31 Dec 2024
predictions for 2025
(looks like I had enough notes for an upcoming event to do A-Z this year…)
Ad blocking will get bigger and more widely reported
on. Besides the usual suspects, the current wave of ad blocking is also
partly driven by professional, respectable security vendors. Malwarebytes Labs
positions their ad blocker as an security tool and certain
well-known companies are happy to help them with their content marketing
by running malvertising. (example: Malicious
ad distributes SocGholish malware to Kaiser Permanente employees) Silent
Push is another security vendor helping to make the ads/malware
connection. And, according to research by Lin
et al., users who installed an ad blocker reported fewer regrets
with purchases and an improvement in subjective well-being.
Some
of those users who installed an ad blocker reluctantly because of
security concerns will be hard to convince to turn it off even if the
malvertising situation improves.
Bullshit is going to be everywhere, and more of it. In 2025 it won’t be enough to just ignore the bullshit itself. People will also have to ignore what you might think of as a bullshit Smurf attack, where large amounts of content end up amplifying a small amount of bullshit. Some politician is going to tweet something about how these shiftless guys today need to pull up their pants higher, and then a bunch of mainstream media reporters are going to turn in their diligently researched 2000-word think pieces about the effect of higher pants on the men’s apparel market and human reproductive system. And by the time the stories run, the politician has totally forgotten about the pants thing and is bullshitting about something else. The ability to ignore the whole cycle will be key. So people’s content discovery habits are going to change, we just don’t know how.
Chrome: Google will manage to hang on to their
browser, as prospective buyers don’t see the value in it. Personally I
think there are two logical buyers. The Trade Desk could rip out the
janky Privacy Sandbox
stuff and put in OpenPass and UID2. Not all
users would leave those turned on, but enough would to make TTD the
dominant source for user identifiers in web ads. Or a big bank could buy
Chrome as a fraud protection play and run it to maximize security, not
just ad revenue. At the scale of the largest banks, protecting existing
customers from Internet fraud would save the bank enough money to pay
for browser development. Payment platform integration and built-in
financial services upsell would be wins on top of that.
Both possible Chrome buyers would be better off keeping open-source Chromium open. Google would keep contributing code even if they didn’t control the browser 100%. They would feel the need to hire or sponsor people to participate on a legit open-source basis to support better interoperability with Google services. They wouldn’t be able to get the anticompetitive shenanigans back in, but the legit work would continue—so the buyer’s development budget would be lower than Google’s, long term. But that’s not going to happen. So far, decision makers are convinced that the only way to make money with the browser is with tying to Google services, so they’re going to pass up this opportunity.
Development tools will keep getting more AI
in them. It will be easier to test new AI stuff in the IDE than to not
test it. But a flood of plausible-looking new code that doesn’t
necessarily work in all cases or reflect the unwritten assumptions of
the project means a lot more demand for testing and documentation. The
difference between a software project that spends 2025 doing
self-congratulatory AI productivity win blog posts and one that has an
AI code catastrophe is going to be how much test coverage they started
with or were able to add quickly.
Environmental issues: we’re in for more fires, floods, and storms. Pretty much everybody knows why, but some people will only admit it when they have to. A lot of homeowners won’t be able to renew their insurance, so will end up selling to investors who are willing to demolish the house and hold the land for eventual resale. More former house occupants will pivot to #vanlife, and 24-hour health clubs will sell more memberships to people who mainly need the showers.
Firefox will keep muddling through. There will be more Internet drama over their ill-advised adfraud in the browser thing, but the core software will be able to keep going and even pick up a few users on desktop because of the ad blocking trend. The search ad deal going away won’t have much effect—Google pays Firefox to exist and limit the amount of antitrust trouble it’s in, not for some insignificant number of search ad clicks. If they can’t pay Firefox for default search engine placement, they’ll find some other excuse to send them enough cash to keep going. Maybe not as high on the hog as they have been used to, but enough to keep the browser usable.
Google Zero, where Google just stops sending traffic to a site, will arrive for a significant minority of sites. But not even insiders at Google know which. (I Attended Google’s Creator Conversation Event, And It Turned Into A Funeral | GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT, Google, the search engine that’s forgotten how to search)
Homeschooling will increase faster because of safety concerns, but parents will feel uncomfortable about social isolation and seek out group activities such as sports, crafts, parent-led classes, and group playdates. Homeschoooling will continue to be a lifestyle niche that’s relatively easy to reach with good influencer and content creator connections, but not well-covered by the mainstream media.
Immigration into the USA will continue despite high-profile deportations and associated human rights violations. But whether or not a particular person is going to be able to make it in, or be able to stay, is going to be a lot less predictable. If you know who the person is who might be affected by immigration policy changes, you might be able to plan around it, but what’s more likely from the business decision-making point of view is the person affected is an employee of some supplier of your supplier, or a family member, and you can’t predict what happens when their life gets disrupted. Any company running in lean or just-in-time mode, and relying on low disruption and high predictability, will be most at a disadvantage. Big Tech companies will try to buy their way out of the shitstorm, but heavy reliance on networks of supplier companies will mean they’re still affected in hard-to-predict ways.
Journalism will continue to go non-profit and journalist-owned. The bad news is there’s not enough money in journalism, now or in the near future, to sustain too many levels of managers and investors, and the good news is there’s enough money in it to keep a nonprofit or lifestyle company going. (Kind of like tech conferences. LinuxWorld had to support a big company, so wasn’t sustainable, but Southern California Linux Expo, a flatter organization, is.)
