The ways we'll claw back our lives from Big Tech in 2025, part 1
The end of the phone based childhood, "content" becomes passé, dating apps shift to IRL, and more
Like many of you, I suspect, I take each new year’s predictions somewhat less than seriously. I’m sure they make for highly clickable content (more on that word in a moment) around holiday time. But I find grand prognostications in general are best received with a healthy dose of skepticism and my baloney-and-SEO-keyword detector dialed to Extra High.
The behavior of individual human beings may be foreseeable, even inescapable, I grant you. But trying to prophesy the future behavior of humans at scale, at the levels of cultures and societies and economies, is a game for pundits and fools; the many overlapping systems involved are too complex and human nature too wonderfully capricious and contrary for us to be able to extrapolate beyond a few hours, much less a year.
Add to the standard cloudiness of the future the wildcard effects we can surely expect from the inevitable chaos, cruelty and batshittery of the coming Trump administration, and we’re deep in who-the-fuck-knows territory. The earth could start spinning backwards and the dead rise to walk the earth, for all I know. Nothing would surprise me at this point.
Having said that! And also having cracked the door on 2025 and taken a quick peek inside, I feel pretty confident in highlighting a few existing trends that I’m willing to bet are going to gain steam in the coming year. No predictions here — just savvy extrapolation sprinkled lightly with some wishful thinking.
When I first compiled this list at the start of January, I found it ran to 3,500+ words. That’s long even for me, so I’ve decided to carve it in half and serve it up in two portions. I’ll drop Part 2 on January 21.
1. The beginning of the end of the phone-based childhood
Last year will go down as a critical turning point for our understanding of the harms of a phone-based childhood. In 2025, that awareness will reach critical mass, and social media companies will be compelled to change how they design and market their products for children, and possibly for adults as well.
It’s a big claim, I know, especially given that the social media oligopoly managed to throttle the bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) in the U.S. Congress just a few weeks ago. But I still believe this issue has the wind at its back culturally, if not legislatively.
As Scott Galloway observes, it’s now become abundantly clear that social media exposes children to graphic sexuality, graphic violence, addiction risk, and numerous major health and safety hazards, often without the knowledge or consent of the child’s parents. And that’s when it’s used normally. Any other product in the world that created similar harms for kids would be banned or age-gated at at the speed of light.
“Any other product in the world that created similar harms for kids would be banned or age-gated at at the speed of light.”
When Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 doorstopper The Anxious Generation dropped in March, its rigorously supported central thesis — that we have overprotected our children from the real world while underprotecting them from the online world — ricocheted across the globe, finding willing ears in parents and schoolteachers everywhere and setting into motion a paradigm-shifting parade of events.
Last year we saw 42 State Attorneys General pursue a federal lawsuit against Meta for fostering addiction among adolescents and teens through their products and creating a global childhood mental health crisis. Australia passed a law setting a minimum age of 16 for opening a social media account — the first such law in the world — and we witnessed the birth of the grassroots Wait Until 8th movement, with parents pledging to wait until their kids are 16 before they get a smartphone. New York City declared social media a public health hazard and “an environmental toxin,” and sued the biggest offenders “for fueling the nationwide youth mental health crisis.” Also in New York, a group of Brooklyn teens dubbing themselves The Luddite Club made national news for rejecting smartphones and social media.
Perhaps most consequently, last fall a staggering 76% of U.S. public schools finally took real measures to restrict students’ use of smartphones during the school day.
All of this adds up to a profound shift in the way we think not just about kids and social media but about the society-wide harms these growth-at-all-costs tech monopolies are causing.
Haidt himself puts it best.
“We talk a lot about 2012 as (roughly) the year when the adolescent mental health crisis began. We think that 2024 will be remembered as the year it began to reverse. We are in the middle of a tipping point, a culture change, a vibe shift about the dangers of a phone-based childhood and the importance of free play and childhood independence.”
2. “Content” begins a slow spiral into stigmatization
Was there ever an awfuler way to describe the result of that most wondrous, inscrutable and quintessentially human behavior, the urge to create?
I’m speaking here, of course, of the word “content” as a common-denominator descriptor of every damned thing on the internet, the mostly interchangeable drek that “content creators” extrude and that makes up nearly all of the commercial web.
The overwhelming majority of online content has little to do with actual creativity, either in form or function. But “content” landed atop the heap of candidates for the job because of the word’s impeccable generalizability in an attention economy laser focused on clicks and eyeballs. It is so ideally fit to purpose not because it describes the qualities of online creative output so well — it does not — but because it describes the objective of that creative output so succinctly.
That objective, as more and more of us have come to understand, is simply to act as a substrate for SEO-optimized keywords and virality in the service of delivering personalized ads and capturing our data. “Content” is bait, nothing more.
But as ever larger swaths of us cotton to the fact that we are the product, not the audience, of the internet’s business ecosystem, and as we gradually succumb to the overwhelm of so much content, so much of which is pure, unremitting drek, the scales are dropping from our eyes. I’m going out on a limb and saying 2025 will be the beginning of the end of the “content”ification of the web.
There will still be vast quantities of SEO-optimized content, to be sure, and content strategists will still be broadly employed. But I suspect this year the word itself will begin to be associated with undifferentiated, low-quality rubbish that’s mostly without value, and that the “content creators” of 2025 will start putting some rhetorical space between what they create (“photography,” “recipes,” “newsletters,” “book reviews,” “music”) and the internet-sized septic tank of engagement bait that lumps it all together. My bet, and my fervent hope, is that “content” will descend into the realm of the Dirty Word this year.
