It’s my annual tradition to take stock of big themes in technology, with a focus on positive developments for you in the past year. Here is the tally of the mostly good, but occasionally crummy, year in technology for 2025.
AI that’s useful and less creepy
I love the motto of Gabriel Weinberg, the CEO of web search and browser company DuckDuckGo: AI should be “useful, private, and optional.”
DuckDuckGo lets you access chatbots including ChatGPT but insists that the AI companies can’t access your data.(The Washington Post has a content partnership with ChatGPT owner OpenAI.)
You can turn off AI features in DuckDuckGo, too. I’m hoping that DuckDuckGo inspires more AI kill switches across the internet.
I’m declaring DuckDuckGo the best technology company of 2025. Even if you never use its products, DuckDuckGo shows that people and companies can challenge the Silicon Valley conventional wisdom that AI is inevitable, inescapable and insatiable.
I’m also curious about the just announced encrypted chatbot from Moxie Marlinspike.
I haven’t tried it yet, but Marlinspike helped create the gold standard encryption that’s used by the Signal app, WhatsApp, Meta Messenger and Google’s texting app for Android phones. If he can likewise establish a usable, private chatbot standard, that’s a boon for you.
I’ve been building Confer: private AI chat where your conversations are end-to-end encrypted so that only you can access them. It’s still new, but I’ve been using it every day and beta testing it with friends. Let me know what’s missing!https://t.co/EsRRPWWpYj
— Moxie Marlinspike (@moxie) December 23, 2025
And I never thought I’d say this, but I’m a convert to AI search technologies for questions and research that don’t work in standard web searches.
I asked ChatGPT recently for the Stephen King novel featuring a character that carves into the skin of another. (“It.”) I used Google’s AI Mode to poke into technology stock returns since the 2010s. It wasn’t perfect but it was useful to guide more intensive research.
Using AI search tools isn’t life changing. And AI still has the same problems. It risks draining precious resources, preying on vulnerable minds, wiping out jobs or choking your favorite websites.
The worst technology of 2025 is a no brainer: AI “agents,” the chatbots or AI browsers that promised you could just tell AI what to do — order groceries or find the best mattress. Outside a handful of tasks such as software coding, agents are an overhyped mess. Just watch this guy failing to order pizza with AI.
It became glaring this year that many Americans mistrust, reject or feel pessimistic about AI even as we use the technology more. That’s not a contradiction. It’s a warning sign.
The companies that make AI, and those of us who use it, must focus on judicious deployment of AI. We can insist that AI be useful, private, optional and open about its shortcomings. And we must be clear-eyed about when AI is the wrong tool for the job.
A technology that beat inflation and got cheaper
Government inflation figures show that prices of wireless phone service have fallen this year. It shows that corporate warfare can actually help you.
Mobile phone carriers are increasingly fighting one another for customers. That has showered many people with steeply discounted new smartphones. There’s also a flourishing market for alternative mobile service providers that can save you loads of money. Here’s how to take advantage of the wireless price wars.
The bad news: You can probably expect price increases in 2026 for laptops and some other electronics. Blame AI.
Gen Z protests and government workers showed technology’s empowering promise
In the United States, federal government workers who were stunned by the tumultuous start to the second Trump administration swarmed to Signal and Reddit to discuss what was happening, buck each other up and share their experiences.
And in countries such as Nepal and Indonesia, young people disappointed in their political leaders used apps such as TikTok, Discord and WhatsApp to spread memes, organize protests and even appoint new political leaders.
These twin movements felt like an echo of the Arab Spring. Those early 2010s uprisings helped cement the idea that people could harness social media to unite against entrenched power.
As with the Arab Spring, 2025’s technology-aided movements might not bring lasting change. But they did remind us of technology’s promise to empower the little guys.
The most important technology of 2025 is:
YouTube. It’s the place to understand where our culture, technology and media are headed.
Google-owned YouTube remains America’s most popular social media service among adults and teens. It tops Facebook, TikTok and Instagram by a country mile.
Americans also spend more time watching YouTube on TV than anything else. Netflix is a distant second, according to Nielsen.
YouTube has spawned news and entertainment empires that couldn’t have existed before, including MrBeast and Ms. Rachel. It’s also increasingly the home for big events such as football games and the Oscars. That combination has grabbed your time, advertisers’ dollars and cultural influence away from traditional Hollywood and media gatekeepers.
That makes YouTube the most consequential technology in our lives and — with apologies to Netflix and the Ellison family — the most disruptive force in media and entertainment.
Runner up: Smartphones. There will more attempts in 2026 at AI-dedicated smart glasses and other gadgets intended to displace the smartphone as the primary computer for billions of people. But it may be that the killer AI device is still the smartphone.
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