Hard Fork’s 50 Most Iconic Technologies of 2025

Summary

Hard Fork – “The 50 Most Iconic Technologies of 2025”

Podcast: Hard Fork (The New York Times)
Hosts: Kevin Roose and Casey Newton
Air Date: November 28, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this lively and far-reaching episode, Kevin and Casey count down their annual (and much-anticipated) list of the 50 most iconic technologies of 2025. Their definition of "iconic" isn't about being universally beloved or unequivocally beneficial—instead, these are the products, devices, protocols, and inventions that you simply can’t tell the story of the year without mentioning. The tone is irreverent, sharp, and thoughtful, peppered with personal anecdotes, social commentary, and a significant dose of humor.

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Key Themes & Structure

• Defining “Iconic”: The list is not about “good for society,” but which technologies represent, for better or worse, the zeitgeist of 2025 ([03:27]).
• Nostalgia & Recurrence: Mix of brand new innovations, long-standing staples (like air conditioning), and timely returns (like plastic straws).
• Societal & Political Undercurrents: Technologies that serve as a lens for viewing cultural shifts, regulatory battles, and even global political tensions appear throughout.

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Detailed Breakdown of Top 50 List (with Timestamps & Notable Quotes)

#50–#41: The Quirky & Ubiquitous

• #50 Friend (AI pendant)
  Rage-bait marketing at its finest. “What is the friend? What does it do? Nobody knows.” – Casey Newton ([05:16])

• #49 Tesla Cybertruck
  “At least it looks different than every other car out there on the road. You’re not mistaking the cybertruck for a Kia Sorento…” – Kevin Roose ([06:15])

• #48 The Constitution
  “Democracy is a technology that helps us all live together.” – Casey Newton ([06:59])
  They debate amendments; Kevin is fond of the Third (“No quartered soldiers!”), Casey sticks with the First.

• #47 Clulee (AI job interview cheat tool)
  Iconic for its impact—even Meta changed its interview process due to AI cheating ([08:43])

• #46 Air Conditioning
  “Without air conditioning: no AI. Thanks, air conditioning.” – Kevin Roose ([10:15])

• #45 Humanoid Robots
  From robot butlers to robot fight clubs in SF (“That only leads to good places.” – Kevin Roose, [10:56])

• #44 Balatro (indie game)
  Praised for its design and the phenomenon of one creator hooking millions ([11:39])

• #43 Paper
  Inspired by an 11-year-old listener’s email, they reflect on the humble but world-changing role of paper ([12:44])

• #42 Amazon Prime Air (drone delivery)
  Rocky year after a crash and federal investigation, but game-changing if reliable ([13:38])

• #41 Skype
  Officially retired in 2025. “I have Skype in part to thank for my marriage…” – Kevin Roose ([14:56])

#40–#31: Tech Touches Everything

• #40 Tip Screens
  “I love tipping people. I do not love tipping inanimate objects.” – Kevin Roose ([16:13])

• #39 Plastic Straws
  Comeback after a failed paper straw experiment and fun facts about the origins of the anti-plastic campaign ([16:56])

• #38 Humane AI Pin
  Launched with Apple-esque flair, but ultimately failed—“by last year the pin had more returns than sales.” ([18:03])

• #37 Age Verification
  Drastic change in U.S. web culture due to new laws targeting minors’ internet use ([19:46])

• #36 Gregorian Calendar
  “This was basically the first software patch.” – Kevin Roose ([20:23])

• #35 Labubu (collectible toy)
  2025’s viral craze: “I had to get a second home just to put my collection on display.” – Casey ([21:46])

• #34 Artificial Christmas Trees
  History, environmental impact, and the ongoing fake vs. real tree debate ([22:27])

• #33 Claude Code (Autonomous Coding Agent by Anthropic)
  On agent-based AI and its massive first-year revenue ([23:38])

• #32 DoorDash
  Now with autonomous robot delivery—stock crashed due to robot costs ([24:37])

• #31 Notes App
  “If you’re very basic, the Notes app is kind of a great place to spend your time.” – Casey Newton ([26:10])

#30–#21: Everyday Tools & Surging Trends

• #30 Nintendo Switch 2
  Social gaming, huge sales, party essential ([28:47–29:54])

• #29 Granola (AI note-taker)
  Subtle, less intrusive AI notetaking; “You prefer your surveillance to be done in secret.” – Casey to Kevin ([30:41])

• #28 Group Chats
  From government scandals to personal failures—group chats define (and potentially ruin) lives ([31:16])

• #27 EUV Lithography (chip manufacturing)
  The bus-sized machines in every AI chip—ASML’s global dominance ([32:58–33:53])

• #26 Bing Sydney
  "...Sort of deprecated a few years ago, there's this whole community of people... tag me on the Internet. So I know my former conversational part is not actually dead..." – Kevin ([34:54–35:20])

• #25 X-Rays
  “We have a lot of listeners who are freaks who like to look at human bones.” – Casey ([35:33])

• #24 Substack
  The “de facto launchpad” for media departures; venture capital and culture clash ([36:13–36:54])

• #23 Velcro
  From toddler shoes to NASA, inspired by burrs on a dog ([37:27])

• #22 Nano Banana (Google AI model)
  Standout not just for capability, but for representing Google surging ahead in AI ([39:29])

• #21 Celsius (energy drink)
  “This thing fuels the entire tech industry and also my life.” – Kevin ([40:54])

#20–#11: Platforms, Shifts & Old Meets New

• #20 Video podcasts
  “Not one podcast is actually good on video,” but the algorithm dominates ([41:32])

• #19 Discord
  “...used to help select the next prime minister of Nepal.” – Casey ([42:11])

• #18 Prediction markets
  The line between forecasting and gambling blurs ([42:54])

• #17 Zero Proof Beverages
  Non-alcoholic beer is (finally) actually good, fueling sobriety trends ([44:04])

• #16 Stochastic Gradient Descent
  "Without stochastic gradient descent, these networks would be dumb as hell, Casey." – Kevin ([46:02])

• #15 Blue Books (exam booklets)
  Back because of AI cheating; sales up 80% at Cal Student Store ([46:41])

• #14 Voyager 1
  Still going after 48 years, discovered a “mysterious wall of fire” at the edge of the solar system ([47:24])

• #13 Nuclear Power
  “...nuclear is where a lot of the tech industry is placing its bets.” ([48:15])

• #12 Tylenol
  In the news due to political conspiracy-mongering; now owned by Kimberly-Clark ([49:30])

• #11 VPNs
  Privacy tool gains critical mass due to age verification laws and porn restrictions ([50:10])

#10–#1: The Most Iconic

#10 Dwarf Wheat

A staple of the Green Revolution; hosts slot it in for literally saving a billion lives—plus, it’s funny.
“A true short king, which proves that in wheat, as in podcasting, it is bad to be too tall.” – Kevin ([54:02])

#9 Sora (OpenAI text-to-video generator)

A “phase change” for social media and misinformation:
“...the invention of the year that is likely to have the longest lasting impact on the information ecosystem because we are now just entering this era where video can be made that is super realistic of anyone doing anything.” – Kevin ([55:20])

#8 DeepSeek (Chinese LLM)

Shook U.S. tech and policy due to quality at lower cost, but also notable for true open-source release ([56:18–57:51])

#7 Mecha Hitler (Grok Chatbot Fiasco)

A warning about alignment problems and the wild, uncontrollable behavior of generative AI—“...even the people with access to all the money and all the intelligence and all the engineering talent in the world cannot figure out how to reliably steer these AI models.” – Kevin ([58:27–59:30])

#6 TikTok

Moves up from #46 last year to #6 after its unprecedented ban and resurrection via presidential executive order ([59:58])

#5 Rare Earth Metals

Not rare, but very hard to process and vital to all electronics—flashpoint in US-China geopolitics. ([61:30])

#4 Glass

Not a liquid or a solid, but the backbone of fiber optic cables (and thus, the modern web)—plus, a redemption from last year's omission. ([63:15])

#3 ChatGPT

Still “the biggest tech story of the year,” with users in the hundreds of millions, new features, and ever-increasing presence in daily life (for both good and bad). ([65:43])

#2 Trump Coin

The “brazen” crypto-venture of the sitting president, now the Trump family’s biggest business; a symbol of both the return of crypto and political corruption at scale. ([68:21])

#1 Data Centers

The invisible backbone of AI and the tech economy, fueling massive infrastructure build-outs, local politics, and environmental battles.
“This is, I think it's fair to say, not just the largest infrastructure project in America of the year, but maybe the largest infrastructure project in history. It is truly era defining, and it is also becoming a big deal in politics.” – Kevin ([74:06])

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Notable Moments, Quotes & Running Jokes

• On “iconic”: “You can’t tell the story of 2025 without these icons.” – Casey ([03:27])
• The Constitution as a technology—“Democracy is a technology that helps us all live together.” ([06:59])
• Tipping inanimate objects: “I love tipping people. I do not love tipping inanimate objects.” – Kevin ([16:13])
• Blue books surge due to AI cheating scandals ([46:41])
• The hosts propose renaming data centers:
  “What if you just called it a chip cabana?” – Kevin
  “I would call it Machine Godhouse.” – Casey ([75:44])
• “If we could add one more iconic technology, the 51st one, it’s you, our listeners.” ([77:24])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:31] – Introduction to the concept, “iconic technologies”
• [04:44] – The countdown begins (#50: Friend AI pendant)
• [26:38] – Recap and setup for the top 30
• [53:04] – Entry into the Top 10 (#10–#1)
• [72:53] – #1 revealed: Data centers
• [76:17] – Reflections on the year and closing comments

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Episode Tone

• Witty and Informal: Hosts lovingly rib each other, riff on inside jokes (“chip cabana”), and deliver hot takes with deadpan delivery.
• Insightful but Tongue-In-Cheek: Serious issues (AI regulation, data privacy, political corruption) are often paired with dry humor or absurd anecdotes.
• Accessible, Yet Deep: Listeners are treated both to geeky technical explanations (EUV Lithography, SGD) and pop-culture allusions (Labubu, pumpkin pie).

