# Gonzo Capital > Gonzo Capital is an independent newsletter on venture capital, startups, AI, and power, written from inside the industry. No PR filter, no algorithm, direct to your inbox. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### ABOUT GONZO CAPITAL URL: https://www.gonzocapital.net/about/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T08:07:32.000Z ## CAPITAL WITH A CONSCIENCE. CHAOS WITH A POINT. Gonzo Capital is an independent publication about money, technology, power, politics, culture, and the increasingly strange systems shaping modern life. It is written from an unusual vantage point, somewhere inside venture capital and technology, but with one foot permanently lodged outside the door. The result is part essay, part criticism, part personal experience, and occasionally part poorly supervised historical digression. No corporate voice. No content farm. No algorithm deciding what deserves your attention. Just an attempt to look at what is happening, ask who benefits, remember how we got here, and resist pretending any of this is normal.**What Subscribing Gets You** Every past essay, unlocked immediately. Every future dispatch on investing, technology, and power, landing straight in your inbox the day it's written, before anyone's had the chance to clean it up. A running account of what capital actually does, not what it says it's doing, from someone who's watched the gap between those two things up close for years. The kind of thing said in the room after the good part of the meeting ends and everyone stops performing. --- ## WHAT YOU'LL FIND HERE Most Wednesdays, Gonzo Capital publishes a long-form essay. Venture capital. Artificial intelligence. Surveillance. Internet culture. Markets. Politics. Technology. Capitalism. Creative work. History. Science fiction. Occasionally something stranger. The subject changes. The underlying questions tend not to. Who has power? What incentives are actually driving the system? What happens to ordinary people when technology, capital, and institutions collide? And why does everyone involved insist everything is going according to plan? --- ## ESSAYS & FIELD NOTES ### Gonzo Capital has two recurring formats. **Essays** are the main event: longer arguments, stories, experiments, rabbit holes, and attempts to make sense of something worth spending time on. **Field Notes** arrive on the last Wednesday of each month: a looser collection of ideas, stories, links, books, observations, cultural debris, and things that refused to leave my head alone. Same publication. Same inbox. Slightly different levels of structural integrity. --- ## WHO WRITES THIS? Gonzo Capital is written by [Carmelo Giuliano](https://www.linkedin.com/in/carmelo-giuliano-3866a81b3/?ref=gonzocapital.net), an investor, founding partner at [Arcanum Ventures](https://www.arcanum.ventures/?ref=gonzocapital.net), venture capitalist, advisor, and historian by training. I have spent years working with founders, investing in technology companies, raising capital, advising startups, and sitting in rooms where people make very expensive predictions about the future. Being inside those rooms is useful. Believing everything said inside them would be considerably less useful. My background in history makes it difficult to look at technology, markets, politics, or institutions as if they appeared yesterday. Most supposedly unprecedented things have ancestors. Most inevitable futures turn out not to have been inevitable at all. Gonzo Capital is where I try to connect those dots, including the ones that make my own industry uncomfortable. --- ## WHO THIS IS FOR Founders. Investors. Technologists. Skeptics. People interested in how power actually operates. People who still enjoy reading things longer than twelve and a half words. It is especially for anyone who has noticed a persistent gap between how the world is described by institutions and how it feels when you actually live inside it. You do not have to agree with me. Frankly, that would get boring. --- ## CONSIDER YOURSELF IN THE ROOM. Gonzo Capital is independent and free to read. New essays arrive most Wednesdays, with Field Notes closing out each month. If that sounds useful, strange, entertaining, or mildly concerning, subscribe below. ## Sign up for Gonzo Capital Dispatches on money, power, and the absurdity of it all, from a VC who still gives a damn. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### START HERE URL: https://www.gonzocapital.net/start-here/ Last updated: 2026-09-01T18:37:09.000Z ### **New to Gonzo Capital? Welcome to the rabbit hole.** Gonzo Capital is an independent publication about technology, money, power, culture, and the increasingly strange future we appear to be building together. There is venture capital here. Artificial intelligence. Surveillance. The internet. Markets. Politics. Occasionally history, science fiction, meditation, and other things that probably seemed related when I started writing about them. If you are new, these are good places to begin. ## Capital, Startups & Venture Capital Essays on venture capital, startup fundraising, investing, incentives, and the strange social rituals that appear whenever founders, VCs, and LPs all need something from somebody richer than themselves. Written from inside the industry, with enough suspicion to occasionally check whether the furniture is nailed down. ← → [ ![Confessions of a Compromised Capitalist](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/size/w1200/2026/07/gonzocapitalissue-1.png) Venture Capital · Capitalism Confessions of a Compromised Capitalist From anti-capitalist to venture capitalist, and the uncomfortable contradictions that came with it. Read essay → ](https://www.gonzocapital.net/confessions-of-a-compromised-capitalist/) [ ![Everyone Is Asking Someone Else for Money](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/size/w1200/2026/08/Article-Humility-of-Fundraising-.png) Venture Capital · Fundraising Everyone Is Asking Someone Else for Money Founders ask VCs. VCs ask LPs. Somewhere above them, someone richer is still saying no. Read essay → ](https://www.gonzocapital.net/everyone-is-asking-someone-else-for-money/) ## Technology & Power Essays about artificial intelligence, surveillance, emerging technology, Silicon Valley, and the institutions deciding how new systems get built, deployed, and justified. The gadgets are interesting. Who controls them, who benefits, and who gets stuck living with the consequences usually interests me more. ← → [ ![Tech Doesn't Understand Why You Don't Like It](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/size/w1200/2026/08/Article-Tech-Industry.png) Technology · Society Tech Doesn't Understand Why You Don't Like It Silicon Valley is extraordinarily good at imagining futures. Understanding the people expected to live in them is proving harder. Read essay → ](https://www.gonzocapital.net/tech-doesnt-understand-why-you-dont-like-it/) [ ![The Most Observed Event in Human History](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/size/w1200/2026/07/Gonzo-Capital-Thumbnails.png) Surveillance · Power The Most Observed Event in Human History How the 2026 World Cup became a global testing ground for surveillance technology built to remain after everyone went home. Read essay → ](https://www.gonzocapital.net/the-most-observed-event-in-human-history/) ## The Internet & Culture Essays on internet culture, social media, algorithms, AI-generated content, online communities, and what living inside the web is doing to human beings. The internet used to be somewhere we visited. Now it is infrastructure, culture, memory, entertainment, employment, and possibly a low-grade neurological condition. ← → [ ![The Internet Was Better When It Was Worse](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/size/w1200/2026/08/Article-Internet-Was-Better-WHen-It-as-Worse.png) Internet Culture · Technology The Internet Was Better When It Was Worse The web became cleaner, smarter, faster and more personalized. Somewhere along the way, it also became less weirdly human. Read essay → ](https://www.gonzocapital.net/the-internet-was-better-when-it-was-worse/) [ ![The Internet Ouroboros](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/size/w1200/2026/08/Article-Internet-Ouroboros-1.png) AI · Internet Culture The Internet Ouroboros AI learned from the human internet. Now the machine-generated web is beginning to train the machines. Read essay → ](https://www.gonzocapital.net/the-internet-ouroboros/) [ ![Music for People Who Aren't Listening](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/size/w1200/2026/07/Article-Suno-AI.png) AI · Music · Culture Music for People Who Aren't Listening What happens when human musical history becomes training material for machines built to make more music than anyone could possibly hear? Read essay → ](https://www.gonzocapital.net/music-for-people-who-arent-listening/) ## So What Is Gonzo Capital? Gonzo Capital is an attempt to understand the systems shaping modern life without pretending they are any less strange than they actually are. Money, technology, politics, and culture rarely operate separately. The interesting part is usually what happens when they collide. But the interesting stuff usually happens where they collide. New pieces arrive every Wednesday. ## Sign up for Gonzo Capital Dispatches on money, power, and the absurdity of it all, from a VC who still gives a damn. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### TOPICS URL: https://www.gonzocapital.net/topics/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T08:06:59.000Z Gonzo Capital tends to wander, but not completely at random. Most essays orbit a handful of recurring subjects: venture capital, technology, artificial intelligence, internet culture, politics, surveillance, markets, and the question of who actually benefits when supposedly inevitable systems become part of everyday life. Start wherever your particular anxiety happens to live. --- [ Topic 01 Venture Capital & Startups Venture capital, startup fundraising, founders, investors, incentives, company building, and the strange rituals that emerge whenever everyone in the room needs money from somebody else. Explore topic → ](https://www.gonzocapital.net/tag/venture-capital/) [ Topic 02 Finance & Money Finance, fintech, digital assets, markets, capitalism, financial infrastructure, and the elaborate systems humans have constructed for deciding what everything is worth. Explore topic → ](https://www.gonzocapital.net/tag/finance/) [ Topic 03 Technology & AI Artificial intelligence, robotics, emerging technology, infrastructure, Silicon Valley, automation, hype, and the increasingly ambitious machines being introduced into ordinary life. Explore topic → ](https://www.gonzocapital.net/tag/technology/) [ Topic 04 Internet & Culture Internet culture, algorithms, social media, music, AI-generated content, online communities, creative work, digital nostalgia, and what living through screens is doing to human culture. Explore topic → ](https://www.gonzocapital.net/tag/internet-culture/) [ Topic 05 Power, Politics & Society Governments, corporations, institutions, geopolitics, regulation, technological power, and the systems quietly deciding how everyone else gets to live. Explore topic → ](https://www.gonzocapital.net/tag/power-politics/) [ Topic 06 Privacy & Surveillance Privacy, facial recognition, data collection, tracking, policing, digital identity, social control, and the increasingly elaborate infrastructure built to know where everyone is. Explore topic → ](https://www.gonzocapital.net/tag/surveillance/) ## MORE TOPICS Some subjects deserve their own rabbit holes... Browse the narrower corners of Gonzo Capital below: [Artificial Intelligence](https://www.gonzocapital.net/tag/artificial-intelligence/) [Fintech](https://www.gonzocapital.net/tag/fintech/) [Digital Assets](https://www.gonzocapital.net/tag/digital-assets/) [Startups](https://www.gonzocapital.net/tag/startups/) [Robotics](https://www.gonzocapital.net/tag/robotics/) [Privacy](https://www.gonzocapital.net/tag/privacy/) [Culture](https://www.gonzocapital.net/tag/culture/) [Environment](https://www.gonzocapital.net/tag/environment/) ## Sign up for Gonzo Capital Dispatches on money, power, and the absurdity of it all, from a VC who still gives a damn. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### GONZO CAPITAL ESSAYS URL: https://www.gonzocapital.net/essays/ Last updated: 2026-09-01T17:27:51.000Z Long-form essays on venture capital, technology, artificial intelligence, internet culture, money, power, politics, and the increasingly strange systems shaping modern life. Written from somewhere inside the machine, but rarely with the assumption that the machine knows what it is doing. Expect arguments, stories, experiments, historical detours, cultural debris, and occasional disagreements with the future. --- ## LATEST ESSAYS Everything here, newest first. If you would rather begin with a few carefully chosen bad decisions, try [**Start Here**](https://www.gonzocapital.net/start-here/). [ ![Tech Doesn't Understand Why You Don't Like It](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/size/w1200/2026/08/Article-Tech-Industry.png) Technology · Society Tech Doesn't Understand Why You Don't Like It Silicon Valley is extraordinarily good at imagining futures. Understanding the people expected to live in them is proving harder. Read essay → ](https://www.gonzocapital.net/tech-doesnt-understand-why-you-dont-like-it/) [ ![The Internet Was Better When It Was Worse](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/size/w1200/2026/08/Article-Internet-Was-Better-WHen-It-as-Worse.png) Internet Culture · Technology The Internet Was Better When It Was Worse The web became cleaner, smarter, faster and more personalized. Somewhere along the way, it also became less weirdly human. Read essay → ](https://www.gonzocapital.net/the-internet-was-better-when-it-was-worse/) [ ![The Internet Ouroboros](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/size/w1200/2026/08/Article-Internet-Ouroboros-1.png) AI · Internet Culture The Internet Ouroboros AI learned from the human internet. Now the machine-generated web is beginning to train the machines. Read essay → ](https://www.gonzocapital.net/the-internet-ouroboros/) [ ![Everyone Is Asking Someone Else for Money](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/size/w1200/2026/08/Article-Humility-of-Fundraising-.png) Venture Capital · Fundraising Everyone Is Asking Someone Else for Money Founders ask VCs. VCs ask LPs. Somewhere above them, someone richer is still saying no. Read essay → ](https://www.gonzocapital.net/everyone-is-asking-someone-else-for-money/) [ ![Music for People Who Aren't Listening](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/size/w1200/2026/07/Article-Suno-AI.png) AI · Music · Culture Music for People Who Aren't Listening What happens when human musical history becomes training material for machines capable of producing more music than anyone can hear? Read essay → ](https://www.gonzocapital.net/music-for-people-who-arent-listening/) [ ![The Most Observed Event in Human History](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/size/w1200/2026/07/Gonzo-Capital-Thumbnails.png) Surveillance · Power The Most Observed Event in Human History How the World Cup became a global testing ground for surveillance technology built to remain after everyone went home. Read essay → ](https://www.gonzocapital.net/the-most-observed-event-in-human-history/) [ ![Confessions of a Compromised Capitalist](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/size/w1200/2026/07/gonzocapitalissue-1.png) Venture Capital · Capitalism Confessions of a Compromised Capitalist From anti-capitalist to venture capitalist, and the uncomfortable contradictions that came with it. Read essay → ](https://www.gonzocapital.net/confessions-of-a-compromised-capitalist/) ### FIELD NOTES FROM GONZO CAPITAL URL: https://www.gonzocapital.net/field-notes/ Last updated: 2026-09-01T18:54:26.000Z A monthly dispatch of things worth noticing. Markets. Technology. Culture. Politics. Books. Links. Strange signals. Personal notes. Things too small for a full essay and too interesting to throw away. Field Notes lands on the last Wednesday of each month. It is looser than the essays, faster on its feet, and allowed to arrive with a few loose screws. --- MONTHLY DISPATCH FIELD NOTES **NO. 01** SEPTEMBER 2026 ## THE FIRST DISPATCH IS COMING. The inaugural Field Notes arrives September 30\. Expect stories, observations, links, books, markets, cultural debris, and whatever else managed to survive the month with enough dignity to be mentioned. [GET FIELD NOTES → ](#/portal/signup) ## WHAT ARE FIELD NOTES? Most Gonzo Capital pieces begin with an argument and disappear down a rabbit hole. Field Notes works differently. It is where I keep the things that do not need 2,500 words. A story worth watching. A chart that bothered me. Something overheard in a meeting. A book. A ridiculous headline. A market signal. A historical parallel. An internet artifact. A prediction I will probably regret making publicly. Some months may lean heavily toward markets and technology. Others may wander into politics, books, culture, or whatever strange object the internet has dragged onto the porch. The point is not to summarize everything that happened. The point is to remember the things that felt worth noticing. --- ARCHIVE STATUS ### NOTHING HERE YET. Field Notes begins in September 2026\. This section will become increasingly cluttered with monthly dispatches shortly thereafter. ## Posts ### The ROI of Staring at a Wall URL: https://www.gonzocapital.net/roi-of-staring-at-a-wall/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T18:18:52.000Z I tried meditating for two weeks and discovered that I couldn't even do nothing without wondering whether it was productive. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/09/image-1.png) Source: Me ## **I Failed at Doing Nothing Almost Immediately** The experiment seemed insultingly simple. For two weeks, I would spend an unremarkable twenty minutes a day doing absolutely nothing. No phone calls or techbro podcasts or listening to my favorite tunes. Most definitely no computer or phone screens, or gaming, or attempting to sneak a peek at my endless onslaught of messages in every possible place and platform. Just twenty minutes, a cushion on the floor, and the milk-white, popcorn-textured wall in my bedroom. I wanted to see if I was still in control, piloting the spaceship of my own mind. I technically have been diagnosed with ADHD after all, but I’ve since begun to suspect that either nobody or everybody has this nowadays. So I scooched the makeshift meditation pillow into position, switched on the fan, set an alarm, and christened this bleak little corner of the room my newly annexed meditation chamber. Then I began staring at the wall. Within minutes, my mind was racing. I was thinking about raising a fund. Then podcast guests I needed to book in September. My in-laws coming to visit. Laundry. Garbage day. Dinner. Various half-baked article ideas. I even started mentally writing the article about meditation while I was supposed to be meditating. My phone sat slightly out of reach. I kept leering at it, constantly tempted. Not because I desperately needed to read a message or see what was happening in the world. I mostly wanted to know what time it was, and how much time had passed… Surely I had been sitting there for fifteen minutes by now. Not even close. Twenty minutes turned out to contain considerably more minutes than I remembered. Still, I made it through the first session without checking my phone. And I even felt marginally clearer afterward. Maybe even a little better at writing. I dutifully recorded my observations, assigned numerical scores to my performance, and prepared for Day 2 of my rigorous scientific investigation into staring at drywall. Then I forgot to meditate. Not metaphorically. I simply didn't follow through on doing nothing the next day. I eventually restarted, missed another couple of days along the way, mangled some of the dates in my notes, and generally conducted the sort of experiment that would get a researcher politely but swiftly escorted off a university campus. I had started because I wanted to know whether I still controlled my own attention. Instead, before I had learned anything about wall-staring, I had already discovered something slightly embarrassing… Apparently even **doing nothing** requires some degree of effort. ## **The Cost of Doing Nothing** I must confess that none of this was new to me. I’d been a somewhat prolific meditator earlier in life, before I subjected myself to the tortures and rigors of the [cutthroat tech VC space](https://www.gonzocapital.net/confessions-of-a-compromised-capitalist/). But I’ve since let this practice slip away from my day-to-day life, becoming a stranger to anything remotely meditative in the past several years. There was no dramatic breakup with meditation. Tech and venture capital simply colonized more and more of my life. More tech and screens and conversations and useless meetings. Years later, my working life is almost engineered against that kind of stillness. There is always another message, another call, another deck. Even the enjoyable bits of my job tend to arrive through screens. I hadn't consciously decided that twenty quiet minutes were frivolous. I had simply built a life in which twenty unclaimed minutes started to look suspicious. Eventually, sitting quietly for a meager twenty minutes became something I *used to* do. Which made this experiment feel less like learning meditation and more like trying to remember a language I had once spoken a long, long time ago. The funny thing was that twenty minutes of silence still sounded pretty good to me… A rare chance to disconnect. In fact, the point of this experiment was to trick myself to get back into meditation. Permanently! I wasn't especially afraid of boredom. I can sit at a cafe and people-watch. I can wait for a train without immediately clawing at my phone. I can disappear into a good science fiction book for hours on end (if it's well written). It comes with a probably undeserved amount of pride in being able to sit somewhere without instantly shoving a screen in my face. I even take that opportunity to silently judge the drone-like behavior of the glowy-rectangle watchers around me from my high horse. What bothered me was the time investment. Even now I’m talking like an investor. Twenty minutes slap-dab in the middle of a workday felt too large a price to pay. There is and was always something I could be doing instead. An email to answer. A pitch deck to fix. Endless amounts of people endlessly waiting on something. An essay like this to write. A podcast to organize. One small task spawning nine more the second I touched it, like some workday hydra I’m never quite prepared for. Twenty minutes staring at a wall meant twenty minutes not spent digging through the mountain. This would even be a reasonable concern too… if I treated every other twenty-minute block of my life with the very same reverence. You can probably guess that I do not. I can watch random music videos, read a news article I had no intention of reading five minutes earlier, open YouTube to upload something and somehow end up learning about a new obscure open-weight AI model that just got released, look up an actor on Wikipedia, and emerge twenty minutes later knowing where his grandfather was born. I can waste time perfectly well as long as the wasted time comes disguised as some sort of stimulation for my hyperactivity-riddled mind. I deduce that what troubled me was wasting time *deliberately*. So naturally, rather than interrogate this any further, I turned meditation into another performance metric I could study and optimize. At the end of each session, I recorded how difficult it was to sit still, how much my mind wandered, how badly I wanted to check something and, most incriminatingly, my **Productivity and Attention Span Afterwards**. I had somehow unconsciously invented KPIs for staring at a wall. On the first day I gave myself a 6 out of 10\. Another session got a 3\. Later there were 7s, 4s, 8s. I kept waiting for the numbers to slyly reveal that these twenty minutes were covertly an investment. It was possible that meditation could sharpen my writing. Maybe I'd rip through work afterward in a torrid tempest of productivity pointed in the perfectly calculated direction. It was my hope that the wall would eventually start paying some damn dividends. What I had intended as an experiment in reclaiming my own mind was seemingly becoming an experiment in whether every part of my life needed to produce something of obvious, tangible value. Even the rare parts of my life specifically reserved for producing nothing. ## **My Brain Has 47 Tabs Open** Once I removed the outside noise, I discovered the inside noise had plenty of material to go off of too. The first few sessions were less like meditation and more like opening the door to a packed storage closet, only to be met with an avalanche of clothing and sports equipment, and other assorted dusty, long-forgotten items. I thought about fundraising. Tax lawyers. Podcast guests. Making dinner reservations for family coming to town. Laundry. What to cook for dinner. Where to take my wife on Friday date night. Basketball injuries. Vacation. Future articles. Old movies. Random business ideas. Things I needed to schedule. Things I had forgotten to schedule. Things that had absolutely no reason to be occupying my brain at that particular moment. Nothing urgent. Nothing useful. My brain had simply generated a question and immediately wanted an answer. Perhaps immediate access to AI-enabled search engines has perpetuated the need to scratch that itch. I had assumed that phones or screens were the problem, or at least a large part of it. Put the phone down, remove the notifications, stop feeding yourself information, and maybe then everything should go quiet. Sort of like starving out the naughty, sugar-craving microbiome for a few weeks to kill off the unhealthy appetites. It turns out I had internalized that information feed. My own mind was acting like a heavily overburdened computer operating system, crashing beneath the weight of meaningless search queries and half-baked documents. Take away the screen, and my brain was perfectly capable of generating its own endless scrolls and loops. Some thoughts were perfectly legitimate, maybe even useful. I really did need to email that lawyer. Dinner obviously had to happen at some point. My in-laws really were definitely arriving soon. But these things had apparently formed an uneasy and inconvenient alliance with dozens of completely inconsequential thoughts and agreed to arrive together the moment I stopped to take a beat and try to do nothing. There was also something vaguely entrepreneurial about the whole experience. Give my brain twenty minutes of unused capacity, and it immediately starts allocating resources of all types. New article idea. Business idea. Remember that call. Maybe do this next week. What if I structured that differently? Have I booked that guest yet? I even caught myself composing this piece in my head on several separate occasions while I was supposed to be observing what happened when I stopped working. For a while I thought this meant I was doing it poorly. I kept trying to clear my mind, focus harder on breathing, stare more intently at the now-familiar wall, find the correct position, become sufficiently Buddha-like to qualify. Sooner or later, I stopped fighting quite so much. If a thought appeared, fine. If another followed it, also okay. The goal became less about achieving some pristine blankness and more about noticing how quickly my attention tried to attach itself to whatever passed through. Neither the noise nor the distracting assaults on my mind subsided. I did, however, become slightly less surprised by how much of it there actually was. ## **Apparently, Doing Nothing Is Somewhat of a Skill** I am happy to report that something did indeed start to change. Not enlightenment. Not serenity. I did not begin levitating above the carpet or speaking exclusively in koans despite having a beautiful wooden Buddha statue conveniently placed in my temporary meditation hub. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/09/telegram-cloud-photo-size-4-5821396465845210928-y.jpg) Source: The Meditation Chamber I just got better at sitting still on my little meditation pillow. During one of the early sessions, the urge to check my phone was so strong that my hand actually hovered over it like a menacing UFO ready to pounce on an unsuspecting farmer. I wasn't waiting for an important message. I wasn't expecting breaking news. I really just wanted to know how much longer I had to endure this agonizing torture session. I gave that urge a 9.5 out of 10. A few sessions later, it had dropped to a 2. Then a 1. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/09/CleanShot-2026-09-02-at-20.10.25@2x.png) Source: Experiment Notes The same thing happened with sitting still. Early on, I was adjusting the chair before I ended up ditching it altogether for a more authentic experience. I constantly found myself readjusting my arms, rotating my stiff neck, stretching my achy bones, fiddling with whatever happened to be within reach. At one point I found myself mimicking the Buddha statue sitting next to me, presumably hoping some of its serene composure would transfer through some proximity-induced osmosis. After some time, I could confidently sit for most of the twenty minutes without moving much at all. My mind hadn’t followed along. On one of the days when sitting still was easiest, I rated my mind wandering a 9 out of 10\. Another day I was physically calm while my thoughts sprinted through articles, calls, vacation, taxes, dinner, and whatever else happened to wander into the room. I had incorrectly assumed improvement would mean thinking less. Instead, it seemed to mean becoming less bothered by the fact that I was indeed thinking. My brain could yell something about taxes, and I didn't have to immediately do anything about taxes. I could wonder how much time was left without checking. Thoughts could arrive without automatically becoming instructions or assigned tasks. For most of the day, a question leads to Google. A message leads to a reply. An idea leads to a note. A notification leads somewhere else entirely. There is very little distance between my impulses and my consequent actions. Sitting there introduced a small gap. Eventually twenty minutes stopped feeling quite so much like twenty minutes. I wrote in my notes that doing nothing had started to feel like a skill that I was honing… Which is an absurd thing to need to learn or remember how to do. ## **Enlightenment Gets Cancelled** Unfortunately, human improvement refuses to cooperate with narrative structure. Just when I had started getting better at this, I had one of my worst sessions. I couldn't sit still; my mind wandered constantly; I *really* wanted to check my phone. Eventually I took a quick look to check the time. Fifteen minutes in. There were five minutes left. This was absolutely devastating information. The attempt felt like a cruel CIA torture session, yet I had no secrets to spill. I was thinking about basketball, dinner, work, anything except breathing or the wall or whatever enlightened people are supposed to be thinking about when they aren't thinking at all. My productivity afterward was abysmal too… So much for progress! A few days later I managed an even worse session at around ten on a Sunday night. My neck hurt. I was tired. My cat had recently slashed my nose, so I spent part of the meditation picking at a dry, bloody scab on my face. I checked my phone multiple times. I wanted the timer to finish. I was irritated that time refused to bend to my will! I went to bed wondering if the whole thing had been pointless. Then, roughly fourteen hours later, I meditated again around eight in the morning. Almost everything reversed… I barely wanted to check the time. Sitting still was easy. My mind was quieter. Twenty minutes breezed by. I felt more tranquil afterward. Same person. Same damaged neck. Same ADHD diagnosis. Same experiment. Completely different result… I started to suspect that the variables surrounding meditation mattered at least as much as whatever meditation skill I was supposedly building. Doing it late, tired and resentful, was a miserable idea. Doing it early, before the day had started throwing things at me, felt 100% different. This is not a scientific conclusion. My experimental methodology included botched dates, missed sessions, subjective numerical ratings, and at least one sneaky accidental nap. But it did manage to puncture the neat story I had unconsciously expected. Some days were good. Some were terrible. Then the next one was good again. Much to my annoyance, this appears to be how most things in life actually work. ## **So, Did This Actually Do Anything?** Does meditation even work? More specifically, because apparently I am incapable of asking a normal question… Did it make me more productive? The evidence was not exactly cooperating with me as I had planned. In an effort to calculate ROI on my time and energy expenditure, I gave myself a productivity score after every session. Sometimes it was high. Sometimes low. Other times I felt clear-headed and immediately got back to work. Occasionally I meditated and proceeded to accomplish approximately nothing (or continued doing nothing). I had been thwarted. There was no glorious upward trend line. The morning sessions generally seemed better. On the final day, I meditated early and gave my post-session productivity a 9 out of 10, the highest score of the experiment. But even I am not shameless enough to claim that means twenty minutes of meditation increased my productivity by some measurable percentage. There were other variables in this imperfect experiment to consider. Maybe I slept better. Maybe I had different work that day. Maybe knowing it was the last session energized me a bit. It’s entirely likely that rating your own productivity on an improvised ten-point scale is not going to survive rigorous peer review. Still, by the end, some things were undeniably different from the beginning. Twenty minutes no longer felt eternally endless. I wasn't constantly reaching for the phone. I could sit quietly without feeling like I needed to escape. I sometimes even enjoyed my respite from the grind. And I increasingly preferred doing it early because it made the beginning of the day feel less like being fired from a cannon into a pile of notifications. Meditation did not fix my attention. But it did make me notice it a bit more. I noticed the moment my brain generated an irrelevant question and demanded an answer. I noticed how uncomfortable unallocated time could feel. I noticed that on some days the problem wasn't my phone at all. The phone could sit untouched while the circus continued perfectly well inside my skull. And that awareness did not suddenly make me a focused person. I still often lose momentum when something interrupts me. I still open tabs I do not need and will never revisit again, despite my belief in it being so. I still have a brain capable of taking a straightforward task and turning it into six adjacent, meandering tasks. But there is something quite useful about catching the machinery in motion. Even if you cannot immediately turn that machinery off. ## **The ROI of Nothing** My final meditation went as well as I could hope for or reasonably expect. I sat mostly still. My mind wandered, but not catastrophically. I had family visiting, there was noise elsewhere in the house, and yet twenty minutes passed without much resistance or pain. I felt quite serene afterward. Grounded, even. And then I opened my journal and wrote about whether meditation deserved to remain in my routine or not. After all of this, I was still doing the calculation. Could I justify twenty minutes every single morning? Would the clarity afterward compensate for the time spent sitting there? Or should I remove meditation from my hyper-optimized schedule and use the twenty minutes for something even more productive? Was there even something more productive I could be doing? *ROI.* I had spent two weeks trying to practice an activity whose entire value may have been that nothing was required of me, and I still wanted to submit an expense report to myself. The funny thing is that I would never conduct this same analysis before wasting twenty minutes on YouTube. I don't calculate the return on listening to a song or ask myself whether lunch improved quarterly performance. I have never finished a movie and wondered whether the two hours should have been reallocated toward operational efficiency. Some activities apparently get to exist because being alive is allowed to contain things other than output. Meditation was harder for me to put in that category. Possibly because I scheduled it with purpose, or maybe because it happened during the workday, or maybe even because years in the startup sphere had taught me to treat unclaimed time as wasted capacity. I don't think two weeks of staring at a wall cured me of that. I might even need two lifetimes of wall staring to fix whatever I’ve got going on. The one thing I do know after all this: I am going to keep meditating anyway. I still think twenty minutes is quite expensive. I just have a growing suspicion that the things I refuse to price might be worth even more. ### Tech Doesn’t Understand Why You Don’t Like It URL: https://www.gonzocapital.net/tech-doesnt-understand-why-you-dont-like-it/ Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:04:59.000Z I saw Mark Zuckerberg cosplaying as a totally normal human person on a [podcast with Theo Von](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbfOkhrgxH0&ref=gonzocapital.net) that came out in April 2025. Theo Von asks Mark Zuckerberg if he drinks coffee. And it’s the kind of question that should require one simple syllable. Zuckerberg replies he does sometimes, mostly when he is on vacation. Recreationally. I had never really considered coffee a recreational drug before. A drug, surely. Although technically I suppose he has a point. He explains that he does not particularly like substances that alter his equilibrium. Why is this exchange so entertainingly off-putting? Mostly because Zuckerberg is clearly trying. This is not the pale twenty-something founder in a gray T-shirt explaining social graphs to Congress-dinosaurs anymore. He has hair now, baggy clothes, chains, the whole human-being package. He goes on Theo Von’s podcast and talks about fighting, family, masculine energy, and whatever else normal guys are supposed to talk about on such podcasts. And yet when Theo goes on to ask him about coffee, the discussion somehow ends up veering towards a talk on equilibrium. Making fun of Zuckerberg for seeming robotic is ancient internet tradition at this point, and maybe even a bit unfair. He seems capable of laughing at himself now, which is more than we can say about some of the other tech moguls at the tippy top. More importantly, I am not even sure Zuckerberg is the strange one anymore… Spend enough time around technology and the whole industry starts to warp minds and sound a little like this. Perfectly ordinary things are described in increasingly peculiar language. Companies that sell basic CRM software talk about transforming civilization. Founders find themselves announcing plans to automate jobs, all while reassuring everyone that workers have nothing at all to worry about and their jobs are safe. Companies trying to convince the public not to fear robots occasionally unveil something that looks like it was taken straight from Terminator 2. Everyone involved seems surprised when the reaction is not universal praise or enthusiasm. Technology has always produced strange people. It probably requires some degree of strangeness to qualify. Nobody sensible looks at a rocket exploding on a launchpad and thinks, *I should spend the next forty years doing this.* So herein lies the problem, and the problem is not that Silicon Valley is weird. Don’t get me wrong, it is very weird. No, I posit that the real issue is that tech folk can no longer see the weirdness from the other side. There is an enormous difference between being unconventional and losing the ability to imagine how you appear to somebody who does not live inside your bubbleworld. Does anyone in tech ever stop to wonder how all of this looks to everyone else? ## Does Nobody See How This Looks?! Want examples? No worries, I came with plenty of receipts. Take [Artisan](https://www.artisan.co/?ref=gonzocapital.net), for instance. Artisan is an AI startup that makes digital workers for sales teams. Its big advertising campaign around San Francisco included billboards reading things like “Stop Hiring Humans” and “Humans are So 2023.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/08/data-src-image-1f3b7655-b526-4798-950f-0ff0841492b4.png) Source: Artisan There is a kind of logic to this. I get it; I worked in marketing for ages. The company sells software that does tedious, automatable work humans currently do, and provocation gets lots of attention. Mostly negative. The campaign clearly got attention. But imagine encountering one of these billboards without having spent the last three years discussing agents, productivity curves, and the economic upside of automation. Now couple that with the existential fear of losing your livelihood. The thing that people are constantly being reminded of thanks to growing talk of AI-related mass layoffs. If you’re gainfully employed currently (I won’t assume you are if you’re routinely putting in the Herculean effort to read these lengthy rambling essays), maybe you have spent the last year hearing that artificial intelligence is fixing to snatch away that job of yours. Your company is experimenting with software that can do small aspects of what you do to earn a paycheck. Your boss has suddenly started using the word “efficiency” 100 times more often... Then on your commute home, some venture-backed AI company has purchased a giant rectangle in the sky to tell you: > **“STOP HIRING HUMANS.”** And despite that, tech execs are still playing the victim. Somehow, the technology industry remains confused about why people are nervous about the ever-encroaching threat of technology. Thankfully, Artisan eventually retired that misguided slogan. They even pivoted to hiring actual humans for sales as well. Anyway, this is not meant to be an argument against Artisan. The product may indeed be useful for some companies. Automating boring sales work is hardly going to bring on a cataclysmic collapse of civilization. I continue to find myself fascinated by that colossal chasm between what the campaign looked like internally versus the way it has now been perceived externally. And that ever-widening gulf keeps popping up all over the place… There is a [robotics company called Satyress](https://www.satyress.com/?ref=gonzocapital.net) building a machine called Threehalves. In fact, this demonic entity inspired this essay in the first place. It is designed for genuinely dangerous work, places where sending a human being might get them burned, crushed, maimed, or killed. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/08/data-src-image-f352ece6-6bdb-433e-a857-7ee966e2f64b.png) Source: [Satyress](https://www.satyress.com/?ref=gonzocapital.net) I can concede that it may be useful and save lives… Threehalves is also roughly seven feet tall, black, horned, vaguely goat-shaped, and capable of carrying industrial tools. In promotional images, this sleep paralysis demon has been shown holding a chainsaw. The company even designed the horns partly so the robot would have difficulty fitting through normal pedestrian doors. Again, none of this makes the underlying technology useless or unhelpful. Quite the opposite. A machine that can enter a burning building instead of a firefighter sounds pretty ideal. I, however, do question whether the ideal ambassador for humanoid robotics is something that looks capable of demanding a blood sacrifice to Baal. There’s no denying that the strategy has yielded some results. The company is on everyone’s radar now, good or bad. This would all be much, much easier to dismiss as a few companies being deliberately provocative if the same problem did not appear everywhere else. It has gotten bad enough that comedians are now making fake AI ads that are increasingly difficult to distinguish from the real ones. And that’s the point I’m trying to get to in my own meandering fashion. The tech industry has become incredibly good at explaining itself to people who already understand the technology industry. Everyone else is left staring at the billboard. ## **The Call is Coming From Inside the House** I [work in venture capital](https://www.gonzocapital.net/confessions-of-a-compromised-capitalist/), so I should probably admit that I am writing this from inside the insane asylum. When you spend enough time around startups, you start to recognize the insufferable terminology of the biz. Then those words lose all meaning to you and they become part of the background scenery. TAMs, moats, flywheels, agents, infrastructure layers, vertical integration, category creation. There are times to use such terms, but I find most people use them on autopilot, and after a while they become tacky furniture needlessly adorning the most boring conversations you can imagine. The thing that keeps me most grounded, however, is trying to describe what a startup does to a normal person. Hell, I’ve given up on trying to explain what my own damn company does to my family at this point. I might have an easier time explaining quantum physics to ’em. I have watched obvious, simple businesses become nearly incomprehensible after being passed through enough pitch decks and LLMs. A company does something useful. Then fundraising begins. The useful thing needs to become some sort of grandiose platform. The platform needs to transmute into some type of future infrastructure. That infrastructure needs to evolve into a whole ocean-sized ecosystem. By Series A, there is a reasonable chance the company is no longer selling mere software at all; “welcome to the foundational intelligence layer for the future of human coordination.” Whatever that means… Lost in all this: the customer still just wants the invoices sent on time. Some of this is benign. Every industry develops its own distinct vernacular. The difference here is that startup lingo keeps leaking outward to the masses. The website speaks like the pitch deck **\>>>** The billboard speaks like the website **\>>>** The founder speaks like the billboard. Eventually, a company is advertising in the middle of Times Square using very specific terminology only a sliver of a slice of a handful of people even understand. This might also explain some of the industry's increasingly strange taste. Like what’s with tech’s fundamental misunderstanding or fetish for misappropriating the works of Tolkien? A surveillance and intelligence company is called Palantir, after the magical seeing stones. A defense company is called Anduril, after Aragorn's sword. A new bank serving technology companies is called Erebor, named for the actual mountain where an evil dragon spends eons carefully guarding its stolen treasure. At a certain point, calling your accounting startup Steve starts to feel almost breathtakingly revolutionary. I don't think these people are secretly unaware of Tolkien. Quite the opposite, actually. The references are attractive precisely because they imply scale, destiny, power, and participation in some much larger mythical tale. Tech is unnaturally comfortable casting itself in mythological proportions. The people inside it just happen to be building the future. They are accelerating societal progress. They are transforming civilization. They are moving intelligence forward inch by inch, reshaping work, defeating disease, solving aging, colonizing Mars, harvesting the energy of the sun with a Dyson Sphere, and making humanity multiplanetary. Some of them may even succeed with some of these outlandish goals. But I’ve begun to notice… There is a side effect to spending your life around people who talk like this. Stay in the bubble long enough, and eventually it stops feeling like a bubble. ## **They Think You Don't Understand** A predictable thing happens when the people outside that bubble object or dissent. “They simply don’t understand.” Simpleminded workers worried about artificial intelligence are *misunderstanding* productivity. Those pesky artists[ angry about training data](https://www.gonzocapital.net/music-for-people-who-arent-listening/) are *failing* to appreciate technological progress. Uneducated parents worried about AI in schools are obviously *reacting emotionally* to a useful and transformative tool. Oh, and rural communities fighting hyperscale data center infrastructure are none other than misguided NIMBYs. Actually, anyone in any way alarmed about the future risks appearing as a Luddite, a doomer, a decel, or whatever word currently en vogue means insufficiently excited about where we are headed. I won’t pretend that this diagnosis isn’t correct from time to time. Human beings have an exceptional historical track record of [panicking about new technologies](https://theconversation.com/the-victorians-had-the-same-concerns-about-technology-as-we-do-60476?ref=gonzocapital.net). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/08/data-src-image-5ec26a71-9806-45a2-a5f8-40fd6575d5da.png) Source: [theconversation.com](https://theconversation.com/the-victorians-had-the-same-concerns-about-technology-as-we-do-60476?ref=gonzocapital.net) People destroy useful infrastructure for all sorts of stupid reasons. Communities oppose housing they desperately need. Nuclear power has spent decades trapped beneath layers of fear, bad politics, and simple misconceptions. Foreign governments deliberately exploit legitimate, civil disagreements because divided societies are way, way easier to manipulate. Imagine how difficult progress would be to achieve if every impossible invention required unanimous approval across the board, including from people who understood it the least. I will say, there is an arrogance hiding inside the assumption that education inevitably produces agreement. Sometimes people do indeed understand the argument perfectly well, and have merely reached a different conclusion all on their own. This distinction seems exceedingly difficult for a tech industry that has become accustomed to measurable/definable answers. Software either works or it doesn't. The benchmark goes up. The latency goes down. The model improves or gets worse. Somewhere there is a graph proving the thing that needs to be proven. But human beings are inconveniently immune to the allure of such graphs. They mainly care about who benefits, who pays, who has control, whether they trust you, what happens to their job, what gets built next to their house, and whether the people telling them everything will be wonderful seem to have any conception of their life whatsoever. Ultimately, what helps or harms them directly. Anthropic CEO [Dario Amodei recently described the backlash against AI](https://fortune.com/2026/08/16/dario-amodei-anthropic-ai-trust-crisis-regulation-frontier-open-models-negative-views/?ref=gonzocapital.net) as fundamentally a crisis of trust. His description of the public mood was unusually candid. Ordinary people, he said, suspect companies and governments are “cooking up some new way to screw them over.” That is probably true. His proposed remedy to the situation is also revealing. Amodei argued that grand promises about AI curing cancer have become clichés, and that the industry will regain trust by actually beginning to deliver on some of those promises. I sincerely hope he is right about curing cancer, but I’m less convinced it solves the entire problem. A person can believe that artificial intelligence might someday cure diseases and still wonder whether their employer intends to use it to eliminate their department next year. They can want better technology and dislike the company installing a cyber fortress like the proposed [Terrafab SpaceX factory getting built in Texas](https://www.constructionbriefing.com/news/spacex-and-tesla-plan-worlds-largest-building/8128960.article?ref=gonzocapital.net) that will be larger than 2,300 football fields or the combined area of Monaco, Vatican City, and Gibraltar altogether. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/08/image-12.png) Source: [The Automation Navigator](https://automationnavigator.substack.com/p/terafab-when-ambition-collides-with)T Humans are complex creatures, capable of holding multiple, seemingly conflicting views at once. This is where a lot of technology messaging seems to break down. The industry keeps trying to grow the upside and shove it down everyone’s throats, when people are simultaneously asking about the downside facing them both now and down the road. Which brings us to those hyperscale data centers… ## **Nobody Asked the Neighbors** From inside the AI industry, the case for data centers is pretty straightforward. These LLMs need compute. Compute requires chips. Chips require enormous amounts of electricity and physical infrastructure. The United States is now competing with China for leadership in a technology that may shape the next several decades of economic and military power. Some are even calling it the next nuclear arms race or Cold War redux. If you truly believe AI will be that transformative, then of course it’s easy to sell the line of thinking that this is all for the good of the nation and critical for national security. Now imagine you live next door to one of these data centers. You have no equity in OpenAI. Hell, you don’t even use ChatGPT at all. NVIDIA’s market capitalization *does not* pay your electric bill for you. Nobody invited you to the WEF in Davos. Elon Musk won’t pay your medical bills when his [Memphis data center pollutes your breathing air](https://www.wired.com/story/spacex-ipo-how-people-living-near-xai-data-centers-feel/?ref=gonzocapital.net) with carcinogens. A developer arrives with plans for a facility covering hundreds of acres, drawing huge quantities of electricity and potentially water, and promises jobs, investment, and participation in the glorious age of artificial intelligence. Your questions may be slightly more provincial. How loud is it? or Who pays for the grid upgrades? or What happens to electricity prices? or How much water does it use? or How many permanent jobs does it actually create? or Why here? or even What do we get? Those are not anti-technology questions. They are perfectly reasonable. The type of questions people ask when someone wants to build something enormous next to their home. Gallup found this spring that [seven in ten Americans opposed an AI data center being built in their local area](https://news.gallup.com/poll/709772/americans-oppose-data-centers-area.aspx?ref=gonzocapital.net), including 48 percent who strongly opposed one. I, for one, thought that number would be higher. Concerns from those in the survey included electricity demand, water use, environmental effects, and local power bills. There is also a foreign interference angle at play here. OpenAI just [disclosed in June that it had banned a cluster of accounts likely originating in China](https://forum.openai.com/public/events/inside-openais-investigation-into-foreign-influence-on-u-s-ai-debates-ybj5vx7df6?ref=gonzocapital.net) that were being used to create American-facing social posts attacking US data center construction. The campaign supposedly tried to amplify concerns about electricity prices and local impacts. So the people claiming China is trying to exploit the issue might not be completely hallucinating. OpenAI found no evidence that the operation achieved meaningful breakout beyond its own activity. Its own report describes the controversy as a legitimate existing American debate and says the operators were attempting to exploit concerns people already held. China never needed to manufacture dissenters in America. It merely noticed they already existed and capitalized on it. This has not stopped a large faction of the technology sphere from clumsily reaching for foreign influence as an explanation for the perfectly understandable backlash. There is something remarkably self-preserving about this broken logic. This is the most important infrastructure built in over a century, and rational people should therefore support it. Opposition threatens American technological leadership, and China benefits from the chaos. The people opposing us are consequently, knowingly or otherwise, helping our enemies over in China. No awkward period of introspection required. Surprisingly, Texas Governor Greg Abbott offered a less flattering explanation earlier this week. Abbott has hardly built his political career opposing business development or American technological leadership, to put it lightly. Last year he was heavily championing Texas as an epicenter of AI investment. Now, amid mounting opposition, his tune has changed significantly. He now says the [data center industry “basically dug their own grave](https://www.axios.com/2026/08/23/greg-abbott-texas-data-centers-ai-backlash?ref=gonzocapital.net).” His complaint was quite simple: developers moved too quickly and failed to get the support of the communities where they wanted to build. How refreshingly mundane and uncomplicated. There was no great information war or grand ideological struggle. Who would have guessed that asking and talking to the neighbors and maybe even inviting them to the party would have helped avoid calamity. This is where tech's relatability problem stops just being embarrassing and becomes its real Achilles' heel. You can survive having your ads mocked on the subway, but building a hyperscale data center is a different matter entirely. ## **When Parody Stops Working** Earlier this year, a quote attributed to Jeff Bezos began circulating online. It was something suitably Bond-villain-esque, even by billionaire standards. According to the quote, Bezos had supposedly suggested that human beings consume too much water and that preserving water for artificial intelligence might be more important because AI could eventually benefit humanity. Well, he never said that. It was satire. The issue was that quite a lot of people believed it. Hell, I even believed it for a split second. The reaction was more interesting than the fake quote itself. “Sorry about the drinking water. The machines need it.” And the public response was, essentially, “Yeah, sounds plausible.” And this is happening elsewhere too. Comedians [Harris Alterman and Dave Ross started making fake advertisements for imaginary AI companies](https://gizmodo.com/comedians-fake-tech-ads-make-fun-of-slop-voice-in-ai-marketing-2000781988?ref=gonzocapital.net) because real AI advertising had become so formulaic. One fictional company offered “panties that think.” Another appeared to announce that Ziplink had become Froggle. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/08/image-11.png) Source: [New York Daily News](https://www.nydailynews.com/2026/08/05/fake-subway-ads-ai-artificial-intelligence/?ref=gonzocapital.net) The joke works because there is a moment where you have to do a double take. We have RentAHuman describing people as the “meatspace layer” for AI. We have companies advertising the automation of human workers. We have startup founders talking about fully automating work. We have real billboards that require local newspapers to explain what the advertisements mean. Satire traditionally takes reality and pushes it somewhere absurd. Technology keeps arriving at something more than absurd, much quicker. And beneath that obvious comedy lies something a bit more troubling. If people can easily believe that a billionaire wants their drinking water for a computer, the industry has a reputation problem that cannot be repaired by changing the font or the lingo. People have developed a mental model of the technology class in their great ivory towers. It is enormously wealthy. It is powerful. It believes in the future. It speaks in grand abstractions. It is willing to disrupt almost anything. It has been telling everyone for years that artificial intelligence will transform civilization beyond recognition whether you like it or not. Then it seems genuinely offended that the rest of society has started taking some of this delusional techspeak literally. ## **Eventually, People Get a Vote** For much of the last twenty years, Silicon Valley could afford to be unrelatable in a way it increasingly cannot. A strange founder could build an app, give it some dumb misspelled name, and you could download it or ignore it. Even enormously consequential software companies rarely needed the approval of your town council, your utility provider, or everyone living three streets away. That is now changing. Artificial intelligence requires power plants, transmission lines, chips, factories, and enormous data centers. Robotics will increasingly put machines into workplaces and public spaces. Autonomous systems will affect transport and defense. AI will change how companies hire, fire, and organize us regular folk. It is already seeping into our schools, hospitals, creative industries, and even [our relationships](https://exceptionalpoint.substack.com/p/the-code-that-says-it-loves-you)! The physical footprint of technology is getting several orders of magnitude larger at exactly the same time its cultural relationship with the public is getting worse. That is a combustible combination. Public opinion is already becoming political reality. Data centers have become a hot-button issue ahead of the US midterms. States and local governments are considering moratoriums, rolling back incentives, and imposing new requirements. There is a temptation inside technology to see this as another obstacle that eventually gets routed around… Maybe. History is also full of useful technologies that societies delayed, restricted, rejected, or regulated into much smaller forms because their advocates lost the public argument. Being technologically correct does not guarantee political permission. An industry that wants to rebuild the energy system, transform employment, and introduce increasingly capable machines into ordinary life is going to need more than technical superiority. For starters, it’ll need to earn the trust of the people it hopes to serve if they are indeed sincere in that goal. And trust gets harder to demand after you have spent years telling those same people that disruption will be good for them. And unlike an adoption curve, those people eventually get a vote. ## **Understanding People Shouldn’t Be a Moat** There are people inside technology who seem to understand this. Airbnb founder Brian Chesky [recently argued that Silicon Valley needs to build more AI products that ordinary people actually love](https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/airbnb-ceo-brian-chesky-urges-193024868.html?ref=gonzocapital.net). His complaint makes a lot of sense. Of the previous 175 Y Combinator companies he cited, 159 were focused on enterprise rather than consumers. Chesky's basic argument was that people may feel differently about AI and start to forgive the intrusion, when and only when it begins producing obvious improvements in their own lives. That seems almost embarrassingly sensible. People generally become more enthusiastic about a novel technology when it does something they want or need… The smartphone did not require Steve Jobs to write a manifesto explaining why everyone should care about mobile computing, nor did Google need Americans to study information retrieval before they appreciated finding things online. The product just went ahead and made the most compelling argument. AI may *eventually* do the same. But usefulness only solves part of the problem. The larger moat may belong to those companies capable of understanding the objections before dismissing them outright. A founder should be able to wrap their head around reasons why someone might hate what they are building. A data center developer should understand the argument of the homeowner directly across the street. An AI company should probably find a more empathetic way to discuss job displacement without buying a billboard that says “Stop Hiring Humans.” Maybe a certain aforementioned robotics company may even consider giving the lifesaving machine slightly smaller demon horns. You know, just normal-sized demon horns. None of this requires abandoning or limiting ambition either. You can keep your total addressable markets that are larger than the combined economic output of ten Earths. I personally still want to see people building strange and useful things that help improve our everyday lives. In fact, I invest in people building strange things. The world would be unbearably dull if every founder waited until an idea sounded reasonable and easy to grasp to everybody at dinner. Technology needs the obsessives, weirdos, eccentrics, and people whose relationship with coffee may be slightly more recreational than the rest of ours. More importantly, it could also use a hell of a lot more humility. Silicon Valley is extraordinarily good at imagining futures, but it would do itself a world of good spending more time understanding the people who have to live in them. ### The Internet Was Better When It Was Worse URL: https://www.gonzocapital.net/the-internet-was-better-when-it-was-worse/ Last updated: 2026-08-19T19:07:33.000Z The internet used to look like a fever dream rendered at 800 x 600\. A sentient casino carpet that somehow learned HTML. Not everywhere, obviously… Sure, there were professionals involved somewhere. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/08/CleanShot-2026-08-17-at-16.16.56@2x.png) But large parts of it looked like they had been assembled at 1:17 in the morning by a teenager with Napster running in the background, three cans of something radioactive-looking beside the keyboard, and a newly discovered, boast-worthy ability to change the color of text. And Myspace, one of the first social networks to truly break into the mainstream, was probably the purest expression of this early web feel. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/08/image-7.png) Kim Kardashian's Myspace Profile Source: [HuffPost](https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/06/11/kim-kardashian-myspace-profile%5Fn%5F7560554.html?ref=gonzocapital.net) You could visit someone's profile and immediately be assaulted by a song you did not ask to hear. The background might be black with tiny pink skulls, or puke green with edgy quotes. Their name was written in a font designed to be technically visible but functionally unreadable to the human eye. There were animated GIFs everywhere. Each worse than the last. Some enormous photograph would load one horizontal strip at a time. Half the page had been copied from another profile, which had copied it from somewhere else, and somewhere else, and pretty much nobody involved completely understood what that pesky code did. Then there was the Top 8 part of the profile… A feature that took the ancient human instinct to quietly rank our friends and turned it into publicly available information. Nations have gone to war over less. It was slow, functionally unstable, tacky, and ridiculous. It occasionally felt like browsing the personal effects of someone who had been allowed to decorate a strip club bathroom. And I sort of kind of miss it. That sentence bothers me just a tiny bit because nostalgia is one hell of a fantastic liar. The past gets softer with distance, and the lens rosier with each passing day. We can’t, after all, pretend like that incarnation of the early web wasn’t terrifying in some ways. People forget the dial-up noises disrupting internet browsing sessions, the broken links, the pop-ups multiplying like digital Herpes, the viruses disguised as Linkin Park songs, and the fact that finding one useful piece of information sometimes required forty-five minutes and the assistance of a message-board stranger called xX\_DragonLord\_420\_Xx. So when I recently read that [Myspace might be attempting another comeback](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g64152v71o?ref=gonzocapital.net), my first reaction was roughly what you'd expect if someone announced they were reopening a restaurant that gave everyone food poisoning twenty years ago. Then, annoyingly, I started to think more about it. The longer I did, the less ridiculous the idea seemed to seem. Not because I desperately need my Top 8 back, or because the world is suffering from an insufficient supply of abominable profile songs. But the news sent me back through an internet I hadn't seriously thought about in ages, one that was slower, uglier, more irritating, and *dramatically* worse at almost every single, possible, last, little, tiny, thing. And I began to wonder whether this was precisely the point. The internet is *technically* better now. Obviously. We’ve had decades to make it run smoother and optimize it. Everything loads. Most things work. It’s all searchable. The largest collection of human knowledge ever assembled fits in a rectangle in my pocket, alongside nearly every album, film, newspaper, map, encyclopedia, marketplace and photograph I could reasonably want. And yet I increasingly find myself missing the internet from when it was worse. I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that. Not because I want the malware pop-ups back. Or the teenage angst associated with AOL instant messaging away messages. Or getting screamed at for picking up the phone while someone is sending an email. Mostly, I’m missing the old internet because I am starting to suspect that some of the things we fixed were not entirely broken. # We Used to Go Places The internet once upon a time used to feel more magical. Maybe that’s my age showing. But I do recall the World Wide Web truly feeling worldwide. Like a collection of wonderful destinations you could travel to digitally. Back when we used to indeed surf the web. Before we had Myspace and instant messaging, we had hobbyist internet forums where people could coalesce around some obscure topic like the history of freight trains or rare Indonesian butterflies. You went to a forum. You checked a blog. You wandered into a fan site dedicated to a band, or a specific car, or a television show, or one man's apparently lifelong obsession with restoring Soviet-era radios. The early internet truly had a sense of geography, strangely enough. You could get lost. You could stumble into something completely unrelated to whatever you had been looking for. You could remember a strange URL that some kid at school told you about and return months later to discover the owner had redesigned the entire thing in lime green. Even social networks felt more like destinations. You visited someone's Myspace page. Looked around for a bit. You listened to whatever God-awful song they had chosen to represent their soul that week. Then you promptly left to *travel* elsewhere. You would need to deliberately navigate your way through the shaky, early internet infrastructure, carefully cobbled together with all of the safety and engineering of a wooden roller coaster. And it was glorious. The first time in human history that we could travel the world and build communities without leaving our shoddy desk chair in the basement. Unfortunately, the modern internet feels off. For all its staggering technical progress, the internet somehow feels like it is shrinking, with fewer places to go. There is now an app for everything. Something carefully designed in a laboratory to peel you away from traveling and keep you neatly confined to a profitable corner of the once great web. An app where you stand still while an endless torrent of distraction flies by you at warp speed. A person you know. A person you don't. A war. A cute dog in a bumblebee costume. An advertisement. Another advertisement. Damn-it, another advertisement. Somebody making pasta. A political argument. A man explaining the collapse of Western civilization from the driver's seat of the shittiest Toyota you’ve ever seen. And somehow, we call this an improved internet. The revolutionary advent of the “feed” somehow seemed to solve a real problem. There was simply too much internet to navigate manually. Somebody had to sort it all out and tell us where to go. So we handed the job to machines and algorithms. We replaced those incredible Geocities and internet destinations with feeds. That sounds like a minor design choice, but I’m not convinced that’s accurate. # A Brief Defense of Bad Technology At risk of sounding naive, I want to staunchly defend the old internet and what it stood for. For most of the time the internet has been around, inconvenience has been treated like a bug.I’ve begun to think of it as a feature. Pages used to take days to load. Now we’ve made them load in the blink of an eye. Getting lost was inconvenient, waiting was brutal, boredom was a systemic failure. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/08/image-9.png) Loading Bar Logic Source: [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/gc46vh/secrets%5Fsoftware%5Fdevelopers%5Fdont%5Fwant%5Fyou%5Fto%5Fknow/?ref=gonzocapital.net) Nobody is advocating or campaigning for the return of buffering wheels or dial-up internet. Nobody wants to lobotomize Google search all of a sudden. But I do wonder if we tore down inconvenient barriers and bugs without fully understanding what other roles they were performing. Boredom made you leave and change your scenery. Running out of things to read and destinations to travel to in the seemingly endless World Wide Web made you close your computer and do something else. Having to search for everything meant sometimes discovering something far stranger or better than you originally intended. A bad recommendation from a friend could send you toward a record, film, book, or bizarre corner of the internet that no statistical model would ever have selected for you in a thousand years. Even waiting and watching the loading bar tended to create little gaps in the machinery. Little instances of boredom that forced us to slow down and process information. We spent decades sanding them away because friction is the natural enemy of good software or UX/UI design. Every extra click, every loading screen, every moment where the user has to stop and decide what to do next is something a crack team of engineers can measure, optimize, and eventually eliminate from existence altogether. Well, it might have worked too well… There is a version of this that reminds me of our relationship with bacteria. For a long time the goal was simple: kill all the germs. Like those old commercials that boasted about sprays and soaps that killed 99.9999% of germs. But as you may or may not know, the human body contains entire thriving, complex ecosystems of them, and some of the organisms we had been trying to annihilate were actually keeping everything else functioning. I posit that the good old internet had a microbiome too. Broken links, boredom, dead ends, bad recommendations, ugly interfaces, moments where nothing happened. What we thought was mere debris left over from unfinished, imperfect technology could have actually been boundaries we desperately needed. # Interlude: In Defense of Autoplay Please mind your step in this quick detour; we’ll be back to the regularly scheduled programming momentarily. I would like to briefly defend one of the worst ideas in the history of the internet, before we get into some of the heavier stuff. Autoplay music. There was something magnificently hostile about visiting another person's Myspace profile and having their musical taste immediately thrust upon you without so much as a warning. You did not consent. There was no tasteful little play button waiting politely in the corner of your screen. You would arrive, and suddenly some infernal Maroon 5 tune was just happening to you like some musical war crime. This was especially dangerous if your computer volume had been left on high. But autoplay did something modern profiles rarely do. It made entering someone's page feel like entering their own personal room. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/08/image-10.png) Myspace if it were a bedroom Source: Facebook You didn't just learn what they happen to like. You were subjected to it. Their song was playing. Their background was epilepsy-inducing. Their photographs were arranged badly. Some quote from *Fight Club* was floating around in a font normally reserved for tattoo parlors. If they had recently pretended to discover Nietzsche, there was a reasonable chance you were going to hear about that too. It was obnoxious but strangely intimate. Today, our profiles are cleaner, faster, less unsightly, optimized, and all-around easier to tolerate. They are also all remarkably similar and devoid of true personality. Same dimensions. Same handful of fonts. Same buttons. Monotone colors. Same little pre-approved, sterile boxes into which we pour ourselves. I am not suggesting Spotify should begin ambushing visitors to my [LinkedIn profile](https://www.linkedin.com/in/carmelo-giuliano-3866a81b3/?skipRedirect=true&ref=gonzocapital.net). Actually, that could be pretty cool. Some technologies deserve to go extinct. But I do miss the period when the internet occasionally allowed people to make decisions so bad that you knew a human being had definitely been involved. # The Internet Has Learned Who You Are Back in the day, we didn’t need algorithms to tell us who we were. We poured our hearts and souls and minds out into our profiles and GeoCities, striving to evangelize and share way too much about ourselves to perfect strangers around the world. Now the internet tells us who we are without much objection from ourselves. In the early dawn of the usable internet, the machinery patiently awaited our instruction. You typed something into a search bar. You clicked a link. You chose where to go next. And that machine was fast, useful, and completely indifferent to whether you were having a midlife crisis, shopping for hiking boots, or for some strange reason, now developing a minor obsession with Japanese jazz from the late 70s. Then it slowly started to pay more and more attention to its users and its users' actions. Search engines learned to predict what we meant when we inevitably misspelled something. Amazon got great at suggesting the next thing we should plop into our shopping carts. Netflix tried to save us from spending forty dreadful minutes choosing the next film to use as a sleeping aid. Spotify built weird playlists around tastes we had never bothered to flesh out or articulate ourselves. Again, this was *mostly* great. Personalization did indeed solve some real problems. The internet was becoming less like a giant filing cabinet and more like a friendly, attentive concierge at an upscale Web hotel. Then came the feed. Now the machine was no longer politely helping us find what we had asked for. It was now meticulously deciding what should appear in front of us before we asked at all. Facebook guesses which friends mattered most, and it’s a bit creepy if you ask me. YouTube guessed which video would keep you watching for hours and hours on end. Instagram correctly guessed whose life you were most likely to envy. TikTok turned this into something approaching sorcery, rapidly figuring out what could keep a thumb moving for another thirty seconds, then another, then another, then another. Just one more swipe. At first, we told the internet what we wanted, before it inevitably began to infer what we wanted. Eventually, it started trying to know before we did. And like some sort of strange chicken-or-egg type paradox, I’m left to wonder if those desires are truly ours, or conveniently planted in our heads, leading us to believe we’ve had our minds read by some talented, spooky psychic. But the better these systems became at predicting us, the less often we had to actively declare ourselves. When the computer stopped waiting for us to tell it exactly who we were, it began to tell us what it thought of us all on its own. You see less of what you would never have chosen, which may sound quite trivial until you start thinking about how much of life is, in the wise words of the immortal artist-philosopher Bob Ross: “Happy Little Accidents.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/08/image-8.png) Bob Ross Making Happy Little Accidents Source: [KraftGeek](https://kraftgeek.com/en-eu/blogs/creator-inspiration/bob-ross-life-story-the-man-who-made-art-accessible-to-millions?srsltid=AfmBOormenx8vw8%5FjnzoTqL8CQOPVUK4W256jOPLdjXwB71LSlaHcBjf&ref=gonzocapital.net) Whether it’s a click on the wrong link, a friend dragging you to a terrible slasher film, or a book you had no desire to read and would have never purchased, a lot of discovery begins with poor targeting and chance. The old internet was full of this because it was absolutely terrible at knowing what to put in front of your peepers. You searched for one thing and found another. There was no grand, hidden intelligence financially incentivized to steer you there. You had simply gotten lost. Recommendation systems are designed to make that happen less often. They reduce the distance between you and the thing you're statistically likely to enjoy. The trouble with that is that the *wrong* thing occasionally turns out to be the *right* thing. And the more accurately our environments anticipate us, the harder genuine surprise becomes to manufacture. And these apps and algorithms are learning to mimic the element of surprise too. Spotify or TikTok can throw you a curveball song at any moment, or inject some novelty into your feed that doesn’t quite fit your normal appetite. But there is something uncanny about artificial surprise selected because a machine has calculated that you are likely to appreciate being surprised by it. At some point, serendipity becomes just another category of personalization. In any case, maybe freedom is not only about having access to everything we want. Part of that same freedom is being exposed, occasionally and without any sort of permission, to things we would never have dreamed of seeking out in the first place. # The Mirror Problem Personalization in algorithms depends on a model of you. At first, that model was pretty crude. Your age. Your location. What items you put in your digital shopping cart. The videos you watched or the websites you visited. Maybe whether you seemed like the sort of person who might click on an ad for running shoes. Well, it’s downright astounding how good those models are getting these days. They have begun to learn what holds your attention, what you skip, what you replay, what you hovered your mouse over for a sliver of an instance, what made you angry enough to push back on an ignorant and anonymous internet comment, or what made you curious enough to stay. Taste, mood, hesitation, timing, and context all got transmuted into digital gold. After a while, the algorithm stops simply observing your preferences and begins building a theory of who you are, what motivates you, and who you might become. This is where things get a bit freaky. If the machine speculates that you may or may not like a certain kind of music, like Swedish Viking Death Polka, it shows you more of it. You tune in and listen out of curiosity. That, in turn, confirms the model. If it thinks you care about a particular political issue, you see more of that too. This can be really dangerous. You engage, perhaps because it is now constantly in front of you, and the system becomes even more confident that this is simply who you are to your very core. The prediction helps create the evidence that validates the prediction, like a seemingly innocuous feedback loop. Nobody needs to lock you inside an ideological chamber or [secretly reprogram your personality into amplifying misogynistic content](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/feb/06/social-media-algorithms-amplifying-misogynistic-content?ref=gonzocapital.net). Social media does a fine enough job of allowing this to happen all on its own. The environment merely becomes a little more responsive to the person it already believes you to be. Over time, that can become a very comfortable sort of trap. We usually imagine identity as something internal, something we discover or concoct within ourselves. But increasingly, we careen through digital environments that are continuously reflecting a version of us back at us, which can be a bit jarring. You liked *this*. You watched *that*. People like you also enjoy such and such... This is who *we* assume *you* are. The mirror gets a bit more polished and a bit clearer. At some point, personalization starts to raise a question that has very little to do with convenience. How easy is it to become someone new when the world around you keeps introducing you to your previous self? And this is where AI matters, although probably not for the [reason we usually discuss](https://www.gonzocapital.net/the-internet-ouroboros/) here. Recommendation systems build models of what we might want to watch, read, or buy. AI gives those models a much larger role: A system that knows your preferences, calendar, writing style, habits, and history no longer needs to merely recommend something. It can begin acting on that prediction too. The better it understands you, the less often it needs to ask you first, which, to be fair, sounds pretty convenient. # The Right to Be Misunderstood But perhaps being asked was doing something more important than we gave it credit for. Every time a machine asks what you want, you are forced to make some tiny declaration about yourself. You choose **\>>>** You change your mind **\>>>** You ignore the recommendation **\>>>** You click on something stupid for no reason **\>>>** You contradict the person you were 24 hours ago. The unsettling version of personalization gets you right so consistently that it becomes damn near impossible to surprise it in any meaningful way. We have spent years talking about privacy mostly in terms of who knows things about us. Who has our data, who can see our searches, who knows what we've bought. I'm becoming more interested in a stranger question: *who gets to decide what all those things mean?