What Does the Technofascist State Look Like?

We entertain the thought exercise: what does the venture capital state look like in a more mature form, say, 5, 10, 20 years from now? How is the venture capital state functioning in its new form once its ambitions are realized? Here we will look at some considerations. 

This is a thought exercise based on the things we have covered in this blog, an initial starting part to talk about it, something we can adjust. But it is important to see that there is a future developing, that we can reasonably project in no uncertain terms, and that is already being put into place. This is no longer an abstract matter but one we can see materializing before us. 

In the first years, venture capital will be living between its existing power bases in America — the Bay, Texas and Miami — and inside of its settlements. I don’t expect to see announcements of the actual parties — the individuals heading this conspiracy — personally taking up official residence in any public way for some time, too conspicuous. However, most of the head venture capitalists will be traveling a great deal more. 

We watch as venture capital takes the form of foreign delegation; a lot of the work they will be doing is establishing and securing their relationships with other foreign states in order to secure their position on the global stage as a nation-state power. We see this in the past few months where we have seen a16z startups and their lead investors, most notably OpenAI and Coinbase, out on the road in Israel, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, the UK and others, essentially presenting a “roadshow” of the latest technological developments, negotiating over regulation and startup headquarters, and raising money from foreign wealth. This gave us a good preview of what venture capital diplomacy is going to end up looking like, consisting of lots of high-level negotiations with governments on issues of taxation and regulation and resources, where the “bargaining chip” is technologies like AI itself.  

We’ve seen the levers that tech has as instruments: they are negotiating as terrorists each time, extracting free reign at the point of: we will take all our offices, our people and our money out of the country, and we won’t let you use any of it, ever. If you don’t harbor us, you will fall technologically and therefore economically behind other countries. 

This has long been the initial negotiating point of venture capitalists and indeed, because they have purposefully formed a monopoly over key pieces of technical infrastructure that many, many people rely on, they have a really strong arm here. Already, venture capitalists are heralded as foreign dignitaries and that was something we were observing early in web 2.0, as venture capital has always negotiated directly with nation-states itself and tech’s global mandate requires them to deeply interact with many, many, many countries where they have users, and to engage DOWN TO A LOCAL LEVEL on issues like regulation of ride sharing, censorship and moderation policies, opening of local offices, lobbying for tax incentives and real estate deals, and so on. They are intimately working this issue in an at-scale way that very few other categorical groups can claim. 

Remember, at the end of the day, these are just fucking fascists. The technology is just an excuse. And it will appear in the form of fascist corporatism, where the society is being driven by the functions of venture capitalist technology development. The problem is that here again venture capital will appear like just any other businessman when what is actually going on is negotiations with a fascist state. While this will generally take the face of a regulatory battle, that is because the regulations with the VC state are the negotiating table. 

Like we’ve been seeing, there will be TONS of capitulating to the venture capital state, like we just saw with the UK. They are an irresistible force because they are ultimately selling the ability for countries to compete technically, as technology dealers. 

We can expect to see quite a bit more overt polickting, as venture capitalists and OpenAI / Coinbase especially have gotten involved in politics, and have signaled intent to openly back friendly candidates in governments all over the world. This is also a difference in how political negotiation and backing works within the “industry”; traditionally, tech companies have “encouraged” their employees to vote for certain tickets and individual tech elite have made major donations. But here it is the startup itself and the venture capital firm itself as the operating unit in political affairs. What this offers to political candidates is something beyond money, actually to have access to the full suite of technology, marketing, PR, community, media, social media and other functions within the venture capitalist ecosystem, as well as its startup workers. This is major firepower and it shows a significant escalation in ambitions to get involved in elections both in America, and all over the world. Again, the percolating sense that venture capital will be much more heavily involved in coup attempts leading forward; this is the inevitable result of the interaction between their ideology and their growing political and colonial strategy.  

The relocation of candidate support from the individual — even if influenced by venture capital — to the level of the corporation, speaks back to that fascist corporatism where the corporation itself is the unit of political activity. The site of political activity will be at the level of the venture capital corporation; or, what we know as a startup. 

Venture capitalists are extremely used to running distributed global systems so their transition to running as a distributed NATION, you will actually find to be quite natural. All of these firms have startups operating at every corner of the globe at all times. The ability to scale this financial vehicle with this level of coordination — using the highly centralized control “tower” of venture capital with the distributed startup ecosystem around it — is what makes them particularly lethal and effective. 

