A grafiti drawing of a white skeleton on an asphalt street with a sewer grid placed direclty where the ribs would be.

 is shared by diegoluis on Flickr (CC-BY)

Tech Hype is Cannibalizing the Future

The street front of a mobile money agent with an Airtel umbrella and sign in the foreground. One person is sitting to the left, reading, another person can be seen from behind inside the store. 

 in Gulu, northern Uganda in 2016 shared by Fiona Graham/WorldRemit on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

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Airtel Money, one of Africa's largest mobile money providers, 

 on the London Stock Exchange this month. The company has been 

 at $7 billion, in what would be one of London’s 

 in recent years. That valuation is a measure of how central mobile money has become to African economies.

Over the last two decades, mobile money has become part of everyday life in most African economies. 

, 40 percent of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa had a mobile money account in 2024, up from 27 percent in 2021. Governments are keen to accelerate this transformation — driven, at least in part, by the promise of 

economic benefits and financial inclusion

 on average, compared with about 34 percent in OECD countries 

. This summer, Ethiopia extended mobile tax payment nationwide through its domestic mobile money platform 

, while Uganda, Zambia and Rwanda are also among a long list of countries which now permit payment of some taxes using mobile money. 

In high-income countries, income tax is often withdrawn from wages before they are paid; in much of Africa, most people are self-employed or work in small informal businesses, so there is no employer to collect the tax from and little record of what they earn. As economies digitize, automatic or mobile payments can make paying tax quicker and easier, as well as make it harder to avoid the formal tax system. Every mobile money payment leaves a record, and those records enable revenue authorities to compare what a taxpayer declares with what banks, mobile money providers, and other agencies hold.

In Kenya, for instance, tax law allows the revenue authority to demand information from third parties, including mobile network operators. Using data like this across a government can improve compliance and support public service delivery — but it is also reshaping how states exercise authority over their citizens, many of whom may be unaware that their data is being used in this way.

 shows what can go wrong when the rules for data use are unclear. Between 2016 and 2019, 

 averaged annual income data from the tax office to calculate welfare overpayments, as if all people earned the same amount every fortnight. For many people in irregular work, this produced debts that did not exist. The government later acknowledged that around 470,000 debts had been wrongly raised, and the scandal is yet

. The problem was not that tax data was shared. It was that the matching was crude, the burden of proof fell on individuals, and no human checked the results before debts were pursued.

Such disasters are avoidable. Governments already have the tools to build vital safeguards, but too many aren’t using them. As part of my research into digital public infrastructure (DPI) and tax across Africa at the International Centre for Tax and Development at the University of Sussex, my co-author Hannelore Niesten and I have found that some countries, like Kenya and South Africa, have legislation permitting sector-specific data protection codes or guidance for banking and health, for instance — but none for tax. In both countries, the agreements between agencies that govern data exchange have not been published.

 identifies three things that governments, tax officials, and regulators can do to harness the potential of tax systems built on DPI without repeating 

mistakes. The key is good governance. Understood as an exercise of public authority (and not simply as an administrative function) this is not a constraint on tax capacity but the route to trust, fairness, and compliance.

First, governments must set clear guardrails on the use of income and tax data. That means preventing taxpayers from being sanctioned based on tax-related information for reasons unconnected to tax, including welfare (as in Robodebt) or policing without clear legal authority and proper checks.

There are many ways for governments to set limits on the use of tax data, encouraging citizens to participate fully in the tax system without fearing that visibility will lead to unexpected negative repercussions. The best solution will differ depending on political contexts; options include writing purpose limits into legislation, updating outdated Memoranda of Understanding governing data permissions, or simply making data sharing permissions between agencies time-limited.

Next, governments should design DPI-enabled tax systems in consultation with taxpayers, who must in turn be given the tools to understand their obligations. Currently, information about tax obligations can be difficult to find. It may not be available in the right local languages or at the point of use, far from capital cities. In Kenya, for example, ethnic minority communities have historically 

 to access digital ID systems, an important rail of DPI-enabled taxation. 