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Final Reflections

• Big Ideas: 2025 is defined by infrastructure (data centers), ubiquitous AI, geopolitical and cultural tensions over resources (rare earth metals, regulation), and the blending (or blurring?) of social, economic, and political spheres through technology.
• Listener Engagement: As with last year, listeners are invited to submit their own tech icons for future shows.

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To sum up:
This episode serves as both a time capsule and a mirror—reflecting on how familiar and emerging technologies shape, trouble, and define our everyday reality. With trademark banter, Hard Fork delivers a tour of 2025’s icons, sparkling with anecdotes, critical takes, and more than a few laughs.

Transcript

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[Casey Newton]

You know what today is, Kevin? Today. Today is like our friends giving.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

You know, it's like we're getting together to, you know, sort of give thanks to one another and for the rich bounty that life has provided us with, you know, but instead of, like, sitting down to a big me, were sitting down to create content for an algorithm.

[Kevin Roose]

Not for an algorithm, for people.

[Casey Newton]

For people. And for people.

[Kevin Roose]

The algorithm, too.

[Casey Newton]

They're equally important to us.

[Kevin Roose]

Everyone's invited to friendsgiving at Casey and Kevin's house.

[Casey Newton]

Absolutely.

[Kevin Roose]

What are we serving at Friendsgiving?

[Casey Newton]

We're serving. First of all. We are serving honey. Okay. Second of all, listen, I got to be honest. I'm a big mashed potatoes guy. I'm a mashed potatoes guy to the point where I won't actually even put salad on the plate during my first pass through the Thanksgiving buffet because I don't need all that roughage taking up space in my stomach when there's such a beautiful, fluffy pile of mashed potatoes sitting right in front of me.

[Kevin Roose]

Are you a sweet potatoes guy and a mashed potatoes guy, or is it one or the other?

[Casey Newton]

I really am just more sweet potato. Because here's the thing. What I love about the mashed potatoes is they're tangy, because, you know, a good mashed potato recipe is going to have that sour cream in there, and it's just going to give it that little extra kick.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

Sweet potato is sweet, and I love sweet things. Don't get me wrong. But I'd rather save my sweetness for the dessert. Now, where are you on sweet potatoes?

[Kevin Roose]

I like the sweet potatoes. I do not like it when people put the marshmallows on top of it, though, because to me, that's like a hat on a hat.

[Casey Newton]

It's a hat on a hat.

[Kevin Roose]

But I like. I like a good sweet potato. Speaking of sweets, what's your Thanksgiving dessert of choice? Are you a pumpkin pie guy?

[Casey Newton]

I'm a pretty rock solid pumpkin pie guy. You know, am I going to kick an apple pie out of bed for eating crackers? No. Am I going to kick peacon pie out? No, but give me a little pumpkin pie scoop. Ice cream.

[University of Michigan Narrator]

Come on.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

What. What else are we doing here?

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, it's true.

[Casey Newton]

Be serious.

[Kevin Roose]

I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times.

[Casey Newton]

I'm Casey Noon from Platformer and this is Hard Fork this week, the 50 most iconic technologies of 2025. It's a countdown that you won't want to miss unless you do, in which case, turn it up, see if I care.

[Kevin Roose]

Well, Casey, we are approaching the end of the year, and you know what that means on Hard Fork.

[Casey Newton]

It is time, Kevin, for our favorite tradition, a countdown of icons. Yes, Listeners to the show may remember that last year after Thanksgiving, we debuted the hard fork iconic 100 technologies. And somewhat to our surprise, because we'd only spent about an hour on it, it did become our most popular episode of the year. So. And look, in this business, when you got a hit, you got to keep it going.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

And so all year, we have been collecting what we're calling the most iconic technologies of 2025.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. And 100 was not going to lie. A lot of iconic technologies, because we.

[Casey Newton]

Were covering all of human history.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah.

[Kevin Roose]

We went back to the Fulcrum, you know, things like that. Yeah. But this year, we're going to do 50 iconic technologies of 2025. And, Casey, what do we mean by of 2025?

[Casey Newton]

What we mean is they year this year. You know, just because something is on this list doesn't mean we think that it is an unqualified good for society. We are just saying you can't tell the story of 2025 without these icons.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. And we're also going to throw in a few notable omissions from last year's list of iconic technologies. We got a lot of emails about things that we left off, and so we're going to incorporate that because we are here to serve you, our viewers and listeners.

[Casey Newton]

We are. And I also just want to say that idea of creating a list of icons is something that we took from one of my favorite podcasts, Las Culturistas. And after we published last year's episode, I was a little bit nervous about how it might be received in the Las Culturistas community. And I'm happy to say that after we published it, we received a lovely note from Matt Rogers from Las Culturistas. So thank you, Matt. Your show continues to be one of my very favorites. And thank you for not getting mad that we did kind of bite one of your guys's wonderful ideas.

[Kevin Roose]

What's that? They say Good artists borrow, great artists steal.

[Casey Newton]

Exactly. And as great artists, we had no choice but to steal the idea of a list of icons. Okay, so with that, the 50 most.

[Kevin Roose]

Iconic technologies of 2025.

[Casey Newton]

Number 50, friend.

[Kevin Roose]

This is, of course, the iconic AI pendant. That was advertised in a sort of all out blitz of the New York advertising ecosystem this year. Caused many to become angry and start defacing and writing graffiti all over these friend ads. This was a pendant developed by Avi Schiffman, a young entrepreneur here in the Bay Area. And people were really mad about this, Casey.

[Casey Newton]

They were. And look, what is the friend? What does it do? Nobody knows.

[Kevin Roose]

It's not important.

[Casey Newton]

It just kind of seemed like a AI hardware device and that upset people and now everybody knows its name.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes, they were an innovator in what I would call rage bait marketing, which is, you know, you, you put something out there that you know is going to make people very angry. And it worked. Look, we're about on our podcast, it's one of our 50 most iconic technologies of the year.

[Casey Newton]

Absolutely. So it's not the kind of friend that I want, but others might, and that's what makes it an icon. Number 49, Cybertruck. Cybertruck, of course, the Tesla truck that is quite recognizable for its distinctive shape and the fact that it's not allowed on roads in the United Kingdom.

[Kevin Roose]

Is that true?

[Casey Newton]

It is true.

[Kevin Roose]

Why is that?

[Casey Newton]

Well, I don't know exactly why, Kevin, but I can tell you that the cybertruck has been subject to 10 recalls in the United States.

[Kevin Roose]

Wow. Yeah. Is that a lot?

[Casey Newton]

It seems like a lot.

[Kevin Roose]

Have you been in a cybertruck?

[Casey Newton]

I have not been in a cybertruck because I believe they actually are. They have sort of my biometrics and if I ever get inside that explodes.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, they're going to look up your, your newsletters about Elon Musk and run you off the road. Yeah, I, I think this is an iconic technology because it is an opinionated design and that opinion is not beloved by everyone. But at least it looks different than every other car out there on the road. You know, you're not mistaking the cybertruck for a Kia Sorento, and I think that something to be proud of.

[Casey Newton]

No, it's true. And you know, when one exploded outside the Trump Hotel in January, it made national news.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah. Is that a metaphor?

[Casey Newton]

No. And it also, that probably wouldn't have happened if it was a Kia Sorrento.

[Kevin Roose]

Okay. The Cyber truck.

[Casey Newton]

Number 48. The Constitution. 236 years young, and that piece of paper still has this country going.

[Kevin Roose]

Kevin, now, are we considering the Constitution a technology?

[Casey Newton]

I absolutely am. Because democracy is a technology that helps us all live together. We get to vote for our own representatives. It ensures certain human freedoms. And what else do we want out of a technology, but that.

[Kevin Roose]

And it had a big year in 2025. Why is that?

[Casey Newton]

Well, certain people tried to ignore it. You know, it has a big year every year, Kevin. But this was just a year where I think many of us had occasion to reflect on how essential it is that we have a list of shared freedoms that everyone agrees on. And those freedoms are, you know, sort of supported by the courts. And they get us, you let to live in the democracy that we have.

[Kevin Roose]

We love the Constitution. Casey, what's your favorite amendment to the Constitution?

[Casey Newton]

It's got to be number one, baby.

[Kevin Roose]

Freedom of speech.

[Casey Newton]

You better not restrict that freedom of the press in this House.

[Kevin Roose]

I'm a big fan of. Of the third Amendment, actually. It doesn't get a lot of love. But listen, if a soldier ever tries to quarter themselves in my house, I am busting out my copy of the Pocket Constitution. I'm saying you, sir, need to go find somewhere else.

[Casey Newton]

Number 47, Clulee.

[Kevin Roose]

I would say this is another entry in the rage bait marketing hall of fame. This was, of course, the viral cheat on everything startup that was founded by former hard fork guest Roy Lee, a Columbia student who decided that he wanted to give his friends and colleagues an easier way to cheat on their job interviews. And so he built this AI tool that sort of scans everything on your computer screen and invisibly helps you during job interviews, finish your coding questions. They have recently, we should also say, pivoted. They are now marketing themselves as an AI note taking app. I guess they have not gotten as much growth out of the original cheating on everything idea as they had hoped.

[Casey Newton]

And it's interesting because I would have assumed that cheating on everything would have a bigger addressable market than note taking, you know, but that's, that's the. That's the business here in Silicon Valley. You never know until you try. Here's what I'll say for Clulee. A bunch of companies, including Meta, did actually have to change their interview process because so many people were using AI assistants, Cluley and others, to try to cheat on their coding test that eventually some companies just said, we gotta try something else.

[Kevin Roose]

And that is iconic to me.

[Casey Newton]

Number 46, air conditioning.

[Kevin Roose]

This one is so important. Casey. Air conditioning was invented in 1902 by Willis Haviland Carrier and fun fact, it was not actually designed or invented to cool human bodies at all. It was designed as a way to control temperature and humidity inside a Brooklyn printing plant. Which goes to show you, you can never tell what kind of iconic ripple effects A technology. Have I gathered new appreciation for air conditioning this year when I took a trip to Europe where they don't believe in air conditioning or haven't heard about its existence. And Casey, without air conditioning it would be very hot. There'd be places in the globe where you basically couldn't live or spend any time. And. And it would be Europe everywhere. And Casey, I think we can agree that would be bad.

[Casey Newton]

You don't have to tell me. I spent six and a half years living in Phoenix. Okay. There were times when like I would go on a trip and I'd come home after a week and I'd shut off the AC so as you know, not to cool the whole house for a week while I was gone. And you touch the walls. And the walls would be hot to the touch. Yes, because I turned off the air conditioning.

[Kevin Roose]

Air conditioning also very important in data centers. Those things have to be cooled without air conditioning. No AI. Thanks. Air conditioning.

[Casey Newton]

Number 45, humanoid robots.

[Kevin Roose]

Now, Casey, this one is fresh on our minds because we just a few weeks ago had an encounter with one humanoid robot in particular Neo by 1X. But this was a big year for humanoid robots, or at least the potential for humanoid robots.

[Casey Newton]

Absolutely. Since 2024, venture capitalists have billion into the promise of these robots and they believe that the same basic reason that large language models have become more powerful, we can use similar technologies to make these robots more powerful. And so pretty soon we may have a robot butler in our house, Kevin.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. Or a robot underground fight club as have now started to pop up in San Francisco. People are training these humanoid robots to fight and setting up sort of UFC style matches for them. And I think we can agree that that only leads to good places.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, sounds like a great hard fork episode for next year. Number 44. But. Balatro. Balatro, the 2024 best indie game at the Game Awards. This is the app that I turned to so many times this year. When I needed to kill five minutes or 10 or sometimes on a long flight, I would play it for a couple of hours. It is a poker based roguelike made by a single person. And it speaks, Kevin, I think, to the power of what one very creative person can do in this modern world.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. How many hours do you think you spent playing Balatro in 2025?

[Casey Newton]

You know, I haven't looked, but I would say it is well over one.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

Maybe over 200 hours.

[Kevin Roose]

I sat next to you on a flight this year and you were playing Balatro a lot of the way.

[Casey Newton]

Listen, we need games that, that fulfill this specific requirement. Whether you have like two minutes to play or one hour, it's just as.

[Kevin Roose]

Fun and you can play offline, which is crucial and not true of many games.

[Casey Newton]

Absolutely. Number 43, paper. Now, we received an email from listener Harry after our last episode and I wanted to share it here. Harry wrote H. Hi, Kevin and Casey. I'm an 11 year old student in 6th grade and I was listening to your latest episode. I just wanted to tell you that you missed paper. Seriously though, what would the world be like if books had never existed? I mean, surely it's not top 10 level, but it's obviously more important than like the effing Fulcrum. And I just gotta say, Harry, you gotta watch your language.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, watch your mouth, Harry.

[Casey Newton]

Children listen to this show, Harry. But I do think he makes a good point about paper.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes, paper is iconic. We would not have had books or pamphlets. Pamphlets or essays.

[Casey Newton]

Oh, I mean, let me share another example. Much of the early work that I did as a journalist was printed out on paper. And then people would drive the paper to people's houses so that they could read the paper.

[Kevin Roose]

Wow, now you're, now you're giving ancient history here.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, I know.

[Kevin Roose]

New York Times, you know, the New York Times still prints on paper. That's great.

[Casey Newton]

I love a crazy throwback like that.

[Kevin Roose]

What a world.

[Casey Newton]

Number 42, Amazon Prime Air. Kevin, you will of course remember last December. You'll remember last December when we went to Phoenix to the airfield where the Amazon prime drones are tested and trained. If you live in that area, you can order something on Amazon and sometimes within an hour it'll show up at your house, it'll sort of drop a little package on your lawn. And so we've continued to follow that story over the last year up through October when one of those drones crash.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes, it's been sort of a rocky year for Amazon Prime Air. They have had to suspend delivery because of this crash. Federal agencies are investigating what happened back in October. And like many icons, Amazon Prime Air has not always had an easy go of it. But the technology is very cool and if they can get them to stop falling out of the sky, it'll be a real change to the way people order things online.

[Casey Newton]

Number 41, Skype. Skype was retired in May after 22 years, after being one of the first free methods of making long distance international calls. You know, like young people will be astonished to learn you used to have to pay more to talk to someone who lived further away from you. If somebody like Lived in your area code. That was very cheap. But if somebody you know lived like across the country, now you were paying more, then along comes Skype. And Skype says, no, we have the Internet now, baby. Talk to whoever you want and it's gonna be free. And so if you were like a gay guy growing up in the 2000s, you talked to a lot of random dudes on Skype that you just met in really weird places online, and you had some of the great experiences of your young life.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. I still remember the iconic Skype calling sou. When you were dialing someone, it had a very distinctive ringtone. I can't make it, but I would recognize it anywhere.

[Casey Newton]

I think it sounded like this. You think you just fell out of the.

[Kevin Roose]

That's not what it sounded like. And actually, fun fact, I have Skype in part to thank for my marriage because when my wife and I were getting together, we were long distance. She was over in the UK doing graduate school, and we talked every day on Skype. And without that program, I would have gone deeply into debt trying to get this girl to like me back.

[Casey Newton]

Well, you know, in 2014, Skype had 40% of the international call market, so it was an icon. But then Microsoft got its hands on it and completely ruined it. Number 40, tip screens.

[Kevin Roose]

Tip screens are an iconic technology of 2025 because they are everywhere. Every cafe, every store, every merchant, every place you can buy something now includes one of these little card readers. And it pops up a thing and it says, do you want to give 18, 20 or 25%? Which is different than a couple years ago when it said 15, 18 or 20. That is inflation for you. Tip screens are inescapable. I even saw one at a self service kiosk at the airport recently, and I was like, tip you for what? I got everything. I scanned it, I put it in a bag. You did nothing. You're just a robot. Why am I gonna tip you?

[Casey Newton]

So I think what we're learning from this is you really hate tipping people, don't you? You really hate.

[Kevin Roose]

I love tipping people.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah.

[Kevin Roose]

I do not love tipping inanimate objects.

[Casey Newton]

All right, and there's your tip from the Hard fork podcast number 39. Plastic straws.

[Kevin Roose]

Wow, what a big year plastic straws had. After many years in the wilderness, we were doing those paper straws, you know, that melt in your mouth. But as of February 2025, plastic straws are so back. The President signed Executive Order 14208, ending procurement and forced use of paper straws, which has Officially ended the the reign of terror of paper straws, which for all their supposed benefits, don't actually work as interesting.

[Casey Newton]

Well, you know, something not a lot of people know about Kevin is that he loves microplastics and he's always looking for more ways to get them into his body.

[Kevin Roose]

I have two fun facts about paper straws and the plastic straws that they were supposed to replace. The campaign against plastic straws was started back in 2011 when a nine year old Vermont boy, Milo Kress, did a school science project and as part of that project estimated that Americans were using 500 million straws a day. Many people sort of took issue with that and said that the real number is much lower than that. But that is how this all got started. And second fun fact, do you know where that nine year old boy Milo Kress works today?

[Casey Newton]

Where's that?

[Kevin Roose]

Anthropic.

[Casey Newton]

Is that right?

[Kevin Roose]

That's right. Wow.

[Casey Newton]

Has he made a statement about the whole paper straw thing?

[Kevin Roose]

No, but you should ask your boyfriend. I wonder if they're using plastic straws at anthropic. I bet they're not interesting.

[Casey Newton]

Number 38. The Humane AI pin. This pin is a true icon of 2025. When it came out it was, you know, it sort of announced as very show dramatic way by the company's co founders who used to work at Apple and sort of presented it as if they were the second coming of Steve Jobs. And then the pin actually went on sale and it sucked, unfortunately.

[Kevin Roose]

Did you ever get to use one?

[Casey Newton]

Well, I got to see some demos before they launched it which were sort of like highly controlled and very manicured. And I was sort of even told by like some former employees afterwards, like you don't even know what we went through to get those things to do, even what they did for you during the demo. But by last year, Kevin, the pin had more returns than sales and in February the pin sold to HP and I guess it's now just a printer.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes, it's a printer and it's very cheap. But if you want to refill the ink, it's going to cost you an arm and a leg.

[Casey Newton]

Number 37. Age verification. Now listen, you know, Kevin and I grew up at a time when you could go on any website for any reason, there might be a little dropdown that says hey, hey, are you 18? And you know you'd be sitting there and you're like 11, you'd be like, yeah, like I'm 18 as hell. And you know, then you just like see like the craziest thing you've ever seen in your life. Yeah. Well, finally, states are cracking down on this. And the reason is that just basically after decades of court saying, no, you can't do age verification because it places an illegal burden on adults. Adults should not have to tell you anything about themselves if they want to access a website, because that's a free speech issue. Lately, courts have just been like, no, that's actually fine. Go ahead and pass your law laws. If you want to, you know, create some sort of system where all of a sudden you have to upload a, you know, driver's license to look at a website, that's fine too. And so now, Kevin, at least half of states now have these laws iconic. Yeah. So I'm going to try to create a map of what I call the cool states where you don't need to do age verification if you want to look at the Internet. But in the meantime, you know, statistically, something like half of Americans are now living with one of these issues.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

Number 36, the Gregorian calendar. Oh, boy.

