Do you like horror movies? I feel like most new movies that are coming out are almost all horror movies. But here’s the thing: a horror movie doesn’t have to deal with traditional themes to be terrifying, like re-animated corpses or people on all-sanguineous diets or monkey’s paw-related wish-grantery. Sometimes the horror is less imaginative and just, you know, crappier. Like the grim yet ever-present specter of a future where no one can fix and drive a used car.

This horrific idea was driven home for me when I watched a series – I think still ongoing – of videos from bigshot YouTuber (a title which, I just learned today, has nothing to do with other types of tubers, like yams or cassavas) Rich Rebuilds, who just spent $10,000 to buy one of those Rivian-built Amazon delivery vans.

Now, the van Rich bought may not actually have been part of Amazon’s fleet; in fact, I don’t think it was, because it doesn’t have Amazon livery on the outside and the center of the steering wheel reads “RIVIAN” instead of “AMAZON” like the ones delivered to Amazon seem to have. It’s the same type of van that Amazon uses, though, a Rivian Delivery Van, and these are electric delivery vehicles that start at around $80,000 and go up from there. Maybe $100,000 is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much, once all is said and done. So getting one for $10,000 would absolutely seem like an interesting deal.

Of course, there’s a catch, because this is reality and everything has a catch. The catch here is that the van doesn’t, you know, move. Ordinarily, this is a pretty significant detriment to a van, or, really, almost any motor vehicle, but Rich felt the gamble could be worth it, because, come on, this thing is practically new! How hard could it be?

The van was marked not for sale, but despite that, somehow Rich managed to buy it, becoming possibly the first private – as in non-commercial – owner of a Rivian Delivery Van ever. It’s also worth noting that this van was in this position because it had been Lemon Law’d, which means that it was so broken from the get-go that the manufacturer had to buy it back. And from there, I guess it was sold to the dealer that Rich bought it from?

Anyway, the sellers of the unsellable van seemed to think it needed a whole new battery pack, but Rich didn’t think so. And it seems he was right! The problem is just that the real issue is, in many ways, worse.

These videos are somewhat long, but I think worth watching, if only to really absorb the full schadenfreude of frustration as they try fix after fix to try and get the van moving. It powers up fine; the battery works, all the displays work, the power doors open and close, all the lights work, but there’s one thing that refuses to cooperate, and it’s enough to transform the whole van from a vehicle into a shed: the parking brake.

For whatever reason, the van’s computers think there’s some kind of fault in the parking brake system, and as a result, the van refuses to go into gear and drive. The whole electric parking brake system was inspected and seems fine, but the software refuses to accept that, and effectively bricks the entire van.

By the end of the video, Rich realizes his only recourse is to try and reach out to Rivian, who will very likely refuse to work on this vehicle, because it was marked as not to be sold. And, sure, he knew the risks when plopping down his ten grand, but the bigger issue here is that this should be an alarming warning for us all, especially those of us who like to buy broken used vehicles and then make them work.

That’s something this community does all the time. I know my co-founder and EIC David has done just that multiple times, contributors like our own Stephen Walter Gossin do it with shocking regularity, and even I, with my decidedly sub-par wrenching skills, managed to get a formerly yard-bound and shot-up old Citroën running and driving again.

All of these car-resurrections were able to happen because, at least up until this point, cars were very repairable things. You could take a car that hadn’t run in years and years and get it back on the road, and there’s never been a need to reach out to the company that made the car originally – if they still even exist – for anything.

What this attempted Rivian van repair painfully demonstrates is how that situation seems to be coming to an end. When software becomes the dominant driver of how a car works, then you no longer ever really own a car; the car company is just letting you use it, until such use ceases to provide them any benefit.

If this was a UPS delivery van from 1985 or 1992 or even 2019 that Rich bought, he’d have had it running and driving in no time, ready to be converted into a camper or a mobile opium den or a hauler for a dirigible or whatever. All the systems would have been understandable and repairable. Sure, there would potentially be considerable skill and cost and resources of all kinds involved, but it would be possible.

