2015 to 2026: the tech news cycle, then and now🔗

Listening back to a tech news show from 2015–2017 is a peculiar experience. You know how every cliffhanger resolves. Some of the era's biggest stories evaporated; others quietly became the world we live in.

What vanished🔗

The VR land-grab. For a stretch of 2015–2016, every other headline was a headset. The breathless "this changes everything" energy around Oculus simply isn't there anymore. VR found a niche; it did not eat the living room.

The IoT everything-rush. "We put a chip in it" was a complete product pitch in 2016. The fridge that tweets, the bin that emails. Most of it is gone, and the warnings the show aired about an IoT bubble look prophetic.

GTA modders vs. Rockstar. Print-the-Legend drone drama. The "Google Tax." Genuine front-page stories at the time, now trivia. The half-life of a tech controversy is shorter than anyone admits.

What stuck🔗

The platform power questions. Apple's move into streaming, the GST-on-overseas-purchases fight, who controls the pipes: those debates didn't resolve, they escalated. The 2026 version is louder, but it's the same argument.

Encryption and surveillance. The crypto-wars beat the show covered never ended. It just changed acronyms.

Teaching kids to code. A recurring, almost romantic theme across the run. Nine years later the question got more complicated, not less, because the thing kids might need to learn keeps moving.

What changed about the cycle itself🔗

The biggest difference isn't the stories, it's the speed and the source. In 2016 a tech podcast could cover "the week's news" and feel complete. In 2026 the news is continuous, algorithmic, and increasingly written by the same machines it reports on.

Which is the quiet joke of this whole archive: a show about the future, recovered from a forgotten S3 bucket, transcribed by an AI, and republished for an audience that now takes that sentence for granted.

The future got here. Go listen to the run-up.