Citizens are understandably reluctant to pay into systems that don’t make obligations clear.

Involving taxpayers from design through to delivery can help make sure everyone understands and can access the system. There are plenty of ways to do it, for instance by testing new systems with small traders, informal workers and women-owned businesses before they are rolled out. This builds the trust that creates long-term buy-in.

But even where governments are unwilling or unable to engage taxpayers in the design process, there are simple ways to help citizens understand their obligations. It’s as easy as making tax information available in the right local languages, in neighbourhoods, at the point of payment.

Finally, adequate recourse must come alongside clear communication. Tax officials sometimes fear that creating new opportunities for taxpayers to challenge decisions will increase the number of disputes; in fact, it can reduce the number of cases that escalate. Tax compliance can be encouraged by lowering the perceived risk of buy-in, and by giving citizens the tools to challenge decisions made about them.

In practice, this means making sure taxpayers have access to clear guidance about who is responsible for correcting an error and how to go about correcting it (e.g. online or at a local tax office). At the same time, regulators should use the powers they already have to act when tax data use is changed without authorisation.

Most importantly, there must be a human in the loop before automated decisions lead to enforcement action, so that ordinary taxpayers are not punished for errors made by automated systems. The legal tools for this already exist. South Africa’s data protection law, for instance, generally bars decisions based solely on automated processing that have legal consequences for a person. It makes an exception where a law or a code of conduct sets out safeguards. The person must be able to respond and must be told enough about how the decision was reached to do so. No such code exists for tax. Issuing one would give taxpayers these protections and settle how the rule applies when automated systems are used to select taxpayers for scrutiny.

As companies like Airtel make cashless payments the norm, the secure exchange of tax data can help realize the 

 of DPI for domestic revenue mobilization and economic formalization throughout Africa. But without embedding trust and accountability by design, those systems can alienate those expected to pay in — in turn, damaging governments’ very ability to levy tax.

Chris Mills Rodrigo is a fellow at Tech Policy Press

In announcing a deep round of layoffs across its 30-newspaper empire last month, McClatchy executives emphasized that they remain “deeply committed to local journalism.”

“That means investing in journalism that is differentiated, consequential and difficult to replicate; reporting rooted in our communities and strengthened by sources, investigation, verification, context and judgement,” Greg Farmer, McClatchy's vice president of local news, wrote in an 

Staff at the chain's papers have good reason to question that commitment.

At the Idaho Statesman, for example, 10 out of 18 reporters were laid off, in addition to three out of the four editors at the historic paper. The staff of the 162-year-old outlet — older than the state it covers — has been reduced to just nine.

“We were presented with no kind of plan or roadmap for what the future looks like,” Idaho Statesman sports reporter and chair of the Idaho NewsGuild Michael Lycklama told Tech Policy Press.

Across the border in Washington state, McClatchy cut seven positions across the four papers it owns. In Tacoma, that included the reporter responsible for covering city hall and local schools.

“We're still deciphering what the future will hold, but on the ground we're utterly confused as to how a local paper moves forward at all without city hall coverage,” said Kristine Sherred, a food and dining reporter at The News Tribune and chair of the Washington State NewsGuild.

McClatchy’s three other papers in the state also lost critical roles, including 

 reporter at the Tri-City Herald, which serves southeast Washington.

On the other side of the country in Florida, McClatchy 

 the Miami Herald’s city hall reporter and gutted the entire writing staff at the Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald, its sister publication

“When you're learning that McClatchy management believes, for example, that the city of Miami doesn't need a city hall reporter anymore it's hard to interpret that as anything but McClatchy is pivoting away from journalism,” Sacramento Bee investigative reporter Ariane Lange said.

Taken together, the layoffs that include at least 

 journalists and media workers — before counting editors and any cuts at the 13 nonunionized McClatchy papers — are seismic for local journalism and the communities they serve.

