It’s a drained trope to say every year was the worst. It’s the results of recency bias, and if we’re all being intellectually honest with ourselves, we all know that it is universally accepted that 536 narrowly edges out 1349 because the worst year ever. The final decade may have damaged our sense of time, however by no means have I felt so shocked when I realized that occurred this year. All years are “bad” of their very personal way, however 2022 was different: This year in tech was outlined by a parabolic whiplash effect: It went and did a 180 on us.
The dramatic implosion of crypto
At the begin of the year, crypto was brimming with promise and buzz. It was the hot trend of February’s Super Bowl ads: Larry David appeared as a skeptic in a commercial for FTX, LeBron James shilled for Crypto.com, and Coinbase and eToro additionally spent ungodly sums selling themselves. It lastly felt like cryptocurrency had reached a tipping level the place it was no longer solely for nerds and criminals — it was for the masses.
Riding alongside that wave was the NFT boom. NFTs had began to appear inescapable the earlier fall, however by the begin of 2022, they had lastly entered the mainstream. In January, Paris Hilton appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and the 2 talked about their Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs. Meanwhile, Seth Green deliberate an entire TV series based on his Bored Ape (which was stolen, then later returned). Sure, loads of individuals were extremely skeptical of NFTs, since spending $200,000 or extra on a monkey JPG didn’t completely appear to make sense as an funding vehicle, however on the begin of 2022, that could all be waved away as “FUD” (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) or with the taunt “Have enjoyable staying poor.”
Ironically, Larry David’s character in that FTX Super Bowl advert turned out to be proper after all.
Then, everything modified — drastically. The spring introduced “crypto winter,” in which the worth of cryptocurrency plummeted. Bitcoin began the year valued at round $47,000 and has now dropped to round $17,000. Many NFT projects were deserted or shuffled along. The floor price for Bored Apes now hovers round $88,000, down from round $260,000 in February. Perhaps an indication of the lack of shine on NFTs is that a recent set of official Donald Trump NFTs was marketed merely as “trading cards.”
Public notion of crypto cratered a lot extra dramatically. The recent catastrophic collapse of FTX and arrest of its founder Sam Bankman-Fried on fraud charges threatens to destabilize the entire ecosystem. FTX customers misplaced serious quantities of cash — as a lot as $8 billion in deposits. But the biggest fallout could additionally be that Bankman-Fried, who was on his way to becoming a family name, appears to have given the skeptics a win: It sure all does appear a little like a Ponzi scheme, doesn’t it? Ironically, Larry David’s character in that FTX Super Bowl advert turned out to be proper after all.
Tech layoffs and Meta’s decline
The entire US economy took a dip this year, and tech companies noticed their shares drop dramatically together with it. In the second half of the year, big tech firms like Amazon, Meta, Snap, Salesforce, Lyft, and extra had layoffs. Across the industry, an estimated 150,000 tech jobs have been shed in 2022, in accordance to the site Layoffs.fyi. For workers who got here from outside the US to pursue the American dream of profitable and prestigious tech jobs, these cuts were particularly brutal, since laid-off visa holders needed to get a brand new job inside 60 days or leave the country.
No fall was maybe as dramatic as that of Meta, whose inventory has plunged 67% from the begin of the year. In February, the corporate introduced that for the primary time ever, Facebook’s user numbers had gone down. In November, Meta cut 11,000 jobs and shut down manufacturing of Portal, its video-chatting device, in addition to wearables it was developing. CEO Mark Zuckerberg attributed the cuts partly to overexpansion throughout the pandemic.
Instagram suffers from having the millennial stink of filtered brunch photos and influencer aesthetic, which is seen as corny and old by Gen Z.
Meta was additionally uniquely vulnerable to Apple’s new coverage that restricted user data collection, which hamstrung its focused promoting business. Apple’s privateness feature began in 2021, and it is estimated that it cost Facebook $10 billion in advert revenue.
Something felt significant about Meta — beforehand a juggernaut that prized growth at any cost — stumbling. Facebook at 18 years old has failed to catch on with youthful people. Instagram, as soon as the hip youthful sibling, has additionally misplaced floor to TikTok. Instagram suffers from having the millennial stink of filtered brunch photos and influencer aesthetic, which is seen as corny and old by Gen Z.
Over the summer, Instagram tweaked its feed to present extra Reels — a blatant try to try to catch as a lot as TikTok. Celebrities like Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian revolted, calling on Instagram to “stop attempting to be TikTok.” And as Snap can inform you, when you’ve misplaced Kylie Jenner, you’ve got a problem. The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, addressed the controversy in an apologetic video and promised to roll again a few of the changes.
For the primary time, there's a sense that Meta is vulnerable — that Facebook and even Instagram might just…fade away, to get changed by TikTok or BeReal or regardless of the brand new factor is subsequent year. We do not actually know what it would look like to have a mature social community die out, and the Myspace analogy doesn’t actually match here. As Ryan Broderick wrote in his Garbage Day newsletter, addressing the possibility of Twitter going away, issues could begin to get actually bizarre first.
Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover
Speaking of social networks dying and issues getting actually bizarre first, the apparent 180-degree flip from “normal” to “straight to hell” was Twitter. The year began out with Twitter being a regular company, run by regular people. The complaints about the platform were regular and the identical as they had been for a few years — there have been various moderation issues, and customers whined about an edit button.
Then, well, everything happened. Starting in April, Elon Musk purchased 9% of the company; accepted then rejected a board seat; made an offer to purchase the entire company; tried to again out of that offer and almost went to court; and eventually went through with the deal for $44 billion. Let that sink in.
Musk has managed in simply two months to present Twitter from no matter Twitter used to be proper into a spot the place people solely talk about Twitter.
By November, he had laid off over half the staff, scared off advertisers, and had a disastrous launch of the platform’s $8-per-month subscription product. He made up new and mercurial moderation rules, suspending then unsuspending celebrities like Kathy Griffin who modified their present name to “Elon Musk” and suspending then unsuspending journalists who reported on an account that tracked his private jet. He made a brand new rule that nobody could ask people to follow them on Instagram or different social platforms, then mostly took it back.
If nothing else, Musk has managed in simply two months to present Twitter from no matter Twitter used to be proper into a spot the place people solely talk about Twitter.
We got some good things, too
There were additionally good 180s that occurred this year! Artificial intelligence made huge and spectacular growth, with consumer instruments blowing people’s minds. ChatGPT became good sufficient to write a satisfactory AP English essay, and the Lensa picture app, which generates avatar images based on selfies, went viral (along with some debate about the ethics of AI art). The blossoming of new social platforms, simply like the anti-influencer photo-sharing app BeReal and Twitter alternative Mastodon, were unexpectedly good issues to occur in 2022.
Technology is thrilling because it’s supposed to change and develop and evolve. Each year ought to have new and unexpected issues (ideally good ones). That’s what makes people need to become coders and designers and engineers — the idea of making one factor that could change the world inside 12 months.
That’s why we keep logging on every day to discover out what’s happening. This ought to be exciting! But here’s my plea to the tech world for 2023: Maybe simply make some incremental changes. Let’s not flip everything upside down again. As somebody who has to write about this for a living, I’m exhausted.