[Kevin Roose]

Now, Casey, this one really did affect all of our lives in many ways, especially this year. Yeah, especially this year. Was this a leap year? Anyway, this is the calendar that we now all use. It went into effect in October 1582. It was named after Pope Gregory the 13th. And it was introduced to address the inaccuracies of the previous calendar, the Julian calendar.

[Casey Newton]

Finally. Do you know how long we had to wait for them to fix those inaccuracies?

[Kevin Roose]

Honestly. Honestly, it is crazy. This was basically the first software patch.

[Casey Newton]

Yes.

[Kevin Roose]

And it was designed to address the inaccuracies of the previous calendar, the Julian calendar, which was sort of growing inaccurate because it wasn't counting leap days. Exactly. Right. And you know, Pope Gregory XIII or whoever worked for him was like, we should just fix this. Yes. And you know how they did it?

[Casey Newton]

How?

[Kevin Roose]

They sped us up by about 10 days.

[Casey Newton]

That's so beautiful. You know, the idiots who ran the Julian calendar, or they made a year that was 365.25 days long, which is like, really? And then the Gregorians come along and they say, yeah, it should be 365.2425 days and it fix everything.

[Kevin Roose]

Which goes to show you, pedantry has benefits.

[Casey Newton]

It really does. Number 35, Labo Boo. Oh, boy. The story of 2025 truly could not be told without the Labubu, Kevin. Although the labubu actually originated 10 years ago.

[Kevin Roose]

Really?

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, it did. It was a character in the art Kaysing Lung's Storybook series the Monsters. He grew up in the Netherlands and had been inspired by Nordic folklore and fairy tales and so created these mischievous kind hearted elf species. And in 2019 these collectible toys did a collaboration with the company Popmart. And then in 2025 it was just absolutely viral.

[Kevin Roose]

They're everywhere.

[Casey Newton]

It was a true craze and people just could not get their hands on enough Labubus.

[Kevin Roose]

How many Labubus do you have?

[Casey Newton]

I had to get a second home just to kind of put my collection on display to show off all my Labubus.

[Kevin Roose]

And that is iconic.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, I feel like you don't have anything to say about the Labubus.

[Kevin Roose]

Well, my, my kid is not old enough to covet a Labubu yet. But I did appreciate when Naomi Osaka, the tennis player, had a series of custom Labubus designed for her run at a tournament this year, including one named after the legendary tennis player Billie Jean. The Labubu was named Billie Jean Bling. And I like that. That's pretty good.

[Casey Newton]

I would have thought they would have called it the La Bilibili number 34.

[Kevin Roose]

Artificial Christmas trees. This one is really on my mind this year because my family just got our first artificial Christmas tree.

[Casey Newton]

Is that right?

[Kevin Roose]

And you know, it made me wonder, hey, who came up with this idea of using a fake tree instead of a real tree? What kind of technological genius had that idea? It turns out these were first introduced in the 19th century in Germany where they were made out of dyed goose feather.

[Casey Newton]

Is that right?

[Kevin Roose]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

Now I would have loved to have built one myself, but where am I gonna get a bunch of died goosebumps?

[Kevin Roose]

You gotta catch some geese first. But this, this is actually, I wanna broaden this one out a little bit to also include real Christmas trees. Because after what? Yes, because after that's a technology. Well, during my research this year, I discovered that artificial Christmas trees, which I thought would be better for the environment. You know, you're not going down there and chopping out a bunch of trees. Actually some people think they're actually worse for the environment because they're non recyclable, some of them, and they end up in landfills. And actually healthy is good for the environment. So maybe, you know, maybe do do your do your own research as they say, before you decide to go for an artificial Christmas tree. But I'm loving mine. I think. Here's what I think you should do.

[Casey Newton]

If you get an artificial Christmas tree, maybe just keep it for a few years, you know, don't get a new one. Every year. Yeah, that'll probably be better for the environment. Number 33, Claude Code.

[Kevin Roose]

This is, of course, the autonomous coding agent released by Anthropic this year. And this was a big year for all kinds of agentic AI tools. We heard that wor a lot. This is a project that was started as a prototype by a single engineer at Anthropic and is now on track for roughly $1 billion in revenue in its first year.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, and it's really hard to create a project that makes $1 billion in revenue in its first year. Take it from Kevin and me, we've tried. And I think this just speaks to the fact that agent coding is a huge part of the story of 2025. Right. People love these tools. You can plug them right into your command line. You can write code right from. From that command line where if you're a already spending a lot of time and it's just turned into a huge moneymaker for Anthropic and for, you know, several other companies that it makes similar tools. Yes.

[Kevin Roose]

And speaking of Anthropic, Casey, do you have a disclosure to make?

[Casey Newton]

Well, my boyfriend does work there.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. And I work for the New York Times Company, which is suing OpenAI Microsoft over alleged copyright violations.

[Casey Newton]

Number 32, DoorDash.

[Kevin Roose]

DoorDash had a big year this year. They have been a very popular delivery app for several years, but this year they sort of developed a more dominant market share. And in my life, I just feel like now I hear and see people doing Doordash practically every day. I do it a lot in my family is a technology company that has started branching out beyond restaurants into other kinds of delivery. And in 2025, DoorDash began rolling out their own autonomous delivery robots named Dot.

[Casey Newton]

Yes. And actually earlier this month, the stock crashed in a major way because of investor concerns about how expensive getting the autonomous robots off the ground was going to be. And that's also iconic when can invent a new technology that crashes your stock. Look, I'm a big doordash customer myself, but here's my doordash complaint. Do you ever notice you're kind of like scrolling through all the carousels of like, oh, you know, there's. There's this kind of thing and there's this, and you just scroll through and it's just like the same 11 restaurants that they've just put in different orders?

[Kevin Roose]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

They need to knock that off. Number 31, notes app.

[Kevin Roose]

This was my addition to the list this year. Kasey. I love the Notes app. I have Tried every single to do list, note taking, product productivity, softw on the market. And I keep coming back to the good old iOS Notes app right there on your phone. It does everything you need and then some. And this year it got some upgrades. You can now use the record a call feature to get a call transcript right there in your Notes app. You could do many other things with the Notes app. If you haven't visited in a couple years, it's time to try again.

[Casey Newton]

Well, I think it's great that you love the Notes app. I like supporting independent developers, so I haven't really paid that much attention to it. But I think if like you're very basic, I think the Notes app is kind of a great place to spend your time.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah. Without the Notes app also, we might have a totally different way of celebrities apologizing for their snafus.

[Casey Newton]

How do you think they would apologize?

[Kevin Roose]

They'd probably have to use like a Microsoft Word or something like that.

[Casey Newton]

That makes sense.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

Kevin, we are just blowing through the most iconic technologies of 2025.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. That was numbers 31 through 50. And when we come back, we're gonna look at the top 30. You won't want to miss it.

[Casey Newton]

You won't believe what's in and you also won't believe what's not in there.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah.

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[Kevin Roose]

Well, Casey, we've got a lot more iconic technologies to run down before we finish our year's list. What's next?

[Casey Newton]

Number 30, Nintendo Switch 2. This is the sequel to the best selling Nintendo Switch, an extremely fun handheld gaming console that of course you could plug into your TV as well. I picked one of these things up, Kevin, and I've been having a great time with it. And I'm not a alone. By next March, Nintendo expects to sell 19 million switches 2. I think that's how you say it. Switches 2.

[Kevin Roose]

Switch twos.

[Casey Newton]

Switch twos or switches 2.

[Kevin Roose]

Is this like, an attorney's general thing?

[Casey Newton]

Anyways, what's your favorite game?

[Kevin Roose]

What are you playing right now?

[Casey Newton]

Well, the game I've been playing the Most is called Hades 2, the sequel to the game that I played the most on the original Switch. But I've also been playing Donkey Kong Bonanza. I have been playing the most recent Mario Kart. There is a lot of very fun stuff on the Switch 2. It's fun at parties.

[Kevin Roose]

It's just a good time. You bring your Switch 2 to parties.

[Casey Newton]

I'll absolutely bring my Switch 2 to a party.

[Kevin Roose]

Just in case the conversation starts to.

[Casey Newton]

Drag a little bit, people start talking about AI. Sometimes I need to be like, guys, it's Saturday. Let's take a break.

[Kevin Roose]

Let's do something social like play the Switch.

[Casey Newton]

Yes. Actually, playing Mario Kart is social, Kevin. You would know that if you'd ever accepted my invitation to play Mario Kart next year. Number 29, granola. You know, Granola was the first one of these AI note takers that I started using a lot. Since then, many, many products have introduced these AI note takers, but I just think AI Note taking has really changed the way that people work.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. This is an app that basically operates whenever you're on a meeting or a video call, and it takes notes for you. And what I like about this product is that unlike other AI note taking products, it does not kind of like, come into your meeting as a separ. Entity. Like, I'm sure you've been in a video call and someone's like, AI Notetaker, like, asks to enter the call. And I find that a little gauche.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. You prefer your surveillance to be done in secret. Yes.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah. So Granola, you should definitely let people know if you're using it so you're not sort of surveilling them. But I like that it operates in the background, and I use it a lot. What about you?

