Holy Multiverse! The Year in Tech

Early this year, I asked Pui-Wing Tam, our tech editor, to look back at 2018 and to predict some of 2019’s biggest storylines.

As we get ready to close out 2019, I asked her for some updates. Here’s what she said:

Q: At the beginning of 2019, you said one overarching story your team would be following was a growing tech backlash. What were some of the most important developments in that area this year and why?

A: So we were both right and wrong. While a backlash did grow against tech in some significant ways in 2019, it also didn’t in other notable ways.

Here’s what I mean: In Washington, lawmakers and regulators clearly took on big tech in 2019. Federal agencies like the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission began antitrust investigations of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple, as did state attorneys general and Congress.

Even in the heart of the tech industry — in Silicon Valley and in Seattle — we saw growing dissatisfaction among workers. A kind of backlash by insiders, if you will. Tech employees gave their bosses a hard time over issues such as climate change and unionization. Companies are still dealing with that elevated level of activism and outspokenness.

But here’s where the backlash stopped. Did most of us drop our use of Google searches or Instagram posting or Amazon purchases or using iPhones? Not in the least. So we continue relying on these big tech companies. And as a result, they continue to mint money and to watch their stock prices go up and up and up.

Q: What story or finding from your team most surprised you this year and why?

A: Technology can still wow us with milestones, in a “Holy multiverse!” sort of way.

Probably the most mind-bending development this year was when Google made a quantum breakthrough. Essentially, the internet giant created a new kind of computer that could make calculations at unbelievable speeds. My colleague Cade Metz wrote of the achievement: “The Google device did in 3 minutes 20 seconds a mathematical calculation that supercomputers could not complete in 10,000 years.”

Whoa, right? As for how exactly this worked, I can tell you it involves qubits and subatomic levels and extremely cold temperatures.

Q: This year, we’ve seen a lot of high-profile tech companies flail financially — most notably Uber, with its disastrous initial public offering . That signaled a major shift. (Like, now it’s important to investors that companies actually make money ?) What can we expect on that front in 2020?

A: That there won’t be a black-and-white answer to whether the startup bubble has popped or not.

Certainly high-profile tech IPOs flopped this year, and people in Silicon Valley didn’t get quite as rich as they expected (cue the small violin). But there’s still a lot of money sloshing around in tech startup land, and it isn’t likely to just disappear anytime soon.

So we’ll be watching a few barometers for where things go. Will Airbnb go public in 2020 and if so, how will it fare? How will other companies funded by SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate that invested huge sums into Uber and WeWork and others, do? And so on.

Even if the rubber meets the road in 2020, there will most likely be glimmers of the next big thing. Back during the dot-com implosion in the early 2000s, Google was just getting going. And we all know how it has since become a dominant force in many of our lives.

Q: What else will your team be watching in 2020?

A: So much to watch! The most obvious is the 2020 election. The pressure is on social media in the next year to eliminate meddlers and misinformation around political candidates and their campaigns, especially after Russians used Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other platforms to inflame voters in 2016.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .