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How AI Plans to Buy 2026 (Jason Sattler aka LOLGOP, who's also written for HuffPost, NYDN, Wired, Common Dreams et al.)
https://www.thefarce.org/how-ai-plans-to-buy-2026/-snipping paragraphs about how little support crypto and AI have from voters, but there's an overlap of donors and ambition, so they're "two halves of the same machine"-
The machine has a name, as the great Gil Durán, author of the forthcoming tome on the topic The Nerd Reich, has been trying to tell us. Tech investor Balaji Srinivasan formalized it in 2022 as the Network State, the ideological project beneath the venture capital, the think-tank papers, the Freedom City proposals, Trump’s Gaza “freedom zone” fantasies, and the already-operational prototype: Próspera, a privately-run charter city in Honduras under its own legal system, backed by Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Srinivasan through a fund called Pronomos Capital.
The Network State offers tech capital two escapes from any semblance of democratic accountability. The first is Voice: capture governments through elections. The second is Exit: acquire or clear territory and build privately controlled zones where democracy, taxes, and regulations do not apply, what Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has openly called for: ten zones on federal land, each “exempt from federal and state law.”
Crypto is the financial infrastructure for Exit, stateless money for stateless cities, a parallel economy that doesn’t pass through the institutions of democratic accountability at all. AI is the weapon for Voice, the dirty digital dissembler, the machine for winning enough elections to make Exit a real estate transaction rather than a revolution. After calling crypto a scam, Trump and his family went all-in; two crypto projects raised the family’s estimated net worth by $2.9 billion.
And even if the dorm-lounge fantasies never come to fruition, the damage is already compounding. AI and its now-symbiotic relationship with the carbon-burning energy cartels making fortunes off powering endless data centers have created a new center of gravity for the American economy, fueling nearly all our recent economic growth while engineering the destruction of the jobs that growth is supposed to serve. This is the future the right has long fantasized about: a machine that produces capital, anonymously concentrates it, and feeds it upward or laterally to politicians who need some encouragement, while methodically eliminating the worker power that might check it.
-snip-
The machine has a name, as the great Gil Durán, author of the forthcoming tome on the topic The Nerd Reich, has been trying to tell us. Tech investor Balaji Srinivasan formalized it in 2022 as the Network State, the ideological project beneath the venture capital, the think-tank papers, the Freedom City proposals, Trump’s Gaza “freedom zone” fantasies, and the already-operational prototype: Próspera, a privately-run charter city in Honduras under its own legal system, backed by Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Srinivasan through a fund called Pronomos Capital.
The Network State offers tech capital two escapes from any semblance of democratic accountability. The first is Voice: capture governments through elections. The second is Exit: acquire or clear territory and build privately controlled zones where democracy, taxes, and regulations do not apply, what Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has openly called for: ten zones on federal land, each “exempt from federal and state law.”
Crypto is the financial infrastructure for Exit, stateless money for stateless cities, a parallel economy that doesn’t pass through the institutions of democratic accountability at all. AI is the weapon for Voice, the dirty digital dissembler, the machine for winning enough elections to make Exit a real estate transaction rather than a revolution. After calling crypto a scam, Trump and his family went all-in; two crypto projects raised the family’s estimated net worth by $2.9 billion.
And even if the dorm-lounge fantasies never come to fruition, the damage is already compounding. AI and its now-symbiotic relationship with the carbon-burning energy cartels making fortunes off powering endless data centers have created a new center of gravity for the American economy, fueling nearly all our recent economic growth while engineering the destruction of the jobs that growth is supposed to serve. This is the future the right has long fantasized about: a machine that produces capital, anonymously concentrates it, and feeds it upward or laterally to politicians who need some encouragement, while methodically eliminating the worker power that might check it.
-snip-
Sattler goes on to explain that VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (AI and crypto investments) has already spent $115 million on the 2026 election, more than anyone else, including $47.5 million to crypto super PAC Fairshake, and $50 million to pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future.
And Marc Andreessen is an insider at the White House.
Sattler points out that the AI/crypto coalition "aims to capture both parties with its big money" and capture or confuse voters with lies.
He summarizes how Musk's $45 million false flag campaign cost Harris millions of voters who'd supported Biden, targeting specific categories of voters in specific states with dishonest ads, and he links to the Washington Post story - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/15/republican-ads-false-flag/ - about it.
He points out that Peter Thiel lackey JD Vance - who "understands disinformation the way a musician understands rhythm" - is already pushing the 2026 narrative of Democrats being the party of corruption and fraud by immigrants, and AI allows them to tailor the most effective variation of this message for specific voters. They're targeting working class independents, many of whom didn't vote in 2024.
This is what we're up against.
And this is why the AI and crypto billionaires, with their AI tools and pressure on everyone to use AI, are our opponents, just as much as Trump is.
We can't assume, for instance, that Dario Modei of Anthropic is on our side or will stay neutral. We couldn't assume that even before he decided he really needed Musk's data center.
Gary Marcus: There are no heroes in commercial AI (Dario Amodei isn't all that different from Sam Altman)
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221082509
Anthropic Isn't a #Resistance Hero (Slate, March 3, 2026)
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221069072
Sattler says we need a better narrative, and he's hoping to use his new StopTheTrillionaires-dot-com website, which he links to, for fundraising to release a documentary on the threat we face before the election. But the messaging can't rely on a documentary, especially when it hasn't been made yet.
Please stop supporting the AI and crypto bros. Withdraw support in any way you can. Including by stopping, as much as possible, treating their heavily hyped but terribly flawed generative AI as something wonderful that deserves as much investment and respect - and use - as possible.