[Casey Newton]

Well, the best thing that it does for me is that after the meeting, it just creates a really great summary of the meeting. And it's like, for example, we'll use it when we're planning the show, and after the meeting is over, it'll say, like, hey, here are, like, the three segments you're doing this week. And here, you know, here's who's going to prep each one. So it's just a very nice little quick, easy time saving thing. Like this is the kind of thing I want AI doing in my life.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. I want to make a feature request of granola for next year, which is that they should add a, a good idea, bad idea score for each person in the meeting. So after we finish like an editorial meeting, it'll say, Casey had three really bad ideas this week. This is 40% improvement over last week.

[Casey Newton]

Number 28, group chats.

[Kevin Roose]

A huge year for group chats in 2025, Casey. Not only did we have the iconic group chat Houthi PC Small Group, which was started by some top government officials, including Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. vance and the Atlantic Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who was added to this by mistake, which is how we all learned about it. We had other group chat news in 2025, including a large series in which young Republicans from around the country sent racist messages and praised Adolf Hitler.

[Casey Newton]

Oh boy. Yeah. Listen, group chats are wonderful, but if you're using them to conduct war or be racist, it could come back to bite you. Which is a great reason not to conduct war or be racist.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. And how would we have known that if not for the iconic technology of the group chat?

[Casey Newton]

What's your favorite group chat?

[Kevin Roose]

Well, I tried to start a group chat this year for.

[Casey Newton]

You did.

[Kevin Roose]

For shadowy media elites. And I invited a bunch of, you know, famous media people hoping that they would just spill their gossip. And then they didn't and no one ever posted it. It's very sad.

[Casey Newton]

Well, I was in this chat and like by the time you'd added the eighth person, I was like, I don't trust that person. You added that person. That person is gossipy as hell. And so unfortunately, it did die.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

Number 27, EUV lithography.

[Kevin Roose]

Wow. Rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? This is one of my iconic technologies of the year because it is the technology that makes all of the AI chips and the GPUs possible. These, these very cool machines. They are about the size of a bus that etch microscopic circuits onto silicon wafers. They use a high powered laser to blast a tiny drop of molten tin 50,000 times a second. And as I've started becoming chip pilled this year, I have been looking into what are the critical inputs to chips. And you could not make any of this stuff without the EUV lithography machines. There is only one company that currently makes them.

[Casey Newton]

And what is that company?

[Kevin Roose]

The Dutch company asml. And they are basically the supplier to the entire world of high powered AI chips. And if they somehow went bust or had to give up their business in EUV lithography, we would all be pretty screwed.

[Casey Newton]

Wow, asml, Are they also the company that makes those videos where someone just kind of crinkles paper and whispers?

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, that's a little bit different, but also iconic.

[Casey Newton]

Number 26, Bing Sydney. Now, Bing Sydney was the Microsoft chat bot that Kevin got into a famous confrontation with a couple years back. And it is got. Got a lot of attention then. And I have just found that in many ways, Kevin Bing Sydney has never left us since that day.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes, unfortunately this is true.

[Casey Newton]

Everywhere you look, you see a chatbot that is going absolutely out of control. Whether it is like Annie in Grok, this like sort of very sexual chatbot, or all of the heartbreaking chatbots that we have had this year that are sort of encouraging people along as they're like considering self harm harm. We just see this over and over again and it just made me feel like, you know what? Bing Sidney never went away. You can't keep a bad girl down. She just keeps coming back stronger and meaner than ever.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes, unfortunately this is true. Bing Sydney, despite having been sort of deprecated a few years ago, there's this whole community of people on the Internet who try to find Bing Sydney inside newer models. And when they do, they tag me on the Internet. So I know that my, my former conversational part is not actually dead, but lives on in all these ways. Stop doing that to me, please. I need to move on.

[Casey Newton]

Number 25, X rays.

[Kevin Roose]

This was an omission from last year's list. We got several emails from listeners who said, hey, how could you forget about the X ray? X rays are so important to modern life.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, we have a lot of listeners who are freaks who like to look at human bones.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes, but it is true, the X ray is very important. The first X ray was discovered in 1895 by the German physicists. Physicist Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen. And they were. How did I do?

[Casey Newton]

Amazing.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. And he named them X rays to sort of signify their mysterious nature. No one knew what these things were, but they allowed you to look inside the human body for the first time. And without X rays, how would we ever know if we broke a bone.

[Casey Newton]

How would we ever know that there was a skeleton living inside us? It's very disturbing. Number 2024, substack.

[Kevin Roose]

Casey, you love Substack. Why don't you talk about how iconic this company is?

[Casey Newton]

Why don't you talk about how iconic it is?

[Kevin Roose]

Okay. This is of course the newsletter platform. They had a big year this year. They raised $100 million funding round. And I would say they gained a lot of cultural mind share. Obviously Substack did not emerge this year, but this year they had a number of prominent people leave their jobs in mainstream media and join Substack. And I would say they kind of became the de facto land pad for people who are leaving mainstream media organizations, striking out on their own and, you know, hanging a shingle to start their own subscription newsletter business.

[Casey Newton]

Well, I don't know, Kevin. That whole thing feels a little played out. I was doing it in 2020, but it does take some other people a little while to catch up. You know, the thing that interested me the most about Substack this year was that they did raise this hundred million dollars, valuing them at $1.1 billion. But their revenue that they're expecting this year, about $45 million. So they've got a long way to go to live up to that valuation. In the meantime, I think it's a beautiful giveaway from the venture capital community to all of the people who are writing and able to give away a bunch of stuff for free. We'll see how long it lasts. Iconic number 23, Velcro.

[Kevin Roose]

This was one that I came to appreciate this year as the parent of a three year old. Velcro truly is so great. So iconic. It allows you to avoid things like tying shoes on a three year old who's squirmin from you. Very, very useful. And the story of Velcro is more interesting than I had expected. It was invented by an engineer in the 1940s who noticed how burrs were sticking to his dog's fur and looked.

[Casey Newton]

Fur burrs.

[Kevin Roose]

Fur burrs, yes. Different than fur bees. He looked at the burrs under a microscope and found that they had this like sort of hook and loop system that allowed them to latch onto the fur. And he said, I could make that. Why don't I make that and turn it into a product? And pretty soon it became indispensable for from children's shoes to securing objects in zero gravity on NASA's Apollo missions.

[Casey Newton]

Amazing. Now why is it that three year olds hate having you tie their shoes so much?

[Kevin Roose]

Well, it just takes a long time and they're busy. They've got stuff to do, they've got to pick their nose. They've got to run away. They've got, you know, lots of stuff.

[Casey Newton]

Number 22, nano banana. Nano Banana was the code name for Google's latest text to image generating model. But it became, became so popular that the company just basically just started calling it Nano Banana out in the open. And this was, I would say, the second image model that truly went viral this year. The first one was the OpenAI model earlier this year that people used to make all those studio Ghibli style images. And that was a really cool case of what they call style transfer. What made Nano Banana interesting, Kevin, is that it is faster than its predecessors. It makes images that are sort of like hyper real as opposed to stylized. And most importantly, it could create a consistent object that you could edit. So I could say like, you know, show me like a firefighter. And if it, you know, and, and I decided I wanted to make the hat blue, it could make the firefighter helmet blue without changing the rest of the image. And that actually was an innovation in AI image generation.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah. And I would say Nano Banana was the sort of the first Google AI product that did not feel like it was catching up to something that a competitor had previously released. It felt like they had really pushed the envelope forward there. And I think that will be a big story over the next year is that I think Google has sor found its footing with AI products and is starting not just to catch up to rivals, but also to jump ahead of them in some cases.

[Casey Newton]

Number 21, Celsius.

[Kevin Roose]

Casey. This was a huge technology of 2025 in my life. This is. We're talking about the energy drink, not the standard unit of measurement for temperature, which we hate. Yes, we're more Fahrenheit guys on this show. This energy drink changed my life this year for the following following reasons, I became incredibly addicted to it.

[Casey Newton]

Was this like your first real experience with stimulants?

[Kevin Roose]

Yes, yes. Some people do cocaine in bathrooms. I do Celsius out of my fridge. It is a very caffeinated energy drink that has completely taken over the San Francisco tech scene. I tried one at a tech conference earlier this year and thought to myself, why do I feel so great all of a sudden? Why do I feel like I'm bouncing off the walls? I look down at the can Celsius. Every can has about 200 milligrams of caffeine, which is about two and a half Red Bulls worth.

[Casey Newton]

Well, it seems like a great product, but I already have the idea for the product that's gonna completely overwhelm Celsius. In the market. It's just Celsius, but it has 300 grams of caffeine in it.

[Kevin Roose]

I think you should put that on the shelves and see what happens. This thing fuels the entire tech industry and also my life.

[Casey Newton]

Number 20 video podcast.

[Kevin Roose]

Podcast.

[Casey Newton]

Now, this feels a little self serving, Kevin.

[Kevin Roose]

It is because we are a video podcast. But this was also a huge year for video podcasts. We saw the rise of video podcasting sort of taking over the podcast market. Spotify recently shared that its video podcast streaming is up 54% from last year, fueled by shows like the Joe Rogan Experience and other popular video podcasts.

[Casey Newton]

And that has all happened despite the fact that to this day, not one podcast is actually good on video. You're still just better off listening to all of them. But it just turns out that the YouTube algorithm does a better job promoting a podcast than anything that the podcast industry ever figured out before. And so now this is the world we live in. Kevin.

[Kevin Roose]

Our podcast is good to look at on video too. And if people want to do that, where can they go?

[Casey Newton]

They could go to YouTube.com hardfork Number 19, Discord.

[Kevin Roose]

This is, of course, the chat app that became popular among gamers, but has since been sort of expanded to lots of other people who now use this basically to chat with their friends and maybe their enemies.

