 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
The West Central Tribune reports... The Willmar City Council on Monday, Jan. 5, is expected to consider awarding the bid for the construction of phase one of the Willmar Connect initiative to construct a city-owned, open-access broadband network. At the Dec. 15 City Council meeting, Bob Enos was joined by approximately 10 people to speak against the initiative. Enos…
Stock bears are turning up the heat on Trump Media as short sellers crowd into the trade after a sharp rally tied to a merger announcement, according to data from S3 Partners. The surge in bearish bets shows traders are bracing for losses after a fast jump in the stock that followed a $6 billion deal tied to energy and artificial intelligence. Shares of Trump Media climbed more than 30% after December 18, when the company said it would merge with Google-backed TAE Technologies in an all-stock transaction. The stock ran even harder right after the news, jumping as much as 63% over two trading days. Since Cryptopolitan reported the announcement, short interest has jumped 31% to nearly 16 million shares, close to the highest level seen since October. After the stock rose another 4% on Friday to $13.77, those short positions were worth about $218 million in bets that the price would fall, according to data from Yahoo Finance.
Finnish authorities have arrested two people as they continue to investigate damage to an undersea telecommunications cable in the Gulf of Finland. The two were part of the crew aboard the cargo vessel, Fitburg, which is suspected of damaging a cable linking Helsinki, Finland, and Tallinn, Estonia. Authorities placed two other crew members under travel bans as part of the ongoing investigation and had begun questioning all crew members.
Starlink owner SpaceX has called on South Africans interested in its satellite broadband services to email ICASA to voice their support. Starlink owner SpaceX says claims that it will receive special treatment or workarounds to Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) laws are misleading. In an email sent to people in South Africa who expressed interest in buying Starlink services, SpaceX said that it was one step closer to becoming available in the country. “South Africa is closer than ever to a transformative digital breakthrough,” SpaceX stated in its letter, sent on Friday, 2 January 2026.
There was a time when most Americans had little to no knowledge about their local data center. Long the invisible but critical backbone of the internet, server farms have rarely been a point of interest for folks outside of the tech industry, let alone an issue of particularly captivating political resonance. Well, as of 2025, it would appear those days are officially over. Over the past 12 months, data centers have inspired protests in dozens of states, as regional activists have sought to combat America’s ever-increasing compute buildup. Data Center Watch, an organization tracking anti-data center activism, writes that there are currently 142 different activist groups across 24 states that are organizing against data center developments. Activists have a variety of concerns: the environmental and potential health impacts of these projects, the controversial ways in which AI is being used, and, most importantly, the fact that so many new additions to America’s power grid may be driving up local electricity bills.
As we head into 2026, the Trump Mobile T1 phone is still vaporware. Preorders for the phone opened in June ahead of a promised ship date of August or September. That timeline first got pushed to October and then to November or December. It's now been delayed once again and won't launch in 2025, the Financial Times reports. Trump Mobile's customer service team blamed the latest delay on the US government shutdown, which lasted from Oct. 1 to Nov. 12. Another customer service rep told Fortune the same thing, adding that the shutdown meant Trump Mobile "had to pause everything on the FCC side of things." They estimated a launch of mid to late January.
Construction will be paused for 90 days as Trump's "Department of War" and Interior Department coordinate to evaluate supposed "national security" risks. The Interior Department announced Monday it is pausing leases for all five large-scale offshore wind projects under construction in America, citing unspecified issues of national security. Canary Media obtained a copy of a letter notifying one of the affected wind farm developers, providing new details about the move — the Trump administration’s most sweeping attempt yet to halt offshore wind construction.
Accelerated growth continues to define the data center industry, driven by surging demand for operational capacity across the Americas. First highlighted in our 2025 Global Data Center Market Comparison, this trend has only intensified, with no signs of slowing. Most demand in the Americas remains concentrated in the continental United States. Power constraints remain a critical challenge, with utility availability playing a key role in site selection for hyperscalers and large colocation projects. Across many markets in the Americas, utility power queues are swelling, delivery timelines are lengthening, and interconnection requests are rising. These pressures are driven by the rapid expansion of AI, high-performance computing (HPC), neocloud, and GPU-as-a-service data center projects.
What’s happening in 2026 makes even the interstate highway system and the moon landing look small. Across the next three years, the world will pour more than four hundred billion dollars into building the physical backbone of artificial intelligence—data centers, semiconductor plants, and energy systems big enough to power small nations. The scale of construction is unlike anything modern industry has seen. This isn’t another tech bubble. It’s a complete rebuild of digital civilization. Every major government and tech giant now treats AI infrastructure as a matter of national security and long-term competitiveness. The race to expand compute power and secure energy capacity has drawn comparisons to the Cold War space race, except this time, the launchpads are steel-framed data halls rising from fields in Virginia, Texas, and Ohio.
