Unfolding Tactics of Venture Colonialism
I’ve covered venture colonialism quite a bit in this blog; and we just published a fact sheet that contains the efforts of venture capital to form settlements and invade, El Salvador, Honduras, Kenya, Nigeria, and Palau. There are also ongoing operations in Guatemala, Dublin, and more that we are still discovering.
In this post I wanted to just do a bit of analysis on the colonial nature of venture capital and their movements, and how we have seen them move over the past year: what tactics are they using? Where are they, in their process of setting up a sovereign, distributed state?
One major development we see is in the speed and tactics of the colonial efforts. One main vehicle that venture capital has been using as its entry point into these countries is Pronomos Capital, backed by Marc Andreessen, the world’s most powerful venture capitalist and main architect of the ambition to establish a sovereign venture capital state. Other members of Pronomos include Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan. One of their number one priorities is Honduras. From the Pronomos Capital description:
“Honduras Próspera is the first modern startup city in operation, designed to elevate human potential through radically human-centered governance. Leading the way in getting full approval through the world first Honduran ZEDE program, they seek to enable unprecedented innovation that drives economic growth and prosperity for Hondurans.”
After attaining this predatory agreement for a sovereign zone in Honduras, resistance by the peoples of this country resulted in an repeal of the law granting the sovereign zone; and now Pronomos is suing the country for 2/3 of its annual budget in a blunt force attempt to get into the country against the desire of its peoples, and steal its land. From Democracy Now at the end of June:
“In Honduras, communities are fighting back against privatization and foreign exploitation after Honduran President Xiomara Castro and Congress repealed a law that established so-called Economic Development and Employment Zones, where private companies have “functional and administrative autonomy” from the national government. Now a Delaware-based company called Próspera [by Pronomos] has launched a case to challenge the repeal of the law under the Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement and is seeking almost $11 billion, which amounts to nearly two-thirds of the country’s entire 2022 budget. This is an example of the “extreme investor rights” of this international trade agreement directly opposing Honduran sovereignty…”
This is incredibly aggressive, incredibly evil, and shows that we are dealing with an enemy who is intent on achieving its sovereign land from these people at all cost, and is willing to take extreme and threatening action, using the full bevy of its arsenals, starting here with massive lawsuits, in order to obtain, against the will of the people, control of their land and the assurance of their unregulated operations. The GDP of Honduras is about $28.5 billion; the total amount of venture capital that moved into US startups was over $240 billion last year (2022). A16z alone was last reported to have assets under management of $54.6 billion, and after their recent world fundraising tour, I imagine it is more like $75+ billion, though frankly, they might stop telling us from here on out to avoid too many questions about the money from Saudi Arabia and Israel it is stuffing itself with.
Anyhow, the litigiousness of the venture capital threat, and the way that the law and courts and international laws can be manipulated and abused, points to the FORCEFUL, PROACTIVE and COORDINATED effort that is at place; this is not a stirring in their psyche from past colonialism impressed, but rather, an active plot and they are very literally strategically invading these countries and come full of legal resources to obtain them via blunt force. With teams and teams and teams of global lawyers providing a much more palatable and subtle invasion tactic, we must have an eye for a defense strategy that can respond to the legal modus operandi; and we must stand in solidarity, including in legal defense, with these countries. Venture capital will do anything and everything to get in there and this is going to include innovative usage of governments and law to bring a target country to heel.
Meanwhile, El Salvador has fallen under a VC-operated and installed dictatorship, infiltrating the government of El Salvador and obtaining key positions in the government, economic formation and business of the country, while the country is in a state of mass human rights abuse and has rounded up 70,000 people with no due judicial process, to throw into the largest prison in the Americas, recently constructed to crush the populace and “clean up” the country to make it welcoming to venture capital. We saw a similar focus on extreme policing and surveillance in San Francisco, Oakland and the Bay Area more broadly, as venture capital took over these regions and set to work criminalizing and displacing long-held local populations of Black and brown people. Recently, there’s been a great deal of concern about the El Salvador model cascading to other countries in the region; via Aljazeera:
“For more than a year, Latin American countries have watched as El Salvador swept more than 70,000 people into its prison system, with little semblance of due process, in a bid to eliminate the criminal gangs that have plagued the country for years. And many seem to like what they see.
