Web3 is a venture capital conspiracy. This is what is is actually going on.
These are the most important things in tech right now.
+ In the roll-out of the Web3 agenda, we are seeing the leading venture capital firm truly coming into its power in command of the entire industry. While a16z has always been King, in *this* bubble we really start to see the skills and strategies they honed in the last bubble. Their ability to lead all of their portfolio companies as a unified team — to get all of them jumping “how high” onto web3 messaging at warp speed — is *this* particular competitive advantage that puts them far and away above the other firms as far as directing the industry.
As soon as they gave the marching orders on web3, within a month or so the entire industry had flipped to the exact same messaging. You’re seeing the same messages about web3 coming out of every single startup, tech elite, a large swath of programmers, and all of the VC firms. The coding schools now have web3 and crypto as part of their curriculum, to kids as young as middle schoolers, and all of the major computer science schools, MIT, CMU, are on board as well. A16z’s complete control of the ecosystem, in basically forcing an entire field into homogenous focus, is terrifying to watch but it also reveals very clearly the degree to which venture capitalists control the market.
Media is a huge vessel that has enabled this level of coordination; the fact that tech finished takeover of “legacy” publishers, scooping up newspapers and magazines and video platforms and so on, in the last bubble, is why you see this just overwhelming agenda of web3 *everywhere*. In the last bubble, tech bought up all the publications in the country, from Washington Post to the Atlantic, while funding dozens of blog sites; media in this country is controlled by VCs and tech elite now. In fact, a16z has often said that they are a “media company” — misleading, but accurate as to their focus on engineering control of media platforms. This is the same a16z who has invested in Facebook, Buzzfeed, Four Square, Substack, Genius, Clubhouse, Instagram, Pinterest…
Public perception is that things like “web3”, crypto, etc. refer to some sort of organic development, when they are extremely highly packaged and massaged and created by VCs (this is just a part of the bubble engineering and market fixing they do). This is being shoved down our throats, while being paraded as human progress under the illusion of “adoption”, where we think that we as consumers are the ones driving the industry through our choices. Rather, it is the industry driving us as consumers by *their* choices.
VCs continually prey on the public’s lack of knowledge, and now people think that “upgrading to blockchain” is an absolute necessity for their sector, that it is needed to modernize the country, the military, the world. That everything that doesn’t make the switch will be dead. Meanwhile, blockchain is just a small part of a technology stack and a giant tech ecosystem, and contains no magical properties to “revolutionize” anything. It is not a product, an ideology, a democratic force, in and of itself, it’s just a distributed database or protocol, depending your leanings. People either pretend, don’t know, or simply ignore that just because a technology is decentralized, doesn’t mean it will be implemented or will operate in a complex technology market as de-centralized, or that the benefits of the technology will accrue equally.
This is just another financial instrument for wealth inequality, and saying “decentralized” over and over and over is a cover for THAT, primarily.
To suggest that “web3” and crypto will be “decentralized” for any material value, is a bad faith representation. Sure, in a vacuum; but not in a very complex system of resources, institutions, companies, exchanges, investment bodies, etc. making it happen, in a coordinated fashion, and working in conjunction to make it… centralized. Yes, the core protocol is distributed, but what surrounds it can be just as closed, as inaccessible, monopolistic, centralized, as much or even more so than the existing system. I just saw something a few days ago that there are MORE centralized exchanges than decentralized exchanges; just one clue of where this is really going.
The “decentralized” analysis makes way for all manner of confusion to the mainstream public and other industries and entities. The technology industry has always relied on keeping technology mysterious and inaccessible to them; the public doesn’t understand (b/c artificially created technical illiteracy), and so tech can put code before use case to sell into and pray on consumers, on city, state and federal funding, to fear monger entire industries into buying and buying from web3 startups, and gaining unilateral mainstream acceptance of crypto as important and beneficial to society before any such thing has been remotely indicated. Much the opposite. So, that’s how we get to this truly bizarre shit like bought-out Congress people saying things like “blockchain will revolutionize our city” as a Trojan horse for tech takeover. And more of that will come. Every single vertical will be humiliated, bullied, forced, threatened, etc. Into this. Technology is positioned to dictate what is required to be “on par” with modernity, whether that has any connection to actual technological advancement or not.
