Tech Is Leaving The Nest and Hurtling Towards America

The fundamental recipe for tech is growth. Everything is about growth. Growth underpins the physics of the industry itself; Moore’s Law, 10x, the 25% returns that tech seeks, the dynamically accelerating rate of data collection, the nature of replication itself. 

Despite its tremendous influence over our lives, tech began… building tech companies, and that is to say, corporations for which the primary product, is the software itself, computing-related hardware (servers, phones, personal laptops), databases, surveillance software, networks, distributed systems and so on. But the moniker “tech industry” has been far more of an artificial distinction that anyone has been led to believe, as VCs began diversifying as soon as their financial stability from 90s-era tech companies was established by dot com exits. But these early forays into other industries, of course, took the backseat on the world stage, and were in deep development while consumer plays like Facebook and Twitter, and Amazon and Apple, took the spot-light as the “face” of the industry. 

One of the biggest changes we are seeing in venture capital right now is the surfacing and expansion of their investments in pretty much every fucking field, industry, vertical you can imagine. Amazon now provides on-demand general virtual healthcare. There are VCs, firms, angel investors dedicated exclusively to developments in genetics, in biotechnology, in life extension, in virtual healthcare. We are now building rockets to space, and moving seriously into weapons production. There are even startups for adoption and foster care, housing and home buying, mining, ocean exploration, schooling.

What you are seeing is these investments, which they have been making for ages, begin to burst from the ground as development and time passed yield fruits and many of these investments are going into production and scale; the broader world has yet to even find out about this massive expansion in scope.

Increases in capital and leverage and development of the technical ecosystem, plus the decay of America, has now made it viable for tech to play with the world on a very physical dimension, one that it has primarily interacted with on the level of city destruction, such as Oakland and San Francisco and rapidly, Miami and Atlanta. Tesla and SpaceX have been the hyper-publicized first forays in these worlds, and behind them, rears aggressive moves into healthcare, the supply chain, and particularly in the factory and manufacturing space. Amazon just announced a new service for on-demand telehealth from the Amazon homepage itself, some of the most valuable real estate on the internet. Amazon itself has been heavily invested in robots for every stage of the process, including delivery; they ramped up their investment significantly after union activity among workers in the warehouses. An entire host of companies under a16z have been building software for warehouse management as well as better factories, as well as startups that are recruiting former military personnel to staff the types of jobs an industrial build out requires.  

People don’t understand that the technology industry, despite playing such an outsized role in life over the world, from an economic footprint, is still very small. Very, very small. Its impact over our financial system, our global footprint, our communications mechanisms, our social lives, is so profound and unmistakable that we perceive it as omnipresent and limitless; rest assured, venture capitalists perceive themselves to be a very small industry and one that actually lacks for money, as they are trying to build an empire. You need to put yourself in their shoes and actually look at the world through their eyes: if you want all of the money, and all of the power, do you perceive the tech industry as being large in that picture? No. There is so much to conquer. When you consider all the money in the world, is Silicon Valley tech a major player? No, it isn’t. The VC machine consumes; and its consumption is about to significantly increase. What it needs in order to create its next order of magnitude growth, is to expand and take over these other sectors; at this point, referring it to as the “tech industry” is a misnomer and a dangerously misleading one, as it suggests a natural limit to their scope; this minimizes, disguises, conceals, etc. At this point we should be calling it the “VC state”, or if that is too far for your sensibilities, the “VC industry”, which is also obscuring but at least directionally closer. 

The automation is not an effort is not to get rid of labor, as regardless of what stage of the empire they are building, they will need low-paid workers for it; rather, they seek to crush labor and depress it to the deepest levels of humiliation, helplessness, and desperation; their goal is to be able to command labor and move it around and formulate it and arrange it and monitor and surveil it and perform experiments on it according to their will, something they have been practicing... on software engineers! VCs will automate workers according to their own design, and are rapidly ascending the cycle of building, automating, building on top of automation, automate that, etc.  

There are a lot of unemployed people and a lot of employed workers that aren’t making much money and don’t have benefits, so tech is in a prime position to scoop up huge quantities of low-paid labor from other industries. Some would think this is such a big transition, but tech employs GIANT numbers of low-paid workers, and is very adept at handling them through a combination of a gigantic wage gap, destruction of local communities and displacement, inflation, and notably unique here, through the “bubble” business model, which is NOT an organic element, but rather a pattern that VCs use on micro and macro levels to make changes in the economy, the distribution of wealth and work; again, they are MARKET FIXERS, their innovation is a comprehensive, concious methodology, for gaining choke holds over industries and workers and towns, for centralizing and singularly ruling data: it is an INCREDIBLY efficient machine for extraction and control, an INCREDIBLY efficient way to extract wealth from the lower classes. 

What seems to be a significant departure from their MO, is really not. What is novel about the technology industry is its *operating method*, and specifically the innovation of the tech venture capital model, which is primarily a financial instrument/structure, a fascist capitalist structure that is in no way *necessarily and uniquely* germane to the specifics of what it is making. It has built “the internet”, broadly, in the past, but there is nothing about the model that built the internet, that cannot be generalized. 

