Next year is the Big Tech final. Criticism of Big Tech is now common sense, voiced by a motley spectrum that unites opposing political parties, mainstream pundits and even tech titans like VC powerhouse Y Combinator, who sing in unison with giants like a16z in proclaiming allegiance to “small 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 now old-fashioned: centralization, supervision, information control. It goes on and on, and it's not hypothetical. Concentrating such enormous power in a few hands does not lead to good things. No, it leads to things like the CrowdStrike outage in mid-2024, when Microsoft's budget cuts caused critical infrastructure – from hospitals to banks and traffic systems – to fail globally for an extended period of time.
Another reason why Big Tech will falter in 2025 is that the frothy AI market, which Big Tech has bet big on, is starting to lose its fizz. Big money companies, like Goldman Sachs and Sequoia Capital, are worried. They recently made public their concerns about the disconnect between the billions needed to create and deploy large-scale AI, and the weak market conditions and tepid returns where the rubber meets the road of the AI business model.
It doesn't help that the public and regulators are waking up to the dependence on AI and the generation of sensitive data at a time when the need for privacy has never been greater – as evidenced, for example, by the continued growth of the number of users in Signal. AI, on the other hand, generally affects privacy. We saw this in June when Microsoft announced Recall, a product that would, I'm not kidding, take a screenshot of everything you do on your device so that an AI system could give you a “perfect memory” of what you did on your device. your computer was doing (Doomscrolling? watching porn?). The system required capturing those sensitive images – which would otherwise not exist – in order to work.
Fortunately, these factors don't just liquefy the ground beneath Big Tech's dominance. They also provide bold visions of alternatives that stop tinkering at the edges of the monopolistic technology paradigm and work to design and build actually democratic, independent, open and transparent technology. To suggest!
For example, initiatives in Europe are exploring independent core technology infrastructure, with gatherings of open source developers, governance scholars, and experts on the political economy of the technology industry.