We can take some ganders of who will be running what functions if we start to look at them as operators of a state. Their state will of course, be organized by company or startup, but for our understanding, we are looking at a situation where Marc Andreessen is the sovereign leader/executive, Palmer Luckey is the head of military, Peter Thiel is the head of propaganda, Elon Musk is minister of transportation, Balaji Srinivasan head of medical development (terrifying possibility), and so on. Startups will nestle under these functions, with major platform companies like Anduril serving as the center of a host of other startups for distributed feature development. 

 Ultimately, they want an empire. They might have made a decision on where that will be HQed, but it will eventually come down to opportunism. In the next few years we see the construction of the VC settlements first. The material goal is to build viable settlements where they can run their affairs independently of control by other nation-states. 

Technofascists have a specific city layout that we can already see in places they’ve colonized in the past, in Oakland and the East Bay. We’ll see large luxury high rises, which tech finds to be the most efficient way to lodge their “citizens”. They are very cookie cutter developments with a number of luxury, cookie cutter accouterments of the neauveu riche, that keep the guinea pigs very spoiled. We first saw this new techno-fied, technofascist living complex in San Francisco and the Bay. This is what replaced many existing residential areas as tech pushed out local residents, as well as what emerged interspersed with the financial district. 

Tech basically adopted and modeled this concept after the Four Seasons and St Regis residences. In the first and 2nd web, when tech had a lot less money than it has now, luxury hotels were widely beloved by tech executives, none more so than Larry Ellison, the Godfather of Silicon Valley, who actually purchased and constructed Four Seasons for his island, Lanai, which he also bought. And a number of tech executives lived in these residences. The St Regis Residences San Francisco was built in 2005, right before the second bubble; the Millennium, at the time of its building the gold standard in the area, opened in 2009. There was a St Regis up in Tahoe, where tech elite love to go, one of my favorite resorts personally. And, these are also the places where tech elite loved to stay as they gained money and power during this time, against established and “old” money, and were on the road staying in these facilities that had everything they need built in — conference centers, gyms, etc. — while traveling extensively for work, also the source of the love for the luxury hotel, somewhere where they can be living comfortably on the road and something which makes the travel experience a lot lighter. It is much more pleasant to fly in international first class or private to London and then stay in a luxury hotel, than it is to fly economy and stay at the worst Hilton in the world, also in London.  

So the tech elite settlement is going to look a lot like a luxury hotel. As far as the main design features, you’re talking about lots of floor to ceiling glass, large, open, empty space (which will be cheaper in settlements), dark wood or brushed concrete floors, large open kitchens with marble islands, minimal decor, oversized furniture, abundant common areas and amenities, and ubiquitously available alcohol and snacks, all within an industrial minimalism of beige, white, gray and black. And oh yeah. These bitches LOVE Edison lights. 

The collapse of home and work is what drives the architectural requirements; much as hotels function when you’re out on the open road selling software. The venture capital settlement reflects the fusion of the person with the corporate apparatus. You live where you work; thus, work must have all the amnesties of a living environment and vice versa. I wouldn’t be surprised if ultimately venture capital attaches sleeping facilities to the office itself, an impulse glimpsed when Musk bought Twitter and had everyone sleeping on mattresses in the conference rooms. Meta has already had company lodging for employees and Google is throughly outfitted with “nap pods”. Perhaps having your own house becomes an elite item that only that top venture capitalists and CEOs have.

So these settlements will look a lot like what we already see in San Francisco and in the Bay Area and on campuses. There is no separation between work and life so all of the steps and stages of living can be effortlessly integrated. 

There are some pretty lux parts of the venture capital standard housing and living plan. You’re going to see lots of pools: indoor, Olympic-sized saline pools, outdoor infinity pools. We love fake fireplaces, with the white or black sand, or coming out of stones. Lately, tech has taken to boxing as a popular hobby; in the last bubble, it was weight lifting and a lot of skiing in the higher tiers of the tech workers. I think what we are seeing in the Zuckerberg mixed martial arts thing, and in the rumored boxing match, is a shift to a more physical masculinity in the technofascist ideology as well. After all, nerds have the “inherent genius” part of the “master race” equation, but haven’t been traditionally known for having the physicality of the master race/ideal man; rather, the field tends to be slightly overweight, and sedentary because the field requires a lot of sitting at your desk clickety clacking away for the man. So I think as the field transforms further into fascism and that venture capital continues to cultivate the workers in the field, we will continue to see this emerging emphasis on the physical body. Last bubble, there was about a two year period where lifting weights was extremely popular with the software engineers, but this quickly fizzled out; the sedentary nature of the work is eventually consuming as more and more of your work time is taken away. Deep on its own anti-aging program, tech elite has an ongoing investment in keeping its prize guinea pigs in top typing shape. 