Killfile is the old Usenet word for a blocklist, and I already had something for B. The shared lists that are possible with the Fediverse and Bluesky are too useful not to escape into other categories of software. I don’t know which ones yet, but a shared filter list to help fix the search experience is the kind of thing we’re likely to see. People’s content discovery and shopping habits will have to change, we just don’t know how.
Low-trust society will trend. It’s possible for a country to move from high trust to low, or the other way around, as the Pew Research Center covered in 2008. The broligarchy-dominated political and business environment in the USA, along with the booms in growth hacking and AI slop, will make things a lot easier for corporate crime and scam culture. So people’s content discovery and shopping habits will have to change, we just don’t know how. Multi-national companies that already operate in middle-income low-trust countries will have some advantages in figuring out the new situation, if they can bring the right people in from there to here.
Military affairs, revolution in: If you think AI hype at the office in the USA is intense, just watch the AI hype in Europe about how advanced drones and other AI-enabled defense projects can protect countries from being occupied by an evil dictator without having to restore or expand conscription. Surveillance advertisers and growth hackers in the USA are constantly complaining about restrictions on AI in Europe—but the AI Act over there has an exception for the defense industry. In 2025 it will be clear that the USA is over-investing in bullshit AI and under-investing in defense AI, but it won’t be clear what to do about it. (bonus link: The Next Arsenal of Democracy | City Journal)
Neighborhood organizations: As Molly White
recommended in November, more people will be looking for community
and volunteer opportunities. The choice to become a joiner
and
not just a consumer
in unpredictable times is understandable and a good idea in general.
This trend could enter a positive feedback loop with non-profit and
journalist-owned local news, as news sites try more community
connections like Cleveland
Documenters.
Office, return to: Companies that are doing more
crime will tend to do more RTO, because signaling
loyalty is more important than productivity or retaining people with
desired skills. Companies that continue avoiding doing crimes, even in
what’s going to be a crime-friendly time in the USA, will tend to
continue cutting back on office space. The fun part is that the company
can tell the employee that work from home privileges
are a
benefit, and not free office space for the employer. Win-win! So the
content niche for how-tos on maximizing home (and van) offices will
grow.
Prediction markets will benefit from 2024’s 15 minutes of fame to catch on for some niche corporate projects, and public prediction market prices will be quoted in more news stories.
Quality, flight to (not): If I were going to be unrealistically optimistic here, I’d say that the only way for advertisers to deal with the flood of AI slop sites and fake AI users is to go into full Check My Ads mode and just advertise on known legit sites made by and for people. But right now the habits and skills around race-to-the-bottom ad placements are too strong, so there won’t be much change on the advertiser side in 2025. A few forward-thinking advertisers will get good results from quality buying for specific campaigns, but that’s about it.
Research on user behavior will get a lot more important. The AI crapflood and resulting search quality crisis mean that (say the line, Bart) people’s content discovery and shopping habits will have to change, we just don’t know how. Companies that build user research capacity, especially in studying privacy users and the gaps they leave in the marketing data, will have an advantage.
State privacy law season will be spicy again. A few
states will get big comprehensive privacy bills through the process
again, but the laws to watch will be specific ones on health, protecting
teens from the algorithm,
social media censorship,
and
other areas. More states will get laws like Daniel’s
Law. (We need a Daniel’s Law for military personnel, their families,
and defense manufacturing workers, but we’re probably going to see some
states do them for health insurance company employees instead.)update 1 Feb 2025: Compliance issues that came up for AADC will have to get
another look.
Troll
lawyer letters alleging violations of
the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) and similar laws will
increase. Operators of small sites can incur a lot of legal risk now
just by running a Big Tech tracking pixel. But Big Tech will continue to
ignore the situation, and put all the risks on the small site. (kind of
like how Amazon.com uses delivery partner
companies to take the
legal risks of employing
algorithmically
micromanaged, overstressed delivery drivers.)
Unemployment and underemployment will trend up, not down, in 2025. Yes, there will be more political pressure on companies here to hire and manufacture locally, but actual job applicants aren’t interchangeable worker units in an RTS game—there’s a lot of mismatch between the qualities that job seekers will have and the qualities that companies will be looking for, which will mean a lot of jobs going unfilled. And employers tend to hire fewer people in unpredictable times anyway.
Virginia’s weak
privacy law will continue to be ignored by most companies that
process personal data. Companies will treat all the privacy law states
as Privacyland, USA
which means basically California.
Why is my cloud computing bill so high? will be a common question. But the biggest item on the bill will be the AI that [employee redacted] is secretly in love with, so you’ll never find it.
X-rated sites will face an unfriendly regulatory environment in many states, so will help drive mass-market adoption of VPNs, privacy technologies, cryptocurrencies, and fintech. The two big results will be that first, after people have done all the work to go underground to get their favorite pr0n site, they might as well use their perceived invisibility to get infringing copies of other content too. And second, a lot of people will get scammed by fake VPNs and dishonest payment services.
Youth privacy laws will drive more investment in better content for kids. (This is an exception to the Q prediction.) We’re getting a bunch of laws that affect surveillance advertising to people under 18. As Tobias Kircher and Jens Foerderer reported, in Ban Targeted Advertising? An Empirical Investigation of the Consequences for App Development, a privacy policy change tended to drive a lot of Android apps for kids out of the Google Play Store, but the top 10 percent of apps did better. If you have ever visited an actual app store, it’s clear that Sturgeon’s law applies, and it’s likely that the top 10 percent of apps account for almost all of the actual usage. All the kids privacy laws and regs will make youth-directed content a less lucrative play for makers of crap and spew who can make anything, leaving more of the revenue for dedicated and high-quality content creators.
ZFS will catch on in more households, as early adopters replace complicated streaming services (and their frequent price increases and disappearing content) with storage-heavy media PCs.