This IS happening.
We saw this phenomenon in the last bubble with buzzwords like “open APIs” — I worked at an API infrastructure company early in my career and it was really just a lot of running around to customers who were driven by the hype cycle, and bullying them into submission with threats that they wouldn’t be competitive unless they bought, coincidentally, our shit. Of course, literally 0 of the promises of the open API “economy”, such as more openness and creativity and innovation and democracy and ecosystem, came to fruition; Twitter basically put the death nail in that one when they cannibalized their precious developer ecosystem. (AKA, everything was centralized.) A lot of people sure made money though!
+ A16z is building a military, as well as trying to start a populist movement, both under the name “American Dynamism”.
Yeah, read that again. We’re fucked.
A VC military.
Read that again. We’re fucked.
“American dynamism” is a fine little piece of propaganda that packages together ideas from technofascism, the Proud Boys, MAGA, assorted colonizer logics and of course, an unhealthy dash of toxic, violent masculinity. They’ve lumped all of their weapons companies under this umbrella; the pitch is your typical nationalistic warmongering: America is #1. We must maintain the competitiveness of American against the communists (China/Russia). We must maintain our ability to defend our country (again from the communists) (China/Russia). And the only way to do that is with Silicon Valley technology. Cool.
It’s positioned broadly as sort of technology public works project… yep… making America great again.
For a long time, the official party line in the industry was essentially that tech contracts to the military and intelligence the same way it would any other vertical, thus, its impartial/”blind” and can’t be really held responsible for SPECIFICALLY creating violence. Oh, okay. So this is a distinct shift to open war mongering. The companies that are in existence under the “American Dynamism” portfolio include Anduril, the crown jewel, builder of surveillance towers, war-grade drones (in operation as we speak). Other companies are doing digital forensics for the CIA (Toka), weapons-grade drone defense (SkyShield), AI pilots to create drone swarms (ShieldAI), a surveillance company with more than 1,200 law enforcement agencies in use (Flock), training programs for military “personnel” read: war criminals (Shift). The real drive we see across these portfolios is for autonomous weaponry — so we can kill people without having to face them. And similarly Peter Thiel, is funding a number of weapons startups as well via his firm Founders Fund, including as a co-invester in Anduril — Thiel has made no bones about being an utter fascist and has been integral to Trump’s team. His weapons companies include Palantir and Flock additionally. He is also a major SpaceX investor (for his PayPal Mafia bud, Elon Musk), important because space technology is being used as a cover and distraction and accelerant of the new military arm of venture capital. As it always has been used.
In the past three years, investment in defense companies hit 14 billion. Venture capitalists’ startups are more and more competing in deals with Lockheed, Boeing, etc. Defense is one of the few remaining sectors in America that tech has not managed to significantly disrupt and shut down competitors, likely because it lacked the money to invest in hardware companies — a point many VCs have made already. But clearly with the ever increasing wealth gap, this is becoming less and less an impediment. To contextualize, Raytheon has a market cap of $141 billion, Lockheed $115 billion… that’s a combined net worth of about Elon Musk’s personal net worth right now, and that’s *before* his crypto investments as a market fixer in the PayPal Mafia comes anywhere near fruition.
You’re seeing some really true convergence of tech leadership on shared problems with this one. The days of competitiveness or at least perceived competitiveness are over and as tech has realized the true potential of the industry, its leaders increasingly recognize themselves as being on the same side. Founder’s Fund and a16z partners and Musk and many other VCs and tech elite are all on the same exact talking points. They talk about “serious” founders (I.e., those willing to get some blood on their hands), about the lingering competitiveness of the military and technological force, and about how the state of American infrastructure is a weakness. Elon Musk recently tweeted the pro-war, nationalistic sentiment that “war is the ultimate supreme court”, while Palmer Luckey has been openly braying about killing Russians on Twitter.
