That Was The Year in Tech: When Nothing Happened (except Everything, Everywhere, All at Once)
That was the year in tech. When nothing and yet everything happened. A year betwixt and between, simultaneously revolutionary and uneventful. That's the ironic conclusion Keith Teare and I reach about Silicon Valley in 2025. It's as if the AI revolution is changing the world without us fully noticing. AI has become electricity—ubiquitous and essential, yet barely noticed. So what will happen on the tech front (or not happen) in 2026? Will it be another year in which nothing happened (except everything, everywhere, all at once). Or are we reaching 1789 or 1917 or 1989—a grand historical year where the logjam breaks and tech formally takes over the world? A true end and beginning of history. The first real year of the tech 21st century.
Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe
The Uberification of Academia: Why Adjunct Professors are Living in their Cars
How to Lose Loudly: What the Left can Learn from the NRA
More Than Chinatown: Bruce Lee and the Invention of Asian American Identity
The AI Pioneer Who Chose Purpose Over Profit: Jim Fruchterman on Why Big Tech Can't Be Trusted with Our Future
World Enemy Number One: Nazi Germany's Obsession with 'Judeo-Bolshevism'
The True Cost of Roadkill: Cars Have Caused 60 to 80 Million Deaths in the Last 100 Years
Is that $320,000 College Degree Really Worth It? The President of Brandeis on why Colleges Must Adapt or Become Irrelevant
The Dark Passions Driving American Politics: Why Liberals Must Acknowledge Anger, Fear, and the Lust for Domination
The AI Assistant That Knows Your Life Before You Do: The End of the Beginning or the Beginning of the End?
TRUMP IS NOT POPULAR: How a Sub 40% Approval Offers Hope for the Dems
The Idiocracy Trap: Why Smart Machines are making Humans Dumb & Dumber
Halfway to Hungary: Jonathan Rauch on the Authoritarian Playbook that Trump Borrowed from a Small, Landlocked Central European State
The Case Against the United Nations: The Israel Obsession, Rwanda, and the Haiti Peacekeeping Scandal