I know! I know what you're about to say because I say it more than anyone: There is no point in taking the ravings of a dementia-addled lunatic seriously! It's a fool's errand! It will only drive you slowly mad!

But then the narcissistic lunatic pipes up with something so wacky that it's impossible to look away. It wraps around the lunatic spectrum to become a work of art. It's like watching Picasso eat a stained glass window.

I am speaking, of course, of His Dictatorness' Latest Weekend Belch.

Wha—what? Huh? You okay there, ya big crook?

All right, I know. Should we ignore this, given that it is so clearly meant as a distraction from $8 diesel, expected stagflation, the Trump family's latest schmoozing with child-abducting Russian oligarchs, the abject failure of Trump's Iraq War, the continued ICE assaults on citizens and illegal renditions of non-citizens, military strikes on fishing boats, billions of dollars in corruption from Dear Leader alone, and the announcement that Secretary of Testosterone Pete Hegseth has ordered mandatory military-wide testing to ensure everyone's getting morning erections?

Yes! We probably should ignore it! But it's impossible, because all that bad stuff is happening everywhere around us but over here in this corner you've got a drunken Pablo Picasso picking pieces of the Duomo di Milano out of his teeth and come on now: You can't just ignore that.

At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch,

Top. Grade. The rest of that is Donald "Dear Leader" Trump's usual drivel, with a lie or a delusion shoved into every individual phrase, but the new delusion here is the insistence that his batshit Loser Arch will not just have some sort of quasi-military observation post crammed on top like he's been claiming this whole time but will now be a top grade "Military Complex."

Because sure, why would you even have an imperial megamonument if it wasn't also going to be a "military complex." The Arc de Triomphe was built to shoot lasers at passersby, a dream that was never realized because lasers hadn't been invented yet; Hitler's planned Nazi Arch was designed to be so massive that it would simply topple onto whatever enemy troops dared touch it, squashing them into paste.

Trump's original plan was to install golden statues on top so gaudy that invading armies would gag in disgust, which would give local teenagers a brief opportunity to Red Dawn their asses, but then he announced that it was going to be a more active military compound, one with a folding chair at the top that some poor lieutenant would sit at day in, day out, so that Donald could tell the Supreme Court that the whole arch was a national security project that Congress and the courts weren't allowed to weigh in on.

And we know that's all this is. It's the same play Trump used to justify tearing down the East Wing of the White House to put up his Ballroom That Is Definitely A Ballroom But Also Ummmm A Drone Port For Some Reason. Donald Trump is extremely stupid, his only method of scheming is to bellow the details of his scheme stupidly and at the top of his lungs, and because he is rich he has always been able to convince the schmucks that surround him to go along with the grift even if it makes them look like the biggest suckers on the planet. It's his whole thing. Sorry, there's a troop in a folding chair at the top, nobody's allowed to criticize me now.

But from here we get into the batshit insanity that almost makes this art. The part he apparently dreamed up the night before, possibly after watching old Airwolf reruns. It's going to be the world's only combination Top Grade Military Complex slash Triumphal Arch. It's going to be a Murder Arch.

to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage. There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World.

Now, to a large extent this is only the ravings of a madman, but on the other hand it's the ravings of a currently powerful madman so that changes things a bit. To be sure, however, it's insane. It would be cute in a five year old: Trump's post reads a lot like a preschooler trying to explain their latest drawing to you, their new invention that's an arch but also it's a robot and this part over here dispenses dinosaurs and the dinosaurs breathe fire and eat people.

But that doesn't cancel out the more sordid truth: This lunatic is our president, not a five year old shoving crayons up his nose. So now, for only the fifth or so time in my life, I now want the Sunday shows, the White House press corps, and all those puddlebrained television pundits to focus on this plan and ask Donald Trump every possible question about his "plan." This isn't just bullshit, on his part. This is a grand design for America's future, a vision of what the nation will be like once Trumpism has disposed of its enemies and can reign ascendant until the point when unchecked rich asshole-backed climate change Venusifies the planet and turns us all into irradiated fossils.

to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones

Why? No, seriously, I want a white paper on this! I need the White House to issue a 40-page report on the urgent need for a 250-foot gold-topped arch that rests exactly under the flight path of commercial jets departing and arriving at the nearby international airport. I want them to cover, in depth, why it's not just fine to put a taller-than-allowed glitter arch under those planes but it is essential to also have swarms of drones launching into that airspace at any given time.

