September 9, 2025 • 26 mins
Mia talks about the new Abundance movement, its ideas and how it operates as a Trojan horse for its funders Peter Thiel and the Koch Brothers.
Sources:
https://thebaffler.com/latest/whats-the-matter-with-abundance-harris?ref=newintermag.com
https://newintermag.com/abundance-big-techs-bid-for-the-democratic-party/#fn16
https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Abundance-Ecosystem-Report-Final.pdf
https://www.semafor.com/article/08/17/2025/with-the-argument-the-left-gets-a-new-publication
http://www.thinktankwatch.com/2022/01/washingtons-newest-think-tank-institute.html
https://www.vcinfodocs.com/venture-capital-extremism
https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/who-is-behind-the-growing-abundance-movement/
https://www.vcinfodocs.com/the-tech-fascist-axis
https://www.abundancedc.org/speakers
https://www.vcinfodocs.com/the-tech-fascist-axis
https://archive.vn/GKRmw#selection-377.0-377.19
https://www.theargumentmag.com/about
https://prospect.org/economy/2024-11-26-abundance-agenda-neoliberalisms-rebrand/
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
All Zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about a
world on fire and how to put it out. I'm
your host, Na Wong. The world is fucked. It's the
one thing everyone agrees on in the vacuum of a
defeated Democratic party and a hideously unpopular fascist takeover that
is nevertheless on the march ideologies VI for the mantle
(00:30):
of resistance to the fascist purge, Sir on mom Donnie's
victory in New York represents the resurch and social democracy
in the streets. Everyone from liberals to communists to anarchists
are fighting against ice and the National Guard occupations. To
get our bearings in the swirling vortex of ideology, let
us check in slightly further to the right, but still
(00:53):
firmly in the grounds of liberalism, on a new movement
called Abundance. What is abundance? Brust into prominence by a
book in March twenty twenty five simply called Abundance by
liberal stalwart as Recline and Derek Thompson, who was well
known futures people like Matthew and Glycias. They argue that
(01:16):
growth is good. They argue we should make more things.
They argue we should have bold visions of the future
with to quote Malcolm Harris's description in The Baffler, desalinated
ocean water flowing from the taps, skyscraper farms, growing our
food indoors, and quote star pills manufactured in space, clean air,
and super fast planes. Think big, think fast, solve problems
(01:41):
by building more. They even have a new magazine run
off of Substack called The Argument, which is supposed to
be about bringing these new ideas to the left. It
includes Social Democratic stalwart Matt Prunek Isn't that nice? Semaphore?
And they, reporting on the launch of The Argument, wrote,
(02:01):
quote many of The Argument's writers have supported or, in
Thompson's case, authored The Ideas of Abundance, a recent book
advocating for reforms to improve government deficiency, lower the cost
of housing, and improve public transportation, among other initiatives. And
those sound like good things, don't they. Let's take a
look at who's funding The Argument. It's funded in part
(02:24):
by Emergent Ventures, which was created by the Coke Brothers
were Cantas Center with seed money from Peter Teel. Wait
what they have a conference every year? They had one
in twenty twenty four. The twenty twenty five conference was
last week. Who was speaking the Apupondance Conference twenty twenty five.
(02:45):
Speakers include Charles Lehmann from the right wing Manhattan Institute,
an organization founded by Ronald Reagan's director of the CIA. Well,
let's hear him outs, Let's see what he thinks. Lehman
advocates what he calls deportation. Abundance witches his plan to
(03:06):
make a more efficient deportation machine that could actually deport
every undocumented person in the US. Wait what? This conference
is also sponsored by the Koch Families organizations Stand Together.
It includes speakers from the American Enterprise Institute. One of
the coast bosses of the event did another conference with
(03:29):
special guest Kevin Roberts, the guy who wrote Project twenty
twenty five. Isn't this supposed to be a liberal movement?
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Oh no?
Speaker 2 (03:39):
What's going on here? Could Abundance really be funded by
all these right wing billionaires and tech fascists? Oh no.
As you may have guessed from the title, most of
today's episode is going to be about what the people
behind Abundance actually want. And it's not what you or
I want. It is what Peter Teo wants, what Mark
(04:04):
Andreesen wants, what jd Vance wants. In a sense, it
is what Donald Trump wants. Because abundance as an ideology
is an attempt by the tech holgarchs to take over
the left the same way they took over the right,
and that makes the ideology extremely dangerous. As we are
(04:24):
going to unfailed. This project is directly tied to many
of the worst people in this country right now. It
is tied to Peter Teal. It is funded by Peter Teel.
It is funded by Mark Dreesen, who is another effectively
te Ali, who believes in most of the same, if
not all of the same things that Teal does. These
ideas are normally unacceptable on the liberal left, but because
(04:48):
abundance is wrapped in the ideology of liberalism, because it
wears the faces of liberal star warts like Ezra Kleine,
it can be smuggled in in a way way that
leaves the left liberalism as a whole susceptible to broad
ideological capture by the very same tech fascists we are
(05:08):
all trying to oppose. Before we fully get into what
the funders of Abundance actually want, let's talk a little
bit about what the ideology of abundance is. The very
very basic ideology of abundance is that we need more things,
(05:28):
we need to build more, and that government regulations are
standing in the way of building things. Now, if this
sounds suspiciously Reaganite to you, that's because in a sense
it is. As re Client describes this as the progressive
supply side economics. Now, supply side economics famously is Reagan's thing.
