Venture Capital As a Geopolitical Force
With the dawn of the new technology cycle, and the seeming start of a new global cycle, we are in a new world where technological competitiveness has emerged as a foremost geopolitical issue, and it promises to shape the geopolitical balance of the globe in very deep ways, and already is. This is already being called by the most bloodthirsty elements of venture capital, the “tech war”. An advisor to Palantir, a cornerstone of the venture capital weapons build-out, recently commented:
“The rise of artificial intelligence may help boost worker productivity and economic growth for years to come, but it’s also leading to some serious tensions between the world’s greatest superpowers, according to Jacob Helberg, a senior policy advisor to the data analysis firm Palantir. ‘What we’re seeing unfolding in real time is nothing short of a tech war between the U.S. and China,’ Helberg, who also leads the U.S.-China Economic Security and Review Commission that advises Congress about national security matters, told CNBC Friday.”
Of course, Palantir has been one of a fleet of weapons startups from venture capital that has been deliberately agitating for tension and military agitation regarding China; these VC-backed weapons companies stand to make trillions from any military escalation they can trick and lie and connive their way into provoking. Holy cow, criminal conflict of interest!!!!
As always, the war is actually about capitalism and the need for capital, the insatiable need for capital and for accumulating it. The “tech war”, which has military aggression against China as its bedrock, also implicates a number of other, if related, geopolitical factors.
What are the material parameters and circumstances of the “tech war”, and what is shaping it?
The major driver here is that venture capital and tech specifically are trying to grow astronomically; we should count strongly on the capital and resource footprint of venture capital and tech to grow by an unfathomable amount just in the next few years. Think alone of the growth of the industry in the last 15 years. Or the fact that they doubled in wealth and power in the pandemic, paving the way to this massive explosion of imperial aim today. We should expect to see that growth rate again achieve massive increases and multiples in the next few years; that is simply the nature of the wild consuming beast of out-of-control venture capital trying to eat the world. The tech war, therefore, the new age of geopolitical focus on technology competitiveness, is about obtaining the path towards unrestrained technological development, under the new “accelerationist” philosophy of the tech billionaires. So it is in large part, about securing the resources for this, removing impediments, and hobbling the competition, while manipulating the global technology and labor market; and this is something that all the super powers are going to be trying to do as well to keep up, Cold War style.
From a market perspective, there are particularly important tools of production, that fundamentally constrain the ability of tech and venture capital to grow: chips and semiconductors.
AI chips from Nvidia are fundamental units to power the new age of artificial intelligence and super computing. Nvidia, an American company, is by far and away the world leader; this makes the rest of the world beholden to Nvidia in the AI era, and already there has been a lot of noise about the purchase and stockholding by countries like Saudia Arabia and China. Nvidia’s chip production is exceedingly difficult to replicate or achieve parity with; these are the hardest and most expensive problems in computer science, Nvidia is a physics company, and developing even just the corporate formation that can deliver on this — the most difficult part of this — is a true Herculean effort. It is highly complex and hugely expensive. Unlike what venture capitalists like to scaremonger about — that China and other countries are stealing all our technology — you can have all the fucking technical blueprints you want but creating an at-scale technological giant with the inner workings and DNA and execution to do this, is a different matter.
When the issue at hand is venture fascist dominance, the biggest market competitor for them is the possible competitiveness of China and other “enemy” countries — the major theme on which much of this hinges. While Nvidia has long been enmeshed in trade restrictions based on its centrality to technology competitiveness, this is reaching entirely new levels as the web 3 bubble opens and gets moving, and in particular, artificial intelligence becomes not only a major marketing vehicle but a matter of military competitiveness, as these chips are being used in warfare AI through a new fleet of venture capital startups (Anduril, Hadrian, Toka, ShieldAI, Mach Industries and others). Here again we see the strong element of military AI, already a site of major geopolitical tension, even as most people have no fucking clue that this artificial intelligence shit has been killing people live in the field for some time now. In fact, Palantir has been a first mover, and is now 20 years old. There are already many deaths via AI — but we are too busy fighting over imagined futures of AGI to face the actual lethal AI threat, which is that PEOPLE are using it to kill other people… as we speak.
Anyhow, just in the past few months, we’ve seen the demand for Nvidia chips emerge as a major geopolitical factor as, on the heels of massive demand and huge stock market gains, major Chinese tech companies ordered $5 billion of Nvidia chips. Just a few weeks after news articles on the order:
“The U.S. expanded the restriction of exports of sophisticated Nvidia (NVDA.O) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O) artificial-intelligence chips beyond China to other regions including some countries in the Middle East. Nvidia said in a regulatory filing this week that the curbs, which affect its A100 and H100 chips designed to speed up machine-learning tasks, would not have an "immediate material impact" on its results.”
So, in the case of Nvidia, there is a highly valuable and scarce asset to protect and a major bargaining chip on the global political landscape, of which allowing and denying access becomes a grave matter. But Nvidia has warned that
“over the long term, restrictions prohibiting the sale of our data center GPUs to China, if implemented, will result in a permanent loss of an opportunity for the U.S. industry to compete and lead in one of the world’s largest markets.”
This speaks to the precarious balance here, as the — by the way, very natural — trade between countries is also implicated; to whit, we see a lot of pressure out of venture capital (as opposed to the tech giants), in the direction of military tension with China. Venture capital can easily take pot shots from the sidelines; this is one of several areas they diverge from the giants, a point for another time. The giants have a much bigger geopolitical footprint than venture capital, and with that comes entanglements from trade agreements and so on that venture capital is not beholden too.
And then again we see that military competitiveness in general is absolutely a massive driver here in trade matters:
“The U.S. has said its export restrictions aim to stop China from obtaining technology that could have military uses. The two superpowers have been locked into a battle over technology supremacy for the last few years, with semiconductors caught in the middle.”
Sticky situation!! Add onto this the possibility that China could come to possess a competitive production process with Nvidia and indeed much of China’s goals rely on technological self-reliance, as capitalist America is intent on fucking with its trade, and therefore, it cannot rely on us to be a stable partner.
Add to this picture the matter of Taiwan, over which there is a great deal of tension around China’s claim to Taiwan, and the fact that the US wants a Taiwan sovereign from China, in no minor part due to Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, which Nvidia itself is reliant on a major partner; Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing which manufactures Nvidia’s chips.
These are key factors shaping the “tech war” as it were, and this is all playing out in the context of military tensions with China rising, and technology taking a new central role in all of this, as the new industrialists of our era, the biggest companies, and the most important resources.
The technology war is playing out in other countries as well. One great example is in Vietnam, which has had and continues to have a major technological development focus, and has hit a few key geopolitical achievements recently. Vietnam’s unicorn VNG, a gaming, media and social platform with built in payments, just IPOed on the US stock market. There was recently a very successful and well populated trade mission, full of blue-chip American tech company representatives, and Vietnam has stated that they want digital services to hit 20% of the GDP by 2025.
Vietnam also has a burgeoning and must-yearned for semiconductor industry to meet the artificial intelligence age, as the US hopes that Vietnam will develop into a major supplier and help to reduce co-dependencies with China. To this effect, the White House just announced a new US-Vietnam Semiconductor Partnership:
“In addition to the partnership, the US has invested a seed fund of $2 million to support Vietnam’s ambitions in the semiconductor industry and supply chain. Arizona-based company Amkor Technology has also announced plans to build a semiconductor factory in Bac Ninh Province, further securing Vietnam’s place in the semiconductor supply chain.”
Importantly, a big part of this partnership pushes Vietnam further into private ownership, going against the mandatory ethical requirements of Marxist-Leninist thought; with the emergence of the parameters of the “tech war”, there is also much new anti-communist sentiment among American venture capital. As we have seen in the past, free market capitalism, constantly on the attack, is a massive destabilizing element to leftist and communist countries, or countries where those parties are established.
To the theme of hunting out other semiconductor industries, OpenAI, in the midst of a major compute shortage, over the summer on a massive delegation tour, stopped in South Korea, whose semiconductor business reached $82 billion in 2022:
“The [OpenAI] CEO suggested South Korea should focus on chips as both system semiconductors and memory chips are needed for AI, reduce corporate regulations to foster AI projects, as well as work towards setting international standards, South Korea's presidential office said.
"People are focused on not stifling innovation, and that any regulatory framework has got to make sure that the benefits of this technology come to the world," Altman said…””
So, more cultivation here of these critical and base resources for the next wave of computing that is coming, and where you see the United States making a number of moves diplomatically, as well as venture capital itself making its independent delegations as a sovereign, around these computing resources.
But there are other issues at play in the tech war, other resources that are fought over and contended over. One of the largest is labor, the labor needed at every level to support the massive growth in venture capital and the tech industry (and the tech military and VC cities) that is coming. I’ve talked a lot about how tech is creating a destabilized global labor force — that it can pit against each other — and as we have seen in Kenya, venture capital operating through contractors and immediately letting them go the second workplace problems and organizing grounds arise — such as getting PTSD from content moderation. Amazon’s Mechanical Turks, the ride-share drivers model, the gig economy overall, the introduction of tools designed to replace and exploit workers (artificial intelligence, workplace and rating systems), the movement of venture capitalists into sovereign zones in the global south where they deal with vulnerable workers, all of this represents a destabilization of the workforce like we haven’t seen before, primarily because of the SCALE at which venture capital is able to do this, and that it actually SELLS worker destabilization to capitalist companies — I.e. AI and the writer’s strikes in Hollywood. It is also a massive robber of labor as it has stolen absolutely mind blowing levels of human work, without pay or credit, as the basis of AI systems which are then used to destabilize the very humanity it stole from.