Think you've avoided the big golden whatever-it-is on top of the arch, commercial pilot? Ha! The joke's on you, because it also launches impossible-to-see drones according to whatever schedule the U.S. military, which is famous for its consideration of D.C. area pilots, wants to fk around with.

I want a press conference on this idea. I want to see scale models. I want to see AI renderings of this Triumphal Arch That Shoots Drones At You.

Jesus, White House press corps, this flippant half-baked bullshit is your whole reason for existing. Get some damn quotes.

Trump's own FAA, which probably means Sean Duffy during one of his breaks between Filming Content, gave brown nosing approval for the higher-than-allowed arch while noting that any changes from the previous design would require a new FAA review.

Which means now Sean Duffy has to steer the remains of his department into an explanation for why "and it launches drones" also doesn't impact the commercial airliners attempting to land at the National Airport. That's a level of improv comedy that even Andy Kaufman wouldn't have attempted.

plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage

Spell it out, buckaroos! Now that you've said it, we have to know. According to Donald, the military made a "strong request" for a 250 foot gilded sniper's nest with a direct line of site to both Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial.

It's obvious why the military wants a sniper nest overlooking Arlington National Cemetery. They're afraid of zombies. They've watched a thousand different zombie movies, 800 of them while drunk (see: Pete Hegseth) and are now imagining any number of scenarios in which the soldiers buried at Arlington come back to not-life, burst out of the ground, and attack.

These wouldn't be just regular zombies. These would be zombies with military training. They'd know martial arts. They'd have a strong chain of command. They'd be able to read maps. Complete nightmare fuel, all of it, which is why Pete apparently put in an urgent middle-of-the-night phone call to Trump insisting that a 250-foot tall sniper tower be constructed nearby in order to pick off zombies and pink elephants as they emerge.

Presuming zombies do not attack, though, the main purpose of the sniper tower would be to have direct line-of-sight to the Lincoln Memorial. One of the most popular protest sites in the whole country.

Why does the military need a fortified sniper's nest overlooking one of the most popular public protest sites in the nation?

Why does the military need to "additionally hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage" in this position overlooking one of the most popular public protest sites in the nation?

Hey. Hey, every reporter in Washington. We want to know.

This is your beat. This is your bailiwick. I don't know what a bailiwick is, as far as I know it's a kind of candle, but whatever it is this is supposed to be your reason for having these jobs in the first place.

How about we all each take just one of our big important questions about which politicians do or do not denounce a Twitch streamer and instead use that time to ask the Donald J. Trump administration why they plan to construct a fortified Sniper Arch overlooking the Lincoln Memorial and fill it with "large quantities of sniper ammunition?"

It seems kinda fking important, to be honest.

Trump's game of insisting that he can do whatever he likes so long as he says "national security" somewhere alongside it has been tedious for a while, but you can't blame him for saying it because the Roberts Supreme Court insisted, straight-up, that presidents named Trump can now do absolutely anything they want so long as they say "national security" somewhere alongside it.

That's why Trump's Ballroom is now a Ballroom plus Drone Port. That's why Trump's Arch With Troop Sitting On Folding Chair had the folding chair guy.

But this? This appears to be a case of Trump's id seizing control over even his narcissism. The man flat-out announced that he was building a Murder Tower, gave no explanation whatsoever for just who he expects to see murdered, only that it's going to require a hell of a lot of ammunition, and we're supposed to just treat it as one of his usual brain-burps?

I ... kinda don't think so?

So let's hear it. C'mon, all you journalists who park yourself in Washington to do journalisming. Let's get to the bottom of this. We need to know, from the military, what the "strong" military rationale is for a sniper nest aimed at Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial. Donald said this was the military's idea, so you're up, Drunky Pete. Give us your scenarios here.

We all want to hear what "military" scenario exists that would see Washington D.C. overrun with foreign adversaries, presumably because they've outwitted or overwhelmed the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Space Force combined, and the only thing that stands between an invading let's say Canada and victory is a group of plucky military snipers with vast quantities of stored sniper ammo holed up in a Triumphal Arch above one particular D.C. road. Oh, and they have drones for some reason.