(05:49):
You will note that basically everyone across the entire political spectrum,
at least sort of when pressed, will agree that supply
side economics simply does not work. But let's hear them out.
I think another way to understand what abundance is and
why it works the way that it does is to
look at it in the context not of American political
(06:09):
ideology and debates, but of Chinese political debates. Now, Chinese
political debates have for most of the last decade, really
decade and a half, taken the form of arguments about
either increasing the size of the pie or splitting the
pie more evenly. On the left, you have a case
for redistribution, right, for higher taxation, for higher welfare benefits,
(06:32):
for giving people things from the states and redistributing it
from rich people to the poor. On the rights, you
have growing the pie, which argues that instead of redistributing wealth,
we should simply grow more wealth and that wealth will
trickle down to everyone else. Wait, this is just Reaganism again,
It's all Reaganism. This is the very frustrating thing about
abundance is that when you actually go past the language
(06:55):
they're using and you look at what they think will happen,
it's just trickle down economics. Again. It's just trickled and
abundance is on the right wing side of it. Now,
you know, there are definitely arguments for places where we
do in fact need to build more things, right, and
this argument has become particularly prominent with the rise of Yimbiism,
and like, yeah, I don't know, building more houses is good.
(07:16):
I mean it was literally a demand of the Hungarian Revolution, right, Like, yeah,
we need more of it. But Comma, we need to
be very very careful here because the way that abundance
structures its arguments and the ways that for example, a
really really vulgar version of Yembiism has been deployed by
(07:39):
these people in order to just sort of wholesale opposed
government regulations. And we're not just talking about things here
like eliminating zoning requirements, right. We are talking about, as
we're getting to later, the people behind this movement wants
to create their own city states and special economic zones
where no government regulation supply. But the fundamental argument here
(08:03):
is that lifting government restrictions on production will increase the
size of the market, and because price is just supply
and demand, prices will fall because there's more supply. None
of this is how markets actually work. One of the
crucial insights of anthropology is that markets are not simply
neutral objective forces that function according to precise mathematical laws.
(08:25):
They are socially constructed. Even in neoclassical economics, by their
own logic. Price is not just supply and demand. That's
something that's only true in perfectly competitive markets, and perfectly
competitive markets do not exist. They probably cannot exist, but
they do not exist in the real world, and they
(08:46):
do not represent something like the housing markets. In the
real world, markets are defined by power. Neoclassical economists attempt
to explain the role of power in markets through monopoly. Right,
you know, you can look at monopoly Monopsany, there are
a bunch of very different things that they think are
sort of deviations of this perfect competitive market where people
(09:06):
band together to build power and thus are able to
distort what the perfect free market should be doing. And
this is a feature of basically every market that actually exists, right,
There aren't perfectly competitive markets. They all have power in them,
and they all have degrees of monopoly to use a
(09:27):
sort of Marxian term in them as well. Now do
you know what else has a degree of monopoly? That's right,
it is the products and services that support this podcast.
(09:49):
So what does this actually have to do with abundance?
Long long ago in a galaxy far far away, I
explained rent on this show, and this is specif here
rent in the context of what you pay to your landlords.
I promise this will circle back to this will circle
back to sort of abundance mbeism. In a second, I
attempted to explain rent by drawing on the work of
(10:11):
the legendary Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Corneal to argue that the
rent that we pay to our landlords function similarly to
oil rent. Re price is not set by supply and demand,
but instead by the social power of oil producers. Now
people got very, very mad at me for this, but
the long deriae of history has vindicated me. In the
(10:34):
real world, it turns out I was right. The most
powerful example of this in the housing market is the
case of real Page, a service that allowed landlords to
get recommendations on their pricing based on information from all
the landlords who submitted their data, thus creating an algorithmic
machine for price fixing. This got bad enough that even
the Biden Just Department got involved. Here's from the Department
(10:56):
of Justice has lawsuits against Real Page. Quote. Real Page
acknowledge that its software is aimed at maximizing prices for landlords,
referring to its products as quote driving every possible opportunity
to increase price, avoiding the race to the bottom in
down markets, and quote a rising tide raises all ships.
(11:18):
A Real Page executive observed that its products help landlords
avoid competing on the merits, noting quote, there is a
greater good in everybody succeeding versus essentially trying to compete
against one another in a way that actually keeps the
entire industry down. A Real Page executive explains to a
landlord that using competitor data can help identify situations where
a landlord may have a fifty dollars increasestead of ten
(11:40):
dollars increase for the day. Another landlord commented about real
Page's product, I always like this product because your augorithms
used proprietary data from other subscribers to suggest rents and terms.
That's classical price fixing. Now. I was derided for arguing
that landlords would band together use in the social power
to prevent rents from falling, even with the units sit
(12:03):
un empty. And it turns out I was right the
whole time. They were doing exactly that. It turns out,
in the actual real world of the markets, all of
these companies on all of these landlords had found a
way to band together in order to use their social
power and use the information in their possession to fix
the price of rent. Here is from Reuters, drawing from
(12:27):
yet another lawsuit, this time from the Attorney General of DC.