* If I spend three weeks watching videos about restoring old sailboats, that hardly means that I’ve up and become a “sailboat person” all of a sudden. Maybe I read twenty articles from a rotten political ideology I despise because I am utterly and morbidly fascinated by it. Maybe I listen to Elliott Smith for four consecutive hours because it is raining outside and apparently I have decided happiness is completely overrated and I needed a good cry. Maybe at two in the morning I become briefly obsessed with Mongolian throat singing or one of those stunning, [folksy Chinese craft channels](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGj7ECffGRw&ref=gonzocapital.net) where they create teapots from scratch. Well, none of these things need to become permanent additions to some invisible computational biography. Human beings should be allowed to generate false positives that don’t neatly fit an algorithm. We should be allowed to contradict ourselves or abandon an interest. We can temporarily become fascinated by idiotic, nonsensical things, tweak our political philosophies, develop new musical tastes or revert to old ones. Basically, we deserve to make no statistical sense whatsoever whenever we please. We may do things because we are bored or tired or hungry or drunk. Maybe there’s no reason at all. That messiness is part of what makes people change, not noise that needs to be cleaned up and sterilized. If every curiosity becomes a signal, every detour evidence, and every past behavior another clue used to predict the very next one, then at some point we risk turning exploration into declaration. You looked at this **\>>>** therefore you are this. You enjoyed that **\>>>** therefore you will enjoy more of that. You behaved this way before **\>>>** therefore here is the future version of you we have prepared for you in advance. You’re very welcome. There is something suffocatingly gloomy and claustrophobic in that. Maybe one of the luxuries we will eventually learn to value is the ability to remain partially illegible. The right to contradict our own data. The right to confuse the algorithm. The right to wake up tomorrow and go down a rabbit hole nobody could have possibly predicted. The right to be misunderstood, at least occasionally. Twenty years ago this would have sounded like an absolutely absurd thing to ask for. Programmatic inconvenience. Computers were already doing a fine enough job of misunderstanding us. # **Too Stupid to Know Us** Which brings me back to that Myspace announcement. A Myspace profile was most likely a terrible representation of who you actually were. The awful songs. Blurry photographs. Badly cropped backgrounds. Quotes from films your younger self only half understood. Then the political machinations of a friend list ranked in an order capable of causing serious diplomatic consequences at school the next morning. It was theatrical, cringeworthy, inconsistent, and almost certainly inaccurate. But the important thing was that **you had made it inaccurate yourself**. You could wake up one morning, decide the old version of you was deeply humiliating, change the song, delete half the photographs, rewrite your profile, rearrange your Top 8 friends, and emerge several hours later as an entirely different moron flailing around trying to find your identity in the world. Myspace never objected. It didn't subtly remind you that historical behavioral data suggested the old you was statistically more authentic either. It never maintained some deeper model underneath the surface, insisting that, based on fourteen months of listening history and browsing behavior, you were still fundamentally a Fall Out Boy fanatic. It simply took your word for it. You told the internet who you were. It listened and believed you. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that it just wasn’t sophisticated enough to argue back, which gave you a peculiar sense of freedom. The modern internet is essentially better in almost every measurable way. It’s glaringly obvious how much faster and smarter and more organized it is. It’s now safer in many respects, as well as more useful and much more powerful. Oh, and infinitely more capable of finding the exact thing you need in millimicroseconds. I still wouldn't trade the modern internet for dial-up and glitter backgrounds. No chance. I do not want malware hiding inside MP3 files again. I do not want to print out thousands of pages of MapQuest driving directions for road trips. I am vaguely sure I don’t even want or need Myspace back. That glorious comeback could be brilliant. Or it could be another bloated, stinky internet corpse briefly shocked back to life Frankenstein-style by a concoction of nostalgia, investors, and people my age suddenly deciding that 2006 was a golden era because our knees, necks, and backs didn’t hurt so badly yet. But reading about the possible return of Myspace did remind me of something I had not realized we lost. The internet once allowed us to tell it, and the people who found us there, who we were on that particular day. Now it increasingly tries to tell us who we are, and predict who we might become. Maybe what I miss most about the worse internet is not the ugliness, the broken links, the terrible songs, or the wooden, rickety, death-trap roller coaster infrastructure keeping the whole thing precariously cobbled together. Above all else, I suppose I miss the naive, fledgling machines of the World Wide Web that were too underdeveloped and rudimentary. The ones that were too damn stupid to actually know me... ### The Internet Ouroboros URL: https://www.gonzocapital.net/the-internet-ouroboros/ Last updated: 2026-09-01T18:32:13.000Z *AI ate the human internet. Now it is coming back for the fossils.* Somewhere, some way, somebody out there is buying an awful lot of old books. Not Hemingway first editions or illuminated, gold-leaf manuscripts hidden in ancient monasteries. No, much stranger things you probably don’t ever think about. A 1995 guide to metropolitan Denver. A manual for WordPerfect harking back to 1991\. Forgotten technical books, local histories from villages you’ve never heard of, academic texts, obscure nonfiction from decades ago, drier than the Gobi Desert. The kind of books that survive for decades because nobody wants them badly enough to buy them and nobody hates them enough to throw them away. Well, in case you’ve not been paying attention, somebody does indeed want *them* now. At one used bookstore in Houston, the manager told *The Atlantic* that [95 of the previous 100 books sold through one online platform](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/08/ai-companies-buying-used-books-for-data/688167/?ref=gonzocapital.net) had gone to the same buyer. Other booksellers have reported similarly strange bursts of demand, including orders where shipping cost more than the books themselves. Over in Europe, [a Dutch bookseller thought a request for 3,000 copies was "spam or phishing](https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/dutch-bookseller-ai-spam-phishing-3000-book-copies-scan-destroy/?ref=gonzocapital.net)." Naturally, the internet has gone and decided that AI is eating the libraries. That isn’t exactly paranoia speaking. AI companies like [Suno and Udio are ravenously dining on the musical output of civilization](https://www.gonzocapital.net/music-for-people-who-arent-listening/) as we speak. We already know that at least one AI company has bought physical books at enormous scale for AI training purposes. For some reason, Anthropic, the safety-minded frontier AI lab behind Claude, called its operation “Project Panama.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/08/image-4.png) Source: [The Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/?ref=gonzocapital.net) The company [bought millions of new and used books](https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/?ref=gonzocapital.net), removed their bindings, cut the pages apart, scanned them, and shredded the originals. Internal material later exposed through litigation contained a sentence that seems scientifically engineered in a laboratory to infuriate bibliophiles: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” [![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/08/image-2.png)](https://rbtx.com/en-US/solutions/book-scanner-with-automated-page-turn-robot?srsltid=AfmBOopzgpa894xxBitbKNcXQGksrgmz7MTHDHwipXY13MgVumlIUCdC&ref=gonzocapital.net) The less murderous version of mass book digitization. Source: [RBTX](https://rbtx.com/en-US/solutions/book-scanner-with-automated-page-turn-robot?srsltid=AfmBOopzgpa894xxBitbKNcXQGksrgmz7MTHDHwipXY13MgVumlIUCdC&ref=gonzocapital.net) Anthropic has reportedly already spent tens of millions of dollars doing it. But I think most of the outrage is misplaced. Looking at the wrong part entirely… ## **The Wrong Thing to Be Angry About** There is something genuinely unpleasant about watching a book being burned or slashed or shredded or torn apart. Kids forced to tear through a summer reading list and prepare book reports for the first day of school may disagree. That visceral reaction to maiming books is not entirely sentimental nonsense, though. Books are obviously more than mere containers for some text. People write in them, spill things on them, gift them to each other, drag them through moves and messy relationships and entire periods of their lives. Sometimes a specific copy matters even though the words inside it are identical to a million other books out in the wild. There are also books where destroying the object destroys something that a scan cannot preserve. An exquisitely rare edition, a heavily annotated copy, a local history with almost no surviving copies, some obscurely strange technical document that was printed once in 1976 and then lost to the forgotten depths of time. If those disappear into a scanner and a private dataset, something has actually been lost. But this is where, in my humble opinion, the conversation around Anthropic starts getting ever so slightly confused. Most books are not unique cultural artifacts with outsized historical significance. Libraries [remove books from their collections](https://theconversation.com/librarians-have-good-reasons-to-weed-books-from-their-shelves-why-is-book-removal-so-controversial-232163?ref=gonzocapital.net) all the time. Publishers pulp inventory. People throw badly-battered books away during cross-country moves. Entire sets of outdated encyclopedias have been sent migrating toward recycling centers since Wikipedia arrived, like dusty, musky lambs to slaughter. The destruction for sure matters. That being said, the fact that a book was physically destroyed does not automatically make it an act of cultural vandalism. Anthropic has now publicly stated that it was not deliberately buying rare or antiquarian books for Project Panama. The more recent buying spree is much harder to explain. Some [sellers have reported unusually obscure material disappearing in bulk](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/02/australian-book-sellers-alarm-destruction-rare-titles-ai-supply-chain?ref=gonzocapital.net), but nobody has shown that Anthropic, or even AI companies generally, are behind all of those purchases. That distinction does indeed matter because there is a tendency with stories like this to let the most disturbing, conspiratorial, tin-foil hat explanation become the accepted one before anybody has actually proven it. And you know what? It is exceedingly easy to see how we arrived there, given how fashionable hating everything remotely AI-related has become in 2026 A.D. Still, we already know enough to ask the more interesting question. But there are more curious things lurking in the tech shadows. More interesting and uncomfortable questions to be asked, and more precarious truths to dislodge… Why would anyone building frontier AI want a thirty-year-old computer manual in the first place? The outrage tends to stop at the part where books get violently dismembered. That’s where I think the story *really* starts to get fascinating. ## **The Paper Guillotine** Part of the answer is **embarrassingly** mundane. Copyright law has made the physical book unusually useful. Anthropic had previously downloaded millions of books from pirate libraries, which is the polite legal way of describing an operation that looks an awful lot like stealing millions of books. Judge William Alsup distinguished between using lawfully acquired books for training and keeping pirated copies in a general-purpose internal library, and [Anthropic eventually agreed to a $1.5 billion](https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-approves-anthropics-15-billion-settlement-copyright-lawsuit-2026-07-20/?ref=gonzocapital.net) “slap on the wrist” settlement over the piracy claims. Not too shabby for a company [valued at $965 billion](https://www.anthropic.com/news/series-h?ref=gonzocapital.net) as of May 2026\. Project Panama followed a different sort of logic altogether. Buy the physical book legally, scan it, destroy the original during the process, and keep the digital copy in an ever-growing digital archive. There is something wonderfully stupid and unsettlingly human about the fact that this can somehow make *more* legal sense than downloading the same damn text from the internet. That helps explain the bizarre mechanics of Project Panama, yet it still doesn’t explain why the books were valuable enough to bother acquiring in the first place. For a brief period, the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence looked less like an Asimov novel and more like a slaughterhouse for literature, where books go to die. The broader argument about AI training data is obviously much bigger than Anthropic alone. OpenAI’s GPT and other frontier models were built from staggering amounts of human-created material, and the circumstances under which that material entered training datasets vary wildly. Some was licensed legally in accordance with the law. Some was scraped from public websites. Some creators had no idea their work was being used at all. In other cases, pirated copies were absolutely involved. You are free to choose your preferred moral vocabulary for all of that. Theft, scraping, learning, stealing, training, gathering inspiration, appropriation, fair use, industrial-scale borrowing without consent. Courts and regulators are still duking it out, trying to differentiate and settle on which descriptions have legal force. I am not especially interested in trying to settle that fight here. At least not here in this particular piece. What interests me more at this moment is what happened after the models had eaten so much of the human internet. Because eventually, somewhere along the line, they started contributing to it too. ## **The Internet Ouroboros** Books were attractive training material long before the current obsession with synthetic data, and long before most people had any reason to think about AI training corpora at all. Before people even knew what AI was or why they should be afraid of it. They are methodically edited, generally more coherent than random web pages, and full of hidden wisdom that seemingly never made the transition cleanly onto the open internet. A manual written for a specialized industry in 1989 might contain information that barely exists anywhere in any fashion online. A forgotten academic book might cover some obscure subject with more depth than twenty years of search-engine-optimized summaries ever managed. I can say from experience that a history degree leaves you with at least one durable skill: finding books nobody else knew were there. If you have ever done any archival research, you know how much of human history never made it online. Sometimes the thing you need is still sitting in a gloomy room inside a book nobody has opened since 1986. Of course, AI labs are more than capable of combing through old websites, newspaper archives, and already-digitized books too. Paper matters because plenty of useful material never made it online, because published editions come with dates and provenance, because books tend to offer denser and more coherent writing than the average webpage, and, thanks to the strange legal incentives above, sometimes buying the physical object is simply the cleanest way to acquire and extract the text. Older books now have another advantage that would have sounded ridiculous a few years ago. Their age tells you something about who, or what, forged them into existence. If a book was printed in 1981, Claude did not help write it. ChatGPT did not smooth out the prose. Nobody was able to ask Gemini to turn chapter three into something “more engaging and digestible.” Whatever its flaws, the thing came from an overwhelmingly human-authored, pre-generative-AI information environment. Once upon a time, that distinction used to be so obvious that nobody even needed a word for it. The early frontier models arrived at an unusually convenient point in history. Humans had spent decades producing enormous quantities of material online before machines became capable of producing convincing language at comparable scale. Blogs, newspapers, forums, code repositories, research papers, recipes, technical documentation, arguments, reviews, obscure hobbyist sites, bad poetry, good poetry, and millions of people patiently explaining the same problems to strangers. It was a gigantic accidental dataset, overwhelmingly created by humans. By people like you and me. Then the frontier models came and absorbed it all, which in turn made something rather funky happen. That overwhelmingly human-only information environment began changing quickly and dramatically. Generative AI started producing articles, comments, product descriptions, summaries, emails, code, forum posts, books, and just about everything and anything else people could persuade it to make. Some of that material is surprisingly useful in a pinch. Some of it is outright sloppy garbage. Most importantly, more and more of it now sits neatly nestled beside human-created material without a reliable or trustworthy way of distinguishing between them. I won’t pretend to be smart enough to suggest that synthetic data is inherently bad for AI. Far more brilliant machine learning experts are chipping away at that problem already. That is one of the places where the public version of this argument becomes complicated. You might not know it, but researchers deliberately use synthetic data all the time. It can be filtered, verified, combined with human data, and used to train models very effectively. The problem appears when that loop is **uncontrolled**. [Research on recursive training](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y?ref=gonzocapital.net) has shown that when models repeatedly learn from generated material without preserving enough of the original distribution, the output can gradually narrow and distort. There is no evidence that Anthropic launched Project Panama because someone over in San Francisco was panicking about model collapse. The documented attraction of books is much, much broader than that: quality, depth, access, and huge quantities of useful text. But… The provenance problem is where I think the story gets stranger. Rare information starts falling away. Certain mistakes become more common. The model begins learning from an increasingly degraded reflection of what earlier models learned from humans. Almost like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy *ad infinitum*. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/08/CleanShot-2026-08-12-at-18.34.25@2x.png) This is not how the paper tested model collapse, but you get the idea. Source: [Finely AI](https://www.tiktok.com/@finely.ai/video/7500275750994447638?ref=gonzocapital.net) The phrase that became popular for this was ‘model collapse’, although I personally think the provenance problem is more interesting than the dramatic name. If a future training corpus contains millions of pages that were generated by previous models, how do you reliably know what originally came from us supposedly learned, upright simians? And once models are rewriting human work, summarizing previous model output, generating articles from generated press releases, and filling search results with content derived from other content, the ancestry gets chaotic, very, very quickly. That is the loop I’ve become obsessed with recently. A rabbit hole I haven’t gotten the slightest hope of crawling out of anytime soon. AI learned from the human internet, then slowly became part of the very same internet itself. The environment that trained the first generation no longer exists in the same form for the next one. And it never will, ever again. And the older material also starts looking different in this post-machine-learning world. Libraries, archived websites, old magazines, dead forums, dusty books. None of these became better sources of information overnight. What changed is the confidence we can have about where they came from. The snake has begun eating its own tail! ## **I Found a Fossil in Google Docs** While researching this, I started looking through some of my old files. I found a Google Doc called *The Lizard*, dated May 19, 2018. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/08/CleanShot-2026-08-12-at-18.39.03@2x.png) A fossil from May 19, 2018\. Questionable prose, immaculate provenance. Source: Me I wrote it while I was living in Vietnam. It is about something I experienced there, written in whatever style and state of mind I happened to have eight years ago. I had largely forgotten it existed. I’ll even go so far as to say that it’s perhaps a painful reminder that I hate my own writing and haven’t gotten much better in a decade. There is literally nothing especially important about this particular short story. It is not some lost masterpiece from my youth. Mostly it is an old piece of writing sitting in an archive. But reading it now, it struck me that the document has acquired a characteristic I had absolutely no reason to think about in 2018. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt who wrote it. It would hardly satisfy a forensic data auditor, but I don't need one to tell me where this thing came from. I remember writing it. There is no ambiguity about whether a model generated the first draft, fixed the grammar, rewrote half the paragraphs, or quietly inserted itself into the process somewhere along the way. I wrote it years before any of those tools were available to the world. The document may not have changed, but the world around it certainly has gotten weirder and wilder. That makes it something like a fossil or a relic of time. Not in the sense that it is precious or worth hanging in the halls of some magnificent museum, but because it comes from a layer of the information environment formed under conditions that won’t ever exist again. There must be trillions of things like it too… Old blogs that have not been updated in fifteen years. Abandoned message boards. University essays. Email archives. Newspaper databases. Flickr accounts. Personal websites maintained by people on some sort of spectrum who knew far too much about orchids or model trains or tropical fish. Photographs sitting on discontinued hard drives. Old company documents nobody cared to delete. Most of this material is individually worthless. Collectively, though, it records a period when human authorship was still that *default* assumption. That is yet another thing that makes those old physical books interesting too. They belong to the same historical layer. ## **The Oil Under the Library** The comparison I keep coming back to is oil, although this stretch of a conceit breaks if you take it too literally. Information is very obviously not a consumable resource in the same way. Training a model on a book does not burn the words. The text can be copied endlessly, and humans can keep producing new material every day. What is finite, however, is the historical period itself. There is unfortunately a closed corpus of information created before generative AI became an ordinary participant in our ecosystem. We can preserve that material and duplicate it as much as we damn well like, but we cannot produce another twenty years of internet magically out of thin air from the pre-GPT times. That is where my silly, little geological analogy becomes useful. Oil fields matter because enormous deposits formed under conditions that cannot simply be recreated whenever we need more. We simply don’t have the time. The individual organisms that eventually became part of the deposit are borderline irrelevant. But the layer matters. The pre-generative internet is beginning to look like an informational version of that. Researchers at [Epoch AI have tried to estimate how much high-quality public human text exists](https://epoch.ai/publications/can-ai-scaling-continue-through-2030?ref=gonzocapital.net) for AI training. The number is necessarily rough, but their work points toward something critical. Frontier AI has been consuming the easily accessible stock of high-quality human-generated text much faster than humans can create equivalent material, and the deficit grows. There are really two problems colliding here. AI labs want enormous amounts of useful human material, and the easiest high-quality supply does not expand at anything like the rate compute has. At the same time, the newer internet is becoming more complicated to trace back to a human source. Old material happens to be unusually attractive on both fronts. That does not mean models are about to run out of things to learn from, though. There is private data, video, audio, scientific measurements, interactions with the physical world, newly created human material, synthetic data, and training techniques that extract more value from existing datasets. Still, the first frontier models received a strange one-time inheritance from their forebears. They arrived after decades of public human writing had accumulated and before generative AI had become a major contributor to that same environment. No future model gets that same cushy deal. The archive itself is not going anywhere. We can duplicate it endlessly forever. But the historical window in which it was produced has closed. Every new year of internet now arrives under different conditions from 2004, 1997, or 1986. A geological layer can be drilled again. It cannot be freshly deposited on command. This is why the awkward, old material suddenly becomes intriguing. A forgotten forum from 2004 might be full of nonsense, but the nonsense has unusually clear provenance. The same is true of a printed book from 1978 or some embarrassing short story I wrote in Vietnam when I was trying to be artistic and profound. Provenance is becoming the harder part to pin down. We have more information than we know what to do with, but we are less certain than ever about who made it, when it was created, and how many machines may have touched that data along its journey. ## **Certified Organic Humans** We are already starting to build products around that problem. The Authors Guild now offers a [Human Authored certification](https://authorsguild.org/human-authored/?ref=gonzocapital.net) for books. Writers can register qualifying works and display a mark indicating that a human indeed wrote the text, with certain allowances for research, grammar, and spelling, and allowances for limited editing tools. [![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/08/image-3.png)](https://authorsguild.org/human-authored/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) Source: [Authors Guild](https://authorsguild.org/human-authored/?ref=gonzocapital.net) The