Read our Digital & Print Editions And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system SUBSCRIBE TODAY At two in the morning, Venezuelan time, on January 3 the lights went out across Caracas. Within hours, the geopolitical architecture of the Western Hemisphere had been violently rearranged. Under cover of a cyber-induced blackout, the United States launched Operation Absolute Resolve – a massive, multi-domain military intervention that culminated in the extrajudicial capture and rendition of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The White House has framed this as being a decisive law enforcement action against a "narco-terrorist" regime. President Donald Trump declared the US was now "in charge" of Venezuela, with Maduro jailed in New York. However, the players and financial interests behind the raid reveal something far more troubling. The move not only dovetails with longstanding Russian attempts, since 2017, to encourage Trump to consider annexing Venezuela, in return for allowing Russia to take control of Ukraine, further evidence unearthed by Byline Times also ties it to tech industry plans to turn a sovereign nation into a laboratory for Silicon Valley's most radical experiment: the "Network State." The 'Network State' Laboratory The US fossil fuel industry spent some $445 million through the last election cycle to influence Donald Trump and US Congress, and donated $19 million to Trump's inauguration ceremonies. Yet the American shale boom which has buoyed the US economy for the last decade is inexorably slowing down. Industry insiders and even conventional forecasts acknowledge that US shale oil and gas production is likely to peak this decade, hitting a long plateau before a decline that steadily shaves off the traditional foundations of US prosperity. Grabbing Venezuelan oil, at least on paper, compensates for this coming energy crisis – expanding the total fossil fuel resources, boosting oil stock prices and conveying to global markets that US oil majors are here to stay. However, for pro-Trump Silicon Valley figures like Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, and Marc Andreessen, the annexation of Venezuela represents a business opportunity of a different kind. They are proponents of what Srinivasan has branded the "Network State" – a movement seeking to fragment existing nations into proprietary, market-governed enclaves or "startup societies". Venezuela, broken by sanctions and now decapitated by military force, offers the potential of being the ultimate tabula rasa. The intellectual blueprint for this intervention began years ago. Founder of the Charter Cities Institute Mark Lutter, who in 2018 received funding from the Thiel-backed Emergent Ventures for work "on charter cities and also an attempt to create a new charter city", previously discussed authoring a white paper on Venezuela premised on a "transfer of power". The paper was never released to the public. In a 2019 conversation Mark Lutter and 80,000 Hours podcast host Robert Wiblin talked about how to capitalise on the forcible removal of the Venezuelan Government. Speaking seven years before the US eventually decapitated the regime, the pair spoke about the sovereignty of the country as being a mere obstacle to economic experimentation. Wiblin, a former Executive Director at the Centre for Effective Altruism – the philosophical engine room for a significant faction of Silicon Valley – hypothesised a scenario where "Maduro gets removed" without saying by what means. Lutter revealed that his Centre for Innovative Governance Research was already drafting a white paper based on the "assumption" that this "transfer of power" would occur. Crucially, Lutter framed this regime change as a necessary precondition for his ideology to take root. He argued that a post-Maduro Government, likely operating in a state of desperation, would be "willing to adopt ideas that otherwise they might not be willing to adopt" – specifically, handing ...