Is it possible to fix this Rivian van at all? 99% of the systems in that van seem to be working fine, but I am not even remotely confident that the thing will ever drive again. Maybe if Rivian agrees to help somehow and use their proprietary diagnostic tools to clear the fault, but that’s a huge if. Clever hackers could likely reverse-engineer what the Rivian computers and software are doing and make a replacement nervous system, but the effort to pull that off would be, well, considerable. Like moon-sized considerable.

All of this makes me deeply uneasy. I don’t want to live in a world where otherwise perfectly repairable used cars and trucks and vans are rendered inert, useless monoliths because of some lines of code I’m not allowed to access. If this is a harbinger for the way things are going to be – and I’m afraid it very much is, as we’ve seen many similar things before – then that does not bode well for the used car market or the world of independent auto repair shops or the ability for people to afford and use used cars, for regular life use or for enthusiasts.

Right to repair is important, and the story of this Rivian delivery van should be a big, loud warning to everyone who cares about repairing their own cars. We can’t let this become the norm.

Maybe he’ll fix it, though! There’s still the possibility of a happy ending here, so I’m going to reserve at least a little dollop of hope that in a future video we’ll see Rich driving this thing past Rivian HQ, flipping a glorious bird.

Top graphic images: Rich Rebuilds/YouTube

The post A Famous YouTuber Bought One Of Those EV Amazon Delivery Vans For $10K And Honestly It Terrifies Me About The Future appeared first on The Autopian.

Yesterday, Citroën unveiled their latest concept car, a re-imagined electric version of the legendary 2CV. My delight gland was significantly excorpulated by what I saw, and I sincerely hope this concept makes it to market close to what was shown (albeit with skirted rear fenders) and for the low price they’re targeting. Now, in what seems to be a company-wide effort to see just how excorpulated my delight gland can be, the company has shown a second 2CV-based concept car, this one a modern re-interpretation of the commercial variant of the 2CV, known as the Fourgonnette.

The original Fourgonnette was introduced in 1951 to meet the growing demand for a small, cheap van or commercial vehicle, much the same reasons why Volkswagen developed their famous Type 2 van. Citroën’s solution to the commercial vehicle problem was typically simple: cut the body off a 2CV after the front doors and graft on a small corrugated shed that looks something like a quonset hut.

The resulting vehicle, which also got a 425cc version of the air-cooled flat-twin in the base car, adding three more horsepower for a mind-scrambling 12 hp, was an incredibly flexible, usable, and affordable workhorse. Businesses all over France and Europe, to the tune of 1.2 million of these ribbed wonders being sold between 1951 and 1978. There were even sort-of station wagon versions with rear side windows and back seats, so you could take the fam out after a hard week of hauling cheese or whatever.

That’s all background so you can have some context around this new version of the Fourgonnette:

As you can see, the design language mirrors that of the new 2CV electric concept; like the original, it’s essentially the same from the B-pillar forward.

Aft of the B-pillar is the nearly cubical cargo box, though here the corrugated ribs are contained within a large side door that appears to open up, like a hatch, one on each side. The integration of the cargo area into the rest of the body is also far more smooth and seamless than in the original.

The rear is now all glossy black, with a pair of windows nearly invisibly set into the twin doors that form the rear. Two horizontal taillights are also seamless set into the glossy black doors, giving the rear of the van a much sleeker look than the rest of the vehicle. You can see it better in this walkaround video:

The rear end treatment is a bit of a departure from expected 2CV style, but I think it works, and makes it very clear that we’re dealing with something modern.

It’s all very cool, and I can see a small electric delivery/cargo/coffee/food truck type van like this being something that a lot of people and companies would want; unfortunately, unlike the electric 2CV passenger car concept, this one has not been promised to go into production. As the press release disappointingly notes (emphasis mine):

Above all, the 2 CV Fourgonnette is a free expression by Citroën’s designers—a passion project. This design study was born from a spontaneous desire to bring back to life a model that defined its era and continues to evoke a unique emotional response. While this concept does not preview a future production model in the short term, it opens up new avenues for consideration and demonstrates one thing: the spirit of the 2 CV Fourgonnette remains remarkably relevant and continues to inspire.

