Next year will be Big Tech’s finale. Critique of Big Tech is now common sense, voiced by a motley spectrum that unites opposing political parties, mainstream pundits, and even tech titans such as the VC powerhouse Y Combinator, which is singing in harmony with giants like a16z in proclaiming fealty to “little tech” against the centralized power of incumbents.
Print cover for The WIRED World in 2025
This story is from the WIRED World in 2025, our annual trends briefing.
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 old hat by now: centralization, surveillance, information control. It goes on, and it’s not hypothetical. Concentrating such vast power in a few hands does not lead to good things. No, it leads to things like the CrowdStrike outage of mid-2024, when corner-cutting by Microsoft led to critical infrastructure—from hospitals to banks to traffic systems—failing globally for an extended period.
Another reason Big Tech is set to falter in 2025 is that the frothy AI market, on which Big Tech bet big, is beginning to lose its fizz. Major money, like Goldman Sachs and Sequoia Capital, is worried. They went public recently with their concerns about the disconnect between the billions required to create and use large-scale AI, and the weak market fit and tepid returns 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 generation of, sensitive data at a time when the appetite for privacy has never been higher—as evidenced, for one, by Signal’s persistent user growth. AI, on the other hand, generally erodes privacy. We saw this in June when Microsoft announced Recall, a product that would, I kid you not, screenshot everything you do on your device so an AI system could give you “perfect memory” of what you were doing on your computer (Doomscrolling? Porn-watching?). The system required the capture of those sensitive images—which would not exist otherwise—in order to work.
Happily, these factors aren’t just liquefying the ground below Big Tech’s dominance. They’re also powering bold visions for alternatives that stop tinkering at the edges of the monopoly tech paradigm, and work to design and build actually democratic, independent, open, and transparent tech. Imagine!
For example, initiatives in Europe are exploring independent core tech infrastructure, with convenings of open source developers, scholars of governance, and experts on the political economy of the tech industry.
And just as the money people are joining in critique, they’re also exploring investments in new paradigms. A crop of tech investors are developing models of funding for mission alignment, focusing on tech that rejects surveillance, social control, and all the bullshit. One exciting model I’ve been discussing with some of these investors would combine traditional VC incentives (fund that one unicorn > scale > acquisition > get rich) with a commitment to resource tech’s open, nonprofit critical infrastructure with a percent of their fund. Not as investment, but as a contribution to maintaining the bedrock on which a healthy tech ecosystem can exist (and maybe get them and their limited partners a tax break).
Such support could—and I believe should—be supplemented by state capital. The amount of money needed is simply too vast if we’re going to do this properly. To give an example closer to home, developing and maintaining Signal costs around $50 million a year, which is very lean for tech. Projects such as the Sovereign Tech Fund in Germany point a path forward—they are a vehicle to distribute state funds to core open source infrastructures, but they are governed wholly independently, and create a buffer between the efforts they fund and the state.
Just as composting makes nutrients from necrosis, in 2025, Big Tech’s end will be the beginning of a new and vibrant ecosystem. The smart, actually cool, genuinely interested people will once again have their moment, getting the resources and clearance to design and (re)build a tech ecosystem that is actually innovative and built for benefit, not just profit and control. MAY IT BE EVER THUS!