startlingly strange part of all this is how quickly it already started feeling ordinary. For almost the entire history of publishing, putting “written by a human” on the cover of a book would have sounded like certifying that it contained words. One would have been relentlessly mocked. It’s not like there was anybody else around to write it. Now the assumption has become the opposite. Something publishers and authors may want to prove. It reminds me a little of food labeling. The underlying items did not suddenly change, but the environment around them did, and eventually the absence of something becomes a selling point. We are already drifting toward the language of food labels: no preservatives, no artificial colors, human-authored. That sounds ridiculous until you scroll through Amazon and realize why those absurd labels exist in the first place. ## **The Machine Writes Back** A [recent study looked at more than 14,000 self-published genre-fiction titles](https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20349?ref=gonzocapital.net) sold on Amazon between 2023 and 2026\. Those researchers found a growing presence of books containing *substantial* amounts of AI-generated text in them. Those books were not necessarily dominating sales, which does matter. This is not a story about readers suddenly deciding AI fiction is better than human fiction. Maybe I’ll be writing that essay in a year’s time. The more peculiar effect was volume. Generative AI made it dramatically easier to pump out something resembling a book at scale. The researchers found a market where the number of titles competing for attention grew much faster than the amount of money readers were spending. That changes a creative market even if the average AI-generated book is mediocre (sorry, but they usually are). It also completes the loop in a way that would have sounded absurd only a few years ago. Human books helped train the models. The models became capable of writing books themselves. Those books entered the same digital markets as human books, which forced human authors to start proving that their books were certifiably human-made. At roughly the same time, old physical books became attractive to AI companies partly because they come from a simpler era when none of this ambiguity even existed. This is why I find it difficult to make Anthropic the villain of this specific story. And trust me, there are plenty of other things to be outraged about. There are legitimate questions about how AI companies acquired training material and whether creators should have been compensated. There are also very reasonable concerns about obscure or rare works disappearing into private corporate datasets, and vanishing altogether. But the image of Anthropic chopping up books is almost too convenient. It gives the story a physical act that looks obviously wrong, which makes it easy to stop thinking there. The more consequential change is harder to take a snapshot of. For decades, digitization solved an obvious problem. Physical information was difficult to search, harder to copy, and often impossible to access. We spent years converting books, photographs, newspapers, and almost everything else we could find into raw, scannable data. Then the digital world became capable of generating information on its own. Once the digital world could manufacture material at essentially unlimited scale, provenance began carrying a hell of a lot more weight. There is more text than anyone could ever read. More images than anyone could ever see. More material can be generated in an afternoon than a person could consume in a thousand bajillion lifetimes. The tricky part now is sleuthing around to figure out who produced that content. Where it may have come from and for which purpose. Oh, and how many generations of machines sit between you and whatever human experience originally existed at its core. Which brings us back to the books nobody wanted. Somewhere there is probably a computer manual from the early 1990s sitting on a shelf because nobody ever bothered to throw it away. For years, the internet made that book look increasingly obsolete. Now its obsolescence may be exactly what makes it useful. It turns out sitting still for thirty years has its advantages. ### Everyone Is Asking Someone Else for Money URL: https://www.gonzocapital.net/everyone-is-asking-someone-else-for-money/ Last updated: 2026-08-06T11:07:23.000Z ## On Capital, Status, and the Humility of the Ask There is a particular expression founders get when they realize you are a venture capitalist. A certain twinkle in the eye. A spark of life. You can see the calculation unfold, the gears turning and grinding away, as they look for a calculated plan of attack. The eyes quickly sharpen and then dilate. Whatever conversation was just happening has abruptly come to a halt. Somewhere a microscopic pitch deck on a lightly smashed smartphone screen is being prepped just for your enjoyment. Until a bigger, more important fish swims by, that is. And so it begins… Sometimes gently. More often than not, with all the subtlety of a brick being thrown through the window of a moving vehicle. Sometimes they ask what I invest in, wait for the answer, then pitch me something completely unrelated that they have rehearsed countless times anyway. Sometimes I am eating, aggressively chowing down on finger foods that I’m somehow never able to truly enjoy. Other times I am already engaged in conversation with someone else, while the ravenous turkey buzzards circle me as if I were a rapidly decaying corpse in an otherwise barren desert. Oftentimes I am clearly attempting to leave, scanning the room for some sort of divine, *deus ex machina* escape plan. These distinctions have not always proved decisive. In my peculiar line of work, I’ve been pitched in hallways, conference rooms, hotel lobbies, private dinners, loud parties, quiet corners, crowded elevators, parking lots, public transportation, even romantic date nights with my poor, understanding wife. You name it. Even during conversations that had absolutely nothing to do with venture capital until the other person discovered what I did for a living. Well, it’s part of the job; I suppose I did sign up for all this. More accurately, it is part of going anywhere while possessing a LinkedIn profile that contains the words “venture capital.” Startup founders obviously need money to help them achieve their dream of building that longshot company from scratch. Investors are supposed to have capital to allocate, watchfully on the lookout for people to allocate it to. Conferences gather both groups inside large buildings, provide them with lanyards, ply them with alcohol, feed them tasty food they can never quite find time to eat, and bless them with almost nowhere comfortable to sit, all while acting surprised when everybody begins hunting one another. Apparently this is networking. I imagine it as the worst episode of *Planet Earth*, David Attenborough calmly narrating as founders and investors circle the canapé table, each pretending not to stalk the other. Some founders are brilliant at this little song and dance. They introduce themselves like normal human beings. They ask questions. They listen to the answers. They seamlessly slip in a mention of what they are building so organically you don’t even realize you’re being asked for anything. More often than not, they flounder and flop. Some spectacularly. They appear to have robotically memorized a sequence of generic buzzwords in a particular order and will suffer some sort of catastrophic internal failure if interrupted before reaching the final slide. Others speak for several minutes without pausing, making eye contact, breathing, or even showing any visible interest in whether the person is still standing in front of them or showing any signs of life at all for that matter. I have also heard downright disastrous, confusing, puzzling, bizarre pitches. That too comes with the territory! Pitches that seemed to become less coherent with every additional attempt to clear things up or answer easy questions. Pitches where the founder insisted there was no competition, which is usually either very good news or extremely bad news. It’s nearly always the latter of the two. Pitches built around a market so enormous that the company would only need to capture 0.000001 percent of humanity, including several remote tribes and possibly the research team living in Antarctica, to produce a respectable return for their investors. You know the ones. (Well, I guess that depends on who is actually reading this. Say hello in the comments!) Perhaps you’ve given a pitch like this before. Or received one! Maybe even both…Want to know the truly scary bit? The pitch does not always end when the conversation does either. It could somehow find a way to follow you around after the event is long over. There is the email sent ten minutes after the nonconsensual meeting. The second email harking back to the first dreaded email. The LinkedIn message checking whether the emails have been arriving. The casual status update that is not really relevant or an update so much as another attempt to restart a conversation that both parties may remember very differently. A polite rejection can be treated as feedback. That feedback can also be treated as an objection. The objection can be treated as the final obstacle standing between the founder and a glorious future in which I admit I was wrong, beg forgiveness, and personally carry their company toward a billion-dollar valuation on my weary, overburdened VC shoulders. *This can be extremely tiring.* There. I said it. Is it controversial to say that? I have no idea. Being approached as a source of capital before being approached as a fellow person is strange. Every conversation acquires a second and third layer. Is this person talking to me because they find me interesting? Do we actually have something in common? Did they laugh because the joke was funny? Was the joke funny? Or did they notice the investor badge and decide that my painfully average observations deserved their fullest possible attention? Most likely, it’s some unholy combination of all of the above. Business relationships are inherently transactional. I’m fairly certain that if I ever went to business school, that’s the thing they would drill into my head on that very first day. I am not shocked or offended by this revelation. Nobody attends a venture conference purely for the architecture, the coffee, the vibes, the potential friendship, or the opportunity to stand beneath hideous fluorescent lights and discuss software infrastructure with hundreds of exhausted, travel-weary strangers. We are all there because we *need* something. Founders *need* investors. Investors *need* founders. Sponsors *need* our contact information. Conference organizers *need* another eight hundred euros for access to a dinner happening behind a curtain approximately twelve and a half feet away. Well, look what we have here… A functioning ecosystem! Still, there is a peculiar feeling that comes from being treated like a walking wallet with opinions attached. It hardens even the softest, most charitable and well-meaning hearts. Repetition makes detachment easy. Eventually, you stop hearing a person ask for help and start hearing the opening lines of another transaction. So naturally I started to make jokes about it as I am wont to do. A small step toward retaining my own sanity. Many, if not most, investors partake in this rite of passage. Jokes and humor sustain us. We trade stories about the worst pitches, the strangest approaches, the wildly inappropriate moments, the people who refused to accept that a conversation had ended, or perhaps refused to accept that it had never really begun. Tales of awful manners or downright refusals to accept thoughtful, well-intentioned feedback we went out of our way to provide. Some of the stories are incredibly funny. These are some of my favorite conversations with fellow investors where we compare battle scars and war stories. Founders under pressure, surrounded by infinite competitors, investors, countdown clocks, burn rates, and the spooky, panic-inducing knowledge that their team needs to get paid whether the next fundraising round closes or not, sometimes behave with the social grace of a panicked raccoon trapped inside a gourmet kitchen. And you know what? I empathize with them wholeheartedly. In fact, both things can be true at once. Some founders are earnest and nervous, while some are calmer and frighteningly well-prepared. Some are panicked, arrogant, rude, or a bit too drunk after taking advantage of the open bar to quell the nerves. Some are desperate, obnoxious, and conceited at the same time, one of the more impressive and confounding psychological achievements available to our species. Some are simply just bad at pitching, or lacking the silver-tongued gene. On the other side of the coin, some investors are simply assholes. Cruelly deriding and lording over the plebeian tech serfs beneath them, enjoying the lofty perch they reside on. Unfortunately, the longer I spent on the investor side of these conversations, the easier it became to forget that these types exist. At first, I thought I was merely laughing at the absurdity of bad pitches or unpleasant interactions with overeager founders. The timing or the language. The delusions of grandeur. The TAM larger than all of Earth’s total economic output. The total absence of self-awareness. The strange little theater of someone smugly yet sweatily pretending not to need something while very obviously needing it more than almost anything else in the world. But the stories changed after enough retellings. Or maybe I did. The founders slowly disappeared from the story and became typecast into neat little archetypes. The desperate one or the delusional one or the annoying one or the belligerent one. Another pitch. Another request. Another human being approaching me with an incomplete idea and the misplaced belief that I might be able to help. Somewhere along the way, I stopped merely making jokes about their behavior. I’m ashamed to admit that I began enjoying what the behavior suggested about me. That people *needed* my attention. Or that my opinion carried some sort of outsized weight. That I belonged on one side of the table and they belonged on the other. That their nervousness said something about their abilities, while my ability to remain stoic and calm said something flattering about my own abilities.It did, of course, but only because I was not the one asking for money. At least, not at that particular point in time. ## A More Expensive Kind of Begging Of course, venture capitalists do not live permanently on the comfortable side of this seemingly one-sided arrangement, although I must admit that would be nice. We spend a downright impressive amount of time complaining about founders asking us for money, considering that asking other people for money is also a rather important part of our own line of work. Founders raise rounds, and venture capitalists raise funds. The terminology is different enough to preserve everyone’s dignity, but the underlying activity remains *eerily* similar. A founder presents a company that barely exists and explains why it will eventually become extremely valuable. A venture capitalist presents a collection of companies, some of which may not exist yet, and explains why they will eventually become extremely valuable, based on a hunch. One arrives with a product, or an MVP, or a half-functioning MVP held together by caffeine, cigarettes, and the goodwill of a criminally underpaid engineer. The other brings a thesis, a pipeline, a portfolio construction model, several graphs climbing heroically toward the upper-right corner of the screen, and a team slide featuring the cheesiest team photos you’ve ever seen. Both are asking someone to ignore the large empty spaces where evidence will hopefully appear later and picture a future in which that money will multiply by unreasonable amounts. Trust that we have noticed something other people missed. Accept that we possess the judgment to act on it. Believe that the market will remain open, the founders will remain sane, regulators will remain sufficiently distracted, and our carefully modeled returns will survive contact with the profoundly unmodeled chaos of our shared reality. Then, ideally, they wire the money without too much additional thought or follow-up questions. Investors often talk as though founders belong to a separate species called ‘Fundraisers,’ identifiable by haunted expressions, financial projections, copious amounts of trauma, and a sudden desire to reconnect with someone they met once at a forgettable side-event in Lisbon long ago. Fund managers do the same damn thing. We adapt the deck to our audience. We bring one part of the strategy forward and subtly move another back into the shadows from whence it came. We change our words or cadence or levels of excitement to match the potential LP, in the hope that it will nudge us ever-so-slightly closer toward that fateful check. We study the person across from us, waiting for a nod, a question about one of the portfolio companies, or any small indication that they are still mentally present and have not slipped into the dissociative fugue-state haze that often occurs halfway through a fundraising presentation. The waiting is the worst part. The most familiar and loathsome part of fundraising after sending over a deck or other fund materials. You send the data room over and receive a polite reply explaining that the opportunity looks very interesting. “Very interesting.” What a magnificent little phrase that is, eh? It offers warmth without commitment, attention without enthusiasm, and the possibility of another conversation without creating any legal, financial, or emotional obligation to ever speak ever again. It can mean just about anything you want or don’t want it to. A yes that has not yet been approved, or a no that has not yet found the courage to introduce itself. Maybe just an email opened by accident while someone was searching for a boarding pass or a six-digit login code. There is no reliable way to know, so you wait while repeatedly muttering to yourself that you are not waiting. You convince yourself your professional future doesn’t hinge on the answer to that question. By God, you have an entire company to run. Or a fund. Or at minimum, a very important, sleek-looking spreadsheet requiring your immediate and undivided attention. You try as you may to carry on like a normal, emotionally stable adult who has not checked their inbox nine times since breakfast. The delay can always be explained. The committee has not met. The family principal is traveling. The investment team is trapped inside an internal review involving scenario modeling, risk analysis, outside expert consultants, and one extremely wealthy eighty-three-year-old man who refuses to approve anything until his preferred tarot card reader returns from vacation. Perhaps they are crushed beneath an avalanche of applications, and their system has fallen to pieces, utterly incapable of surviving the wrath of their inbound leads (I speak from experience here). I have watched carefully constructed processes fall apart once enough people begin throwing decks, messages, introductions, reminders, updates, and friendly little nudges into the machinery. There is always a process, and there is also usually someone else who needs to be consulted, even when the person consulting them has spent the previous six months presenting themselves as the sole ruler of a private financial empire. Founders ask venture capitalists. Venture capitalists ask limited partners. Limited partners may answer to families, committees, boards, trustees, government mandates, consultants, beneficiaries, or another pool of capital sitting further upstream. Eventually, that wealth chain becomes impossible to coherently follow. You begin to suspect that most of the world’s money is controlled by seven people sitting inside a windowless room in Geneva, passing the same folder back and forth while the rest of us lowborn peasants pretend to possess autonomy and investment authority. Well, everyone indeed answers to someone. That’s an objective truth. The person who appeared enormously powerful over lunch may spend that same afternoon trying to persuade someone who barely remembers their name. None of this came as some sort of grand revelation to me, though. I already knew fundraising was an excruciating, torture-tactic of a game. I knew founders carried payroll, expectations, years of work, all while shouldering the deeply unpleasant possibility that none of it would survive the rigors of startup life. I have always tried to treat them as people first, even when the pitch was terrible or the timing bordered on criminal. Sadly, that empathy doesn’t make you forever immune despite your best intentions. There is some [research behind this discomfort](https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341%5FReadings/Power/Galinsky%5Fet%5Fal%5FPower-and-Perspectives-Not-Taken.pdf?ref=gonzocapital.net). Experiments on power and perspective-taking have found that power can make it harder to see a situation through someone else’s eyes, often without any conscious decision to stop caring. Apparently, the room can begin rearranging your mind before you realize you have started believing it. You can understand the hierarchy perfectly well and still enjoy your special, cozy place inside it. You can recognize another person’s vulnerability and become impatient with it anyway. You can know that status is temporary while quietly absorbing the way a room or event or person treats you. No, raising capital did not teach me that founders were indeed human. That’s a bit obvious even for the not-so-sharp among us. Raising capital did, however, show me how easily knowing something and consistently behaving as though you know it can drift further and further apart. This neat, little lesson became harder to ignore as I moved through different kinds of financial rooms, attended different events and VC dinners, or sat through a bona fide litany of different LP pitches. I have been in my fair share of rooms where venture capitalists are treated like rockstars or minor members of a royal family. Red carpets and flower petals gracing private entrances and reserved tables. Special dinners and yacht parties. Founders waiting patiently for a chance to introduce themselves while event organizers scramble to explain that the investors are taking a short break from the unbearable burden of being asked questions. It is deceptively easy to get swept up in that sort of atmosphere, absorbed by the dizzying allure of it all. People lean in closer when you speak and hang on tightly to every last, insignificant word. They listen carefully to your opinions about markets you may only understand at a surface level. They laugh at jokes that did not deserve anywhere near that level of enthusiasm. Soon they are asking what you think about artificial intelligence, geopolitics, interest rates, robotics, the future of labor, the collapse of Western civilization, and whether the hors d’oeuvres contain gluten or not. After enough of this, you may even begin to feel somewhat important. It’s intoxicating. Well, until you encounter that next level. You want a truly humbling experience? Try going to [Davos](https://www.weforum.org/meetings/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2026/?ref=gonzocapital.net) in January. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/08/image.png) Source: NPR Maybe a side event at a conference for family offices and ultra-high-net-worth individuals appears on your screen. The website is tastefully beige and unassuming. There are photographs of villas, mountains, cigars, and people staring thoughtfully across bodies of water they presumably own. All of the hallmarks of cliché wealth stirred together. You look at the ticket price. You rub your eyes and look again. Surely it includes a small apartment. Possibly a sports car. **Spoiler:** It doesn’t. It doesn’t guarantee any favorable outcome at all, actually. Suddenly, you are no longer the important, big-shot investor entering through the private door. You are another forgettable fund manager hoping to gain access to the bigger fish that swim in grander seas. The people who possess enough capital to materially alter the trajectory of your business and life. Same exact person. Different tag or badge. How very sobering. In one room, I am treated like the money. In the next, I cannot reasonably justify the price of being allowed near it. This caste system becomes impossible to ignore after that. A founder may look at a venture fund and see an almost unimaginable concentration of wealth. Millions of dollars available to place into ideas, sometimes on little more than conviction, relationships, or an alarming tolerance for risk. The fund manager may look at an institutional allocator controlling billions and feel roughly the way a child feels when begging a parent for spare change while the ice cream man drives by on a hot summer day. The allocator then spends the following week attempting to impress a sovereign fund, a prehistoric banking family, or some private office representing a fortune accumulated through shipping, mining, manufacturing, real estate, or an ancestor who made one excellent decision in 1794 and permanently altered the reproductive incentives of the entire bloodline. There is *always* another layer, another dinner, another committee, another person whose time is treated as more valuable because the money behind them contains a few additional, pesky, little zeros. And you know what? That hierarchy does not dissolve into thin air as you move upward. It just becomes a hell of a lot more expensive. And this is not merely the social theater of Davos. In the first quarter of 2026, [six venture firms collected more than three quarters of all the capital raised by US funds](https://nvca.