What It Means That the Most Complete Map of Silicon Valley’s Political Project Had to Be Published Anonymously
I have spent over a decade documenting this industry under my own name. My name is on three books. It is on a documentary. It is on the petitions, the complaints, the events, the record. I made that choice deliberately, and I have paid for it in ways I have written about elsewhere.
So when I find a researcher who has produced something extraordinary and refuses to sign it, I do not dismiss them. I pay attention. Because I know exactly what it costs to sign, and I know what it means when somebody decides they cannot.
The site is called Venture Capital Status. It lives at vcinfodocs.com. It has nineteen chapters. It is, by its own description, the length of a standard nonfiction book. There is no author page. There is no masthead. There is no LinkedIn. There is a ProtonMail address and nothing else.
And it is the most comprehensive single map I have found of what venture capital is actually building.
What Is In It
The chapters read like an index of everything I have been shouting about, assembled by someone with more patience than I have.
There is a chapter on the Network State — the project to build sovereign corporate territories outside the reach of any nation’s law. There are chapters tracking those projects on the ground in Honduras, in Nigeria, in El Salvador. There is a chapter on unregulated medical experimentation in those zones, and another on the fertility and embryo-screening startups being built alongside them. There are chapters on weapons startups, on the crypto financial system, on parallel media, on the capture of institutions.
Every chapter is built the same way: a claim, then a link to the primary source. Reuters. Bloomberg. The Guardian. Court records. SEC filings. Company press releases. UN reports. The venture capitalists’ own manifestos, their own podcasts, their own books, quoted at length and linked so you can go read the original and decide whether the quote was fair.
This is not a blog of opinions. It is a citation apparatus with an argument attached.
The Pamphlet Has Always Been Anonymous
There is a long tradition here, and it is worth remembering it before anyone sneers.
Common Sense was published anonymously in January 1776. Thomas Paine’s name was not on it. The Federalist Papers were published under the name Publius, and it took decades to sort out with certainty which of the three men wrote which essay. The Letters of Junius attacked the British government for three years and nobody has ever definitively established who wrote them.
We did not lose anything by receiving those documents without a byline. We received the argument and the evidence, and we did with them what free people do.
The anonymous pamphlet is not a modern internet pathology. It is the oldest form of accountability journalism there is, and it exists for exactly one reason: because sometimes the people you are writing about can hurt you, and the writing matters more than the credit.
Why This One Is Anonymous
I want to be precise here, because I deal in documented facts and my critics are waiting for me not to.
I do not know who runs vcinfodocs.com. I am not going to speculate about their identity, and I would ask you not to either — if they wanted you to know, you would know.
But I can tell you what I understand about the position they are in, because I have been in it.
The people documented on that site include some of the wealthiest individuals on this planet. Firms with tens of billions of dollars under management. Men with permanent litigation counsel on retainer, who have demonstrated across two decades that they will fund lawsuits — including other people’s lawsuits — as instruments of policy. One of them famously financed the litigation that destroyed an entire publication. That is not an allegation. That is a matter of public record he has discussed himself.
Against that, a single independent researcher has one asset: being difficult to find.
I chose the other path. I put my name on it. I do not regret that and I would not counsel anyone away from it. But I understand completely why someone would look at that landscape, do the arithmetic, and decide that the research reaching the public matters more than their name reaching the byline.
The anonymity is not a weakness of the work. It is a measurement of the environment the work had to be produced in. Ask yourself what it says about the state of press freedom in this country that the most thorough survey of Silicon Valley’s political project had to be published by a ghost.
The Objection I Hear — and Why It Fails
Somebody is already typing it: anonymous means unaccountable. If they won’t sign it, why should I trust it?
It is a fair instinct. It is also, in this specific case, backwards.
An anonymous source you cannot check is a problem. An anonymous researcher who links every claim to a document you can open in a new tab is not a problem — it is the opposite of a problem. The whole design of that site is an invitation to distrust the author and verify the sources. The homepage says so directly: verify the information, use it, share it.
Compare that to what passes for tech journalism in outlets that are funded, wholly or partly, by the same venture capital firms they are supposed to be covering. Those pieces have bylines. They have mastheads. They have editors and standards pages. They also have owners. I would rather have an unsigned document with two hundred working links than a signed one with an investor.
Trust the sources. Distrust the author. That is not a lowering of the standard. That is the standard.
Why I Am Linking and Not Copying
The site is dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0 Universal. That is about as generous a gesture as a writer can make — it is a formal renunciation of ownership over your own work.
I could mirror the whole thing. I looked hard at doing it. I am not going to, for two reasons.
The first is honest and practical: the site is built substantially out of quoted material from the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired, and a shelf of published books. The anonymous author can release their own sentences into the public domain. They cannot release Bloomberg’s. Copying it wholesale would not be an act of solidarity. It would be an act of carelessness with somebody else’s rights, and I have spent ten years arguing that this industry treats other people’s work as raw material. I am not going to do the same thing in the other direction.
The second is simpler. The site does not ask to be mirrored. It asks to be cited. Journalists, academics, tech critics, podcasters — the homepage names them and invites them to cite the work. A duplicate adds nothing. A citation adds a reader.
So I have built a resource page. It links to every chapter, gives full credit, and points people to the original. That is what the author asked for, and it is what the work deserves.
Go Read It
I have said before that our task in this window is to make the record so large, so sourced, and so human that no algorithm can erase it and no influence operation can outweigh it.
Somebody just added nineteen chapters to that record and asked for nothing in return — not money, not credit, not even their own name on the cover.
The least we can do is read it. The next least is to cite it, so that when the search engines and the language models go looking for what venture capital built, they find this too.
Go.
Vahid Razavi is the author of “No Ethics in Big Tech” and “Ethics in Tech and Lack Thereof”, and the director of the documentary “Forever Peace Now”. His work is self-funded — no corporate sponsors, no government grants, no advertising. Learn more at NoEthicsInBigTech.com, ForeverPeaceNow.com, ParentsPlea.com, and MyAWSStory.com.
Note: NoEthicsInBigTech.com is not affiliated with vcinfodocs.com and has no connection to its authors. We link to it as independent third-party research. Its claims and characterizations are its own. Readers are encouraged to follow its citations to the primary sources and reach their own conclusions.
Sources: Venture Capital Status, vcinfodocs.com, chapters and CC0 1.0 Universal dedication as published, accessed August 2026; Creative Commons, CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, legal text; Thomas Paine, Common Sense, published anonymously, Philadelphia, January 1776; The Federalist Papers, published under the pseudonym Publius, 1787–1788.
