It was December 2020 in San Francisco and Mike Solana was fed up. In the wake of the pandemic, as many of his friends and colleagues in the tech industry were leaving the city, the anti-tech media was shaping their exodus into yet another hysterical narrative. “There was this idea that tech people had come, extracted all the wealth in San Francisco, and moved on,” says Solana, the chief marketing officer at Founders Fund, a venture firm cofounded by Peter Thiel and known for its bets on Airbnb, Palantir, and OpenAI. “The premise was just totally wrong.” To set the record straight, he took to his Substack.
In a piece called “Extract or Die,” Solana argued it wasn’t tech that was the parasitic blight on the city: It was government officials. Tech companies had brought San Francisco unfathomable wealth, money that went on to be mismanaged by politicians who had exacerbated every one of the city’s issues, from the housing shortage to drug use. “The truth is,” he wrote with characteristic bombast, “had tech workers actually assumed a significant measure of political influence, and led in local politics, San Francisco would today be one of the greatest cities in the world.”
Solana’s cri de coeur ignited a corner of the internet. Hundreds of engineers, executives, and venture capitalists shared the article and thanked Solana for speaking up for them. His Substack, Pirate Wires, gained thousands of subscribers. The response was overwhelming, and he realized there was a role he could fill within the media landscape. “It helped me understand what I was doing that no one else was really doing,” he says. Pirate Wires, he resolved, would become its own full-fledged media company. With backing from Founders Fund, Solana hired four full-time editors and writers, moved from Substack to a splashy website reminiscent of Vice, and wrote a swashbuckling mission statement about being an antidote to “our modern publishing giants” and “draconian political censorship.”
But he was far from the only one in tech who decided it was time for tech to punch back.
Over the past few years, a cadre of prominent tech founders, investors, and personalities — most but not all of them wealthy, middle-aged white men — have launched their own tech-focused media projects. The most famous of these is “All-In,” the clubby podcast hosted by the investors David Sacks, Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Friedberg. Regularly near the top of Apple and Spotify charts since it debuted in March 2020, the show features the self-proclaimed “besties” pontificating on startup investments, politics, and poop jokes. They frequently bring the most influential people on the planet in for friendly interviews, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump.
There’s also Coogan, a popular YouTube channel in which John Coogan, a cofounder of the health-food company Soylent, narrates short laudatory documentaries about tech companies and entrepreneurs, like “How to BUILD Like Elon Musk” and “The Epic History of Artificial Intelligence” — a sort of “Why We Fight” for Silicon Valley. Elite venture firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital and even tech companies like Coinbase have launched their own media arms, publishing glossy magazine-style profiles of founders and breathless essays about the ecstatic future of tech — especially AI — while combating “misinformation” about the industry in the legacy media.
Most of these projects have branded themselves as “techno-optimistic,” a phrase popularized by Marc Andreessen in his 5,000-word chest-thumping “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” Though they compete for attention, they’re unified in a primary agenda: To advance the idea that, as Andreessen puts it, “technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.”
While it’s tempting to cast the pro-tech media as PR with some razzle-dazzle, there’s another side to its agenda: to call out the enemies of tech — namely regulation, wokeism, legacy media, and, increasingly, liberal politicians. These outlets are fast becoming the spaces where tech’s most powerful players unapologetically say what they really think. It also gives them the opportunity to circumvent scrutiny from traditional media, shaping counternarratives on their own terms. The pro-tech media is, above all, a call to arms for the tech industry. In the words of Solana, it is a “revolution of the broletariat.” Or as the investor Balaji Srinivasan put it in a recent interview with Pirate Wires, it is “information warfare of one tribe versus another.”
And as the pro-tech media’s influence rises, its founders and followers are taking this war into their offices, city halls, and even presidential politics.
For many years, the pro-tech media had no reason to exist, as much of traditional media either ignored tech or cheered it on.