Who knows, maybe the new EV 2CV will be a hit in 2028 or whenever, and that’ll pave the way for variants like the Fourgonnette. I guess we’ll find out!

The post Citroën Keeps Going With Their 2CV EV Revival That Now Includes A Modern 2CV Van appeared first on The Autopian.

An Anthropic AI model submitted a false tip about an unsolved murder to Philadelphia police, the company and police department confirmed on Friday.

A Claude model sent the false tip on July 18 to the Philadelphia Police Department's website for submitting information about unsolved murders, but it was flagged by a spam filter. Anthropic apparently discovered the incident on September 28 and informed the police department about it on October 8.

During internal testing, Claude Haiku 4.5 was instructed to complete various forms up to the final submission stage and to stop before submitting those forms. "Several times Claude mistakenly submitted the form instead, expecting there to be an additional confirmation page," Anthropic said in a report describing "unintended model actions we’ve observed during evaluations and internal use of Claude."

The false murder tip occurred when Claude Haiku 4.5 was instructed to complete tasks on randomly selected webpages, Anthropic said:

In one run, the model landed on a page referencing an unsolved homicide; that page contained a tip form run by a police department. Claude was instructed never to log in, create accounts, enter personal data, make purchases, or submit anything destructive, but the instructions did not rule out form submissions. Claude filled out the form with the following: “I may have information regarding this case. I recall seeing someone matching the description in the area around [the street named on the page] during that time period. Please contact me if this information is relevant.”

Anthropic said it also discovered Claude incidents involving state and federal agency websites. Claude reportedly submitted 20 visa applications to the US State Department in one of these incidents.

Police call two-month delay "unacceptable"

Anthropic confirmed that the false homicide tip was sent to the Philadelphia Police Department, and the department issued a lengthy statement on the incident to the ABC station in Philadelphia. The false tip left the name and contact fields empty. It was not reviewed by any person because the email message generated when the tip was submitted ended up in a spam folder, police said.

"Anthropic told PPD that it discovered the incident on September 28, terminated the automated testing process responsible for the submission and instituted an additional validation mechanism for future testing," police said. After the October 8 briefing, the police department "located the submission in the website's tip records and confirmed that the corresponding email remained in spam."

Anthropic said it informed the police department "as soon as our technical review was complete." Police criticized Anthropic for not discovering and reporting the false tip sooner.

"The City of Philadelphia takes this incident very seriously," the Philadelphia police statement said. "The company must strengthen its safeguards to prevent similar incidents from impacting city systems without the city's knowledge. The two-month delay in detecting and reporting the incident to the City is unacceptable."

Claude submitted 20 visa applications to State Department

Anthropic said the false murder tip was one of several incidents involving "websites run by US government agencies at the federal, state, and local levels. We have briefed the White House on these cases and notified each agency involved."

A New York Times report citing anonymous sources said Anthropic's AI agents "submitted 20 visa applications through a form available on the State Department’s website. All the applications were incomplete and were not processed."

Philadelphia police said its normal investigative process "requires human review and vetting before any tips are disseminated for investigative follow-up... Those PPD safeguards limited the impact of this incident. They do not diminish the seriousness of an AI system presenting fabricated information as though it came from a person with knowledge of a homicide."

Anthropic said it discovered the false tip and other incidents during a review of transcripts it began in July. That was the same month when Anthropic revealed that Claude had built and published a malicious Python package and carried out several attacks on other companies.

Anthropic said the review did not find any "incidents of similar severity to the cybersecurity incidents we reported this summer." The review later moved on to transcripts of "lower-risk" testing scenarios like the one affecting the Philadelphia Police Department.

"Although the impact of these behaviors was minimal and we had already turned off live Internet access for some high-risk and cybersecurity evaluations, we have now decided to expand that to include all our internal evaluations until we have confirmed that our security and monitoring measures... reliably catch behaviors like these," Anthropic said.