3. Print is punk again
After a decade in the wilderness, print media — actual words printed on actual paper — appears to be staging a lowkey comeback. In August, SPIN Magazine came out of print retirement as a new quarterly with a full editorial staff reporting, once again, to founder and editor-in-chief Bob Guccione Jr. Also, in August, The Onion began distributing a print edition for the first time in more than a decade. Last summer Nylon and even LIFE plopped back into the meatspace world. In September, New York Magazine and The Cut dipped a toe into the waters with a stand-alone print Fall Fashion Issue. Vice will relaunch its print magazine in the spring. Hell, even the poly/casual dating app Feeld got into the action (so to speak) with a new print pub called — wait for it— A Fucking Magazine.
And it’s not just magazines. Zines are making a comeback, too! Substackers are switching from digital to print distribution! (OK, at least one is.) Even TikTok’s parent company (for the moment), the Chinese technology giant ByteDance, is horning in on the action, with a new publishing imprint that will publish print editions of new “BookTok”-friendly titles and sell them in physical bookstores.
Why the newfound interest in print? Jordan LaFlure, The Onion’s executive editor, nails it: “For the same reason that 18-year-old kids are buying Taylor Swift on vinyl.”
(I honestly do not know if anyone, much less an 18-year-old-kid, is buying Taylor Swift on vinyl, but I take his point. Also, see the entry on the return of the bookstore in Part 2 of this series later in January.)
4. A mainstreaming of the backlash against algorithmic curation and control
I have more to say about this in my interview with
at her marvelous newsletter Brave Enough. For now, I’ll simply say I expect to see a welcome new front open up in the culture wars this year, one pitting humans against the algorithms. A backlash against algorithmic curation has been building quietly for several years, pushing back against the self-serving corporate manipulation of everything we hear, watch, see, and read. And a new crop of algorithm-free platforms and services are springing up in response. I believe this year we’ll see the anti-algorithm backlash break out into the mainstream.I also think that wave will mirror the emergence of a movement toward healthier lifestyles in which, faced with an exponentially increasing flood of SEO-optimized online content, we collectively begin to view personal attention as equally precious a resource as personal privacy.
I saw hints of this paradigm shift out there at the end of 2024; I expect we’ll see much more of it in 2025.
5. Dating apps move offline
If there’s anything Gen Z loves dumping on more than skinny jeans, millennials, and work, it’s dating apps. But the ennui goes way beyond Gen Z. For most singles, their hopes of scoring a partner on Bumble, Hinge, eharmony, Match, Tinder, or any of the long tail of niche-specific romance apps who lasts longer than the arrival of the check has taken on the aspect of winning the Powerball jackpot — it’s alleged to happen, but you don’t actually know anyone who has.
As a result, we’ve lowered our sights from marriage material to “nanoships” and “delusionships.” In a survey, 40% of Zoomer respondents said they’d rather get elbow-deep in toilet water before enduring another hour of small talk over drinks.
A recent study found that nearly 80% of singles aged 18-54 are emotionally fatigued and/or burned out (their words, not mine) on dating apps. Match Group and Bumble — which together cover just about the entire industry by market share — have lost more than $40 billion in market value since 2021.
The reasons are myriad and depressing. Relationship expert Myisha Battle, for example pulls no punches: “What’s different for dating in this moment is that the sheer volume of rejection and disappointment is so much higher for daters than it has been in previous generations.” Ouch.
We spend every day immersed in an online version of the Ludovico Technique, bombarded with images of perfect bodies with perfect lifestyles, perfect hair, perfect abs, and perfect jobs (influencer, natch). Pretty much everyone we meet is going to be a letdown when our standards are global, sponsored, retouched, and professionally produced.
At the same time, we’ve all slipped into a passive, total reliance on algorithms to surface for us the perfect, personalized thing — playlist, movie, book, TikTok, outfit, home appliance, rideshare, vacation rental. It’s hard for us to imagine any other means of discovery. An aimless amble around the dog park sans earbuds and sunglasses? Swipe left, thanks.
And yet IRL dating events began popping up last year, many hosted by the very apps that are to blame for this mess.
On TikTok, viral videos urged Zoomers to delete the apps, leave the house, and try to meet people offline. Gen Z doesn’t know how to flirt, you say? In 2025 we’ll see a surge of new businesses and coaches step in to help flustered 20-somethings learn how. Luvvly dating, for example, hosts meet cute “scavenger hunts” that leads participants through a series of “mini first dates,” all without ever having to put down their phones.
There’s been a surge in IRL dating services like Leap Social, Thursday, City Swoon, and First Round's On Me, with formats ranging from the time-honored speed dating to “paint and sip” and “human romance comedy shows.” App-fatigued singles are even resorting to pitch decks and billboards.
With the dating app market estimated at $10 billion in the U.S. alone, entrepreneurs and investors are going to follow where the singles lead. And if Gen Z is looking for love offline, you can bet that’s where the industry will move.
I’ll be back the week of January 20 with Part 2 of this preview of 2025. In the meantime, look for me next week at Brave Enough!
brilliant!
Loved this and look forward to the January 20 piece. I was just having a convo with my wife about how teenagers/20-somethings meet and hook up these days. My sense is - they don’t. Fingers crossed they will get to experience the IRL awkwardness of first moves and fumbled flirtations. That shit is real in the best and worst way, and they deserve to experience it. Great writing, Patrick.