With the massive explosion of AI generated content, the matter of content moderation in this new technical plane, takes a new centrality in the technology geopolitic. And indeed we see that Meta and OpenAI, both backed by the same money, have committed massive labor abuses, the latter AI trainers being paid just $1-2/hr, and mounting abuses have led to the formation of the African Content Moderators Union.
The more that venture capital fucks workers, the more resistance will form, and this will shape social movements and be an ongoing battle, at a level we have not seen in the past. We are looking at a new era of global worker smashing, and hopefully, a new age of global worker movements to fight shared threats, happening simultaneously and in tandem in dozens and dozens of countries around the world.
This applies to a variety of labor types, obviously, but it’s worth mentioning how this specifically relates to computer programmers. Over the past 10 years, learn-to-code programs have been implemented internationally, often behind the front of getting “more X into tech” (used by venture capital to promote an agenda where they can have talent trained at zero cost to them) and from the early days of the web 2.0 bubble where tech was relying on outsourced labor from Romania and India primarily, there are now many more areas of the world that have growing tech outsourcing organs, and developing their own tech economies in tandem. So even within programming there is a much larger labor pool and the useful, destabilized labor pools of many countries, can be pitted against one another through international competition, and indeed we see examples of this in venture capital delegations that are doing touring and delegation to secure these labor sources. This is when we see venture capital transform to operate in a far more global and distributed way, enabled by the massive increase in their power and profits from the pandemic, in which tech literally doubled on all relevant metrics.
As we start to see a TRULY global tech industry and venture capital industry, we are looking at a new level of global exploitation, as operated entirely as a remote, distributed labor pool, with a number of new labor sources that have been slowly coming onto the market and maturing, giving tech and venture capital many more options for predatory labor exploitation. Venture capitalists out on the open seas are able to act as kingmakers; as many countries seek to “transform” into tech countries under false economic pretenses, startups are the foundation of that and that means, venture capital. Indeed, venture capital has been ramping up international funding, opening a number of new offices across the world, it has been threatening to pull its startups out of America, and has been doing far more global delegation based on bringing the startup economy or stimulating a startup economy in this manner, with venture capital money being a major point of negotiation, as well as the needed corporate infrastructure, and the participation in the broader venture capital economy.
We also have the matter of venture colonialism, which involves the effort of venture capital to secure a network of sovereign, billionaire/tech class cities across the global south, marking a massive evolution in venture capital and its imperial and colonial aims. Please see more articles about venture colonialism and its implications here, as well as this fact sheet / overview of the status of venture colonialism in 8 different countries.
Another major factor is that venture capital is actively trying to stimulate fake social movements, and essentially build a party around their colonial and fascist agenda. In the next article or two we’ll go into more details about the implications, but so far this has included the creation of the network state movement (the venture colonial agenda), the #StandWithCrypto “campaign” out of a16z company Coinbase, the fascist Yuga Lab culture op, and various efforts like “effective accelerationism” that attempt to create a philosophy that justifies all of this. There’s also the various culture ops like Pirate Wire, a VC fascist propaganda media outlet, and Evie, a Peter-Thiel backed media company ostensively for women that pushes extremist misogynistic talking points. “American Dynamism” is a philosophy / political platform that venture capitalists have designed to cover up the massive startup military build-out and lobby Washington.
If venture capital is successful in raising an organized, extremist right-wing movement out of these many efforts, particularly on the international scale, tapping into far-right movements and regimes around the globe, like that in El Salvador where we see venture capital move on the country as it falls into a state of human rights abuses, we will be looking at a very profound, powerful, monied and resourced, fascist movement that will be defining in the new cycle of world affairs.
And not to be remiss, yet still brief, venture capital is building out a fleet of weapons startups as we speak, leading a new and terrifying vision of war as an autonomous, AI-driven, drone swarms and machine-operated war machines, deep surveillance, specifically designed to fight in a proxy war with China and re-armament; that is covered more extensively in this article on how venture capital is provoking nuclear-level tensions with China, as its main market competitor, and this on the lethal weapons boom out of venture capital.
Of course, this is only a selection of the ways that venture capital will affect and accelerate its impact on the geopolitic, on the balance of power in the world, but hopefully this gives us a little more context on venture capital as a geopolitical force as we head into a new global cycle, marked by new shifts and positions and evolutions/devolutions in capitalism.