And somehow, in this scenario, the military foe who's managed to threaten the nation's capital wouldn't just drop a 2,000 bomb on the arch and solve their problem.

I don't often want to hear more about the things this dementia-cooked seditionist dreams up during Natalie Time but this one, I think we really need to hear the details on. Go on, then, let's hear it. I want to hear every detail of this new military installation that the Pentagon considers even more important than Pete Hegseth's morning erection screening program.

Go on. We need this. It'll be hilarious.

This essay was written with Cindy Cohn, and originally appeared in Lawfare.

One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping into the internet backbone or mass collection of telephone or internet metadata. The legal and technical architecture of modern mass surveillance, initially framed as a necessary defense against terrorist threats, has grown far beyond that justification and national security in general. Mass surveillance is now a routine tool used by law enforcement. ICE uses it in immigration actions and against people exercising their First Amendment rights to protest. It’s also increasingly part of private security systems, such as facial recognition at venues such as Madison Square Garden and networked Flock license plate capture systems on roads and in parking lots.

The interrelation between private and governmental mass surveillance is worth examining. Surveillance is the business model of the internet; companies like Google and Facebook constantly spy on their users’ behavior. From the National Security Agency relying on data collected by telecommunication and internet companies, to local sheriffs and ICE agents relying on cellphone location data and privately managed automatic license plate readers, governments primarily obtain the mass surveillance information through private companies. Increasingly, access doesn’t just come through legal processes, either. FBI Director Kash Patel recently confirmed in congressional testimony that the agency is purchasing information on Americans from data brokers and intends to continue to do so.

This pipeline from private collection to governmental collection means that as companies collect more information for surveillance capitalism purposes, more is available to law enforcement as well. And as the technology for mass surveillance and analysis improves, especially with the increased use of AI technologies, the problems attendant to mass surveillance grow as well.

After 9/11, the idea that the government could surveil the population to safety took hold. In 2001, the fear of terrorism reached a frequency and intensity never before seen. Along with that came the fear that the enemy could be anyone, anywhere. As a result, the government’s response was to watch everyone, everywhere. This line of reasoning underpinned the shift from targeted to mass surveillance. Or, in the words of an internal National Security Agency (NSA) presentation that was made public as part of Edward Snowden’s 2013 disclosures, a government that can “Collect it All,” “Process it All,” “Exploit it All,” “Partner it All,” and “Sniff it All,” will ultimately, “Know it All.” Similar rationales support the rise of domestic mass surveillance: if law enforcement could see and hear everything, it could more effectively interdict and solve serious crimes.

The national security community has never provided a full analysis of the costs and benefits of these mass surveillance programs, either in terms of taxpayer dollars or diversion of resources from other efforts—or any demonstration that those techniques stopped attacks that otherwise they would not have been able to prevent. While the NSA occasionally presents examples of the successes due to its mass surveillance programs, especially when those techniques are under public pressure, the examples also regularly fall apart upon serious scrutiny. And even if some utility exists, it must be seriously weighed against the costs.

Similarly, there has never been any comprehensive analysis about whether domestic immigration or law enforcement’s use of these techniques actually makes people safer, or whether other techniques could produce the same results. Instead, both the police and the companies selling these tools float anecdotes and dubious data. For example, Flock’s data equates the number of law enforcement hits in their database with actually solving crimes.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, it seems reasonable to step back and evaluate the costs of this shift to mass surveillance, especially in terms of Americans’ rights and freedoms.

The Shift

The easiest place to see a shift to mass surveillance was in the government’s decision immediately after 9/11 to collect Americans’ telephone records. The program started under an argument of pure executive power as the “President’s Surveillance Program.” But in 2006, that argument secretly shifted to a novel interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot. Act which had only previously authorized more targeted access to record. While some media and public interest organizations struggled to force the government to reveal the program as early as late 2005, the government only officially confirmed it after the 2013 Snowden disclosures. In 2015, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the government’s interpretation of Section 215 as allowing mass collection of telephone records. Later the same year, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act. While this new law still allows collection of a tremendous amount of domestic telephone records, it ended the indiscriminate mass collection that had occurred for nearly fourteen years.