To that effect, expect lots of gyms!!! The gyms that are at these major luxury complexes are amazing these days, love them — in fact, the Musk/Zuckerberg fight is much preceded by the addition of regulation boxing rings to tech gyms! All the machines your heart can desire. Super nice locker rooms. Cold refrigerated towels in two scents: eucalyptus and peppermint.

 Just like your nicest and most elite startups, there will be ping pong tables, pool games, vintage video game consoles, even bowling.

When we start looking into wellness/recreating, this inevitably brings us to the fascinating question of how medicine will be handled in the technofascist settlement. One layer of this is covered in a recent post on this blog, discussing the technofascist strategy to get more access to unregulated human testing via the actual residents and indigenous peoples of these areas. 

These will be the ones at the very bottom of the technofascist medical testing; essentially, the equivalent of mice or rats in the medical testing mechanism, and then by the time you get to actually rolling out the testing on technical workers, that’s going to be more at the level of a pig or a chimpanzee. The only actual humans in the technofascist rearrangement of medical development, of course, are the venture capitalists; so when we look at the city as a site of medical development, the scale drops away beneath them. Every year we add to their lives must come from somewhere. 

The fully contained, cut off venture capital city itself provides a way to deeply control the integration of new medical developments into society. For over a decade, many of the large tech campuses have had medical care in-house; this is accompanied by a series of startups, including OneMedical, recently purchased by Amazon, which have provided concierge medicine to tech workers for years, with original offices in the Bay — medicine above and beyond what is accessible through the public system. So we see a gating system happening and the different economic groups accord to a level of medical testing and a level of medical treatment.

I believe that the tech building infrastructure will someday be analyzed along the lines of how we now look back at other fascist architectural styles. To this point, a general summary of architectural style under fascism: 

“Fascist-styles of architecture are a branch of modernist architecture which became popular in the early 20th century. The Italian Fascist style was also greatly influenced by the rationalist movement in Italy in the 1920s. Rationalist architecture, with the help of Italian government support, celebrated the new fascist age of culture and government in Italy.

In Nazi Germany, the extremely large and spacious Fascist architecture was one way envisioned by Hitler to unify Germany for what he described as "mass experiences", in which thousands of citizens could gather and take part in the patriotism of community events, and listen to speeches made by Hitler and other Nazi party leaders. 

The fascist styles of architecture took design cues from Ancient Rome in that buildings of the styles were generally very large and symmetric with sharp non-rounded edges. The buildings purposefully conveyed a sense of awe and intimidation through their size, and were made of limestone and other durable stones in order to last the entirety of the fascist era and create impressive ruins. The buildings were also very plain, with little or no decoration, and lacked much complexity in design. These generalities of fascist architecture contributed to the simple aesthetics the edifices display. All these aspects helped the fascist dictatorships exhibit absolute and total rule of the population. Hitler and Mussolini used fascist architecture as another source of propaganda to display to the world the strength, pride and power their regimes had.” 

While surely comparing architectural phenomenons is insufficient for a level of the charges, when there are so many elements consistently lining up with what we know about fascism, these other considerations have more berth, or at least we must ask ourselves how the properties of technofascism may express themselves in these large-scale productions of architecture. 

(For the record, all of the VCs in this conspiracy are fascists, but they count several Nazis among them and are very comfortable with working with Nazis and having them around. See: Yuga Labs, an a16z crypto company funded with over $400 million, whose literal logo is a VERY slight various of the Nazi insignia for Waffen Totenkopf, one of its elite SS units.) 

Nothing comes from nowhere. 

