Venture Colonialism is A Rapidly Scaling, Anti-Worker Wrecking Ball Intent on Destabilizing and Exploiting All Global Workers
Everyone knows that the tech industry busts unions; well actually, that is something that has only become mainstream knowledge in the past few years with the arrival of the Amazon Labor Union. A lot of people don’t realize how long-standing, how many times, and how effectively, and how purposefully, systematically, and how GLOBALLY, tech has been putting down workers around the world and at home. They have become a fucking machine for crushing workers, violently extracting labor from them, and ruining their communities, forcing people to live on sub-living wage, from ride-share drivers in Nigeria to cafeteria professionals on big tech campuses, Silicon Valley, USA, to content moderators and now AI trainers. Indeed, farrrr before the Amazon unionization, we had massive labor fights in the Bay over the tech campuses, most ostentatiously via the contracting firm Bauer Transportation, which was used as a front for anti-worker activity including illegal union busting. Oh and there was that time we were flying in programmers from India illegally to work for literally cents an hour.
In this post, I want to express that this is a system and design, that there are inevitable ruptures coming between VC and workers we need to prepare for, and that this is no ordinary capitalist union busting, because it is a fascist global mass worker exploitation program designed to provide the base of the technofascist empire.
WE ARE NOT DEALING WITH THE NORMAL FARE OF COMPANIES WITH THESE FOLKS.
Tech exploits even its most “prized” employees, the computer engineers themselves, paying them an insanely low amount compared to how much revenue they generate for the company. Another famous anti-worker measure taken was when Steve Jobs via Apple entered into illegal and anti-competitive agreements to control programmer salary in the Valley with other huge tech companies; unionization is not the only thing on the table, but wage fixing, both of which interrupt worker power and organization to great effect. That lawsuit was settled in 2014. So we are talking about a very deep thing that goes wayyyyy back and is a defining feature of the industry.
Many software engineers are required to work 60-80 work weeks that consistently produce broken homes, broken bodies and damaged brains. I’ve been tracking burnout within the industry — particularly among programmers — for over 10 years and have come to understand it as a complex workplace injury, that often involves physical conditions like repetitive stress industry, and mental illnesses including anxiety, depression and unfortunately, PTSD. This is not unrelated to the physical effects of the mining tech relies on — including deadly child labor — or physical injuries in tech warehouses. This is not unrelated to how major companies like Meta and OpenAI — both backed by the same money — have used outsourcing to acquire $1-2 or less workers, working with incredibly traumatizing content such as child sexual abuse material, murders and torture, pet abuse, etc. There is a consistent emotional violence against workers that appears, even in very different parts of the tech and venture capital apparatus; it still mirrors each other, here, in the psychological violence. And of course we also see this where algorithms have become bosses, literally automating human bodies according to the machine; gig workers are often terrorized by the need to achieve stars from customers so they can continue to like, pay the water bill, and are pushed far beyond what is reasonable to no end except venture capital returns.
This was on display during the pandemic, it was absolutely gut wrenching to see how venture capital and big tech responded. Elon locking people in factories, warehouse workers given no safety gear, gig economy workers left out in the cold in the days of lockdowns.
Tech has lived in a constant battle against workers; they live there, they understand that, that is the world they live in, where they are fighting with workers in some way, everywhere they go; in fact, they GO THERE to get and exploit the labor. The Spotify artists even organize because of the lack of reasonable pay. And this constant battle has been continuously GLOBAL. These labor problems have broken out everywhere from the United States to Nigeria and Kenya and the EU and India and Brazil and fucking Sweden and the Caribbean; every single place and area VC has launched this destabilizing, exploitative and insecure gig model, there has been resistance.
In our latest case, 150 workers in just May of this year, gathered in Nairobi to establish the first African Content Moderators Union:
“The establishment of the Content Moderators Union is the culmination of a process that began in 2019, when Daniel Motaung, a Facebook content moderator, was fired from his role at the outsourcing company Sama after he attempted to convene a workers’ union called the Alliance. Motaung, whose story was first revealed by TIME, is now suing both Facebook and Sama in a Nairobi court. Motaung traveled from his home in South Africa to attend the Labor Day meeting of more than 150 content moderators in Nairobi, and addressed the group.
“I never thought, when I started the Alliance in 2019, we would be here today—with moderators from every major social media giant forming the first African moderators union,” Motaung said in a statement. “There have never been more of us. Our cause is right, our way is just, and we shall prevail. I couldn’t be more proud of today’s decision to register the Content Moderators Union.””
