Risk Capital: The Right-Wing Origins of Venture Capital

M.R. Sauter, University of Maryland, presents as part of the 2025/26 FIMS Rogers Chair Lecture Series.

Thursday, January 15, 2026
Conron Hall, University College
4:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Register now.

All are welcome to attend.

Abstract: In this talk, M.R. Sauter argues that the U.S. (and thus North American) innovation economy was constructed through financial law rather than technology policy. Focusing on the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and the regulatory construction of venture capital as patriotic “risk capital,” the talk examines how neoliberal reforms redefined prudence, risk, and fiduciary duty in ways that routed collective retirement savings into speculative finance while insulating financial elites from accountability. These changes normalized a political economy in which professional risk-taking was framed as a patriotic necessity, even as its costs were systematically displaced onto workers and the public. The talk situates this transformation within a broader trajectory of democratic erosion, showing how deregulation, politically mobilized risk narratives, and neoliberal financialization have proven structurally compatible with authoritarian and far-right projects that demand sacrifice without consent or reciprocity.

Speaker bio: M.R. Sauter is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland College of Information. They are the author of The Coming Swarm: DDoS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet. They received their PhD from McGill University in 2020, and they hold a master's degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT. They have held research fellowships at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society, and New America. Their work has been published in The Atlantic, Enterprise and Society, the Journal of Communication, the Case Western Reserve Law Review, Real Life Mag, e-flux, New Media and Society, Ethnography Matters, HiLow Brow, io9, Vice, the National Post, the Globe and Mail, the Los Angeles Times, the American Behavioral Scientist, and the MIT Technology Review, and in collected volumes published by MIT Press and Peter Lang. They have frequently appeared as an expert on technology, culture, and politics on the CBC, NPR, TVO, the BBC, PRI, American Public Media, the Boston Globe, and other international outlets. Their research has been featured by Popular Mechanics, BoingBoing, Slate, Der Spiegel, and the Christian Science Monitor. Their second book, Risk Capital: How High Finance Remade High Technology is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press.

Co-sponsored by the FIMS Rogers Chair of Studies in Journalism and New Information Technology and the Starling Centre for Just Technologies and Just Societies.