The beginning of the end of Big Tech
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This week WIRED Start invited Meredith Whittaker , president of Signal Messenger and chief adviser to the AI Now Institute , to share her thoughts on the future of Big Tech and her theory that everyone is falling out of love with the massive, money-oriented, global technology titans.
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.
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.
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.
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Until next time
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Senior Advisor/Consultant. Mentor. Tech/Innovation Strategist. Angel Investor. Passionate about conservation, climate & sustainability. Ex-VP Strategy & Emerging Business at Lenovo
1moBy what mechanism will this happen?. Consumers have made it clear they will give up privacy for convenience or peer pressure. Big tech offers the most of that given their size and dominance. I don't see the government intervening in the next 4 years . So even if the vc community creates a startup friendly environment, I'm not sure how it displaces the incumbents any time soon other than screwups of "twitter" type proportions.....
Senior Network Administrator
1moDecentralization is a key metric inorder to keep populations freedoms intact.