The messaging of American Dynamism is spreading quickly, and I’ve seen it used by politicians, other VC firms, Blackrock (!!), by high-profile tech influencers, it’s been on Joe Rogan FFS. In what we were talking about with coordination across portfolio companies, we’re seeing many companies within a16z but outside of the weapons sector echo word-for-word American Dynamism talking points. This is rolling out, again, in such a way that it looks organic, but it actually originated at VC firm Catalyst — the main architect at Catalyst, Katharine Boyle, now works for a16z. She is a warmongering psychopath, bloodthirsty bitch, hates abortion and is worried about the birth rate, etc. Etc. Etc. (As an aside, and post coming on this shortly, this is a good example of how “women in tech” has been the biggest platform under which war crimes and human rights abuses are hidden. Women in tech has results in tens of thousands of women working at weapons companies, intelligence agencies, tech monopolies and financial frauds, etc. This is what “we need more female VCs” ends up looking like: Katherine Boyle, war architect for a16z.
And it’s spreading: the emoji symbol [🇺🇸🚀] that they are using to represent American Dynamism is appearing in Twitter bios across the tech sector. Many of the VC’s profile backgrounds now picture such Americana war propaganda as the statue of liberty and American flags. The word “warfighter” is seen across the various portfolio sites, in the sense of “for the modern warfighter”; the industry’s open embrace of the term represents a more radicalized positioning than ever before.
The fact that the rocket ship is a primary visual symbol involved and that Elon Musk (also PayPal Mafia) is playing a prominent role in this expansion is because space programs have long been nationalistic covers for build out of the war machine. There will be all kinds of fantastic space launches that will be called “American Dynamism” and tech innovation, and distract the world from what is actually going on, which is basically tech taking over control of the military more and more and producing more and more surveillance, oppression and death for not only policing/intelligence agencies here in the US, but all over the world as tech stokes the flames of forever war and sits on the precipice of a new escalation.
The global nature of tech is going to make it possible to funnel weaponry into other conflicts and escape any and all regulations. It will become a powerful arbitrar of global conflict, and it will continue to do business directly with foreign governments, and it is an intelligence agency unto itself. For many years now, large companies like Amazon and Microsoft aren’t just selling to intelligence agencies, the military and ICE, they are custom-building solutions and strategies, going out into the field, guiding the vision and implementation of police and military violence. As Palmer Luckey’s involvement in Ukraine shows, tech will increasingly be the architects of war, under the guise of offering “solutions” and “products”.
One underviewed problem with this massive build-out is not only that tech will be providing a variety of bad actors with weapons, but that this actually gives tech itself its own military force that it can control as a sovereign nation. It is bootstrapping basically a soup-to-nuts military force of autonomous aircraft, weaponized drones, surveillance substrate and superstructure, even fucking blimps. This gives it an autonomy it hasn’t had before. I (and very few others, believe me) have long argued that tech is a sovereign, colonial nation unto itself, and that it sees itself as its own entity separate from the United States. In fact, a prominent technofascist from a16z recently released a book called How to Build a Nation or some bullshit — like the expression “software is eating the world” that Marc Andreessen coined, it is naked in its disgusting and depraved colonial ambitions.
While tech has long had a private police force, it now has its own entire military. Under what conditions they will use that unilaterally are unclear, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was ever a direct confrontation with tech to see drone swarms killing revolutionaries in the streets of Sand Hill. And I’m not joking, because that is what it is going to take to stop these fucks. Their armaments totally changes the ballgames as far as implication for stopping them. They have made it perfectly clear that they won’t abide by natural law, the law of the international courts, nor stop committing war crimes and human rights abuses, without force. And now they have a defense against that force. Which means we have lost a massive competitive advantage. And if there is ever a civil war in this country, technology will be on the side of colonizers and fascists, which they are, and they will be armed. Programmers are functionally soldiers and tech elite are war architects when they are this embroiled in forever war.
