2025 GeoLegal Outlook - The Unruly World
Happy New Year! I outline five themes for the wild year ahead and anchor them in books you should read to prepare.
2025 is shaping up to be a year of tremendous change. Literally, as I publish this outlook, wildfires are raging walkable to my house in Los Angeles - a symbolic representation of a world on fire. Still, where there’s risk, there’s also opportunity.
There is leadership change in the US, Canada, Syria, South Korea and many other countries. There is the potential to halt festering conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, if not solve underlying issues. There is a possibility that 2025 will be the year that Artificial General Intelligence is reached under some definitions and that technological advances will unlock a new frontier of growth via breakthroughs in everything from medicine to enterprise productivity. Yet, in pursuit of such growth, or maybe simply just because of culture wars, the environmental, socioeconomic and diversity priorities of many firms and economies will take a back seat in 2025.
This year, rather than produce a forward looking take on what I think is going to happen, I want to outline some broad frameworks for understanding the uncertainties that are undoubtedly ahead. Therefore, I’ve framed my outlook around the five core themes I’m tracking, and anchored them largely on books that may be helpful to navigate them. I highly recommend you pick each up so you can be prepared for the volatility ahead. There is no substitute to reading or listening to deep research: TikTok memes rarely provide the depth needed for strategic decisions.
1. The Unruly World
I’ll start here since it’s my core framework for understanding the world ahead. As I write in my new book Unruly (available to pre-order here), the world is more volatile than in the lifetimes of most senior executives and it is also “un-ruling” - the rules and laws that govern politics and business are being undermined. To understand the world ahead, we must appreciate that politics, law and technology are in dynamic flux. This flux creates three synthetic risk categories that will all manifest through 2025.
a. GeoLegal Risks - The intersection of politics and law will manifest through new sanctions, tariffs, national security reviews and politicized courts around the world, as it already has in just the first few days of the year (whether the blocking of Nippon Steel’s takeover of US Steel or the British government threatening to arrest Americans for social media speech).
b. Artificial Politics Risks - These risks emerge from the intersection of politics and technology. While we are past the mega-election year of 2024, there are still plenty of ways for deepfakes to fell politicians and for tech-powered weapons to be deployed in the battlefield. Crucially, however, we’ll start to see the onset of AI taking jobs from knowledge workers as I discuss further below, which will have its own political ramifications.
c. LegalAI Risks - The intersection of technology and law will start to manifest with companies being overwhelmed by automated lawsuits and courts being overwhelmed by higher volumes.
In writing my book, I drew huge inspiration from Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave, which wrestles with many of the same issues from the perspective of one of tech’s leading minds, and from Azeem Azhar’s book Exponential. Both are a good place to start if you are a senior executive grappling with technological advancement.
2. The End of Ethics
I was recently asked what keeps me up at night, and the crowd let out an audible gasp when I said that it was the dramatic retreat from ESG and DEI because such important work was far from complete and progress was about to be knocked back by at least a decade.
Indeed, it would be easy enough to write about the nearly simultaneous retreat of household name companies from the ESG and DEI initiatives that many had launched in the wake of #metoo, George Floyd and investor pressure (it seems like literally everyone but Costco is retreating in some form). But my personal ethical concerns are different than broader business implications, where companies are embracing the air cover they have to retreat from ESG and DEI more broadly in order to reduce complexity and cost. This is actually politics as usual - the pendulum swung too far one way in the US and is swinging back. It will return some day in the future, if not soon.
Rather, the biggest ethical questions we will probably face in 2025 have to do with the artificial intelligence tools we are growing dependent upon. Some of that will be about what those tools are allowed to be used for: To replace workers? To power autonomous weapons? To let still-biased software take high-stakes decisions? Some of the ethical debate will be around environmental concerns related to pollution of large computer centers and the restarting of nuclear power.
But the concerns are broader still. As Parmy Olson writes in her FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year Supremacy: AI, Chat GPT, and the Race that Will Change the World, AI is increasingly a winner-take-all game that can only be played by a very small number of megalithic companies. The book tracks the evolution of DeepMind and OpenAI, both of which started with sincere commitments to ethics that have bent in the direction of the largest tech companies offering them resources and compute. On some level, its simply too tempting to be the gatekeeper to human knowledge and easy to convince oneself that getting to AI breakthroughs faster will be better for everyone on the entire planet. A political moment that undervalues ethics is meeting unrestrained profit motivations - and 2025 is a critical year in that story, particularly as the technology advances so quickly.
3. Growth and its Discontents
The age of globalization - which we are exiting - was built on a single, simultaneous rush to get rich. The problem is that many workers were left behind and their resulting anger has manifested in the elevation of populist politicians appealing to broader instincts like slamming the immigration and free trading doors closed. In a similar way, gains from technology will become a core flashpoint of political debate over the course of 2025 in many economies. Workers who once competed with their global peers will now compete with their artificial replacements.