Other shifts to mass surveillance continue through today. The NSA launched its Upstream program, which involved intercepting both metadata and content from key telecommunications junctures inside the U.S., soon after 9/11. It was also initially conducted under a claim of purely presidential authority. This program was brought under marginal congressional and programmatic (not targeted) Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court review via Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act. In 2017, more than15 years after its inception, the NSA ended content searches due to FISA court pressure, but the mass collection continues.

Despite the stated goal of conducting mass spying only on people outside the U.S.—which itself is problematic given international law’s requirement that surveillance be both necessary and proportionate—mass surveillance collects a tremendous amount of U.S. persons’ communications. This can happen because people communicate with people abroad, or because of overcollection—when government agencies gather far more personal data on non-targeted US persons than authorized by law. The concerns about collecting Americans’ data on U.S. soil led Congress to allow the program to officially expire in 2026, although the previously-approved mass surveillance itself continues until at least Spring of 2027.

The shift to mass surveillance would be notable enough even if it remained only a strategy of the intelligence community. It has not. Americans are awash in mass surveillance. Networks of automated license plate readers such as those offered by Flock and Vigilant Solutions blanket both public and private roadways and parking lots. These networks often allow searches by law enforcement, including across jurisdictions. They are, for example, being used to track people seeking abortions across state lines. Facial recognition tools, once the province of only the more elite parts of federal law enforcement, are increasingly used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on immigrants and protesters, in airports by the Transportation Security Administration, as well as by private entities. And, of course, modern phones track users’ locations constantly—and that information is readily available to law enforcement, often with only minimal process protections.

Constitutional Costs

Regardless of the murkiness of its actual usefulness, the shift from targeted to mass surveillance has profound implications for Americans’rights. It has created risks that have become increasingly evident, especially under the Trump administration.

At a basic level, the Fourth Amendment guarantees that citizens can be secure in their “persons, houses, papers and effects” from unreasonable searches. Warrants breaching that security should be supported by probable cause and particular descriptions of the place to be searched and items to be seized. Mass surveillance turns that promise on its head, allowing access to our “papers and effects” by the government without individualized suspicion or a particularized description of what data is being seized, much less probable cause. This protection was in response to colonial British misuse of writs of assistance, which authorized indiscriminate searches rather than targeted ones.

The justifications for exempting mass surveillance from constitutional protection vary. For Section 702, the government has taken the position that U.S. persons’ communications caught up in the dragnet, either due to overcollection or because they were communicating with someone outside the United States, do not require a warrant prior to initial collection or secondary access by the FBI and several other agencies. The argument is that if the initial collection was not aimed at Americans, the information is free from constitutional protection for any later uses, even for reasons far afield from the initial rationale for collection.

Other arguments rest on the claim that metadata is outside the Fourth Amendment, despite its demonstrated ability to reveal intimate details of all of our lives. Still others rest on the Supreme Court-created Third Party Doctrine, which holds that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to data shared with companies that provide us with services. Some turn on whether analysis by machine counts, claiming that only “human eyes” matter—a particularly troubling argument with the rise of artificial intelligence. What’s more, the government has used doctrines like standing to limit the ability of those subjected to mass surveillance to seek constitutional protection. No matter the argument, the goal is the same: to place the mechanisms and fruits of mass surveillance outside the protections of the Fourth Amendment.

The overarching truth is that, due to the concerted efforts by the government since 9/11, and the rise of technologies in recent years, the slice of Americans’ lives and data that are actually protected by the Fourth Amendment has shrunk significantly in the past 25 years. Together, with the technical capabilities of mass surveillance and the increased ability for that data to be analyzed using AI tools, the “security in our papers and effects” that the constitution promises seems increasingly illusory.

In addition to the Fourth Amendment, mass surveillance creates tensions with the First Amendment. The Constitution has long recognized that the right to freedom of speech requires a zone of privacy against governmental surveillance. The right to anonymous speech as well as the right of association both recognize the chilling effect that surveillance creates for people saying unpopular things or attempting to organize for political or other societal change. Mass surveillance grants the authorities the ability to track those people, both in real time and historically, that is inconsistent with actual techniques of freedom of speech and assembly.