However, Marc Andreessen is a fascist, not a Nazi; he is leading the way in the creation of his own fascism, technofascism, and recent comments suggest he views Nazism as sortof a mistaken cult outgrowth of fascism more generally (the latter speculation). In the middle of the pandemic, he published the now famous “It’s Time to Build” essay, essentially extolling Americans to turn to technological development as a way forward, to triple down on, effectively, venture capital as an economic model. Of course, this was wrapped up in the same gauzy, superfluous appeals to “the future we want for our children” and so on, and there’s actually a fair bit of nostalgia to it, some “make America great again” if you will, Marc being a sentimental person as times which is easily mistaken for caring about the future. Or, like, people.

One of the major themes of that essay is the idea of a grand new, beautiful, technologically enhanced version of a city: 

“We also can’t build the cities themselves anymore. When the producers of HBO’s “Westworld” wanted to portray the American city of the future, they didn’t film in Seattle or Los Angeles or Austin — they went to Singapore. We should have gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular living environments in all our best cities at levels way beyond what we have now; where are they?… Where are the supersonic aircraft? Where are the millions of delivery drones? Where are the high speed trains, the soaring monorails, the hyperloops, and yes, the flying cars?”

There are a few things going on here. The most obvious of which is that this is a child’s version of a great city, a thought exercise we all engaged in at youth as we played with Lego blocks to make some overly elaborate, shape rotator bullshit in class. But the other of course is that every single thing mentioned above — delivery drones, supersonic aircraft, hyper loops — are all things that he is working on through his collection of a16z portfolio companies that are all working on this shit. So, this was a pitch for his companies and less of any kind of objective view of what would make a good city, though it does show his recipe for his own cities. 

I absolutely expect their new cities to have all the bells and whistles and to take on some pretty substantial construction projects of world-class buildings; this will be their first time constructing settlements from scratch rather than taking the gradual process of gentrification and labor exploitation and displacement that we have seen in the past with San Francisco and Oakland. This will be an opportunity to test out the many “city-building” startups that they have started to invest in; it is green field, open seas opportunity to test these technologies — particularly the many autonomous technologies for delivery and transportation, and for a host of new factory startups. The venture capital settlements will provide large scale projects to these startups and “eating your own dog food”, a strategy we use for testing and iterating new technology products, will also accelerate these “building” technologies. I suspect these will become sites of new factories and new kinds of factories, using new technologies from the portfolio.

Having a city that they unilaterally control is a hunger that has driven them for some time and also prompted their flight from San Francisco, which they managed to wholly take over except for one neighborhood — the Tenderloin, the impoverished part of the city, where live a number of low-income families, sex workers, queer people, homeless people, and people who are drug addicts or have serious mental illness. The area has also been a historic area of housing activism, AIDs activism, mutual aid societies, of resistance, of social progress and in many ways, the Tenderloin has been the last stand of San Francisco against the tech and venture capitalist threat. The Tenderloin to them came to stand for their inability to gain control of the ENTIRE region, for all manner of petty grievances with California, most having to do with restricting housing speculation on the back of displacement, with regulation, and with taxation. The desire and the thrust here is for total ownership and monopoly, and this finally gives them that, a city they have total control over. 

I expect that they will start out by building a more modest settlement that can function while the longer-term projects are built. I think they want to be in substantial operation with multiple settlements in the next 5 years, which means, that the venture capital state is operating out of that city, with a mass of startups, venture capitalists and their workers, with money allocated to that sovereign area, construction projects broken ground, vision of the city publicly presented,  etc. 

An important note, is that these cities that are dreamed of, are only going to be happening for the venture capital class despite being located in someone else’s fucking country, and that far from being some blueprint for a distant future, this is about the cities that venture capital has had underway for some time, in the securing of sovereign zones like we find in Nigeria, El Salvador and Honduras, and their construction of bitcoin settlements — El Salvador just broke ground on their airport for all the private planes coming in. 

You have to wonder what would be the initial size and what size we could be looking at, as far as people who effectively “part” / “citizens” of the venture capital state. I think something important to keep in mind is that the state doesn’t have to be big. This is coming from a very, very small group of people. One number that has been floated by a16z in its book “Network State”, which describes their strategy for setting up their empire, was 1 million people. But they won’t get there right away.