A monthly report from W. C. Smith in twenty twenty
two showed the company had increased revenues per unit by
four point six to four point seven percent despite decreased
occupancy levels. According to the lawsuit, so what is that saying.
(12:48):
That is saying that the actual number of people in
these apartments is decreasing, the number of apartments staying open
that have no one in them is increasing, But the
price is not going down, even though there's more supply.
The price is still going up. Why is the price
still going up? Well, well, well, the Justice Department caused
(13:11):
this price fixing, large scale collusion to disrupt the functioning
of the perfectly normal competitive market. The anthropologist for a
Nano Coronel, as I argued before, calls it absolute rent,
rent extracted by virtue of the social power of the landowner.
As I wrote in that episode, quote, absolute rent does
not obey the law of supply and demand. It is
(13:32):
the product of social power, of the power of landownership
itself and the organization of the landowning class. And they're
backing by the state and its militaries and police. And
this causes economists attempting to use supply and demand to
explain rent to get very very important events very wrong.
Morris Edelman, the famous Soil Economy is predicted in nineteen
(13:53):
seventy two that the price of oil was going to
collapse based on oversupplying competition. Instead, it increased four one
hundred percent between nineteen seventy three and nineteen seventy four
because oil producers banned together to exercise their power, and
their organization, known as OPEK, became a genuine world power.
As Coroneal put it quote, the sharp increase of nineteen
(14:15):
seventy three and nineteen seventy four and oil prices did
not result from a world shortage of oil. It was
rather the outcome of a long historical process by which
OPEK nations, acting as landowners, developed a means to extract
a rent on the basis of their ownership of the
oil fields, and absolute rent in addition to the differential
rents to theay collected in the past. In nineteen seventy three,
(14:36):
a set of converging political and economic conditions helped establish
their collective ability to restrict the world's supply of oil.
With this power, OPECK felt entitled to set the market
price of oil, thus freeing the level of rent from
the previous constraints of market price. Now rent itself, absolute
and differential would determine the market price of oil. What
does that sound like, Oh, it sounds like real pages
(15:00):
price fixing. Algorithm. Why does it sound like real Page's
price fixing algorithm. It's because in the real world, markets
are not neutral institutions that operate according to neutral laws.
They are institutions created and enforced by the state. Landlords
can jack up your rent because they wield collective power
together and have the ability to use the state to
(15:22):
drag you out of your home at gunpoint. Abundance is,
to a large extent, an attempt to harness widespread discontent
over the price of goods, the price of rent, the
price of food, and argue that you can simply produce
more and this will make all of the prices go down.
But as we've seen here, as long as the social
power is held by the rent extractors, they can simply
(15:42):
set their own price. None of this is addressed in abundance,
and there's a simple reason for that. The people funding
the abundance agenda are the very same people profiting from
their social power. So let's talk about the money. I'm
going to be quoting here from a report from Prospect,
which is very good. The Institute for Progress IFP, which
(16:05):
co hosted Abundance twenty twenty four and is listed as
a key institutional partner by the Inclusive Abundance Initiative has
a bevy of corporate ties. In twenty twenty two, IFP
received one hundred and ten thousand dollars from FAI and
has fai's executive director on its board. Now, FAI is
the Foundation for American Innovation. I'm going to read this
(16:26):
is also an Abundance co host, which is very funny.
I am going to read a quote from Kate Willett,
who has also done some excellent reporting on this, and
she describes how the FAI hosted another conference in twenty
twenty four called Reboot. Quote the quote. Surprise guest of
the conference was Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation
in chief architect of twenty twenty five. Now back to
(16:49):
the Institute of Progress. Part of what's going on here, right,
is that this is an increadin, you know, And what
I'm trying to emphasize by how confusing this whole thing is,
is that Abundance is composed of a series of think
tanks and weird in institutes that are all tied into
a bunch of tech money. Right, Keeping the acronym straight
is very difficult. You do not need to hold all
of them in your head. The other thing that you
(17:10):
need to understand about this right is if you look
at who is co hosting these conferences, and who is
behind these books, and who was behind these media outlets,
a very very clear picture starts to emerge. I'm gonna
go back to quoting from Prospect. One of the funders
of the Institute for Progress was Emergent Ventures, which is
a product of the Coke Back Mercantis Institute at George
(17:31):
Mason University. Emergent itself was launched by a grant from
Peter thel Peter Theal is a right wing billionaire with
a vast influence network at the intersection of technofuturism and
anti democratic thought, who has called technology an alternative to
democratic politics small d democratic by the way, he means
the concept of democracy to quote unilaterally change the world.
(17:51):
Vice Presidents Elect JD. Vance is a known scion of
Peter thel Let's Look at the Chamber of Progress. Another
one of the groups that has had Lee involved in abundance.
Chamber of Progress, which self identifies its work as part
of a growing abundance policy movement, is a trade group
started with Google seed money by Google alum Adam Kovakovich.
