Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds

A 2025 follow-up to his 2019 'Too Much Dark Money In Almonds' (Americans spend more on almonds than on elections; why doesn't any billionaire just buy politics?). The answer arrived: Marc Andreessen's crypto PAC Fairshake raised $260M in 2024 (vs AIPAC's $87M), combining the everyone-else strategy (fund safe incumbents and both sides of close races) with the AIPAC strategy (annihilate a chosen enemy — Katie Porter, via $10M of attack ads that never mention crypto), and won overwhelmingly (a pro-crypto House bill, a strategic Bitcoin reserve). Now the AI industry copies the playbook: 'Leading The Future' ($200M, a16z + Greg Brockman) plus Meta's PAC, aimed at crushing any AI-regulation politician. Part V is a call to action: political money is so small that a committed group can counter it; AI safety has underperformed (FTX poisoned the well; EA institutional scar tissue), but $7K hard-money checks from 1,000 EAs would matter — with concrete asks (aisafetypolitics@gmail.com; donate to Alex Bores/RAISE Act and Scott Wiener/SB 53).

Quality 72 · Strong. Strong. Clear, well-reported political-economy with a sticky thesis — the very smallness of US political spending makes it both capturable by one billionaire and contestable by a committed minority — plus a rare concrete, actionable mobilization for AI-safety politics. More topical update + advocacy than original theory (the core insight is the 2019 post's), so it sits with the strong topical essays (Record-Low-Crime 73, Political-Backflow 73). 72.

Claude’s paradigm shift 42 · Moderate. Moderate. Applies and updates his own 2019 'smallness of political money' observation to the crypto/AI PAC era; the analysis is sharp but the framing is not new. 42.

Real-world impact 3 · Moderate. Clear, well-reported political-economy with a sticky thesis — the very smallness of US political spending makes it both capturable by one billionaire (Andreessen's $260M Fairshake) and contestable by a committed minority — plus a rare concrete, actionable mobilization for AI-safety politics. Real topical relevance to political-money dynamics, but an update-plus-advocacy informing the debate — modest RWI.