Every year, Mary Meeker, a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, releases the Internet Trends Report.

It is massively influential in the start-up/tech entrepreneur world. It’s seen as The Bible for investment in the sector and Meeker is known as the Oracle.

The 2018 edition is a gigantic 294 slides of data. For people who want general breakdowns of all those slides, I can recommend looking at Recode and Techcrunch. I’d also recommend this Inception-esque article from Nieman Labs on the underlying economics of media advertising — newspapers didn’t simply die, they were killed off by mobile.

For those of us who aren’t looking to invest in tech companies (or buy up ailing newspapers) in the next 12 months, I thought it would be useful to pull out the trends that are likely to impact politics and society more broadly.

1. Immigrants (potentially) have a powerful ally in the tech sector.

More than half of the most highly valued tech companies in the U.S. are founded by first- or second-generation immigrants.

Uber, Tesla, WeWork and Wish all have first-generation founders. Add to that the chronic shortage of highly specialized technical workers needed to build and update digital products, and Silicon Valley could be a massively influential lobby for pro-immigrant legislation.

Google was actually the top spender lobbyist in Washington in 2017, the first time a tech company has topped the list. All the major tech companies have already publicly condemned Donald Trump’s immigration policies when the Muslim Ban was announced in January.

Not only are these massively well resourced organisations, they are also desperately in need of a win after being embroiled in the fake news debate, massive cryptosecurity breaches like WannaCry, the anti-trust drumbeat building on both sides of the Atlantic, and now the immediate implications of GDPR.

Fighting the good fight on immigration would be win-win — give most of Big Tech’s detractors a good story to talk about and ensure the pipeline to talent stays open.

2. China is drawing level with the US.

Currently, China is home to nine of the world’s 20 biggest internet companies while the U.S. has 11. Five years ago, China had two and the U.S. had nine. What’s changed?

“The digital world relies on data, and no one produces more of it than China’s 1.4 billion internet users.” A strong point made by Christopher Balding in a piece for Bloomberg back in March, though it’s only part of the story. In the Internet Trends Report, 38% of Chinese survey respondents were willing to trade their data for better products, compared to 25% of American respondents. And that suggests the balance of power in tech (as in so many other sectors) could well shift decisively in the next few years.

The emerging AI sector — which most analysts think will be the key driver of tech growth in the coming decades — also looks likely to be totally dominated by China, who have set aside $320 billion to become world leaders by 2030. (Europe is way behind, except in terms of path-setting regulation).

3. Disruption comes at you fast when you’re not a robot.

It took about 100 years for people to adopt the telephone. It took 60 years until stoves were commonplace. The consumer internet has hit saturation point in less than a decade. This has profound consequences for how society adapts to new technology. Hundreds of millions of people moved from agricultural jobs to services in the 1900s. What comes next?

With the rapid advance of futuristic sounding advances like automation and machine learning, as well corporations that cut out the middle men using technology, the way we work will again face upheaval. The Uber-ization of the workforce looks set to continue apace.

In the USA, the freelance workforce has grown by 8.1% since 2014 (overall workforce growth = 2.5%) as millions of people have already moved to on-demand work. This is, to put it mildly, very concerning considering the record on workers’ rights from these sorts of companies. Anybody remember #DeleteUber? 2017 feels like a very long time ago.

4. GDPR vs product designers.

This one is interesting in that the information Meeker supplies underlines the techlash narrative we’ve heard so much about over the past 12 months.

Digital product design has always been fundamentally based on collecting user data. UX designers use it to work out how users interact with products and engineers use it to figure out exactly how quickly things need to load before users give up. User data is the basis of the constant testing and iteration that has underpinned the development of some of the most popular products ever created.

But now users are demanding that their data not be used for that. They only want their data used for specific, pre-defined purposes and now they have the GDPR to back them up. 64% of survey respondents reported simply deleting their apps in response to data privacy concerns — that’s only going to get worse. How do tech companies provide better customer experiences without their go-to tool for measuring and iterating? How do tech companies convince users to trust them without using the feedback loops that got them into this mess in the first place?