Venture Colonialism: Who Will Build the VC Cities?
Marc “King of Silicon Valley” Andreessen, the top VC in the biz, a16z, dreams of cities.
In his now famous 2020 essay “It’s Time to Build”, he laments,
“We 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?”
A man was just sentenced to hanging in Singapore for having a few pounds of weed, but okay. Marc has also spoken quite highly of the British Empire so there’s no accounting for taste. And yet this obsession with the city has come to the forefront of the venture capitalist ideology, as their visions of themselves as a sovereign nation solidified in the pandemic. A black swan that let them double their wealth and power in a few short years.
Their vision involves the establishment of sovereign archipelagos — cities — all over the world, a distributed nation that is connected digitally; eventually, they establish a centralized landmass as well, the re-constituted colonial empire.
In the a16z book about their plans to build their own country, openly called “Network State”, they emphasize over and over the power of land, and they speak lovingly of Israel and Christopher Columbus — commonality: genocide, founding a new nation-state. In fact, a16z thinks of their new state as a type of “decentralized Zion”.
This is a very old game, we are just starting a new match. The colonial power is venture capital and their eyes are on setting up command posts around the world, within countries that will recognize their sovereignty and offer total freedom from regulation and taxation. I.e, countries that have been crushed by wars, coups and capitalism emitting from the imperial core.
This is well underway.
The VC-backed Bitcoin City in El Salvador. There’s Bitcoin Lake, in Guatemala, funded by an anonymous “crypto whale” in California, and established by a Christian missionary. Is any of this starting to sound familiar?
There’s the Peter Thiel-funded “startup city” in Nigeria. There’s the Silicon Savannah in Kenya, where OpenAI has ruthlessly exploited a contracted workforce training their AI models, paying as low as $2/hour before laying off workers. This is the new model for software development and it is absolutely tied up in their visions of sovereignty and colonization.
In Brazil, the giant VC cornerstone company Coinbase has integrated its technologies and opened a “technology hub”. There are also emerging zones like this in Vietnam and in Dublin.
All of these plays involve a trade between VCs and the governments, the trade that features so prominently in the Network State: the VCs will bring “economic growth” and “modern technology” and in exchange, they will get land where the rules don’t apply, operate in a taxation free environment, operate in an environment free of regulation, and are recognized as sovereign. Network State specifically notes that small countries are ideal for this.
And oh yeah there’s… cheap labor there.
These VC settlements for now are bare bones, the legislative strata, some offices, some bribes, but they are the foundation for the construction of VC cities. And they have grand plans for their cities, massive construction projects. These are all places that have been marked for development by venture capitalists, places where they fully intend to build out VC-built, -owned, operating settlements and cities.
Which is going to take labor.
WHO DO YOU THINK IS GOING TO BUILD THE CITIES?
WHO IS GOING TO BUILD THE CITIES FOR THEM?
Same as it ever was.
It’s happening again.