Despite the suspension of civil liberties and allegations of abuse in El Salvador, politicians in neighbouring countries like Honduras and Guatemala have praised President Nayib Bukele as a model worth emulating….”
Consider that El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala all, are under siege from venture capital. In Guatemala, venture capitalists circle the area, currently in political upheaval, looking for tax exemption and recognized sovereign ground, as the people figure out how to defend their right to their land and self-determination from corporations and predatory “economic zones”.
Terms like “domino effect” certainly come to mind, though what we are looking at here is in fact the potential domino effect of venture fascism, easily infiltrating these areas using legal force, promises of economic revitalization, support for right-wing politicians, bribery, election interference/manipulation, and bringing with it its extensive weapons portfolio, and policing, surveillance and military technologies. In these situations where countries have ongoing conflict between the leftists and the right wing, venture capital is perfectly positioned to come in and support and bolster and right wing, which we have seen in El Salvador: a VC-installed and protected dictatorship, being camouflaged in the auspices of a new technological economic revitalization, which of course is never to come. El Salvador is a stronghold and bleeding edge for the new model of venture colonialism; from this stronghold, the spread of venture colonialism can be established.
From the same Aljazeera article linked above:
“During the Cold War, right-wing dictators and militaries in Central America — often propped up by the United States — killed, tortured and abducted hundreds of thousands of people deemed communist or subversive, including students, religious officials, Indigenous people and labour organisers.
“The rhetoric of anti-communism enabled political elites to bend the law, abuse human rights and go after political dissidents, no matter their involvement in guerrilla groups,” [Gema] Kloppe-Santamaria said. “So I see a continuum, with criminals and drug traffickers taking the place of communists as a new enemy used to justify abuses of power.””
I want to zoom in on the comments about the repetition of anti-communist patterns, to say that we are indeed in a new age of anti-communist sentiment within venture capital. The top venture capitalists have been, for 18 months now, embarking on an extraordinary campaign of anti-communist rhetoric, disparaging — with no provocation — “agents of the CCP” in America, the communist “veneration of weakness”, dissing Lenin, our hero, and so on; and as I have mentioned before, there are no communists in Silicon Valley, where venture capital comes from, and there hasn’t been any viable communist organization in America since god knows how long — this means that the leftists in their gaze are not in fact the wokes in America but rather the leftists in the global south who will be the only true resistance to the venture capital aggression. I will also mention that this anti-Communist rhetoric was NOT in evidence in the previous 15 years of venture capital ideology, so this is a new phenomenon coinciding with rising fascist, imperial/colonial ambition and engagement.
The reality is that many of these countries are up in the air and in the middle of a fight between communism and fascism, even where it is not understood as such; because the venture capital invader is unrecognizable through its formations and its operations across thousands of startups which it controls, and it is able to take any form it wishes, as it can generate new formations endlessly with limitless resources, making it difficult to track the actual source and more difficult still to see the venture capital movement in its totality, as it appears in a thousand different faces in media, non profits, startups, bootcamps, conferences, podcasts, venture vehicles and investment firms, funds, educational programs and so on.
Venture capital very much sees this as a matter of fascism vs communism; while it has not yet openly claimed the title of fascism (something I do expect we’ll see in the next 10 years), their talking points are as rabidly and explicitly anti-communist as they are rabidly and explicitly fascist in nature… as Marc Andreessen, the boss of venture capital, is fond of saying, there is a choice between fascism and communism… and we can’t have communism. This is a good example of how venture capital is sneaking in its political views under the auspices of righteous anti-communism, because communist movement is the only thing that can meaningfully respond to, smash and destroy, a rising fascist state, as venture capital very much imagines itself to be.
