Tracking American Dynamism: The Early Days of Trump’s New VC-Engineered Political Platform

I wrote in significant depth recently about how American Dynamism is functioning in the overall landscape of tech; this piece takes a look more specifically at the phenomenon and documents how it has spread.

American Dynamism has been engineered as a political strategy by Marc Andreessen, the head of a16z, and Peter Thiel, an extremist Republican and fascist, founder of PayPal. In Silicon Valley, people joke about the PayPal Mafia: but they are terrified of it. Thiel is a member along with Elon Musk: people who got extraordinarily rich from PayPal and used that money and power to bootstrap themselves into the very top of tech, and now work together across their various companies and VC firms and agendas to continued glory. Marc Andreessen is also part of the PayPal mafia, and has also been heavily involved with Thiel and Musk in various efforts including, most significantly for our purposes, Facebook and the autonomous weapons company, Anduril.

The problem described in their new bit, American Dynamism, is that America has fallen behind the times, has fallen short in keeping up with the cutting edge of society, that it is at risk of losing its #1 status, that our infrastructure and military are old and decaying. Our infrastructure in general is falling behind of technological innovation, we are failing to maintain competitiveness with China and Russia. The only part of America still producing, of course, is Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley should provide the leadership for a revival of America as a great industrial center. American Dynamism ostensively refers to all manner of things from improving the supply chain to replacing transportation to re-doing the schools to creating “government 3.0”. Most concerning, it calls for a significant military build-out that is “tech savvy” - I.e., that is being designed out of Silicon Valley and not the traditional weapons manufacturers, who have fallen behind the curve. It is, essentially, MAGA but with an actual business plan behind it; it is reminiscent of something like the New Deal or other large-scale public works projects in rhetoric and reference. And its core demand is that we basically Silicon-Valley the entire country.

On an implementation and ideological level, American Dynamism comes directly from Silicon Valley, emerging in one of the smaller firms, General Catalyst, and quickly transferred to the VC firm a16z via the hire of an absolute war hawk and anti-abortion fanatic, (and Founder’s Fund alum) Katharine Boyle, earlier this year; she has been in an official position as architect and propaganda of American Dynamism and making a number of hires for it in the past few quarters. From a16z, we saw immediate pickup by Peter Thiel’s firm, Founder’s Fund. It is my suspicion that they seeded it out of a16z to avoid any issues of, I don’t know, conspiracy to steal the election to get weapons contracts or something.

Peter Thiel specifically has been one of Trump’s closest advisors since his first run, and has not left his side. In the past few months we’ve seen Peter Thiel on the campaign trail talking about the need for the Republican party to have a more positive message, something to counter its often negative and reactionary standpoint:

“Thiel argued that although the national headwinds favored Republicans this cycle and potentially in 2024, the party had to offer a positive vision and program to succeed long term and be credible…

Thiel said Republicans needed to be more than just the party that doesn't like "woke stuff." He argued for Republicans to build a lasting coalition, the party needed to figure out a way to deliver broad-based economic growth that benefited all Americans.”

This messaging was confirmed by Rick Scott, National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair. This is, of course, a set up to roll out the American Dynamism platform as the new direction of the Republican party. Thiel’s fellow PayPal Mafia founder, Elon Musk, just purchased Twitter and will be allowing Trump back on the platform shortly, and you can bet what’s going to come out: American Dynamism. 

First, some quick history on American Dynamism, and then I will review how it is rolling out for the historical record:  

While the concept for American Dynamism seeded in GC, it has been a16z, the most powerful VC firm in the tech industry, who has really developed the framework, forwarded it as an industry agenda, applied it across its portfolio companies, and is behind the current push to roll American Dynamism out as a platform. a16z put their first real stake in the ground when they rolled out American Dynamism as a major category of their investments; I.e. It is categorized as a vertical alongside things like social, consumer, b2b, healthcare, biotech, and other categories that VCs use. So at this point, a16z debuts American Dynamism as a category enveloping primarily weapons companies, but interspersed with various supply-chain startups, robot startups, surveillance, delivery drones, etc. 

