With over 100,000 automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) sprouting out of the ground over the past few years, you might be tempted to ask: “with what money?”
Drug money, as it turns out, though it’s not exactly what you might think. A bombshell investigation by Mother Jones found that police departments across the US are using settlement money from the opioid crisis meant for struggling communities to instead fund Flock surveillance cameras.
All together, Mother Jones identified 19 agencies across ten different states which spent nearly $1 million of opioids settlement funds on ALPRs from companies like Flock and Axon (though the publication notes that’s almost certainly an undercount.)
The funding pipeline looks like this: after massive pharmaceutical firms agreed to pay out a combined $50 billion for their role in the opioid crisis, state agencies responsible for allocating those funds decided that police departments would make efficient use of the dough. Police agencies — which already account for one of the largest shares of municipal expenditures in the US overall — made a heartwarming pitch: send us that opioid money, and we’ll use it to buy new police toys and stamp out drug dealers.
As police departments across the US have made abundantly clear, ALPR systems are much better for stalking and harassing innocent civilians than they are for actually fighting crime. And when it comes to combatting the opioid crisis, specifically, there are perhaps few police toys less suited to the task.
“While $50 billion may seem like a lot of funds, once it’s divided up over 18 years and thousands of localities, a lot of places really aren’t getting that much, particularly given the scope of the crisis,” Robyn Oster, director of policy at the Partnership to End Addiction told Mother Jones. “Whatever funds you’re spending on a camera, you’re not spending on getting someone into treatment.”
Overall, it’s a slap in the face to anybody victimized by the man-made public health emergency that was — and still is — the opioid crisis. Rather than funding state-run rehab clinics or harm reduction campaigns, that money is being flushed away into AI surveillance cameras so that police can catch hardened criminals legally buying weed, or picking up petty cash from the ground.
“It’s just really not the way to make the most impact in addressing addiction,” Oster said.
I constantly think about the quote (literally no idea what it’s from) I read once about how teenage girls want to fuck their band guy idols because it’s the closest they can get to wanting to BE their band guy idols. Like damn… way to recontextualize my entire adolescence with 1 sentence
Read that again. Fifty. The Aquatic Centre opened in 1976, the year the CRTC said yes to curling on television and I was two years old. It is not a ruin. It is not a safety hazard. It is a building that somebody decided, at some point, was cheaper to demolish than to paint.
And the thing that troubles me about it isn't even the building itself. It's what the decision tells us about Vancouver — because the aquatic centre is just the most visible symptom of a disease the whole city shares.
We Used to Build Things That Lasted
If you think I'm exaggerating, read the city's own paperwork. The Current State Report that accompanies Vancouver's community centre strategy — the city grading its own homework — finds that over half of the community centre inventory is rated "poor" or "very poor" on the Facility Condition Index.
Britannia, Marpole-Oakridge, Ray-Cam, and the West End centre are all in various stages of renewal planning. Hastings Community Centre scores a facility condition of nearly 26% — firmly "poor" — and carries a high seismic risk rating, in an earthquake zone, while ABC forces through budgets that save the millionaire homeowners a few dollars a month.
Then, in September 2025, the city's Auditor General made it official. His audit covered the 46 recreation facilities the ParkBoard operates — 24 community centres, 14 pools, eight rinks — and put a number on the neglect: a funding deficit of $33 million per year, part of a citywide infrastructure deficit the AG pegs at $500 million per year.
That's not a rounding error. That's a city choosing, annually, not to keep its own buildings alive.
The Aquatic Centre didn't crumble. It was allowed to fail — a slow, budgeted neglect over decades, ending with a press release about exciting new waterfront opportunities.
The Shell Game
Here's where it gets really fun. In 2014, the city took over building maintenance for the Park Board's facilities under a formal agreement. The buildings, the boilers, the leaky roofs — that became the city's job. And ever since, the city's favourite talking point has been that the Park Board hasn't done enough to keep facilities up to date.
The Auditor General, with the patience of a man who has read all the contracts, notes that while the 2014 agreement exists, there is no operating-level agreement that actually defines who is responsible for what. A decade of shared maintenance duties, no written division of labour, and endless mutual finger-pointing.
I keep reading that sentence hoping it will make sense eventually. The city holds the wrench. The city blames the other hand for having no holes in its pocket. It's like watching someone burn down a kitchen and then complaining the chef isn't cooking fast enough.
