The Tech Industry is a Fascist State, And They Have Declared War on Us
We have been in a war with venture capitalists for many years now.
In Oakland, in San Francisco, in the East Bay, the movements against gentrification, labor exploitation and surveillance were fights against technofascism — the technofascism that was arming and funding the police terrorizing these communities, that was building the surveillance systems for installation in these vibrant centers of life, culture, community, and notably, with a strong resistance history.
When we were fighting for these cities, it was against tech invasion, not Republicans. It was against the highly paid tech “workers” they were sending in overwhelming droves, armed with huge stacks of stolen cash, to take over housing and buy up businesses and force long term residents out. They are now poised to do this in over a dozen major cities around the world, including Atlanta, another major center of Black life in America, and Dublin, which already has a giant history of ruthless invasion and colonization. When AirBnB was silently re-arranging the economics of the landlord criminal racket, that was technofascism. When we were fighting OPD, we were fighting a technofascist-armed, militarized police force, with significant ties to tech money. When our protestors were being tracked down, arrested and sometimes killed by the FBI, it was tech that was doing it — they used social media data, they used geolocation data, they used facial recognition technology, all supplied by tech; and when we fought that, we were fighting technofascism. When we were fighting against detainment of women and children in particular at the US/Mexico border, it was tech that had built and installed the surveillance towers.
Tech has been waging war on us for a long time; when are we going to show up to the battle field, taking them in their entirety not as “part of a system of oppression”, but as a unified, direct material threat?
You know all those hate groups that have now been swirling for years and terrorizing women, particularly Black women and other feminists/activists of various marginalizations? The hate groups that were consistently, consistently causing absolute havoc in movements ranging from women in tech agitation to digital feminist organizing, and eventually targeting protestors at anti-fascism rallies? Here is the truth about these hate mobs: they were all started by people in the tech industry, people in tech built these sites and also staffed them, programmers developed these techniques of digital terrorism; the archives demonstrate a disproportionate number of technical users and note overwhelming activity by technologists on these platforms. Reddit was started by technologists and was the absolute nexus and one of the first places where social-media mediated attacks begun. Reddit, straight from the Valley, supervised by tech elite and VCs, ran wild for years. How many lives did it destroy? How many movements did it put down through fear? And who were the first adopters of Reddit as well? Computer programmers. All consumer products for tech launch *to the technology industry* first. 4chan was started by a computer programmer, and even after it carved a path of pure destruction for years on end, its founder was hired at fucking Google, a reward for a job well done.
All of the women I was working with during these major movements of the past ten years, were terrified of this coordinated gang harassment. These mobs are often thought of as free-floating, amorphous groups of extremist Republications; they weren’t. There is a reason women in tech and rapidly, women in gaming were some of the first major targets of this style of terrorism. Because it was fucking men in tech who were these mobs.
The form of this wasn’t Republican; it wasn’t values-driven or Christian or patriotic, or even particularly issue-specific, it wasn’t about the government, it wasn’t about America. It was just… a hell-brand hybrid of Nazi-ism and “trickster-ism”, of absolutely rank superiority and authoritarian attitude, of malevolent and sadistic violence. It was absolutely noxious organized FASCISM, and it was coming out of tech.
How much damage do you think that attacks like those from Reddit, 4chan/8chan, etc. have done to our movements over time? I can give you a list right now of over a dozen women in tech in visible activist roles, who were literally forced to flee their homes due to these attacks. Girls in the industry were terrified of catching the attention of these groups. They could descend any moment. It was coming from inside the house. One of the VC practices even had its own site, Hacker News, a sort of hand-grown voting and comment site for technical “workers”. HN was full of fascism, rank colonialism, violent misogyny, and was allowed, by VCs, to openly attack any woman in the industry with no consequence. The flavor of the harassment, as I remember it, had the normal level of sexual abuse, but it was beyond sexual harassment: it was a display of absolute hatred and wrath, it was authoritarian, cruel, it objectified its targets as animals, it advocated for immediate death for these… dissenters. It was fascists terrorizing anti-fascists out of their corporate fascist superstructure. They didn’t want women to go back into the kitchen and have babies, they wanted to violently rape and kill them. As if we didn’t have obvious proof enough, some of the top top people in the industry have been caught actively funding these hate mobs.
We have been fighting tech fascism for years without even realizing where it all was coming from.
As we were fighting and getting put down, they were coming into full domination of the media. They have started alllll of the online media sites, and they have bought up all the legacy publishers — Atlantic, Washington Post, Time, LA Times, Fast Company. As an aside, did you know the Buzzfeed started as a way to detect and notify the company of viral activist activity? Fascinating history there that goes wayyyy back and has an entire lineage around figuring out how to stop the internet from being used as a revolutionary platform.