This movement goes back to a really core conflict in industry dynamics: that is, the industry’s relationship with the weapons and defense and intelligence and policing agencies. The “liberal” Valley’s position, until now, has been either ambivalent or just submerged; the relationship is kind of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy; it is understood that some of technical work is for the government, but until recently, this wasn’t so much a political or ideological stance as much as a sales strategy — at least supposedly. In-Q-Tel (the CIA’s VC firm) was always sitting right off to the sidelines, mysteriously appearing in rounds with undisclosed amounts of money and pumping Silicon Valley technology into the war machine, but the industry very much isolated that from our other efforts. It was simply not spoken of, in large part, even as weapons companies gathered in numbers at recruiting fairs for CS students. Military customers have been a silent but fast-growing vertical; surveillance and intelligence have of course always been closely intertwined, and during the last bubble in particular — with huge deals on the table like GovCloud — venture capital has built up close relationships with the military and intelligence infrastructure even far beyond what was previously left in the shadows. 

The long intertwinement of the government with the industry has not been without disruption, most notable after the Snowden/PRISM revelations, activations on campus in protest of weapons companies recruitment, Project Maven (which led to employee walkouts and eventually to capitulation by Google to not renew Pentagon contracts for AI), and most recently, #NoTechforICE. 

It was #NoTechforICE that really pushed the Valley into a more dedicated position on the topic. It’s important to understand that a16z’s response to any resistance whatsoever — including objecting to sexual abuse at GitHub in the early days of the last bubble — has consistently resulted in a16z doubling and tripling down. #NoTechforICE got the furthest of any resistance to tech since PRISM, even though PRISM dwarfed it entirely, it was nonetheless somewhat widespread, with particular pickup by college students who used it to organize and protest on campus. A broad-based student coalition could theoretically, seriously threaten tech’s entanglements with military and intelligence and become a vehicle for protest that could serve as an effective umbrella for a variety of discontents in the young population: surveillance, algorithmic bias, the incursion of social media on society, the wealth gap, labor/workforce tension, academia’s ties with the private sector, etc. Similarly, there was a significant response from the tech community itself — there was at least one case of a technologist pulling code that was used; but no more than one or two minor contracts were actually dropped.  

That is a major clue as to the level of commitment tech actually has to these types of contracts. Here it was faced by a very significant, cross-body movement about a pressing and heartrending issue (family separation, deportation, child sexual abuse) uniting students and people both inside and outside the industry, and those with related struggles, including the Jewish resistance. Yet, that movement wasn’t even successful in stopping *singular* companies from a very specific contract for a very specific operation in a very specific part of a specific agency for a specific term; this actually would have required fairly minor material changes by the industry to address to satisfaction. But what the disruption ran into, but never articulated, was that the ICE contracts represented just a part of the industry’s incredibly lucrative work with government, intelligence, military, etc. forces just in general. And to cancel an ICE contract would mean putting that entire relationship into jeopardy; these are not agencies that want to sign contracts with people who would ever cancel on them just because some computer programmers and students got upset about dead kids. 

For my part, I really expected that #NoTechForICE would pick up the latent energy of the tech justice movement which had come to something of a standstill — it could re-invigorate people and work that came before. Unfortunately, the movement died out in part due to COVID, but also the normal things of non-profit failure, outside consultancies with little concept of the problem faced (ex-Google, specifically, a very distinct breed of tech “activist”), lack of funding, and ultimately, the body of tech workers once again failed to show any ethics, much less ethical commitment, once again. Again and again they fail.

What did come out of it, is that a16z came out swinging in full support of ICE contracts; the firm had long been shameless as far as the ethical bounds of their company, but this was a full triple down — undoubtedly a message to their friends in the CIA and military: don’t worry, this ain’t changing shit. Even as #NoTechforICE flew, a16z doubled down and announced investment in Anduril Technologies — the company that was actively building surveillance towers at the border — and also published clear messaging that they were sticking with the CIA. Unsurprisingly, as Marc has served on the advisory board of the head of the CIA and is, definitionally, a high-level CIA asset. His ties to Israel also point to a clear connection to Mossad, as well as his continued investment in Israeli companies and moving AirBnB, a known mechanism of economic and housing destruction, into the West Bank.  

