The Startup Armada, The True VC Power
A lot of discussion of VC power pertains to their money, which is considerable, and their political clout, capable of couping the “greatest” country in the world, and in fact has done so.
Money is money. But true power is infrastructure. And they have absolutely fuck tons of it, infrastructure is coming out of their ears. Over the years, the venture firms involved in the fascist conspiracy have funded literally thousands of startups, and in many of those cases, they have retained an incredible degree of control over them.
Startups are submissive to the venture capitalists, who decide if they get more money or die. Venture capitalists fill the boards, install their personal lapdogs in positions from the executive to the sales and marketing and engineering teams, ensuring they have their people firmly lodged in every one. Venture capitalists broker rounds of funding, massive sales deals, partnerships, and possess a giant marketing machine which the startups rely on.
In short, the startup is the bitch of venture capital, and far from being a remote party hinging on the possibility of success, the venture capitalist is inside the guts of it all, making sure it all goes according to plan. A centralized organizing function for all the economic, political, cultural and social activity. A startup is like a attack dog with a choke collar held in the hand of a fascist psychopath who is liable to unleash it at any moment.
To understand tech fascism and its power, you have to look inside the venture capitalist’s portfolio. The portfolio is what has made Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) the king. These are just a selection of the a16z portfolio but I didn’t want to make you scroll forever, but if you WANT to scroll forever, go to https://a16z.com/portfolio/ after you read this and get a sense of how expansive and vast this truly is.
It goes on like this for pages and pages and pages.
A few points here on why this gives so much power to venture capitalists, and why having a massive portfolio gives them unique powers. In no order:
Having startups in basically every single vertical — medicine, social media, ecommerce, crypto, defense, transport, etc. — gives them a sentry in every single global market. The VISIBILITY this gives into the market, the COVERAGE that it gives them, is remarkable. They are able to collect and collate market intelligence through every single one of them, presented neatly to them by the startup in various reports and heavily prepped-for meetings. They are able to EXERT INFLUENCE in every single one of those markets. They are able to COORDINATE VAST LABOR POWER AND COMPUTING RESOURCES in every single one of those markets.
Data obviously a big related one here as again, this gives them such an incredible data footprint that reaches everything on earth. The venture capitalist is operating in god-mode across the portfolio and that means having profound access to all of our data, market intelligence, the state of global infrastructure and development, etc.
Ability to service their entire portfolio from startups within it. I.e. their portfolio companies themselves buy and sell between themselves, technologies are rolled out across the portfolio, things can be kept “in house”, the way they like it. This point is relevant to the Network State because the portfolio creates an economy of its own, with clear borders of what is and what is not in the venture capital organism. All of this greatly benefits each startup as it exists not so much in competition with related startups but as an organ of the total body under the venture capital apparatus; this is related to the concept of corporatism in fascism, and brings to mind the idea "everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state", where the Network State is the venture capital state. But that is a discussion we will tackle at a later date.
Social and political norms and values are easily dictated by the venture capitalist and spread quickly throughout the portfolio. We saw this with the entrance of the American Dynamism platform by a16z, where the venture capitalist produced a platform of war and an associated socio-political movement, and it was quickly adopted across hundreds of startups. With so much control, isolation, and coordination, the venture capital portfolio is a great political and economic force when told what to do.
Having the centralized function of venture capital means that they are able to develop much more quickly and efficiently than single companies or investors in a small number of companies, even though those companies may be larger as in the case of private equity. New innovations are able to spread easily across the armada, the best practices of engineering and marketing and recruiting and all matters of the startup, any new method of coding or new tool of production can spread. In and of itself, this is not necessarily a bad thing, to have innovation shared co-operatively in this manner across a broad range of instruments, but when that is being orchestrated by fascists to do fascism, we have problems.
Price fixing, market fixing, economic crime, cover-ups, clandestine operations, mega-projects that require huge coordination (like the new Manhattan Project Palantir is working on), obviously thrive here; it becomes a criminal cartel and monopolist.
They are able to construct markets in this way; they build out, through startups, everything they need for the crypto financial system: banks, loans companies, exchanges, POS, lobbying, superpacs, wallets, etc. And similarly, the venture capital military, which has drones, autonomous vehicles, hypersonic planes, missiles, software for computer attacks, factories, etc., with many startups contributing to the totality.
With venture capital, what looks like a couple thousand different startups is actually… just one thing.
As it pertains to the Network State, the portfolio and its many, many, many workers, become citizens of the new fascist state, already existing within its nascent form, and relying on it for survival.
I shudder when people say that the Network State is a pipe dream, meanwhile venture capitalists have hundreds of thousands of people in their portfolio companies that are already seeped in the ideology and are financially reliant on it. These startups will all be building infrastructure for the Network State, its workers will be its citizens (colonizers and soldiers) and its economic engine, its adoring public, the excuse, the political force.
In actuality, the venture capital portfolio is a weapon, and is used as such. Though there has been much progress in recent months on identifying the tech fascist threat, too often I find absent any discussion whatsoever of the startups they control, and how they may be used to achieve goals; i.e. Coinbase led the charge for the giant crypto superpacs that influenced the election to great degree, one of many strategies used in the coup.
It’s in the startups. Have a great day!