I think what qualifies as an official and material member of the nation-state, for all intents and purposes, is someone who has a citizenship to the “host” state, and someone who is “officially” employed by the nation-state in a venture capital or startup role. For example, El Salvador is in the process of determining a citizenship process to bring in venture capital, tech elite and high-level technical workers, and already has an extremely permissive visa system that has allowed venture capital, tech elite and technical talent to come in and out at will, as tens of thousands of actual residents and citizens are incarcerated. There has been talk floating around about offering $100,000 citizenships to crypto and tech-related people emigrating to the area for tech work; a pot that is sweetened by the new legislation that means there will be on no taxes for the proceeds of crypto, AI or tech investments, and that offers freedom from regulation. This is exactly the type of environment that tech will be trying to create all over the place and once the fundamental pieces are in place, we may be amazed at how fast this moves. 

We’ve actually seen the venture capital and startup vehicle itself undergo some changes lately. I wrote recently about the shifting formation of the startup: moving towards smaller core teams, enhanced integration with research and academic and government teams to make up the difference, and large, low-paid contract workforces for a mass pool of labor. To this point, OpenAI is a perfect example of what the new “normal” startup looks like as it becomes more concentrated, smaller and more dynamic, flexible and distributed than we saw in web 2.0. Aka, this is the “web 3.0 startup”. In OpenAI’s case: a large contracted workforce from Kenya that was paid only $1-2 / hour and no stock. With the development of contracting workforces in places like India, Romania, Brazil and others maturing over the last bubble, there is now a much more established infrastructure to support larger-scale digital contracting including in the area of programming. What happens when we go on a large-scale effort to teach everyone in the world to code, often under the guise of “diversity and inclusion”, and install large contracting workforces around the world? Ten, twenty years in, you have a really well developed resource base for technofascist labor exploitation; using outsourced software development is now viable as a continuous part of the business. When you outsource software development or more significant parts of it, you are getting cheaper labor, you have a more flexible pool of labor where capacity can be bursted up for larger workloads and scaled down and moved around at ease. This is the next level of contracting and it’s not an accident that coding automation is part of this process. The desirable characteristics of this workforce are secured by its destabilization.

The footprint of ownership at the company is also changing; there is an effort to concentrate more of the ownership of the company over time, by giving out less stock to employees, re-buying stock, and ensuring that the founder’s share — which tends to get diluted over time with future investment — is actually maintained; here you get at this concept of the “benevolent dictator” concept that we see from the Linux open source community. Which unfortunately, makes for highly alarming words when combined with the idea of venture colonialism. The citation is old car and rail tycoons who maintained huge shares of their companies even as they grew into giants. Larry Ellison is our best example of this where he has retained a staggering 42% of Oracle stock, and this is the direction that the industry overall is turning to, very a’la Ford (who built weapons for the Nazis). 

So we see a situation here where the capital is concentrating, the footprint is concentrating, the ownership and control is concentrating. The lines between citizens of the venture capital state and those who merely work for it in startups and/or as contractors will be wider. AKA, only “cream of the crop/10x” white and Asian men will be the ones left in; other parties working for the tech empire will be moved to positions once reserved for the workers who maintain tech campuses — prototypes for tech countries. The “outside” group is growing as we speak; it will encompass the vast majority of women’s roles (as engineers, marketing workers and operational employees), as well as software engineers who have traditionally been full-time employees but are now being pushed out to contract or gig labor. Additionally, there’s been consolidation in the VC industry itself, with power law kicking into effect as a16z emerging as a monopoly-sized firm; specifically, the monopoly on capital for technological development. 

The fact that only 2% of venture capital funding goes to women, and only 1 in 10 venture capitalists is a woman, means we are truly looking at a nation-state that could end up being 90%+ White and Asian men, the richest and most powerful in the world; the technofascist superpower nation.

60-75 million people were under control of the Roman empire with a population of one million people living in Rome itself. In the British Empire, 412-458 million people lived under the empire while a fractional population was the “empire” itself. This will be the same: a minority trying to gain power and control over, and enslave a majority. They know that they don’t need a big footprint, and that it isn’t advantageous at this time; this has a lot to do with the general “slimming up” of the venture capital economic formation. 

We can expect the venture capital settlements to have strong borders. Their command of border control technology has gotten extremely strong and border control is a major area of military engagement and contracts. Most significantly, we have Anduril, which has over 200 surveillance towers all across the US/Mexico border, including covering tribal land, quietly and in an autonomous fashion, rounding up women and children to shove in a filthy cell where they will be raped and die. 

Soon, tech will have its own borders to control. 

