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Before introducing Andrew Keen, the audience was asked the following polling question: “Do you trust ‘Big Tech’ to shape our agentic AI future?” The audience overwhelmingly (89%) answered no, which can only be seen as a strong distrust, something that Keen is full heartedly agreeing, only for different reasons than you might expect.
The Antichrist of Silicon Valley Speaks Again
If Sandra Matz worried that AI might make us too bland, Andrew Keen arrived to remind everyone that Big Tech might make us extinct. Introduced, as always, as “the Antichrist of Silicon Valley,” Keen wore the label like a badge of honor. “If my mother could be resurrected,” he joked, “she’d finally be proud her son is famous — for being the Antichrist.” With his trademark mix of wit and fury, Keen’s keynote — “Do You Trust Big Tech to Design Our Agentic Future?” — was part sermon, part satire, part history lesson.
AI taking away Agency
He began by unpacking the title. “Agentic AI,” he said, “is a Freudian slip. We talk about AI giving us agency — but in truth, it’s taking it away.” He recalled Steve Jobs’ original dream of computers as “bicycles for the human mind.” Instead, he said, they’ve turned into “Pelotons for the algorithm,” carrying us wherever Big Tech pedals. Keen pointed out that trust — the very word in the audience poll preceding his talk— is today’s scarcest global resource. “We don’t trust governments, we don’t trust institutions, and yet somehow we’re supposed to trust companies worth $20 trillion?”
The ‘greed’ of Big Tech
With caustic precision, he named them: Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia,
Tesla. Together, he said, they control “a quarter of global GDP.” “I don’t blame them for being rich,” he said. “That’s capitalism. But let’s stop pretending they’re missionaries.” He traced Big Tech’s evolution from Google’s idealistic “Don’t be evil” to what he called “Don’t be caught.” The engineers who once claimed to liberate humanity, he argued, imply reinvented 19thcentury industrial capitalism — with better PR and brighter offices. “Big Tech isn’t evil — it’s just greedy. But greed, when automated, scales faster than empathy.”
A for-profit Frankenstein
His fiercest criticism was reserved for OpenAI. Founded as a nonprofit to “benefit humanity,” it had, he said, become “a for-profit Frankenstein stitched together from the corpses of its ideals.” He described its founders — Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Larry Page — as “modern alchemists who think they’re gods but act like gamblers.” Quoting the “godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, Keen said even AI’s creators no longer trust their
own inventions. “I asked Hinton what the odds were that AI would destroy the world,” Keen recounted. “He said 10 to 15 percent. Then I asked how he knew. He said, ‘I have no idea.’ That’s where we are — apocalyptic roulette with trillion-dollar chips.”
Erosion of authority
For Keen, the problem isn’t just technology — it’s the erosion of authority. Governments are weak, the UN is irrelevant, and expertise itself is under attack. “We’ve replaced the age of enlightenment with the age of the algorithm,” he said. “And the algorithm doesn’t do nuance.” He lamented how language — the very essence of human consciousness — is being commodified. “We’re outsourcing our words,” he warned, “and in doing so, we’re outsourcing ourselves.”
Surveillance Fascism
Keen described today’s AI economy as “a masquerade — startups dressed as revolutionaries but funded like empires.” The line between government and Big Tech, he argued, is disappearing. He predicted a looming crisis: when the AI bubble bursts, the U.S. state will step in to prop up companies like Open AI and Anthropic, entangling technology with politics. “What we’ll get then,” he said, “won’t be surveillance capitalism — it’ll be surveillance fascism.” When asked if he was pessimistic, he replied, “Always. But I’m a determined optimist. I just outsource the optimism to Menno.”
The concept of ‘ours’
Keen’s closing argument was surprisingly tender. He contrasted Big Tech’s obsession with “my data, my product, my profit” against what he called “the lost word of the century — our.” “These companies can’t design our future,” he said, “because they’ve forgotten the concept of ours.” The institutions meant to protect collective well-being — governments, universities, civic bodies — are crumbling. Yet, he insisted, they can be rebuilt. “We humans,” he said, “can still design better futures. We’ve just got to stop behaving like apps waiting for an update.”
Fight for our collective sanity
After his fiery crescendo, Keen couldn’t resist one last callback to Sandra Matz’s metaphor. “Sandra’s right,” he said. “We worry about what flavor of ice cream to pick, when the freezer is on fire.” The audience laughed — but not comfortably. Keen’s performance was classic Andrew: sharp, sardonic, and unsettlingly prophetic. If Matz urged us to keep our inner weirdness alive, Keen urged us to fight for our collective sanity before the machines — and their makers — claim it for good.
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Please note – This report was created by almost exclusively using available AI-tools except for minor editorial tweaks and some limited lay-out changes.