Are We Witnessing Silicon Valley's Total Collapse? Another Theory of Venture Capital As A Political Act

We shape the world and the world shapes us right back

Peter Thiel and Ross Douthat

Is Peter Thiel’s deteriorating physical health a sign of the weakness of his sector? Will we date the Thiel-Douthat interview as the moment Silicon Valley collapsed? Was it the reassertion of power and control by the media?

A friend of mine and I often discuss how many of our artists friends would have their content stolen from their laptops and produced into films and streaming series. (It’s become pretty common since the advent of file sharing.)

Another friend of mine and I talk about how one of the most dangerous things you can do is be a creative person lest someone kill you to increase the value of your catalogue which they now control. (If you ever look at the deaths of rappers you can go a long way here.)

Still another colleague and I go around and around discussing how it’s dangerous to start a startup because — unless you have backing from a state — you’ll be Eduardo Saverined. They’ll literally kick you out of the company you started and think nothing of it. It’s happened to me more times than I care to admit it.

In my friend’s theory of the world startups fail because they promise a gain before they have ever built anything. They start off in the negative, in other words, and that when you take on venture capital you’re just more and more in the negative. It’s a compelling assessment and there’s definitely some truth to it.

But I don’t think that’s strictly speaking what a lot of countries are trying to do when they say they are doing venture capital. They are trying to shape us with the dollars they send back to our economy.

I think most venture capital is as much about shaping the venture capitalists as it is about their businesses. It’s as much about preserving access to the kind of Americans who could be in America’s leadership class and having countries shape that rather small list.

If you give a venture capitalist a billion dollars he’s going to get at least $20M in fees. That’s more than enough to influence politics and public opinions. These venture capitalist, in other words, should be seen as political operators, oftentimes acting on behalf of a foreign power. Most of them were Jews or South Africans or South African Jews with a few Eastern Europeans thrown in for good measure. They are all middle-manning between Chinese and American economies and building their private empires for good measure.

In the past — or at least since the 2008 financial crisis — this coterie were the types who attended Harvard, Stanford or U Penn and I think this accounts for the pedigree of a lot of the startups that came out of those years and the sort of fetishization with these allegedly elite colleges.

Of course you won’t find any American blacks, any Native Americans or even any Sons of the American Revolution among those who are getting venture capital. Some folks have tried to make this a racial question but it’s really about who gets to have money in the American elite and about whether you can replace one American elite with another, more foreign-infused one. In my view this question remains the definitive political question of our time. Will the children of the people who built the United States be replaced?

Unfortunately a lot of countries which are less than enthused about the murderous conduct of the Zionist regime and its correspondent ties to Silicon Valley and as such, they are looking for replacements in industry, in politics, and even in public affairs.

If it feels as if the Russian and the Chinese deep states are suddenly helping us to take apart the private empires of a Sam Altman or a Elon Musk you might well be right.

To form a startup is in some real sense a political act and it’s not a crazy idea to think that the same people who would go and form a startup might also be inclined to go into politics. In fact I’d argue that they already are in politics, just maybe not the electoral sort.

If you think about it both Donald Trump and J.D. Vance were startups. Donald Trump came out of the go go ‘80s and ‘90s and still takes all manner of foreign cash for licensing deals. J.D. Vance pretended to build startups that cared about the Midwest. And yet both men were keenly political as you can see from their earliest television appearances or the books they may or may not have written which were largely about themselves.

If you think about foreign-backed players like Peter Thiel and Rebekah Mercer spent a total of $20M (or less than half of Bezos’s wedding) to elect a vice president of the second oldest president we have ever had.

I don’t mean to pick on Vance; you could have made a similar case about Kamala Harris, whose sugar mommy was none other than Steve Jobs’s widow.

If you don’t think that this sort of thing has an effect on the kinds of candidates we elect think again.

Hell, if I had a spare $25M I’d run for president. Why not? The worst case scenario seems to me that you’d win.

The question for Democrats is whether or not they’ll run against the system which produced the Vances or Trumps, to say nothing of Sam Altman or Elon Musk, or against the personalities of Vance and Trump or Musk and Altman. The former is nothing short of an American revolution whilst the latter accepts the frame.

At heart this is what is most disturbing about Zohran Mamdani to the class which props up the real estate rackets which back Trump. Is Mamdani a harbinger of things to come? How you answer that question reveals a lot about how you see the future of our country.

You can see the ICE agents combing Los Angeles and the seeming departure of the Silicon Valley elites for Palm Beach and D.C. as part of reckoning over the future of California. So, too, the defeat of the Adelson-led efforts to colonize Texas.

The future leadership cadre of Texas, California and Florida are currently taking shape.

*****

A reader asked me a few questions and I love to get them, especially if they pay up. (Don’t forget your teachers!)

While I find exposing the dirty ongoings in Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley-adjacent organizations interesting, the things that I really want to know are:

1. How do the Power-That-Be choose the technology that they’re going to hype? What’s the criteria? Ease-of-Sale? Indecipherability? Surfeit of Pretty Faces?

The Powers-That-Be are often in tension which, I think, explains all the lawsuits flying around. Most of the technology which winds up getting pushed is in the interests of the deep states of the three major powers.

Russia wants to be American but in Russia. China wants to stop their citizens from revolting as their population craters. America wants to manage and process the world. In a very real sense the American system has reasserted itself as the Rome of our time. We are very much in control of the world and anyone who tries to sell you a post-American frame doesn’t really get it.

I suspect that China will continue for sometime to push the AI and EV stories as those are the two which more or less strengthen their frame on the global affairs. The American deep state and the post-Putin Russian deep state are OK with these stories so long as we control our own AI and the EVs drive down the cost of oil globally. Russia has barely been explored with respect to its mineral wealth to say nothing of Africa. How we turn these resource producing areas into full members of the American-led global order remains especially fraught.

If I had to guess China and America will jointly nationalize a number of companies, including Tesla, and that that joint ownership will be how the world’s first and second largest economies come to a detente.

2. Why AI now? Why not continue hyping Web3 tech?

Web3 was always a strange and lazy marketing attempt in much the way crypto was to track all the activities of the Silicon Valley class. I never paid it much mind and it went as soon as it came.

3. After AI, what would the Powers be hyping next?

Were it up to me it would be restoration of the natural world through genomic cataloguing of all manner of flora and fauna but I suspect we will only begin that project when it threatens our survival as a species. If you think about the recent arrest of the Chinese scientists who purportedly targeted our agricultural industry you get why biosurveillance is so important.

There’s a strong case to be made for the next generation of solar as well.

4. How long would pumping operations of this sort last? The reason why I’m asking is that in the eyes of a growing number of people, it seems that the US has been using technology hyping as one of the means that they use to buttress USD dominance. Han Feizi, a writer (name is a pseudonym), at Asia Times (asiatimes.com/2024/09/the-tragedy-of-american-wealth) has argued (and I’m grossly simplifying here) that the US’s only real source of wealth is selling increasingly overvalued assets i.e. pieces of America to gullible foreigners. To add, In China, conspiracy thinkers and even respected academics, view the US’s geopolitical actions abroad as means of stimulating the circulation of USD back to the country. Taking all of this in mind, I hope you understand the rationale of my questions.

I’m unfamiliar with Han Feizi’s writings but the fact that he has to write in a pseudonym more or less gives the game away. If America is such a bad place why do so many what to do everything they can to get here?

There’s a larger question embedded here: Is America worth it? And I suppose the answer to that question is compared to what?

Thatcher famously said that “there is no alternative.” Well there is no alternative to American power. At least not yet.