“It’s going to be devastating for a number of communities,” said NewsGuild President Jon Schleuss, especially “because a lot of the people that McClatchy decided to lay off are accountability journalists.”

Layoffs are unfortunately common in journalism, an industry that has been bludgeoned by the 

 of its traditional print advertising model and then floundered in a 

But McClatchy, which was purchased by the private equity firm Chatham Asset Management for $312 million in 2020 after its previous owners declared bankruptcy, has not cited financial headwinds to justify these cuts.

A spokesperson for McClatchy did not return requests for comment on this article. The company said inability to pay wages was not behind the layoffs in response to a formal request for information from the Idaho NewsGuild obtained by Tech Policy Press.

What makes this particular round of media layoffs unique is what McClatchy is choosing to invest its resources in instead of reporters and editors: artificial intelligence.

 a new AI-powered tool it calls a “Content Scaling Agent” (CSA). The CSAs have primarily been used to regurgitate summarized versions of articles written by staff.

The introduction of this new technology, which is likely to have a significant impact on newsrooms, caught reporters by surprise.

At the Sacramento Bee, for example, the newsroom only found out about the new tool because one reporter was asked by an editor to review an AI-produced summary of a piece they had written.

“There is pretty broad consensus that the rollout of this initiative was incredibly ham-fisted,” Lange told Tech Policy Press in May, shortly after the tool was introduced into McClatchy papers. “It appears that there was very little thought, and possibly no thought at all, put into how this might affect the public trust and specifically how this might affect our reputations as journalists.”

Workers across the McClatchy network organized quickly in response to the CSAs, with reporters in unionized newsrooms demanding that their names not be attached to AI-generated articles. This byline strike was honored by management in many newsrooms, who instead put editor’s names on CSA-generated articles along with 

In addition to catching reporters by surprise, the abrupt introduction of CSAs seemed to violate their union contracts.

Many NewsGuild unions have contract provisions requiring advance notice, normally of 30 days, before introducing new technologies. Several of them, including the unions at The Sacramento Bee, Idaho Statesman, and the four Washington State McClatchy papers, filed union grievances, formal claims that management violated collective bargaining agreements, when the CSAs were rolled out.

The CSAs were not McClatchy’s first foray into using AI to produce journalism.

In 2021, the Miami Herald announced it was 

 the Miami Herald Bot to its real estate coverage team. In 2025 it then hired an “AI-Assisted Reporter” tasked with overseeing AI-produced material. One employee at the Miami Herald, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, told Tech Policy Press in July that that hire is now just reporting on real estate themselves.

Two years ago, McClatchy acquired the company Trend Hunter, which specializes in generating “AI-powered 

” on consumer topics based on “billions of data points.” Since the acquisition, articles about dubious health trends attributed to staff at Trend Hunter have appeared all over McClatchy outlet websites. Social media accounts of McClatchy papers have also 

 on Trend Hunter’s online store, as Straight Arrow News reporter Mark Keierleber has 

 of The Miami Herald and The Kansas City Star found that AI-generated content made up to 20 percent of the articles on their sites.

And, perhaps most insultingly for McClatchy journalists, less than a week after the layoffs were announced, company leadership 

 celebrating five new hires from August for its AI-focused “Content Innovation Lab.”

One hire will be working on McClatchy’s newly-launched sports-focused vertical called 

, a website with the tagline “Powered by TrendHunter.” The website’s headlines include “5 things every Texas college football fan needs to experience at least once,” “Five costumed mascots that capture the spirit of college football Saturdays,” and, for good measure, “Five human mascots who capture the spirit of college football Saturdays.”

 attached to that last article, Mike Garbett, is credited with 91 articles on StudentSection between Sept. 24 and 30 of this year.

StudentSection articles now appear across McClatchy newspaper websites with little identification beyond having StudentSection appended next to reporter names.

The chain will soon be launching another vertical called Saltwater South — a “brand focused on life in the coastal South” — according to a job posting shared in a public LinkedIn 

 on Aug. 25 by new McClatchy content director Lisa Cericola who was also hired in August.