Up until this exact point, the industry had walked this very thin line of how to continue essentially just keep doing weapons building for the American forever war, without losing their image as essentially a liberal industry. During PRISM tech did an amazing PR spin on it all, acting like innocent victims and taking up Snowden as a personal hero and icon — somehow they made it work, and despite being the sources of the surveillance, tech escaped with little negative effect on their reputation. #NoTechForICE was a wakeup call to the Valley, that something needed to be done to prevent this issue in the future. So American Dynamism it was! A fancy rebrand of “we sell things that kill people.”

The framing of American Dynamism is actually quite brilliant. Instead of saying: yes we do this, we build weapons, deal with it; it says: this is the necessary agenda, this is an agenda that we need to save America, this is the imperative of the global digital age. And if you’re worried about weapons building, you don’t understand the game we’re in on the world stage. This is vital to the future of our country and its infrastructure. And so you see that even as they’ve expanded the political platform that is American Dynamism, its origination is literally in a point of disruption and conflict over whether or not the tech industry should build weapons that kill people. You can see how this would also be a very useful container for the right overall.

It’s important to keep an eye on the spread of the American Dynamism concept, because it also provides evidence that this was created and artificially pushed on society by a very small group of the richest and most powerful venture capitalists in the world, with the goal of securing huge contracts for them, and with zero intentions about what is actually good or needed for America — you’re talking about people who have been tech billionaires for well over a decade, with almost no attachment to “regular” people outside of razing them and extracting resources from them. 

So at first it was these VC firms and their immediate portfolio companies pushing America Dynamism. Something interesting started happening where a number of the venture capitalists switched their social media presence to reflect American Dynamism. Suddenly all of their background pictures were the Statue of Liberty, the American flag, one of our space rockets. In their bios was “American Dynamism” and also the emojis of the American Flag and the rocket ship. This was huge hint that the roll out of this movement was going to play out online in a more broad based way, and that the marketing material and approach were being highly coordinated and orchestrated, down to symbols and emojis. This was never *just* a category for VC funding; it was designed as a play for America itself.

American Dynamism isn’t just posited as a category on a drop-down menu of the firm’s investments. No, it is posited as simultaneously a philosophy, an ideology, a political platform and a business strategy. It’s dangerous linguistics because its incredibly imprecise. What is does do is offer a large umbrella under which to plausibly gather a number of outright dangerous companies and concepts and ideologies. Specifically, the large scale build out of autonomous weaponry, military-grade levels of surveillance, the private sales of tech weaponry directly to foreign powers, the explicit and dedicated nationalistic focus on being “competitive with the enemy” and “not losing our place in the world” or our “edge” or… what makes America great again. Not to mention its implications for Cold War with Russia and China. American Dynamism is more than weapons, though - its a play for more and more of the physical infrastructure of the country in general. While these infrastructure companies and schemes will also no doubt cause massive damage, they help to disguise the weapons with mass-death potential under more approachable America-Dynamism based platforms like improvements to the transportation system and the supply chain. 

I’ve been watching carefully. In order to be a viable political vehicle, it at least has to have *some* pretense of being an organic movement, or at least something that has any kind of basis in any kind of the citizen interest. In June, a16z made a few key hires into its American Dynamism space, and things have ramped up from there — the concept and application has spread beyond them since. 

In the early days, there was a disturbing configuration of viewpoints, evidence that American Dynamism would in fact function as a wide base of various Republican interests. One of the early people tweeting about American Dynamism as “believing in big ideas”, was the host of a Bible podcast and head of a Zionist nonprofit foundation. This is important because collaboration with Israel has been a big theme and another point of deep acceleration for VCs and American Dynamism. By June, other venture capitalists were referring to it as a “movement”, and relating it to populist themes. VCs from a16z were writing op-eds for the Bari Weiss newsletter. Industry pundits such as Jason Calacanis were posting anti-China messaging and tying it directly to American Dynamism talking points of “serious founders”, “serious companies”, “serious problems” —  a way to merely dismiss any points of argument as infantile and weak. This is a pretty common thing that Trump himself does - to just bypass serious contentions with hand waves.

All kinds of lesser VCs, Virtue, Countdown, were hopping on; this has only picked up. Smaller VCs are always hoping to get in on big deals with the largest VCs as they can’t really play in the big leagues and get into rounds without them. They also, in this case, serve as a vehicle with which to exercise the broader industry’s agendas. Smaller VCs have no choice but to fall in line with a16z’s agenda if they hope to make it.

