Jul 01, 2025
As AI integration accelerates across sectors in 2025, a cultural split is emerging: between those swept up in passive adoption, and those pushing back, demanding greater control, transparency, and intentionality. We’re essentially seeing people reassert their right to shape their technological environments, rather than simply existing within them. Crucially, we’re seeing the conversation move beyond convenience and efficiency, towards a values-based approach. Reclaiming agency over technology is a way to ensure progress serves people, rather than the other way around.
Where It’s Going: Technological Agency is becoming a line in the sand. In 2025, there is no neutral stance to take in this space, and you can’t opt out of the conversation. If you don’t make conscious choices about the tools you use, the tide will carry you anyway. Choosing how to engage with tech is crucial.
In response to growing concerns about corporate control over digital spaces, Free Our Feeds is building an independent foundation to decentralise the social web. Centred on the AT Protocol (the open-source scaffolding behind Bluesky), the project aims to create a healthy, interconnected social media ecosystem that isn’t governed by billionaires or tech giants. By funding projects like IndieSky, which builds tools and infrastructure for people-powered platforms, Free Our Feeds is laying the groundwork for an internet that puts users in control.
So What: Free Our Feeds hopes to reclaim ownership of the systems that mediate our speech, identity, and connection. It’s also a nudge to interrogate our digital dependencies. What tools do you use? Do they serve you and your mission? Where can we collaborate on alternative infrastructures, rather than renting space on extractive ones?
Microsoft Artifacts explore how AI can expand artistic expression while remaining rooted in human imagination. It saw creatives partner with open-source AI tools to spark a broader conversation about AI’s role in the future of art.
The Information Commissioner’s Office has a live AI Toolkit, which gives practical support for organisations to reduce the data risks associated with their AI use, particularly where it could interfere with employee rights to data privacy.
This new iPad case comes with a smart ring that measures your vitals – so that if you die, the smart ring can send a signal to the case to brick the iPad and ensure all data is wiped. Yes, it’s satire. But yes, it also is available for sale.