Venture Capital Medical Experimentation
We’ve been talking a lot here about what venture capital colonialism looks like, as they negotiate with countries in the global south for sovereign zones and freedom from taxation and regulation, establishing settlements for “bitcoin cities” and “startup cities”, moving in legions of highly paid white people and cracking down on “crime” to prepare the way for colonial gentrifiers. Variations of this are taking place in Kenya, Nigeria, El Salvador, Honduras, Vietnam and Brazil, and Ireland. The number of targets will expand over time. Massive construction projects, including bitcoin mines and large urban developments, are already underway in many of these areas, with many more planned.
Venture capitalists hope to get many things from the countries they invade. Land, housing, cheap labor, electricity, various natural resources, and of course, broad latitude to do whatever the fuck they want, away from the jurisdiction of America and other nation-states. I.e., their own jurisdication. But another thing that we need to tunnel in on is the issue of medical experimentation and how that is a resource issue for venture capital — which has the bottleneck of how many and how cheaply it is able to complete human testing.
An extremely expanded framework for medical experimentation, happening under “free market” technofascism, changes the biotech game completely. The ability to scale human testing is a chokepoint on the type of medical development that venture capitalists are aiming to do — most importantly, life extension technologies. We should expect target lifespans of 130+ up to 200 in the higher echelons. Like any good sci fi, the higher up you are on the pole, the longer you live. Or has that always been the case?
Importantly, venture capitalists are seeking discontinuous medical advances, or sea-changes in outcomes from new technologies. It is this type of innovation that tech is built to create. You increase your chances of discontinuous medical advances when you can obtain an extremely low-cost, unregulated mass of experimentation subjects. In short, this is one of the biggest bottlenecks in technofascist medical development, denied to them so far by the FDA, and the new colonial efforts are a dead fit here; the interest is both personal (“I am so fucking great and life as a billionaire is so awesome I want to live forever”) and market — I.e. The size of the global health care market which tech has only begun to get into.
Scaling human test subjects via distributed startups using people who are disposable, untracked, stuck in destitution, without legal or humanitarian remedy, in extremely impoverished areas, is an “innovation” enabling speed and scale. I.e. This is a massive accelerant if they are able to secure it.
Medical experimentation is a very dear issue to the venture capitalists behind this plot — a16z, Founder’s Fund and collaborators. The Network State, a book from a16z, lays out in quite some detail, its plans to establish its own distributed, sovereign country. Medical experimentation provides a key motivation. The book discusses the idea of “medical sovereignty” zones where FDA and other nation-state regulations don’t apply.
This is, of course, couched in terms of individual liberation and the free market, as always; this is about “the absolute right for anyone to buy or sell any medical product without third party interference. Your body, your choice”. Hilariously, the language of abortion rights — which were struck down just before the book was published — is here used to justify an obvious Nazi scientist plot: “We need new jurisdiction with fundamentally different levels of risk tolerance, and clear-eyed consent by all who opt in.”
In 2017, Peter Thiel funded an experimental herpes vaccine off shore on St. Kitts island in the Caribbean. Peter spoke out against FDA regulations at this time as well, citing them as a primary motivator for the experiment. The average yearly income in St. Kitts is about $18,000; Peter Thiel is worth $4.9 billion. Meaning that each resident makes in a year,
.000367346%
of Peter Thiel’s net worth.
I think the problem here is pretty obvious.
Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel are co-investors in Pronomos Capital, a VC financial vehicle whose entire goal is to build sovereign cities inside of existing nations. They have projects in operation in Honduras and Nigeria, among others as we speak.
As we all know, venture capital has been extremely bullish on biotech and particularly in the arena of anti-aging technologies; most of the VCs that we follow on this blog have been funding anti-aging and longevity startups forever, with Larry Ellison notably being a major first mover in the space; he had a non-profit set up for these purposes way before most of these other people even got to the Valley.
But it is worth mentioning that what Larry Ellison is trying to do is live a more healthy balanced life, and create better luxury experiences for guests at his resorts, an ongoing passion project. The same cannot be said of a16z and Founder’s Fund, both of which are fascist venture firms who are very openly beelining for cheap bodies for medical testing.
It goes without saying that the primary motivator for VC and tech elite is to ensure their own personal health and longevity, and that of the other people in their “class”, or “master class” if you will. They themselves speak often about how there is just an innate, scientific reason that they are better and richer than everyone else; a myth that spreads across the entire industry in concepts like “the 10x engineer” and “the founder”. They believe that some people are inherently better than others, that this is backed by science, and that the strong win out over the weak and that’s just how it goes. So the medical experimentation thing is very much situated within that context.
And of course we need to take a moment and remember the Tuskegee Study, Henrietta Lacks, and the Nazi medical experiments and doctors.
There is a reason that this thing that venture capitalists are doing, sounds like these other things. And we can’t just walk past that or ignore it. If there is even a slight POSSIBILITY that similar horrors could emerge from this perfect recipe for mass medical human rights abuse, that needs to be at the forefront of many, many people’s minds and something that we are investigating and intervening in.