+ You know, this is a moment to really reflect on the #NoTechforICE movement. I was quite ill when that was going on, but nonetheless was very engaged raising money for organizers and student coalitions, exposing ICE contracts, fleshing out the map of tech weapons production, as well as creating a framework to try venture capitalists and tech elite for war crimes due to their direct responsibility in the brutality at the US/Mexico border, particularly the separation and sexual abuse of children. I forwarded, in the commons and in the backchannel with organizers, the importance of a war crimes framing as well as the necessity of going directly after VCs, as they are the ones who are actually commanding individual startups and driving the weapons agenda. Lauren Chief Elk and I even set up a webpage and I built out a wiki with some of our research, very clear, but, no one wanted to do that, and now, just a few years later, we are facing an unprecedented build out of tech weaponry whose scope far exceeds anything we have seen before.
This is what happens when our movements don’t go hard enough, don’t go long enough, and don’t go for the actual power sources, instead fighting in proxy squirmishes over individual contracts or platforms that are quickly squashed by tech and then forgotten while the rest of the machine goes on unabated.
This is why I specifically call for the heads of venture capital and tech elite. This is not a problem that can be solved by social media and petitions and awareness and representation and diversity. These are war-mongering psychopaths who will never stop until they ARE stopped. It is because we’ve let them go on so long without a direct confrontation that they are where they are now.
+ Putting aside whatever you may think of the current war between Ukraine/Russia, I draw your attention to the following facts: the head of Ukraine SPECIFICALLY and BY NAME called for help from tech companies — it asked for satellites and drones and surveillance and most importantly, it called for tech to disable services to Russia, including taking down social media infrastructure, shutting down access to crypto, etc.
In the wake, the CEO of Coinbase has said that they will follow US law, including any sanctions against any foreign actor, and shut down access. This should show you just how “decentralized” Bitcoin is, if at any point Silicon Valley can just shut down the primary mechanisms for accessing it and trading it. While there are “technical” ways around this, end users are obviously not fucking computer programmers and when SV cuts off access to exchanges and wallets, and other key financial infrastructure (say, PayPal), it is functioning as a centralized power. It’s an important fact that is displayed here: the crypto market is controlled by US venture capitalists beholden (opportunistically) to US law, and thus, the entire trajectory of crypto will be tied to that. This is one more thing that belies that the decentralized nature of the underlying technology.
It was an important milestone for tech not only in that it provided a popular direct war at a moment when tech needs a warmongering platform, and not only that, it proved beyond any doubt that the can liaison and sell directly into warring environments. Also one of the first major, visible tests of tech’s ability to perform “remote-disarm” — this to me is perhaps one of THE key components of their weapons strategy that has been left out: the idea that, remotely, Silicon Valley VCs can shut down so many of its services that it actually can cause tremendous hardship and burden and even mass death.
I don’t think its impossible that tech could shut down an entire country to the point where large scale damage would be done, as in, people starving, economies collapsing, mass death, devastating destruction, disease. Tech seeks such utter control and is a monopoly of monopolies, and so obsessed with gaining as much visibility and control over everyone in the world, and putting points of centralization on them, that this ability is a natural effect— they have been allowed to grow so criminally without almost any regulation, oversight, etc. much less any kind of democracy or voting or moral code, and and and…
What would happen in America if Amazon shut down its delivery tomorrow, its Whole Food stores? What would happen if we couldn’t use Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or or or … What if we couldn’t access any of our crypto, or use CashApp, or Venmo … or iMessage …. what if they shut down Uber and Lyft so we couldn’t get around? Because those are allllllll owned and invested in by the same group of tech elite. The recipe to taking over or decimating a country, perhaps ours, is very clear. Which brings me to my next point.
+ Tech is stealing the presidency. Believe me or don’t, this is fucking happening.
Peter Thiel, member of the PayPal mafia, has been a closest advisor and strategist for Donald Trump, for a long time. He has recently spoken, as part of his campaign duties, about MAGA needing a more positive message… and guess what that will be? The American Dynamism that he has been developing with his cronies Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk.