Vancouver Aquatic Centre
Zero Means Zero
So why does a city with one of the healthiest downtowns in North America have community centres held together with caulking? Because Vancouver underfunds itself. Deliberately.
We've been treating that as a badge of honour for decades instead of what it is: a fifteen-year-olds'-homework understanding of how municipal finance works. Low taxes aren't free. They compound, just like interest — except what compounds is the repair backlog.
And the current response to all this is a budget branded "Zero means Zero," which sounds decisive until you notice that the zero applies to tax increases and not to the crumbling. A tax freeze in a city with a $500 million annual infrastructure deficit isn't fiscal discipline. It's a demolition order with extra steps. You don't save the money; you just spend it later, at demolition-contract prices.
The Auditor General, again and to his credit, says the quiet part out loud: if these gaps aren't bridged with taxpayer funding, the city will have to choose which assets it keeps and which it "decommissions" — which services it simply discontinues.
Vancouver has apparently made its choice. Ask anyone who used to swim laps at the Aquatic Centre.
Who Actually Runs the Parks?
Meanwhile, the Park Board has developed a habit of signing contracts with private operators that read like they were negotiated by the operator. No rent — instead, the concessionaire pays a percentage of revenue. Sounds reasonable. It isn't. If your income is a slice of the pie, your incentive is control of the bakery, and you've paid nothing for the oven. That arrangement means for the operators of the Prospect Point Cafe if they dislikes what the Park Board is doing — say, don’t fancy a bike lane passing their business — they can simply shut the doors and wait for the city to blink.
Which, during the Stanley Park bike lane fight, is more or less what happened. A public street in a public park was effectively held hostage by the terms of a lease the public's own board signed.
Destinations, Not Cities
And then there's the philosophy underneath all of it. The Aquatic Centre replacement is the case study.
Back in 2022, Vancouverites voted in favour of borrowing $103 million for the renewal of the Vancouver Aquatic Centre — Bylaw 13442, if you want to read the fine print yourself.
Now, the ballot question itself was lawyerly about it — the wording covered "replacement, renewal or rehabilitation," a spread broad enough to drive a zamboni through.
But nobody has to guess what voters thought they were buying, because the city's own information sheet for the plebiscitespelled it out: the proposed first phase would focus on renewing the existing 50-metre lap pool and diving pool.
The 50-metre pool was the product on the shelf. That's what the brochure said. That's what people voted for.
What the city is now delivering is a 25-metre pool. Half the length. The response to "this isn't what we were told" is essentially a shrug about modern construction costs and the desire to create yet another destination by adding a water park feature to the centre.
Notice what survived the value-engineering process and what didn't. A destination on the waterfront — render-ready, ribbon-cuttable, great for tourism brochures — fits the budget. A genuine 50-metre facility, the thing the city's own materials promised as phase one, does not.
The community was sold infrastructure. The city is delivering an attraction. And this is exactly the trap the ballot wording built: borrow against a promise vague enough to mean anything, then let the meaning shrink in private, after the votes are counted. The lawyers were careful. The swimmers weren't consulted twice.
The same logic produced another example: at English Bay, the concession stand was replaced with a Cactus Club restaurant. A chain restaurant in a public park, on public land, and then — of course — the concession portion promptly closed, because the restaurant would rather you sit down and pay table prices. We traded cheap beach food for a table minimum.
Destinations photograph well. Maintenance does not. But a city is made of Tuesdays, not grand openings — of the swim lane at 6 a.m., the bench you sit on, the parent paying four dollars for a hot dog after soccer practice.
Vancouver keeps optimizing for the photograph and tourist.
What This Says About Us
The Vancouver Aquatic Centre is fifty years old and we're tearing it down. Not because it failed, but because letting it fail was cheaper than maintaining it, and because a replacement gives someone a ribbon to cut — provided the ribbon can be attached to something a little smaller than what was promised.
Zoom out and you can see the pattern: buildings we don't repair, mandates we quietly shrink, revenue we sign away, blame we redirect, and taxes we refuse to collect.
Vancouver likes to think of itself as a green, livable, world-class city.
World-class cities fund their libraries, their pools, and their community centres.
What the Aquatic Centre tells us is that we've become very good at the branding and very bad at the boring part. The wrecking balls are coming for the pool this fall. Judging by the state of the rest of the city, they'll have plenty more to do after.
The next municipal election is on Saturday, October 17, 2026.
According to new documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, an undergraduate working with DOGE requested that his work for HUD count towards his University of Chicago degree.
