Silicon Valley Has Gone Dark

This is an official bulletin!!!! 

In a salvage mission to see what is out there that could be allied into the tech resistance, I have completed an informal survey of the state of tech reporting. I am qualified to do this because I have a strong background in tech PR before leaving the industry, established and edited the largest body of tech critique in history, Model View Culture, in the last bubble, and I have participated in hundreds of anti-tech actions over the years. Also there’s the six books of material that is published for free on this blog, make sure to check out all 150 articles, all of them pertinent and relevant, and designed to be enduring systems critique. End of advertisement. 

It is as a purveyor of a free and independent press and a long term critic of the industry, that I tell you: Silicon Valley has effectively gone dark and we will be getting little to no real information out of that industry. We can no longer trust almost any of the information that we are getting out of the industry that cannot be materially independently verified. Salt to wound, most of the “critical” voices in tech seem to not be aware of the most significant developments in the field, in particular the extreme imperial and colonial outward growth, the development of dozens of weapons startups, the establishment of settlements in a dozen countries, and the transition of venture capital into a sovereign power. As well as the way AI is being used as a global labor wrecking ball to destabilize jobs and bring them under the management and administration of venture capital through gig work, increased global competitiveness, automation and seizing control of core corporate infrastructure. 

It is these most critical elements that are missing in almost every piece of tech critique or tech critical content, these elements that are missing from almost all mainstream media, these elements are missing in social media discourse about technology. And even then, the bit that we can materially establish, is from the meager public record that does exist. 

Everything that we see about Silicon Valley, is going through and controlled by venture capital hands and what they want us to see, on platforms they own and control, whether that be social media like X, their growing media network of podcasts and global events, or major traditional news outlets that have been purchased by tech billionaires. There is no legitimate tech press in existence now and there has not been since early in the second bubble, where the rash of industry publications had venture capitalists and their startups as their sole funding. There has never been a good tech press, but the status has devolved significantly, as venture capitalists now rely almost exclusively on their own platforms, and are able to infinitely spawn podcasts, newsletters, crypto culture ops, a dizzying array of events, etc., and have mainstream outlets in their pockets. 

Venture capital maintains a culture of fear around dissent; many of the sharpest tech critics I knew in web 2.0 faced nonstop harassment, abuse and death threats. To this effect, almost none of the good people I know from web 2.0 are still operating now, and there is a new rash of tech critics, backed by tech money in almost all cases, who have no idea what they are talking about and consistently making bad calls in venture capitalist’s favor — I.e. Calling last year that artificial intelligence and crypto were both over, silly, unserious, as well as the metaverse and web 3.0 broadly, which has included the military build-out which is so throughly ignored. The ongoing painting of venture capital as frivolous even as it pushes a hostile financial system in the global south, sets up settlements in a dozen countries around the world, and deploys dozens of new weapons startups into combat zones as an imperial force, is truly remarkable. Nor did any of these people retract, re-issue statements, and change. Instead, the new rash of tech critics busies itself with clout seeking and not research. 

Most concerningly, there is no culture or stand point of investigation into the industry, and the technical nature of the industry also makes it very difficult to do any investigation whatsoever by anyone who isn’t deeply experienced in the field or has the guidance of someone who does. There is a manufactured unapproachability to the subject because the type of people who do conduct independent investigations, find it difficult to break into this area; even though it is not intrinsically harder to understand than any other field, it is the learned technical illiteracy and learned hopelessness about learning tech, that venture capital has worked extremely hard to maintain; they benefit from no one feeling like they are qualified to open up the curtains and have a look outside the castle. 

A16z, the biggest and most powerful venture capital firm, and its boss, Marc Andreessen, have often referred to itself as a media company. And they have now taken full control of their destiny, with a giant explosion of media out of its vast networks of startups as well as its core funds. 

