TechScape: From TikTok controversy to folding phones, your burning tech questions answered

After three years and more than 100 issues, as well as two bouts of paternity leave, two AI summits and an entire cryptocurrency boom-bust cycle, this is my last newsletter. It’s also the end of my 11 years at the Guardian, almost to the week: my first day was the release of the iPhone 5S, and on 9 September we’ll see the launch of the iPhone 16. It’s been a ride.
For the last two weeks I’ve been asking readers for questions and have been bombarded. I apologise if I didn’t get round to yours, but thank you so much to everyone who wrote in.
What’s been the most shocking thing you’ve discovered in researching/reporting on the TechScape? – Alexandria Weber
In 2019, I was sent a leak of TikTok’s internal moderation documents. They revealed, for the first time, that the company had explicit policies, in writing and applied globally, to enforce Chinese foreign policy on its platform. The company, the leak showed, censored videos that mentioned Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence or the banned religious group Falun Gong.
TikTok insisted the documents were out-of-date, even at the time, and that they had been retired some months earlier and replaced with new, locally sensitive guidelines. As a mark of the direction the company was moving in, that was a good sign. But that leak provides the basis, to this day, of concerns that the company isn’t as separate from the Chinese state as it suggests.
Computer scientist Ray Kurzweil says that within 20 years we will have the ability to duplicate a person’s mind in a computer, including all their memories, their personality and consciousness. Do you think this claim is credible? – David
Kurzweil’s “singularity” has been 20 years in the future for the last 30, so I’m not sure there’s reason to put much weight on the date he predicts. But the bigger problem for me with his predictions is that, in the last few years, the order of operations has changed somewhat.
The old singularitarian view was that computers were getting faster and faster, and eventually they would get fast enough to mimic a brain, at which point uploads would be possible. That’s subtly different from the AI utopian worldview, which is that AI gets more and more capable until the AI cracks the problem of uploading a human brain.
In that vision of the future, uploading your brain only even becomes a thing after superintelligent AI is already created and reshaping the world. It seems like an odd thing to focus on!
Do you think Facebook and Google have already peaked, and face a slow but inevitable slide into relative insignificance? – Barney
Never say never. Companies reinvent themselves all the time – tech, of course, has the greatest example of that with Apple, all but written-off as a leading player in the 1990s before launching its remarkable revival, from the iMac to the iPhone. Both Meta and Google are racing to try to take a lead position in AI, which could see them becoming, again, some of the most significant companies on the planet.
But I agree with the premise of the question: there is a shift in excitement and attention in technology, and the existing businesses of Google and Meta are on the downside of that shift. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Google Search are going to continue printing money for the foreseeable future, but none are at the exciting frontier of the industry any more.
Also, of course, when a company is the fourth- or sixth-biggest in the world, it’s hard not to have peaked. There’s only so much more “up” to go.
Where do smartphones go from here? How can a new smartphone model really distinguish itself from the crowd? – John Brown
The boring but true answer here is that foldable phones are going to steadily come down in price and up in quality until there’s a sudden bloom of creativity in hardware design again. Samsung’s led the way with its two approaches – the clamshell-style Flip seen, heavily, around the Olympics, and the folio-style Fold. The screen technology still isn’t flawless, with a noticeable ridge down the middle of the unfolded phone, and the prices range from high to eye-watering, but the devices are the only truly novel designs to be seen in the industry in the last decade.
And then, in a year or two, Apple will launch a foldable and everyone will realise that they exist.
The vibes around tech seem to have changed a lot in the past half decade or so – there seems to be much more anxiety about how it will change society for the worse, and not much optimism. Do you think the industry can overcome that? – Ido Vock
I think tech now feels like a very similar position to finance 15 years ago. It will continue to attract smart and capable people because the work is interesting and well-paid, but there’s a very clear vibe shift. I don’t think the industry can reverse the clock, but I wonder how much it is necessary to do that. Money solves a lot of ills, and it’s better to be rich than optimistic.
The real question, for me, is whether that shift around tech as a sector threatens to spill over into a broader cynicism around the entire idea of science and technology improving the world. I hope not. I remain, fundamentally, optimistic about the progress of humanity, and think some of the forthcoming breakthroughs in fields such as health, green energy, and even spaceflight are going to be exciting.
Best game ever (and why is it a Soulsborne)? – Chris M
Soulsborne games, for those not in the know, are a genre created by a developer From Software and its auteur director Hidetaka Miyazaki, characterised by punishing difficulty curves, oblique narrative structures and a tone memorably summed up as “fucked-up little guy chuckles at you from behind a locked door”. Personally I have a soft spot for Bloodborne, the 2015 PlayStation 4 entry in the series, but I’m 50 hours in to Elden Ring, the most recent Soulsborne proper, and it’s very good.
The best game ever, though, remains the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Six years on from the release of the Switch and its console-defining launch title, it’s still not been topped, even by its impeccable sequel, Tears of the Kingdom. That said, Elden Ring is a great game for adults who are too proud to be seen with an all-ages title but really a little bit of Goth Zelda.
Any more of this and I’ll have to co-brand my final newsletter with Pushing Buttons, so let’s end it here.
What’s the best example you’ve seen of tech providing a truly valuable positive change to the world in your time in that gig? – Steve Parks
In my professional life, the answer is unquestionably machine transcription. It’s not flashy, but being able to generate a flawed real-time transcript of a recording of an interview is genuinely transformative to reporting, speeding up the work of turning an idea into a published news story by hours.
More broadly, I think a similar answer is the rise of machine translation. These tools have improved slowly and consistently over the past 20 years to the point that significant sections of humanity can now communicate with each other, basically intelligibly, in near-real-time. One of the most interesting outcomes of which is that, at least in the short term, nothing really has changed. Language proficiency is still valuable, people still largely consume content in their own language or professionally translated, and there has not been an enormous merging of online communities into one enormous global melange.
Maybe that will come? Or maybe this science-fiction turned fact technology will continue to be mostly useful for making my holidays smoother and letting me read funny Bluesky posts from Japan.
What’s next? – 17 different readers, thank you all
After 11 years at the Guardian, I’m not leaping straight into the next thing, and I’ll be taking the next six weeks off. Until then, you can keep in touch with me on some of the weirder social networks like Bluesky or Backloggd; I won’t return to writing a weekly newsletter any time soon, but if you’re interested in an infrequent update on where I’ve published stories, I intend to put the odd roundup on my dormant Substack.
I’ve met so many readers of TechScape over the years, and been overjoyed every time. Thank you to everyone who’s read, emailed, or shared a story, and stick around – there are some great writers lined up to take over.