(18:13):
Kovakovich proudly touts his college activism, leading an effort to
cross a United farm Workers picket line. The Chamber of
Progresses partners red funders include A sixteen Z Circle, Coinbase, Google,
Kraken Ripple, Waimo, and Dresen Horowitz or A sixteen z
(18:33):
is a venture capital firm heavily invested in AI and
crypto co founder Marc and Dreesen believes the technology is
a solution to every problem. He's also on Meta's board.
He is also a theolite tech fascist. This is it,
in some sense, a very very interesting collusion of forces. Right,
we have the Koch Brothers, who are, you know, sort
(18:53):
of the ancient libertarian right side of Republican dark money.
They are, you know, the people who have traditionally funded
right wing movements in the past. They are the tea
party people. They are, you know, they are sort of
the boogeyman under the bed for anyone who has wanted
to make the world a better place for a very
(19:15):
very long time. And they and their organizations are working
with the emergent tech fascist right. You know, people like
people like Mark Andreson, people with Peter Tel and these
are the organizations that have gotten in bed together in
order to do this. Now, these people have a bunch
of absolutely hideous beliefs. We're not even going to get
(19:37):
in to the eugenics here, but like these the people
funding this thing are huge eugenesis. We literally do not
have time to do all of the eugenic shit associated
with this, because if I were to actually do the
eugenic I mean, we talked about some of like Maddie
and Glesias's bullshit on this podcast earlier, but like if
I actually went through and did this, this episode would
(19:57):
be like twelve hours long. I am going to to
cover this sort of network state, Peter theolite eugenics circle
at some point later. That is a forthcoming episode, but yeah,
for now, here are these ads. Hopefully are not eugenics.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Woo.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
So let's get back to who I think are really
the two primary villains of this story, and that is
Peter Theal and Mark Andriesen, who are two of the
most dangerous people in the entire world. Teel and Andresen
are fascists who believe the state should be a corporation
run by the tech elite. They do not believe in democracy,
(20:48):
and particularly theol has said that democracy is the enemy
of freedom. Right, when these people talk about running the
state like a business, they mean that there should be
an unaccountable fucking philosopher CEO king, that there shouldn't be democracy.
A common feature of this, and you know, the physical
manifestation of this thing is an idea called the network state.
(21:09):
And a very common theme of the founders of Abundance
is their support for the network state, both as a
concept and in terms of building them. So what is
the network state? The network state is, to a large extent,
the thing I've just been describing, Right, The version of
it that they pitch is that these are like they're
like opportunity zones, right, They're these like tech cities you know,
(21:30):
that will eventually become like real states that are that
are based off of special economic zones where you know,
special economic zones are like the normal regulations of the
state do not apply, so you can, you know, do
whatever you want, right, you can. You can we can
build prosperity by by having no government regulations and run
everything through corporations. These network states would be again actual
(21:53):
straight up corporations that own and control territory and run
it as the state. These states are already coming into existence.
Maybe the most important prospera a corporate city for profit
in hont Duras that is run by a corporation, again
in a special economic zone where the state does not apply.
It does not have a mayor, it has somewhat appointed
(22:15):
by the corporation who runs the city. This is happening
all over the world, particularly in developing countries, where it
is being pushed by all of these just absolutely demonic
tech cools, and they're also being started in attempts at
being started to run them in the United States. I'm
going to quote here from Shanley's venture capital blog venture
Capital Status, which is a very very good resource on
(22:38):
the network state, which we'll be covering more fully later
because we don't have time to do much more than
a brief introduction to their ideas here. In Soleerro County, California,
a cartel of venture capitalists associated with Andreas and Horowitz,
which is again a Mark Rison's firm, bought up over
sixty five thousand acres of rich fertile farmland and using
(23:03):
secretive and threatening methodologies, including suing local farmers. They plan
to build a city with weapons developments and manufacturing, aerospace
and robotics companies, shipbuilding, homes, and schools. This network state
is called California Forever. Also in California, there has been
a discussion by network state operatives of taking over Presidio
(23:24):
in San Francisco, and there is a network state planned
in Somona County. Its founder is a quote former promonist
venture capitalists. These are the same people funding Abundance. Here's
from Kate Willett again, one of the California Forever billionaires.
California Forever is again the name of the network state
they want to set up by buying a bunch of
(23:45):
land in Solano County. One of the California Forever billionaires,
Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, looms large in abundance world.
Along with Open Philanthropy, he donated to fund a one
hundred and twenty million dollar Abundance tied to Ezra Klein's
book release. Coulson is a key backer and inspiration for
(24:05):
the Institute for Progress, the think tank which works closely
with others in the Abundance network, including the Abundance twenty
twenty four conference. The goal of the network state movement
is to accelerate the destruction of the United States and
create these corporate network states in their wake. They want
the world to be composed of these networks of venture
(24:28):
capital tech corporations run and ruled by them by the
tech elite for profit. These are the people that are
funding all of these fucking movements. These are the people
funding the Argument. These are the people funding the Abundance Conference.
These are the people that people like Ezra Kline have
(24:49):
been brought in to run cover for. These are Trump people.