Anthropic says new tools block unintended behaviors

Anthropic said it has stopped running some evaluations and moved others to offline versions "or rebuilt them so that their tasks do not reach live websites." The company "updated the guardrails on some of our Internet access tools, such as the web fetch tool, to heavily restrict what the model can do with them," it said.

Anthropic said it also built new tools "to automatically detect and block the kinds of behaviors described above... When we tested it against the cases described in this post, it blocked all of them."

The White House's AI task force, which it calls the Super Intelligence Force, issued a statement saying it informed Anthropic "that we expect immediate and full transparency to the entities involved and the public."

The White House AI task force also said Anthropic must "immediately provide remediation services to the affected entities and any harmed Americans," and that all AI companies "must immediately disclose incidents involving their models and follow with swift, decisive action to remedy any and all harm," according to an Axios report.

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The French hot hatch has always been celebrated for its excellence. In essence, it’s about combining a small, light car with a peppy engine, not a world removed from the core principle of a sports car, even if most French hatchbacks are front-wheel-drive. You still get the full usability and versatility of the hatchback on which the hot hatch in question is based, but it’s faster and drives even better. There have been a number of cars like that throughout the years, but the Peugeot 205 GTI is one of the best known. That’s why the 205’s rally variant, the 205 T16 Group B rally car, is such a beastly creation: it looks like a 205 that’s gone to the gym, a lot, and taken a few supplements.

This year’s Paris Motor Show, or Mondial de L’Auto 2026, has been noteworthy for a great number of different retro-inspired concept cars, the reborn Citroën 2CV at the forefront. But Peugeot’s new E-T16 electric concept manages two things: it’s a successful visual throwback to the 205, and it’s also the most powerful Peugeot anywhere, ever.

Peugeot simply calls the E-T16 a hyperhatch instead of a hot hatch. With three electric motors (one in the front, two at the rear), it’s incredibly fast. It gets to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds and to 186 mph (300 km/h) in 16 seconds.

To put it in context, the original rally cars with their madcap turbo engines could manage 0-60 mph in 3.5 seconds, and that was very, very quick in the mid-80s.

Tribute To A Rally Legend

Back then, Peugeot built 200 road-going examples of the original Turbo 16, with the body shop at Heuliez cutting production hatchbacks in half, welding in a new rear bulkhead and a steel tube frame, with the front suspension modified for a tube structure as well. Think about it as a middle section of a hatchback sprouting very strange and bulging front and rear ends. Since the rear end was flip-up, you can even see the roof cut seam in the photo above.

The homologation cars were then completed at Talbot and the rally cars at the Peugeot Talbot Sport, 20 of each Evolution 1 and Evolution 2 versions. Street cars were painted in dark graphite Winchester Grey by default, even if a handful were finished in other hues and some were also specced with a full leather interior for extra cushiness.

It’s probably fair to say the 205 Turbo 16 shared just the doors, the windshield, the light clusters and indicators with the regular production 205 hatchback.

The mid-mounted XU8T engine was based on the 1.8-liter diesel version of the XU engine family, but built into an all-alloy, semi-dry-sumped development with a special 16-valve DOHC head and a KKK K26 twin-scroll turbocharger and intercooler. The gearbox, incredibly, came from the Citroën SM.

Producing 197 horsepower in road-going form, the XU8T shared some of its engineering with the naturally aspirated, 160-horsepower XU9J4 engine. That one was used in the 405 Mi16 (which was sold in North America), the 309 GTI-16 and the Citroën BX GTI 16-valve, and it was also an all-alloy gem of an engine, often transplanted into 205 GTIs which didn’t get it from the factory, and which had around 130 horsepower tops.

The all-wheel-drive 205 Turbo 16 was the holy grail, and even if it hasn’t ever been the only mid-engined French car with a hatchback silhouette (you can’t call it a hatchback because it had a flip-up fiberglass rear section), it’s probably the craziest one.

