Newsletter No 22
Date: 30 April 2026
Two years of Critical Takes
Critical Takes on Corporate Power is two years old this month. I’m proud to have created a unique and useful resource for people in civil society, featuring nearly 50 articles and interviews with people who are experts in their fields.
I’m also proud that Critical Takes has reached thousands of people around the world purely by digital word-of-mouth - no marketing, no AI, no SEO – and despite the deliberately rather austere style of the website which is designed to highlight what matters here: the ideas.
The future of Critical Takes is uncertain because I haven’t been able to raise funding to cover its running costs. I’m not willing to charge for access, because ideas can’t flow freely if people have to pay for them, so I’m continuing to cover the costs myself. I hope to be able to keep doing that for a while longer.
(You could help by letting me know of any freelance research projects you hear of. I specialise in analysing companies’ financial reports to work out what they’re up to.)
The plan for the next few months is to put all the ideas on the platform into an updated version of So, What Should We Do About Corporate Power? If you haven’t read the original, please take a look: it draws together a lot of people's thinking in only eight pages.
Alternatives to corporate power
There are now three interviews on Critical Takes about what the economic alternatives to multinationals’ current dominance might look like in three industries: finance, farming and pharmaceuticals.
These interviews underline that many such alternatives already exist, somewhere in the world - they just need to be expanded. I’m hoping to cover Big Tech next. If you have ideas for other alternatives to corporate power, and for people to interview, please let me know.
Resisting Big Tech
This week I went to a conference in London called Resisting Big Tech Empires which was organised by two UK NGOs: Global Justice Now and the Balanced Economy Project (who have a new report out about AI infrastructure called Licenced to Loot).
There were a lot of strong presentations including a funny and sweary explanation by the writer and activist Cory Doctorow of his famous term “enshittification” (from 03:35 in the video) and a compelling response from Sofia Scasserra (from 37:00).
Anita Gurumurthy, the executive director of IT for Change, talked vividly about young workers in India being paid low wages to be filmed endlessly folding and refolding towels, so that machines can be taught their movements and used to put people out of work.
She also talked about the horror of “content moderators” across Asia and Africa being traumatised by watching endless footage of violence and abuses so the tech giants can claim to have sanitised their feeds.
Speakers throughout the day suggested various responses to the power of Big Tech which, I felt, haven’t quite cohered yet into a single campaignable agenda. Partly, perhaps, because of the great complexity and very rapid spread of the global problems created by the tech giants.
Something that did come across very clearly, however, is that an immediate and effective course of action in all our societies is to resist the spread of data centres.
One of the clever PR tricks played by Silicon Valley has been to get people to talk as if the digital sphere existed only in a metaphysical realm called the “Cloud”, rather than in our material world. The appearance of more and more data centres, with their gargantuan hunger for land, energy and water, is puncturing that illusion.
There’s still the prospect that the giant AI investment bubble, which is currently holding up the US stock market, will burst or deflate at some point. This wouldn’t be the end of either Silicon Valley or AI, but it would create a political moment to push for more just and democratic alternatives to the dominance of Big Tech.
Next month I plan to look at a big new UN report on ending poverty to see what it has to say about corporate power.
Until then, good luck with your work!
Diarmid