Mark Howard

Philosophy #FAQ Ontology: what the fuck? Causality: why the fuck? Epistemology: how the why the fuck? Phenomenology: the fuck.

I.e. they’re so effective at using capital to create value (unlike the rest of us) that we should pay them to use it. You know, to make all our lives better. They’re performing a public service in their mind. Andreessen in echoes this view in his confused straw man account of Marx

I think it speaks to the Randian notion of capitalists as unappreciated value creators who deserve to be better treated / rewarded by society. Thiel frequently asserts that what makes SV unique is the culture in which creators capture some of the value they create (knowin that VCs get the rest)

PitchBook: >25% of unicorns likely sub-$1B, while total unicorn value holds steady (top 10 > 50%).

Hypergrowth was always meta-growth -- valuation above fundamentals, organizing time, capital, expectation.

Exit well: simulation becomes institution
Miss the moment: undercorn

Two neurosurgeons just raised $25 million betting brain cells can (someday) outcompute silicon | Fortune The Biological Computing Co. (TBC) has raised $25 million in seed funding, Fortune has learned.

Two neurosurgeons just raised $25M to use living neurons as compute. Wow. Capital abides no limits.

If biology = infrastructure, we’re not just solving an energy crunch but paving a path to biocommodification: life as circuit component.

fortune.com/2026/02/11/t...

We asked 13 rising-star VCs how they use AI. Here's what they told us. For up-and-coming venture capitalists, tools like ChatGPT and NotebookLM have become a core part of the job.

Interesting piece on VCs using “AI second brains.” Legitimation dressed as efficiency.

VC turns capital + audacity into “genius.” AI now accelerates it: faster theses, denser hype, cleaner inevitability.

Future “necessity” can’t arrive fast enough it seems.

www.businessinsider.com/how-venture-...

Musk’s SpaceX–xAI move is less “AI ambition,” more VC power logic at planetary scale. Loss-making xAI gets laundered through SpaceX’s future necessity; it’s an attempt to capitalize on anticipated dependence (orbital compute) before it exists. Contrarian optionality: burn now, monopolize later. 🚀📈

The political economy of venture capital: winners-take-all and founder control Abstract. In many US Tech corporations such as Meta, Alphabet, and SpaceX, founders still hold shareholder voting control. How can we better understand the

Sharing a great new paper on VC from David Kampmann, LSE really leading the way on the new critical scholarship on VC
@jathansadowski.com @mrshoward.bsky.social @edwardongwesojr.com @parismarx.com @profhilaryallen.bsky.social @jacobsilverman.com
academic.oup.com/ser/advance-...

Seen at an AI investment summit hosted by UC Berkeley today. We need to stop being so overly deperndent on AI folks.

The second (excellent) article from Distinktion’s special issue on Silicon Valley imaginaries is now available. Check it out below.

A Critical Theory of Venture Capital YouTube video by Olivier Jutel

A recording of my seminar "A Critical Theory of VC" www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhJy...

Huge thanks to @ojutel.bsky.social and folks in the Media, Film, and Community programme at U-Otago for helping me think through and refine the ideas contained here.

Contrarian optionality and negative mimesis: venture capital and the institutional logic of Silicon Valley This paper offers a theorization of contrarianism in Silicon Valley, presenting it as a strategic rationality underpinned by institutional infrastructure. Rather than treating contrarianism as prin...

Check out my new article published @distinktionjournal.bsky.social on contrarianism as a cultural practice enabled by the institutional logic of Silicon Valley VC. Read it here (open access): www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Although Jaron might not approve of me using social media to express this — oops!

Having Jaron Lanier visit my Ethics and Technology class today to talk to my students was a real treat. Generous, thoughtful, and refreshingly optimistic - the class and I feel so very lucky to have had this opportunity.

What a time to be alive.

I just gave to Randy Villegas! Show your support with a contribution.

Hey folks — my friend Randy is running for congress in a Republican-held district and needs support. Randy is running a grassroots campaign but the Democratic establishment wants someone who will take corporate money. Please, if you’re able, consider chipping in:

secure.actblue.com/donate/callt...

I am very happy that my program is hosting @mrshoward.bsky.social in two weeks for a discussion of the role of contrarianism in the Silicon Valley founder/VC mythos. QR code for Zoom Deets

Part of the “selling point” is that investors and would-be entrepreneur-residents can just pick their legal code from a figurative dropdown.

Extra-judicial zone. So essentially has its own laws or lists of laws. With prospera for example, the only laws they were bound to were the Honduran constitution and criminal code. The rest is a free for all.

The so-called “cathedral” that Musk and others (following the writings of Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land) have set their targets on includes not just government, but the press and higher education. What appeared to be a batshit political theory just a few years ago is becoming a serious proposition.

Yes, but it’s often scholars who make things more complicated in the first place. I mean, that’s practically our job.

Digital proof-of-personhood (World ID) is the ultimate data tracking tool. Most countries/authorities have pushed back for this reason causing world to scale down those capabilities, but with Musk currently steamrolling the US gov.. the functionality remains a potentiality.

Nah. It’s just a catalyst for the ai arms race that investors in “Open”AI said they wanted to avoid. The private commercialization of AI was always inevitable, and so was an arms race. Buckle up, and don’t badmouth AI just in case it becomes self-aware and decides to kill you (and me!)

And so the FTC’s careers page has seemingly been deleted. That didn’t take long. It seems Silicon Valley’s cozying up to the incoming administration is already paying dividends. Prepare yourself for unprecedented monopolization and market manipulation.

One of my greatest dislikes about being an academic/writer is my ability to come up with perfect sentences (and sometimes even paragraphs) in the shower that I am somehow incapable of writing coherently 5 minutes later. Sigh.

Belgianth?

Biden Team Considers Blanket Pardons Before Trump’s Promised ‘Retribution’ White House officials believe President-elect Donald J. Trump’s selection of partisan warriors for top law enforcement jobs indicates that he will pursue revenge against his perceived enemies.

Oh my. This is how a republic dies. There will no longer be any accountability or consequences for political actors. Even if Biden doesn’t do it, Pandora’s box is now open. www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/u...