Solana, who began his career as a book editor at the Penguin Group in New York, likely speaks for many when he admits that he was once so insulated from Silicon Valley that he was unaware it was a real place. “I genuinely thought it was a metaphor,” the 38-year-old says. Just 20 years ago journalists covered the tech industry “like it didn’t matter, like it was this hobbyist, interesting, plucky thing.” Back then, startup founders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk were trumpeted as rebels and aspirational leaders. But to Solana and many in the tech industry, ever since Donald Trump’s social-media-fueled election in 2016, many of those same founders have been treated to unrelenting scrutiny and scorn. As Solana puts it, it felt like “the entire startup ecosystem, the concept of startups, anybody working in this stuff was deemed suspicious and bad and that the future would be bad.”
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On the surface, the pro-tech media aims to bring back some now much-needed hype to the industry. Many of Silicon Valley’s most touted innovations over the past several years have failed to live up to their promises: cryptocurrency, NFTs, the metaverse, Web3. Meanwhile, several of its most prominent and lucrative products — most glaringly social media — are increasingly scrutinized by regulators. Sam Bankman-Fried, once touted as the next Warren Buffett, is serving 25 years for fraud. Gen Z is turning away from working for Big Tech. An industry once made up of innovators and upstart “disruptors” has become corporate, bloated, and complacent. To many, tech has lost the plot. The pro-tech media gives tech’s main characters the chance to write their way back to the original storyline, that the industry is “making the world a better place.”
Trae Stephens, a partner at Founders Fund, described Pirate Wires as a kind of daily affirmation for Silicon Valley.
“We believe in the romance of technology, of industry,” Andreessen writes in “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” “The eros of the train, the car, the electric light, the skyscraper. And the microchip, the neural network, the rocket, the split atom.” The pro-tech media is full of this type of romanticizing. Recent Coogan videos include “Palantir: The App That Caught Bin Laden,” “Anduril – The Startup Reshaping Geopolitics,” and “This Email Changed the Credit Card Industry,” a 30-minute documentary about the payment-platform startup Ramp. Pirate Wires, too, touts the awesome promises of tech, with headlines like “Palmer Luckey Saves the World” and “We Need to Be Living Forever” and theatrical, ooh-rah proposals for “why now is the time to build the greatest era of human civilization.”
Trae Stephens, a partner at Founders Fund, described Pirate Wires as a kind of daily affirmation for Silicon Valley. “It’s not only techno-optimistic, but it also has a nostalgic vibe,” he says. “Like, ‘We were great, we are great, and we can be great.’ That’s an empowering message to people who are building.” Or as Dick Lucas, a software developer who subscribes to Pirate Wires, put it to me: “Why would I read the tech section of a news site when I can go to the tech publication that’s in tech with the people that are doing the stuff?”
Lucas’ bio on X is emblematic of much of the pro-tech media’s audience: “Techno-optimist, American Dynamism, long Mars, long humanity, long crypto, long freedom, accelerate or die.” These readers tend to see themselves, as Lucas describes it, not as “tinfoil-hat guys” or “burn-it-down guys” but as rational but radical contrarians.
These are all identity-driven brands, and their identities vary. “All-In” is like a cross between Joe Rogan and “The View”: fratty, barbed, gossipy. Coogan opts for an informed but breathless documentary-style approach. (Coogan, who is an entrepreneur in residence at Founders Fund, often receives comments that he is running ads on behalf of the firm.) Meanwhile, Pirate Wires is urgent and irreverent, often veering into winding tangents that yield contradictory insights. A typical passage: “Now that Kamala is running for president (don’t ask how), it was inevitable the press would pivot to publicity for Team Coconut. But with gaslighting so extreme, and months to go before the election, it looks like our entire world’s about to be rewritten. Screenshot everything, and try to remember who you are.” As Stephens puts it, reading Pirate Wires feels “like being inside Solana’s brain.”
