Next year will be the end of Big Tech. Criticism of Big Tech is now common sense, expressed by a motley spectrum uniting opposing political parties, traditional experts, and even tech titans like VC powerhouse Y Combinator, which sings in harmony with giants like a16z by proclaiming loyalty to “the little ones.” tech” against the centralized power of the incumbents.
Why the fall from grace? One reason is that the collateral consequences of the current Big Tech business model are too obvious to ignore. The list is already old: centralization, surveillance, control of information. It continues and is not hypothetical. Concentrating such vast power in a few hands does not lead to anything good. No, it leads to things like the CrowdStrike outage in mid-2024, when cuts by Microsoft caused critical infrastructure (from hospitals to banks to traffic systems) to fail globally for an extended period.
Another reason why Big Tech will falter in 2025 is that the frothy AI market, which Big Tech bet big on, is starting to lose its effervescence. Big companies, such as Goldman Sachs and Sequoia Capital, are worried. They recently went public with concerns about the disconnect between the billions needed to create and deploy AI at scale, and the weak market fit and tepid returns on the path to the AI business model.
It doesn’t help that the public and regulators are waking up to AI’s reliance on and generation of sensitive data at a time when the appetite for privacy has never been greater, as evidenced by, on the one hand, the persistent growth of Signal users. AI, on the other hand, generally erodes privacy. We saw this in June when Microsoft announced Recall, a product that, I kid you not, would capture everything you do on your device so that an AI system could give you a “perfect memory” of what you were doing on your computer (Doomscrolling? Porn?). -looking?). The system required the capture of those sensitive images, which would not otherwise exist, in order to function.
Fortunately, these factors are not only liquefying the terrain under the dominance of big technologies. They are also driving bold visions of alternatives that stop playing at the boundaries of the monopolistic technology paradigm and work to design and build truly democratic, independent, open and transparent technology. Imagine!
For example, initiatives in Europe are exploring an independent core technology infrastructure, with meetings of open source developers, governance academics and experts on the political economy of the technology industry.