The border will be installed and patrolled by Anduril and other VC-funded startups, which will use a mix of surveillance, drone and other autonomous systems, and AR/VR technology, in order to keep venture capitalists safe from the people they are invading. VC have their own turn-key solutions that have already been in production in major global combat zones, and that competency will come with them. Even though many of the People don’t even know that the venture capitalists are there and eying their country and their people for takeover, tech knows that it will face potentially fierce and even military resistance when push comes to shove. People around the world know what a colonizer looks like — it comes everytime as white men with a new kind of money. 

Tech is expecting a fight because it faced one in San Francisco and Oakland and San Jose, where local residents fought back against gentrification, housing instability, police violence, labor exploitation, the yawning wealth gap, the takeover of local businesses by speculators, and so on. Resistance efforts occurred everywhere from the level of the legislature to the street, when tech was faced with protest from citizens and even its own employees, rising up against tech collaboration with the war machine. 

The technofascist empire is being constructed in more than six places, many of which have had or have significant civil upheaval, war, contested and authoritarian governments, have massive wealth inequality, active communist and progressive parties, and weapons lying around from various conflicts tied to imperialism and colonialism that has occurred previously. So VC will not go in without expecting a fight; they are also planning on encountering specifically communist resistance, something that’s been a major talking point of theirs: we have to beat the communists at all costs. Since there are no communists in America, I will leave it to your imagination on where these communists they are so worried about might actually be. 

The brutal smashing of social movements — including unionization efforts which have been globally dismantled — by VC is of great interest and a critical point. It might seem that tech will be going into new colonial areas and thus be starting from scratch as far as encountering new types of social movements and threats. But the threats they face there will very much resemble those faced in Oakland and San Francisco and just internally within the industry: communities of Black, brown and queer people, with which they waged a war over the land, ownership and control of the Bay Area for many decades; a battle that was only decisively lost in the latter part of web 2.0. 

What we actually have on our hands is not a venture capital threat that is brand new to putting down resistance, but one that has a massive amount of experience, via everything from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring, in doing this, is extremely savvy about Communist history and theory and praxis, and has a plethora of weapons available in which to interrupt activists, organizations, protests, educational programs, fundraising efforts and other, in order to destroy the resistance from multiple angles at once. 

As I’ve written elsewhere, tech’s strategy against dissent in the past has heavily leaned on selectively hire people from the resistance or invaded groups, putting them into lucrative job positions, and funneling most resistance into the territory of “DEI”, a politic that prioritizes representation within the enemy’s side, over actual victory over the enemy. I believe that tech will *originate* DEI campaigns in these areas, having just swallowed them over here; they know how effective it is to roll up corporate and venture capital resistance into the machine itself, using just essentially open bribery packages; this is a technique they have used over and over again, and have hired up tens of thousands of women, queer people, people of color, by demographic, specifically to serve in totally de-radicalized functions INSIDE of the machine, where it was much easier for them to limit, manage and control, as well as eventually to do away with. These minority groups were flushed out in all of the massive layoffs that came out of the sector over the past year and half, and tech was shutting down all of the DEI efforts well before this recent Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action. 

So one of the major things that these communities will face as tactics, is assimilatory tactics where venture capital is trying to assimilate a very small group of “others” into the industry, which we have seen is actually very effective in diffusing the energy and disrupting leadership of these movements; often it is ones with the most potential to be movement leaders that are targeted for exactly that reason. As far as dealing with protestors, they own the social media platforms, and they will be backing the cops and right wing regime in the area. Point being, they are set up to be extremely effective here and they have fought these battles before, while people whose lands they are showing up to, many of them are encountering technofascism in a material way for the first time, putting them at a massive information disadvantage that we can only overcome while working together. 

Another interesting question is how the fascist state will be governed. Luckily, this one is much easier than you might think, because they will continue to govern themselves as they already govern themselves and arrange themselves as startups and venture capitalists, which are demarcated by economic indictors: venture capitalists centralize capital and then deploy it to the startups according to their interests. The venture capital morphs into the corporatist state, compromised of many functions (startups) with one centralized financial function, wherein a very small group of people decide to what and who the money is going to flow, thus controlling the destiny of technological development and of the technofascist nation state. The central function of the state is the production of the technological development. 