I’ve covered this more extensively elsewhere, but there are some economic innovations on the part of VCs that is the *true* characteristic of the “tech industry”:

Invading cities and rapidly gentrifying and causing displacement, depressing the working class, extracting money from real estate and land — strip mining it with incredible speed and competence. Authoritarian control and procedures across the entire industry — establishment of unification, uniformity, and hyper-concentration of power in a VERY small group of people (the industry is effectively run by a16z with critical supporting roles of the PayPal mafia.) Union busting from the ground up, helped by specific technological innovations for detection and surveillance. Establishing itself as the SOLE option of funding, so that all funding for the field is gate-kept through the same very small group of people. Establishing monopolies on data as well as aggressively mining data, as much of it as it can, as fast as possible (notably, this focus on data is going to be a huge competitive edge as it moves into other areas; they will capture all the relevant data of the industry in order to create a functional monopoly on it — data is its primary tool of control and dominance). 

So what is happening is not “the tech industry branching into other areas”; what is hurtling towards every industry in America is an economic weapon of great force, of singularity of intent, of economic violence, of fascist leadership, of uniformity, of monopolies, of strip-mining cities, of an almost soldier-like technical workforce run on authoritarian principles. This is an economic machine they have been perfecting for somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 years, and it is the most advanced capitalistic, fascist formation in the US. 

VCs now have the pull and the money and the political, economic and media clout/dominance, to enter these other areas aggressively, to provide the initial capital for the overtake of other industries, whose entry points are often much higher than software offerings. As VCs have stated, development of hardware and investment in factories and manufacturing, has been difficult because of the amount of up-front capital required. So what seems to be a departure from their MO, what is changing is simply the scope/scale of their work, but using the same economic formation, or rather, they are ready for their next step towards world dominance.

This is not the only way that VCs are leaving the nest. Tech has already left Silicon Valley itself, where it was so heavily concentrated for so long; even as they built out some more companies based in New York, SF dominated. During the pandemic it was “remote forever”;  today it is “make sure to move to Atlanta or Miami, because that’s where we’re building!” These newly anointed “tech cities” significantly expand tech’s geological footprint, as it needs to grow and feed on more cities, extracting labor and money from the city in order to expand its growth. Silicon Valley is declared dead, no longer the “center of innovation”; this means only that they’ve strip-mined it and effectively turned it into a company town (glamorized barracks), re-arranged the economic structure to ensure a perpetual source of extremely low paid workers providing the foundation of the more or less fully formed tech city. Now, using that base (including acquiring the vast majority of the land), they are ready to alight. 

Outside of the obvious existential threat to these cities, it’s worth remarking on the fact that the centralization of the tech industry and the tech base in Silicon Valley offered us, for a very long time, the ability to attack them on a very concentrated level. Now, we are dealing with a far more distributed situation than previous, and the levels of security are at a height they never were in the first or second bubble; additionally, due to heavy investment in weapons development, they now can hire their own independent security forces of mercenaries, ex-SEALs, special forces, CIA, secret service, etc, and also supply them with weapons that come out of a technofascist production system. So, we are in serious trouble right now as far as a movement that could effectively depose these psychopaths.

Another constraint on VC power has been the source of the money that they manage. In brief, most of the money that VCs spend fundamentally is from Limited Partners (LPs), and these represent a number of financial interests, such as pension funds, schools, hospitals, foundations, non-profits and so on. For these interests, VCs are a part of the overall financial portfolio, and part of that portfolio is allocated to “high risk” or related categories, and that is where the VCs fit in. 

This has become… constraining for VCs in multiple ways; obviously you have the issue of flow dependent on the LPs, you are operating in a very specific part of a portfolio, there is competition between firms for them; frankly, it is a “high risk investment” on the VCs part as well, to have their funding coming from these limited sources. As the people are made poorer due to tech’s acceleration, there is less money from sources like retirement funds and education to invest in VC. So, part of what you are seeing happening is that VCs are trying to significantly broaden their funding sources. It recently leaked that A16Z is going to launch a private wealth management service, which means they will be taking on investment from extremely monied private individuals, most likely an assortment of the worst war and economic criminals in the world, who also came into their vast wealth with open trickery and corruption and devastation. VCs are now aiming for giant weapons and defense contracts from the US government itself, as illustrated by their new “campaign”, American Dynamism, which represents a massive build out of the war machine at the the expense of the US government. Furthermore, the industry is developing very much to the point that it can simply… fund itself using the returns it obtains; it is my belief that their ultimate goal is financial independence from any other sovereign nation, and cryptocurrency is obviously playing a big role there. 

So, sovereignty, financial independence/freedom of regulation, devastating expansion and war on American cities, global war more generally, are all coming up big time with this one. 

I’ve been trying to understand the VC model for over ten years, and I have been doing that with literally zero support of economists in academic or the industry itself. Literally no one is maintaining an eye on huge sections of the technology industry — just absolutely huge parts of this apparatus are known to no one external to the core power structure. This is highly dangerous.

I grow desperate for people to start realizing what is going on, I am sick of fucking single-handedly having to provide the critical analysis around here, and I am DYING to share this burden. PLEASE consider joining the resistance against the VC state. THIS is one of the most important, if not THE most important, developments in our country at this time.

Wake up, wake up, whoever you are.