Daniel Susskind’s Growth: A History and a Reckoning raises the important question of why societies have anchored on a need for boosting the arbitrary statistic of GDP. The economic history of the statistic of choice is interesting enough, but the book is even more insightful in raising the key question of how to give citizens agency again over the type of growth that they want. Yes, all of our businesses are supposed to show quarter on quarter growth or else we are dismal business leaders. But growth at any cost undermines the supposed prosperity it is expected to provide. That’s because prosperity is more than an uptick in a statistic: It’s a feeling of satisfaction amongst the citizenry that their lives - and their children’s lives - are getting better. As people start losing jobs to AI at an increasing clip, expect national economic growth alone to no longer be tantamount to “better.”
One vector of this is the consolidation of power in a small army of the mega-elite who control more and more of our lives. Nobel Laureates Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson tackle this vector of the growth debate in Power and Progress, which grapples with how elite control of technology affects the societal impacts of that technology. The core argument is that new institutions are needed to channel the voice of workers in order to make sure machines are designed to work with humans instead of replacing them. This long economic history is a warning shot fired in favor of greater state control and trade unions. This couldn’t be more out of step with the current political climate in the US, but it is an important intellectual counterpoint. This sits in the category of alternatives to consider when the costs of the next wave of technology-powered growth start to be felt.
4. The New Influence
As I write in Unruly, a world where companies are increasingly drawn into the geopolitical fray as political actors is a world where those companies need to start conceptualizing themselves more like political organisms.
Brody Mullins and Luke Mullins’ magisterial work The Wolves of K Street drives home just how much influence American lobbyists have over policymaking, or, as is often the case, policybraking (my term for slowing down policymaking). While it may seem like the incoming president has the political will and political capital to act as he pleases, companies and industry groups have a long history of deploying any means necessary to get their desired outcomes. The book is a cinematic tour of Washington’s underbelly highly relevant for the current moment, with tales of how to play public opinion and use social media to get the attention of the incoming president.
But the world is more than just Washington. To the extent that companies are engaging in political wrangling with officials in many countries, they would benefit from porting over lessons in diplomacy, foreign policy and intelligence to the private sector.
This means companies need senior officials who are able to integrate cross-currents of politics, law, technology and public relations into strategic positions the organization can take and express to external stakeholders. Colin Reed’s piece for Encyclopedia Geopolitica on developing a corporate foreign policy strongly makes this case.
Yet to develop a corporate foreign policy, companies increasingly need to reflect on whether they have the right intelligence, security and threat teams to inform such strategic choices-and whether they have the right monitoring tools and processes to be successful. Lewis Sage-Passant’s book Beyond States and Spies: The Security Intelligence Services of the Private Sector helped me understand the shape of all forms of corporate intelligence gathering - from whether private sector intelligence work must be shrouded in secrecy (occasionally but not exclusively) to various makes, models and use cases—from 9th century corporate intelligence to the NFL hiring intelligence teams to screen out mafia influence.
With a strong intelligence structure in place, companies are better able to take political positions, adapt to shifting political landscapes and move from narrow lobbying to broader influence. These skills are critical for the road ahead.
5. The Law Transforms
The legal sector is on the cusp of dramatic change - change that has nothing to do with the billions of dollars being poured into enterprise solutions but rather change with respect to the role the law plays in society. Surveillance, personalization and automation of the law will increasingly become a reality in 2025 and we need roadmaps to conceptualize this new landscape.
Gillian Hadfield’s Rules for a Flat World (an older book that I find myself increasingly referencing) makes a compelling case for why government may never actually be able to regulate technology directly and offers up an alternative structure for regulation made by for-profit entities. The Legal Singularity by Abdi Aidid and Benjamin Alarie provides a unique vantage on what happens when technology makes the law entirely predictable, while Personalized Law: Different Rules for Different People by Ariel Porat and Omri Ben-Shahar raises the specter that technology will soon be good enough that each of us could have different laws governing us simultaneously - for instance, me and my wife having different speed limits on a given day because our smartwatch ratted out that one of us was up all night writing while the other one snoozed.
How your legal team navigates this, however, is a different story. I constantly refer back to Building an Outstanding Legal Team by Bjarne Tellmann when thinking about how to advise law departments to prepare for this change. It’s a critical reference that cuts across the leadership, technological and legal perspectives needed for success.
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We have quite a year ahead of us, and I hope this was more useful than simply outlining for you all of the things in 2025 that you can fear. Instead, I wanted to arm you with practical guides from an interdisciplinary set of authors that you can reference amid the unruliness ahead. But I’ll be back to your regularly scheduled fearcast next week!
What did I miss? Let me know below.
-SW