They seek total domination and control, the level of authoritarianism they represent is, to my knowledge, unmatched in American corporate history. They have implemented a global surveillance state with almost no interference whatsoever; they are reaching deep into the people of other countries to extract data from them in the new data economy where they can wield that data as a weapon without anyone who can stop them. An all seeing eye that violently and invasively seeks as much access to people as possible, which it then destroys with pedophilia and bullying and artificial creation of misery and anxiety, literally INFLICTING mental illness on people; and it is a one-way mirror; the benefits of that giant collection of data to society could be immense, allowing us to see aggregate trends and explore wide-population phenomenons like pandemics, like contagious social phenomenons like eating disorders and suicide, that would help us detect which communities needed help.
But this data is not meaningfully exposed back to us; it is sold off for advertising but is primarily just held captive by the fascist surveillance infrastructure — one that is privately held by fascists, the same fascists who have been arming the cops and actually developing *independently* its own versions of technology-enhanced “super cops” for sale. Who was a first investor in Facebook? Peter Thiel. Palantir is in many ways a natural outgrowth of Facebook and has explicitly used its data in multiple projects. It is an explicitly militarized formation for sale to intelligence agencies, of which tech has increasingly been the backbone of. Thiel also helped fund Cambridge Analytica, which promoted ideas developed by… a Palantir intelligence asset, and collaborated on use of Facebook data together. Weird!
Facebook is the data core of the technofascist empire. Makes sense. Facebook is literally dystopian fantasy. What is more fascist than trapping us in a corporate-controlled, literal panopticon that literally controls our interactions with each other, that watches it, decides what we should see of the world, manipulates our feelings and social connections, runs wide-area population studies without consent or ethics, and barely shows us any of that data ourselves? Our data, huge amounts of data that belongs to humanity and that was generated by humanity, is disappearing into a vortex controlled by a tiny group of people, being weaponized by intelligence agencies and industry interests, and returned to humans in the form of oppression, election-engineering, spying, infliction of mental illness, and manipulation of information.
And then there’s the outright violence. Tech has moved aggressively, under the guidance of Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen of a16z, and begun a massive build-out and new age of tech weaponry, under the banner of “American Dynamism”. Tech isn’t new to weapons manufacturing, obviously, and I will point out just a few historical facts to help contextualize. IBM gave computers to the Nazis. The Manhattan Project was developed in large part by computer scientists; even Grace Hopper contributed code. All of the programmers and engineers on the project, except for a scant few, KNEW what they were building, decided to excuse themselves from the morality of it, and KEPT GOING even after Germany was no longer a threat; knowing what the target would be. Our industry truly begins there, in the Manhattan Project, where many of the techniques that are used at giant tech companies today, such as compartmentalization, are still practiced. The very foundations of our field are mass death. Famously, NASA hired a number of Nazi scientists, engineers, etc. in the inception of these programs; they would intersect with early Silicon Valley in numerous ways. The beginning of “modern” Silicon Valley as we know it, began with the innovations of a small semiconductor lab in Mountain View, whose leader was a eugenicist, race science proponent and all-around anti-Black psychopath. And of course, the industry is now led by a combination of out-fascists, and fascists who pussy foot around in public keeping up the veneer that Silicon Valley is just “an industry” as opposed to a burgeoning fascist state which has a direct and continuous fascist lineage and a consistent fascist core of some of the most extremely rich, extremely dangerous fascists in history: technofascist billionaires.
There are a huge number of people in the technology industry who are either overt or closet fascists. I worked at one company in around 2012-2013 and there was an actual factual Nazi who worked there. And not only that, everyone KNEW he was, because he would get two beers in him and start screaming filth about Black people and spewing slurs. He also sexually harassed several women in the office and was consistently talking sexually about them to other male engineers. I tried to get him fired repeatedly, to the point of yelling at corporate peers; no dice. The idea of “free speech” — where free speech means only the ability to terrorize everyone around at will, and as a cover for a huge range of heinous acts of mass terror, is strongly embedded inside the industry culture.
It is incorrect to think of venture capitalists as just another type of businessmen. These are not just industry titans; these are colonizers, they are invaders, they are empire builders, they are destroyers of worlds, they are fascists, devouring, vile, armed to the teeth, with a mission to do what they are doing to us in America, everywhere in the world. These are people who openly say India is better off for colonialism, who wax poetic about Christopher Columbus who used genocide to conquer “America.”
