Hard Reset's Top Ten Posts of 2025
The reporting that defined our year: A.I., labor, economics and tech’s political swerve
It was just about a year ago when the first idea for what would become Hard Reset began germinating. When we published our first newsletter in February, we wrote that we hoped to fill a void, as “the once robust world of tech activism and dissent — walkouts, internal protests, defections — has gone underground, along with the thriving media ecosystem that used to shine a light on it.”
The mainstream press, under threat as ever and slow-footed by nature, wasn’t always meeting the moment. In this environment, independent newsletters seemed like a sensible alternative.
A year later, we’re proud of what we’ve built here. We’ve grown from two writers to four, have hosted events in San Francisco and New York, and have built a large network of dedicated and engaged subscribers. And there is has been so much to write about in a year that has marked a shift — culturally, politically, economically. Even a scan of the headlines from this time last year seems like a blast from a different era: “TikTok Faces U.S. Ban…” “Big Tech Remains Top Priority for DOJ and FTC in Antitrust Litigation…“Tech Takes a Legal Beating.”
For this week’s newsletter, we wanted to run down some of Hard Reset’s top posts of 2025.
NDAs and free will (March) Ariella Steinhorn’s post about non-disclosure agreements, especially those used to silence workers after traumatic workplace experiences, was one of our first posts to go “viral.” We don’t aim for virality here but certainly appreciate when our posts travel far and wide — whether from readers’ sharing them, links in other publications, or some twist of fortune from the algorithm overlords.
Nope, Killing People Isn’t Cool (March) William Fitzgerald, with his background as a Google employee turned activist and founder, brings a different perspective than many journalists when writing about the industry. This opinion piece he wrote gained traction with its succinct message, as he examined how a one-time taboo against military work in Silicon Valley had shifted.
The world is way too complicated to model (May) Ariella’s interview with former tech worker Juan Sebastián Pinto remains one of our most read pieces of the year. He told her how he grew uncomfortable with his work for Palantir as he “saw how artificial intelligence was being used to wage warfare through sensors, surveillance, computers, and automated decisions.”
Ex-Tesla manager dishes on the company and his unceremonious dismissal (June) During Elon Musk’s blitz in Washington at the beginning of the Trump term, one particularly idealistic Tesla sales employee, Matthew LaBrot watched with despair as the company’s fortunes seemed to sink lower with every bombastic tweet or appearance. Motivated by what LaBrot says was not animus as much as concern for the company and its mission to electrify the world, he published an anonymous letter for other workers to sign that argued that the CEO was hurting the company’s image and tanking sales, urging Tesla to move on without him. LaBrot was fired within two days. The interview we did with him made a splash, drawing coverage in outlets like Futurism, Electrek, Yahoo and others, with perhaps most attention to his succinct summation of the company’s car business: “They’re absolutely hosed.”
One NZ man vs. Pakistani scammers making millions on fake ghostwriting deals (June) Ariella’s interview with a New Zealand–based fraud investigator, Danny de Hek, about the sprawling network of ghostwriting and book-publishing scams run largely out of Pakistan, remains our most read piece ever. It looked at how cheap labor, digital tools, and weak enforcement have turned literary fraud into a booming business — a parable for a scam heavy era where it is increasingly difficult to tell what is real or not online.
More Perfect Union is rising. Founder and Bernie advisor Faiz Shakir talked to us about why. (August) It’s almost trite at this point to talk about how the news industry has suffered since the emergence of Big Tech. But leftist media startup More Perfect Union is thriving. Founded by longtime Bernie Sanders advisor Faiz Shakir in 2021, More Perfect has carved out a distinct niche through videos that shine a light on the way that society is increasingly tilted toward the powerful — and explored the ways that populist frustration with that status quo rarely cuts cleanly in a right vs. left binary.
The Man Whose Model Predicted The Mess We’re In (October) Eli Rosenberg said he was floored a few months ago when he stumbled upon the work of Jack Goldstone and Peter Turchin, two political scientists who predicted, with stunning foresight, that inequality would lead to political chaos in the U.S. Goldstone made this prediction in a book published nearly 35 years ago, identifying greed and inequality as central ingredients in societal collapse, at a time when everyone else was talking up the “End of History.” In this interview, he talked to us about his work, and how it has started getting more attention in the U.S. recently after years when he was only consulted as an expert on unstable foreign countries.
New Court Filings Reveal Internal Communications at Meta and Snapchat (November) Alex Shultz sifted through the more than 6,000 pages of documents released as part of two major lawsuits against the big social media platforms, to find some of the most salient bits, including Meta’s internal deliberations about attracting teenagers to its platform without their parents knowing, and a similar push for 13-year-old users at Snapchat.
America’s Only AI Protections Are About to Get Bulldozed (November) A major theme of the year was A.I., a multilayered story affecting everything from local governance, to the economy, to the way we communicate, politics in Washington and beyond. We covered the bold push in D.C. to block any state-level regulation of A.I. when it first surfaced in Congress in the spring. And when Jacob Ward joined us in November, he wrote this excellent overview of the Trump administration’s effort to resurrect the policy via executive order. “Americans could soon be on an A.I. superhighway with no speed limits, no lane dividers, and no guardrails,” he wrote. “The White House is, according to a leaked draft obtained by several outlets, about to issue an executive order banning state AI laws.”
Sam Altman’s Disastrous Interview With Jimmy Fallon (December) Alex unpacked Altman’s recent appearance on Fallon’s show, which went viral for all the wrong reasons, writing that “the lack of interest in Altman as an emergent public figure, and the deeply critical reaction to his interview from those who are paying attention, is a very, very bad sign.”
Bonus: Check out Alex’s 26 (bold) Predictions for 2026, including that Sam Altman will mostly stop posting on social media, Trump figures will face more consequences for malfeasance, and that wildcat strikes will become more popular as federal labor laws face increasing legal threats.