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The holidays are a time for reflection, but lately I’ve been overthinking things: Over the past few weeks, I’ve listened to a playlist of my top songs via Spotify “Wrapped,” revisited my summer-long job hunt on LinkedIn’s Year in Review, and ruminated on my crossword abilities with The New York Times’ Year in Games feature. In 2025, there seem to be more of these data interpolators than ever: The event-planning service Partiful invites users to an After Party, revealing the people they socialized with the most this year. Your Year With ChatGPT lets us see how many em dashes we exchanged with AI. There’s also PlayStation’s Wrap-Up, Goodreads’ Year in Books, and Years in Review for Duolingo, Letterboxd, and Oura. Even Untappd, a social network for beer enthusiasts, has a year-end wrap-up called Recappd.
The wrap-up tradition has been around for a number of years, but what was once a cheeky bit of marketing has now expanded into a full-blown season of its own. In today’s internet landscape, personalization is the coin of the realm: Search results, on-site advertisements, and social feeds are all tailored to users’ precise desires based on their behaviors. During recap season, those behaviors themselves become the product. Data typically reserved for in-house analytics teams are suddenly interesting in and of themselves—and reviewing those data can be fun, until we’re reminded just how much we’re tracked, and just how valuable our data are to companies’ bottom line.
Because the market for year-end-data visualization has become so bloated, and because consumers now practically expect their digital habits to be condensed and repackaged, products and services that really needn’t be “wrapped” are being contorted into the format. For the past few years, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority has issued a Metro Rewind, totaling commuters’ top bus and railway stops. The goal, according to a press release, is nothing less than “transforming each person’s transit history into a vivid, shareable snapshot that captures how you move across the region.” No data set is too mundane for this treatment: The cloud-storage service Google One sent out a Year in Review telling users how much of their allotted storage they’ve used up, and reminding them how long they’ve been subscribed.
But the year-end recaps that seem to work best are the ones that give people something they actually want. In the case of Spotify Wrapped, the promotional blitz is productive both for the company collecting the data and for the user. Wrapped is a glorified ad for Spotify’s ability to make money off its users’ data, but it also comes with a host of features that are actually useful. I look forward to Spotify Wrapped because it leaves me with a playlist full of my favorite songs of the year and lets me compare my songs against my friends’. But as more companies scramble to turn wonky user data into something slick and shareable, the utility and the joy get harder to see: Do we really need a readout of the Metro stops that our friends are visiting most frequently?
What it does reveal isn’t always enjoyable, either. I consider each order placed on a food-delivery app to be a personal failing on my part, but Uber Eats’ “YOUBER” attempts to celebrate those late-night moments of laziness and capitulation. At their best, personalized year-end recaps find the fun in data. But the story of a meal—even a memorable one shared with friends—can’t be told in flat numbers. And it’s a good thing that Strava’s Year in Sport is reserved for paying subscribers, since I know I’d bristle when confronted with all of the days I failed to run this year.
Spotify says that “your Wrapped is a reflection of you: unparalleled and unmistakably personal.” But the idea that such limited data can offer that level of access is a convenient fiction. These features can also reflect what users want them to: As recaps have become a yearly expectation, some people have found ways to alter their digital footprints, cherry-picking the kinds of media (books on Goodreads, movies on Letterboxd, music on Spotify) that might reflect refinement and taste when it comes time to share. “Just as the machine tailors itself to us, we try to tailor ourselves to it,” my colleague Nancy Walecki wrote in a 2023 reflection on Spotify Wrapped. Enthusiasts like to debate when exactly Spotify stops tracking user behavior, and which weeks out of the year might not count for the following year’s edition. This year, Spotify tracked listening habits from January to mid-November, which means it’s entirely possible that mid-November through December is unsurveilled time. “Safe months to listen to your guilty pleasures,” a Mashable article once called this indeterminate period.
In 2025, surveillance is no revelation. We choose to surrender our valuable data to certain apps because we accept that the products are worth it. And, in many cases, when those annual recaps arrive, we welcome them. But it helps when companies give us something to make those concessions a little easier to tolerate. Hence the bargain I make with Spotify each year. Still, I relish what little chance I get to evade the watchful eyes of these data collectors. We have another full week before the tracking for next year’s reviews kicks off—and then we’ll do it all over again.
Related:
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- Do your parents have a screen-time problem?
- House Republicans aren’t having any fun.
- Adam Serwer: Cancel culture’s boomerang effect
- Franklin Foer: J. D. Vance fails a simple moral test.
Today’s News
- The Justice Department released a second batch of Jeffrey Epstein–related files yesterday that contain multiple references to President Donald Trump—including flight records and a subpoena sent to Mar-a-Lago—and warned that some claims against Trump in the documents are “untrue and sensationalist.” The files were briefly taken down from the DOJ website before being reposted late last night.
- The U.S. economy grew at a 4.3 percent annual rate in the third quarter, the strongest pace in two years, according to a report whose release was delayed by the recent government shutdown, the Commerce Department said.
- The Trump administration will begin garnishing the pay of student-loan borrowers in default starting the week of January 7; about 1,000 notices will go out first and more will follow, the Department of Education said.
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Evening Read
‘It’s Very Controversial, but I Love Nick Fuentes’
By Ali Breland
When I rode the escalator into the lobby of the Phoenix Convention Center on Thursday, one of the first things I saw was a two-story-tall picture of Charlie Kirk with his arm reaching out to the sky …
AmericaFest has long been one of the biggest events on the right, but this year, the conference saw a record turnout of roughly 30,000. When I asked attendees why they had decided to come, they invariably told me that they were there “because of Charlie.” Many of the most prominent influencers and politicians in MAGA world spoke at the event, including Vice President J. D. Vance, Donald Trump Jr., and Steve Bannon. Almost all invoked his memory onstage. When Speaker of the House Mike Johnson spoke of erecting a statue of Kirk in the United States Capitol, the crowd broke out into “Charlie” chants. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton compared Kirk to Jesus.
But during my four days at AmericaFest, I noticed that something else was also casting a shadow over the conference. Everyone had come to unite around Kirk, but they kept fighting about Nick Fuentes.
Culture Break
Take a look. Every story The Atlantic publishes includes art that provides readers with another lens through which they can understand and experience a given subject or idea. Here’s a collection of The Atlantic art department’s favorite images of the year.
Listen. These are the 20 best podcasts of 2025, Benjamin Cannon writes.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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