Remember, American Dynamism is proposed as not just a VC strategy but an actual grassroots movement, and I’ve already seen people saying their “position” is American Dynamism, that they believe this is the future of American, and of course, the new lingo, “builder”, which is what you are if you build weapons or VC startups, and if you don’t, you’re “unserious”. Yes, someone over at a16z has been busy in the language virus mines coming up with all this elaborate Orwellian double speak. Probably Marc. If you’re reading this Marc, I will see you in a war crimes tribunal before either of us dies.
The Valley is coming up red, and not in their own blood in the streets, as God would prefer. The Valley has had a bit of a PR problem in that its true ideology is obviously deeply tied up in right wing and extremist right wing values, but they have cosplayed as Democrats for a long time simply because that is who they were bribing out in California — any detailed reading of campaign contributions make it evident that the industry is pretty ambivalent on parties and while not being blue at all, just opportunistically goes for whoever they think is most advantageous. Thus, tech elite are in the position of having to switch from appearing Democrats to actually being Republican, in the open. Tech workers themselves have had to hide their true values for a long time, and this gives them both permission and encouragement and context to come out and claim themselves as “builders” in “American Dynamism”, when of course that’s just the elaborate cover for being mercenary killers and members of hate groups.
When the election season really gets going, Thiel will help Trump roll out his new “positive” platform, American Dynamism, with the help of the rest of the PayPal mafia, all of the VCs in the Valley, every single tech employee that wants to remain employed and get rich, as well as Zuckerberg (a16z and Thiel have played HUGE roles at Meta). I won’t repeat myself here but an earlier post discusses the giant role tech has played in creating, manning and protecting hate groups throughout the history of the Internet. With Elon’s purchase of Twitter, they are now in a position to bring all of those hate groups back from the patchworking of underground sites, and back onto the mainstream platform. This will all be wrapped up in MAGA and American Dynamism language, but ultimately, they will hand him the presidency, and in return, he will give them shit tons of infrastructure and defense contracts that will cause even more money and power to fall down on the heads of tech elite.
It is my belief that at this point, the government will be controlled in large part by venture capitalists.
+ The “crypto winter” is faked and fixed. Period. This is not real. This is market fixing.
Crypto is being kept artificially deflated. The pricing of the asset in no way reflects its actual value. There’s a PR front going on that this could be “the end of crypto”, as the Valley, especially a16z, has continued to invest heavily and exuberantly in the space, as the ecosystem around it proliferates and more and more COUNTRIES sign on, to say nothing of “Bitcoin cities”, as well as huge institutional investors like fucking BANKS who have previously been too conservative, signing up. Literally nothing about the ecosystem points to a market this low *except* the price.
Weird!!
The way to explain what is happening with crypto right now is to recognize one of the venture capitalist’s core competencies: they are monopolists and market fixers. They do not simply “spray and pray”, a derogatory for the idea that they basically are just doing guesswork instead of being careful architects of the industry.
People don’t seem to understand that crypto is not a new phenomenon. PayPal was working on its vision for this in the *90s*, so yes, that’s Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, PayPal Mafia. Crypto is cited as one of their major visions for the company, but the technology wasn’t there in the late 90s, nor the strong arm backing. There were versions of cryptocurrencies in the late 90s: “Bit Gold” was the first. Some have thought its creator is Satoshi, and notably, the guy who made Bit Gold is a total piece of shit, just like all these guys. This is not something that was “discovered” and created some kind of organic gold rush. Marc Andreessen has been working on the idea of cryptocurrency since the 90s. They all have. Very much counter to its reputation as something shiny and new and fallible, decades of infrastructure work has gone into this and is currently going into this. When I showed up to the Valley in 2009, there was already HUGE momentum around it, and that was over 13 years ago. All of that time, the full force of the technology industry has been behind this. The number of people who have an investment in this, including massive institutions just now coming on big time, can’t be underestimated or reduced.
Note: those whales are coming on board in the midst of this artificially deflated price. You guessed it: key institutional investors, mega-rich individuals, hedgefunds, private banks, and undoubtedly crime syndicates who were too risk-adverse to make heavy investments in the first go, now “see the light” (aka, the extent of the market fixing), and have one more chance to get on board… at rock bottom prices. JP Morgan even said earlier this year that Bitcoin is massively undervalued — and then it bought in big. People who are truly in the know, can see this very clearly.
