The big noise in tech this year was the sound of trends dying and eras concluding, Axios' Scott Rosenberg writes.

The big picture: Tech's 20-year run of mad growth, fueled for much of that time by easy money, came to a crashing halt in 2022 as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates to fight inflation.

• That left large tech companies scrambling to lay off workers and startups desperately hoarding their remaining cash. The industry hadn't seen anything like this since the turn-of-the-millennium's dotcom bust.

The era of social media seemed to expire in front of our eyes, too.

• TikTok's dominance among younger users suggested an online future focused less on one's personal network and more on content selected by a fiendishly efficient algorithm to snare your attention.
• Facebook, now Meta, doubled down on a 3D metaverse future and restructured its news feed to be more like TikTok.
• Twitter sold itself to Elon Musk. As he fired more than half the company's staff, many users held premature death vigils for a service they feared would abruptly crash — but Twitter's end is more likely to come via a long, slow decline.

The techlash's final throes also played out in 2022.

• A long-term effort by the U.S. government to rein in tech's giants started with thunderous Hill hearings and cries of "Break up Facebook!" five years ago and ended in legislative paralysis, with Congress failing to pass any significant new laws curtailing the tech industry's power.
• Fear of government action has probably checked some further consolidations of power by Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. But regulatory lawsuits are slow and uncertain, and the companies' war chests easily absorbed even hefty fines and legal fees.
• The states and the Supreme Court could still make life hard for these giants. But overall, tech's leaders continue to worry less about government action than about the rise of new competitors and mass changes in user behavior.

The cryptocurrency boom was another big tech trend that 2022 halted in its tracks.

• Crypto's "winter" began with the market collapse last spring and deepened with the implosion of FTX in the fall.
• Bitcoin believers and blockchain enthusiasts still predict that another spring awaits this technology, but many observers see only more ruin ahead.

Of note: In this environment, even bedrock internet institutions suddenly look vulnerable.

• Some saw a threat to the dominance of Google search in the rise of OpenAI's ChatGPT bot.
• ChatGPT, some observers argued, could replace the venerable search engine by answering users' questions more fluidly — if less accurately.

Yes, but: In this year of endings, some key dimensions of tech held firm.

• The smartphone era may be mature, and some visionaries dream of what might replace it. But the phone remains our universal interface to the digital realm — and an essential tool for living.
• Getting and staying connected to the network continues to be a prerequisite for doing almost anything. Even in remote wildernesses, Apple is promising your newest-model iPhone can tap a satellite to summon help.

What's next: With so many final chapters being drafted around us, it can be hard to spy new beginnings.

• Many of tech's possible next chapters — like connected VR worlds and AR overlays and quantum-computing breakthroughs — will take time to unfold.
• Tech's most-likely-to-explode-soon bet is on AI, where widely available services to analyze data and generate content keep improving at astonishing rates.
• Be smart: The biggest companies still employ many of the best AI researchers and control the biggest pools of data to train their models.

The bottom line: The pandemic temporarily ballooned growth estimates for companies providing remote access and on-demand services, and 2022 forced many of them to make painful cuts.

• But the COVID era taught the industry a lesson that still holds: While the tech economy may be an endless boom-bust cycle, the curve of change driven by computing and digital communications just keeps ascending.

Twitter has stopped paying the rent on some of its office leases and hasn't paid numerous other vendors since Elon Musk acquired the company in late October, multiple sources told Axios' Dan Primack.

Why it matters: One of the world's richest men isn't honoring financial obligations made to those with far fewer resources.

Axios has obtained emails between Twitter employees and several frustrated landlords, who could be best described as getting the run-around.

• In some cases, the landlords offered lease termination deals whereby Twitter wouldn't owe the full amount, but were rebuffed.

One major issue seems to be that many of the landlords' contacts at Twitter have either been fired or quit, leaving behind junior staffers who are trying to catch up.

• But the delinquency is so widespread that some believe it's de facto policy under Musk, as suggested in a New York Times report about how the company's new owner is seeking to cut costs.

What they're saying: Bill Reynolds, a Colorado landlord who leased Twitter around 40,000 square feet in Boulder, tells Axios: "If you don't pay, you don't stay. They aren't paying, so they aren't staying."

• Twitter no longer has a communications team or other spokespeople for Axios to contact for comment.

More than a week after a ransomware attack sparked the shutdown of servers at cloud and email-hosting provider Rackspace Technology, questions are still rising and its customer base is growing frustrated, Axios' Sam Sabin reports.

The big picture: Experts tell Axios that corporate ransomware victims face a tough dilemma: Sharing too much info risks it being weaponized in lawsuits or ruining negotiations with attackers. Not sharing enough could lead to customer outrage or even a mass exodus.

Driving the news: Over the weekend, Rackspace released more details about how it's responding to a Dec. 2 attack that prompted the shutdown of its Hosted Exchange servers, leaving thousands of small- to medium-sized businesses without access to their email inboxes.

• It hired incident response firm CrowdStrike, got two-thirds of affected customers set up with alternative email services, and ensured that any emails archived before the attack were safe.
• But some customers tell Axios they still haven't received any word about whether the company will be able to bring their servers back online or what data, if any, hackers have stolen.

Why it matters: How a company responds to an ongoing security event can have a serious impact on its short-term business and any litigation outcome or regulatory reviews that come from the incident.

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Trading Places

• Kevin Goldsmith, formerly of Spotify, Adobe and Microsoft, has joined music startup DistroKid as CTO.

ICYMI

• Apple plans to allow third-party app stores for users in the EU starting with iOS 17 next year, but may look for alternate means to approve apps' access to sensitive features, Bloomberg reported, citing sources.
• Twitter may require users to allow personalized ads in an effort to boost ad revenue. (Platformer)
• Instagram is adding support for text-based notes as well as a new candid feature that aims to replicate popular social app BeReal. (TechCrunch)

Sure, it's fun to doodle in a notebook, but what cartoonist Luigi Kemo does with lined notebooks is out of this world.