I highly admire these efforts and wish them all the best, but this union is under great risk, because these tech companies have tonsssss of experience in busting unions and generally preventing work stability and organizing. So as these union members are starting to develop this competency and engage with these oppressors through union organization, at the time they are even just getting their bearings about the venture capital threat, this is at the same time that an extremely well calibrated, effective and experienced worker crushing weapon, is increasing its presence in the region; and it will be a force to reckon with because venture capital is rapidly expanding in these areas, in particular with a sovereign startup “zone”, outside of Nigerian jurisdiction despite being located within the state, invested in by Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen via their venture firm Promonos:
“ALONG THE HALF-FINISHED asphalt of the Ibeju Lekki Epe Expressway out of Lagos, flanked by marshland, unmarked farms, and rows of fledgling developments, there is an invisible point after which some of Nigeria’s laws suddenly no longer apply. In 2009, the Lagos state government declared a 150-square-kilometer patch of land along the Gulf of Guinea coast “the Lekki Free Zone,” offering tax holidays and other perks for companies who set up there. “The moment you are inside the zone, you are outside of the Nigerian state,” says Omolade Adunbi, professor of Afro-American and African studies at the University of Michigan…”
It is the establishment of these sovereign zones, for VC settlements, that will bring the people into even more conflict over labor exploitation… after all, who will build the cities? Resistance to another Promonos venture capital settlement in Honduras, has escalated in recent months as the legality of the settlement is undergoing legal battle. These projects are under construction now, including the Bitcoin City in El Salvador, which proceeds despite the country being in a state of horrific human rights crises.
The tech crushing of unionization is unique I think from what we’ve seen in other corporate formations; for one, because anti-unionization tech, worker displacement tech, and gig economy administration, are all things that tech actually sells to OTHER enterprises; they not only practice it but turn it into a product and export it. The rise of AI is a great example and we see the direct connection to the major Hollywood writer’s strikes here in America; AI has also been cited in other anti-worker actions. In this case, we see that the technology firm is actually selling the means to worker displacement and instability; this puts technology itself at a totally new level of being inside the constant conflict with workers, in so many levels and in so many mechanisms, including, importantly, its products and technologies as being anti-worker or designed to fuck workers, in general. This means that doing this is actually core to their DNA, they are incentivized to do this, and they are SCALING the worker crushing through these platforms and the destabilized labor models that come with it.
Something like a normal corporation, with a specific focus — say, producing a kind of food item, or even a media company — has a limited range of worker stuff to squash. The context is known and stable; their union squashing activity looks a lot like a silo, they can do it up and down their stack. Tech’s approach is more of a razed wrecking ball, a constantly spinning, harming, evolving, accelerating, global effort, to squash workers, as the DRIVER of that. The implications of the level of activity suggests that tech is one of the top if not THE top, enemy of workers around the world. A concrete, identifiable conspiracy of people have grown and built this machine and now as Silicon Valley leaves the nest and goes truly global, workers around the world are facing a coordinated threat that they don’t even know about yet. Even to see one union busting system within this vast system, gives you no idea of what is actually implicated in the mega picture of this: total, global, multi-level, technology-enabled, purposefully built, destruction of the working class and displacement of it for technofascist exploitation.
That is a totally different animal than we have seen before. Because actually what tech is trying to do, is enslave all of the workers of the world under technofascism.
I’m sorry but that is literally what is happening here and AI is a huge deal to do with it, as well as various supply chain and programming automations — not because the idea of LLMs are inherently evil, but because they are being developed and deployed for the specific purpose of destabilizing workers and the economy so that workers are more exploitable and more under the thumb of venture capital.
They are fascists. This is who they are, and this is what they do. They are not just tackling the American workforce or the areas they just happen to touch resistance — they are AGGRESSIVELY GOING AFTER global labor as an existential goal and as a core driver, connected directly to their revenue, in a very serious way. And that — a cheap and destabilized labor force run through by venture capital exploitation across the entire network and stack— is what they NEED to complete their ambitions of building a new empire, various forms of accelerationism, wealth concentration, capital and power. They need this labor and they are securing it for themselves. They need labor for their new cities and campuses, for data for their AI, as coders and drivers, as personal staff, as physical labor, mining, as bodies for human experimentation. After all, someone needs to build the technofascist empire.
“Time to build” really means “time for YOU to work for ME”.
And they have workers literally surrounded in 1000 kinds of exploitation, where there is increasingly no refuge from technofascist worker exploitation and corporations willingly hand over the keys, and governments open up countries to them. This promises to put the global workforce into the hands of technofascists; especially considering this comes in conjunction with the whole venture colonialism pattern (which is written about in more depth here), which will provide the structure for all of this as well as the motive.
This is not just about union busting in ride-share work, or any other vertical; this is not the expected fare of regular corporations; this is about an effort to totally fucking bulldozer the world, and to do that from top to bottom, globally. In the words of the economist Marx: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”
VC is an active, aggressive and hostile entity acting on the mandate to capture, destabilize and extract from workers, all over the world and particularly in areas it has marked for settlement. As we speak, this mandate is executed on from hundreds of VC firms, hundreds of thousands of startups, and over time, millions of different tools and platforms, all unfolding in dozens of countries simultaneously. This is a HUGE part of web 3.0 and somehow we are not discussing the magnitude of this threat, and the dire conditions we are already in.
ANYTHING to do NOTHING, huh? I hope you realize that people die from all this shit. This is a bleak fucking future my friend. Do you know literally anyone besides me working on this? DM me if so.
Tech takes out workers at the knees at a variety of layers and levels, and that is what makes it a particularly effective machine. This is not incidental, it is the point. Mass scale, global destabilization of the workforce… this is a huge market for them, and exactly what they need for their new floating, distributed fascist empire.
Great!!