What Has Driven Our Elites Insane?
10-11th December 2026 @ York University, Toronto, Canada
Workshop Organizers
Kean Birch, York University, Canada
David Tyfield, Lancaster University, UK
Abstract Submission
Please submit your paper proposal to both the organizers by Friday 4 September 2026. Proposal abstracts should be 300-500 words. Emails: kean@yorku.ca and d.tyfield@lancaster.ac.uk
Funding
Some funds will be available to support accommodation and travel costs of participants; please specify if you need support at the end of your abstract.
Call for Papers
“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad”
Our techno-financial elites (Harrington 2024; Cohen 2025; Farkas and Mondon 2025; Atal et al. 2026; Birch 2026) are making a series of extraordinary decisions and choices right now, exemplified by the trillion-dollar bet on generative artificial intelligence (genAI) as the next technological revolution that will transform our societies. These decisions and choices run counter to an array of research on the negative implications, impacts, and effects of genAI on our societies, economies, and polities – including an incredible lack of evidence that genAI will or can transform economic productivity in ways that usher in a bountiful future. Yet, our elites feel little compunction not only about extoling the virtues of this supposed beneficent future but also to putting their enormous resources into convincing the rest of us that genAI will radically transform and improve our lives.
Why are they doing this? What has led our elites to make a series of extraordinary decisions and choices that run counter to any sensible approach to technological innovation? The short answer, we think, is that our elites have gone insane.
The aphorism that the “definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result” – whatever its origins – seems increasingly apt in the context of this question. Our elites are making massive investments into genAI with little to no evidence that this investment will generate the necessary profits to provide a suitable return; financial bubble and ruin seem the very likely result (Wachter and Wachter 2026; Hellman and Birch 2026). Firms like OpenAI and Anthropic are looking to go public through IPOs and being valued at nearly US$1 trillion, as are firms like SpaceX which is valued at nearly US$2 trillion. For comparison, Google’s market capitalization at IPO was around US$23 billion in 2004, while Facebook’s was just over US$100 billion in 2012.
Yet, the difference today is that there is not just a lack of evidence that the expected and promised sociotechnical impacts (e.g. productivity gains) are happening from the introduction of genAI, but that there is a very credible argument to the contrary, regarding its potentially negative, and maybe even catastrophic, impacts; none of which is deterring our elites from both touting genAI as the next technological revolution and forcing it down our throats as an inevitability.
In some ways, then, we have been here before: a long line of promised technological revolutions stretches back over the last 20 years, including biotechnology, nanotechnology, genomics, biofuels, blockchain, Internet of Things, 3D printing, cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens, virtual and augmented reality, drones, metaverse, and self-driving vehicles (Funk 2024).
And yet, in others, we are entering uncharted territory, where the elites driving this change are manifesting a qualitative shift, from the self-serving blinkeredness of greed, familiar over centuries of capitalist growth, to collective delusion and psychosis. At the very least, in the narrowest economic terms that these elites would understand, this time the resulting crash could well be different: the societal impacts of a genAI crash could be worse than the global financial crisis, considering not only the lost investment but also the opportunity costs of not putting that investment to productive use elsewhere (e.g. sustainability transitions).
One suggestion is that elites are not like the rest of us; they do not think or see the world the way we do (also Scott 1998). This is not because they are special, but because elite cognition and cognitive practices are constituted by their distinctive context and reward structure (Nightingale 1998). Expectations, promises, and assumptions play an important role in cognition, generating feedback loops that justify and legitimate decisions and investments (Barnes 1983; Beckert 2016; Birch 2023). Among contemporary tech elites, these cognitive dynamics have become increasingly reflexive. Occupying their singular position of authority – as self-styled ‘Masters of the Universe’ – they increasingly understand that their decisions performatively shape the very world they claim to predict (cf.Fisher 2009 on ‘capitalist realism’), but only insofar as they can sustain their own status as a ‘visionary’ member of that tech elite. Their reward structure depends on successfully performing their continued inclusion amongst the storied – but intensely competitive – ranks of that tiny elite. In other words, it depends less on their knowledge or correspondence with ‘truth’ than on securing alignment with their ‘peers’, and thence self-referential proof of their own foresight and intellectual brilliance. What matters, then, is not whether an advocated technological future is likely, but whether enough influential actors collectively align with one’s own stance and so perform it into being. For in that way, the crucial social validation from that elite is achieved, and through demonstrable performance of one’s continued ‘godlike’ cognitive powers of ‘future-truthing’ (viz. ‘x will have been true because and by way of our making it so’, and where ‘us’ includes ‘me’).