The VCs are artificially deflating the price of Bitcoin to allow more major players on; with a major stake in making the crypto succeed, they will help fix the market with a16z. In fact, at this point, the number of powerful people, players, VCs, industries, banks, crime syndicates, etc. that have a huge stake in this going well, means that the most powerful individuals and structures in the world are going to do everything in their power to make this bitch pop. And because they got in at such a low price, there will be a very immediate reward as soon as the VCs relieve pressure and the price goes up again, astronomically.
The amount of wealth transfer that is going to happen when crypto truly takes off is going to make the transfer of wealth to tech during the pandemic (over 2x in money and power), look like an absolute joke. Venture capitalists, tech elite, and the tech class overall, has been buying incredible amounts of this stuff, both institutionally and as private investors, since 2009. The price of Bitcoin didn’t go above $1 until 2011.
I need to warn you about the incalculable shift in financial future that is going to happen, the wealth gap that is going to be created. The wealth of tech billionaires after this? We’re going to be talking about tech multi-trillionaires. Not to mention the number of tech workers who are about to become hugely rich. Who do you think was buying up all the Bitcoin in the early days, who had the money and the access? Even now, who do you think is making major individual investments in crypto? Almost everyone who gets individually truly rich off of this is going to be computer programmers or some member of the tech class. Tech has always used its employees as a weapons, and high salaries/comp have always been a part of that; they are used to oppress the lower classes in the cities they invade.
Again, I cannot emphasize enough how much this is going to increase wealth inequality, and how much money is truly going to flow to the tech industry — again, as an armed, sovereign nation totally fixed of market, now with an autonomous military — this is going to fundamentally reshape the global financial structure, to devastating effect.
Why do they need so much money?
They want to take over the world.
+ I’m not joking. Marc Andreessen says: software is eating the world. And it sounds provocative and insightful, but it a bare naked howl of greed. They want it all. People think that tech is just a software empire; its not. Marc Andreessen is actually the largest landowner in San Francisco following the untimely passing of his father-in-law earlier this year, who helped broker the arranged marriage into his criminal SF real estate empire. Very few people know that Marc truly got his start by gold-digging some poor bitch. She was vastly richer than him, and now she is married to one of the biggest psychopaths the world has ever seen. You dumb ass bitch. Divorce, babe, divorce.
Tech is currently in the process of setting up strongholds in
- Dublin
- Miami
- Palestine
- Detroit
- Nairobi
- Austin
- New York
- Atlanta
- Chicago
And others. Tech started the whole “taking over the world” thing in the Bay, in SF and in Oakland. The bubble grew and grew. It began to change the city. More and more white people came in. Tech real estate barons bought up land, illegally displaced tenants, moved in highly paid employees who started pricing out the neighborhoods. The cities transformed almost entirely “tech cities” (company towns, open air offices), nothing but big tech companies. Devoured. Felled.
They are using the exact same strategies they used with San Francisco and Oakland, but now all over America and increasingly the world. Establish tech HQs. Set it up to turn into a company town. Move in the tech workforce. The workforce itself is one of the greatest weapons tech has, and so it needs to get them in there quickly. The tech workforce has some very specific properties. One is that they are in large part White or Asian men, paid on average let’s say, somewhere around 150,000 base, plus bonus and stock, in cities where huge populations live at or below the poverty line. And that is being modest. People in tech regularly pull 350k total comp or more / year, and even among them there are whales that will be able to do disproportionate damage to the city (I.e., buy up night clubs and restaurants as hobbies, become real estate investors and landlords, build private communities, etc).
And those are the people who will be able to command the housing market, and they will push lower income workers out of housing and come to occupy it themselves. This sets into effect a cascading factor where tech workers themselves then try to move away from the tech center to get a “better quality of life” and cheaper housing, and “more culture” (displaced people are “culture” to techie scum), thus they move into the places that those they have displaced have gone. Think of it like a ripple. Salaries and comp are just a way of weaponizing software developers against humans at this point; they perform critical functions in the entire process. With Web3 and crypto, tech workers are going to be richer and more effective VC cucks than ever.