Photograph: Samuel Corum/Getty Images
Christopher Sweet, an affiliate of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, requested college credit for his time in government, according to new documents obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal organization.
Sweet was stationed at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and in emails between Sweet and Scott Langmack, another DOGE affiliate at HUD, it appears that Sweet was looking to frame his work at HUD as an independent study worth three college credits. Sweet joined HUD in the spring of 2025 as an undergraduate college student at the University of Chicago to work on building an AI tool that would crawl through the agency’s rules and regulations and flag them for rescission, or the cancellation of contracts. The tool, called SweetRex, was intended to be rolled out across the federal government.
In an August 26, 2025 email titled “which of these should go to U Chicago,” Langmack wrote to Sweet saying, “I need to send them something that has specific framework of the different courses/credits we want them to give you.”
Documents attached to the email show that Sweet’s work was divided into four potential courses, “Advanced AI Prompt Engineering for Legal Reasoning,” “Applied Data Science for Federal Regulatory Analysis,” “Computer Programming for Scalable Al-Legal Systems,” and “Legislative & Regulatory Authority in AI-Driven Reform.” It appears these were meant to lead to a final proposed thesis focused on “the design, implementation, and impact of integrated AI, data science, software engineering, and legal authority analysis to rationalize outdated federal regulations.” The documents make clear that Sweet’s work was not an internship but, “graduate-level, multi-disciplinary research producing real-world outputs that are already influencing federal regulatory reform."
It appears that the final outline that was created to send to the University of Chicago for approval was created by AI. In an August 27, 2025 email, Langmack tells Sweet “I did the outline on ChatGPT.”
HUD and the University of Chicago did not reply to requests for comment. WIRED confirmed that Sweet did, in fact, graduate from the University of Chicago this June with a degree in economics, though it is unclear if credits from his time with DOGE contributed to the school’s requirements.
Langmack came to HUD from the property technology company Kukun—whose website describes it as being on “a long-term mission to aggregate the hardest to find data”—with zero experience in the federal government. He is now the executive director of deregulation AI at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), according to his LinkedIn. Langmack did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“These documents raise serious concerns about how one of DOGE’s unqualified employees has been entrusted to handle legal work, rewriting rules and regulations that affect millions of Americans, while attempting to count this work towards an undergraduate degree,” says Daniel McGrath, special counsel for oversight at Democracy Forward, describing the case as part of the “Trump-Vance administration’s relentless pursuit to cripple the important work of the federal government.”
They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.
Orwell, 1984
In a letter to his mistress Louise Colet, the novelist Gustave Flaubert remarked that “to be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.” He then added, “though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.”
In all seriousness, a friend reminds me that, once all “this” is sort of over, one way of reconciling oneself to the fact that seventy-seven million people voted for Trump in 2024, after everything that had happened over the previous eight years, is that a very large percentage of those people are idiots, and consequently have never achieved the level of mens rea, as lawyers would say, to merit the consignment to a fiery pit that a more knowledgeable choice would require.
We really, really need to talk about venture capital. Because it’s not “venture capital” anymore.
There’s a huge disconnect between what most people think of VC, where an investor has a big fund and cuts checks to help a founder build a company, and the current reality, where a handful of billionaire extremists use the cover of “VC” to advance an outrageous agenda where they’re accountable to no one.
I’m gonna explain this from a standpoint that almost never gets articulated: I’ve personally raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding as CEO of startups, and been directly involved as a board member or advisor in raising hundreds of millions more. I’ve sat in board rooms, across the table from the people I’m talking about here, or been at the industry events that they frequent. So this isn’t sour grapes because these VCs wouldn’t cut me a check, or some chip on my shoulder about these investors due to a business deal. This is what I know about these bad actors because I’m part of the community of creators and inventors who build the things that they used to invest in — back when they still cared about innovation.
Many of the trends in society and politics that people are most angry about, from data centers being forced down everyone’s throats, to all of our favorite apps and services being enshittified, to politicians being paid to ignore the will of the people, are all being supercharged by these cancer capitalists. They have warped the structure of venture capital into a form of oligarchy that answers to no market, no regulators, and no voters. So it’s worth understanding exactly how they did it.