I’ll let that sit with you, that genocidists are aspirational for the most powerful VC firms in the world.
Tech is… necrotic. It rots things. It sucks life out of things. It… spreads. They are not industry, they are a fascist state. Their values are not Republican, not even extremist Republican, which is how many have them pinned. These people absolutely do not love America and do not want to be part of America. There is open scorn for America in Silicon Valley. She is regarded as a nuisance and more increasingly, a danger: regulations, laws, fines, the SEC, the FTC, the congressional testimonials, taxes. Silicon Valley hates all of these things and feels America and the American people have no rights over it. Silicon Valley hates to be fucked with; forcing Zuckerberg to testify was probably a huge wake up call for them and a major event accelerating their nationalist isolationism and their sense of themselves as a sovereign entity actually in opposition to America. Silicon Valley wants no regulations, and it is sick, frankly, of having to deal with the laws and regulations everywhere, years ago a writer for my magazine highlighted the lawlessness of the industry and its willingness to skirt local and global regulation. This is bullying cities into submission and buying local politicians, signing agreements they never fulfill to get significant breaks in the taxes. They are openly scornful. They hate labor laws, and have consistently been involved in tech-enabled union busting, such as the Amazon tool for detecting which warehouses are most at risk of unionization. They are aiming for a zero regulation environment and America has become too constraining on its ability to grow.
When they look at America, they see something that needs to be replaced, dominated, subverted, taken over. Something that should be strictly managed and enforced by… a police state, a surveillance state, as a labor colony for its higher empire, a possession, a resource to mine… a source of funding to extract by any means necessary. A round of funding for their real “startup”: a growing fascist state needs money. Lots of money. The Valley is literally obsessed with finding ways to “get out of America” / escape her grasp. Over the years there’s been an obsession with sea-steads, with actual pilots initiated by Google, that would allow the industry to operate from international waters. There’s the ongoing California succession fantasy. And of course, the space race, even if only intended as a tool in a cold war with communists (fucking AGAIN?!!?), represents the highest ambitions to fully escape the control of anyone, and instead lord over the earth from above.
Let’s just be real quick and go through the “Early Warning Signs of Fascism” checklist:
- Powerful and continuing nationalism: The tech industry considers itself to be its own nation, its own thing — not a part of America, its own empire. And the allegiance to that from the top of the industry to the line programmers, is complete. Their nationalism is hard to recognize because it is not a nationalism for America, it is nationalism for themselves as sovereign, and for the total dedication of everyone in it to building out, not an industry, but a fully functioning, autonomous state-within-a-state, now complete with its own military and currency. Once you start to think of tech nationalism as being about -itself-, not America, much more about how they operate becomes clear.
- Disdain for human rights. Oh god, where do we start? The brutal invasion and torture of low-income families, drug users and sex workers in the Tenderloin? The coordinated arming of police with advanced surveillance software and hardware to crush our most marginalized citizens? How about actively selling all kinds of different technologies into ICE, and doing nothing even when there was global, specific outcry about this enablement? In fact, doubling down? How about the Rohingya genocide? How about moving AirBnB, a known destroyed of cities, into the West Bank? How about total disregard for humanity in the collection and operation of its data, knowingly inflicting suffering onto users of even its most consumer-friendly products, like social media? You could write book after book after book about tech’s disdain for human rights. They are categorical human rights abusers and war criminals.
- Identification of enemies as a unifying cause. What enemies connect the tech empire and organize its members? For one, leftists. Tech in particular hates leftists and has played key roles in putting down leftist organization, in particular the anti-police violence movement and the tech feminist movement. Tech also unifies itself by distinguishing itself from low-paid labor — the actual working class is its scorned enemy, and this is apparent in everything from how contractors are treated and spoken about, to the bulldozing of housing for lower-paid workers, and so on.
And tech unifies itself by using AMERICA itself as an enemy; it is, again, widely regarded as holding us back from true glory and innovation. And particularly in the industry’s white supremacy, it builds up brown and Black communities as a unifying enemy that much be destroyed. I.e., the way VCs have talked about “cleaning up the Bay” for years, in direct reference to people (primarily of color) without homes, people with severe mental illness, people who are drug users and sex workers. The entire Bay area of techies views the Tenderloin and unhoused people (due in large part to tech gentrification) as a common enemy to destroy.
