The Fake, VC-Engineered Social Movement for Crypto
I was going through my email and stumbled upon an email from Coinbase! Excellent. Happy to hear that Bitcoin continues to recover from the fake crypto winter, wink wink. We’re all gonna be rich!!
Coinbase is the mega crypto company from our colleagues at a16z. Coinbase has been at the helm of fighting regulatory battles over crypto. A recent spat between the SEC and Coinbase including both of them filing papers at each other, and Coinbase is taking a few moves to guard its position: establishing trading HQ out of the country, proactively suing the SEC, and stoking the “culture” around crypto into some kind of grassroots social movement to help propel its interests.
Within the email was a call to action, for readers to put the blue shield emoji into their Twitter handles, to show “support” of crypto in the face of the battle over regulation. The email encourages people to “Mint your Stand With Crypto NFT”…
“Make your voice heard by supporting the Stand With Crypto commemorative NFT collection and adding a shield emoji to your Twitter display name…
To extend your voice further, join Crypto435, our campaign to grow the crypto advocacy community and share tools and resources to help shape the policies and regulations that will impact crypto and web3 for years to come.”
The Crypto435 site consists of a sign-up link to stay informed about the campaign via text message, and the following:
“Policymakers in Washington DC and state capitals across the US are making decisions about the future of crypto. Their choices will determine how, when, and where YOU can build, buy, sell, and use crypto. We need to make sure they get it right, and that means making your voice heard.
We’re excited to introduce Crypto435, a grassroots campaign to advocate for pro-crypto policy. Now is the time to change hearts and minds in all 435 Congressional Districts across the U.S.”.
The page is hosted by Quorum, based in Washington, D.C., which makes software for public affairs, and includes campaign management tools for stuff like this. Quorum also helps customers implement campaign strategy, so it’s possible that they are planning to be pretty hands on with this Crypto435. Regardless, I think this is a moment to look at the political and cultural aspects of this as tensions spill.
The first striking thing about this was of course, the use of leftist organizational strategies from the early days of Twitter. We have put flags and other symbols in our handles, and changed our display names to show solidarity with various ACTUAL social causes, from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter to our support for specific victims of sexual violence and police violence.
The construct “I stand with _____” , was used heavily by leftists in social movements over the past decade, to uphold people and communities; it was NOT used on behalf of billionaire-owned technofascist corporations, even though it has been co-opted repeatedly by politicians over the years. You stand with Ferguson. You stand with Palestine. You stand with Occupy. You stand with Iran.
And now, you stand with crypto billionaires.
Wait what?
Indeed, one of these things is not like the others.
This is happening in the broader context of a16z and cronies (Founder’s Fund, Lux Capital), ongoing efforts to stoke a populist movement with the banner of reinvigorating America through venture capital, presenting the alm of “innovation” to the wound of capitalism. This campaign from Coinbase is not a one off but part of a broader strategy of these VCs to artificially generate a populist movement across the portfolio. We see this most prominently in “American Dynamism”, where VCs are engaged in an aggressive military build out under the augurs of a revitalization of American strength and innovation.
So, this is the development of that populist movement or the overall populist movement that a16z is trying to create, co-opting heavily ideas, words, strategies that we have had on the left over the past 10 years, and re-orienting them around crypto, venture capital, corporatist ideals, etc.
The venture capital role in culture wars has been under discussed. This is not wholly new to them. Most saliently, 4chan, 8chan and the hate groups of Reddit who were so effective in squashing the movements of the last cycle, emerged directly from venture capitalists and the tech industry, and were helmed in large part by technologists as these groups engaged in technical attacks like doxxing, DDoSing, hacking, SWATing, deepfakes and more. (By the way, we are due for an evolution in what these attacks look like with the arrival of AI and the Metaverse.) The entire trolling culture and the hacktivist culture, which fell pretty quickly into outright fascism, comes from venture capital and its startup ecosystem. Multiple top venture capitalists and tech elite have funded right-extremism movements affiliated with these hate groups as well.
Less understood is that venture capitalists have been very carefully studying activist movements for many years. For one, they were popping off all over in the Bay area as the venture capital industry grew to engulf the city. They were seeing these movements all over their data. Buzzfeed was actually founded as an effort to understand what makes activism and social progress / movements go viral, to figure out its underlying secrets and patterns, and then use those in order to improve corporate advertising. Their focus on social progressiveness during the heady days of 2012-2016 was not from some sense of altruism.
And yes, Buzzfeed was funded by a16z too.
So, they have very much been in the culture war. They were definitely taken aback by all those movements though, particularly the ones inside the industry, and particularly for those that called for a change in venture capital, redistribution of wealth, and a new system for managing technology development, all very much at the fore of the “techlash”movement from 2012-2016. The tech lash — its more extreme goals helmed by moi in independent press — caused Marc Andreessen to plunge into an existential confusion that he is only now emerging from, having spent the intervening years deep in political history, desperate to find SOME, ANY framework outside of just open fascism that could serve as a pretense for the major backlash he was ready to exhale and for his massive escalation of power and wealth.
As we speak, due to massive layoffs, women are being swept out of the field as well as every progressive interest group at tech companies; no independent groups have been left standing. Marc will punish the sector severely and representation is falling dramatically as he has been involved in multiple rounds of layoffs, including Twitter’s extremely brutal one. A major beef that Marc had with Twitter was that *its employees had (centrist) liberal values*. That is part of the extreme rage and unnecessary degradation that we saw during the transition. A public demonstration about what we do with woke employees.