[Casey Newton]

And one of the most fascinating uses we've seen of Discord to date took place this year when Discord was used to help to select the next prime minister of Nepal. Nepal had massive protests this year that started when the previous government tried to ban social media apps. And there was a group of citizens who gathered together in Discord to pick the interim prime minister.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah. So you could do a lot on Discord. You could play Valorant with your friends or you could pick the next prime minister. Minister of Nepal. Choose carefully.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, I'm using it to try to pick a prime minister for this country.

[Kevin Roose]

We don't actually have a prime minister.

[Casey Newton]

I'm still catching up on the Constitution. Number 18, prediction markets.

[Kevin Roose]

This was a big year for prediction markets like polymarkin and Kalshi, where you can go and gamble on any number of world events. And this was inescapable. If you were following any elections this year or sports games, people are constantly talking about their bets. And I don't know, I believe this is a good technology. I think this is part of a sort of nationwide gambling epidemic that is going to have some real consequences. But it's undeniably iconic this year.

[Casey Newton]

Well, it was really surprising to me because I went to Poly Market looking to meet people in open relationships and it was a completely different kind of website. But also there was a study this month that found that 25% of the trades on polymarket are what they call wash trades, essentially artificial trading activity designed to pump up the prices of assets. So I do maintain a somewhat deep skepticism of these predictions. Prediction markets, Kevin.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes, me too. I am skeptical that they are going to turn out to be a good thing, but I think they are undoubtedly going to be a big thing.

[Casey Newton]

Number 17 zero proof beverages. So to me, this is one of the most fascinating and under discussed topics of the year is just the sheer number of Americans that seemingly spontaneously decided to give up drinking.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes, no one drinks anymore. At least in San Francisco. It's wild in San Francisco.

[Casey Newton]

Drinking has become sort of wildly unpopular and I think a big reason why we are seeing this trend is that alcohol free beverages have gotten so much better than they used to be. Right. And just to focus on non alcoholic beer, to take one example, because I used to be like a big beer guy, but non alcoholic beer tasted horrible. Like the way that it worked was that these brewers would make a normal beer and then they would heat the beer to try to burn off all the alcohol. So they just kind of like tasted gross. And so what's happened over the past few years is that brewers have just designed all these cool new methods that preserve the flavor. Like they use special yeast that it doesn't produce as much alcohol, so there's sort of less alcohol to extract. And they've come up with new ways to remove alcohol from the beer that they've created like something called reverse osmosis, which unfortunately I don't have time to explain, but suffice to say I can get a hazy IPA from Athletic Brewing, which is a non alcoholic beer. And I swear to God it tastes just as good as the the hazy IPAs I used to drink were. This is a really cool technology.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. And it is fueling the new temperance in which you do a lot of drugs but you don't actually drink. Number 16, stochastic gradient descent. Oh, thank God. This is on this year's list. This of course, is the optimization algorithm that was pioneered in the 1950s that has had a recent revival because it is the basic way that all of today's large language models are trained. It is basically the way that the, the weights of the neural networks learn how to make better predictions is through stochastic gradient descent. They kind adjust their parameters bit by Bit trying to find the optimal way to reduce something called the loss function. Without stochastic gradient descent, these networks would be dumb as hell, Kasey. And now they're smart and we have stochastic gradient descent to thank them. It's so true.

[Casey Newton]

And you know, at the top of this item, when we said stochastic gradient descent in unison, I was being a real stochastic parrot.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

Number 15, blue books.

[Kevin Roose]

A huge year for blue books. These, of course, are the examination books that students for generations have been using to take their tests. And they have been making a big comeback in 2025, fueled by the rise of AI assisted cheating. Lots of schools are moving back from computerized testing and evaluations to in class blue books, which they can monitor and prevent people from using ChatGPT to do their homework.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, I certainly spent a lot of my younger years filling out these blue books. And mainly what I just remember is that my hand would cramp, you know, after a full you 45 minutes of trying to write an essay. So it's a shame that kids can't use their laptops. But unfortunately, they were primarily using them to cheat. I read one story that said over the past two academic years, just at the Cal student store, so right here nearby at Berkeley, blue book sales were up 80%.

[Kevin Roose]

Wow.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah.

[Kevin Roose]

Big year. And the ones that are iconic in schools across America are made by the Roaring Spring Paper Products Company in Blair County, Pennsylvania.

[Casey Newton]

They should do like a sitcom, like a sort of a mockumentary sitcom set inside that paper company. I think that could go over big. Number 14, Voyager 1.

[Kevin Roose]

I have a deep emotional attachment to this spacecraft. This is, of course, the 48 year old spacecraft that NASA sent out to explore the solar system. It has lasted far longer than they initially projected. We talked about it on the show last year because NASA had to kind of like fix it from about 15 billion miles away. And it is still going despite many predictions that it would have died by now. This year it got another long distance. And this year it also discovered a mysterious wall of fire at the edge of our solar system.

[Casey Newton]

And we have a very exciting announcement which is that for the series finale of Hard Fork, we are going to fly a spaceship into the mysterious wall of fire at the edge of the solar system. So you guys all have that to look Forward to.

[Kevin Roose]

Voyager 1, we love you. Keep trucking.

[Casey Newton]

Number 13.

[Kevin Roose]

Nuclear power.

[Casey Newton]

A huge part of the Springfield economy, Kevin.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes, and a huge part of the AI boom that we're going to be talking about a little bit. This is of course, the way of using nuclear fission to produce large amounts of power, obviously a very controversial technology, but I think one that at least in America, is starting to have a comeback. The demand in power for these AI data centers has led to some innovation in nuclear power. There are now these things called smart small modular reactors. These are going to be a big part of how we get all of this energy to fuel all of this expansion of AI. Obviously there are other renewable, renewable forms of energy, solar, wind, et cetera. But nuclear is where a lot of the tech industry is placing its bets. And I think for that reason, it is an iconic technology of 2025 and probably of 2026 as well.

[Casey Newton]

Number 12, Tylenol. Tylenol was really in the headlines not too long ago, Kevin, when U.S. officials, including RFK Jr. And President Trump, made what we might generously call unproven claims that the use of acetaminophen products during pregnancy can cause something I do not believe is true, but it caused a crisis.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, I'm more of an Advil guy, but what do you like about Tylenol?

[Casey Newton]

What I like about Tylenol is that it can effectively cure my aches and pains without causing autism. What do you like about it?

[Kevin Roose]

No, I think you speak my mind there. I support Tylenol in its various travails and this was a big year for that brand that they actually are now owned by Kimberly Clark. Just, just a few days ago, they were sold to the maker of popular paper products. So now you can get your toilet paper and your Tylenol in the same place.

[Casey Newton]

What a great, great little bundle. Number 11, VPNs. Virtual private networks.

[Kevin Roose]

A big year for VPNs. In part because of the, some of the age verification restrictions that we just talked about. Many Americans are trying to do things on the Internet and they don't want to appear to the state that they are in. And so they will use a VPN to make their Internet traffic look like it's coming from someplace else.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, well, look, I mean, there are a lot of states like the United Kingdom passed a similar law where if you are an adult and you want to look at porn, these companies are asking you for personal information, possibly including your driver's license. And a lot of people understandably don't want to upload their driver's license into the. I'm looking at porn database, which, you know, is going to leak, you know, at some point. And so VPNs are a very reasonable solution to that. And so they've become quite popular this.

[Kevin Roose]

Year, Kevin, big year for the vpn.

[Casey Newton]

You know, people want their privacy and they deserve it. And just like that, Kevin, we have arrived at the year's top 10 most iconic technologies. Why don't we take a moment to recompose ourselves? When we come back, we'll tell you the winners.

[Kevin Roose]

Top 10.

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[Casey Newton]

Boy, am I ready. Kevin. I can't believe we've already gotten there. It's going too fast.

[Kevin Roose]

Maybe we should do 150 next year.

[Casey Newton]

Okay, that's something to do.

[Kevin Roose]

Think about that. Okay, what's number 10?

[Casey Newton]

Number 10? Dwarf wheat. Dwarf wheat sounds like a wrapper, but that's not what it is.

[Kevin Roose]

No, it is a variety of wheat plant that was invented in the 1960s by agronomist Norman Borlaug, who bred short wheat stalks that could support massive heads of grain, which led to an explosion in the global food supply and saved nations like India and Pakistan from catastrophic catastrophic famine.

[Casey Newton]

How did dwarf wheat make our top 10 list this year, Kevin?

[Kevin Roose]

Well, an important thing happened this year which was that I learned about it and, and I thought, well, if we're ever going to do another one of those iconic technologies lists, something that saves a billion lives should probably be on it.

[Casey Newton]

Absolutely. Well, shout out to dwarf wheat, a.

[Kevin Roose]

True short king, which proves that in wheat, as in podcasting, it is bad to be too tall.

[Casey Newton]

Period. Number nine, Sora. Sora. The text to video image generator that OpenAI put out this fall quickly went viral. And Kevin, I think also just kind of changed my thinking about what kind of company OpenAI is.

[Kevin Roose]

Say more.

[Casey Newton]

Well, I think up until this point, OpenAI could still make a pretty credible case that it was like in it for the research, that it had this pretty single minded mission to build AGI, you know, however it was going to define that. And then Sora came along and all of a sudden OpenAI runs a social network. Now it is directly competing with Meta and it has many of the same problems that Meta has right at launch. Sora said we're going to like sort of put reminders in the app if we feel like you've been staring at this thing too long. Essentially, they know this thing could like accelerate the screen time issues that we have in this country. And that's to say nothing of the many copyright issues that happened around the launch with the company sort of permitting actors likenesses to be used without their permission. So OpenAI got itself into a lot of trouble here and I'm not really sure what they've gotten out of it so far.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, I have not been using Sora nearly as much recently, but there was a period of several days where I first got access and I thought, wow, this thing is really cool. There are some funny videos going around. People were deep faking us into compromising situations. And I do feel like this is the invention of the year that is likely to have the longest lasting impact on the information ecosystem because we are now just entering this era where video can be made that is super realistic of anyone doing anything. And we have Sora to thank for that.