- Rampant sexism. Oh, for sure. Venture capitalists treat women like fucking animals. I knew, immediately, that something was horribly wrong when I entered the industry at 22. Women made so much less money, and almost none of them get venture capital funding, and they were openly scorned. In the office they treat women like servants and office girlfriends, and like animals. They hired girls based on their looks and their breasts. With less than 20% of the industry being women, they are constantly surrounded by men in the industry who -no matter what she does- will never view her as smart, competent, or anything like that. I would REALLY love to see stats on how many women end up getting passed around, sleeping with coworker after coworker, because we are literally used as free office-subsidized sex dolls.
There was rape everywhere in the industry, like a plague. Behind closed doors women passed on the names of the many serial rapists that adorned the highest ranks of the industry. I watched those men get meticulously, smoothly shuffled around when an issue came up: they knew this game. They were covering up the rape problem by intimidation, by control of the technology press and by use of NDAs and coercive settlements. It is literally budgeted into the industry, the amount of money you have to pay when one of your little psychos attacks yet another poor girl at the office. This wasn’t the simple misogyny we thought we were fighting — unconscious bias, lack of education and empathy, stereotyping, sensitivity and management training — it was the complex misogyny, cruelty of fascism, using rape and economic violence to put down even the smallest of industry reforms.
This of course, has extended into the products in ways that are extremely well-documented now: the way that women on its services are used as bait and terrorized and surveilled, fed to pedophiles and stalkers and domestic abusers. It inflicts eating disorders, body dysmorphic disorder on teen girls. It profits off sex workers while marginalizing the field and continually interfering with their businesses and ability to transact. Ad nauseam, tech has this one covered. These are extremely sexist people. They hate women, and it shows up through everything.
- Controlled mass media. COME ON, these people have gone on a multi-decade holy mission to own and control all of the legacy media and to start and have total control over their all-new digital media fleet. Think of all the following companies; they are not only all tech-owned, but in most cases were started or funded or both by one of a very small group of incredibly powerful people, most of them relating to a16z or the PayPal mafia: Buzzfeed, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat; further up I listed the huge number of tech billionaire-owned media. They control it all. It looks less monolithic because these are all presented as different companies, different buyers, different interests, different subjects, but they all trace back to the same exact source, and the effort to purchase, corrupt, build, manipulate media, by technofascists, has been unprecedented, uncontested, and totally successful.
- Obsession with national security: The tech industry has been 100% fully fusing with, not the government broadly (which they hate), but very specifically, intelligence agencies and border control (which they love). Tech has supplied ICE with every kind of technology you can think of, from data sources to surveillance equipment to literal guard towers at the border. You have just MASSIVE collaboration with the CIA, in particularly through the CIA’s VC firm, InQTel. The NSA has been named repeatedly again and again, most famously with PRISM, as collaborating with tech on large-scale surveillance operations. Tech is currently building out an entire category of new “security” platforms… for drones (read: weapons companies)!. They patrol their own borders with private policing hired from local precincts or just actively bought. Neighborhood “watch” apps? Amazon’s Ring? The obsession is absolutely there; it is defining.
- Religion and government intertwined. This one is harder to make the case for; recently tech has been talking about the birth rates and abortion, specifically in the context of weaponizing Republican talking points and linking them to tech innovation, but that is uncharacteristic and just part of election interference rather than any deeply held belief. So I can’t really characterize tech as religious in any particular form, tech does pride itself on atheism, but it is certainly something to keep as eye on, and I’m curious to investigate what types of subtle/systemic religiosity might be operating.
- Corporate power protected. Yeah, this really isn’t even worth diving into here, because its pretty clear that tech forwards corporate power as its highest ideal and wields huge amounts of resources to extend itself as a corporate empire and use it is an insulating feature as it grows. Corporatism, capitalism, all that, tech is fully originating from it.
- Labor power suppressed. You see this in soooo many places in the tech ecosystem. 10 years ago, tech companies were being caught union-busting contracted workers in the Bay area who were providing vital services in transportation, building maintainance, culinary, janitorial, etc. They have suppressed these workers not only through direct union busting but by MASSIVELY underpaying them WHILE gentrifying their communities, leaving labor in a very serious and precarious situation. Amazon is now famous for union busting at its warehouses, see the aforementioned technical tool for hunting unions down. Tech has built out an entire stack for surveilling workers at every single step of their work; robots literally telling them what to do. Tech’s stark lines of division — there’s the high paid tech workers, and then everyone else, a vast sea of labor for exploitation. Not to even mention the exploitation that occurs IN their favored labor base (who they abuse mercilessly but no one will admit it). Yes, yes and yea.
