A Review of Technology in 2025

As the year wraps up, there’s always a customary series of posts about looking back so we can look forward. I’m going to share some personal experiences from how technology has impacted my family directly in an effort to highlight actual utility vs solutions in search of a problem. I plan on making some technology decisions for 2026, and also some very verbose solutions in the event anyone wishes to follow parts of my journey. Some of these personal solutions address the enshittification of technology, and others may be quirky projects. I’m not going to call out any particular company, as they all seem to be trending in the direction of making things worse and not better. Firstly, let’s call out the elephant in the room: AI and LLM’s.

This last year, my wife was diagnosed with a glioblastoma; this was horrible news, and we are grateful for her medical team and care, but even in this, we couldn’t escape the terrible influence AI and LLM’s were about to impose. Her journey started with emergency life saving brain surgery; while the front office of the hospital was keeping her alive, the back office was starting to file the necessary paperwork with the insurance company so that they could get paid for their work. A few days after the surgery, the first of many insurance claim denials started to appear in the mail; denied payment of emergency brain surgery due to not having a preexisting condition, denied payment of ICU and related hospital stays due to previous claim being denied, denied because of being out of network hospital and not traveling nearly two hours to an in-network hospital for emergency care, etc. The reasons for the denials were always fine print language interpretations that only an algorithm could find, and a LLM would explain. I became an expert in navigating the phone dial queue to get to an actual human who would ultimately adjudicate all the claims and approve them. I have over a ream of denial paperwork, and can’t believe the sheer cost they bore as a business for implementing faulty technology. Postage, paperwork, compute, etc; and I certainly cannot be the only one. The insurance providers’ choice for implementing AI and LLM based solutions was certainly costing them more money and time in this case, than it was saving.

Then there is the matter of AI and LLM’s being forced into the products and devices we use on a daily basis. We found them to be more interrupting of our day to day management than supportive. Navigation choices from in app usage to ride share integrations were some of the most comically worse decisions I had experienced in recent years. The implementation of them into telephone AVR’s has also certainly cemented their place in a new circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno. One of my more recent moments of frustration is that the company that makes the software for my wife and my cellphones started to remove functionality we depended on because the company couldn’t get that functionality to integrate with AI cleanly with the older versions of cellphones that we have as our daily drivers. The feature was simply “reoccuring alarms,” like “every morning I want to have an alarm wake me up at 6:30AM, and a 7:20AM alarm to remind me to take medication.” Because the parent company could not integrate that into their AI model for our generation of phones, they removed the feature and did so silently versus removing the AI model. We missed a school bus and medication a few times until an insider at that company explained what was going on, and our only solution was to purchase a 3rd party app for the luxury of recurring alarms. Good job; punish your users for using your products by removing functionality they depend upon.

AI and LLM’s aren’t all bad, but companies are shoving them into our products and forcing their consumers to change and accept it, even when it is horrible and not useful. Some of the positive solutions I’ve had with LLM’s is having my children use them to help write fairy tales and stories; I figured that hallucinations are a problem, so why not use them constructively and use them as a tool. I also use them to help me manage my infrastructure at home; they’re not an expert agent, but I do get utility out of having seemingly a junior level systems administrator helping me manage household alerts, and trying midnight fixes within scope. But then again, there’s a lot of this that I could probably better automate with a script. I guess I fell for “a solution in search of a problem”.

I’ve also noticed a negative change in our personal devices, from smart phones, TVs, appliances and vehicles. Enshittification has warmly embraced them as well, and also has impacted the consumers in a negative, and sometimes threat to injury. My wife’s car is a relatively new EV; it has some quirks, but the biggest is when the built in automagical and inexplicable safety mechanisms activate and abruptly apply the brakes when the vehicle is in motion. This always happens if the driving conditions are drizzle to light rain. This feature cannot be disabled, and there is no software fix as of yet, and has been a reported problem for over a year. I just don’t drive the car in those weather conditions. Cars should be cars, cellphones should be cellphones, and your refrigerator should keep your food cold. All of these devices, and more, have had privacy terms and policies implemented into them because the manufacturers are continuously finding more ways to collect data about you and profit. I miss turning on my TV and having it not immediately start playing commercials for the manufacturer attempting to sell me more of their products, even before I start watching my own shows from my own media. I do not think that it is prudent for your refrigerator to be showing you customized advertisements. And I certainly don’t believe it is appropriate for the company I bought a truck from to be continuously monitoring my driving habits and selling it to the insurance company. And if you don’t agree with these invasive privacy malware contraptions, then your only recourse is to not purchase them; this used to be an option, but practically all devices and manufacturers participate in making their products worse for the consumer.

Then there is where all this data is stored: the cloud. I remember when the sales pitch of the cloud was simply, “let us be your IT department, and we’ll keep your email running.” The slippery slope that has become now lands in “you have no choice but to use one of these three companies if you want to quickly do business on the Internet.” Once your company is locked into one, it is exceptionally difficult to migrate your data to another one, even if you decide to self host. You no longer own your data; the companies seem to own it all, and constantly change the terms of how they’re going to use it. If they lose control of the data, there also is no recourse or long term effect that would cause for a change in service offerings that are aligned for the benefit of the consumer or customer.

Additionally, more datacenters are being built every day, and more are negatively impacting our costs of living, community wellbeing, health, and most importantly our environment. My usage of electricity hasn’t changed much in the last two years, yet my bill has nearly doubled in cost; the reason, according to my legislators of my State, is that these big companies are building datacenters and the power companies are shifting their operational costs onto me, the residential consumer. Our change is going to be purchasing power from renewable sources this year, which have always been more expensive, but are now looking to be cheaper than the power produced by our utility company. We feel like we are being penalized by paying a service tax for a system we do not partake or utilize.

Technology change used to be not just magical, but actually useful. Innovation is no longer for the consumption of the product, it is for how much you can squeeze from the consumer. Our modern society has become locked into only being able to make poor choices, because the good ones have been taken away. In order to bring choice and autonomy back, friends and I are starting to enumerate solutions that a reasonable person can run at home to bring back their ownership of their data. It won’t be for everyone, but I personally believe many folks will benefit from it. If you feel like contributing your solutions, please reach out (russell at handorf d0t com). You can get a primer and outline of what we are proposing here (https://jawncon.org/decloud/); it isn’t being a home lab, but a home production data center that you can afford.

I feel that technology and products have gotten out of hand, and they’re heading in a direction that is only getting worse. Whatever the reason, I feel and hope that we can make some consumer choices with some elbow grease to signal that enough is enough.