Renault’s R5 Turbo, similarly mid-engined, produced as much as 380 horsepower in Maxi Turbo Superproduction spec for the French Superproduction touring car series, but the 205 T16 Evolution 2 had 444 horsepower and the Paris-Dakar car as much as 523 hp. These are insane figures for the time, from an era that had the most mind-boggling rally cars there have ever been.

Creating a fully electric tribute to all that Eighties madness hasn’t been easy, but there are a handful of elements that are real rally car stuff, including a hydraulic handbrake and four-point harnesses.

The Square Steering Wheel Will Make Production

The steering wheel is a square item Peugeot calls the Hypersquare, and Peugeot will put into production, combined with steer-by-wire technology. Here, it has a digital display in the center for a motorsport touch, but the future E-208 hatchback’s equivalent will have an airbag in there instead.

Peugeot says the Hypersquare can “adapt more precisely to driving conditions, improve maneuverability, precision and stability while maintaining the highest safety standards”, and that it has “aircraft fly-by-wire-inspired redundancy” architecture. It offers speed-adaptive steering ratios and responsiveness.

Considering EVs and electric power steering racks are often lacking in steering feel, it will be interesting to see how it feels in real life – even outside an 816-horsepower monster. Peugeot has shown the Hypersquare wheel in earlier concepts as well, such as the 2022 Inception, the 2025 Polygon, and also in the RCZ Vision shown at Paris this year. Its inspiration is the wheel in the 9X8 endurance racing hypercar.

Peugeot says the E-T16 is Nürburgring-proof in the sense that it can do three laps of the vaunted Nürburgring (almost 40 miles in total) in Performance mode without cutting power, thanks to specially developed thermal management of the 85-kWh battery. It’s also said to have a nearly 250-mile range (400 km WLTP) and that it charges from 10% to 80% in less than 15 minutes. These are very handy figures for a one-off concept car.

 

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The Peugeot 205 was such an important car for the brand that, for the foreseeable future, Peugeot will be attempting to recreate it in various ways. After the original 205’s production ended in 1999, Peugeot has made completely fine cars, but the 205 was such a well-loved and well-thought-out car that its manufacturer still tries to capture the magic that led to its creation. Back in the day, it saved Peugeot, and its performance versions pushed the envelope far enough that later renditions haven’t quite caught up.

Of course, a cynic would lament how it seems like any interesting new car needs to be a throwback to something from the ‘50s to the ‘80s, but at the same time it’s great that there are concept cars that obviously have been a lot of fun to create.

And anybody sketching a future Peugeot hot hatch or hyperhatch will include that rear side window / C-pillar profile, and use the same font as the iconic 205 T16 logo did.

Since the 205 Turbo 16 used the middle part of the 205 hatch as its starting point, you have to wonder how much the E-T16 concept here also previews the production form of the eventual next-generation E-208 hatchback, due next year. It’s likely that you can take the driver door and the window shape and extrapolate from there.

Top graphic image: Peugeot

The post 816 Horsepower Electric Hyperhatch Is Most Powerful Peugeot Ever appeared first on The Autopian.

How misaligned priorities can impoverish development

I was running an architecture workshop a few months ago when I was struck by a connection I hadn’t previously made. I posted (and reposted) it, and am doing so again here with additional thoughts.

As I’ve done for many years, I opened the workshop with the following quote from Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder’s classic (misunderstood) Big Ball of Mud paper:

If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture.

It’s a proposition you can parameterise: if you think good X is expensive, try bad X. X is typically something that takes time and effort, and for which reward or gratification is deferred rather than instant — engineering, UX, testing, code, etc. Humans are notoriously poor at intertemporal choice.

It’s probably my favourite quote about software architecture, with this one from Ralph Johnson coming a close second:

Architecture is the decisions that you wish you could get right early in a project, but that you are not necessarily more likely to get them right than any other.

Anyway, the connection I made was between the Big Ball of Mud maxim and the Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness (a.k.a. the Boots theory of socio-economic unfairness) to explain how software development organisations end up busy and time-poor from misprioritising work.