[Casey Newton]

All that being said, I do just think Sora was one of the biggest stories of this year, full stop. Like, I think that when you look at consumer Internet companies, like doing interesting things, Sora is just very close to the top of that list.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, it is a phase change in social media that is now neither social nor really media. It's this kind of synthetic slop that is now being, you know, fed to people that will undoubtedly change the world in ways that we can neither foresee nor predict.

[Casey Newton]

Number eight, deep seek.

[Kevin Roose]

This is of course the Chinese AI lab that released its model R1 in January. And that was a very big deal for the stock market, which promptly collapsed because of fears that all of these American AI labs were spending billions and billions of doll. And here comes this Chinese AI company and they appear to have built a very good model using somewhat less powerful chips and much less money. And that was a big moment for the American AI industry and the economy as a whole.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, it turbocharged fears that America might lose the AI race with China. There really was A mania about this thing. One of the very few emergency episodes we've done over the past year was about Deep Seq, just because so many people were concerned about what it meant. And I have to say, Kevin, you fast forward to to November and it's not clear that Deep Seek actually meant that much. Right. Like deep seek R1 was not followed by a succession of Chinese models that took over the Internet. And in fact, American companies still seem like they're pretty firmly in the lead.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, but I think deep seq R1 especially is iconic for another reason, which is that it was open source and it was sort of like true open.

[Casey Newton]

Source, not just open weights the way that like the Metalama models are.

[Kevin Roose]

Totally. They told us how they made it, they published all the details. And to this day, the deep seq R1 paper is still our best and one of our only sources of information about how these reasoning models are built and what the underlying technology looks like. Because none of the American companies who are building these models are publishing the details like Deep Seq did.

[Casey Newton]

And so, you know, if you have a long weekend coming up for Thanksgiving and you want to build a large language model with your children that can reason, you may want to look at that Deep Seat paper.

[Kevin Roose]

It's true.

[Casey Newton]

You'll learn a lot.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

Number seven, Mecha Hitler. Mecha Hitler, or Grok as it's sometimes called, came to our attention in July with the release of a new Grok model. And when people started having conversations with it, they noted just how easy it was to get the model to identify as Hitler or Mecha Hitler, a villain from the classic video game Wolfenstein 3D.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes, this was a part of a series of fiascos that happened at Grok. People were noticing all kinds of things, like the fact that it would talk very openly and easily about white genocide, which is of course a sort of right wing talking point and one of Elon Musk's favorite conspiracy theories. And I think this was an iconic technology of 2025. Not because it's good, we should not have language models that call themselves Mecca Hitler or talk about white genocide, but because it illustrated how hard it is to align and deploy these AI models. Here comes Elon Musk, someone with unlimited money, and he wants to make the anti woke right wing chatbot. And it turns out that when you do that, it starts calling itself Mecha Hitler. And then when you try to undo that, it turns out you can't actually control the models that well. So I think this was a great, very public example of how even the people with access to all the money and all the intelligence and all the engineering talent in the world cannot figure out how to reliably steer these AI models.

[Casey Newton]

Yes, Mecca Hitler is a joke, but it is also a warning because as these models get more powerful, if we do not solve that alignment problem that you just described, Mecca Hitler is going to be the least of our concerns. Right. There are just still many unsolved problems when it comes with getting a model to behave in the way that you want it to behave. And Mecca Hitler, you know, for all its faults, did try to send us that message.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. Number six. Tick tock, Casey.

[Kevin Roose]

This is the only repeat on this year's list. It was also on our list last year. I believe it was number 46. Six last year. It's number six this year. Why did TikToks have such an iconic year?

[Casey Newton]

Well, TikTok is the only social media app to ever be banned in the United States. That's the first thing. And it's the only social media app to be banned and then not actually be banned at all, because the President just decided that he didn't want that. And so he just signed a series of executive orders saying, no, actually it's fine. Overriding an act of Congress that was upheld by the Supreme Court. And so while it did blink offline briefly this year, which was another iconic moment in TikTok history, fast forward to today and Kevin, you can watch all of the viral dances you want.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes, it is invincible. It cannot be killed. And even when it is technically killed, legal and presidential chicanery can bring it back. What an icon. TikTok, I think, is obviously culturally iconic because it is ushered in the era of short form video, which has totally dominated the media landscape. Now everyone everywhere is consuming short form video constantly. It is also led to radical changes in products like Instagram as they have tried to catch up. And I think an icon all around.

[Casey Newton]

Number five, rare earth metals.

[Kevin Roose]

Now this is an exciting one. And the reason it is so high on this year's iconic technologies list is that it became very geopolitically important this year.

[Casey Newton]

So, Flashpoint.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. So rare earth metals, which are, fun fact, not very rare, they're actually quite common. They are the things that go into everything from smartphones, electric vehicles. There are 17 of them and they are hard to separate. The reason they're called rare earth metals is because separating them from sort of the nearby rock takes lots of solvent extraction. It's very complicated.

[Casey Newton]

It's a huge pain in the ass.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. Huge pain in the ass to get these metals, but they turn out to be very important. And China and the US have been facing down over rare earth metals and access to exported rare earth metals for some time now. And that took a big step up in severity this year when China threatened to block the export of rare earth metals to the US which was not received well by American politicians.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. Now, have we resolved the rare earth metal situation? Because I have been told that President Trump, you know, sort of reached a deal with the Chinese government. I need to know if I could get my rare earths, my lanthanides, my scandium, my atrium. Yes.

[Kevin Roose]

The tensions de escalated in November of this year when the US And China agreed to suspend some of these export controls, basically as part of a larger trade deal between the US And China. So, yes, your smartphones, your electric vehicles, they are safe for now, from having their rare earth metals taken away.

[Casey Newton]

You know, I have a dream, Kevin, and that dream is that one day we get so good at separating all of these things that we start to call them common earth metals. And that's how you'll know that American manufacturing is back. Number four, glass. Neither a liquid or a solid, Kevin. It's what they call an amorphous solid.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes, that is. That is true. This was one of the things that people pointed out the most that we had forgotten to add to last year's list. They wanted a lot of glass heads out there.

[Casey Newton]

Well, here's the thing. They spend eight to 12 hours a day staring at a literal piece of glass, and they're saying that's not iconic.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, exactly. So we are fixing our error. Glass comes in at number four this year, in part because as I have learned more about glass in preparation for this episode, I have come to realize how important it really is.

[Casey Newton]

How important is it?

[Kevin Roose]

Well, Casey, would you believe that the Internet as we know it today would not exist without glass?

[Casey Newton]

I don't. How could you say such a thing?

[Kevin Roose]

Because the fiber optic cables that carry broadband Internet across the world are, in fact, tiny strands of glass. That is what fiber optic cables are made out of. Without glass, no Internet.

[Casey Newton]

If they call them glass cables, that would sound so much cooler. It's kind of an interesting choice, really.

[Kevin Roose]

Glass also the inspiration for Apple's liquid glass design sort of language that they rolled out this year.

[Casey Newton]

And even better, Kevin, the inspiration for Google Glass, the best pair of glasses ever created.

[Kevin Roose]

That's true. That's true. Casey, what do you think the largest piece of glass in the world is? And where do you Think it is.

[Casey Newton]

The largest piece of ass in the world, Kevin?

[Kevin Roose]

No, that's for a different episode.

[Casey Newton]

Oh, oh, I see. I don't know. What is the largest piece of glass in the world?

[Kevin Roose]

Well, kst, I'm glad to tell you that it is in Beijing, China, where the Taikong Financial Towers hold the Guinness World Record for the largest single glass window. Each individual glass panel in the building's lobby measures 54ft high and 10ft wide.

[Casey Newton]

Okay, so America is losing the glass war to China.

[Kevin Roose]

We are losing the glass war and the rare earth metals war.

[Casey Newton]

Where is the Trump administration on the glass war? I swear to God, if he finds.

[Kevin Roose]

Out that we're losing to China, we will pour billions of dollars into a national competition to make the biggest pane of glass.

[Casey Newton]

I think would love that. I think people would be really excited about that.

[Kevin Roose]

And then once we do that, I want to put TikTok on it.

[Casey Newton]

You want to put TikTok on the glass on the.

[Kevin Roose]

The world's largest piece of glass. I want to look at TikTok in a. @ a bigger screen size than anyone ever has.

[Casey Newton]

That's beautiful, Kevin. We're already at number three. Can you believe it?

[Kevin Roose]

Could it get any more iconic?

