IT HAS been an apocalyptic year for technology, but that doesn’t mean we are heading for dystopia. In fact, the biggest tech failures of 2022 are actually an encouraging sign that many humans are still quite sensible despite everything.
As I discussed in my most recent column (10 December), Twitter appears to be imploding after new owner Elon Musk of staff and allowed and back on the platform. For many of us, it seemed like a nightmarish harbinger of things to come online.
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The immediate reaction of many advertisers and users was “get me the hell out of here”. Twitter’s advertisers fled; many will never return. With them went the site’s biggest source of revenue. Then Musk’s plan to recoup losses by charging users $8 per month for verified member status caused so many problems he walked the plan back within days. People may be visiting Twitter to watch it burn, but few are willing to pay for its continued existence. That gives me hope.
Meanwhile, FTX, one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, was to be built on sand. It was a bullet into the head of blockchain hucksters. Banks and investors lost millions, and FTX owner Sam Bankman-Fried went from billionaire to broke overnight. As technologist Molly White has chronicled on her crypto-sceptic site , the so-called crypto revolution has made a few people rich – and bankrupted countless innocent investors who didn’t understand what they were getting into. Lives have been ruined. The end of FTX means fewer people are now at risk of losing their money and there is greater awareness that crypto investments can be more like pyramid schemes than bridges to a brighter future. Score one for justice.
In news I find both hilarious and heartening, a recent revealed that Amazon’s creepy digital assistant Alexa has . You know Alexa – it lives in a little device and responds to voice commands like “play a song by X-Ray Spex” or “tell me the mass of the sun”. It also has well-documented that are quite alarming, such as recording everything said nearby, even when the device appears to be off. Amazon was selling Alexa products at cost because the firm assumed that people would use them to buy lots of stuff from Amazon, allowing it to recoup its losses on sales of the device.
Apparently consumers were having none of that – at least, not the human ones. There is a very popular of a parrot that managed to order ice cream and strawberries through Alexa. But for their part, humans mostly used their Alexa assistants to play music or answer questions. I will admit the main thing I used Alexa for was telling maths jokes. It has a surprising number of good ones! At any rate, my faith in humanity was restored when I read that nobody was using these things to buy more stuff from Amazon.
There was one piece of genuinely sad news in the tech industry this year. Many of the biggest tech companies, from to , announced mass layoffs right before the holidays. When we focus on the rich and powerful men who own these companies, we often forget about the real casualties these billionaires leave in their wakes. People lost their livelihoods. Some of them are contractors who got no severance pay and are a month’s salary away from living in their cars. If you know somebody who has been laid off or whose job has suddenly become more precarious, please do something nice for them this holiday season.
Farewell to Twitter, FTX and Alexa! Long live humanity!
Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest novel is The Future of Another Timeline and they are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is
