WIRED report: The five technology and policy trends shaping 2025

Zoe Schiffer: Yes, that was another executive order issued. I think it was literally titled something about removing data silos. Another thing that sounds good on the surface: Data silos, inefficient, look bad, but there’s a really good reason to keep a lot of this information separate. You don’t necessarily want the federal government to be able to tie all of that together to track you across any platform to know your financial data, your health data, your whereabouts, all of that.

Brian Barrett: Yes. I mean the Trump administration now wants to check five years of social media if you were coming into the country just to see what you were saying. They are also looking to strip more foreign-born Americans of their citizenship. They are moving towards denationalization. The forecast for 2026 and migration is not great. It’s only going to get worse and worse. Or let’s say you’re an engineer who was born in a different country and you had the choice of going to the United States or Canada or China or somewhere else in Europe, I think that question is much harder to answer now than it was before all of this happened, I think.

Zoe Schiffer: Yes, I think that’s absolutely true. And I think we’ll have some really good reporting on that in 2026. So, as we come to the end of our 2025 recap, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the Jeffrey Epstein saga. This is a story that has lived through the lives of many over many years, but it seems to have really reached a boiling point this year, politically speaking. I think Brian, can you refresh our memory on what happened this year?

Brian Barrett: I get the easy job. Without going into the whole Jeffrey Epstein thing for many reasons. He is clearly a disgraced financier, a convicted sex offender, and the subject of numerous conspiracy theories from QAnon to the White House and its supporters. What we saw this year was a real move toward releasing the so-called Epstein files, which Donald Trump basically ran on. He said, “Look, if you get to that office, I’ll release the Epstein files. You’ll get them right once I get there.” And then we got to that point, and he got there and said, “You know what? It doesn’t matter.” There were those who said that there were no Epstein files. In fact, the Epstein Files are a hoax. Actually, no, they’re here. It was chaos.