Taking control of real estate is an absolute priority. The fact that the richest and most powerful VC in the Valley is also the biggest landowner is not a coincidence. It’s also not a coincidence that a16z has re-invested in WeWork’s founder, who has accumulated ownership of 3,000 residential units in… Miami and Atlanta, two places who are already in the late early stages of the fall of their cities. AirBnb, a known gentrifier and destroyer of cities and housing markets, as well as things like WeWork, and collaboration with developers and speculators, as well as other startups put into specific formations to impact a city in specific ways, all of these are used to literally gain ownership of the city’s foundational land itself.
And just like in San Francisco and Oakland, they’ll install Ring cameras on their houses and “neighborhood watch” apps that help them criminalize residents and get them arrested. They’ll obliterate most of the queer infrastructure; while there are some bars for gay white men, the last lesbian bar in San Francisco closed long again. I went to the final night and it was horrible. I had dreamed, as a queer girl, of coming to SF ever since high school. I barely even caught the death rattle. A full assault on the arts and culture is part and parcel. Tech workers demand “higher end” establishments and become a major voting bloc, with VCs literally telling them how to vote.
One of the first orders of business is to declare war on the areas of the city where people who are homeless, who have psychotic disorders, are victims of violence, displaced folks and others, primarily of color, with police and legislation and policy. The Tenderloin in San Francisco has been internationally shamed by the Bay Area for decades. Twitter bought its headquarters there and then immediately IPOed, minting dozens and dozens of new multi-millionaires overnight into it; it then reneged on all its promises to the residents and city. Against all odds, the Tenderloin still stands as tech elite bays and howls about there still being people left alive in it.
And the billionaires do their thing. Marc Benioff started buying buildings in down SF, and now his tower is the highest in San Francisco, even though he himself is terrified of heights. I was in the Irish bar one day (which was invaded by mid Javascript programmers), talking with a nice union man about the building, and he showed sheets of steel at the top with blood on them from the men getting injured, way up there at the top of the world. Mark owns a whole complex of large buildings, taking over entire bands of the city. There’s the Benioff Children’s Hospital. There’s the Zuckerberg Memorial hospital. The Oracle stadium.
They chum up with politicians of the target state; recently saw something with a16z warhawk Katharine Boyle doing a photo op with Miami’s mayor. The tech company wants to have as much control over local politicians as possible and to minimize their influence in subordinance to tech itself. They often force cities to make unfavorable deals with them, such as allowing them to evade taxes. They basically threaten and bully cities, or bribe and gain control of so many of the politicians, that they ensure a very friendly operating environment.
They have a template. This is what will happen in every single target city.
The result to the city victimized by tech invasion is catastrophic. Long-time residents are completely displaced and pushed out. The demographics of the city change within years. It took tech about 20 years to fully kill SF, but now that they have this template they’ve perfected, cities will fall much faster. All of their wealth and assets transferred into VC hands. I’m already getting messages from people in Dublin that they are being invaded at warp speed; Ireland may be one of our only points of believable resistance as stands, they absolutely hate being invaded and it has been done to them for hundreds of years. The fact that tech is moving into it is disgusting and inhumane. But that is how these psychopaths roll.
I have been saying these things for a long time, and its getting to be too light. I don’t care if you read my posts after the world ends and say “Shanley was right.” I care if you wake the entire fuck up so we can do something SERIOUS and MATERIAL about this.
We are running out of time. By the time this thing gets out of the bag, the whole world is fucked, and we will have lost forever. Their vision is to eat the world; let ours be to save it.
But this field is full of nothing by cowards, sea to sea. Fall into it, animals. When there are war crimes tribunals for this, programmers will be on trial too, and facing the ultimate justice. They will have earned it far more than their riches; their true riches will spill in the sand.
Crimes against the world are punishable by death.