Next year will be the Huge Tech final. Criticism of Huge Tech now rests on common sense, expressed across a diverse spectrum that unites opposing political parties, mainstream pundits, and even tech titans like VC powerhouse Y Combinator, which sings in harmony with giants like a16z in proclaiming allegiance to ” small tech” against the centralized power of incumbents.
Why the fall from grace? One reason is that the collateral consequences of Big Tech’s current business model are too obvious to ignore. The list is old: centralization, surveillance, information control. This is ongoing and not hypothetical. Concentrating so much power in a few hands does not lead to good things. No, it leads to situations like the CrowdStrike outage in mid-2024, where Microsoft’s corner-cutting led to a global failure of critical infrastructure – from hospitals to banks to traffic systems – for an extended period of time.
Another reason Big Tech will fail in 2025 is that the fragile artificial intelligence market that Big Tech is betting big on is starting to lose momentum. Major financial firms such as Goldman Sachs and Sequoia Capital are concerned. They recently went public with their concerns about the disconnect between the billions required to create and use AI at scale and the poor market fit and poor 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 fact that AI relies on and generates sensitive data at a time when the appetite for privacy has never been greater – as evidenced, for example, by the continued growth of Signal users. On the other hand, AI destroys privacy in general. We saw this back in June when Microsoft announced Recall, a product that, I’m not kidding, will take screenshots of everything you do on your device so that the AI system can give you a “perfect memory” of what you were doing on your computer (Doomscrolling? Porn – supervising?). For the system to work, it required capturing sensitive images that would otherwise not exist.
Fortunately, these factors do more than liquefy the ground for Big Tech’s dominance. They are also pursuing bold visions of alternatives that stop tinkering at the edges of the monopoly technology paradigm and work to design and build truly democratic, independent, open and transparent technologies. Imagine!
For example, initiatives in Europe are exploring independent core technology infrastructure by organizing meetings of open source developers, management researchers and political economy experts in the technology industry.