Regarding Tech “Critics” Who Said It Was All Over Last Year
I don’t know if you noticed, but last year a lot of people on the American “left” (centrist liberal), spent all year, all fucking year, building platforms telling people how the following technologies, which are now rallying tech to never-before seen heights (like *I* predicted), are dead, stupid, failed and over:
- Crypto
- Web 3.0
- The metaverse
- Bitcoin
- Venture capital in general
- Tech in general
And now, just months after some of the most dire predictions from the latest crop of tech critics, we have: Apple launching its AR/VR headset with Meta fast at the heels; Blackrock applied for a bitcoin ETF, you can now trade bitcoin on Fidelity and bitcoin is starting a clear bull run; web 3.0 is not only not “dead” but every single aspect of it that VCs were discussing and building around, is going into production and pumping hard and ready to scale and the data is coming. And so are the customers.
Already in production.
WEIRD!
So what is the truth?
People being fucking wrong as shit has been a huge problem for me my entire time doing this. I have been fighting tech fascists for over ten years. And *always* there is a fucking circus of people, presumably on “our side”, that are literally building followings, media careers, book deals, splashy magazine articles, non profits, and most importantly for their purposes, clout — on fucking categorically LYING about what is happening in the industry, *making fun of it* to *minimize it*, leading people to believe *we are not faced with the threats we are clearly faced with*, and rerouting the anxiety, stress and even fear, into something that they don’t have to worry about and, perhaps more importantly, don’t have to DO anything about.
Inaction above all. The MO of the America Left.
Look, people don’t understand technology that well. So they don’t know how to tell who is full of shit and who isn’t. OF COURSE they want to hear a democrat posing as a socialist tell them that there’s nothing to worry about with technofascists!! OF COURSE they want to be let off the hook from actually learning about what is going on!! OF COURSE they want to hear that there is nothing to be done, these guys are fucking jokers, there’s no way they will like, force us into the Matrix, launch artificial intelligence with no regulation and leave the country!!! They’re just incompetent bumbling scammers!!!
So much easier to deal with than say, a rising fascist empire with its own fully functional financial system and now, military! The tech “critics”, fucking know-nothing do-nothing loser bitches, are here to reassure the public that the whole thing was actually ending and crypto was in fact over and we can all laugh now.
How did that hold up?
And anyone who is still laughing should be shot.
Do you know how hard it is to get shit done around here when everyone literally believes that none of this stuff is even happening BECAUSE OF “LEFTIST” TECH CRITICS, EVEN THOSE WHO CALL THEMSELVES SOCIALISTS OR MARXISTS? I don’t know if anyone noticed but we have a rapidly evolving threat that is NOT like what we have been facing in the Republican party and other bullshit that the “left” in America has been focused on — votes, votes, votes.
It is a sport on the left to poke fun of venture capital and crypto, in a sort of ham handed dull witted humor, new “tech critics” emerged over the pandemic and were championed, pretending to be fucking socialists and shit, and they are literally failing to put 1 + 1 together. If you’re serious about this, you are working your ass off to try to STOP the enemy, not build a media career on it, because we are literally watching the rise of the technofascist state, and it’s no fucking laughing matter, it’s nothing to poke fun at. These people are not stupid, OBVIOUSLY. And their shit isn’t going anywhere. OBVIOUSLY. And we are in huge danger. OBVIOUSLY. And these are the REAL fascists in America and this the real fascist threat we need to be fighting. Not Trump voters. Venture capitalists.
Obviously.
The level of tech criticism that was out last year and has been out the entirety of the history — that came out of media outlets and popular podcasts and influencers and news rags and DSA Twitter — was and is absolutely devastating to our opportunity to actually proactively organize.
If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you know that I have never said that web 3.0, crypto, or anything else is gone. I don’t make fun of these fucking folks. I don’t make fun of how they look, I don’t call the ones who are in charge of the game stupid. I don’t gravitate towards covering small-time fraud over large-scale conspiracy for global financial markets. I don’t say the metaverse is dead before it even launches. All of that SHIT is DANGEROUS to be out there because it is misinformation and we are already getting so much of that from THEIR camp. (To say nothing of the “tech critics” who literally take checks from Google and PayPal Mafia).
*My* work leads to the understanding that we are under a specific and material threat with material and exploitable dimensions. That being the rise of the sovereign technofascist state. This other bullshit teaches us that “resistance” is laughing at the constant psyops coming out of these people and getting zingers off at them. We need to be planning a fucking offensive here and instead everyone is sitting around with their thumbs up their asses talking about how “the history of California is what got us here.” EVERYONE ALREADY KNOWS. Cool story bro, but we need to be reading The Art of War and coming up with a concrete global battle strategy.
Half of these folks are compromised already by their ties to tech funding, to mainstream media and affiliation with bitch ass fake leftist “parties” like the DSA. Venture capitalists know how to play people like this like a fucking fiddle. They tried it many times with me in my early days in this market… over 10 years ago. In fact, “critics” like this play right into their hands. They didn’t give a shit that everyone was saying it was over last year; you’ll notice they made no effort last year to create a counter narrative, they did not put a fight, in fact, they themselves encouraged the mentality and the lie that tech was in some kind of serious shit last year.
And it works! You spread the LIES. These critics were not organizing people to meet this moment. They were not spreading accurate material information that would help people all around the world resist. They were not coordinating. They were not looking around at the large body of radical critique that has been made before them and that they offer watered down versions of 10 years later. They weren’t trying to figure out WTF happened last time. No. They were fucking lying and/or just being fucking idiots, and rolling around in clout, and working on their fucking platforms.