That is why the recently released 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy is so troubling. On page seven, the White House expressly states that it intends to target domestic activists with its heretofore foreign-targeted powers. It says that the government “will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender and anarchist” and “will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa.” While framed as targeting “violent” groups, it’s clear that the government intends to use its national security tools, presumably including the tools of mass surveillance, against Americans in ways that will create profound tensions with the First Amendment rights of people to organize and communicate privately.

Costs Due to Mistakes and Abuse

Even assuming some utility from mass surveillance—a fact we do not dispute, even if the public record is shaky and conclusory—the history of both the national security and domestic uses of mass surveillance confirms that these tools are inevitably misused, and that mistakes have impacted huge numbers of Americans. The past twenty-five years have demonstrated that it is not possible to surveil the entire US population while staying within the bounds of even a very generous legal framework like Section 702.

As Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) recently stated in discussion of Section 702 in an interview with Tech Policy Press: “backdoor searches have been used improperly for protestors, 19,000 campaign donors, members of Congress, journalists, government officials, a state court judge who had complained to the FBI about police misconduct. It has been abused substantially in the past.” The NSA experienced so much abuse of its mass surveillance tools by actual or aspiring romantic partners and ex-spouses that an internal name emerged for it: “LOVEINT,” or Love Intelligence.

That same pattern of abuse is now emerging at the domestic law enforcement level. A Texas police officer misused, and then lied about, using license plate readers to track a woman suspected of seeking an abortion. Multiple law enforcement officials have been accused of tracking people they either wished to have a relationship with or who were their exes. And mass surveillance technologies have been used to track both immigration targets and citizens engaging in their First Amendment-protected right to track and record the police.

Mistakes are inevitable with collections of data of this size and scope. The history of the FISA court’s reviews of Section 702 is littered with examples of the NSA not being able to follow its own rules limiting the scope of what it collects and analyzes, even after having been given multiple chances by the court. On the local level, the technical protections that Flock, for example, put in place have repeatedly been insufficient to stop “accidental” sharing its data with out-of-state law enforcement. These mistakes have fueled growing efforts by local communities across the country to remove license plate readers. Those efforts should be the first step in a broader reconsideration of mass surveillance.

More generally, ubiquitous surveillance carries a real societal cost. The chilling effects are real and pervasive, and they tend to fall hardest on the most marginalized members of society. Moreover, social progress requires the ability to experiment in secret. It’s hard to imagine a society progressing morally to the point of accepting and legalizing things like marijuana use or gay marriage if the earliest signs of that shift are snuffed out because of overzealous surveillance.

Reversing Course

While a cost-benefit analysis is not the best frame for deciding constitutional rights, it is a place to start to evaluate government policies. If the costs are too high and the benefits too small, what should the public do? While the policy and legal frameworks can be individually complex, mass surveillance is a problem in all of its applications. So too should solutions be comprehensive rather than piecemeal.

One comprehensive strategy is to reset the promise of the Fourth Amendment and recognize that a warrant is required prior to collection, access or use of information gathered through mass surveillance. This would apply to collections that include U.S. persons, whether done for national security or domestic purposes. This protection would apply regardless of whether the information is in the form of metadata. It would apply regardless of whether the information is held in homes or by services people rely on, such as telephones, internet or social network providers, or by private entities utilizing mass surveillance for their own purposes. By passing this legislation, Congress could ensure this rejection of mass surveillance, and include real enforcement such as a private right of action and an automatic exclusionary remedy in criminal prosecutions. The courts could also recognize this protection of “papers and effects” directly as a plain language interpretation of the Fourth Amendment.

There are already a number of efforts that take on pieces of mass surveillance. Section 702 has expired and should remain so. This was due largely to efforts to block the “back door” access to Section 702-collected data without warrants. The bipartisan “Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act” would prevent the government from purchasing data that it would otherwise need a warrant to obtain. The Supreme Court itself has already been chipping away at the Third Party Doctrine, with a recent step in the rejection of mass geofence warrants—warrants seeking the identities of individuals based upon their proximity to a crime—in Chatrie v. United States. Now, such warrants fall, at least initially, under the Fourth Amendment.