We very much need to fear the establishment of a venture capital stronghold in any area and how it can use that as a point of strength to influence and affect surrounding countries and those that share economic flow. With tech-enabled super-policing flowing into El Salvador on venture capital behest, it is easy for them to get weapons into the country.
If this is sounding a bit too much like the CIA for your comfort, I invite you to read this article on how the CIA operates its own venture capital firm, InQTel, in Silicon Valley, working extremely closely with a16z and Founder’s Fund — the same people behind Pronomos Capital. The CIA has funded over 120 artificial intelligence startups. None of this is a secret — it’s openly published on the InQTel website. Marc Andreessen himself was on a secret advisory board to Pompeo, since leaked, and these firms go in on hundreds or thousands of investments in weapons and defense and surveillance companies with each other. This is certainly an unholy alliance and its not a “mistake” that the VC approach in this countries — from backing right-wing regimes like that of Bukele in El Salvador to flooding the area with imperial money, surveillance and weapons — looks and feels a lot like the CIA 3.0.
For these VCs, operating closely with the CIA, these countries are a fucking red Ferrari sitting there with the keys in em and gas in the tank, with all the ingredients they need: smaller and weaker economies, political turmoil they can take over and command, existing mass wealth inequality, and right-wing elements just waiting for gifts of cash, deals and weapons to flow to them. When I talk to people, they act like I’m being farfetched, or that this is a task so Herculean that venture capital won’t be able to pull it off; I would like to posit that in fact, right wing elements in these countries are going to be BIDDING and BEGGING for venture capital invasion. With right-wing politicians and business development as their first foot forward, venture capital will be extremely fast and lethal in these environments, and right wing elements will be competing to host the venture capital parasite, as well as liberal or leftist elements that don’t know who and what they are dealing with here, or are willing to sell out for money, fame, and power.
Major sea changes in the geopolitical landscape are constant in history, and we are potentially looking at that kind of situation here; despite the speed and urgency of this issue and its development, I’m still getting blank stares from some people who really should fucking know better and it is deeply alarming.
More alarming still is that here in the imperial core, where we can see the material operations of the venture capital most clearly, absolutely no one here is taking responsibility for a rogue element of American capitalism that has “leveled up” into fascism and is now headed out in seek of other countries to burn. As the resistance in America, this is something we have an obligation to warn and help out with, but don’t worry, you just sit on your ass while actual fucking organized fascists leave here with critical global technology infrastructure and trillions of dollars to set up shop for their unregulated medical startups in the global south, you fucking cowards.
To the point of the viability of this invasion, I wanted to touch on an interesting aspect of this, which is the matter of scale and how this invasion strategy will be scaled and what is required to make it scale. There has been significant efforts by Pronomos Capital, a16z and the other core conspirators here, which is the effort to create some kind of “community” or, frankly, global political party, around this entire concept of tech colonialism. The Network State, an a16z book which lays out in detail the venture capital conspiracy to establish its own sovereign distributed empire, focuses extremely heavily on recruiting tech and crypto wealth to the idea that they can use their new found wealth to design their own sovereign society.
Venture capital has made a lot of younger, particularly Millennial people rich with tech startups and crypto. There is a healthy pocket of people among them who have made enough to retire, or that they don’t have to work, and need something to do — this is mainly technology executives and computer engineers, and for almost all of them, these are the venture capitalists who made them rich. We also have another cohort here which is crypto millionaires, these are usually millennials who were early to crypto and they have a decent population now, of people who are now retired, have tons of money, are allegiant to venture capital because that is what made them rich, they are highly networked as a community via crypto events and natural affinity, as well as crypto Twitter and other parts of the crypto verse that have been created by venture capital to build artificial and lucrative early community and retail platforms. And in the coming years tech money, as it grows, will continue to generate this class of multi-millionaires; they are in a class financially far below the billionaire, and like a smaller VC firm, joining up with the billionaire gives them a ton of access to power and money they don’t have themselves with their own capital; for the billionaire, they are getting lots of the capital back for investment through this process when aggregated over tens of thousands of multi-multi millionaires, and they are able to benefit from all of the activities, the political dynamism, the search for meaning and an effort to keep going after retirement, the networks of all of these people — particularly tech wealth which is highly networked with an incredibly skilled body. We certainly cannot say as much for the crypto wealth, which bring idiocy but also, the vulnerability to being organized by … well, people who aren’t complete fucking dumbasses.
