Newsletter No 16

Date: 30 September 2025

 

Will the AI bubble pop?

There’s a widespread view that Big Tech firms’ massive investment in AI has created a US stock market bubble which is going to burst at some point.

US Big Tech firms are spending hundreds of billions of dollars building AI gateways into the digital world, evidently in the hope that we will all have to go through those gateways and enable them to extract even more tolls in money and data, thus extending their long run of spectacular profits.

(And then there is Nvidia, which has become a four-trillion-dollar company by supplying the vast numbers of chips used by the other tech giants).

However, sceptics point out that there is little sign so far of any serious profit being made on all the money being poured into large language models and energy-guzzling data centres.

At some point, the argument goes, hype will meet reality and share prices will fall. The biggest tech firms are so gigantic that they can survive a stock market crash, but an awful lot of money is going to be lost.

There’s no way of knowing how or when such an event might happen, because there’s so much contingency involved, but there does seem to be a lot of dry timber lying around – sky-high stock valuations, large amounts of capital flowing outside the regulated banking system and a corrupt and unpredictable US president.

How bad might the bursting of an AI bubble actually be? Pundits have suggested anything from a painful correction in the stock market, like the dot-com crash at the start of this century, to full-on 2008-style meltdown as ripple effects cause panic in other markets.

The bursting of an AI bubble could cause a lot of damage to the innocent through knock-on effects on the wider economy. But it would also undermine Silicon Valley’s techno-utopian narrative and its baneful influence over governments.

So it’s worth thinking about the political opportunities that the popping of an AI bubble could pose for campaigners who are seeking to curb corporate power.

On which point …

 

Radical change means working differently

This month Critical Takes featured a thought-provoking article by Audrey Gaughran, Michelle Meagher and Meghna Abraham. The article was first published by SOMO and they kindly agreed that I could publish a slightly shorter version of it.

They argue that campaigners and academics working on economic change need to think about transforming the global economy rather than tinkering at its edges. For example:

“Much of the work on the regulation of companies … has tended to accept the existence of massive multinationals and merely try to deal with their impacts on society. Too little work seeks to limit or remove their power.”

Thinking radically, they say, means coming up with responses which are genuinely co-created with activists and social movements and having those responses ready to deploy when the political moment arises. They see 2008 as a missed opportunity to do that.

Radical thinking, they say, has to include credible responses to the difficulties that deep change will pose. For instance, reducing over-consumption in the rich world will hit those workers who make the stuff that’s consumed, while economies like those of Ireland and Mauritius depend heavily on inflows of private capital and would need alternative models.

These are the sorts of questions we need to be wrestling with. I think that means exploring synergies between different approaches to change and avoiding the temptation to plump for “golden keys” – single-factor solutions which are assumed to “unlock” complex and multi-dimensional problems but actually can’t. (There's also a conversation to be had about who "we" are in this context and what our role should be).

Michelle Meagher and Meghna Abraham are now running the Future Economy Incubator. This looks like a really interesting new project that will be worth following.

 

Curbing corporate monopolies in African countries

Critical Takes published a very informative interview with Chilufya Sampa, formerly head of Zambia’s competition commission and now with the Shamba Centre for Food and Climate.

He talks about the recent history of monopoly regulation in African countries, notes some successes for regulators and considers the obstacles, one of which is that national competition authorities struggle to get good data about the behaviour of multinationals in other countries which could help them to identify price-gouging at home.

This is a must-listen/read interview if you’re working on corporate monopolies or global food systems. The problem is fundamental, since we’re talking about giant corporations overcharging people in African countries for food and farming inputs.

The interview suggests an advocacy target for campaigners in multinationals' home countries, which is that their own regulators should more freely share non-public information about “their” multinationals with African regulators.

 

Publish What You Pay becomes the Resource Justice Network

This month the Publish What You Pay (PWYP) coalition changed its name to the Resource Justice Network and broadened its mission. You can read what they say about it here.

Since 2002 PWYP has campaigned for financial transparency in the oil, gas and mining industries. Its new mission, which absorbs this work, is campaigning for justice and equity in the governance of energy and natural resources.

I worked with PWYP for years while I was at Global Witness. Looking back, I was under a big misconception that transparency could be a “golden key” for the the Resource Curse. I thought that by supplying citizens with more information, we could empower them politically to overcome problems of corruption and mismanagement.

In reality, transparency is necessary but very far from sufficient as a catalyst for deep change in the political economy of resource extraction. I spent ages reflecting on this belated realisation and it had a big influence on Critical Takes, which aims to avoid golden keys by considering different responses to a structural problem side-by-side.

The Resource Justice Network seems not only better aligned with the broad concerns of its members than PWYP was in its early days, but also more rooted in the global South. The days of Northern-dominated discourses of “good governance” and “transparency and accountability” (which I helped to promote) are well and truly over, as they should be. It will be really interesting to see where the newly-renamed and refocussed network goes from here.

 

This newsletter is already a thousand words long so I’ll skip the “interesting takes in other places” and wish everyone good luck with their work, until next month.

Diarmid