A more comprehensive approach would also address mass surveillance carried out by private companies, and to ensure that Americans have the right to encrypt and secure their data. There are many reasons the United States would benefit from a comprehensive privacy law—and curbing mass surveillance is one of them. Addressing mass surveillance is certainly one of them. Ideas such as the banning of secondary uses of data—with roots in the Fair Information Practice Principles from the 1970s—are worth pushing forward. So are moves such as creating fiduciary duties for mass data collectors. There are many more ways to curtail private companies’ mass surveillance while staying within constitutional boundaries. But addressing the costs of mass surveillance by both companies and governments is even more important in a world where AI agents are making decisions both about the public and on their behalf based on their data and observed behavior.

Twenty-five years after the U.S. government embraced mass surveillance, it’s time to evaluate it as a whole, and consider responses that address the problem as a whole. Americans must ask: Is it consistent with a self-governing democracy to have systems that watch everyone everywhere? Is the public comfortable with governments—federal, state, local—that seek to “know it all” about its citizens? Is the public comfortable with private mass surveillance in its own right and as it’s being increasingly used to fuel government surveillance? These questions have long needed serious consideration. But as it becomes increasingly evident that the Trump administration is using mass surveillance to keep itself in power, stifle dissent, and undermine political opponents, these questions are now more urgent than ever.

Cory Doctorow makes sense of wtf is happening with AI.

The Indiana Hoosiers football team, still-undefeated national champs (17-0 including last year and this one) take on the Howard Bison today at noon. I'll be watching. (It's on Fox One.)

John Venn has the perfect historical marker.

How Tony Pierce's busblog took off on 9/11.

I just added my thoughts to these thoughts by Eduardo Ordax. Said he,

My biggest concern about AI? That we all start sounding and thinking exactly the same.
We spend so much time talking about AI alignment. I worry about how much we’re aligning ourselves with it.
Same words. Same ideas. Same “unique perspectives.”
And scrolling through LinkedIn, I feel like it’s already happening.
I want AI to help me develop my thinking. I’m less excited about outsourcing what makes it mine.

Commented I,

How services trained on everybody and everything make everybody sound like everybody and as if they know everything about everything.

Not sure I'm right about that, but whatever.

VC Isn’t VC Anymore — Understanding the Rise of Cancer Capital. “We must understand that it is no longer a financial machine that is used to fund startups, but a political and social machine focused on dismantling democracy and civil society.”

“The hardest thing about being alive is that we exist as accidents of chance, and the universe does not hand us meaning. Nobody and nothing will give us meaning. We have to make it. And I think love is an instrument for how to do that.”
— Maria Popova

From a beautiful conversation between Debbie Millman and Maria Popova.

We really, really need to talk about venture capital. Because it’s not “venture capital” anymore.

There’s a huge disconnect between what most people think of VC, where an investor has a big fund and cuts checks to help a founder build a company, and the current reality, where a handful of billionaire extremists use the cover of “VC” to advance an outrageous agenda where they’re accountable to no one.

I’m gonna explain this from a standpoint that almost never gets articulated: I’ve personally raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding as CEO of startups, and been directly involved as a board member or advisor in raising hundreds of millions more. I’ve sat in board rooms, across the table from the people I’m talking about here, or been at the industry events that they frequent. So this isn’t sour grapes because these VCs wouldn’t cut me a check, or some chip on my shoulder about these investors due to a business deal. This is what I know about these bad actors because I’m part of the community of creators and inventors who build the things that they used to invest in — back when they still cared about innovation.

Many of the trends in society and politics that people are most angry about, from data centers being forced down everyone’s throats, to all of our favorite apps and services being enshittified, to politicians being paid to ignore the will of the people, are all being supercharged by these cancer capitalists. They have warped the structure of venture capital into a form of oligarchy that answers to no market, no regulators, and no voters. So it’s worth understanding exactly how they did it.

