Looking back on the tech industry over the last 25 years

Tech is omnipresent in our lives, a fact that’s only escalated over the past 25 years. Every new innovation has come with assurances of a better, healthier, more productive, more livable future. Despite all those promises, the only thing that’s clear a quarter of the way into this century is that humanity is grappling more than ever with the impact of the behemoth that is “the tech industry,” for better or for worse.

In 2000, according to Pew, 52% of adults in the US were online. Today, we’re at 96%. One big reason: The advent of the pocket computer. The iPhone changed the way both business and society operates.

Fun social platforms wrought privacy concerns. The app economy blossomed to a trillion-dollar industry, opening new doors to dash through (as well as introducing a new verb to our lexicon: “to uber”). Smartphone-connected micromobility pledged to solve the “last-mile” problem while littering city sidewalks with abandoned scooters.

Tech advancements in medicine offered ways to grow “fitter,” tracking our sleep and counting our steps, and yet, the US mortality rate remains shockingly high for a wealthy nation. The 40-hour workweek remains standard despite SaaS, apps, platforms, and AI tools promising to usher in an era of fine-tuned worker productivity. Climate tech has repeatedly vowed to slow, if not altogether solve, the climate crisis, but the mercury bubbles ever upward.

For Tech Brew’s slices of Morning Brew’s Quarter Century Project, we looked at a dozen incidents that defined tech as we know it today and asked the everlasting question: What happened, and where are we going?