By Catherine Thorbecke | ABC News | December 29, 2021
Over the past year, routine space tourism emerged from science fiction to reality, digital art you can’t even touch auctioned for millions at Christie’s, and malicious attacks emanating from cyberspace crippled real-world critical infrastructure in the U.S.
The technology industry unceasingly shaped the way Americans lived in 2021, embedding its brands and tools into intimate parts of daily life as the ongoing pandemic further normalized virtual work, school and socializing.
The promises of tech’s ability to make our lives easier and more efficient continued to drive U.S. economic growth in the shadow of the relentless health crisis, but also exposed new pitfalls as more Americans lived their lives in a digital world where misinformation on everything from elections to vaccines thrives. This manifested off-the-screen in ominous ways during 2021, including an unprecedented post-election riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and an “anti-vax” movement that has prolonged the suffering wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The gatekeepers of Big Tech saw their net worth surge over the past year, but also endured a year of major shakeups: from Jeff Bezos stepping down as Amazon CEO, to a scandal-plagued Facebook rebranding as Meta, to Jack Dorsey resigning from Twitter. The mounting power of tech giants also came under renewed scrutiny — albeit accompanied by little action — from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Despite the wild 12 months where Americans watched, seemingly in real time, as technology transformed society in good and bad ways, experts are holding onto hope that the lessons we’ve learned in 2021 can inform us going forward.
“I’m trying desperately to be optimistic,” Karen Kornbluh, the director of the Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative at the German Marshall Fund, and a former U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development during the Obama administration, told ABC News of the tech industry’s past year. “This has been a learning year. We didn’t need another learning year — but I do think a lot of people learned a lot about how this all works and how entrenched it is and how dangerous it is.”
Still, Kornbluh argues that the tech sector is “so innovative and creative and allows people to do so many things we never could have imagined before.”
“We can’t lose our sense of wonder about it all, and because there are these new opportunities, I do think the industry is going to try to put a lot of these problems behind it before we move into this new era,” she said.
Here is a look at the year in tech, lessons the industry has learned and what to expect looking forward into 2022.
