‘They’ve pickled each others’ brains’

You said this moment in tech is “grim” and “about as bad as you’ve seen.” What are the forces that have brought us to this moment?

A great one, that is going somewhat underreported, is just the numbers. ChatGPT came out in late 2022, a little over three years ago, and since then there have been over half-a-million layoffs across the tech sector. Just that one signal — put all the other things aside — that’s decimation. That’s twice as much as the DOGE guys cut in the federal government. This would be devastating if it was the auto industry. It’s ten times as many people as work in the entirety of coal mining. It’s shocking to think about that many jobs gone. This industry’s been gutted. 

In any normal time, people would say, “Oh, this is a recession.” But because those same companies [who are doing layoffs] are doing this financial sleight-of-hand where they’re doing deals with each other — like, “We’ll buy machines from you and you buy AI from us,” — they make it look like the share prices are going up, so it doesn’t look like a recession. That’s part one.

Part two is what we’re seeing at the top, which trickles down to tech workers and creates this really grim outlook. What I mean is we’re seeing this new technique of the leaders of these companies — the investors, owners, CEOs — are now able to make money even if the companies never make money. That’s new. It started a little over ten years ago, and I’ll give you Uber as an example. 

Before they went public, Uber had only ever lost money. Billions and billions of dollars. And yet, their investors were still able to make billions of billions of dollars in profit by making this thing public and recouping that money on IPO day. That is different than everything else in the prior history of the industry. What they figured out was if you tell a great story, and, importantly, if you get a legal monopoly, which Uber and Lyft basically did, you can print money kind of without regard to whether it ever makes sense as a business or not.

So that’s been a pattern with everything that’s followed, whether it’s crypto or AI. This isn’t even venture capital anymore. Venture capital means you take a risk. High risk, high reward. If there’s no risk, that's not venture capital.

If you wouldn’t call this venture capitalism, what would you call it?

It’s pure crony capitalism. Corruption capitalism. These days, when you go to raise, the VCs are explicit about how they’re all talking to each other about what your business is, what your economics are, what they think of your company, what they each think they might offer you. That is collusion. They’re not competitors. It is essentially one company with different divisions, openly sharing information against entrepreneurs.

If you get to even a Series B, you will have to take money from either Andreessen Horowitz or Founders Fund or Ron Conway, and it’s straight-up Godfather shit. They’ll say, “You’re gonna need help some day, and we can help you. We know PR. If you get stuck, we know someone in the White House.”

Let’s talk about the tech and White House. When we think of the tech industry of the 2010s, we think of progressive, optimistic ideals. Now, we’re seeing the hard tech era and tech leaders cutting DEI and supporting Trump. For those of us who weren’t there, was the tech industry of the 2010s just marketed differently, or did it really operate differently?

For workers, it was genuinely really different. It was peak Obama optimism era, and it was 100 percent sincere. The creature comforts were really good, the benefits were great, the holiday parties were huge. And structurally, tech companies were genuinely providing upward mobility for people. They were genuine advocates for H-1B visas. 

People now are at this point where they're so beaten down they're kind of like, “Was it all a lie?” But I had enough visibility and access, like I’ve had dinner with Jeff Bezos, I’ve been in the room, and I can say they were different. They have changed, and been changed by intentional political actors like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin. And now they’ve pickled each others’ brains.

Do you think today’s founders have to move in this more libertarian direction to survive in this industry?

They don’t even have to move. I talk to young founders these days and for them, there’s no other world than the Trump world. I ask them what inspired them to go into tech and they say they read Marc Andreessen’s manifesto, they read Peter Thiel’s books, and I think, “Oh, your brain’s cooked.” They come in pre-pickled. But everyone else who could have told an alternate narrative has been hounded out of the industry.

In terms of the libertarian bent, those intentional political actors like Peter Thiel were very intentional about it. They created their own media ecosystem. They created Substack — they, meaning Andreessen Horowitz is a big investor — and paid to have content on there that would drive users to their own media. They took over culture.

On the topic of VC media ecosystems, I saw the Thread you posted a few days ago about common things VCs believe. One was “Platforms need Nazis on them.” What do you mean by that?

Well, it’s inciting. These guys like Thiel and [White House AI czar David] Sacks have been fixated for 30 years on trying to normalize and re-assert the public use of slurs. One of the examples they use [in their 1998 polemic The Diversity Myth] is the r-slur, which had just fallen out of favor in the early ‘90s. And they were explicitly saying not being able to use these slurs reflects growing political power from these groups, and that's why we need to bring them back.

I have these notes that I’ve written, and I need to wait until I can like spend my entire waking hours defending the onslaught of shit I’ll get for writing it, but I really think the thing that they’ve been working towards for 10 years is to get Trump to be able to use the n-word in public. And I think we are less than a year away.

That is dark. I can’t even contain my reaction to that. That is scary.

I want to be wrong. But, yeah, they want to make sure [marginalized groups] don’t have power, and that’s signified by having Nazis on a platform. 

On that note of power, with all the layoffs and the bleakness among the workforce, do you think we’re going to see any sort of labor power movement in the tech industry?

I’m hopeful. There was a moment in 2018, 2019, 2020, early COVID, when I thought there was going to be a moment. That’s when you had Amazon workers unionize in Staten Island [in 2022] and the first Google union [in 2021]. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in the next 18 months after that they put $10 billion into teaching tools how to code. Like, ChatGPT comes at the end of 2022, right? It’s not entirely because of that, but it’s not not because of that.

Also, like I said, [tech workers’] brains are pre-pickled. They don’t know the first thing about labor, and they’re trepidatious about learning because it’s coded “other.” Like, solidarity with the people serving meals in their workplaces is terrifying, because those people are completely disposable. None of those people have equity, none of those people have any job security.

To somebody graduating college in 2026, would you recommend a career in tech?

I think it’s hard. But compared to what? Compared to being a prison guard? Yes. But I do think tech is going to be the industry that is most changed by AI. Right now, ChatGPT can write a memo for you, write code for you. But the tools they’re building now, it’ll be more like one tool will replace an entire team of software engineers.

For someone entering college in 2026, would you recommend studying computer science?

It puts a pit in my stomach to say it, but no. I think [coding] should be part of people’s lives, for sure. But should you go into it as a career? I feel the same way about it when somebody says to me, “I’m going to learn an instrument for a living.” I’m like, “Well, hold on.” If you’re going to be the best in the world at that instrument, okay, go ahead. But if you’re not going to be the best in the world, it’s going to be a hard road for you.

Last year, we heard so much about the AI bubble. Do you think we’ll see a crash in 2026?

They’ve sort of economically engineered themselves out of crashing, and this is sort of similar to the de-risking of venture capital. When there's no risk, you don’t have crashes and you don’t have bailouts. And this is sort of, again, a feature of fascism versus capitalism.

It was trendy in the last couple of years to call where we’re at “late-stage capitalism.” Would you call this fascism?

Yeah, we’re there.

Okay, the million dollar question: Do you still feel optimistic about the tech industry?

Well, I have to believe. Part of the reason why is that I’ve seen it change people’s lives for the better. I think you can still build a thing that does connect the world and enables people to be part of the lives of people they love using technology. People can do it again. I think people are starting to understand the stakes. People understand that Elon Musk made a machine that makes child abuse material. I think it has to get pretty dire before people will make a change. But I think it can happen again.

Do you see anybody leading that charge?

There are some small projects, but I don’t want to blow anybody up yet. They’re fragile.