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Q1-2026-PitchBook-NVCA-Venture-Monitor.pdf?ref=gonzocapital.net). Experienced managers captured more than 90 percent of it. There may always be a richer investor, but an increasingly small number of firms appear to own the building. I have also met smug LPs who seemed to enjoy the imbalance more than was strictly necessary. They communicated through ambiguity, maintaining enough interest to keep the conversation alive without offering anything remotely resembling a decision or an indication of which direction they may be leaning in. They may have been evaluating. They may have been preserving optionality. Some, I suspect, are likely intoxicated by the enjoyment of being pursued. The thrill of being chased has its appeal. That possibility does not appear often in the official literature on institutional capital allocation, but I remain convinced it explains a nontrivial amount of human behavior. The most frustrating part is not necessarily rejection… A clear no can actually be quite liberating, providing closure that allows everyone involved to move on with their lives, update a spreadsheet, complain privately, and set off to find someone new to disappoint them. The maybes are worse. Heartbreaking even. A warm meeting followed by silence. The vague suggestion to kick the can down the proverbial road and reconnect after another milestone is hit. A request for additional information that you send immediately, only for it to be placed inside the infinite warehouse at the end of *Raiders of the Lost Ark*, never to be seen by another living soul. Enthusiasm seems to evaporate without ever becoming negative enough to acknowledge. Founders have complained about this behavior for as long as venture capital, or any sort of investing, has existed, and they are normally right on the money. None of this was new information, although my place in the machinery of capital formation and allocation had shifted. When the silence belongs to someone else, I suddenly feel every hour of it. A delayed response looked less like an overflowing inbox and more like carelessness. Ambiguous enthusiasm sounded more evasive. The reluctance to say no and relinquish me from my hopeless optimism felt unnecessarily cruel. I catch myself asking why people could not simply be direct, then I remember how often directness becomes complicated when you are the person trying to preserve a professional relationship, an option, or the likely possibility that circumstances could change later. That did not and does not make every delay reasonable, nor does it absolve anyone who enjoyed keeping fundraisers suspended in uncertainty. It simply makes the resemblance harder to casually dismiss. I’ve always understood that pressure founders carry. Raising capital did not magically install empathy where none existed before. It did, however, highlight how easily empathy can coexist with habits you would dislike immediately if they were mirrored back in your direction. The investor and the fundraiser are NEVER fixed identities, simply temporary roles assigned by the location of the money in that particular situation. Move it into another snapshot in time and the person who seemed powerful five minutes earlier is checking their inbox, rereading a polite sentence, and wondering what in the world “very interesting” was supposed to mean in this particular instance. ## People Like You More When You Write Checks Who would have guessed that handing out capital makes people like you more? Duh. The strange thing is that the money begins working before anyone actually writes a check. Simply being tangentially associated with capital changes the temperature around you. It has a mysterious way of making messages get answered faster. Invitations pop out of left field. People who might otherwise have offered a polite nod immediately become intensely curious about your thoughts on the future of technology, markets, human civilization, or whatever subject happens to be floating through the room at that particular point in time. Sometimes they even ask about you. Like how you are doing or what’s been going on in your life. Sometimes it even feels sincere! I have watched colleagues move on over from venture capital into operating roles or become founders themselves, only to discover that a portion of the warmth surrounding them had apparently belonged to their job title. The invitations slowed down. People became much harder to reach. Conversations that once happened easily began requiring introductions, follow-ups, reminders, friendly bumps, pings, and perhaps the occasional small ritual sacrifice at the altar of the gods of calendar availability. These were the same exact people, with the same exact experience and roughly the same exact personality. They had simply moved from one side of the table to the other. Unsurprisingly, money generates a great deal of ambient affection. It makes people laugh slightly harder or turn ordinary opinions into brilliant, strategic market insights. It causes otherwise busy individuals to discover unexpected openings in their crowded calendars. People unexpectedly want you for their conference panels and podcasts. Then the perceived access disappears and some of the affection goes with it. That raises an uncomfortable question. Did they like the person, or did they like what could move through them? The even less comfortable question is how often I have been guilty of the same thing. I would love to say that I treat every person with identical enthusiasm regardless of whether they are useful to me, but this would be an outright lie and a worrying sign that I had learned absolutely nothing from writing the previous several thousand words. Despite my best efforts and my genuine approach to networking and conversing with other people, we all allocate attention. We respond faster to certain people. We prioritize conversations that might lead somewhere. We remain vaguely connected to individuals who could become important later and quietly lose touch with others once our lives stop overlapping. It’s a universal axiom in our industry, whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not. This is not unique to venture capital either. It may simply be adult social life with a spreadsheet or CRM attached. Nor is every transactional relationship dishonest. Founders want investors. Investors want returns. Fund managers want LPs. LPs want access to attractive opportunities. Everyone wants introductions, information, credibility, distribution, employment, customers, influence, or at minimum a seat at the dinner where the *good* wine is being served. Mutual usefulness is not some sort of blight on society or a moral shortcoming. Many genuine friendships begin because two people were professionally useful to one another. Affection and utility can occupy the same relationship without immediately strangling each other. The trouble begins when we lose track of which one is doing the heavy lifting. Strategic interest starts dressing itself as friendship and disingenuous pleasantries. Wealth gets mistaken for wisdom. A person becomes endlessly fascinating because everyone knows they can say yes, while the person asking for something is treated as a minor administrative inconvenience. The investor who arrives forty minutes late or blows off calls is busy and important. The founder who arrives flustered is disorganized and unserious. The wealthy person’s laconic nature becomes intimidating confidence. Their silence suggests deep insight and brooding thought. Their basic inability to respond to an email is recast as evidence that their time is simply more valuable than yours. People searching for capital rarely receive such flattering interpretations. We scrutinize their tone, follow-ups, body language, confidence, and timing, hoping to detect weakness from the normal human debris left behind by someone doing something stressful. I have routinely caught myself doing this. A founder follows up too soon, and it feels desperate, like a clingy date texting after a tepid first meeting. Another waits too long and apparently lacks urgency. Someone is nervous, so perhaps they cannot lead. Someone else appears completely tranquil, so they must not understand the danger. The rules mutate depending on who is being judged, and how much power, capital, or influence is involved in the equation. It is an extraordinarily convenient system for the person doing the judging. I do not, for the record, think every connection in finance is fake. That would be much too easy or lazy, and it would also be very, very wrong. I have met generous people, sincere people, and people who offered help without calculating what might return to them later. Hell, I’ve even made a few friends in my time as a VC. And somehow it’s not very easy for me to make friends (I know I know I must be a lot of fun at parties). I have also watched a room become more interested in someone the moment it learned how much money they controlled, or which fund or Fortune 500 company logo sits neatly beside their name. Money does not create every hierarchy, but it makes this one easier to see. It reveals who receives patience and who is expected to earn it. ## **Some Money Is Too Expensive** I hope that this doesn’t come across as a suggestion that you should simply give up hope, submit to the caste system, and play its hideous game. None of this means that a person raising money should ever become endlessly agreeable. Fundraising does indeed require humility. You are asking another person to trust you with capital, often based on limited evidence and a future that exists primarily inside a collection of slides. They are, in turn, are allowed to ask difficult questions. They are allowed to hesitate. They are allowed to decide that you are woefully wrong. You are even allowed to dislike the decision without concluding that the person who made it is stupid, cowardly, or personally committed to sabotaging your destiny to be a unicorn founder or the world’s next Warren Buffett. But humility has its limits. The fact that someone possesses money does not require you to admire them. I have encountered people in family-office and UHNWI investor circles whose public personas appeared almost scientifically engineered in a laboratory to repel and disgust me. Wealth displayed as personality (or lack of). Arrogance presented as aspiration. Social media profiles filled with expensive objects, shallow proclamations, and the unmistakable energy of someone who had never encountered a room where another person was permitted to disagree. One in particular made me pause recently while doing some investor networking. This person is capable of writing a meaningful check. The sort of check that could help build something, extend the runway, create momentum, or at least make several difficult conversations temporarily less difficult. But I do not want to flatter them. I do not want to pretend that their vulgarity is fascinating or that their money has transformed a collection of terrible instincts into an investment philosophy. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/08/image-1.png) Source: The Guardian That sounds easy to say when the money is hypothetical. The decision becomes more complicated when you need it. This is where all the cheerful talk about alignment usually becomes very technical. People discuss time horizons, return expectations, liquidity, governance rights, reporting requirements, and the many other ways two parties can discover several years later that they agreed to completely different things. All of that matters. Character matters even more. An LP can be passive on paper while still changing the culture surrounding a fund. Their expectations influence behavior. Their reputation becomes attached to yours. The kinds of conduct you tolerate in exchange for the capital rarely remain isolated to the fundraising process. Not every check improves the institution it enters. In fact, some checks can actively harm the institution and invite chaos and discord. Some money arrives carrying expectations you do not want. Some money requires a degree of personal obedience that no management fee can make respectable. Occasionally the cost has very little to do with the terms written in the actual contractual agreement. I am not claiming there is morally pure capital somewhere waiting to be discovered by the sufficiently principled. There is not. Money has a history. Institutions have contradictions. I have made compromises and will almost certainly make more of them. Anyone who operates inside finance while claiming total purity is either lying, delusional, or has inherited enough money to convert personal preference into their own moral philosophy. The question is not whether the person or the capital is flawless. The question is [how much of yourself must be surrendered to obtain that capital](https://www.gonzocapital.net/confessions-of-a-compromised-capitalist/). In the first thing I published here, I wrote that leaving finance felt like handing the room over entirely to people I did not trust with it. I told myself I would rather remain inside and help direct capital with a conscience. This is the less heroic part of that bargain. Directing capital with a conscience means very little if you are willing to trade away the conscience to obtain the capital. Fundraising should make you less arrogant. It should humble you and teach you that conviction alone does not entitle you to anyone else’s money and that the people across the table may see risks you have ignored. It should not turn every wealthy person into someone worthy of reverence or worship. There must remain some distance between adapting your pitch and reorganizing your personality around another person’s approval. The hardest test of alignment is deciding whether you are willing to walk away from money that would genuinely help. But moral compasses cost a fortune these days. ## **Everyone Is Asking Someone Else for Money** All this brings me back to the founders circling conference rooms with decks prepared on lightly damaged smartphone screens. Some will still approach at the worst possible moment. They’ll be socially awkward, unable to read the room, utterly missing the fact that the person they are pitching is already being pitched by another person just like them. Some will speak for far too long. Some will ignore every signal that the conversation has ended and then follow up the next morning to ask when we can continue it. I will always find this irritating. I’m only human. Empathy does not require investment, and it certainly does not require pretending every pitch is good. There are no participation trophies in fundraising for startups. A founder can be a wonderful human being, and still be wrong, or early, or not cut out for entrepreneurship at all. An investor can be empathetic and still politely reject an investment application. The problem begins when the ability to say no starts feeling like proof that the person saying it belongs to a higher order of the species. Capital creates real power… Everybody knows that. Companies survive or thrive or crumble and disappear based on who receives it. Employees keep jobs or lose them. Teams shrink or grow. Ideas either gain enough oxygen to become real or remain trapped inside the heads of the visionaries that dreamed them up. Pretending the hierarchy does not exist would be dishonest and frankly, not very useful. Treating it as a measure of human worth is something far, far worse. Someone needing your approval does not make them smaller than you. Needing another person’s approval does not place you beneath them. No amount of success or money should ever let you lose sight of that fact. And treating people decently only because the roles might reverse later would miss the point entirely. That is still transactional behavior, only with a longer time horizon. The founder deserves to be treated respectfully in a dignified manner, even if they never become successful, never raise another round, and never occupy a position where ignoring their message could cost you something. Regardless of whether they are a young, first-time founder from Nigeria fresh out of university, or an ex-OpenAI employee from Singapore with two unicorn exits. The LP deserves honesty and respect even if they ultimately decline. The investor should be able to reject a company without turning the founder’s vulnerability into entertainment. The fundraiser should be able to hear no without surrendering their judgment, dignity, or ability to distinguish a useful relationship from a wealthy asshole. None of us performs this ritual perfectly. I sure as hell haven’t. This “journal entry” is a testament to the fact that I don’t stop thinking about this and won’t ever forget it. There will be more bad pitches. More vague replies. More investor dinners, expensive conferences, private rooms, broken processes, unanswered emails, and people trying to appear calm while quietly wondering whether they have enough money to survive the next stage. A whole lot of awkward, imperfect fumbling around. The ecosystem will continue functioning. More or less. At the next conference, another founder will notice the investor badge or bracelet, and begin preparing their approach. The investor will see them coming, glance instinctively toward the nearest exit, and then check their phone as it gently vibrates inside their pocket. An LP may have finally replied... ### Music for People Who Aren’t Listening URL: https://www.gonzocapital.net/music-for-people-who-arent-listening/ Last updated: 2026-07-30T18:29:02.000Z The palatial, cavernous villa sat on a small island in Thailand, large enough to make an emperor blush with envy. There were vacant rooms nobody ever seemed to enter, sprawling terraces overlooking the sparkling water, and a dining table covered with enough food to feed a famished village. Platters of wagyu beef, exotic fruits, a sea’s worth of fish, luxurious desserts… By the end of the night, most of that food would still be sitting there, untouched. On the bright side, at least the army of staff and hired help was able to try caviar and king crab for the first time. You’re probably wondering at this point where this is going, why I was there, and why you should care. Well, somehow I had been hired to play music for an actual Russian oligarch. I do not use “oligarch” here as decorative shorthand for a rich man with an ugly watch. He was, as far as I could tell, the genuine article. Flanked by well-dressed guests, all seemingly bored in the face of their splendorous status quo. The villa, the staff, the security, the guests, and the studied boredom all suggested that there was nothing out of the ordinary. No diminished decadence on their never-ending vacation. No expenses spared. We set up on stage, tuned our instruments, shook out the nervous jitters, and waited. Not knowing what to expect, we were instructed to start playing our set for the empty gala. Audience be damned. The guests couldn’t possibly walk into a silent banquet after all. When they eventually wandered their way over to the beachside feast, they did not seem particularly interested in us, nor impressed with the scenery in general. I cannot remember much eye contact. There was no hostility in it. Hostility would have required acknowledgment. We were another part of the arrangement, like the lighting, the flowers, the hired Russian dancers wearing traditional, folklike garb, the local Muay Thai fighters staging a private gladiatorial spectacle, or the pristine food decorating the street-sized table. And so we played. A few times we replayed songs that we played before anyone had arrived at the beginning of our set. Fortunately or unfortunately, nobody noticed. I had performed for indifferent audiences before. Anyone who has played music for money or entertained in any way, on any level, eventually learns that being heard is not included in the contract. You can spend years trying to create something beautiful and perfecting your craft, only to then discover that the person paying simply isn’t interested in the process, the person, or the actual music itself. They mostly need a respectable sequence of noises to fill the intermittent gaps between conversations. Luckily for my younger self, that gig paid very well. So well, in fact, my partner at the time and I treated ourselves to a mini vacation at a resort on the island AND a few new instruments like bass guitars, amps, and a keyboard for our growing collection of dust collectors. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/07/image-12.png) Source: TripSavvy This paid much better than most nights when people actually cared or listened. When I was a much younger man, I was accustomed to playing more for much less, and feeling more heard, seen, and appreciated. More useful, more jovial, more creative and motivated. More in love with the idea of playing music as a profession. In that bizarre little royal banquet on the Gulf of Thailand, the strange part was not that the guests ignored us. Their indifference was familiar. What unsettled me most was how little it mattered in the grand scheme of that transaction. They had purchased live music, and live music was certainly present, as were the people tasked with making it on the spot. Our attention was required. Theirs was, well, optional? Okay, that might be a bit unfair. Someone may have been listening quietly. The sad-looking billionaire may have loved every note and simply possessed the facial expression of a man reviewing disappointing quarterly reports. Resting rich face? I cannot claim to know what happened inside anyone else’s head. I only know what it felt like from where I stood on stage. It felt as though the music had been mechanically separated from the people making it. Our physical bodies were necessary because the “technology” of the evening still required hands, breath, memory, coordination, and a willingness to remain on stage. But socially, we were already absent, removed from the mix. The most we could hope for was a photo or brief video for some influencer's Instagram reel. At some point I looked across the villa at the smorgasbord nobody seemed to eat and wondered whether the food and the entertainment and the dancing and the music were serving the same purpose… To demonstrate abundance and serve as a not-so-memorable backdrop. Their consumption was almost entirely beside the point. I couldn’t for the life of me recall what we played that evening. I remember the scene more clearly than the songs. That may say something unflattering about the performance, or about memory, or about what happens when art becomes a transactional product for the highest bidder. Unfortunately, there is an entire economy out there built around music that nobody listens to very closely, if at all. You’ve probably heard it countless times without thinking about it. It plays beneath advertisements, hotel breakfasts, corporate presentations, video games, reality television, restaurants, podcasts, shopping centers, and luxury feasts on tropical islands. Most of it is made by working musicians who understand that transcendence is not always the assignment. Glamor and fame are not guaranteed. Sometimes the assignment is simply to make the silence less noticeable. For a long time, producing that atmosphere still required a person. Even when musicians were treated as decorative labor, their physical presence created obligations. They had to be hired, scheduled, transported, fed, paid. Their presence endured as human beings. A person had to learn the instrument. Someone had to write or arrange the music. Someone had to show up, play or record it, invoice for it, and accept that the audience might remember the dessert more clearly than the melody. For most of human history, even disposable music required an inconvenient, pesky human somewhere in the mix. Well, now companies like [Suno](https://www.google.com/aclk?sa=L&pf=1&ai=DChsSEwj3z5C-rfWVAxUEn4MHHXs0BisYACICCAEQAhoCZWY&co=1&ase=2&gclid=CjwKCAjwpqHTBhAcEiwAj2Afusi09j51w9wzvek5g4ExTNGEhxWBDxk-6VJgf38kEFWnNtygHsuo9xoCCwIQAvD%5FBwE&ei=MJ5oaqqFCfyO9u8PvOeq8A0&cce=2&category=acrcp%5Fv1%5F32&sig=AOD64%5F3j3FWBaiIESOStmnyhrG0EIQVqPQ&q&sqi=2&nis=4&adurl=https://suno.com?utm%5Fsource%3Dgoogle%26utm%5Fmedium%3Dcpc%26utm%5Fcampaign%3D22340479166%26utm%5Fterm%3Dsuno%2520ai%26utm%5Fcontent%3D802264255818%26wpsrc%3DGoogle%2520AdWords%26wpcid%3D22340479166%26wpscid%3D177890886633%26wpcrid%3D802264255818%26wpkwid%3Dkwd-2105142870610%26wpkwn%3Dsuno%2520ai%26wpkmatch%3De%26wpsnetn%3Dg%26gad%5Fsource%3D1%26gad%5Fcampaignid%3D22340479166%26gbraid%3D0AAAAA9pWpdtW69zCA8nI4ERFH7IWkO7w0%26gclid%3DCjwKCAjwpqHTBhAcEiwAj2Afusi09j51w9wzvek5g4ExTNGEhxWBDxk-6VJgf38kEFWnNtygHsuo9xoCCwIQAvD%5FBwE&ved=2ahUKEwiq3Yi-rfWVAxV8h%5F0HHbyzCt4Q0Qx6BAgPEAE&ref=gonzocapital.net) have begun removing the inconvenience. ## How the Machines Learned to Play This so-called machine never wonders or cares whether anyone is listening… It never dreams of bright lights, or infuses its own trauma or drama into the art, transmuting pain into audible emotion. It does, however, require something to listen to first. It needs *inspiration* to put it as delicately as I possibly can. Suno can take a few lines of text and return a complete song, all in the time it takes to skip to the next track on Spotify. Phantom vocals arrive already attached to somewhat sensible lyrics. Drums, guitars, synthesizers, orchestras, and production choices appear without anybody booking a studio session or arguing over that “perfect” final mix. You can describe the mood, genre, and subject, then wait for the machine to “compose” something that resembles music made by people who dedicated half a lifetime to their crafts. I won’t sit here and pretend it isn’t impressive. But that ability obviously had to come from somewhere. In a court filing, Suno [acknowledged that its training data included essentially every reasonable-quality music file it could access](https://www.404media.co/ai-music-generator-suno-admits-it-was-trained-on-essentially-all-music-files-on-the-internet/?ref=gonzocapital.net) across the ENTIRE open internet. The company described a collection containing tens of millions of recordings, including copyrighted material owned by the same record companies now suing it. Even that description failed to capture the sheer ambition of the operation. In July 2026, a hacker breached Suno and [provided 404 Media with internal source code and information](https://www.404media.co/hack-reveals-suno-ai-music-generator-scraped-youtube-deezer-and-genius/?ref=gonzocapital.net) about its training libraries. According to the material reviewed by the publication, Suno built systems to scrape and collect songs, lyrics, scores, stock music, podcasts, sounds, and other audio from across the entirety of the web. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/07/image-17.png) Source: 404 Media The [listed sources](https://www.404media.co/hack-reveals-suno-ai-music-generator-scraped-youtube-deezer-and-genius/?ref=gonzocapital.net) included YouTube Music, Deezer, Genius, Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, and the International Music Score Library Project. One internal file reportedly referred to more than *two million clips* taken from YouTube Music alone. Even now, I see more musicians and creators such as [El Stepario Siberiano](https://www.youtube.com/@ElEsteparioSiberiano?ref=gonzocapital.net), who are publicly pleading for help, unsure how to deal with the fact that they are non-consenting AI trainers. Source: [https://www.youtube.com/@ElEsteparioSiberiano](https://www.youtube.com/@ElEsteparioSiberiano?ref=gonzocapital.net) Other files measured the material in hours, including more than 100,000 hours from one YouTube Music dataset and another 150,000 hours from a separately tagged collection. Nobody could possibly listen to a sliver of a fraction of it all in a lifetime. The machine definitely doesn’t have to. This was a strange case where musical history was hastily converted into inventory. Every forgotten album, private obsession, regional genre, embarrassing phase, wedding song, protest anthem, studio experiment, and angsty teenager screaming into a cheap microphone could potentially become another microscopic contribution to the ever-growing behemoth. The collection reportedly extended beyond professionally released songs. It included stock libraries, sheet music and scores from the International Music Score Library Project, podcasts, lyrics, and material uploaded by ordinary people who may never have imagined that their work would help train a commercial music factory. ## Sign up for Gonzo Capital Dispatches on money, power, and the absurdity of it all, from a VC who still gives a damn. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. The sheer scale makes individual consent almost absurdly impractical, a fact they strategically and routinely use to their advantage. Imagine knocking on the door of every musician, producer, composer, singer, session player, label, publisher, and estate whose work contributed to the machine’s education. The negotiations alone might outlast recorded civilization. Technology companies tend to treat this impossibility as an argument in their favor. Permission at that scale would be difficult, expensive, unrealistic, and perhaps fatal to the money-printing product itself. Therefore, they build first and leave the legal system to pick up the pieces, trying to determine whether permission was necessary. A tactic [all too common](https://fortune.com/2024/05/31/ai-openai-sam-altman-google-search-ask-for-forgiveness-instead-of-permission/?ref=gonzocapital.net) in the AI space already, even in other niches. I also can't sit here and pretend there isn’t a certain [venture-backed elegance](https://www.gonzocapital.net/confessions-of-a-compromised-capitalist/) to this approach. It’s practically taught in business schools. Suno [argues](https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/music-ai-startups-suno-udio-slam-record-label-lawsuits-court-filings-2024-08-01/?ref=gonzocapital.net) that training a model on copyrighted recordings qualifies as fair use. Its position is that the software analyzes patterns across existing music so that users can create new work. This is along the same lines as the famous 90’s case, **Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc.**, where Irish singer Gilbert O’Sullivan (via his label, Grand Upright Music) sued rapper Biz Markie and his label, Warner Bros. Records, for sampling the distinctive piano loop and opening words from O'Sullivan's 1972 hit "*Alone Again (Naturally)*" for his own track "*Alone Again*" on the album *I Need a Haircut*. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/07/image-13.png) Source: Cold Chillin'/Warner Bros The ruling helped accelerate an industry practice in which commercial samples were cleared in advance, with royalties and permissions negotiated case-by-case. To take it even further, Suno has even compared the process to a young musician learning rock music by listening obsessively to rock songs. In its legal response, Suno accused the labels of protecting their market power from a new creative tool. The analogy is attractive. Every musician is trained on other musicians. We all stand on the shoulders of giants after all. I learned by listening to songs I loved. Albums I got for Christmas each year from Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin or Bob Dylan. I recall attempting to imitate them poorly, gradually recognizing chord progressions, rhythms, structures, and tricks on my path to ultimately learning guitar and piano and singing. Nobody develops a musical vocabulary alone. Even the strangest experimental artists and generational savants carry ghosts and echoes in their hands. Still, I never swallowed up millions of recordings whole like a blue whale feasting on a colony of krill with exceptional speed and ease. I could never ever study every genre simultaneously. Or remember every production choice. Or turn around and manufacture a catalog of sparkly, polished songs before lunch. My influences were limited by time, access, taste, geography. Oh, and the patience of anyone forced to hear me rehearse for hours on end. Those limitations helped make me a particular musician. A model’s strength comes from escaping those very same limitations. This is overall one of the main appeals of artificial intelligence in our modern age. Suno does not need a childhood, a hometown, a broken heart, or a cool older sibling with a suspiciously good record collection. It can absorb more musical history than any person could encounter in all our lifetimes combined, and use the patterns buried inside it to produce something immediately and eerily familiar. That familiarity is commercially useful. It is also the primary source of the unease. The labels claim Suno copied enormous amounts of protected music to build a product capable of competing with the people whose recordings made it possible. Their original 2024 lawsuit identified 560 works. After gaining access to Suno’s training data during discovery, [Universal and Sony asked the court](https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/why-a-fight-over-61000-recordings-could-shape-the-future-of-ai-music-licensing/?ref=gonzocapital.net) in May 2026 for permission to add 61,026 recordings. They said those tracks represented only a fraction of the millions of their recordings found in the dataset. Suno has opposed the expansion of the case at every turn. The legal argument will involve fair use, technological protection measures, market harm, and several other phrases capable of putting a somewhat healthy person into a light coma. The moral question, however, is less technical. Suno needed music before it could ever hope to make music. Let’s cast aside for a moment the fact that I’m not even sure whether it qualifies as music if a person hasn’t created it. It needed countless people to sing, play, write, fail, experiment, record, and release their work out into the wild. Their collective output became the soil from which the product grew, although most of them were never told they were planting a thing. Perhaps the courts will decide that this is simply how learning works for humans. Maybe listening at machine scale remains legally comparable to listening as a person. Or even that the resulting songs are transformative enough to justify the copying required to create them. Those possibilities do deserve serious consideration. Cheap creative tools can allow people to make music who lacked the money, training, physical ability, confidence, or industry access to do so before. Many Suno users may be doing something more meaningful than manufacturing background sludge for dreary hotel lobbies. Yet democratizing creation of music does not erase the method by which the tool was built, or excuse it from culpability for the tangible or intangible damage it’s capable of doing. The public internet was treated as a vast cultural buffet. The developers arrived hungry, took what the model could digest, and promised that everyone would benefit from the resulting abundance. There was always plenty of food to dine on, but nobody ever asked whether it was theirs to take in the first place. ## The Lawsuit Was the Negotiation Well, the owners of the buffet eventually arrived. And they brought their legion of litigators. In June 2024, [Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group sued Suno and Udio](https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/suno-sued-by-major-labels-says-transparency-is-important-as-record-industry-proposes-ai-labeling-system/?ref=gonzocapital.net), accusing both companies of copying copyrighted recordings on an enormous scale to train commercial music generators. The labels warned that synthetic music could compete with, cheapen, and eventually drown out the artists whose work had helped make the artificial intelligence systems possible. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/07/image-16.png) Source: Chartlex The lawsuits were described as a defense of human creativity. A place to draw a line and the right hill to die on. The lawsuits also contained an important qualification: The Recording Industry Association of America said the music industry already supported artificial intelligence developed with permission and participation from rights holders. The fight concerned who had been asked, who had been paid, and who controlled what happened next. The machine itself… apparently was never the only issue. Copyright gave the labels all the leverage they needed over it. Individual musicians are scattered across countries, contracts, genres, and decades. Some are long dead and buried. Others no longer control the recordings they helped create. Negotiating with every singer, producer, songwriter, session player, publisher, and estate would be a mess. Maybe even impossible. The major labels could offer access to enormous catalogs in a single meeting, which in turn made the courtroom part of the marketplace. A lawsuit could demand compensation for the past while creating influence over the future. The labels could challenge the way these systems were built, then negotiate a commercial position inside whatever survived, like a parasite lodging itself deep inside a living host. By late 2025, that process was already yielding deals. In October 2025, [Universal settled its case against Udio](https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/universal-music-settles-copyright-dispute-with-ai-firm-udio-2025-10-30/?ref=gonzocapital.net) and announced plans for a licensed music creation and streaming platform. [Warner reached its own agreement with Udio](https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/warner-music-settles-with-ai-firm-udio-plans-joint-platform-2025-11-19/?ref=gonzocapital.net) weeks later. Then [Warner settled with Suno](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/nov/26/warner-music-signs-deal-with-ai-song-generator-suno-after-settling-lawsuit?ref=gonzocapital.net), the same company it had accused of mass infringement. The Warner agreement promised new licensed models, opt-in participation for artists and songwriters, and controls over the use of their names, voices, likenesses, and compositions. Suno also announced tighter download restrictions and said the licensed models would replace its existing versions during 2026. The announcement sounded less like the end of a legal battle, and more like the tip of the spear for a grand product launch. There is nothing inherently sinister about licensing. Permission does matter. Compensation matters. Artists should obviously have more control over whether a company can manufacture songs using their voices or identities. A negotiated system is plainly better than an industry where developers take whatever they can reach and instruct everyone else to sue later. Usually with far fewer legal resources or capabilities to win. Still, the sequence is impossible to ignore. A company can build first, grow quickly, and defend the entire process as fair use. Once the machine becomes too valuable to destroy, the people who control the catalogs can negotiate a share of it. A staple of capitalism. The contract changes the future. It cannot return to the beginning and ask permission before the training occurred. In theory, the settlements can indeed compensate the relevant owners well enough. It’s possible that past conduct was absorbed into the price of future cooperation. The agreements are private and opaque, so the public cannot see what was paid, forgiven, reserved, or secretly accepted in some forgettable backroom. What we can see is where the parties ended up and where the cookie crumbled. Within roughly eighteen months, Warner had moved from plaintiff to partner. Universal [did the very same](https://www.universalmusic.com/universal-music-group-and-udio-announce-udios-first-strategic-agreements-for-new-licensed-ai-music-creation-platform/?ref=gonzocapital.net) with Udio. As of the time of writing, Sony has not settled, while Universal and Sony remain active plaintiffs against Suno as of July 2026\. Their ongoing case shows that the industry has reached no consensus. Some catalogs are becoming licensed infrastructure while others remain locked up as evidence in court. Calling this hypocrisy is admittedly satisfying, but ultimately incapable of painting a sincere and complete picture. The labels had already said they welcomed *authorized* AI. Litigation helped establish what authorization might cost. That is the colder version of the story: Copyright did not stop the machine, even a little bit. What it DID do was give the largest rights holders enough power to charge for access to it. The musicians appeared throughout the announcements. Their creativity justified the lawsuits. Their protection gave the partnerships moral legitimacy. New revenue opportunities were promised in their name. Yet ownership of a recording does not mean a company personally wrote the song, sang the words, played the instruments, or spent years developing the style now being converted into a feature. The labels had earned their seat at the negotiating table through somewhat predatory contracts signed long before Suno ever existed. The next fight would be over who they were entitled to speak for once they eventually sat down and talked. ## The Artist Was NOT in the Room The musicians eventually asked a question the licensing announcements had managed to avoid. Who gave the labels permission to speak for them? Were they just being cut out of the picture like they always had been? In June 2026, the [American Federation of Musicians sued Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/music/music-industry-news/musicians-union-lawsuit-ai-song-generator-settlement-1236614835/?ref=gonzocapital.net). The union accused both companies of licensing recordings made by its members to Suno and Udio without properly compensating or crediting the musicians who performed on them. > Update: July 30: The AFM filed an amended complaint on July 24, naming Universal Music Group, Warner Records, and Atlantic Recording Corp. Both sides are now preparing dismissal motions, with opening briefs due August 14. According to the lawsuit, the labels secured retrospective settlements for the alleged use of their catalogs and prospective licenses for future AI training. The companies created a new source of revenue while refusing to tell the union which recordings had been licensed or whose performances were being fed into those models. The AFM argues that these arrangements trigger payment and bargaining obligations under its collective agreements covering new uses of recorded performances. Warner and Universal disputed that characterization. Universal pointed to its longstanding relationship with the union and said it expected the issues to be resolved through “collective bargaining.” Warner described the lawsuit as “unproductive” because negotiations were already underway. No matter what the court decides, the dispute is exposing a massive rift that licensing announcements tend to blur: *Owning a recording is different from having made it.*Many notable musicians had to learn this in a very public and difficult way. A label may control the master recording. A publisher may administer the composition. The named artist may possess rights connected to their identity, voice, or likeness. Beneath all of that are the musicians whose performances remain embedded in the finished song, sometimes without their names appearing anywhere a casual listener would ever likely see. The drummer may have created the rhythm that holds the recording together. A session guitarist may have found the hook everyone remembers. An arranger may have transformed a mediocre song into something capable of surviving for fifty years or more. They were paid to perform under agreements written before anyone imagined that those performances could be used to train software capable of manufacturing unlimited new music. A relic of the past when things were done MUCH differently. The labels have promised artists and songwriters meaningful control over this new system. Warner’s Suno agreement says participation in uses of names, images, likenesses, voices, and compositions will be optional. Whether that actually happens or not remains to be determined. Warner has also described its AI deals as “new opportunities for artists and songwriters to earn money.” That still leaves a crowded room of people whose work exists inside the recordings without being covered by the language most useful for a press release. A session musician may have no famous voice to protect. Their name may possess no tangible, commercial value. Maybe nobody will ever build a consumer feature around their likeness. The value lies in the performance itself. We’re still talking about raw, creative, emotional, human output here. That performance can help make a recording valuable enough to train a model, while the person responsible has little ability to negotiate with the company using it. This is where the difference between ownership and authorship stops being philosophical. The companies holding the strongest legal rights gained seats at the table. They could sue, settle, license, and negotiate future revenue, all while the starving artists who physically played the notes were left asking what else had been agreed to on their behalf. The labels could eventually compensate them. I sincerely doubt it based on historical precedent and what friends in the industry tell me. Or maybe collective bargaining will produce a workable formula someday, somehow. The AFM lawsuit may eventually become another negotiation over percentages, reporting requirements, and the definition of a new use. Even a favorable settlement would reveal something uncomfortable about the sequence. The technology companies allegedly took the music first. The labels only negotiated once the machines became immensely and obviously valuable beyond a shadow of a doubt. The musicians then had to turn around and sue the labels to learn whether their own work had been included in this infernal transaction. During that private concert in Thailand, the guests barely acknowledged us, but our presence still created certain obligations. Somebody had to hire us. Somebody had to arrange our hotel and our meals. Somebody apparently paid our meager invoice (Yes, I should have definitely asked for more in retrospect). The emerging system preserves the performance while gradually removing the performer from every stage that follows. That may be why the working musician has a whole lot more to fear than the superstar whose name appears front and center, prominently displayed above the song. The first people exposed will be those whose work is already easiest to overlook… The people who lose the most, the fastest. ## The People Who Make the Background You’ve probably never heard of the people being pushed aside. They are the anonymous backbone of the industry. They compose for advertisements, corporate videos, low-budget films, podcasts, games, production libraries, and the enormous supply of online content that demands a soundtrack by tomorrow morning. They play additional instruments in studios, sing backing vocals, improve demos, and turn unfinished ideas into professional recordings. Their work is everywhere, with no fame to speak of. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/07/image-14.png) Source: Far Out Magazine The biggest artists can sell more than music. Their identities carry value. Fans care about the person singing, the mythology around them, and the possibility of seeing them perform live. A company can generate a song resembling a Taylor Swift hit, but it cannot easily manufacture the strange cultural machinery or the cultlike following surrounding Taylor Swift. A hotel chain looking for three minutes of unobtrusive piano has fewer sentimental requirements. The music only needs to be pleasant, appropriate, affordable, and delivered on time. Preferably with no buffering or advertisements. Nobody checking into the hotel will demand to know whether the pianist suffered sufficiently while recording it. There is no official cruelty-free music designation for cage-free pianists. That is the market where generative music is most useful, the most quickly. A [2026 study by France’s National Music Center](https://cnm.fr/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/20250617%5FCNM%5FIA%5FStudy%5FEN%5F1.pdf?ref=gonzocapital.net) identified composers of standardized background and atmospheric music as “particularly exposed to AI systems capable of producing soundtracks from emotional, visual, or narrative instructions.” That very same report warned that synthesis and sampling technologies could “accelerate an existing decline in studio work for backing musicians, especially for performances that can be added during post-production.” The displacement may arrive with little fanfare for most. Even for musicians, it may not yet be obvious. Hopefully this can be a reminder or a wake-up call for musicians and music lovers alike. A video producer stops searching through a music library and generates a track instead. A composer loses a small advertisement. A session player is no longer called in to add strings, harmonies, or a second guitar. Each individual decision looks insignificant on its own, especially to the customer saving time and money. Collect enough of them and a profession begins disappearing entirely on the periphery. A [study commissioned by CISAC](https://www.sabam.be/sites/default/files/Study%20on%20the%20economic%20impact%20of%20Generative%20AI%20in%20Music%20and%20Audiovisual%20industries.pdf?ref=gonzocapital.net) estimates that generative music could account for “roughly 60 percent of music-library revenue by 2028” under its modeled scenario. The same study also projects that “24 percent of music creators’ revenue could be at risk,” although those figures remain forecasts produced by an organization representing rights holders rather than settled economic facts. The transition is already becoming ordinary. In a [Berklee survey of 1,003 musicians](https://www.berklee.edu/beatl/in-sync-music-and-video-2026?ref=gonzocapital.net), video creators, marketers, and music supervisors, nearly a third of respondents said they had used “AI-generated music as the final audio track” in published content. That does not mean every use displaced a paid musician. Some of those videos may never have had a music budget in the first place. A teenager making a short film with Suno is not necessarily stealing a commission from an orchestra somewhere in the world. The tools can also help independent creators make work that would otherwise remain trapped in their heads. A songwriter can build a convincing demo without hiring a band. A filmmaker with no budget can experiment with a score. A musician can use generated material as a sketch and replace it later with something better. Democratization is real, but so is substitution. The same tool that can give one person access to music can remove another person from the equation. Which interpretation applies depends largely on whether you are the person creating something new or the person who used to receive the invoice. I have been that second person. The billionaire businessman in Thailand still needed us to stand on the stage. We had to arrive, tune our instruments, wait for the guests, play the songs, and accept the peculiar humiliation of being ignored in person. A machine can now provide the same atmosphere without requiring a stage, a meal, transport, patience, or eye contact. Sure, the music will be worse. For background music, worse may still be good enough. That is the danger for working musicians. They do not need to be replaced by something more talented. Something adequate, instant, and cheaper shall suffice! Hell, make it nearly free if you can. ## The Music That Paid Nothing and Meant Everything Years before that concert for nobody in Thailand, I found myself sitting at a beaten-down, partially functional, public piano in downtown Denver. My “career,” if you could even call it that, was in its infancy. The 16th Street Mall, a lively avenue for commerce and recreation, replete with frolicking tourists, families, and talented street performers, had several donated pianos that had all seen many better days. The piano belonged to everyone, which meant it probably belonged to nobody in particular. This particular piano had been left outside for anyone to play. From eager children smashing the keys to drunken pub-dwellers out for a night on the town, these pianos loomed large while also blending into the background scenery. The keys had absorbed weather, dirt, spilled drinks, children’s hands, and the uneven enthusiasm of people who knew the opening notes of the most annoying and overplayed song you’ve ever heard, and fully intended to make that knowledge everybody else’s on the street’s problem. I was younger, broke, and wandering my way around the United States, playing music for coffee and cigarette money to anyone who would listen and had two coins to rub together. I recall taking a break from singing, my voice shot and my guitar slightly out of tune from hours of playing in the oppressive mile-high sun. I sat down and began playing the beaten old piano to switch it up for a moment, with no intention for anyone to hear or appreciate or pay me for indulging. I artfully danced my way up and down the ivory keys, tactically dodging the dead notes. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/07/image-15.png) Source: pianos.pub There was no booking or manager. Nobody had requested a particular song. Nobody had promised to pay me. I was not performing for an audience so much as passing part of the day in the company of an instrument that is very dear to me. People strolled by. Some even slowed down. Most continued wherever they were going. A public piano rarely defeats the combined urgency of work, errands, hunger, and the deeply important business of staring into a phone and bumping into others while walking along. At one point, a little girl and her mother came along and stopped. The child began to groove. I cannot remember exactly how old she was. Definitely young enough to move without wondering whether anyone thought she looked foolish. Young enough that every step still looked slightly uncertain. She danced beside the piano while I played, wholly committed to whatever private celebration had suddenly possessed her. Her mother beamed with excitement and joy as she watched the pure, unadulterated euphoria only a child can get from the most trivial and wonderful and benign moments. I remember daydreaming long after that moment, that perhaps this was the beginning of something wonderful. Maybe she would grow up to become the greatest concert pianist the world’s ever seen. Years later she might even remember the strange man at the public piano and tell the story during an interview after performing at Carnegie Hall. It’s much more likely she forgot about me before suppertime. She may never have learned an instrument, or even taken any interest in music recreationally or professionally at all. She may have grown into someone who sings badly in the car, cries during film scores, or keeps one favorite song ready for the days when the world becomes heavier than expected. That would be more than enough too. More valuable than any well-deserved concert booking fee. I have no idea what the moment became for her. I know what it became for me, and what it has remained. At a time when I had basically nothing, music made something magical happen. No moment could ever make me fall in love again with music quite like that. The music crossed the small distance between the piano and a child. She heard it, decided movement was the proper response, and briefly turned an ordinary street into a lively dancehall. Nobody signed anything. No ownership changed hands. No platform recorded the engagement. No rights holder negotiated a royalty for the dance. No menacing record labels or lawsuits. The entire economic value of the performance was absolute and utter zero. As far as I know, no artificial intelligence models were trained in that moment. What I DO know is that the music industry is about to produce more songs than all the people that ever existed could ever possibly hear. Machines will compose them in seconds, shaped from the accumulated work of people who spent their lives learning how to make sound matter. All of the recorded, creative, sonic output of civilization compacted into a musical black box. And you know what? Some of those songs will be useful. A few may even be beautiful. They could even fool your average listener or a washed-up musician like myself! The machine can make the song, but the moment still has to happen between people. ## Sign up for Gonzo Capital Dispatches on money, power, and the absurdity of it all, from a VC who still gives a damn. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### The Most Observed Event in Human History URL: https://www.gonzocapital.net/the-most-observed-event-in-human-history/ Last updated: 2026-07-26T15:53:10.000Z The line moves fast. Faster than you expected or remembered. Faster than thousands of impatient souls wearing overpriced replica shirts should be able to funnel themselves into a stadium without causing at least one minor riot, one broken turnstile, or one man discovering at the worst possible moment that his phone battery is dead. You opted into the system before you arrived. Perhaps you did it while purchasing the ticket. Perhaps it was one of those boxes you clicked while distracted, exhausted, or deeply uninterested in reading another fourteen million words of terms and conditions written by a law firm that regards human comprehension as a security vulnerability. Now you look up and notice a camera catching a glimpse of your mug. Somewhere behind a wall you cannot see, a system compares that face against the biometric profile you enrolled, connects it to your ticket, verifies that you are apparently who you claim to be, and opens the gate. No codes. No stamps. No bracelets. You do not hand anything to anyone. In fact, you do not even need to remove your phone from your pocket. That whole exchange took maybe four or five seconds? Could be even less. A bored stadium employee lazily ushers you through with the maximum level of disinterest and apathy permitted under modern employment law. The look on their face tells you that this happens a few thousand times per hour. At Gillette Stadium, the same voluntary facial-authentication system was designed to let registered fans connect their faces not only to their tickets, but to their payment methods as well. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/07/image-3.png) Source: Microsoft Somewhere in that very same building, a concession stand can use the same system to sell someone a watered-down beer and a hot dog priced as though the animal had been raised by hand in luxury, educated at an Ivy League university, and slaughtered during a private ceremony conducted by a Michelin-starred chef and a high priest. Congratulations, your face just became your ticket. Then your face became your wallet. And your wallet got you into the world’s biggest sporting event without a word being muttered. Convenient, isn’t it? The best tricks are the hardest to catch. Somehow none of this feels like surveillance. What it does feel like is damn good service in the modern age. ## **The Most Surveilled Show on Earth** The World Cup was a month-long defense technology convention disguised as a football tournament, and millions of fans were invited to become unpaid beta testers. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/07/image-4.png) Source: NBC News Spain may have snatched the trophy away from Argentina on Sunday, but the surveillance and defense technology industries walked away with something that may eventually prove far more valuable. A live demonstration. A case study. Obvious proof of scale. A month of operational data gathered from the largest sporting event on the planet, played across 104 matches, 16 host cities, and three countries. I would like to call it the most surveilled event in human history. Unfortunately, humanity has not maintained a reliable historical scoreboard for cameras pointed at civilians per square foot, so proving that claim with any intellectual honesty is nearly impossible (but I’m going to continue calling it that regardless). It was, at the very least, one of the most technologically sophisticated security operations ever wrapped around a sporting event. Facial authentication turned human faces into tickets and payment credentials. Four [Boston Dynamics robot dogs joined the security operation](https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/08/science/video/cncpm-robotic-dogs-world-cup?ref=gonzocapital.net). Two were deployed at the International Broadcast Center in Dallas, while two more operated at MetLife Stadium, where the final was played. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/07/image-11.png) Source: Boston Dynamics They carried cameras into areas where human security teams needed additional reach, inspecting perimeters, monitoring assets, and helping investigate suspicious packages or potentially dangerous materials. Above the stadiums, counter-drone systems scanned the sky. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/07/image-6.png) Source: New York Post Fortem Technologies [received a multimillion-dollar order](https://www.fortemtech.com/press-releases/2026-02-12-fortem-receives-multimillion-dollar-order-to-defend-2026-fifa-world-cup-venues-from-drone-threats/?ref=gonzocapital.net) to deploy radar, command software, and autonomous DroneHunter interceptors capable of pursuing unauthorized drones and capturing them in nets. Lenovo built an [Intelligent Command Center](https://news.lenovo.com/building-an-intelligent-command-center-for-fifa-world-cup-2026/?ref=gonzocapital.net) that gave FIFA a centralized, real-time view of tournament operations, allowing organizers to observe activity, identify emerging trends, and respond across the enormous footprint of the competition. FEMA alone [awarded $625 million to the eleven American host cities](https://www.fema.gov/grants/preparedness/fifa-world-cup-grant-program?ref=gonzocapital.net) to strengthen security operations and protect the communities hosting the tournament. That was not purely a technology budget. It also covered the sprawling human machinery required to secure an event of this scale, including planning, exercises, police, emergency response, cybersecurity, personnel, and coordination. It also does not include every additional dollar spent by local authorities, the wider federal government, private operators, Canada, or Mexico. Sixteen cities. Three countries. One hundred and four matches. Millions of people passing through an unprecedented web of cameras, sensors, databases, autonomous machines, aerial defenses, and centralized command platforms. ## **The Tradeoff** Each individual component arrived carrying a perfectly reasonable explanation and probably a laminated visitor badge. At one point, estimates for getting into Gillette Stadium were [hovering around one hour to clear security](https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/boston-stadium-fifa-world-cup-games-fans-security-water-bottles/?ref=gonzocapital.net). And what did we receive in exchange for this strange new intimacy? Faster entry. Shorter lines. Protected airspace. Safer tunnels. Better crowd control. Fewer opportunities for fraud, violence, terrorism, catastrophe, or some drunken halfwit launching a consumer drone into the flight path of a passenger aircraft because he wanted a better photograph for social media. I do not want stadiums bombed. I do not want drones crashing into crowds. I do not want thousands of people compacted into a narrow entrance until the collective mass of humanity begins behaving like toothpaste being forced through a tube. I am not suggesting that security personnel protect millions of people using binoculars, whistles, smiles, and positive thinking. Some of these systems probably made people safer. Some may have prevented incidents we will never hear about, silently detecting a threat, identifying a weapon, diverting a crowd, or stopping some terrible chain of events before it gathered enough momentum to become a breaking-news chyron. I am going to venture out onto a very sturdy limb and assume that most reasonable people agree with me on these points. Well, that is exactly what makes the question so difficult. And what makes this piece worth writing too… There is no single moment when someone announces that you now live inside a panopticon. The panopticon will not be televised! There is no dramatic vote. No emergency broadcast. No grim-faced government official appears on television wearing an ominous black uniform to inform the public that privacy has officially been cancelled due to budgetary constraints and the need for a more seamless customer experience. There are only thousands of individually reasonable decisions, each made by sensible people attempting to solve a legitimate problem. One camera. One database. One emergency grant. One faster entrance. One safer stadium. One more convenient, tasteless beer. We don’t need threats to surrender our privacy when faster lines and more convenience will suffice. That is how the machinery always arrives. It smiles pleasantly, saves you four seconds, remembers your preferred payment method, and asks whether you would like to opt in for an even smoother experience next time. The bane of privacy. At some point, opting out begins to feel like punishment. The biometric entrance takes seconds. The alternative requires a phone, a code, a document, a queue, and the patience of a medieval monk illuminating a manuscript during a famine. Technically, you still have a choice. Technically, you are also free to walk four hundred miles instead of taking an airplane. Temporary surveillance should come with a demolition plan. A date when the cameras come down. A date when the data disappears. A public explanation of who can search it, what it can be used for, and whether the police, the stadium, the technology vendor, or some future owner can quietly expand its purpose after everyone has stopped paying attention. Instead, temporary usually describes the justification. The machinery itself develops roots. By the time anyone pauses to ask what has been built, it is already humming behind the walls and forgotten about. ## **Infrastructure Never Leaves** [Matthew Guariglia](https://www.eff.org/about/staff/dr-matthew-guariglia-0?ref=gonzocapital.net), a policy analyst at the [Electronic Frontier Foundation](https://www.eff.org/?ref=gonzocapital.net), has spent years warning about this tendency. Technology installed for one extraordinary purpose rarely remains confined to that purpose. Once the cameras, fiber connections, databases, control rooms, contracts, and institutional permissions exist, they become infrastructure. Infrastructure has a peculiar quality. It does not like to leave. Qatar [installed more than 15,000 cameras](https://www.businessinsider.com/world-cup-monitored-cameras-facial-recognition-tech-qatar-2022-11?ref=gonzocapital.net) to secure the 2022 World Cup. They watched stadiums, transit systems, surrounding areas, and crowds arriving from every corner of the planet. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/a7/f9a788de-665a-4e4b-9aa1-91f8e38e2279/content/images/2026/07/image-8.png) Source: alzabeele.com The tournament ended. The cameras, cables, control rooms, contracts, and trained operators did not spontaneously evaporate. The concrete remained. The cables remained. The command rooms remained. The knowledge of how to operate them remained. Most importantly, the belief that this level of observation was now normal remained. Cameras are not folding chairs. They are rarely packed into the back of a van with the temporary fencing and driven away once the final whistle blows. There has been plenty of attention paid to the lenses themselves, especially the visibly creepy ones perched above roads or swiveling from stadium ceilings like metallic carrion birds. The lens is only the most obvious part. The more important questions live behind it. Who owns the feed? Who can search it? Who can add a name to the list? Who decides what constitutes suspicious behavior? Who gets to change those rules six months later, when the tournament is over, the public has moved on, and the original promise has dissolved into the bureaucratic mulch? The camera watches and the permission structure decides what the watching means. ## **Who Gets to Define a Threat?** This did not begin with the World Cup. The tournament simply provided an especially gaudy excuse to stare at machinery that has been quietly colonizing public life for years. A few weeks earlier, across the Hudson at Madison Square Garden, the Knicks played their first NBA Finals games at home in twenty-seven years. They would eventually defeat the San Antonio Spurs and win their first championship since 1973. The arena was packed with celebrities, season-ticket holders, exhausted fathers, screaming children, corporate guests, and people who had traded a kidney on the secondary market for seats somewhere near the roof. Above and around them sat one of the [most extensive facial-recognition systems ever deployed](https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/msg-owner-uses-surveillance-spy-013021994.html?ref=gonzocapital.net) by an American entertainment venue. MSG Entertainment originally presented the system as a security tool. Then the definition of security began to slip and slide and wander. For years, the company [used facial recognition to identify and remove lawyers employed by firms](https://apnews.com/article/new-york-knicks-nba-sports-510add2445e3620452660ab7196242d0?ref=gonzocapital.net) involved in litigation against it. Somewhere between nine hundred and fifteen hundred attorneys reportedly found themselves placed on an exclusion list, not because they posed a physical danger, but because their employers were professionally inconvenient. A woman accompanying her daughter’s Girl Scout troop was separated from the group at Radio City Music Hall. A father was reportedly pulled aside in front of his son at a Rangers game. New York’s attorney general raised concerns that the policy could violate anti-discrimination law. A state senator described what it increasingly resembled, a private company using biometric surveillance to punish its critics. Then came the database. According to [reporting by WIRED](https://www.wired.com/story/madison-square-garden-celebrity-database-surveillance/?ref=gonzocapital.net), which MSG disputes and has challenged in court, a private talent system contained information on roughly 40,000 celebrities and public figures. Some entries reportedly included race, gender identity, sexual orientation, risk ratings, and labels such as “**DO NOT HOST**.” One entry concerned a teenager in Colorado who received a visit from local police after posting something unflattering about the company’s owner online. Perhaps the child posed a grave threat to public safety. Maybe the republic was wobbling beneath the force of one adolescent tweet. Perhaps the security system had become something else entirely. At what point does public safety become private power with a watchlist? Who controls the definition of danger once the infrastructure exists? And what prevents “dangerous” from slowly mutating into “annoying,” “critical,” “litigious,” “embarrassing,” or merely “someone the owner does not like”? The same question follows us outside the arena. Flock Safety’s automated license-plate readers now operate across thousands of American cities and communities, recording vehicles as they move through neighborhoods, intersections, shopping districts, and public roads. The systems are sold as tools for finding stolen cars, locating suspects, and solving crimes more efficiently. Once again, the thesis is perfectly reasonable. Until somebody gets access, that is. Reporting has uncovered multiple cases of police officers using license-plate systems for personal reasons, including an [officer accused of searching for and tracking](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/classroom/daily-news-lessons/2026/07/police-say-flock-cameras-help-solve-crimes-but-critics-call-them-an-invasion-of-privacy?ref=gonzocapital.net) an ex-girlfriend. Once a system exists, its purpose is no longer determined solely by the reason written in the procurement document. It becomes whatever the next authorized person can persuade themselves is necessary. Privacy is not disappearing equally either. For most people, surveillance is something performed upon them. For the wealthy, it can be purchased, commanded, and pointed outward. The ordinary spectator surrenders their face for a faster entrance… The powerful purchase a system capable of deciding whose face may enter at all. ## **Who Owns the Machine?** Every time the line moves faster, somebody gains something. The spectator gains convenience. The stadium gains throughput. The security team gains visibility. And the police gain searchable information. The vendor gains a successful deployment, operational experience, commercial legitimacy, and an impressive new slide for the next sales presentation. Public money helped build that showroom. A touching little act of involuntary venture support from the taxpayer. The fans supplied the operating environment, one scanned face, one opened gate, one tracked movement, and one frictionless purchase at a time. The companies left with proof that these systems could survive millions of people, enormous pressure, international attention, and the logistical bedlam of the world’s largest sporting tournament. A camera sees a face. A ticketing system knows a name. A payment processor knows what you bought. A license-plate reader knows which vehicle arrived. A police system may know where that vehicle has appeared before. Elsewhere, another database may know your employer, your law firm, your risk score, or something foolish you posted online when you were fourteen and briefly believed your opinions were both original and necessary for civilization. Each system holds a fragment. And power accumulates in the places where those fragments can be connected. The company manufacturing the camera may not actually own the machine in any meaningful sense. The company controlling the interface, the permissions, the integration layer, and the searchable record may understand far more than the camera ever could. And the person being understood may have no idea that the profile exists. ## **The Reference Customer** Any company that can say its technology operated successfully inside a sixteen-city, 104-match international security operation now possesses the only sales asset that truly matters. Proof at scale. Airports will want it. Schools will want it. City governments will find reasons to want it, especially after being shown a polished case study filled with reassuring graphs and photographs of happy families moving rapidly through gates. The tournament was never the end market. More like a grand debut. A true reference customer. The world’s biggest tech show. ## **The Pitch Deck for the Panopticon** Last week, I [introduced this publication](https://www.gonzocapital.net/confessions-of-a-compromised-capitalist/) by admitting that I still do not know whether working inside venture capital makes me a Trojan Horse or merely another well-dressed accomplice. A few [angry villagers on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/venturecapital/comments/1uxa015/comment/oz0yfu8/?context=3&ref=gonzocapital.net) arrived shortly afterward carrying torches, pitchforks, and several reasonably phrased questions about what ethical dilemmas I was actually referring to. Fair enough. This is *exactly* the kind of problem I was talking about. Because I fortunately or unfortunately understand every layer of this system. Identity verification at the gate. Command platforms watching from behind the wall. Counter-drone systems patrolling the sky above the stadium. Police technology stitched across the city. Payment processing waiting quietly beside the beer line. Every layer had a founder who could explain exactly what problem they were solving. Every company had a business model that made sense on a whiteboard. Every market was large enough to generate excitement, competition, recurring revenue, and the peculiar glint that appears in an investor’s eye when the total addressable market begins acquiring extra zeroes. The company hired to hunt drones over World Cup venues did not emerge from a cave beneath the Pentagon. It was backed by recognizable institutional capital, including Lockheed Martin and Mubadala. That is a perfectly normal-looking cap table. I can imagine the pitch deck. I can imagine the market-size slide. I can imagine the founder explaining that the product protects civilians, prevents catastrophe, reduces strain on law enforcement, and solves a threat that will only become more dangerous as drones grow cheaper and more autonomous. I can imagine being interested. Because I would be. Useful technology does not automatically create a good world. A profitable company can solve a genuine problem, serve willing customers, save time, prevent harm, and generate a splendid return while still contributing to a society I fundamentally do not want to inhabit. These decisions rarely feel sinister inside the room. Nobody opens an investment committee meeting by dimming the lights and unveiling a presentation titled “Constructing the Surveillance State, Seed Round.” They discuss fraud reduction. Throughput. Public safety. Customer experience. Unit economics. Market expansion. The return profile… They discuss whether the founder is credible, whether the product works, whether customers will pay, whether competitors can copy it, and whether the company can become the dominant provider of something that did not exist as an industry ten years earlier. Each company solves a recognizable, sometimes obvious problem. Each investor can defend the individual decision. The aggregate is nobody’s line item. Every component arrived with a perfectly reasonable explanation. That sentence describes the World Cup security operation. It describes Madison Square Garden’s watchlists and databases. It describes the camera over the road. It describes a Tuesday afternoon investment committee meeting. This is one of the many ethical contortions at the center of investing in novel technologies. *We are asked whether a company can succeed.* *We are rarely forced to answer what happens to the rest of us if it succeeds completely.* Almost nobody votes for the surveillance state. They get sold a football match, a faster line, a safer city, or a good return. ## **The Cameras Didn’t Go Home** A few months from now, the World Cup will already be turning into pub trivia. The banners will be gone. The temporary barriers will have been dismantled and hauled away. The original trophy will return to Zurich. A replica will sit beneath museum lighting while tourists pose beside it and argue over whether the final was actually any good. (It wasn’t). The stadiums will return to their ordinary business. More matches, events, concerts. More people passing through those tech-infused arches and gates. Above them, the cameras remain resolutely mounted. Behind the walls, the systems will continue humming, searching, matching, logging, and remembering. Nobody will even need to make a dramatic decision to keep them alive. There will be no ceremony for turning them off. The fans went home. The cameras did not. ## Support Gonzo Capital Dispatches on money, power, and the absurdity of it all, from a VC who still gives a damn. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### Confessions of a Compromised Capitalist URL: https://www.gonzocapital.net/confessions-of-a-compromised-capitalist/ Last updated: 2026-07-30T16:51:22.000Z I don't tell this to many people... I was once homeless. Free. Riding across vast stretches of the United States with nothing more than a bicycle, a guitar, and a sleeping bag. Careless, naive, and rejecting anything remotely adjacent to working a 9-5 job, or living as a functional, productive member of society. I simply wanted to experience ultimate freedom and opt out of capitalism. I even went so far as to promise my friends and family that I'd never ever in a million years be a rich man. I'd never let that happen. I'd sooner play music for money on the street and eat stale bagels from dumpsters than become another cog in the machine. I even remember people's perception of me changing depending on my perceived economic output. When you're on the margins of society and not making or spending money, good luck even getting a business to let you use the bathroom in the downtown of a busy city. I truly believed that being rich was a sin, and I truly believed that humanity overcomplicated life with our side hustles, and purchases, and obsessions with status. Well... If you're reading this now... **Spoiler Alert:** Life is completely unpredictable, and the things we do and say when we are young rarely take into account the wisdom and experience and changes in philosophy that we find as we age, meet new people, and venture off to new places. If you're reading this now, you probably don't see this adding up. How did a homeless troubadour on a bicycle end up becoming a venture capitalist, seemingly betraying every virtue and strongly held belief he once had along the way? The short answer is that I was always investment-minded, having studied it at a young age, going for weekly breakfast meetups with my Uncle, who had seen promise in me for some strange reason. With the right guidance and ample time spent ideating and iterating over scrambled eggs, delicious pancakes, and crispy, maple syrup-soaked bacon every Saturday morning, I began to fall in love with the idea of investing and owning small pieces of big companies. I was potentially always a miniature VC at heart, yet I found myself aimlessly wandering from job to job, place to place, lifestyle to lifestyle without truly understanding that I could make a life and career out of that. Fast forward a few decades, and I now work in the investment space, helping to back, invest in, build, advise, incubate, and create tech startups. I sit across the table from brilliant founders, trying to decide if they have ideas worth backing. I attend meetings and dinners and events with people who have made their peace with a version of the world I'm not sure I believe in. I rub elbows with people who have obscene amounts of money and influence. And I can't help but feel like a complete hypocrite. I can't shake the feeling that my younger self would be both proud and disappointed with how I've turned out. Maybe he wouldn't even be able to recognize me altogether. Some days I feel like a traitor to the cause. Conveniently forgetting my old oaths to fight for justice, equity, and dignity for all. Other days, I tell myself I'm a good guy on the inside. A Trojan Horse affecting change from the only place it can truly happen. What's more powerful than being in the right place at the right time with the right connections and resources? It may be abundantly clear now as you read this (if you are still indeed reading this!), but I have not resolved this conflict. Not even a little bit. It's an infinite struggle happening in my head, burning up memory usage while I tick away and try to build my own VC fund, [Arcanum Ventures,](https://www.arcanum.ventures/?ref=gonzocapital.net) with one of my childhood friends, [Sasha Asheghi](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasha-asheghi/?ref=gonzocapital.net). I've been marinating over writing both this "confession" and this newsletter/blog for a long time, trying to figure out how to broach the subject, what to write about, and how to direct my fury, rage, passion, sadness, and conflict. How to channel it into doing something about the injustice I see every day in our industry? I've been inside this industry long enough to see how it works when nobody is performing. Not the version that gets written up in TechCrunch. The other version. The one where founders get managed rather than supported the moment the power dynamic shifts. Where decisions that will affect thousands of people get made in forty minutes because the numbers work. Where exhaustion gets mistaken for commitment and sociopathy gets mistaken for vision. I remember a partner making a reference call on a founder, getting back an honest and unflattering answer from someone who had nothing to gain from being honest, thanking them for their time, and funding the round two weeks later anyway. The founder tested well in the room. That was enough. I'm not naming anyone. I don't need to. If you've spent any time in this world, you already know exactly what I'm describing... And if you haven't, you deserve to know **it exists**. I could have left it all behind too. Some days I still dream of doing just that! I feel out of place, pretending the world isn't falling apart at the seams is exhausting. There is a need to remind myself that I do love and enjoy what I do. The version of me on that bicycle would probably say I should have. There are days I think he's right. I'd still rather live in the woods than any city I've ever been in. But leaving felt like handing the room over entirely to people I don't trust with it. Capital goes somewhere. It shapes what gets built, who gets a chance, what the world looks like in a decade. I'd rather be one of the people directing it with a conscience than stand outside throwing rocks and achieving nothing. Voting with capital and currency and allocation of investment is ultimately the most impactful vote one can make, far more critical than a vote for a political candidate. That's not even a heroic position either. It's just the simple calculation I made. I'm still not entirely sure it was the right one. So where am I going with this? I want to formally introduce you and everyone reading this unhinged rant, to my new baby, [**Gonzo Capital**](https://www.gonzocapital.net/). > Gonzo Capital is what happens when someone who doesn't belong somewhere refuses to leave and refuses to shut up. Every week, I'm going to take something happening in the world, in money, in politics, in power, in history, or my experience working in tech/VC/investing, and tell you what I actually think about it. Not the safe version. Not the version that keeps everyone comfortable. The one that keeps me up at night. Brutally honest, no holds barred, and potentially controversial. I'm a historian by training, which means I can't look at anything happening today without seeing the long shadow of everything that happened before it. I'm going to use that. I'm going to be funny like some of my literary heroes such as Camus and Thompson, when the only other option is despair. Seemingly all the time, unfortunately, when faced with the issues of modern civilization and the confounding advent of new technologies that complicate life rather than enhance or improve them. Oh, and I'm going to be wrong sometimes. Really wrong. And I'm going to say so. Gonzo Capital is the thing I say in the room that nobody else will say. Consider yourself in the room. If you've read this far you already know whether this is for you. You're probably someone who has felt the distance between how the world gets described and how it actually operates. Between what people in positions of power say they believe and what their decisions reveal about what they actually believe. Between the version of capitalism that exists in press releases and the version that exists in practice. I don't have solutions. I have a point of view, a long memory, and a low tolerance for people who mistake greed for vision and call it disruption. Subscribe if you need it. Forward it to someone who does. I appreciate you nonetheless... And so it goes. ## Sign up for Gonzo Capital Dispatches on money, power, and the absurdity of it all, from a VC who still gives a damn. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.