Even if these projects do not publish AI-generated material, the material produced by them is not journalistic in nature. Instead, it seems McClatchy’s executives are all in on producing content, and lots of it.

“It really feels like McClatchy's strategy is getting out of the journalism business and into the content business,” said Lycklama from the Idaho Statesman. “They say tons of pretty words about how important local news is, but look at where they're investing their time and resources: It's AI and it's celebrity gossip magazines,” he added, referring to McClatchy’s 2024 

 with another Chatham Asset Management-owned company, magazine publisher accelerate360, 

 titles such as Us Weekly and In Touch Weekly.

This embrace of AI and maximalist content production at the expense of traditional, human-crafted reporting threatens the future quality of journalism.

At a very basic level, AI-powered tools are prone to mistakes. Not only do the systems lack the capacity to reason or to possess the deep subject matter knowledge that beat reporters do, they also frequently 

 in collaboration with 22 public media organizations in 18 countries found that AI assistants misrepresented news content nearly half the time.

The media holding company Gannett (later 

 the use of an AI-powered tool to generate high school sports reports in 2023 after the pieces it pushed out to its newspapers were riddled with errors and clunky constructions.

Beyond mistakes, AI tools are also unable to replicate the relationships local journalists have with the communities they cover. Included in the layoffs at The Sacramento Bee was Joe Davidson, who covered local sports for nearly 40 years.

“Maybe you could get an AI product to do the scores easily, but the kinds of stories that Joe does are so much more than that,” Lange said. “He is part of the community. He's going to teenage football players' funerals, and he's following the arc of these teams. The depth of his experience can't be replaced, and people love him. People know Joe as a person; no one's gonna invite an AI chatbot to their son's funeral.”

Local reporters are also key levers of accountability. When Idaho Gov. Brad Little announced a $2 billion investment in public schools in 2024, he 

 on dilapidated education infrastructure produced by the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica. Becca Savransky, one of the two reporters on that piece, was among those laid off.

The closure of newspapers across the country, who perform oversight of authorities, 

 with a rise in federal corruption charges against local actors, and one study released this summer found that corruption and wasteful spending tied to decreased accountability journalism 

 Americans $1.1 billion in higher borrowing costs for local governments.

“It's really dark that McClatchy would lay off so many accountability reporters,” Schleuss said.

McClatchy is not the only media company betting on AI. But it may be a canary in the coal mine for how embracing it can hollow out local news.

“Our websites are flooded with AI-generated and tabloid slop that has nothing to do with our local communities, and it drowns out a lot of the work that we're actually doing here in Sacramento and in and in other municipalities across the United States,” said Lange.

Pushing back against AI integrations in newsrooms when they threaten jobs or quality journalism will require workers to be organized.

 campaign seeking to win contract provisions including transparency requirements, protections against layoffs, and journalist input in the roll out of technologies.

However, although many McClatchy newsrooms had won these kinds of protections earlier, they 

 when the CSAs were introduced and layoffs followed.

“The technology is evolving so rapidly and dangerously that even some of the language that had already been secured in some ways sort of felt insufficient,” Sherred from the Washington State NewsGuild said.

 appearing on Tech Policy Press in 2026. More from the series 

Every day, we are told that we live in the future — or at least, on its precipice. “The Intelligence Age” is just a few 

 it was a few years away in 1970. Technology will solve every problem, as long as we are ‘

, there is also a flavor of hype for that, too — promoted by the same narrow slice of tech elites and upholding the same 

 that technology moves in a straight, unstoppable line toward an apocalyptic Singularity.