They are the forces behind jd Vance. They want to
inflict their vision of tech fascism on the the world,
but they are hideously popular in power. In order to
achieve their regenda, they cannot simply rely on their incredible
hegemony on the right. They need you, They need your
(25:13):
buy in. They need the support of good and kind
hearted liberals who they can radicalize into Trumpian tech fascists.
This is their opening gambit, and they've played it well.
But there is still time for them to fail. And
there is still time for us to build a future
built by us and for us, by and for each other,
based on mutual aid and the benefit of all of
(25:36):
worlds without death squads and ice, a world ruled not
by corporations but by us. The fight for that world
begins here and now.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
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All Zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about a
world on fire and how to put it out. I'm
your host, Na Wong. The world is fucked. It's the
one thing everyone agrees on in the vacuum of a
defeated Democratic party and a hideously unpopular fascist takeover that
is nevertheless on the march ideologies VI for the mantle
(00:30):
of resistance to the fascist purge, Sir on mom Donnie's
victory in New York represents the resurch and social democracy
in the streets. Everyone from liberals to communists to anarchists
are fighting against ice and the National Guard occupations. To
get our bearings in the swirling vortex of ideology, let
us check in slightly further to the right, but still
(00:53):
firmly in the grounds of liberalism, on a new movement
called Abundance. What is abundance? Brust into prominence by a
book in March twenty twenty five simply called Abundance by
liberal stalwart as Recline and Derek Thompson, who was well
known futures people like Matthew and Glycias. They argue that
(01:16):
growth is good. They argue we should make more things.
They argue we should have bold visions of the future
with to quote Malcolm Harris's description in The Baffler, desalinated
ocean water flowing from the taps, skyscraper farms, growing our
food indoors, and quote star pills manufactured in space, clean air,
and super fast planes. Think big, think fast, solve problems
(01:41):
by building more. They even have a new magazine run
off of Substack called The Argument, which is supposed to
be about bringing these new ideas to the left. It
includes Social Democratic stalwart Matt Prunek Isn't that nice? Semaphore?
And they, reporting on the launch of The Argument, wrote,
(02:01):
quote many of The Argument's writers have supported or, in
Thompson's case, authored The Ideas of Abundance, a recent book
advocating for reforms to improve government deficiency, lower the cost
of housing, and improve public transportation, among other initiatives. And
those sound like good things, don't they. Let's take a
look at who's funding The Argument. It's funded in part
(02:24):
by Emergent Ventures, which was created by the Coke Brothers
were Cantas Center with seed money from Peter Teel. Wait
what they have a conference every year? They had one
in twenty twenty four. The twenty twenty five conference was
last week. Who was speaking the Apupondance Conference twenty twenty five.
(02:45):
Speakers include Charles Lehmann from the right wing Manhattan Institute,
an organization founded by Ronald Reagan's director of the CIA. Well,
let's hear him outs, Let's see what he thinks. Lehman
advocates what he calls deportation. Abundance witches his plan to
(03:06):
make a more efficient deportation machine that could actually deport
every undocumented person in the US. Wait what? This conference
is also sponsored by the Koch Families organizations Stand Together.
It includes speakers from the American Enterprise Institute. One of
the coast bosses of the event did another conference with
(03:29):
special guest Kevin Roberts, the guy who wrote Project twenty
twenty five. Isn't this supposed to be a liberal movement?
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Oh no?
Speaker 2 (03:39):
What's going on here? Could Abundance really be funded by
all these right wing billionaires and tech fascists? Oh no.
As you may have guessed from the title, most of
today's episode is going to be about what the people
behind Abundance actually want. And it's not what you or
I want. It is what Peter Teo wants, what Mark
(04:04):
Andreesen wants, what jd Vance wants. In a sense, it
is what Donald Trump wants. Because abundance as an ideology
is an attempt by the tech holgarchs to take over
the left the same way they took over the right,
and that makes the ideology extremely dangerous. As we are
(04:24):
going to unfailed. This project is directly tied to many
of the worst people in this country right now. It
is tied to Peter Teal. It is funded by Peter Teel.
It is funded by Mark Dreesen, who is another effectively
te Ali, who believes in most of the same, if
not all of the same things that Teal does. These
ideas are normally unacceptable on the liberal left, but because
(04:48):
abundance is wrapped in the ideology of liberalism, because it
wears the faces of liberal star warts like Ezra Kleine,
it can be smuggled in in a way way that
leaves the left liberalism as a whole susceptible to broad
ideological capture by the very same tech fascists we are
(05:08):
all trying to oppose. Before we fully get into what
the funders of Abundance actually want, let's talk a little
bit about what the ideology of abundance is. The very
very basic ideology of abundance is that we need more things,
(05:28):
we need to build more, and that government regulations are
standing in the way of building things. Now, if this
sounds suspiciously Reaganite to you, that's because in a sense
it is. As re Client describes this as the progressive
supply side economics. Now, supply side economics famously is Reagan's thing.
(05:49):
You will note that basically everyone across the entire political spectrum,
at least sort of when pressed, will agree that supply
side economics simply does not work. But let's hear them out.