This puts us at an incredible disadvantage when it comes to fighting them. And the things that can be accomplished in the dark are very different than those which must face the light. Venture capitalists have secured this state, this state of no-information, of no-critique, this monopoly over tech media, over decades. This doesn’t happen in a vacuum — this is a result of two decades of suppressing and terrorizing dissent, of squashing independent media, of maintaining a monopoly on social media platforms, of buying the media directly out, out of terrorizing dissenters into silence. The hostile takeover of Twitter by a small number of venture capitalists — a16z among them, though this was not reported on much, weird — is perhaps the inevitable crown on this trajectory; this fundamentally compromises global communications as we have already been able to see with ongoing interference in resistance efforts for Palestine on the platform, not to mention the collaboration of Twitter’s new owners with Israel on a number of dimensions. 

In the latest incarnation of their forceful efforts to control the conversation and cultural production, they are directly targeting liberal and leftist audiences, presenting the false impression of a powerful “woke mind virus” elite and an “anti-tech” left — hilariously, the DEI they speak of  threatened their companies only in the form of… demands for mild reform, such as hiring a few more women, how about it?!. But no. Percent of VC funding to women remains at a lousy 2% and representation of women in the industry has actually dropped over the last 10 years. Cool!!  

So there has been a drastic culling just in the level of tech critique production that is being done at all, especially as many of these publications — take Buzzfeed, most notoriously, were originally funded by venture capitalists, who put their hand too close to the fire. And as they themselves radicalized over the years, the centralist liberal sites they had founded, no longer reflected their values. It is perhaps more true to say that the venture capitalists radicalized, than the other side. They have outgrown the politics of younger and more innocent days, and this has required a reshaping of the media landscape to accord with it. 

While certainly I especially am quick to jump to blame “our side”, as this is all that we can control or influence — it must be acknowledged that this silence, this lack of insight and visibility, this lack of meaningful materialist critique, this lack of reporting, was carefully secured by this small group of venture capitalists, acting in a coordinated way across decades, to destroy tech critique. This is the first time that I’ve seen a near-total information blackout, with nearly nothing outside of VC press releases and their owned platforms — it is frankly eerie. It turns out that the silence of fascism is something that is manufactured and secured and patrolled and defended and fought for. 

The implications of this are, for one, that any tech resistance that does begin to percolate and appear, is going to be a highly visible target for retaliation. For this reason, it is my advice that tech critique and resistance goes underground, to rely very little on the traditional vessels of the past, particularly media jobs and non-profits. Venture capital is excellent at neutralizing these vessels and thus it becomes recommended to change tactics. The need for *actually independent* tech critique is abundantly clear — not tech critique that relies on platforms owned by venture capital, and that unfortunately includes social media, or funded by venture capital, which includes the large rash of projects in Pierre Omidyar’s “Reimagining Capitalism” series, pushing reformism and bolstering, well, tech capitalism of course. For all PayPal Mafia activity, Omidyar has funded some reformist bullshit, containing it, watering it down, keeping it under control. There are no “good tech billionaires”. All communications platforms have been compromised and that requires us to work in new ways. It is also essential that materialist information and framing be prioritized. 

But most importantly what this tells us is that the time for analysis has come to a close, and the focus needs to move to action, in direct confrontation with the venture capital threat, with the specific goal of overthrowing it. We could waste our time with more and more “critique” and “analysis” , but what is needed is *intelligence*, is material information on the threat, what is needed is the creation of material strategies that pursue that goal, rather than aiming speciously at “critique” and the never-ending tsunami of AI philosophy, which plays directly into their hands. There is no more question as to the direction of the venture capitalist soul, on which much of prior work hinged: could we avoid the worst futures, could they be convinced to reason, could we work within their limits and bounds and platforms to secure reform sufficient. And the window for that has certainly closed and the experiment for that has certainly ended and conclusively. It’s a no. Via active engagement in a fight with venture capital, we regain even a scrap of ground in our battle with them, a battle that exists whether we have fought in it, or even acknowledged it.

Time to dance in the dark.