- Disdain for the intellectual and the arts: First thing that comes to mind is the industry’s single edict of “build, build, build” — it has an almost drone-like quality, and tech specifically disdains any sort of cultural analysis, social analysis, feminist analysis, etc. This is called “unserious”, a distraction, whining, inferior. And in many ways this is a form of extreme anti-intellectualism, where you are just pushing out these many many modes of analysis and thought that have thrived sometimes for centuries; they are all flattened away and dismissed in favor of one extremely narrow ORDER: build the empire. Building the empire good, everything else bad. That is their foremost platform and politic. The tech industry as a result operates with a singular lens, and incalculable volumes of intellectual work and inquiry are brutishly pushed away as being unimportant, a waste of time, a distraction, etc.
- Rampant cronyism and corruption: LMFAO THIS ONE IS SO EASY. Look, just look at the PayPal mafia. Since their inception TRYING TO CREATE A DIGITAL CURRENCY in the 90s (crypto is a large scale, multi-decade financial conspiracy), their key players have gone on to be absolutely storied as Silicon Valley success legend. They are marveled at as a phenomenon of innovation and intelligence, when really all this is is a bunch of extremely rich white men who succeeded at making a ton of money together and decided to just keep doing that: cronyism. The more they grew, the more they could work together to forward their agendas while, again, appearing as separate entities. Thiel, Musk, Sacks, Rabois… they have worked together in any number of formations as co-investors, founder and investor, political think tank / advocacy center (Thiel is Trump’s closest advisor). It is cronyism and corruption of the highest; they are part of a very small group of people that are perpetually showing up right next to each other working on some of the more fringe horrors of the industry, whether that is Palantir or Andural (the foremost tech “startup” weapons manufactor). Or look at a16z — they have literally been fixing the tech market since 2009, or at least, thats when they announced it. VCs are market fixers: the epitome of rampant cronyism and corruption.
So, in sum. Yes, these people are fascists, they are absolutely fascists, they are fascist from top to bottom, fascism is the defining characteristic of the tech industry, which most explains and predicts its behavior and outcomes.
We have been fighting tech fascism for a number of years now. In hindsight it is easy to see, but in the thick of battle in the last 10 years, fascism seemed to be pouring out of every corner and every outlet; only now in hindsight does it become obvious where it was all coming from. The “rising fascism” we have been talking about isn’t just or even primarily or even fundamentally coming from Republicans; huge volumes are coming out of venture capitalists and the tech industry. This is a fascist industry run by fascists, and operated as a fascist state. We need to fight them as they are.
They declared war on us a long time ago, and we’ve been fighting them in disjointed proxy battles for years. The fight for Oakland (lost), the fight against surveillance (lost), the fight against online harassment mobs (lost), the fight against ICE (lost), the fight against police violence (lost), the fight for women in tech (lost) — tech has been, with its own agendas, and exercising its own goals, at the very center of all of this, pumping fascism everywhere it went and feeding on the downfall of America (that it is orchestrating) to bootstrap its long-dreamed of, sovereign fascist state.
Look, they are fighting us and they will kill us unless we get them first. Instead of fighting this enemy through 12 different side channels they are covertly operating, piecemeal around the country and up and down the issues, we have to form a coalition of people who have been oppressed, displaced, violated, arrested, invaded, gentrified, kicked out, exploited and terrorized, marginalized and sexually abused by tech, and go directly at the source.
Fuck the “workers” inside the tech empire, trust me, they picked their side, and any “advocacy” they are doing in there is only for their personal advantage. Tech “workers” are not going to do the job for us of taking out this fascist state; they are its gilded citizens, and they serve at the pleasure of the crown: a16z.
We have been at war with venture capital tech fascism for a long time; but most people haven’t even realized what is going on, the enemy has not seemed coherent because of all the forms it has taken. With awareness and distance from the absolute destruction of every liberal and leftist program in America in the past ten years, we can now see with clarity.
As we speak, the technofascist state is rolling out a whole new agenda they are about force down our throats; it includes cryptocurrency, the metaverse (a new height of surveillance operatus), and a full-scale surveillance and military buildout.
They are calling it American Dynamism, and it is its first true campaign as a sovereign fascist state.
They’ve declared war on us. I think we all know exactly what the fuck is up, and what will be needed to stop them. We must behead these motherfuckers before it is too late and this country’s peoples, and those everywhere, fall entirely into their hands. We know who they are, we know what they are doing, we know what they are planning, and the ONE thing they are NOT planning for is a broad-based movement aimed at the “industry” as a whole, as a totality, that properly locates tech fascism and the technofascist state as the enemy.
We need to show up to this fight. Big time. Right now. This could easily be a cohesive political movement that reclaims our power from 10 years of smashed movements and reformulates itself as a full frontal assault on the ones who have been smashing them: tech fascists.