What is Happening in Tech and Venture Capital?

Change How You Think About Tech 

There is a lot of misinformation and lack of knowledge about what is happening in the technology industry. We only have the information they are choosing to release. They own most of the media and social media infrastructure, have infinite amounts of money and resources to spend on PR and exposure, and there are very few independent investigators working in this area due to its technical nature.

Many people have been misled into thinking that venture capitalists, in particular, are foolish, unserious people, making silly, uninformed bets, and their work is just toys and dreams. This is belied by overwhelming evidence that venture capitalists have built and own huge amounts of global-scale infrastructure that profoundly affects the future of everyone on the planet, and they are successfully executing on significant, long-term agendas of 50-100 years. The cultural craze of making fun of tech elite, is covering up their very serious and dangerous actions. This is something we have to combat everyday as we try to raise the alarm about developments in venture capital that present a global threat. 

Towards A Material View of Technology 

Many people assume they won't understand what is happening, because it is too technical and inaccessible. It is important to know that technology is the excuse and the tool for massive wealth consolidation, surveillance, colonization, militarization and capitalist expansion. We need to understand these incentives and drives, and recognize that the many different technologies we hear about, are just ways for them to achieve their goals of wealth, power and control. The focus should be on the entire system, of which even a major technology breakthrough like AI, is only one part. 

The Real Story of Venture Capital Development 

What is happening in tech is happening because a very small group of venture capitalists made a lot of money in the first dot-com bubble, becoming billionaires. This small group of venture capitalists have continued to accumulate wealth, power, control, and command many thousands of startups. At no point was the wealth hoarding or the consolidation of power disrupted, and as a result, the industry has produced an incredibly small group of people with an incredible amount of power. Inevitably, they have radicalized over the years, growing increasingly fascist. The pandemic allowed them to double their wealth again and significantly escalated their timelines for conspiracies that have long been in the works but are now moving into at-scale production. 

While these venture capitalists came out of Silicon Valley, they have reached a point where they consider themselves to be their own sovereign power, and are pursuing that goal as an existential driver. 

Venture capitalists are engaged in several serious conspiracies that have not made it into the global discussion about what is happening in technology. 

Militarization and Imperialist Expansion

Venture capitalists are in the middle of a massive weapons build out, with large numbers of extremely well funded startups working on a new vision of AI-powered, autonomous warfare. While Palantir usually gets most of the attention, understand that venture capital is building and selling an entire weapons fleet, and that military expansion is one of their #1 goals. This is a huge global market for them particularly as tensions between the United States and China heat up and Africa and Central America become key battlegrounds for a proxy cold war. Venture capitalists have been a primary driver of aggravation of tension with China, using anxieties about military and technological competitiveness to drive fear and uncertainty.   

Weapons companies include: Skydio, AI-piloted weapons drones, which has raised $570 million. Hadrian, a weapons factory startup, has raised nearly $100 million. Toka, a “cyber defense company” based in Israel, has raised $37.5 million. ShieldAI, focused on military AI applications, has raised about $573 million. Mach Industries, which is “better defense systems for the US and its allies, fueled by hydrogen”, recently raised $5.7 million. Vannevar Labs, which has raised $87 million, focuses on software for battlefield intelligence. Most importantly, there is Anduril, a company built to replace existing weapons companies like Lockheed and Raytheon. Anduril has raised $2.2 billion dollars, and is live in combat zones around the world, and has created the lethal US/Mexico border with new technologies including tech-powered border towers.

Most of these weapons startups are coming out of a small number of venture capital firms: a16z, Founder’s Fund, Lux Capital, and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm. The CIA has funded over 120 artificial intelligence startups, something that is left out of the conversation, though this information is publicly available on the In-Q-Tel website. We must always assume that what we know is only a small part of the picture. 

This is the beginning of a lethal weapons boom that has been carefully prepared since web 2.0. Venture capitalists have made war technologies a priority, are heavily involved in the Pentagon military strategy, have raised large funds for this strategic direction, have been courting Congress, and are heavily integrating into the defense apparatus.

Colonial expansion; establishment of cities and sovereign zones

Venture capitalists, who have a primary goal of establishing themselves as an independent, sovereign entity, are in the middle of an aggressive global land grab to secure sovereign cities in locations all over the global south. Currently, sovereign zones and operations for billionaire cities have been secured in a number of locations, most significantly in El Salvador, Honduras, Nigeria, Kenya, and the Mediterranean. There is significant “vulture capitalism” or venture colonialism efforts in Palau and Guatemala as well. In these countries, venture capitalists will back right-wing elements in order to gain broad latitude and extract predatory agreements for land, natural resources, labor, and recognition of sovereignty, as in El Salvador, where venture capitalists are in key government positions and driving the economic trajectory of the country. 

Many of these zones and cities are being funded through Pronomos Capital, one of many financial vehicles used by tech. One of the reasons it is so difficult to analyze venture capital is because it uses hundreds of different financial vehicles- from startups to funds to bootcamps and coding schools, non-profits, think tanks, media companies, and podcasts- to drive its agendas forward. The investors behind Pronomos are the same ones driving the military agenda: a combination of venture capitalists from a16z and Founder’s Fund. These are the two firms most at the center of the catastrophic developments across the sector; they are also the people behind OpenAI. 

New age of global labor exploitation

Artificial intelligence and the global expansion of the gig worker model are going to massively expand labor exploitation around the world. Venture capital is moving from being based in Silicon Valley, to operating fully as a distributed global power. The pandemic was a major catalyst for this event, through remote work and significant increases in usage of technology products, and multiplications in tech wealth.

Venture capitalists are building hundreds of artificial intelligence startups, many directly targeting the replacement or significant destabilization of workers, which will be moved into the gig economy model. This includes legal professionals, computer programmers, writers, designers and artists, administrative and operational positions. Automated factory startups and robotics work have manual laborers in their crosshairs.

Significant increase in wealth inequality

Tech doubled in wealth over the pandemic. This bubble promises to see them multiply and grow again and again. Via new infusions of foreign money, massive government contracts for weapons and surveillance, international expansion, exits from web 2.0 startups and new startups, and returns on crypto, venture capital will be significantly more monied than ever before.

There is a popular perception that crypto is a temporary fad, scam, or small bubble. Rather, this is a fully operating, VC-owned financial infrastructure, which consists of banks, exchanges, retail platforms and investment products. The amount of money that venture capitalists will make as the crypto agenda continues to roll out, means that the wealth concentration and hoarding will produce unprecedented heights, and with that, the inevitable impoverishment of others and the consolidation of power. 

Development of fascist ideology

Over the pandemic in particular, venture capitalists have radicalized in highly dangerous ways. In addition to militarization and colonial expansion, venture capitalists espouse inherent superiority, race science and a natural social hierarchy, autocracy, voracious anti-communism, suppression of the free press, suppression of trade unions, obsession with civilization decline, and building of a police state. The radicalization of the venture capital ideology means that we are very much dealing with the emergence of a global fascist force.