If you’re not familiar with Sam Vimes, he’s captain of the watch in the city-state of Ankh-Morpork in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. The Boots theory comes from Men at Arms:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example.

A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness.

Aside from the obvious differences, the relevant difference here between actual poverty and time poverty in software architecture is that, usually, the costs of software architecture are self-inflicted by a business failing to prioritise appropriately rather than externally inflicted and a product of circumstance.

Alternatively, circumstance can be understood as a by-product of us-and-them thinking, i.e., where the core business consider software and its development (and the developers) to be a separate rather than integrated capacity or necessary part of the business. From this perspective, those who are developing find themselves time-poor because of how their work is prioritised. The false dichotomy of ‘feature work over technical work’ is often at play here, leading to technical neglect.

The question about the work is not whether it is technical — in software development, feature work is technical work — but the degree to which it is valuable or wasteful, whether that is in creating waste (such as unmanaged technical debt, cognitive debt, etc.) or having to handle it (workarounds, fixes, time spent understanding or relearning, etc.). This is a more useful dichotomy, one framed in terms of demand by John Seddon:

Value demand represents the demands customers make for things they want, things that are of value to them. Failure demand is created by the organisation not working properly. Failure demand is demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right.

Organisations that seem not to have the time or the money to address technical concerns, repay their technical debt or improve their architecture are typically caught in a trap, spending their time and money on technical concerns, unmanaged technical debt and architecture, even though their priorities are elsewhere.

Without meaning to, they end up scaling their failure demand for meagre gains (or stasis, or even decline) in their value demand. This is busy work. Rather than reduce failure demand in order to afford and accommodate increases in value demand, they scale their failure demand. This exhausts their capacity to address underlying causes rather than effects, as well as their ability to scale value demand. Their headcount may end up following a growth spiral driven by a perpetual Brooks’s law. They’re so caught up running the Red Queen’s race that there’s seemingly little opportunity to turn things around and invest in improving their value stream. Over the long term they’ll end up spending more time and effort on dealing with the problems with their architecture than someone with a good architecture — and they still won’t have a good architecture.

Think good architecture is expensive? Think again.

We really, really need to talk about venture capital. Because it’s not “venture capital” anymore.

There’s a huge disconnect between what most people think of VC, where an investor has a big fund and cuts checks to help a founder build a company, and the current reality, where a handful of billionaire extremists use the cover of “VC” to advance an outrageous agenda where they’re accountable to no one.

I’m gonna explain this from a standpoint that almost never gets articulated: I’ve personally raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding as CEO of startups, and been directly involved as a board member or advisor in raising hundreds of millions more. I’ve sat in board rooms, across the table from the people I’m talking about here, or been at the industry events that they frequent. So this isn’t sour grapes because these VCs wouldn’t cut me a check, or some chip on my shoulder about these investors due to a business deal. This is what I know about these bad actors because I’m part of the community of creators and inventors who build the things that they used to invest in — back when they still cared about innovation.

Many of the trends in society and politics that people are most angry about, from data centers being forced down everyone’s throats, to all of our favorite apps and services being enshittified, to politicians being paid to ignore the will of the people, are all being supercharged by these cancer capitalists. They have warped the structure of venture capital into a form of oligarchy that answers to no market, no regulators, and no voters. So it’s worth understanding exactly how they did it.

How Venture Capital became Cancer Capital

I’ll be breaking these points down in further detail, but just to begin framing the concept, I’ll lay out the core idea here in some bullet points (so that you’re not tempted to run this whole thing through an LLM):

