New-year message

Long term readers of Techdirt know that, since 2008, I've written a final post of the year on reasons to remain optimistic. It started when some people kept ...

[over to an entirely new platform](https://www.techdirt.com/2022/02/25/important-announcement-techdirt-is-migrating-to-new-platform/). [covering some terrible legislation](https://www.techdirt.com/tag/ab-2273/) in California. Or there are [lots of other ways](https://www.techdirt.com/support/) to support us. [had predicted it for years](https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/28/elon-musks-biggest-success-story-convincing-people-to-try-out-an-open-distributed-social-network/) with little to show for it. [were told](https://medium.com/@springboard_ind/google-vs-amazon-vs-microsoft-vs-facebook-who-is-leading-the-ai-race-9e9cefbc5c45) that only Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft could possibly “lead” in AI, because they had access to the best talent, and the most data, and no one else could possibly catch up. I have strongly mixed feelings about much of the cryptocurrency space, because I do think there actually are some potentially useful opportunities in (once again) moving some level of power out from giant central players (banks in this case) towards a more decentralized world that empowers those who used to be kept out of the system. So I think it’s also great news for most of that to be destroyed, and for most people to turn their attention elsewhere, to see how people who aren’t in it for the monetary aspect can make some useful things with the technology. While it launched in 2021, 2022 is when the Framework laptop seems to have really started to take off, showing that a brand new laptop company can enter what had felt like a mostly closed market with an innovative take that is focused on (yet again) putting more power in the hands of the end users: shipping a laptop that not only is designed to be modified by the owner, but where the user is specifically encouraged to repair and modify their own laptops. I don’t think any of those companies will disappear, of course, but having them fade into the background and allowing some new entrants to lead the innovation train for a while is a compelling thought (just as happened with previously dominant firms like Microsoft and IBM). I know that Techdirt haters keep (falsely) claiming that we’re “big tech shills” or whatever, but watching the natural order of things take down these giants and open up new paths to innovation is one of the most thrilling developments for innovation in recent years. Over the last five or six years or so, people kept insisting that the big internet companies were too big and too powerful to ever fail or get disrupted. Sometimes it’s because of those dark times, whether it’s because more tech folks have extra time on their hands, or because an industry (or wider economic) recession just clarifies new opportunities.