In 2025, we were given the opportunity to think about how we can improve our digital lives.
BetaKit wraps up the year with a look at the biggest tech stories of 2025. There will be even more news in December, you can read the full series Here.
There is a wonderful story by Isaac Asimov that begins in 2061 with last question people will ask someday. In the story, humanity managed to find infinite energy, but it realized that energy, like everything else, inevitably decays. So they ask: can we reverse this? The computer, an image of a 1950s LLM chatbot, does not provide an answer.
This year the decline was undeniable. It seems that many of the technical systems we interact with in everyday life have degraded beyond the point of usability, or as Canadian Cory Doctorow puts it, dumbfounded. Doctorow first coined the term “enshitification” to describe the collapse of the platform in 2023; in 2024, the Australian Dictionary named it its word of the year. By the time Doctorow released book with the same title This fall, enchittification has fully penetrated the public consciousness. The word raises the question: is it possible to reverse this process?
First, let's address the obvious: BetaKit is a technology publication. We tell stories based on the inherent optimism of our country's tech entrepreneurs. There are many tech companies, especially in Canada, that are doing incredible, innovative and outspoken things. So much, in fact, that we have dedicated our The most ambitious this summer's release will tell the stories of tech companies, people and products that go big.
But our role as media is to balance that optimism with professional skepticism (always) and criticism (when warranted). And there seems to be no end to the list of technologies that have earned criticism from users for the way they have consumed our time, attention and money this year.
A year in shit
In 2025 Samsung Smart refrigerator for $3,500 started showing you advertisements in your kitchen; this resulted in at least one hospitalization after suspected of causing a psychotic episode. Automakers such as Volkswagen software have blocked core features that were previously free, e.g. access to your engine's full powerfor subscriptions. Smart home assistants Prioritize AI over accuracy. Even the bathroom has not escaped the enchitification of household appliances: Kohler introduced a subscription camera for the toilet which does not encrypt its photos, but can use them to train its AI.
The law has determined that Google has intentionally deteriorated the search product. Companies from grocery stores To airlines introduced dynamic pricing, adopting the consumer-unfriendly practices of ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft.
It was found that more than half of social media traffic comes from bots, who frequently post politically or financially motivated disinformation. Some of it was just AI-generated slop. In fact, OpenAI, Meta and Google launched entire applications to facilitate the generation of that slop that users quickly made a video of Ukrainian soldiers change, racist images Martin Luther King Jr. and deepfake porn colleagues and classmates.
This summer I lingered on this viral, Video created by artificial intelligence about rabbits jumping on a trampoline – first because it made me laugh, and later because I began to notice its supernatural qualities. Delay on video hints to the algorithm that the user wants more; Over the next few days, my feed was filled with increasingly impossible videos of fake animals (a bear, a whale) on the same trampoline.
I didn't look away from what the algorithm was feeding me, and now that's all there is to see.
Online approval rating 0%
This month Time magazine called “AI ArchitectsOn one cover, the CEOs of Meta, Tesla, Nvidia, OpenAI and Anthropic sit astride a steel beam, emulating the nameless steelworkers of the famous era. 1932 Rockefeller photo of construction. The image seemed to suggest that these faces represented the builders of our future, our great cities, our destiny.
Many, especially in Canada, are increasingly beginning to question whether the technologies these leaders are creating are good for us. This question is relatively new. In 2000, US public relations firm Edelman reported that technology was the sector that inspired the most public trust. But from 2017 to today, Gallup polls show approval of what it calls the “internet industry” has fallen from about 40 percent to practically zero. As the FT writes, even the narratives promised by these tech leaders have shifted from optimism to doomism, despite the fact that “many of modern dystopian plutocrats “These are the same people who promised utopia in the early days of the Internet.”
Personally, I remember one utopian phase of the Internet fondly: StumbleUpon. Founded by University of Calgary alumni, the website allows users to browse a kaleidoscope of pages. Concert recordings of a Tokyo jazz bar. Click. Mexican Mom's Cooking Blog. StumbleUpon closed seven years ago; one of the site's co-founders, Garrett Camp, moved to Los Angeles and co-founded Uber. In 2025, he is now working on Uber for private jets.
We don't stumble around the Internet like that anymore because we can't. Our digital lives are now closed off in ways that make it harder or more expensive for us to obtain the information we seek, adding to the resentment that has soured public opinion toward technology in general. The Internet no longer feels like a single, heterogeneous place. Instead, we spend our time jumping between collapsing platforms. Critics have outlined numerous costs, our time, our environment, our societywhile the benefits seem more nebulous.
“If enchittification is not the result of a new kind of evil man or the great forces of history bent on turning everything to shit, but rather the result of a specific political choice, then we can change these policies, make them better.”
Cory Doctorow
This doesn't mean that previous eras of the Internet were a golden age that we need to return to. The first internet forums were still hubs for hate speech. Access to information was limited by technical knowledge or limited by infrastructure. Since then, consumer-facing technology has, for better and worse, become much easier to use and more accessible.
But improvements like accessibility require collective choice to support them. This requires funders, both public and private, to prioritize open creativity and collaboration; this requires builders to prioritize users over owners. This year we have encountered many reasons why we have not been able to allow this type of innovation environment to flourish.
Doctorow said in a speech this spring, paraphrasing Canadian technology activist and writer Ursula Franklin, that the results of technology not predetermined: “They are the result of conscious choices. It's a very sci-fi way of thinking about technology. Good science fiction is not just about what the technology does, but who it does it for and who it does it for.”
And, he added, that's good news. “Because if enchittification is not the result of a new kind of evil man or the great forces of history bent on turning everything to crap, but rather the result of specific political choices, then we can reverse these policies, make them better, and emerge from the enchittocene.”
This work is one of retrospective series published by BetaKit this month and celebrates the Canadian tech stories that defined the year. Our journalists wrote that Canada is now at a crossroads:
- Will we be able to get started? domestic industry and innovation or continue to be completely dependent on foreign technology companies.
- Has our defense spending will make our country safer and more prosperous or simply make us more militarized.
- Be it madness around AI materialize into real economic value or fail, dragging the markets with it.
I will add one more thing, returning to the question of whether it is possible to reverse the process of enchittification.
In this story by Asimov, the computer cannot answer humanity's question. We won't have an answer in 2026 either. We'll have to figure this out ourselves.
Over the next year, we'll continue to follow Canadian tech founders, funders and critics as they search for these answers. We hope you will follow their stories with us.
Artistic image courtesy of Madison McLachlan for BetaKit.
#CDNTECH 2025
BetaKit looks back at the defining Canadian tech stories of 2025..
