Abolish venture capitalism

It's a scourge and we should walk away

For his first column for The Nation magazine, Edward Ongweso Jr. wrote a fascinating piece that examines the drain on our world that is venture capitalism:

Venture capitalists have used a low-interest-rate environment to enrich themselves and their friends. They created tech that supercharged surveillance, immiseration, and dispossession, and along the way, they blew up their own financial ecosystem in a panic. Why should we trust them with so much power over the economy?

Here’s the most innocuous definition imaginable of “venture capital.”

That makes VC sound necessary, when in fact it’s a quick and easy way to funnel billions of dollars to your already-rich friends (and the field is peopled almost entirely by white people, whose wealth already outstrips those of their other-than-white friends). This is not a new problem; in fact, it feels entrenched.

Venture capitalism is lousy with myths (VC is risky; VC gives great returns), which are fairly easy to dismantle. And here’s something disquieting, also from Ongweso:

The crown jewels of Silicon Valley and its financiers are technologies deployed for surveillance and social control, as well as public sectors that reorient themselves towards this task. For the state, venture capital is necessary for American global technological supremacy. Silicon Valley has remained all too eager to make money in China, even as industry insiders like former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt or Palantir cofounder and chief executive Alex Karp scream for a geopolitical strategy that embraces venture capital and a new cold war for a strange sort of techno-nationalism.

Venture capitalism thrives when labor rules are skirted, when industry regulations are ignored or destroyed, when rich people gather around the pool and divvy up the goods. Remind me why we aren’t disdainful?