Help me make Vampire Valley

...a film about the internet.

You probably saw me messing around with some Vampire Valley clips and streams on here the last few months — posting teasers, rants about the Spectacle, and various half-finished segments on the history of the internet. Well, having now tried a few things and with Pistachio Wars finally out and streaming, I now have the time and energy to make it into a full-fledged documentary: Vampire Valley, a film about how the internet is destroying our minds and destroying the world.

Problem with this kind of work is that it takes time and resources…lots of time and resources. So I’m crowdsourcing the first episode of the series: “Born in Sin.” I need your help to make it!

How did I get here? Well…

I studied computer science in UC Berkeley and worked at an internet start up while in college. I know that world. I know how computers work. I was a programmer. I could have been Mark Zuckerberg. I could have been your billionaire tech overlord. But I dropped out before I made my app. I left Silicon Valley. I took the moral path and became a journalist. And now I’m begging for money on GoFundMe.

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Out of all the journalistic work I’ve done to date, I genuinely feel that this is the most important. The internet has now become a purely negative force, corrupting everything it touches. It’s so vast and multifaceted, and reaches so deep into our lives and culture and politics. And yet we don’t have a cohesive narrative that helps us understand the internet’s trajectory from its utopian ideals in the 1990s to the oligarchic dystopia of today. Vampire Valley, I hope, will fill that void.

So give me money if you can!

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Some perks to help motivate you:

• If you give $100 or more, you’ll get a free annual subscription to this NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS newsletter.

• If you give $500 or more, you’ll get that *and* a signed copy of my book Pistachio Wars, which inspired the documentary I made with Rowan Wernham.

• If you give $1000 or more, you’ll get all that *and* your name in the credits of the film.

• If you give $5000 or more, you’ll get all that *and* get listed as a producer on the film.

• If you give $10,000 or more, I’ll suc…well let’s not talk publicly what I, the director, will do for (or to) you. But rest assured it will be a lot and you’ll love it.

—Yasha

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