I think another way to understand what abundance is and
why it works the way that it does is to
look at it in the context not of American political
(06:09):
ideology and debates, but of Chinese political debates. Now, Chinese
political debates have for most of the last decade, really
decade and a half, taken the form of arguments about
either increasing the size of the pie or splitting the
pie more evenly. On the left, you have a case
for redistribution, right, for higher taxation, for higher welfare benefits,
(06:32):
for giving people things from the states and redistributing it
from rich people to the poor. On the rights, you
have growing the pie, which argues that instead of redistributing wealth,
we should simply grow more wealth and that wealth will
trickle down to everyone else. Wait, this is just Reaganism again,
It's all Reaganism. This is the very frustrating thing about
abundance is that when you actually go past the language
(06:55):
they're using and you look at what they think will happen,
it's just trickle down economics. Again. It's just trickled and
abundance is on the right wing side of it. Now,
you know, there are definitely arguments for places where we
do in fact need to build more things, right, and
this argument has become particularly prominent with the rise of Yimbiism,
and like, yeah, I don't know, building more houses is good.
(07:16):
I mean it was literally a demand of the Hungarian Revolution, right, Like, yeah,
we need more of it. But Comma, we need to
be very very careful here because the way that abundance
structures its arguments and the ways that for example, a
really really vulgar version of Yembiism has been deployed by
(07:39):
these people in order to just sort of wholesale opposed
government regulations. And we're not just talking about things here
like eliminating zoning requirements, right. We are talking about, as
we're getting to later, the people behind this movement wants
to create their own city states and special economic zones
where no government regulation supply. But the fundamental argument here
(08:03):
is that lifting government restrictions on production will increase the
size of the market, and because price is just supply
and demand, prices will fall because there's more supply. None
of this is how markets actually work. One of the
crucial insights of anthropology is that markets are not simply
neutral objective forces that function according to precise mathematical laws.
(08:25):
They are socially constructed. Even in neoclassical economics, by their
own logic. Price is not just supply and demand. That's
something that's only true in perfectly competitive markets, and perfectly
competitive markets do not exist. They probably cannot exist, but
they do not exist in the real world, and they
(08:46):
do not represent something like the housing markets. In the
real world, markets are defined by power. Neoclassical economists attempt
to explain the role of power in markets through monopoly. Right,
you know, you can look at monopoly Monopsany, there are
a bunch of very different things that they think are
sort of deviations of this perfect competitive market where people
(09:06):
band together to build power and thus are able to
distort what the perfect free market should be doing. And
this is a feature of basically every market that actually exists, right,
There aren't perfectly competitive markets. They all have power in them,
and they all have degrees of monopoly to use a
(09:27):
sort of Marxian term in them as well. Now do
you know what else has a degree of monopoly? That's right,
it is the products and services that support this podcast.
(09:49):
So what does this actually have to do with abundance?
Long long ago in a galaxy far far away, I
explained rent on this show, and this is specif here
rent in the context of what you pay to your landlords.
I promise this will circle back to this will circle
back to sort of abundance mbeism. In a second, I
attempted to explain rent by drawing on the work of
(10:11):
the legendary Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Corneal to argue that the
rent that we pay to our landlords function similarly to
oil rent. Re price is not set by supply and demand,
but instead by the social power of oil producers. Now
people got very, very mad at me for this, but
the long deriae of history has vindicated me. In the
(10:34):
real world, it turns out I was right. The most
powerful example of this in the housing market is the
case of real Page, a service that allowed landlords to
get recommendations on their pricing based on information from all
the landlords who submitted their data, thus creating an algorithmic
machine for price fixing. This got bad enough that even
the Biden Just Department got involved. Here's from the Department
(10:56):
of Justice has lawsuits against Real Page. Quote. Real Page
acknowledge that its software is aimed at maximizing prices for landlords,
referring to its products as quote driving every possible opportunity
to increase price, avoiding the race to the bottom in
down markets, and quote a rising tide raises all ships.
(11:18):
A Real Page executive observed that its products help landlords
avoid competing on the merits, noting quote, there is a
greater good in everybody succeeding versus essentially trying to compete
against one another in a way that actually keeps the
entire industry down. A Real Page executive explains to a
landlord that using competitor data can help identify situations where
a landlord may have a fifty dollars increasestead of ten
(11:40):
dollars increase for the day. Another landlord commented about real
Page's product, I always like this product because your augorithms
used proprietary data from other subscribers to suggest rents and terms.
That's classical price fixing. Now. I was derided for arguing
that landlords would band together use in the social power
to prevent rents from falling, even with the units sit
(12:03):
un empty. And it turns out I was right the
whole time. They were doing exactly that. It turns out,
in the actual real world of the markets, all of
these companies on all of these landlords had found a
way to band together in order to use their social
power and use the information in their possession to fix
the price of rent. Here is from Reuters, drawing from
(12:27):
yet another lawsuit, this time from the Attorney General of DC.
A monthly report from W. C. Smith in twenty twenty
two showed the company had increased revenues per unit by
four point six to four point seven percent despite decreased
occupancy levels. According to the lawsuit, so what is that saying.
(12:48):
That is saying that the actual number of people in
these apartments is decreasing, the number of apartments staying open
that have no one in them is increasing, But the
price is not going down, even though there's more supply.