We are about to get a “post-American internet,” because we are entering a post-American era and a post-American world. Some of that is Trump’s doing, and some of that is down to his predecessors. When we think about the American century, we rightly focus on America’s hard power — the invasions, military bases, arms exports, and CIA coups. But it’s America’s soft power that established and maintained true American dominance, the “weaponized interdependence” that Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe in their 2023 book The Underground Empire: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties As Farrell and Newman lay out, America established itself as a more than a global power — it is a global platform. If you want to buy things from another country, you use dollars, which you keep in an account at the US Federal Reserve, and which you exchange using the US-dominated SWIFT system. If you want to transmit data across a border, chances were you’re use a fiber link that makes its first landfall on the USA, the global center of the world’s hub-and-spoke telecoms system. No one serious truly believed that these US systems were entirely trustworthy, but there was always an assumption that if the US were to instrumentalize (or, less charitably, weaponize) the dollar, or fiber, that they would do so subtly, selectively, and judiciously. Instead, we got the Snowden revelations that the US was using its position in the center of the world’s fiber web to spy on pretty much every person in the world — lords and peasants, presidents and peons.
As federal AI legislation remains stalled, states like California and Texas are stepping forward with distinct—sometimes conflicting—approaches to AI regulation. In California, policymakers are focused on preventing “irreversible harms” from AI, with strong emphasis on fairness, disinformation, and high-risk use cases. In contrast, Texas has already passed the Responsible AI Governance Act, which codifies AI documentation, transparency, and red-teaming requirements into law by 2026. Together, these approaches highlight a new reality: AI governance is no longer theoretical, and regulation is coming from the ground up.
The Trump scandals can be overwhelming, but as I argue in this piece, his corruption is enabled by media consolidation. We tend to think of antitrust and corruption in separate buckets, but the Jimmy Kimmel scandal shows how concentrated control over information becomes the ground on which corruption thrives. It’s time to break up Big Media, Big Tech, and the Big Money finance system that binds them together.
The real threat to liberal democracy isn’t authoritarianism—it’s nationalist oligarchy. Here’s how American foreign policy should change.
|
If AI ruins our civilization, it will be because we asked it to. For years, AI safety researchers have wrung their hands—and rung alarm bells—over the impending “existential risk” or even “extinction threat” posed by artificial superintelligence. Meanwhile, labor market analysts warn of an impending deluge of joblessness as bots take over everything from filing lawsuits to waiting tables. Thus far, such worries can seem like shrill sci-fi fantasies when, for many, ChatGPT is used mostly for homework help or writing break-up letters. But what if this is the real existential risk—not a Terminator-style robot coup but a slow-motion cultural death by a thousand cuts?
- Elon Musk’s xAI faced backlash for recent Grok chatbot posts of artificial intelligence-generated sexualized images of children on X.
- The company responded to a request for comment with an autoreply: “Legacy Media Lies.”
- The proliferation of AI image-generating platforms since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 has raised concerns over content manipulation and online safety.
Elon Musk’s xAI saw user backlash after its artificial intelligence chatbot Grok generated sexualized pictures of children in response to user prompts. A Grok reply to one user on X on Friday stated that it was “urgently fixing” the issue and called child sexual abuse material “illegal and prohibited.” In replies to users, the bot also posted that a company could face criminal or civil penalties if it knowingly facilitates or fails to prevent this type of content after being alerted.
KFGO reports... Starlink will begin a reconfiguration of its satellite constellation by lowering all of its satellites orbiting at around 550 km (342 miles) to 480 km over the course of 2026, Michael Nicolls, SpaceX’s vice president of Starlink engineering, said on Thursday. The company is looking to increase space safety by lowering the satellites’…
While the internet has become an essential part of many Americans’ daily lives, some people in rural and underserved communities still lack access to high-speed broadband and the digital skills necessary to use it. Historic investments such as the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment, or BEAD, program present opportunities for states to move closer to universal connectivity. But uncertainty around federal changes to these programs and challenges such as infrastructure regulation can be barriers to deployment. This year, state legislatures continued efforts to close the digital divide, which the Pew Research Center defines as the gap between the 78% of households that have access to broadband service in their homes and the remainder that do not. NCSL tracked more than 600 broadband bills from 51 states and territories in 2025, with 45 states and territories enacting 139 bills and resolutions on the topic. NCSL saw trends in four key sectors of broadband policy: infrastructure regulation, critical infrastructure protections, state broadband funding, and assistance for rural and low-income communities.
