The New York Times' podcast Hard Fork, hosted by veteran technology journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, released its highly anticipated countdown of the 50 Most Iconic Technologies of 2025 in late November 2025.
Building on the unprecedented success of their 100 Most Iconic Technologies list from the previous year—which unexpectedly became one of the podcast's most popular episodes—the hosts tackled a fresh challenge: distilling the technological landscape of a single transformative year into a curated selection of influential innovations.
The core premise of Hard Fork's ranking methodology remains refreshingly unconventional. Rather than relying solely on market capitalization, adoption metrics, or academic citations, the hosts employed what they describe as "vibes-only decision-making," a deliberately subjective approach that captures not just technologies' measurable impact but their cultural resonance and definitional role in shaping 2025.
By "iconic," the hosts consider technologies that fundamentally altered society—whether positively or negatively—or at minimum made existence more compelling and complex.
A Year Dominated by Artificial Intelligence
The 2025 selection reveals an unmistakable preoccupation with artificial intelligence and its cascading effects across technology, business, and daily life.
Multiple AI models and AI-adjacent technologies permeate the list, reflecting the year's defining reality: artificial intelligence transitioned from a specialized academic pursuit to an infrastructure challenge reshaping global economics.
ChatGPT, the household-name chatbot that catalyzed the generative AI boom in late 2022, maintains its iconic status through 2025 as the technology continues reshaping how people interact with computers. Claude, Anthropic's reasoning-capable language model, earned recognition partly due to Claude Code's projected first-year revenue of approximately one billion dollars, signaling how AI model capabilities now translate directly into commercial infrastructure.
The inclusion of DeepSeek R1, an open-source Chinese artificial intelligence model, underscores how 2025 became a pivotal year for challenging Western AI dominance. DeepSeek's November 2025 launch triggered sharp market declines across the AI value chain as investors reconsidered spending assumptions, proving that innovation geography and accessibility constitute technological significance regardless of geographic origin.youtube
The list extends beyond language models to encompass the physical infrastructure enabling these systems. Data centers achieve iconic status not as abstract concepts but as the largest coordinated infrastructure project in American history.
With companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Amazon committing hundreds of billions of dollars to construct massive computing facilities, data centers represent technological choices with geopolitical, environmental, and economic implications that transcend their underlying technical specifications.
Invisible Technologies Reshaping Reality
Hard Fork's selection process consistently privileges technologies whose importance is inversely proportional to their cultural visibility. EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) Lithography appears on the list as the essential enabler of modern AI chips, the manufacturing process without which contemporary artificial intelligence hardware cannot exist.
Similarly, Glass—particularly fiber-optic cable infrastructure—commands inclusion not for glamour but for fundamental necessity: the global internet's nervous system depends on ultra-purified silica transformed into transmissive strands.
Air Conditioning, invented in 1902 for a printing plant in Brooklyn, demonstrates how Hard Fork values technologies based on their societal reach rather than recency.
The hosts recognized that climate-controlled environments enabled workforce concentration in office spaces, reshaped residential patterns, and now face increasing strain from artificial intelligence's computational heat generation. Discussions of data center placement and power consumption inevitably circle back to cooling challenges that air conditioning technology must address.
Cultural Technologies and Unexpected Inclusions
The list balances infrastructure-level technologies with unexpected cultural artifacts. Labubus—the vinyl collectible figures created through collaboration between Pop Art and independent artist Kasing Lung—achieved global phenomenon status in 2025, with dedicated stores opening worldwide and limited editions selling out within seconds.
The inclusion of Labubus reflects how 2025 technologies encompass not just functional tools but cultural totems that organise desire, capital, and identity formation. One dedicated article about the artist who bedazzled Naomi Osaka's Labubus underscores how technology now encompasses bespoke customization and the intersection of celebrity, art, and consumer goods.
Wheat receives an unlikely spot on Hard Fork's list, reflecting recognition that ancient agricultural biotechnology remains foundational to human survival and that genetic developments in grain continue shaping global food security and economic systems.
The Infrastructure Behind Innovation
Group Chats, particularly encrypted platforms like Signal and WhatsApp, achieved new prominence in 2025 as elite decision-making migrated from public platforms to private digital spaces.
The Signalgate controversy revealed how group chats had become crucial infrastructure for political and military strategy, effectively privatizing discourse that once occurred in public forums. This technological shift has profound implications for transparency, accountability, and information asymmetries.
Nano Banana (Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash Image codename, later formally released as Gemini 3 Pro Image), an AI image generation model, earned recognition for its technical achievements in text rendering, character consistency, and instruction following—capabilities that fundamentally altered what artificial image generation could accomplish within seconds.
The model's community reception, with record-breaking voting metrics on comparison platforms, demonstrated user enthusiasm for AI image tools despite ongoing copyright and creative authenticity concerns.
The Tesla Cybertruck Phenomenon
The inclusion of Cybertruck on a list of truly iconic technologies of 2025 reflects how industrial design, electric vehicle ambitions, and technological symbolism converge.
Beyond its mechanical specifications, Cybertruck became a cultural artifact representing either technological audacity or reckless design depending on one's perspective—precisely the kind of contested significance that Hard Fork's methodology captures.
Reflecting on 2025's Technological Zeitgeist
Hard Fork's 50 Most Iconic Technologies list functions as a cultural snapshot of 2025, a year defined by accelerating AI capabilities, massive infrastructure investments, and growing anxiety about whether technological progress serves humanity's interests.
The selection process deliberately avoids valorizing innovation for its own sake. Instead, the hosts acknowledge that technologies can be revolutionary and problematic simultaneously, transformative and destructive in equal measure.
The methodology matters because it rejects the premise that technology rankings should reflect market success or venture capital backing alone.
By privileging cultural impact, infrastructure importance, and definitional significance—combined with subjective editorial judgment—Hard Fork's list captures how 2025 will likely appear to future historians: a year when artificial intelligence transitioned from emerging technology to essential infrastructure, when billion-dollar investments in data centers overshadowed traditional capital projects, and when invisible technologies mattered more than visible ones.
The episode's success reflects broader hunger for technology criticism that moves beyond either uncritical cheerleading or reflexive skepticism.
Hard Fork positions itself as a space where tough questions about AI safety coexist with genuine fascination about emerging capabilities, where infrastructure challenges matter as much as consumer products, and where acknowledging technological disruption remains compatible with curiosity about what comes next.
As 2025 concludes, this list will likely endure not as a definitive ranking but as a index to what informed observers considered worth discussing when reflecting on a transformative year.
In that sense, Hard Fork's methodology proves more valuable than any individual ranking: the act of curating, debating, and explaining what counts as iconic technology reveals more about how this moment feels than any algorithm-driven ranking could capture.