When we pause and lean back from the screen, however, our lived present is made up of the ruins of past futures, our legs constantly kicking against the expensive debris of earlier fantasies. A South Korean journalist wanders alone through the abandoned ruins of virtual university campuses on the Metaverse, many of them 

 at a ratio of seven-digit figures in development costs to three-digit figures in daily users. An American woman has partial vision restored with a smart bionic implant technology, then is suddenly rendered blind again when the 

 for state subsidies on data centers, then 

 when the time comes to deliver concrete infrastructure, jobs, and technological progress, despite their continued ability to funnel astronomical levels of funding to each other through “

.” Chinese data centers lie fallow and 

 after anticipatory investment, while grid overload 

In each case, we are not simply dealing with delays or side effects in technological progress, but hype as a vast, systematic wastage that takes from society’s finite funding, resources, and opportunities and leaves behind invisible costs and burdens.

Hype is eating the future, and leaving us the bones.

In this pattern, hype does not simply raise funding, legitimacy, and enthusiasm to bootstrap new technologies and ideas into reality. Rather, it is this cycle of anticipation, simulation, and amnesia which itself becomes the means for extracting short-term profit out of long-term stagnation. Hype 

 by cannibalizing the accumulated expectations from past failures to make the object of the hype appear plausible and attractive. Google Glass, discontinued for consumers 

, failed in its mission to effect a paradigm shift in ubiquitous computing and smart technology development, but the basic proposition for the technology has effectively been recycled into Meta’s Ray-Ban lineup. The growing public backlash to what some term “

” indicates that Silicon Valley’s persistence was not exactly necessitated by broad market demand. Instead, such projects leverage the shared cultural expectation that augmented reality glasses are ‘the future’ — expectations cultivated by earlier cycles of hype, prototypes and spectacle.

This cannibalistic tendency is deeply embedded into venture capital, which is built around the need to 

 outsized gains from high-performing investments (the largest of which are dubbed ‘unicorns’), and thus systematically 

 start-ups to project extreme growth in return for anticipatory investment. Hype thus relies on numbers, predictions, and other performative rituals of certainty to generate collective belief around what is, in reality, a far more limited set of technical capabilities and scientific evidence. It is the job of global consultancy firms to issue precise-sounding numbers, like “

” in anticipated economic growth through AI, which politicians may then treat as objective evidence for justifying grandiose 

 in national budgets with equally unclear outcomes.

The very notion of ‘predicting’ future advances in AI and related technologies has become an exercise in what economist Paul Romer once called “

,” where the appearance of numbers, especially enormous ones, dresses up unquantified speculation as calculative objectivity. And like hype narratives themselves, these predictions tend to be most consequential when they are made, but are typically forgotten when the time comes to determine whether they were right or wrong. In 2016, Geoffrey Hinton 

 that radiologists would be completely outperformed by machines 

. Yet even expert predictions tend to be staggeringly inaccurate: the environmental scientist Vaclav Smil famously 

 his review of energy forecasts over the past century by describing them as a "manifest record of failure." Like a rotating deck of credit card debt, each prediction borrows credibility from the future to purchase legitimacy in the present — and then flees to the next topic of speculation before the bill comes due.

Sometimes, failures do lead to wider stigma and skepticism around the technology in question. But this does not happen anywhere near as often as the massive levels of investment and inflated promises might warrant. The distinct characteristic of tech hype of the 21st century is the overwhelming centralization of wealth, cultural prestige and, increasingly, political autonomy that is used to instill a sense of inevitability around Silicon Valley visions of the future, and a sense of learned helplessness, or even “

,” for those who would prefer another path. Mark Zuckerberg and Meta thus live to dream another day, relatively unscathed from the over 

Failure serves an important function for the health of our political and economic ideas. Even the most libertarian idealization of market rationality requires that products, firms, and ideologies pay a proportional price for failure, allowing better alternatives to access those resources and opportunities. The late capitalist tech economy, however, turns to hype as a means to cheat this process. From the Stepford Wives to sycophantic, female ‘

’, or from virtual reality glasses in the 1980s to … virtual reality glasses in the 2020s, the same turgid renditions of future technology are recycled across multiple generations, often brimming with 

 for retrograde fantasies about society and progress.

 that postmodernism might best be regarded as a “prolonged meditation on all the technological changes that never happened”. Postmodernism, in other words, may simply be our tortured response to entire generations lived out in this condition — in which we are constantly strapping in for the future, making ready each time to throw out the communities, cultural practices, and values that we have come to appreciate in their imperfections, only to be told once again that the plane must return to the gate for another unspecified checkup.