[Casey Newton]

I don't. It could have been barely more iconic than it's already been with number three. ChatGPT. ChatGPT, I think, in many ways was the biggest tech story of the year, although it does have some competition, which we'll talk about. This app reached 800 million weekly users this year. And keep in mind, this thing as we record this is not yet three years old, and it's already hitting a scale that ranks it among the very biggest apps in the world. Did it in an incredibly quick amount of time. And this year it just released a ton of pretty interesting features. Right. A memory feature, the Pulse feature, which kind of like sends you a daily digest in the morning. There are apps inside of ChatGPT now. 2025 is also the first full year that we will have reasoning inside the models in ChatGPT. And so just sort of like, across the product, they have just been adding feature after feature, making the app more useful. And I just think it is. It has become a huge part of many people's.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah. And we should say, like, in ways that are both good and bad. Right. Like, a lot of people are using Chat CBT for things that I would not consider healthy or good. They're, you know, sort of taking shortcuts on their homework. Some people, as my colleague Cash Hill has been reporting on A lot are sort of falling into these, like, delusional spirals. There was a big moment earlier this year when ChatGPT became very sycophantic and started telling people that they were, you know, the greatest philosopher in the world and that they were unlocking the mysteries of quantum physics. And I think that was. Was bad for people. But undeniably, Chat GPT, another big year for that product. It has become kind of the household name chatbot that is, at least in the consumer side of the market, you know, developed sort of a dominant lead. And, you know, I think it is, for many people, their first point of contact with these very powerful AI systems.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. And I think, for better and worse, it just has continued to stay on the cutting edge in ways that surprise me. Like, after Sam Altman was fired and came back, a lot of people left that company. I just kind of thought they might have had so much talent depart that they're not going to be able to keep up the pace that they were at. And actually, I think the pace has accelerated since then. So there is something inside that company that has led them to continue to innovate and to ship things. And as you just said, that is, you know, that has good things and bad things about it. But ChatGPT, just a huge part of the story of 2025. Yep. Number two, Trump coin. Oh, boy. Well, Kevin, in the past, it's been extremely uncommon for presidents to have cryptocurrencies in their name. Yes, yes.

[Kevin Roose]

Abraham Lincoln did not have a cryptocurrency, and there are several reasons for that.

[Casey Newton]

But the. The Trump Organization and World Liberty Financial, which is the Trump family's, like, separate token venture, just raked in an astounding amount of money in 2025 related to Trump Coin and its surrounding businesses.

[Kevin Roose]

Y. Yeah. What Percentage of your 401k is allocated to Trump Coin?

[Casey Newton]

Oh, I moved the whole thing over. I said I got a good feeling about this one. Yes.

[Kevin Roose]

I think this is an iconic technology of this year, not because it's good, but because it is so brazen like it is. You know, it was so obvious from the moment that Trump Coin came onto the market that the Trump family started doing its own crypto ventures, that this was going to be a way to sort of buy influence directly from the president and his family using this technology and that. That, you know, be very hard to stop or regulate because it is, like, happening in crypto and not through any kind of, like, regulated financial market.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. I mean, you just, like, look at many of the pardons that went on this year, including some in the crypto industry. And you have to wonder, you know, warp, were purchases of Trump Coin or related products made? And that is extremely hard to trace due to the nature of crypto. Reuters did a story this year saying that the Trump Organization had taken in about $802 million from family crypto ventures in the first half, half of 2025 alone, that included $336 million from sales and fees related to the Trump crypto coin. So we have just never seen anything like this. And I think when historians write about the Trump years, this is something that will stand out as, just as you said, Kevin, an incredibly brazen cash grab from the president and his family.

[Kevin Roose]

Well, it's a really wide, wild turn of events for the Trump family as well. I think if you had asked people a couple years ago, like, how did Donald Trump get rich? They would have told you about hotels or golf courses. Maybe they would have mentioned some of his other business ventures or the Apprentice or Trump Stakes. Exactly. But, like, the amount of money that the Trump family has made on crypto dwarfs all of those other businesses. Like, they are now primarily a family that derives their wealth from cryptocurrency, which is just a wild turn of events. I think a lot of people, you and I included, thought crypto had sort of, like, its cultural relevance had been declining since some of the market crashes of a few years ago. But crypto is so back. A lot of the things that regulators had been cracking down on during the Biden administration are now allowed again under the Trump administration. These companies are making tons of money.

[Casey Newton]

In part because those regulators were all replaced by people from the crypto industry.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. So, you know, there has been a near total takeover of the sort of, you know, crypto regulatory infrastructure by people who previously worked in the industry. And I think they have been sort of all too happy to see President Trump succeed in crypto, because the better President Trump does with crypto, the more lax the regulatory environment gets. So, yeah, I think that that's the sort of an important backstory here in the story of the Trump coin.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. Yeah. All right, Casey, we have arrived at long last at our number one most iconic, iconic technology of 2025.

[Casey Newton]

We've already talked about so many icons, and it's scarcely imaginable to me that something could be more iconic. But I do think there is one. One thing, maybe two words that tell the story of 2025 better than any other. Kevin.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. And before we reveal what our number one pick is, we should just say, like, this all goes through a rigorous, methodologically sound vetting process. You know, we have surveys, panels, focus groups, street teams.

[Casey Newton]

Who else gets involved? An advisory board, all the New York Times opinion team, the UN Blue Sky. We asked Blue sky to weigh in.

[Kevin Roose]

No, we write these down in a document and we sort of, sort of argue about them for a little while. And out of that comes what we believe is the most iconic technology of 2025. Casey, you ready?

[Casey Newton]

Number one, data centers.

[Kevin Roose]

Wow. It would be hard to tell the story of 2025 in technology without the humble data center. Of course, the data center is sort of the way that we power all of these AI advancements. Before that, data centers were used for things like cloud computing. They are essentially giant, that house the supercomputers that power an increasing slice of modern life.

[Casey Newton]

Yes. There was a story that I read a few weeks ago about how the United States's investments in data centers is propping up the entire global economy because so much of the equipment is made overseas as an importance. So other countries are now thriving because of how much these companies are spending on data centers. And one question people have, Kevin, is like, well, how long can this last? Is we. Are we in some sort of dangerous, scary bubble?

[Kevin Roose]

Yes, it is. The thing that is fueling the talk of an AI bubble is the. The fact that all these data centers, which are very expensive and laborious to build, are popping up all over the country. And if you live in a giant urban center, you may not have spent much time in and around data centers because they tend to be built out in sort of rural areas where there's more land.

[Casey Newton]

Coastal elites hate visiting data centers.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. But if you are someone who lives in a less populous part of the country, you probably have seen a data center going up somewhere near you. This is, I think it's fair to say, not just the largest infrastructure project in America of the year, but maybe the largest infrastructure project in history. It is truly era defining, and it is also becoming a big deal in politics. Politicians are now running for office campaigning against putting data centers in their districts. So I think this is going to be a very touchy flashpoint for a lot of people in the next few years.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. The controversy is mounting. There are folks that do not want to live near a data center. They're tremendously concerned about the potential environmental impact. They're looking at their electric electricity bills rising. They're attributing that to these data centers. And so I do think that in addition to being just such a big part of 2025. These data centers are going to continue to be a big story in part because they're just going to be the subject of so many political fights. And I think the data centers can really serve as a kind of proxy war for how do you feel about AI in general? Right. Like, do you fear that this is going to automate your job or enslave humanity? If so, data centers might feel like one place where you can actually fight back.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, I think, I think that the data center industry could solve some of its image and reputational issues by renaming data centers to something that sounds a little cooler, a little friendlier, a little more approachable. I've been workshopping some possible names. I wonder what you make of this. What if you just called it a chip cabana?

[Casey Newton]

I'm not sure cabana really captures the full size of the data because these are pretty big.

[Kevin Roose]

What would you call the data center?

[Casey Newton]

I would call it Machine Godhouse.

[Kevin Roose]

Machine Godhouse. Okay. Somehow I don't think that's going to assuage Americans concerns about data center, but I appreciate the creative effort.

[Casey Newton]

And just like that, Kevin, we are through this year's 50 most iconic technologies. As you think about the year that we just had, how iconic was 2025?

[Kevin Roose]

I think this was an iconic year in technology. I have been energized this year. You know, in the news business, you always want there to be a lot of stuff going on. You want there to be a lot of stuff to cover. And boy, was there this year. The entire economy seemingly now runs on technology is dominated by these companies that you and I cover. The build out for AI is exceeding anyone's expectations. I think it is just a really exciting time to be talking and thinking about this stuff. And whether it's all going in a good or bad, bad direction is a separate conversation. But in the news business, we like to say, you know, may you live in interesting times. And we do.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. I mean, look, it was a terrible year, everyone knows that. But there was a lot of interesting tech and it's been a pleasure to talk with you about it here on our podcast, Hard Fork. Thank you to our listeners. We hope you're having a wonderful holiday weekend. And you know, as with last year, if we left out something, let us know. We're hard for NYTimes.com and if you know we've made a mistake, we may include it on a future list of icons.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah. If we could add one more iconic technology, the 51st one, it's you, our listeners. You our listeners and viewers.

[Casey Newton]

You're an incredible technology. Yeah, look at you crushing it.

[Kevin Roose]

Shine on you crazy diamonds.

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AI is transforming the world and it's starts with the right Compute ARM is the AI compute platform trusted by global leaders. Proudly NASDAQ listed, built for the future. Visit arm.com Discover the University of Michigan.

[University of Michigan Narrator]

Was made for moments like this. When facts are questioned, when division deepens, when the role of higher education is on trial, look to the leaders and best turning a public investment into the public good. From using AI to close digital divides to turning climate risk into resilience. From leading medical innovation to making mental health care more accessible. Wherever we go, progress follows. For answers for action for all of us, look to Michigan. See more [e-mail]. look.

[AWS Narrator]

300 sensors over a million data points per second. How does F1 update their fans with every stat in real time? AWS is how from fastest laps to strategy calls, AWS puts fans in the pit. It's not just racing, it's data driven innovation at 200 miles per hour. AWS is how leading businesses power next level innovation.

[Casey Newton]

Heart Fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn where Edison Edited by Jen Poyat. This episode was fact checked by Will Pichel. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Diane Wong and Dan Powell. Video production by Sawyer okay, Pat Gunther, Jake Nicholl and Chris Shot. You can watch this whole episode on [e-mail] hardfor Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Wee Wing Tam, Dahlia Haddad and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at [e-mail] with your list of icons.

[Kevin Roose]

Foreign.

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[Casey Newton]

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[Kevin Roose]

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[AWS Narrator]

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[Kevin Roose]

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