 We get insight into this from the “Network State”, a16z’s book that lays out their vision for a distributed technofascist state, consisting of distributed settlements in the global south that are eventually re-centralized into a common mass down the road, with outposts, when the nation has gotten to the size and capability and need for the seat of the empire itself. The startup founders will be actually stakeholders in the country itself; the country will be privately owned, and most citizens will have no stake in it, just as now, where only a small number of the people who work on something have any stake in the startup and even less in the proceeds of venture capital. They will continue to use the structure of the board of directors, something that has been reflected in the DAO model and thus is already in core technical infrastructure, with the board of directors primarily represented by the VCs.

There is unlikely to be any kind of mass voting system and there won’t be any motion to implement one; in this model, “democracy” emerges from the “free market forces” and “competition”. In reality, it will be a monolithic block of people indoctrinated militantly into the same mindset, and convinced by venture capitalists that everything that lies outside the startup walls, is trying to destroy the greatness within in, and thus must be aggressed against. The establishment of literal borders around the startup empire is also functional to split technical workers off from the rest of the world; these efforts have been carefully developed over time with the evolution of tech campuses designed to keep everyone preoccupied in working for the company, and in fact having all of their relationships, including romantic and sexual relationships, play out *in the context* of technology development and in the context of the overarching venture capital state. This fusion of self with technological development, which has appeared very literally in the last few years, is core to the technofascist propaganda and indoctrination, and in the ideology itself. 

The ownership of the country will be divided up across the founders of the startups that hold up the fascist state. The country will be managed like the finances of a startup and venture capital firm. At the central top, you will have one leader and his bureaucratic and managerial functions, that essentially functions as the venture capitalist but now the venture capitalist firm is overseeing the entire state. The major functions of the state will be carried out by startups. 

Under this model, you’re seeing the possibility for a level of power concentration, wealth concentration, and draconian hierarchy that has literally no resemblance to even what we see in the American political system. As in, choices about the future of the country will be made by a much smaller percentage of people; the state will actually have MORE power over citizen’s and colony’s lives than already exists in the United States. This is because venture capital is already led under the dictatorial model, where the founders run the entire show beneath them, VCs over them, and where founders and venture capitalists are dictators. Venture capitalists have been beating the drum of the importance of having “One leader”, and with startups nested under venture capitalists, you have essentially a distributed dictatorships. This means that there will be one dictator for the state itself, and the most likely candidate for that right now is the richest and most powerful capitalist, Marc Andreessen. The jury is still out on the honorific. I like “king” but maybe that’s antiquated. 

A major piece of the governmental function is how negotiation will be carried out at the level of the nation-state, and again, we don’t have to wonder because we have seen tech openly and independently negotiating with other nation-states using technological development and capital as the vehicle for that. To reiterate, venture capital is used to operating global distributed systems both at the technical level and at the operational level, so they are truly masters of this game at a level we don’t usually consider. International offices, adoption efforts, regulatory battles, fund raising from foreign funds, and the development of tech economies in countries all over the globe, have brought tech very close to the central operating system of the world, and they are well familiar with nation-state leaders — as recent OpenAI and a16z dignitary tours have demonstrated. So they are one of very few groups of power and money that actually has this level of high-level penetration into the globe already, and that is going to be a priceless advantage as they continue. 

Ultimately, what venture capital aims to establish is a monopoly on technological production; so their ultimate negotiating tool is offering and withdrawing that — we have seen this with tech “heads of state” like Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and a16z, in a coordinated effort, threatening to pull technology out of countries as a tool in negotiations with nation states over regulation. But of course the startup “secret sauce” is just productivity that is extracted brutally and accelerated by a criminal concentration of capital, and a specific configuration of capital deployment and strategies for capital management, as well as the internal principles related to that, which architect the organization of the startup and the venture capital state. 

A massive piece of this is the financial system — cryptocurrency, and this is absolutely vital, yet has been covered in depth in other parts of the blog, most succinctly in this piece on how crypto is the currency of the venture capital state. It is only within the context of the emerging technofascist empire that we can understand the role of crypto in these proceedings; the technical attributes of the underlying protocol have been consistently and effectively used to cut off material analysis of how the overall financial system implicated by crypto functions. 

So, that’s our brief tour through some of the more prominent characteristics of the technofascist state as it emerges right before us. We’ll stay on the case. Please tell people you know and trust that the real fascist threat has arrived and they have computers.