These plans have all been openly admitted to, stated at conferences and in books, on venture capital websites, documented, marketed and even promoted by our tech billionaires; this is not a secret certainly within the industry but also in many political and media circles who have documented the stray comments here and there. Put together, the evidence paints an undeniable picture, which is that this is a human rights crisis waiting to happen and we need to make sure that never comes to pass. Once they are outside of American jurisdiction and in production on mass medical experimentation as a sovereign, it will be too late. We are losing our last possibilities of keeping these fuckers from absconding from the country, using crypto regulations as an excuse for a long-existing dream of sovereignty.
El Salvador gives us a good starting point to discuss the medical experimentation issue and what that could look like. Right now, the country is under invasion by crypto venture capitalists who have secured a very attractive package from the local dictator: 0 regulation, 0 taxation on crypto and AI assets, appointments in the government, and a VC-backed crypto mine utilizing precious natural resources — like their fucking volcano — while building a “Bitcoin city”. Meanwhile, the country has fallen into a state of human rights abuse, cited in the gravest terms by Amnesty International, globally criticized for the suspension of civil rights under the dictator, a police state installed, and is also facing a hunger crisis. It is also in a state of advanced wealth inequality, with almost 40% of the population below the poverty line… “the richest 10% of the population receives approximately 15 times the income of the poorest 40%.”
These are the conditions in many of the other areas that VC is in the process of invading as we speak: civil conflict, poverty, authoritarian governments, police states or aspiring police states. Areas where there has been civil conflict or war of some kind, with a legacy of colonialism but also social movement, where there is a lack of money, a lack of food, and a lack of medical care.
AKA sitting ducks.
El Salvador also recently opened the largest prison in the Americas, where tens of thousands of young men who have not received a fair justice process are being treated like animals, beaten and starved to death, and lack any meaningful recourse. That is also an extremely vulnerable population that VC would love to get its hands on. Prisoners have long been the subjects of medical experimentation, much like people in mental hospitals. The new venture capital strategy enables it to capture value from these local populations and actually CREATE a class of test subjects; after all, they are going to be sitting in prison anyway. VC will create even more inequality and turmoil and violence in these regions, producing perfect victims for them. Round ‘em up!
The specific reason for El Salvador’s recent mass incarceration is to make way for the venture capital cronies of the criminal president Bukele; “cleaning it up” for the world of crypto tourism, crypto investment, crypto startups, international crypto events, and so on. This is a process that happened throughout the Bay Area as well as venture capital grew. There is not actually a lot of guess work here because we can look at what they have done in the past, what they have the resources to do now, and what they have openly said they are going to do, and what they are doing. This is not exactly a tarot reading my friends. This is happening and it is exactly as bad and as dangerous as it sounds.
The average yearly income of a person in El Salvador is $4,260. That is such a fractional part of any measure of VC wealth that it seems absurd to even try to spell it out. But these are obviously people who are desperate, living in largely degrading and degraded conditions, and who will be strong targets for venture capitalists who can easily afford to pay them a lifetime’s of wages… in order to get unregulated and unsupervised access to disposable bodies for medical experimentation.
Disposable bodies are a very important resource in capitalism and fascism, turns out.
There is a larger context here of human experimentation within the tech industry and the central role that it plays in the industry development and in the essential qualities of the industry. I would suggest that human experimentation without consent or compensation is a standard operating procedure for the whole industry. Our best example is Meta, which has been continuously caught performing wide area experimentation without consent or compensation, and in fact, their entire business model hinges on them doing just massive amounts of testing, adjusting, crunching, fiddling with us on the behest of billions of dollars of advertising money. While in the old days ads might have been tested out on a focal group, Facebook is literally running trillions of experiments and tests at all times in order to use that information for its revenue. The reason it was so important to them to capture “big data” was so that they could use it to do more experiments on us, and change our behavior according to their whims.
Soylent, also backed by a16z, is another good example where tech put out this product that hadn’t been tested by anyone, from a team with no nutritionists or doctors or anything of the like on it, but was rolled out primarily industry-wide as a cool new futuristic meal replacement alternative, thought it was evidently inferior to what was already available on the market. The Reddit for the product filled with tech bros suffering uncontrollable diarrhea and other nutritional issues, but dissuaded not in the least. Innovation!!
So this impulse runs extremely deeply in the field and it is unsurprising that it is propelling so much of this outward colonial expansion. These are countries who lack the regulatory infrastructure to intervene even if they weren’t too busy selling regulations away, putting all of their people in grave danger. In these countries, VC will be the de-facto king.
We like, seriously need to do something. Like I don’t even know what to say at this point. Do you know how many people will die if we don’t get in front of this? Do you know the human suffering and exploitation that will add up so quick?
Everything comes from something. In order to get extra years of their lives, they will have to extract them from someone else’s. It really is that simple.