Anyhow, what I see is a conspiracy that is really struggling to find its footing in asserting itself as some kind of broad based political movement. The fundamental issue is that their interest in crypto and the results of crypto will simply be more wealth inequality, benefitting no one but themselves, their cronies, the tip of the 1%, etc. So this means that they have to construct something around that, which might be palatable to the right wing in this and other countries. Which means they have to lie. Their favorite activity.
One message they are hoping will stick is “BiG FINanCE IS, THeY’Re TrYINg to SCreW YoU, We ARE ViCTims ToO”. Playing on this distrust that people have of the big banks and painting themselves as some kind of persecuted underclass, an underdog story; very typical obsession with persecution we see in fascism generally. They are trying to establish something like this ethos: crypto is for the man setting out to go his own way (as VC is literally doing), to escape a system that has been eaten up by the woke virus. Anything labelled woke virus (including Goldman Sachs lmfaooo) is bad, anything labelled crypto is good.
One of the problems here is that a lot of the Millennial right wing audience here is flat fucking broke just like everyone else. They might look to this as a financial opportunity; however, most people in these income brackets have to liquidate soon after purchase to handle things like the rapid upswing of inflation. They are not going to be able to hold the crypto long enough to see it change. Further, they just don’t have a lot of money to invest, so their outcome is unlikely to be life changing. If you put 100 bucks in Bitcoin, and it goes up by 5x (astronomical but we are well on our way), you still just have 500 bucks. Marc doesn’t even know what $500 -is- anymore.
Venture capital is trying to convince people it can offer people a different financial story, the problem is that, it literally just can’t deliver on that. With the total lack of financial literacy, people are gonna be putting a couple hundred dollars or even a few thousand into crypto, might THINK that they are going to become rich overnight, not really understanding the underlying mechanisms. And maybe it is on that hope that venture capitalists must dance.
Millennials are also becoming LESS conservative with time in a reversal of the unfortunate Boomer situation. The Boomers, who are somehow, NOT dead yet.
HOW
H
O
W
Fucking Henry fucking Kissinger is still alive. AND FUNDING STARTUPS.
Gen-Z grew up on Tumbler and shit and now their brains are fried, they are all anarchists and shit, so there’s not gonna be a lot there to work with. Only 20% of Millennials go red.
The way I would handle this is through subsidizing crypto investments, literally just giving away free cash and Bitcoin and seeding it in these communities. We’ve got about 70 million people in Millenial pop, and 20% of that is Republicans, let’s call it 14 million. You only need a small handful of that, the most extreme ones.
Let’s say there’s one extremist for every 100 people, which might be generous. Now we’re down to 140,000. That is more than enough to start a revolution with. For the low price of 4.2 billion, you can give each of them about 30k. And you give more to some of them and less to some of them depending on their social media prowess, etc., and obviously using Cambridge Analytica, Palantir, Facebook, our friends at the CIA, we should be able to do some really detailed analysis for how to properly seed the populist movement and who will be the most vulnerable.
The good guinea pigs put that in the crypto bank and as you keep raising the crypto prices, that’s gonna pay off for them down the road, because they put enough in it to make something out of it (in their world). Fiddle with the numbers if you please. Maybe just see if the Saudis are willing to pick up the bill. If these people got $30,000 from you, they will probably be willing to die for you, speaking to the collapse of our country which VCs are prepared to take advantage of fully.
Lots of things are becoming extremely cheap to VC at the same time things are becoming extremely expensive for everyone else.
DANGER ZONE.
At the end of the day, I feel like VC are going to actually have to present a financial package that works if they have any hope of getting this going. And the above should be illustration enough for you of how far their money can actually go when it is contextualized in the economic desperation of many Americans. AKA, very far. They can literally buy themselves a revolution, a social movement, a politician, and do, and have. They are already starting some new fascist outlets, which will offer fascist jobs, in a media landscape that has been decimated by capitalism, much of the media either owned by or funded by these same people that they have just recently shut down. This culture war is about to be blaring. The venture capitalists are truly entering the chat now.
At the end of the day, they are just doing what every other disgusting capitalist scum is doing: funneling and manipulating of the various energies that have come out of the collapse of the country, in whatever direction will get them richer. They are banking on crypto being some kind of hope, but I think that’s pretty out of touch. Lots of people rightfully perceive tech is part of the problem, based on their own experiences with the technology they keep sending us, which sucks ass.
People are upset and desperate about the state of things. As the economy worsens, people get more desperate. And tech is in the position of sitting right there and potentially being able to offer a stimulus check. But it won’t come organically through crypto. So if it comes at all, they’ll have to fake it just like all this other shit.
Well, enough of that. We’ll continue to keep an eye on the development of venture capital and specifically in regard to how it is trying to start and fight culture wars, create new radicalized communities, and start actual “movements”, using the strategies of the many movements they have killed.
All in all, I’m not convinced that they will be able to pull this off in a mainstream way. Decades of isolation in the tech sector means it’s hard for things to spill over. They are also billionaires in the position of trying to convince some extremely poor people that they are also victims of financial inequality. LMFAO. On the other hand, Marc Andreessen does not fuck up and he does not lose. And VCs are used to subsidizing their products for a time, for adoption, until they can put the screws to em.
Soon, we’ll talk about what this kind of social movement op looks like on a global scale, as America is far from the only target of their “grassroots” ambitions, and as they continue to invade countries that HAVE real movements in the global south.