The price is still going up. Why is the price
still going up? Well, well, well, the Justice Department caused
(13:11):
this price fixing, large scale collusion to disrupt the functioning
of the perfectly normal competitive market. The anthropologist for a
Nano Coronel, as I argued before, calls it absolute rent,
rent extracted by virtue of the social power of the landowner.
As I wrote in that episode, quote, absolute rent does
not obey the law of supply and demand. It is
(13:32):
the product of social power, of the power of landownership
itself and the organization of the landowning class. And they're
backing by the state and its militaries and police. And
this causes economists attempting to use supply and demand to
explain rent to get very very important events very wrong.
Morris Edelman, the famous Soil Economy is predicted in nineteen
(13:53):
seventy two that the price of oil was going to
collapse based on oversupplying competition. Instead, it increased four one
hundred percent between nineteen seventy three and nineteen seventy four
because oil producers banned together to exercise their power, and
their organization, known as OPEK, became a genuine world power.
As Coroneal put it quote, the sharp increase of nineteen
(14:15):
seventy three and nineteen seventy four and oil prices did
not result from a world shortage of oil. It was
rather the outcome of a long historical process by which
OPEK nations, acting as landowners, developed a means to extract
a rent on the basis of their ownership of the
oil fields, and absolute rent in addition to the differential
rents to theay collected in the past. In nineteen seventy three,
(14:36):
a set of converging political and economic conditions helped establish
their collective ability to restrict the world's supply of oil.
With this power, OPECK felt entitled to set the market
price of oil, thus freeing the level of rent from
the previous constraints of market price. Now rent itself, absolute
and differential would determine the market price of oil. What
does that sound like, Oh, it sounds like real pages
(15:00):
price fixing. Algorithm. Why does it sound like real Page's
price fixing algorithm. It's because in the real world, markets
are not neutral institutions that operate according to neutral laws.
They are institutions created and enforced by the state. Landlords
can jack up your rent because they wield collective power
together and have the ability to use the state to
(15:22):
drag you out of your home at gunpoint. Abundance is,
to a large extent, an attempt to harness widespread discontent
over the price of goods, the price of rent, the
price of food, and argue that you can simply produce
more and this will make all of the prices go down.
But as we've seen here, as long as the social
power is held by the rent extractors, they can simply
(15:42):
set their own price. None of this is addressed in abundance,
and there's a simple reason for that. The people funding
the abundance agenda are the very same people profiting from
their social power. So let's talk about the money. I'm
going to be quoting here from a report from Prospect,
which is very good. The Institute for Progress IFP, which
(16:05):
co hosted Abundance twenty twenty four and is listed as
a key institutional partner by the Inclusive Abundance Initiative has
a bevy of corporate ties. In twenty twenty two, IFP
received one hundred and ten thousand dollars from FAI and
has fai's executive director on its board. Now, FAI is
the Foundation for American Innovation. I'm going to read this
(16:26):
is also an Abundance co host, which is very funny.
I am going to read a quote from Kate Willett,
who has also done some excellent reporting on this, and
she describes how the FAI hosted another conference in twenty
twenty four called Reboot. Quote the quote. Surprise guest of
the conference was Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation
in chief architect of twenty twenty five. Now back to
(16:49):
the Institute of Progress. Part of what's going on here, right,
is that this is an increadin, you know, And what
I'm trying to emphasize by how confusing this whole thing is,
is that Abundance is composed of a series of think
tanks and weird in institutes that are all tied into
a bunch of tech money. Right, Keeping the acronym straight
is very difficult. You do not need to hold all
of them in your head. The other thing that you
(17:10):
need to understand about this right is if you look
at who is co hosting these conferences, and who is
behind these books, and who was behind these media outlets,
a very very clear picture starts to emerge. I'm gonna
go back to quoting from Prospect. One of the funders
of the Institute for Progress was Emergent Ventures, which is
a product of the Coke Back Mercantis Institute at George
(17:31):
Mason University. Emergent itself was launched by a grant from
Peter thel Peter Theal is a right wing billionaire with
a vast influence network at the intersection of technofuturism and
anti democratic thought, who has called technology an alternative to
democratic politics small d democratic by the way, he means
the concept of democracy to quote unilaterally change the world.
(17:51):
Vice Presidents Elect JD. Vance is a known scion of
Peter thel Let's Look at the Chamber of Progress. Another
one of the groups that has had Lee involved in abundance.
Chamber of Progress, which self identifies its work as part
of a growing abundance policy movement, is a trade group
started with Google seed money by Google alum Adam Kovakovich.
(18:13):
Kovakovich proudly touts his college activism, leading an effort to
cross a United farm Workers picket line. The Chamber of
Progresses partners red funders include A sixteen Z Circle, Coinbase, Google,
Kraken Ripple, Waimo, and Dresen Horowitz or A sixteen z
(18:33):
is a venture capital firm heavily invested in AI and
crypto co founder Marc and Dreesen believes the technology is
a solution to every problem. He's also on Meta's board.
He is also a theolite tech fascist. This is it,
in some sense, a very very interesting collusion of forces. Right,
we have the Koch Brothers, who are, you know, sort
(18:53):
of the ancient libertarian right side of Republican dark money.