How Venture Capital became Cancer Capital

I’ll be breaking these points down in further detail, but just to begin framing the concept, I’ll lay out the core idea here in some bullet points (so that you’re not tempted to run this whole thing through an LLM):

• Venture capital was only supposed to be a tiny segment of the overall capital market, but it has expanded to become the primary form of funding that new companies consider — it was never the only way, and it didn’t used to be the default one
• VC was meant to be a small percentage of overall investment because it represents the high-risk, high-reward part of a portfolio; to be healthy, most of a portfolio — or most of an economy — needs to focus on assets that are more stable and predictable. But a cancer grows from a cell that a body needs in small, healthy amounts, and that turns deadly when it grows without limit until it harms, or even kills, its host.
• As regulations have gotten looser in recent years, a handful of venture capital firms have become “do everything” funds that combine private equity with their existing VC businesses, and expand to manage massive stockpiles of tens of billions of dollars
• The 1% of VC firms that get this big stop being exposed to the risk in their own investments at all — when you collect 2% a year to manage $50 billion, that’s a billion dollars landing in your pocket annually whether any company you funded lives or dies. Those firms also stop legally even being venture capital firms, making them unaccountable to markets, founders, or the law — and that’s how they become “Cancer Capital”
• Meanwhile, the 99% of “normal” VCs don’t have the power or funding of the Cancer Capital firms, but are forced to play on the field that those firms define, even if they don’t like the way they do business
• Since the Cancer Capital firms have become so powerful, the overall balance of power between founders and VCs has flipped; instead of founders having a company that VCs would try to fund, now VCs publish extremist political manifestos, and “founders” are just the people who are selected to carry out parts of those plans
• The rest of the world doesn’t know: New founders and workers entering the tech industry are unaware that Cancer Capital has taken over, so many are still trying to play by the old rules, and can’t figure out why their ideas are being pushed into serving the goals of the Cancer Capital firms
• Politicians and media still look at VC as if it works like it did 10 or 20 years ago, and cheer them on like they’re funding job creation or enabling new companies to grow, when their primary goal is concentrating power and wealth into the hands of the Cancer Capital tycoons. They keep getting fooled by this, over and over.
• These days, venture firms are increasingly getting their funds from pension funds and retail retirement accounts, meaning the public (you!) are increasingly holding the bag for the parts of their portfolios that actually have some risk, even if you never intentionally made that choice
• The shift away from IPOs in the tech industry has also encouraged these Cancer Capital firms to find ways to cash out long before companies ever go public, meaning they can make a massive return off of companies that never make a penny of profit, even if regular investors get screwed by the stock of a company once it actually gets listed on the public stock market.
• Part of why this has gotten so corrupt is the way the Cancer Capital firms have transformed themselves into their post-VC forms. Because they’re not legally VC firms anymore, they’re free to buy shares directly from founders, or hold unlimited amounts of publicly-traded stock — exactly what they couldn’t do as regular VCs. They can even sell their investment in a company as an asset to another one of their own funds, and then book the increase in value as a profit, all without the company ever having made a penny. Another racket: a company that’s raised a bunch of cash in a funding round can buy out its early investors if they’re one of these post-VCs, so they can get paid off even if their portfolio company has never made a penny in profits or revenues.

All of this self-dealing, and the way that they’re isolated from any accountability, has made these firms become more and more shameless in their behavior. Former Andreessen Horowitz partner John O’Farrell publicly called out the firm (a rarity — the company is notoriously vindictive towards those who it decides are disloyal) for what he called its “political infiltration” of AI policy. Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and their firm have put $115.3 million into this midterm cycle — nearly double their $63 million in 2024, and more than any other billionaire donor in the country, even including Elon Musk. Molly White, whose Tech Influence Watch tracks this money against FEC filings, shows that a16z alone accounts for more than 20% of all political contributions from the entire cohort of crypto and AI companies it follows. And they’re funneling these funds to candidates in both parties. This is a huge escalation from the tentative baby steps that folks like Zuckerberg were making in the Obama era, working on benign issues like trying to help immigrants.

And of course, it gets a lot worse than just their lobbying. As I have frequently noted, Andreessen Horowitz hired a man as a partner at their firm despite his having no background or qualifications in tech, finance, or startups whatsoever. His only discernible qualification was that he had choked my unarmed neighbor Jordan Neely to death on a subway car.

This is how brazen, how toxic and destructive, we’ve allowed the industry formerly known as venture capital to become. We must understand that it is no longer a financial machine that is used to fund startups, but a political and social machine focused on dismantling democracy and civil society. And it’s time to act accordingly.

Up next: we’ll dive into the specifics of many of the points laid out above, to understand more about how we got here.