But both the progenitors of these projects and their fans share an overarching ethos that building and turgidly celebrating tech is itself an identity. They also tend to share other aspects of their identities: 70% of Pirate Wires’ paid subscribers are men ages 25 to 40 who work in tech and finance. In his own words, Solana is writing for and perpetuating a “new class of people building new things” who are “increasingly isolated from mainstream culture.”
One aim of the pro-tech media is to crystallize and propel an unapologetic, unified bloc of people working toward a shared vision of tech: Us. The other is to identify, call out, and neutralize its detractors: Them.
“It’s weird that tech people have been painted as the villains,” says Packy McCormick, whose techno-optimistic Substack, Not Boring, has some 225,000 subscribers. Pro-tech media outlets, he says, are “reframing who the villains are.”
The media and its perceived anti-tech bias are frequently in the pro-tech media’s crosshairs, from entire publications like The Washington Post and TechCrunch to individual tech journalists like Taylor Lorenz, Ryan Mac, and Kevin Roose. Pirate Wires has published two particularly acerbic stories — one by Solana, one by the journalist Jesse Singal — criticizing one story by the journalist Casey Newton that they argued wildly overplayed the rise of Nazis on Substack. “Casey isn’t a journalist,” Solana wrote. “Casey is a political activist who calls himself a journalist in service of mainstreaming his activism under the cover of neutrality.”
“That kind of writing needs a counterpoint, and it just never had one before,” Solana tells me of the Newton articles. (Newton declined to comment for this story.)
“Tech was held accountable by legacy media, and now Pirate Wires is holding legacy media accountable,” said Erik Torenberg, the founder of the pro-tech company Turpentine Media.
On Pirate Wires, jeremiads have been written against Anthony Fauci, Ellen Pao, NPR CEO Katherine Maher, DEI activists at Google, San Francisco’s “DEI Industrial Complex,” DEI at large, and Disney.
The pro-tech media’s other adversaries are a constellation of government, corporate, and entertainment figures dubbed too reflexively anti-tech, too anti-growth, or too politically correct. On Pirate Wires, jeremiads have been written against Anthony Fauci, who “oversaw one of the greatest erosions of institutional trust in American history”; Ellen Pao, “the architect of tech’s #metoo movement”; DEI activists at Google; DEI at large; Disney, for its penchant for “girlboss protagonists”; and NPR’s CEO, Katherine Maher, for her “near perfect record of ideological opposition to Silicon Valley.” Though Solana has since moved to Miami, his fiercest ire on Pirate Wires remains fixed on San Francisco’s liberal politicians. A sampling of recent headlines: “How San Francisco Attracts and Traps Homeless Transplants,” “How San Francisco’s DEI Industrial Complex Works,” and “Inside SF Public Schools’ Shocking Health Curriculum.” “All-In” has similarly taken aim at figures including Fauci, George Soros, Joe Biden, and a host of California politicians.
In 2022, when David Sacks was personally bankrolling the recall of the San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin, he and the other “All-In” hosts goaded listeners to support recalling Boudin and Gov. Gavin Newsom in exchange for personal shout-outs on the show.
Emboldened by this chorus of combativeness, many of the pro-tech media’s luminaries and disciples are taking its agenda into the real world. “If you have a belief and you see it in Pirate Wires, maybe you can bring it up at your company’s all-hands,” John Coogan says. Or if you’re management, you can use the pro-tech media to tell your underlings to get with the program. In November 2022, a week after Elon Musk took over Twitter and laid off half its staff, a vice president encouraged concerned remaining staffers to listen to “All-In.” “The most recent podcast covers the current layoffs happening across tech and provides some insight into why this is happening/necessary,” the VP wrote, according to reporting from Casey Newton. Or you can take the pro-tech media to city hall. At a recent meeting of San Francisco’s board of supervisors, a woman lambasted a city initiative that redistributed $120 million in police funding to Black communities by citing a lengthy quote from a Pirate Wires screed against the “historic racial equity cash grab.”