How Venture Capital became Cancer Capital
I’ll be breaking these points down in further detail, but just to begin framing the concept, I’ll lay out the core idea here in some bullet points (so that you’re not tempted to run this whole thing through an LLM):
Venture capital was only supposed to be a tiny segment of the overall capital market, but it has expanded to become the primary form of funding that new companies consider — it was never the only way, and it didn’t used to be the default one
VC was meant to be a small percentage of overall investment because it represents the high-risk, high-reward part of a portfolio; to be healthy, most of a portfolio — or most of an economy — needs to focus on assets that are more stable and predictable. But a cancer grows from a cell that a body needs in small, healthy amounts, and that turns deadly when it grows without limit until it harms, or even kills, its host.
As regulations have gotten looser in recent years, a handful of venture capital firms have become “do everything” funds that combine private equity with their existing VC businesses, and expand to manage massive stockpiles of tens of billions of dollars
The 1% of VC firms that get this big stop being exposed to the risk in their own investments at all — when you collect 2% a year to manage $50 billion, that’s a billion dollars landing in your pocket annually whether any company you funded lives or dies. Those firms also stop legally even being venture capital firms, making them unaccountable to markets, founders, or the law — and that’s how they become “Cancer Capital”
Meanwhile, the 99% of “normal” VCs don’t have the power or funding of the Cancer Capital firms, but are forced to play on the field that those firms define, even if they don’t like the way they do business
Since the Cancer Capital firms have become so powerful, the overall balance of power between founders and VCs has flipped; instead of founders having a company that VCs would try to fund, now VCs publish extremist political manifestos, and “founders” are just the people who are selected to carry out parts of those plans
The rest of the world doesn’t know: New founders and workers entering the tech industry are unaware that Cancer Capital has taken over, so many are still trying to play by the old rules, and can’t figure out why their ideas are being pushed into serving the goals of the Cancer Capital firms
Politicians and media still look at VC as if it works like it did 10 or 20 years ago, and cheer them on like they’re funding job creation or enabling new companies to grow, when their primary goal is concentrating power and wealth into the hands of the Cancer Capital tycoons. They keep getting fooled by this, over and over.
These days, venture firms are increasingly getting their funds from pension funds and retail retirement accounts, meaning the public (you!) are increasingly holding the bag for the parts of their portfolios that actually have some risk, even if you never intentionally made that choice
The shift away from IPOs in the tech industry has also encouraged these Cancer Capital firms to find ways to cash out long before companies ever go public, meaning they can make a massive return off of companies that never make a penny of profit, even if regular investors get screwed by the stock of a company once it actually gets listed on the public stock market.
Part of why this has gotten so corrupt is the way the Cancer Capital firms have transformed themselves into their post-VC forms. Because they’re not legally VC firms anymore, they’re free to buy shares directly from founders, or hold unlimited amounts of publicly-traded stock — exactly what they couldn’t do as regular VCs. They can even sell their investment in a company as an asset to another one of their own funds, and then book the increase in value as a profit, all without the company ever having made a penny. Another racket: a company that’s raised a bunch of cash in a funding round can buy out its early investors if they’re one of these post-VCs, so they can get paid off even if their portfolio company has never made a penny in profits or revenues.
All of this self-dealing, and the way that they’re isolated from any accountability, has made these firms become more and more shameless in their behavior. Former Andreessen Horowitz partner John O’Farrell publicly called out the firm (a rarity — the company is notoriously vindictive towards those who it decides are disloyal) for what he called its “political infiltration” of AI policy. Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and their firm have put $115.3 million into this midterm cycle — nearly double their $63 million in 2024, and more than any other billionaire donor in the country, even including Elon Musk. Molly White, whose Tech Influence Watch tracks this money against FEC filings, shows that a16z alone accounts for more than 20% of all political contributions from the entire cohort of crypto and AI companies it follows. And they’re funneling these funds to candidates in both parties. This is a huge escalation from the tentative baby steps that folks like Zuckerberg were making in the Obama era, working on benign issues like trying to help immigrants.
And of course, it gets a lot worse than just their lobbying. As I have frequently noted, Andreessen Horowitz hired a man as a partner at their firm despite his having no background or qualifications in tech, finance, or startups whatsoever. His only discernible qualification was that he had choked my unarmed neighbor Jordan Neely to death on a subway car.
This is how brazen, how toxic and destructive, we’ve allowed the industry formerly known as venture capital to become. We must understand that it is no longer a financial machine that is used to fund startups, but a political and social machine focused on dismantling democracy and civil society. And it’s time to act accordingly.
Up next: we’ll dive into the specifics of many of the points laid out above, to understand more about how we got here.
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