There are multiple layers of the new colonial agenda of venture capital. The part that you probably don’t see is how venture capital is slowly and deliberately manipulating and grooming the tech graduate and crypto class — new money multi-millionaires, almost entirely white and Asian male, many of whom made the money through not any special insight into the matter, because they just happened to be in the right place at the right time. This is a population that venture capital is heavily courting in “communities” like Atlas, Pronomos Capital podcasts by Balaji Srinivasan, crypto conferences like the Palau Blockchain Summit, and in the creation of “Network State” influencers and clout games on Twitter. Venture capital is experts at culture ops, having controlled allllll of the social media and the startup ecosystem for decades now, and their ability to grow and direct a following, and to radicalize it at aim it at venture capital goals, cannot be underestimated.
These are their settlers.
Another pattern that we need to watch out for is the early destruction and attack on the independent press in these areas; one of the first items of their agenda is to smash the independent press, something they have done extremely effectively in America by supplanting the independent press and replacing it with algorithmic, VC-owned platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Buzzfeed and so on. To this note, we also see in these situations that the independent press is compromised and threatened in these situations, as El Salvador’s independent press, El Faro, fled the country for Costa Rica under political threat just this year, as venture capital is wrapping up its infiltration into the government and setting its sights on its plans now that it has locked up 70,000 people.
This is not new. I ran the only independent technology press in the web 2.0 bubble, Model View Culture, operating for three years between 2014 to the end of 2016. I was attacked literally non stop by venture capitalist-directed hate groups, had to get armed security, lived in hiding for years, was stalked by a16z-affiliated goons, left my house on multiple occasions under credible death threat. Venture capitalists deeply hate the independent press and in fact all independent infrastructure. One of their first moves, and perhaps even before we see anything else, will be moving in on the independent press of these countries — fleeing like I once did in VC attacks on the independent press 10 years ago. They are NOT new to this, they are not fucking around, they have a very serious itinerary that they are executing on at warp speed. What is coming to these countries is not an enemy inexperienced with combatting social movements; in fact, we can track in clear material detail how they have done so in the past and actually evolved an absolutely effective modus operandi backed by unlimited and yet still growing, money and power, at 10x rates expected in the next few years.
People often act like this is a conspiracy theory, and unlikely, or aspirational and philosophical on the part of the venture capitalists, immaterial in nature; but I would argue that venture capital is perfectly positioned to prey on these weak areas, that they have said they are invading, that they have successfully secured land, that they are defending it using a full, aggressive legal attack pattern, that they are experienced and mercenary, that they have the full support of the CIA, and this cascading effect is a matter of deep and extreme concern.
You are talking about people who took over the entire Bay Area, San Francisco and Oakland, that have nearly limitless resources to bring to bear on the body of this matter, and they are accelerationists — which means they will work as quickly as possible, at tremendous speed and tremendous force, to impact these countries and use them to form its distributed empire. They can offer limitless money and aid to right-wing politicians; they control the social media that is used to organize social resistance; they are experts in crushing movements; they have unlimited legal resources, unlimited resources to do covert ops in other countries, and massive packages to offer politicians who are willing to sell out their countries for personal gain, of which there are always aplenty.
Stay tuned. They are getting faster and faster, and further and further, by the second. And every one of those seconds that passes, is bad.