownership and the broader shifts it represents. I wrote about this earlier; the take-away is that people want a new social media platform that is accessible to a mainstream, progressive audience and where it is safe to organize social movements, but we can’t have one, because the tech ecosystem is actually not competitive but rather a monopoly. Thus we are stuck on Twitter infrastructure, which has very literally been captured by the fascists.
People in the mainstream don’t really know that it is literally possible to…. Hire freelance software engineers outright and pay them to build things for us.
Right now, we have 0 viable social infrastructure for organizing social movements, that are secured from roving fascist groups helmed by venture capitalists. We don’t need to build something that can accommodate the world; but we do need an infrastructure that can support the core of the resistance and highly interested parties, that can accommodate a few 10s of million people, and that is ruthless about keeping fascist sickos out. If we accomplish that, we can be relatively moderation-light, if we are able to keep enemy forces out from the onset. It is extremely possible to create social media infrastructure tools that can scale to these numbers, if we are able to employ a team to work on it. It wouldn’t be overnight, but it is very possible that we could get at least an initial alternative up within a 9-12 month time period.
This is urgent because we can’t even talk to each other online anymore. Every single platform is directly owned and influenced by venture capitalists that have no problem throwing their weight around to crush social uprising.
One of the main reasons that social media networks are so difficult to run is because they have to support multi-billion dollar advertising ecosystems and constantly strive to return massive returns on investment to venture capitalists. They are fucking around with algorithms and manipulating the platform according to advertising and political wishes all the time. What we require is far simpler and can be far more stripped-down as it doesn’t hold as its primary function either providing disgusting rates of returns to the enemy, generating revenue off advertising, or manipulating the populace to the benefit of same. The best model for new social networks is simply a chronological, text-based timeline. It doesn’t even have to support a wealth of multimedia. We can have a minimal feature set. Anything we try to organize online at this point, is subject to being attacked by fascist terrorism. We must remove that element and establish a safe zone where these matters can actually be conducted.
3. We need an independent tech press.
It should be pretty obvious by now that any semblance of an honest and reliable tech press is over. The Intercept, which was funded by the PayPal Mafia, is in decline as it pulls funding and its bastion, Glenn Greenwald, moves on to yet more PayPal-mafia backed work and exposes himself as a VC bitch, in the light this time, eating venture capital ass in public and decrying the “wokes”; in a recent book by a billionaire a16z operative, Greenwald is described in glowing terms as a “revolutionary”.
LOL.
When VCs think you are are a revolutionary, it’s a pretty good sign that you are a fucking piece of shit and definite confirmation you are an op.
The Intercept has done its job of funneling tech-critical energies in the wake of PRISM and slowly bringing them back into the venture capital fold; now it has been abandoned and begs for money as the cash follows Greenwald deep into destabilizing Brazil’s media, economy and politics as venture capital looks to the global south in search of sovereignty.
The Atlantic is owned by tech. The Washington Post is owned by tech. Los Angeles Times and Fast Company. Buzzfeed is a VC experiment to engineer fake virality, totally in line with its recent ChatGPT implementation. “The Information” is an internal industry op funded by tech companies and VC, not a bit of genuine critique in the whole thing. Absolute moral depravity I do not know how the founder lives with herself.
Most concerning, venture capitalists are on a war path against the media that does exist, even where it is already corrupted; crying like little bitches that their empires have been jeopardized by mild criticism from the New York Times. Since tech is the only industry that is “thriving” in this country due to its natural inverse relationship with the national health, we can expect the vicious carve into media to continue. They would prefer: no media, and are actively in the process of neutralizing it — buying it up is very much part of that process and totally consistent with its MO: a huge reason why it was able to squash independent organization in tech was because it literally bought people out, and they sold out in droves for a pittance. Let that be a listen to you: most of the tech “activists” who got “the package” enjoyed 2 years of limelight, cash and fancy jobs, and now its over. Most of them will be effectively banned from the industry; good. They fucked us so bad for personal greed.
With tech being the only industry even in the position to launch and maintain media, we aren’t going to be looking at anything new much less honest, anytime soon. And all the indie media from the 2010s has been wiped off the face of the planet.
We need independent tech media that isn’t funded by venture capitalists immediately. We need that independent tech media to be staffed by economists, analysts and investigators with a deep sense of where we are in the tech capitalist timeline, so we can work to establish and scale an analysis of what is going on that people can connect to. There is so much information about venture capitalists that is not making it through their thick web of lies and orchestration and dominance of media. Very basic frameworks for understanding the politics of these technologies, are not making it through; thus we are in a position of needing to teach media literacy but do not have a platform to do so.
