will happen next year Big Tech should end. Criticism of Big Tech is now common knowledge, voiced by a diverse spectrum that unites opposing political parties, mainstream pundits, and even VC powerhouses like tech giants. Y CombinatorWhich is aligning with giants like a16z in declaring allegiance to “small tech” against the centralized power of those in power.
Why the fall from grace? One reason is that the attendant consequences of the current Big Tech business model are too obvious to ignore. The list is stale by now: centralization, surveillance, information control. It goes on, and it's not imaginary. Concentrating such immense power in a few hands does not lead to good things. No, it leads to things like crowdstrike outage in mid-2024, when Corner-cutting by Microsoft critical infrastructure led-from hospital to the banks transportation system– To fail globally for an extended period.
Another reason for Big Tech to falter in 2025 is that the frothy AI market that Big Tech had bet big on is starting to lose its luster. Big capital like Goldman Sachs and Sequoia Capital are worried. They recently went public with their concerns about the gap between the billions needed to create and use AI at scale and weak market fit and where the rubber meets the AI business-model road.
It doesn't help that the public and regulators are waking up to AI's reliance on and production of sensitive data at a time when the appetite for privacy has never been higher – as evidenced by Signal's steady user growth. On the other hand, AI generally destroys privacy. We saw it in June when Microsoft announces recallA product that, I kid you not, can take screenshots of everything you do on your device so that an AI system can give you a “perfect memory” of what you were doing on your computer (doomscrolling? porn -Look?). For the system to work it needs to capture sensitive images – which would not otherwise exist.
Happily, these factors are not just weakening the ground beneath Big Tech's dominance. They are also empowering bold visions for alternatives that stop tinkering at the edges of the monopoly tech paradigm, and work to design and build truly democratic, free, open, and transparent technology. suppose!
For example, Initiative Independent core technological infrastructure is being explored in Europe with a meeting of open source developers, governance scholars and experts in the political economy of the tech industry.