A year of technology with a big ending

The big buzz in tech this year has been the sound of dying trends and end times.

The big picture: Tech’s 20-year frenzy, fueled by easy money during that time, was

• That means big tech companies are scrambling to lay off employees and startups are hoarding their remaining cash. The industry hasn’t seen anything like this since the dotcom boom of the century.

The age of social media I thought it was going to end before our eyes.

• Tik Tok’s dominance among younger users suggests that the online future is focused on your own personal network and on content selected by an efficient and efficient algorithm to capture more attention.
• Facebook, now Meta, doubled down on the 3D metaverse future and structured its news feed more like Tik Tok.
• Twitter sold itself to Elon Musk. As it laid off more than half the company’s employees, many users held warnings of an untimely death for a service they feared would suddenly collapse — but Twitter’s end is likely to come in a long, slow decline.

The last throes of techlash He also played in 2022.

• The US government’s long-running effort to regulate the tech giants began with the Thunderous Hill hearings and the “Break Facebook!” Five years ago and it ended in legislative paralysis, Congress did not enact new laws to limit the power of the tech industry.
• Fears of government action have prompted further power consolidation by Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. But regulatory prosecutions are slow and uncertain, and the companies’ war chests easily carry hefty fines and legal fees.
• States and the Supreme Court can still make life difficult for these giants. But overall, tech leaders continue to worry less about government action than about the rise of new competitors and changes in consumer behavior.

The cryptocurrency boom 2022 was another big tech trend that stopped it in its tracks.

• Crypto’s “winter” started with the market crash last spring and deepened with the FTX push in the fall.
• Bitcoin believers and blockchain enthusiasts still predict another spring for this technology, but many observers see only more doom ahead.

Note: In this environment, even bedrock Internet institutions suddenly seem vulnerable.

• Some saw a threat to Google’s search dominance in the rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot.
• Some observers believe that ChatGPT can replace the venerable search engine by answering users’ queries more quickly – if less precisely.

Yes, but: In this final year, some key dimensions of technology persist.

• The smartphone era may be coming of age, and some visionaries are dreaming of what it might replace. But the phone is our universal interface to our digital realm – and an essential tool for life.
• Connecting and staying connected to the network continues to be a prerequisite for doing anything. Even in remote wildernesses, Apple promises that your newest model iPhone can tap a satellite to call for help.

What’s next: With so many final chapters unfolding around us, it can be hard to spy new beginnings.

• Many of the technology’s potential next chapters — like connected VR worlds and AR overlays and breakthroughs in quantum computing — will take time to unfold.
• Tech’s soon-to-explode bets are on AI, as widely available services for analyzing data and generating content continue to evolve at an astonishing pace.
• Be smart. Big companies still employ many of the best AI researchers and control the largest pools of data to train their models.

The main point is: The pandemic has temporarily dampened growth forecasts for remote access and on-demand services companies, and 2022 will force many to make painful cuts.

• But the Covid-19 era taught the industry a lesson that remains: while the tech economy may be a never-ending boom-bust cycle, the curve of change driven by computers and digital communications is rising.