A particularly problematic effect of this is evident in the way that elite cognitive practices reflect second and third order self-referential thinking. This involves (re)configuring technological decisions as the search for alignment with ‘peers’ whose enrolment in innovation and investment ends up reinforcing a particular elite conformity around nebulous “vibes” – e.g. simulation, reactions, attention, etc. Vibes turbocharge a reflexivity of self-referential and self-righteous belief that elites are best-placed to determine the technological direction and futures of entire societies because of their supposedly unique insight and intelligence regarding prospective trajectories.
Moreover, this elite has a particular character, not just the abstract form outlined above: key evidence for justifying one’s privileged status includes performance of visionary commitment to the unprecedented revolutionizing of everything by the latest technological breakthrough, at the forefront of which they are positioned in each case (thereby further confirming their exceptional capabilities). The consequence is that elites end up constantly searching for the next technological revolution to jumpstart another round of creative destruction; not only is jam always tomorrow, not today, but there must be an ever-new promise of even better jam tomorrow or else the performance of privileged tech elite status collapses, and with it the whole, intrinsically speculative, techno-futurist worldview.
However, the ever-tightening loops of reflexivity increasingly threaten to release only the destructive effects of techno-economic change because that reflexive performativity configures sociotechnical change as an outcome of financial bubble blowing, in order to reap the economic returns of investing in technological innovation. For elites, bubbles are the driver of innovation because, for them, innovation is about ‘creating value’ – for themselves – and dominating markets – again, for themselves (Muniesa 2017); these being the forms of evidence of ‘future-truthing’ that remain both relevant from their perspective and practically deliverable.
What matters, thus, is the rolling on of ever-more-grandiose technological promises as ever-greater, and so potentially destructive, technological bubbles; rather than – and ever-more-dangerously-divorced from accountability regarding – any manifest actualization of the promises in new technologies demonstrably improving society. The former sustains the very conditions underpinning continued inflation and concentration of tech elite power, and so the system as a whole, in positive feedback loops; the ‘world’ going mad as our elites do, and vice versa, both relations mediated through the unprecedentedly influential technologies being fashioned in their image. The latter, meanwhile, becomes progressively more irrelevant to actual power-relational dynamics, while also increasingly undeliverable, given the ever-more eschatological promises emerging from that self-styled ‘god-like’ elite.
So, returning to the question, “what has driven our elites insane?”, highlights a simple answer: perhaps, at the base of it all, the answer is that elites are locked into feedback loops which mean that they are ever less able to see or understand the world outside of their narrow context and narrowly-drawn reward metrics centred on money and future-oriented financial calculations of what (social) value means (i.e. asset ownership, capital gains, and return on investment) (Birch and Muniesa 2020). Our elites are being driven insane by a restricted cognitive lens that then, in turn, enacts the ‘real world’ conditions for its further empowerment and further narrowing; one that centres on notions of value wholly determined by the attention – good or bad – that something has. The more attention that something has, the more it appears to have value, whether or not that attention (or ‘vibes’) translates into anything beyond financial returns for that same elite. This is thus to trace social-cum-ideational dynamics and positive feedback loops of, if not growing insanity, then certainly the dangerously self-reinforcing delusion of a limited way of thinking, blithely uninterested in what it cannot see, and its unprecedented systemic social advancement (cf. McGilchrist 2023).
To understand our current, perilous condition, then, we have to unpack how this techno-financial elite sees the world in order to intervene into technological and financial innovation by reconfiguring techno-financial practices, valuations, and understandings of technology so that they can, instead, promote collective, democratic, and socially beneficial outcomes.
But perhaps you have another idea…
We’d love to hear about it!
References
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