Twelve committees moved $4.85 billion through American politics in four years, accounting for over 35% of total expenditure. Behind them sits a room of maybe forty people.

The convenient fiction about American campaign finance is that it is a mass phenomenon — millions of small donors, a distributed civic act. The plumbing supports that story: ActBlue and WinRed processed roughly $8.9 billion between them across the 2022 and 2024 cycles, most of it in increments small enough to be a lunch.

But the rails are not the money. Strip them out and what remains is a far smaller structure, where twelve committees accounted for $4.85 billion of actual political spending over those two cycles. Each of those twelve resolves, on inspection, to a handful of names. Often to one.

Hub Culture is working with the Digital Asset Transfer Authority to make tickets, donations and hotel rooms available in Ven to support the first DATA Annual Meeting, 9-11 April in Washington D.C.