What’s ahead in 2026
Hey everyone,
It’s funny how we often treat the start of a new year like a magical clean slate. Lately, I’ve been thinking about why we reach for that feeling in the first place. Especially after a year like 2025, it’s natural to want a moment to imagine something new.
But when I look ahead, I don’t see a break between 2025 and 2026. I see a through-line — one shaped by power and profit, yes, but also by people meeting those crises with clarity. Our survival depends on seeing the first with eyes wide open and backing the second with everything we’ve got.
It’s been a pretty heinous year. Governments employing shock doctrine tactics. Big tech CEOs abandoning any pretense of equity to fall in line. Data (and the centers that store it) cementing its status as the new climate catastrophe. ChatGPT rotting our brains, AI slop rotting our shared realities.
But alongside all of that, something else was happening: more people were paying attention, and refusing to just absorb the punch.
In the US, thousands are organizing court watches and foot patrols to protect their neighbors from ICE raids. Organizers in New York built a messaging strategy strong enough to upend the centrist stronghold on the city’s mayorship. Community organizers around the world are fighting back against resource-hungry data centers. And across Kenya, India, and Brazil, local activists are demanding transparency and community control over AI deployments. People are showing up, and even if it doesn’t always feel like it, that matters.
With everything that’s happened this year — if we’re being honest, everything that’s happened over the last four decades — I wanted to track the plot and share what I see us hurtling toward. Here’s what I see coming in 2026: both the challenges and the counterforces rising to meet them.
1. Tech is making nothing, and we’re surrounded by it.
In The NeverEnding Story, “The Nothing” creeps in at the world’s edges — an expanding force that consumes by hollowing everything out. That’s increasingly what our digital environment feels like: content designed to be produced, not actually consumed; an economy optimized for speculation, betting, and grift instead of value; and a quasi-religious commitment to AGI that asks us to sacrifice everything to build…The Nothing. In 2026, this force will keep growing, deepening our collective ennui, disconnection, and political emptiness.
And in the midst of this, there are people refusing to be hollowed out. Writers and artists like Eryk Salvaggio, who treat AI not as destiny but as culture worth interrogating, are carving out spaces where meaning still matters. Creative movements are reclaiming that meaning from algorithmic sludge, slow media is quietly resurfacing, and community-run tech collectives are building alternatives. These are small but potent antidotes to The Nothing…and given support, they’ll grow.
2. Corporate titans are becoming the grand strategists of our lives and economies.
With political vision faltering, tech leaders are stepping into the void, treating global ambition like a game of Napoleonic strategy — combining sweeping vision with staggering resources. It’s no accident that Sam Altman cites Napoleon or that Foxconn’s Terry Gou has a low-key obsession with Genghis Khan. Billion-dollar AI bets and mega-infrastructure plays are reshaping public life through private ambition.
And there are emerging leaders, like Mamdani in the US and maybe Polanski in the UK, who are beginning to reclaim public imagination from these corporate emperors. Their campaigns have gained momentum through clear, powerful messaging about what we WANT and grassroots organizing to attract the people and build the power to make it happen. The question for 2026 is whether we’re willing to back that shift with the pressure, organizing, and attention it will take to keep turning the tide. I’m hopeful, in part because groups like Media Justice and Tech Tonic Justice are supporting communities to do just that, creating materials that help local people move from abstract concern to collective action.
3. Tech is pushing past democracy and flirting with feudalism.
Some companies aren’t just gaming existing systems, they’re actively dismantling them. Capitalism sits alongside proto-feudal experiments, where democracy is just one option among others. To defend the institutions we once took for granted, we have to recognize how fundamentally they’re being bypassed.
And in 2026, we’ll see more people recognizing that these systems are no longer the safeguards they once were — and begin strategizing at the level where tech giants are actually playing. Excited for Gil Duran’s book and the emerging engagement in these dark enlightenment and sea-steading fantasies.
4. Power brokers are consolidating control through infrastructure.
I keep thinking about Marietje Schaake’s point from our interview earlier this year: digitization has come to mean privatization. From Palantir to Anduril, IndiaStack to biometric border systems, the fusion of state and corporate incentives is quietly reshaping how much control we actually have over our lives. These aren’t just financial plays, they’re mechanisms to accumulate leverage and steer political trajectories. Cory Doctorow made the point in our conversation that if a company can technically do something that benefits them, they will. The same is true of states. And when you merge the incentives of a company with those of a state — especially one that wants power without the political ideas or public support to earn it — you get a force that we need to fight like hell.
And in 2026, we have the chance to push and see the counter-movement expand. Groups like Foxglove, which is suing to stop these death hugs, and investigative outlets like Lighthouse Reports, whose work on TBI and Oracle is shattering the center-left “nice guy” myth, are already doing that work — exposing the crony capitalism hiding in plain sight. Local organizers, journalists, and lawyers are all already connecting the dots publicly, exposing how infrastructure shapes power, and winning fights that once seemed unwinnable.
5. Tech is becoming a cult — and AI is the altar.
As “The Nothing” spreads, people are reaching for meaning wherever they can find it, and the promise of AI transcendence is becoming its own belief system. Engineers and end-users collapse into the same shared delusion — a techno-religion dressed up as progress. At ZEG, I spoke with Chris Wylie about tech as religion, and to Greg Epstein, whose book Tech Agnostic examines how the pursuit of AI has morphed into a cult-like experience. In 2026, expect the zeal to intensify, with AI framed less as a tool and more as a faith-based experiment.
And to push back, we have to stay grounded in community, ethics, and real problem-solving. From researchers to artists to organizers, people are carving out space for human-centered tech, and pulling others back from the altar. Movements and organizers, like Adele Walton and her Logging Off Clubs, are giving people concrete ways to resist AI zeal and rebuild community-centered practices.
6. AI companies are becoming the worst kind of platform: all the costs, none of the benefits.
Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism lays out five types of platforms — advertising, cloud, industrial, product, and lean — each with its own logic. AI companies now resemble a chaotic blend of all of them. They shoulder the huge infrastructure costs of a cloud platform without the lock-in; chase the user scale of an advertising platform without the revenue; borrow the transformational rhetoric of industrial platforms without the clients; and sell subscriptions like product platforms — but at a loss. They posture as lean, but their unit economics are anything but.
And 2026 may expose just how unsustainable this multi-platform mash-up really is. The laws of gravity (and capitalism) might bring these delirious titans to the ground. That collapse opens space for alternatives — solutions that could scale when the current model falters. It breeds a new norm of suspicion against AI pitchmen (including, hopefully, from the dream-less center left politicians drunk on their stories of growth) that might serve our society well.
7. On-the-ground organizing will matter more than ever.
Despite these grim trends — and in some ways, because of them — local action and movement organizing will remain powerful and necessary. Around data centers, AI governance, and tech’s environmental and social impact, communities are already showing that collective action works. At our live show in New York, data center organizers shared some of the most stirring and inspirational political visions I’ve encountered. The ability to act locally and hold power accountable will be a defining counterforce to the abstract, distant forces shaping our world.
And in 2026, this will be the counterforce that shapes our political landscape. From local victories to large-scale alliances, people are showing that change comes from the ground up — and that the future doesn’t have to be something we inherit, but something we actively build.
It’s easy to only see the darkness ahead, but none of us would be doing the difficult work we do if we didn’t think our collective efforts would make a difference. So what’s your prediction, and what’s giving you hope going into 2026?
I want to hear from you. What are you watching or working on? What community fights or interventions inspire you? What gives you energy in moments when things feel overwhelming?
Reply to this email, and in the new year, I’ll share what our community is seeing and building.
Alix