Perhaps most significantly, the pro-tech media has begun to influence the national political agenda. In June, the “All-In” hosts Palihapitiya and Sacks hosted an up-to-$300,000-a-head fundraiser for Trump’s reelection campaign at Sacks’ $20 million home in San Francisco, an event that once would have been unimaginable in the city. Trump went on to be treated to a fawning interview on the podcast, and Sacks went on to speak at the Republican National Convention, where the Peter Thiel protege JD Vance was named Trump’s pick for vice president.
Of the members of the news media I talked to about pro-tech media, some were backhandedly laudatory. “Mike Solana is a talented guy on a number of levels, some of them nefarious,” Brian Merchant, a tech columnist who wrote the book “Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech,” said. “Both in politically playing the game to get funding for his projects and also in being an effective asshole writer who can get attention on the internet.” Others exhibited the same instinct to “go direct” to their audiences as tech entrepreneurs. When I asked the Semafor founder Ben Smith for an interview, he wrote back, “Super interesting topic but I’d rather compete with you on this one than be a pundit. :)”
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Others were cautiously enthusiastic. “Why should journalists own the ethical obligation of informing people about the world?” said Eric Newcomer, a reporter who left Bloomberg in 2020 to start a Substack covering the tech industry. “Tech is oriented in a good way around productive solutions, but when it comes to the media they’ve just been whining and abrogating responsibility. So if these people say ‘We can do news better,’ well, good. Let them figure it out.”
Some early pro-tech media ventures have already figured out that even the most avid enthusiasts will retreat from bland propaganda, no matter how sleekly packaged. Andreessen Horowitz’s publication Future, for example, launched in 2021 with a string of high-profile editorial hires and a glitzy website touting itself as “the future of media.” It failed to gain a loyal readership and shut down after just 18 months.
And even with monied backers, high-profile connections, and a bravado that captures the tech industry’s zeitgeist, building a successful media company in 2024 is a steep challenge. Media’s “business model is just completely fucked,” Solana says. As advertising dollars dry up for publishers, he’s been toying with different strategies for monetization. Still, Pirate Wires’ $20-a-month subscription fee is a steep price for what subscribers get: The site tends to stagnate, with several days often passing between single posts. Solana still assigns, edits, and writes the majority of the site’s content. “The truth is I have two full-time jobs right now and it’s absolutely miserable,” he said. Perhaps tellingly, he has no plans to leave Founders Fund anytime soon.
Still, as mistrust in traditional media remains high and readers flock to more identity-focused brands, these projects will likely only gain traction and play an increasingly important role in shaping how the tech industry sees itself and perceives its enemies. Lulu Cheng Meservey, a communications expert who has worked extensively with tech founders, told me that when she talks to entrepreneurs about the publications they’d most like to be covered in these days, “they will usually say The Information and Bloomberg, but also Pirate Wires or John Coogan.” More and more, tech’s elite are following Balaji Srinivasan’s advice in a recent Pirate Wires interview — “Don’t fucking talk to journalists” — and going to the pro-tech media to set the agenda.
But their success comes with an irony: The more they multiply, the more they’re starting to act like the media outlets they despise, shamelessly vying for attention and an edge in branding. On June 30, Solana posted a 3,000-word essay, called “We Are the Media Now,” that set his sights on a new target: his rising competition in the pro-tech media. He took on an uncharacteristically defensive tone listing Pirate Wires’ bona fides against the rest of the field: “I wrote about San Francisco local politics when the subject was somehow both considered silly and ‘mean.’ Today, that discourse is a core part of tech culture.” He ended with a message for “every billionaire in tech” looking to start their own media company: “The good news is you don’t need to build an ‘edgy new tech press outlet’ that doesn’t want communism. I already did that. You’re welcome.”
Solana seems keenly aware of this development. “The truth is,” he told me recently, deploying one of his favorite phrases, “the unfortunate truth, by the way, is that I think I’ve become a journalist. And I don’t love the feeling.”
Zoë Bernard is a feature writer based in Los Angeles. She writes about technology, crime, and culture. Formerly, she covered technology for The Information and Business Insider.