Then we started to see the messaging come out of crypto startups, both within the a16z portfolio and outside of it, as more and more startups, employees and executives began to take up the propaganda, in large part because their ability to access capital and customers also depends on the VCs now hawking American Dynamism as well. What they say, goes.

Most recently, the media machine has really gotten up and running. Like Anduril submitting a panel to SXSW on the “AI Arms Race”… moderated by an NBC news corespondent in national security. LOL. Palmer Luckey, the serial killer behind Oculus who now runs a16z’s crown military jewel, has been out doing the tour of various grifter podcasts to talk about defense spending and American Dynamism; Marc Andreessen even showed up on fucking Joe Rogan, also showing a new courting of the right that will only accelerate in days to come.

American Dynamism is now showing up with Google at Department of Defense venture capital conferences. The Economic Innovation Group is holding their own series on American Dynamism. Some “Association of CEOs” was tying American Dynamism to congressional spending, just another data point that this is a major vehicle to extract more government contracts. By September, American Dynamism was not only a movement but a political position, lying outside of Democrats and Republicans, creating an air of neutrality even as it openly allied with Republican messaging and symbology.

Most recently, we’ve seen American Dynamism start to be remixed by techies into various constructs like “American Industrial Dynamism”; of course, this paves the way for people to insert anything in between American and Dynamism; American Healthcare Dynamism, American Transportation Dynamism, American Education Dynamism, etc. Etc. You can see how this could make a really compelling Republican platform, huh. One VC has even been talking about American Dynamism as some kind of cultural revival. Anduril has started hosting meetups boasting a “booming community” around American Dynamism. Even weed entrepreneurs are talking about American Dynamism’s transforming potential. And entire groups of “entrepreneurs” in Miami, which is currently under invasion by the tech industry, are spreading these talking points too. In a conference in Miami by the Lincoln Network, “Reboot”, American Dynamism was the dish of the day; leading to a Politico article about the emergence of this “new kind of American politics”. This all coming shortly after a name-drop of American Dynamism in NSA remarks on the national strategy with elegant reference to “recharging the engine of American dynamism.” Unsurprising that we see it there already considering how closely intertwined Silicon Valley is… this agency has consistently been the catalyst and co-architect for some deeply shared goals around surveillance, cyber security, data collection, etc. It is very likely that intelligence agencies have been instrumental in putting together the American Dynamism strategy.

Most concerning of everything that I have personally seen is that the term American Dynamism very recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal, in an article talking about the New York governatoral races, commenting on the hypothetical chance of the governorship switching to Republican and the justification for that being… that we need some more American Dynamism! Literally. Direct quote: “New York ought to be a showcase of American Dynamism, but it’s turning into a warning of progressive decline”. This quote was then taken up by other Republican candidates as reasoning to vote Republican. 

This was the first time I has seen the word used directly in the copy of a mainstream publication as opposed to a quote or something off of social media. American Dynamism still isn’t in very wide circulation at this time; it wasn’t attributed in a quote, nor was it reporting on some event; the article was, in its own voice and intention, using American Dynamism as if it were some kind of legitimate parlance and not an emerging extremist political position directly from a very small group of tech billionaires. This usage didn’t come from nowhere, so they were either being clued in at some kind of behind-the-scenes meeting, or someone on their editorial team is taking venture capital money. Either way, this was a critical moment for American Dynamism, when it made the leap into the mainstream press. 

I’ll continue tracking American Dynamism as it rolls out. My expectation is that as Trump comes back online with Elon Musk in charge of the platform, and as his re-election campaign really gets running, you’ll start to see this roll out across the Republican party similarly to how it’s being rolled out across the tech industry — designed to seem like something organic and grassroots, but heavily engineered by the elite. It’s important to collect evidence of how these things spread; even if I am wrong and American Dynamism will NOT be a part of Trump’s platform, this remains a huge threat as it disguises tech ambitions of large scale weapons manufacturing under the guise of populism; this is what will let the tech industry get to the next level by securing untold amounts of government contracts and building out its own military.