They are, you know, the people who have traditionally funded
right wing movements in the past. They are the tea
party people. They are, you know, they are sort of
the boogeyman under the bed for anyone who has wanted
to make the world a better place for a very
(19:15):
very long time. And they and their organizations are working
with the emergent tech fascist right. You know, people like
people like Mark Andreson, people with Peter Tel and these
are the organizations that have gotten in bed together in
order to do this. Now, these people have a bunch
of absolutely hideous beliefs. We're not even going to get
(19:37):
in to the eugenics here, but like these the people
funding this thing are huge eugenesis. We literally do not
have time to do all of the eugenic shit associated
with this, because if I were to actually do the
eugenic I mean, we talked about some of like Maddie
and Glesias's bullshit on this podcast earlier, but like if
I actually went through and did this, this episode would
(19:57):
be like twelve hours long. I am going to to
cover this sort of network state, Peter theolite eugenics circle
at some point later. That is a forthcoming episode, but yeah,
for now, here are these ads. Hopefully are not eugenics.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Woo.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
So let's get back to who I think are really
the two primary villains of this story, and that is
Peter Theal and Mark Andriesen, who are two of the
most dangerous people in the entire world. Teel and Andresen
are fascists who believe the state should be a corporation
run by the tech elite. They do not believe in democracy,
(20:48):
and particularly theol has said that democracy is the enemy
of freedom. Right, when these people talk about running the
state like a business, they mean that there should be
an unaccountable fucking philosopher CEO king, that there shouldn't be democracy.
A common feature of this, and you know, the physical
manifestation of this thing is an idea called the network state.
(21:09):
And a very common theme of the founders of Abundance
is their support for the network state, both as a
concept and in terms of building them. So what is
the network state? The network state is, to a large extent,
the thing I've just been describing, Right, The version of
it that they pitch is that these are like they're
like opportunity zones, right, They're these like tech cities you know,
(21:30):
that will eventually become like real states that are that
are based off of special economic zones where you know,
special economic zones are like the normal regulations of the
state do not apply, so you can, you know, do
whatever you want, right, you can. You can we can
build prosperity by by having no government regulations and run
everything through corporations. These network states would be again actual
(21:53):
straight up corporations that own and control territory and run
it as the state. These states are already coming into existence.
Maybe the most important prospera a corporate city for profit
in hont Duras that is run by a corporation, again
in a special economic zone where the state does not apply.
It does not have a mayor, it has somewhat appointed
(22:15):
by the corporation who runs the city. This is happening
all over the world, particularly in developing countries, where it
is being pushed by all of these just absolutely demonic
tech cools, and they're also being started in attempts at
being started to run them in the United States. I'm
going to quote here from Shanley's venture capital blog venture
Capital Status, which is a very very good resource on
(22:38):
the network state, which we'll be covering more fully later
because we don't have time to do much more than
a brief introduction to their ideas here. In Soleerro County, California,
a cartel of venture capitalists associated with Andreas and Horowitz,
which is again a Mark Rison's firm, bought up over
sixty five thousand acres of rich fertile farmland and using
(23:03):
secretive and threatening methodologies, including suing local farmers. They plan
to build a city with weapons developments and manufacturing, aerospace
and robotics companies, shipbuilding, homes, and schools. This network state
is called California Forever. Also in California, there has been
a discussion by network state operatives of taking over Presidio
(23:24):
in San Francisco, and there is a network state planned
in Somona County. Its founder is a quote former promonist
venture capitalists. These are the same people funding Abundance. Here's
from Kate Willett again, one of the California Forever billionaires.
California Forever is again the name of the network state
they want to set up by buying a bunch of
(23:45):
land in Solano County. One of the California Forever billionaires,
Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, looms large in abundance world.
Along with Open Philanthropy, he donated to fund a one
hundred and twenty million dollar Abundance tied to Ezra Klein's
book release. Coulson is a key backer and inspiration for
(24:05):
the Institute for Progress, the think tank which works closely
with others in the Abundance network, including the Abundance twenty
twenty four conference. The goal of the network state movement
is to accelerate the destruction of the United States and
create these corporate network states in their wake. They want
the world to be composed of these networks of venture
(24:28):
capital tech corporations run and ruled by them by the
tech elite for profit. These are the people that are
funding all of these fucking movements. These are the people
funding the Argument. These are the people funding the Abundance Conference.
These are the people that people like Ezra Kline have
(24:49):
been brought in to run cover for. These are Trump people.
They are the forces behind jd Vance. They want to
inflict their vision of tech fascism on the the world,
but they are hideously popular in power. In order to
achieve their regenda, they cannot simply rely on their incredible
hegemony on the right. They need you, They need your
(25:13):
buy in. They need the support of good and kind
hearted liberals who they can radicalize into Trumpian tech fascists.
This is their opening gambit, and they've played it well.
But there is still time for them to fail. And
there is still time for us to build a future
built by us and for us, by and for each other,
based on mutual aid and the benefit of all of
(25:36):
worlds without death squads and ice, a world ruled not
by corporations but by us. The fight for that world
begins here and now.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
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now find sources for it Could Happen Here, listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
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Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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