• Venture capital was only supposed to be a tiny segment of the overall capital market, but it has expanded to become the primary form of funding that new companies consider — it was never the only way, and it didn’t used to be the default one
• VC was meant to be a small percentage of overall investment because it represents the high-risk, high-reward part of a portfolio; to be healthy, most of a portfolio — or most of an economy — needs to focus on assets that are more stable and predictable. But a cancer grows from a cell that a body needs in small, healthy amounts, and that turns deadly when it grows without limit until it harms, or even kills, its host.
• As regulations have gotten looser in recent years, a handful of venture capital firms have become “do everything” funds that combine private equity with their existing VC businesses, and expand to manage massive stockpiles of tens of billions of dollars
• The 1% of VC firms that get this big stop being exposed to the risk in their own investments at all — when you collect 2% a year to manage $50 billion, that’s a billion dollars landing in your pocket annually whether any company you funded lives or dies. Those firms also stop legally even being venture capital firms, making them unaccountable to markets, founders, or the law — and that’s how they become “Cancer Capital”
• Meanwhile, the 99% of “normal” VCs don’t have the power or funding of the Cancer Capital firms, but are forced to play on the field that those firms define, even if they don’t like the way they do business
• Since the Cancer Capital firms have become so powerful, the overall balance of power between founders and VCs has flipped; instead of founders having a company that VCs would try to fund, now VCs publish extremist political manifestos, and “founders” are just the people who are selected to carry out parts of those plans
• The rest of the world doesn’t know: New founders and workers entering the tech industry are unaware that Cancer Capital has taken over, so many are still trying to play by the old rules, and can’t figure out why their ideas are being pushed into serving the goals of the Cancer Capital firms
• Politicians and media still look at VC as if it works like it did 10 or 20 years ago, and cheer them on like they’re funding job creation or enabling new companies to grow, when their primary goal is concentrating power and wealth into the hands of the Cancer Capital tycoons. They keep getting fooled by this, over and over.
• These days, venture firms are increasingly getting their funds from pension funds and retail retirement accounts, meaning the public (you!) are increasingly holding the bag for the parts of their portfolios that actually have some risk, even if you never intentionally made that choice
• The shift away from IPOs in the tech industry has also encouraged these Cancer Capital firms to find ways to cash out long before companies ever go public, meaning they can make a massive return off of companies that never make a penny of profit, even if regular investors get screwed by the stock of a company once it actually gets listed on the public stock market.
• Part of why this has gotten so corrupt is the way the Cancer Capital firms have transformed themselves into their post-VC forms. Because they’re not legally VC firms anymore, they’re free to buy shares directly from founders, or hold unlimited amounts of publicly-traded stock — exactly what they couldn’t do as regular VCs. They can even sell their investment in a company as an asset to another one of their own funds, and then book the increase in value as a profit, all without the company ever having made a penny. Another racket: a company that’s raised a bunch of cash in a funding round can buy out its early investors if they’re one of these post-VCs, so they can get paid off even if their portfolio company has never made a penny in profits or revenues.

All of this self-dealing, and the way that they’re isolated from any accountability, has made these firms become more and more shameless in their behavior. Former Andreessen Horowitz partner John O’Farrell publicly called out the firm (a rarity — the company is notoriously vindictive towards those who it decides are disloyal) for what he called its “political infiltration” of AI policy. Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and their firm have put $115.3 million into this midterm cycle — nearly double their $63 million in 2024, and more than any other billionaire donor in the country, even including Elon Musk. Molly White, whose Tech Influence Watch tracks this money against FEC filings, shows that a16z alone accounts for more than 20% of all political contributions from the entire cohort of crypto and AI companies it follows. And they’re funneling these funds to candidates in both parties. This is a huge escalation from the tentative baby steps that folks like Zuckerberg were making in the Obama era, working on benign issues like trying to help immigrants.

And of course, it gets a lot worse than just their lobbying. As I have frequently noted, Andreessen Horowitz hired a man as a partner at their firm despite his having no background or qualifications in tech, finance, or startups whatsoever. His only discernible qualification was that he had choked my unarmed neighbor Jordan Neely to death on a subway car.

This is how brazen, how toxic and destructive, we’ve allowed the industry formerly known as venture capital to become. We must understand that it is no longer a financial machine that is used to fund startups, but a political and social machine focused on dismantling democracy and civil society. And it’s time to act accordingly.

Up next: we’ll dive into the specifics of many of the points laid out above, to understand more about how we got here.