Getting an independent social network, and an independent technology press, is absolutely vital. We need this infrastructure as table stakes so that we can actually move forward. Right now we are sitting ducks and fascists are picking us off one by one as they have been for 10 years on Twitter. We need to set up digital and media space that isn’t corrupted by them and thus leaves the future of our work and organization in their hands.
4. Regroup Whatever is Left of Anti-Tech Movements
If you looked around today it would be easy to conclude that there had never been any anti-tech movements, for PRISM or anything else. But that isn’t true: it’s just that all of these movements, spanning everything from attempts to make tech pay taxes to equal access to the internet, have been squashed piece by piece by tech in various configurations ranging from buying up activists to unleashing fascist harassment mobs on Twitter to sinking entire communities to purchasing politicians. Fragmentation, careerism, non-profits, burn-out, all of these have been huge contributors to the loss of these movements.
I think we’re looking at basically totally re-constituting a movement; but part of that should include reaching out to as many people as we can from previous initiatives and see what, if anything, there is to salvage: some intel we can take on, a mailing list we could use, a few comrades that still have some fight in them, anyone who still might be trying to hold onto any kind of fort down, or have a line to anyone who does. Going into the CS schools should be a priority as well.
Frankly, I’m not sure how much is out there; this would be essentially a geological survey; I have seen first-hand how very quickly people move on from things, that faced with any failure they will just jump shift, as if this was all going to be handed to us in one motion. Nonetheless, some survey is indicated.
Barring that, we might very well be left trying to do an entire movement from scratch, but one that is re-oriented towards some more forceful central goals; like the unconditional halt of city invasion and artificial intelligence implementation; and the immediate re-distribution of wealth to communities that were bulldozed to make way for these empires. Or basically, the total and unconditional neutralization of the power structure in tech.
5. Make fighting venture capital a priority in labor movements.
I’ve written about this more extensively elsewhere, but will include here, that technology’s most recent developments have involved not only huge, destabilizing lay-offs, but the rapid deployment of artificial intelligence into the infrastructure. This promises to affect jobs, stability, pay and working conditions, for nearly every sector of society; it is coming online in tandem with automated robots and automated vehicles that are rolling out with speed and urgency in the supply chain. In words, we are entering a period in which the impact of tech on society will result in acute, defined pain and suffering for the labor force; this is an opportunity to capture the inevitable energies released and direct them back at their originators: tech, in acts of: revolution.
The obstacle to this is that most workers aren’t used to seeing the tech industry itself as a coherent enemy and reachable target. As a worker today, you are looking at both fighting your individual employer and their politics or policies, and the tech industry itself, which is hoping to bring as much wage depression, automation and instability as possible.
Within the industry, it’s possible that we will soon be looking at some of the first true labor impulses ACROSS the field with the advent of coding AI and with the stated desire of venture capitalists to reduce the compensation and stability of the programming workforce; if this does in fact provide a platform where we are seeing programmers beginning to actually organize, it is imperative that that be connected to larger struggles with tech-enabled work precarity and compensation depression.
This significantly includes building a worker’s movement that includes the massive outsourced programming contract force in Romania, in India and so forth; these workers are already getting absolutely fleeced in comp and are overworked even more criminally than they are in the US. While these workers have significantly less privilege than programmers here, it is vital that they be recognized in this fight as well, and this further serves the interests of establishing a distributed global movement to correspond to the VC’s distributed global empire.
One of the things I worry about is that workers do not recognize the threat that technology poses to them as its own monolith; in tech is where you will find the revolutions in the instruments of production that Marx discusses, and their links to the oppression and exploitation of workers. It’s important because the SOURCE of these changes is not coming from the singular company that a worker is at in most cases; but rather, the giant technology apparatus that is putting these technologies into play on the field; or rather, developing and aiming these economic weapons at workers.
Welp, we certainly have our work cut out for us, but if I were putting together a new movement to confront the technology empire in THIS moment and in THIS era, that is where I would start.
The most salient design point from all of this, is that in the past, our movement against tech has NOT been global and it has NOT been distributed, and it has NOT kept pace with tech imperialism, and has NOT succeeded in creating a unified multi-issue resistance. We need to change our approach, to be global and distributed because that is how they are taking over the world; we cannot fight them using single issues, single formations, geolocation-locked strategies. It is a damn waste of human life in many ways, for us to attack this piecemeal and as new, each time tech creates another rupture with its various excesses, extractions and abuses.
If they are leaving the nest we have to as well.