There is a heavy collective cost to hype’s devouring of future possibilities. If it were only that the objects of hype tended to be delayed and disappointing, then the solutions would be relatively simple. We could try to be more cautiously optimistic about AI, trusting what Louise Amoore 

 as the “promise to render all agonistic political difficulty as tractable and resolvable". We could ridicule specific failed innovations and entrepreneurs while believing that the princess is to be found in another castle, and that a different technical approach or a more likable genius will still deliver on the original promise.

But when we recognize hype as an ordinary, structural mechanism for extracting short-term profit at the cost of long-term stagnation, and for funneling societal resources toward recycled futures and away from alternative possibilities, the true cost of hype becomes apparent: it is a siphoning away of opportunity costs at the planetary level. When the Metaverse’s combined costs 

 $80 billion, this is no longer simply a matter of a private corporation’s (in)competence, but symptomatic of a wider inability in late capitalism to efficiently channel investment and enable genuinely beneficial enterprises. In every local council budget allocation for the newest surveillance camera gadget or ‘AI education’ gimmick, we waste the opportunity to raise more fundamental questions about how a future society should be built. What is the point of imagining new technologies without new ways of living? This is the question that hype keeps us too busy to ask.

David Harvey famously described capitalism’s recurring search for the “

”: from overseas colonies to remote, inhospitable regions of the Earth, and finally to 

 — throughout, the perpetual pursuit of untapped material resources that can deliver adequate profit margins to justify continued investment. This injection of new resources, markets, and profitable asymmetries can only ever be temporary, however, requiring ever more extreme strategies for identifying the next spatial fix. Hype operates along a similar logic of declining rate of profit. 

 it recycles earlier visions of the future, and repackages tried-and-failed innovations as the next great frontier, the leash grows shorter. What hype always seeks to erase from its own history — and what 

 must repeatedly bring back to the fore — is the widespread disbelief and rejection that 

 bubbles just below the surface, and is today breaking out into view again.

Ultimately, the problem with hype is not that everybody earnestly believes in it: today, the problem is that hype is institutionalized and bureaucratized, becoming ever more inoculated to the disgust and ridicule aimed its way.

Update (October 7): Shortly after this article was published, The Guardian 

 that the Trump administration urged several countries to drop their sponsorship of the #Disinfo2026 conference, with Canada, Lithuania and the EU’s diplomatic service subsequently withdrawing their support.

Europe’s premier gathering of disinformation researchers, the 

 conference, opened Wednesday, October 7, with some of its biggest government backers pulling their names from the sponsor list at the last minute.

, brings together researchers, NGOs, think tanks, public authorities and technology companies working on disinformation, and more specifically on foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI). The organization works through collective action, fostering a community of practitioners who share knowledge and information, mostly publicly through a series of reports, activities and webinars.

But just before the event, the logos of three government sponsors — the European External Action Service (EEAS), Canada and Lithuania — were covered with tape on conference banners and printed materials.

The withdrawals came as organizers and participants faced questions over the conference’s programming, including discussions about whether the United States itself has become a source of foreign information manipulation in Europe — a politically sensitive question at a time when the Trump administration has 

increasingly challenged European approaches

It was not immediately clear whether the governments had withdrawn their financial support, or were simply distancing themselves publicly from the event. The EEAS remained involved in the program, with representatives presenting its research at the conference.

The EEAS told Tech Policy Press it asked for its logo to be removed because of the content of the program.

“We have decided to have the EEAS logo removed from the material associated with the conference in view of the content of the program,” a representative for the service said. The organizers, they added, had framed some discussions in ways that “do not align with the official positions held by the EU.”

At the same time, the EEAS stressed that supporting “free and open discussion” at civil-society events working on foreign information manipulation and interference remains an important part of its work.

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