Erik Carter / The Atlantic The dramatic, multidimensional implosion of Meta; the nuclear train wreck of Elon Musk’s Twitter; the momentous labor uprising against Amazon—it wasn’t just an unusually disastrous year for America’s biggest tech companies. It was a reckoning.
The tech giants that have shaped our lives, online and off, over the course of the 21st century have at last hit a wall. Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple all saw their valuations fall, sometimes precipitously. Many slashed their workforces; at least 120,000 tech workers lost their jobs this year. The myth of the genius founder, which insulated so many of these giants from so much criticism for so long, was debunked before our eyes .
These companies, launched with promises to connect the world, to think different, to make information free to all, to democratize technology, have spent much of the past decade making the sorts of moves that large corporations trying to grow ever larger have historically made—embracing profit over safety, market expansion over product integrity, and rent seeking over innovation—but at much greater scale, speed, and impact. Now, ruled by monopolies, marred by toxicity, and over-reliant on precarious labor, Silicon Valley looks like it’s finally run hard up into its limits.
Call it the improbable paradox of the modern tech giant. Some of the most powerful, profitable, and expansive companies in human history—associated at least nominally with wide-ranging innovation—are stuck. They’re failing utterly to create the futures they’ve long advertised, or even to maintain the versions they were able to muster. Having scaled to immense size, they’re unable or unwilling to manage the digital communities they’ve built. They’re paralyzed when it comes to product development and reduced to monopolistic practices such as charging rents and copying or buying up smaller competitors. Antitrust investigations beckon. Their policies tend to please no one ; it’s a common refrain that antipathy toward Big Tech companies is one of the few truly bipartisan issues.
You can just feel it, the cumulative weight of this stagnation, in the tech that most of us encounter every day. The act of scrolling past the same dumb ad to peer at the same bad news on the same glass screen on the same social network: This is the stuck future. There is a sense that we have reached the end of the internet, and no one wants to be left holding the bag.
How these companies respond to this troubled new era will have major repercussions. This is why throughout 2022, we’ve been pitched a mishmash of virtual- and augmented-reality projects and “metaverse” concepts . It’s why the tech giants that preside over today’s toxic online communities are now promising to force them onto our faces. It’s why there’s brewing resentment among certain tech-industry heavyweights who believe they’ve seen their visions stymied . It’s why others are jumping ship, leaving massive planks of online infrastructure open to acquisition and further disarray.
There’s a palpable exhaustion with the whole enterprise, with the men who set out to build the future or at least get rich, and who accomplished only one and a half of those things.
The most obvious example of tech’s quagmire, of course, is Twitter. From his overinflated bid to buy the company for a price that doubled as a weed joke to his catastrophic tenure as CEO, Elon Musk and his tortured dalliance with the social network was the most-watched tech saga of the year. By November, Musk had slashed half the staff and reinstated some of the site’s most controversial banned users, including the neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin and former President Donald Trump . He used his new perch to promote right-wing conspiracies, to mock nonbinary people and Anthony Fauci, and to suspend journalists. Advertisers balked and paused spending on the platform. Prominent users sent farewell tweets. Now, at the end of the year, amid lawsuits , potential Federal Trade Commission and European Union law violations , a shriveled staff, and a mounting pile of unpaid bills , Twitter’s future is very much in question.
But the relentless Musk/Twitter drama shouldn’t overshadow the conditions that allowed it to erupt in the first place: The platform has been in a state of arrested development for a long time. It has struggled to add users and to keep toxic content, abusive accounts, and disinformation off its platform. It’s popular among a subset of people—especially comedians, journalists, and politicians—but it hasn’t turned a profit since 2019, and even then, profit-turning was a rarity. It’s posted a loss in eight of the past […]
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