Smug as shit. That is something I cannot take in these people. SMUG ABOUT WHAT!?!?!? SMUG ABOUT WHAT?!?!!? YOU’RE FUCKING WRONG.
Same fucking exact shit that happened in web 2.0 and it was a problem then and its MORE of a problem now. The mainstream public is now seeking accurate tech analysis and what they are getting, is simply not the truth, is not coming from people who know what they are talking about. There is a need for accurate and material information that is not being met here, that is being met by opportunists instead.
If you are following a tech person who said ANY of these were over, failed, gone, done, going down, sinking, in a “winter”, or simply so stupid that the main thing to do was laugh, at anything on this list —
- Crypto
- Web 3.0
- The metaverse
- Bitcoin
- Venture capital in general
- Tech in general
PLEASE do not listen to them ever, ever again about anything about tech.
When do we start having intellectual pride and principles? When do we start demanding a bar for the critique we listen to, the theory we follow, and the people we believe in? When do we start actually having a material analysis and thus being able to design a material response and to actually understand what we are ever dealing with? When do we get out of the clout game, that plays directly into venture capital hands, stand out of the limelight for 5 fucking minutes, stop worrying about our fucking reporting careers with massive media conglomerates, and try to come up with an actual plan? This is clown shit and I am so fucking sad that I literally risk my life to bring independent tech critique to people that is actually correct, and I take pride in that, and then you have clout chasing bootlicking losers spraying the field with rank misinformation, utterly clueless about how this industry even works. STOP.
JUST STEAL MY SHIT. SERIOUSLY. STEAL IT. Anyone can do this analysis. And more people HAVE to.
I am so fucking mad bro. I am so mad.
What happened last year in tech critique is one of the most egregious instances of clout poisoning I’ve ever seen. The left much prefers to believe that Silicon Valley is a joke than to actually have to belly up to the bar and see what is actually being served around here. As people’s uninformed takes -- “LOL CrrYPto iS FAkE , TheRE Is NO MEtaVERse, LOL TeCH BiLLioNAIrES are STUpid Babies, VENtURe CApITAlIStS aRE CHasInG ShORt TERm RETurns” (they have 100+ year timelines) — got likes, favs and RTs, this incentivized people to produce more of this content, a sick feedback loop between dumb and dumber, and we ended up with no one having any idea what is going on.
It’s actually a really big deal that people called this wrong. Because there is a material reality here which is that we have a rapidly devolving situation on our hands with venture capital. It is making extremely aggressive moves, it is about to announce a massive funding raise, all of its technologies are NOT dead as rumored but actually on a fucking bull run. Things devolve quickly here on out. They are deploying a machine that has been carefully prepared, only now coming into public view; but that machine has been there working and executing and making it happen, this whole time that fake ass bitch “tech critics” were pissing on a grave they made up in their head. And now the zombies are coming.
When you say “this is stupid, its failing, its gone”, when that is your MENTALITY and your FRAME OF REFERENCE for what is happening, and your critique, is going to consist of looking for crumbs that justify your argument. Thus you see a parade of minor failures and flubs and ops triumphantly mined and held up as yet more evidence and, importantly, yet another opportunity to act smug, crack a joke, and make everyone listening to them, also get to laugh, feel like THEY THEMSELVES KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON, and feel like everything is gonna be alright.
This type of analysis spreads like wildfire. It’s an analysis that literally anyone can apply without any thought. It has virality built in because you can ALWAYS find some especially egregious scam in some corner of crypto, or you can find a clip of a VC acting like even more like a jackass than usual, or pull a tweet from a billionaire’s feed (that’s probably an op tweet), and crow over it, and feel superior. Under this model, everyone is a fucking tech expert, and it spreads virally and easily.
People LOVE to feel like tech experts and tech critics, turns out.
But definitely, definitely don’t want to be one.
Venture capitalists have zero problem with a bunch of centrist democrat pussies on Twitter with media gigs, telling everyone they’re a joke, while they themselves are inking deals for sovereign cities within nation-states, building out a whole new military apparatus with a new KIND, *kind* of warfare, investing in hundreds of AI startups with the CIA, moving into a whole new phase of at-scale unregulated human experimentation, and securing the future of its own financial infrastructure with integrations with fucking Blackrock, Fidelity, Chase, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and building out a new, global scale venture capital apparatus that will function in dozens of distributed places around the globe. They are currently invading at least 6 countries in the global south to set up their empires.
Venture colonialism.
We are FUCKED right now. We are FUCKED if we cannot put this childish clout seeking bullshit aside and be fucking be serious one fucking time.
They are doing the fucking shadiest shit ever, they are literally trying to start their own fascist state, last year they were artificially deflating the market in order to get better deals on startups, partnerships, deals and cryptocurrency. THEY WANTED YOU TO THINK THAT THINGS WERE IN THE GUTTER FOR THEM. THEY WERE QUIETLY ONBOARDING ALL OF WALL STREET AT ROCK BOTTOM PRICES.
Because you know why? Because you FUCKING KNOW WHY YOU MORONS?!
Because if the proper analysis had been circulated last year, we would have to organize against this, we would have to get off our fucking asses and stop mistaking Twitter clout for resistance to an emerging fascist nation-state.
We would have had to be serious.
We would have had to fight back.
Wake up. Anyone who spread this bullshit and hasn’t issued a full analysis (post mortem), owned up to this, talked about it, corrected it, has now gone from questionable ignorance to definitive opportunist.
Leave them in last year.