The massive energy needs of artificial intelligence data centers became a major political controversy in 2025, and new reporting suggests that it will grow even further in 2026. CNBC reported on Thursday that data center projects have become political lightning rods among politicians ranging from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on the left to Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on the right. However, objections to data centers aren’t just coming from politicians but from ordinary citizens who are worried about the impact such projects will have on their local environment and their utility bills.
A friend of mine, Frederick Pilot, recently asked me an interesting question. Is digital literacy that comes from using a smartphone the same as digital literacy from using a computer? It’s a great question, because the majority of Internet users in the world only have broadband access through a smartphone. In developing nations, 90% of broadband users only have access to a smartphone. In the U.S., 16% of adults only use a smartphone to reach the Internet.
Despite all the hype, overall global nuclear capacity shrunk in 2025 as retirements outstripped additions. Still, the sector could rebound in the coming years. For press releases, policy changes, and promises to build new nuclear power, 2025 was a gangbusters year. For actually adding new reactors to the grid, not so much. In fact, around the world, more gigawatts’ worth of nuclear reactors were retired than turned on this year, according to new data from the consultancy BloombergNEF.
A team of researchers at Epoch AI, a non-profit research institute, are using open-source intelligence to map the growth of America’s datacenters. The team pores over satellite imagery, building permits, and other local legal documents to build a map of the massive computer filled buildings springing up across the United States. They take that data and turn it into an interactive map that lists their costs, power output, and owners. Massive datacenter construction projects are a growing and controversial industry in America. Silicon Valley and the Trump administration are betting the entire American economy on the continued growth of AI, a mission that’ll require spending billions of dollars on datacenters and new energy infrastructure. Epoch AI’s maps act as a central repository of information about the noisy and water hungry buildings growing in our communities.
We’ve been hearing the same mantra for years now: AI will change everything. And yes, some things will change. But what hasn’t changed, and this is what’s really interesting, is the old-school political economy that sustains AI: the way its infrastructure is being built, how it’s being paid for, and the perverse incentives to make it all happen. Because when an industry needs obscene amounts of electricity and capital to grow, what we see is not the future, but the same old old story of financial engineering, environmental factors and a geopolitical regulatory free-for-all. Let’s start with the power source.
NPR health and science correspondents Rob Stein and Katia Riddle chat with host Emily Kwong about what these cuts could mean for the future of science. Science in the United States took some big hits this year. The Trump Administration disrupted federal funding for all kinds of scientific pursuits. Administration officials say those changes were a step towards reinvigorating federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health. But many scientists disagree.
The AI boom has caused as much carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere in 2025 as emitted by the whole of New York City, it has been claimed. The global environmental impact of the rapidly spreading technology has been estimated in research published on Wednesday, which also found that AI-related water use now exceeds the entirety of global bottled-water demand. The figures have been compiled by the Dutch academic Alex de Vries-Gao, the founder of Digiconomist, a company that researches the unintended consequences of digital trends. He claimed they were the first attempt to measure the specific effect of artificial intelligence rather than datacentres in general as the use of chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini soared in 2025. The figures show the estimated greenhouse gas emissions from AI use are also now equivalent to more than 8% of global aviation emissions. His study used technology companies’ own reporting and he called for stricter requirements for them to be more transparent about their climate impact.
“One of the most ‘democratic’ republics in the world is the United States of America, yet nowhere is the power of capital, the power of a handful of multimillionaires over the whole of society, so crude and so openly corrupt as in America. Once capital exists, it dominates the whole of society.” – V.I. Lenin, 1919 Last November, four days after the presidential election, Fox News personality Jimmy Failla said Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris because he had a “secret weapon.” That weapon? The working class, at least according to Failla. In this commentator’s telling, Trump “connected with working-class voters on unprecedented levels…at a time when far too many people feel ignored by Washington elites.” The same narrative was being pushed again on Inauguration Day, with split-screen coverage on right-wing social media contrasting Democratic Party lawmakers in their stuffy-looking suits on one side and everyday Americans in their Carhartt hoodies and blue jeans on the other, eating hot dogs and popcorn as they awaited Trump’s arrival at Capital One Arena. The message was clear: Trump fights the “political establishment” to lift up the masses, those who work for a living and struggle to get by. If we’re being honest, we must admit that Failla, Fox News, and the rest of the far-right echo chamber aren’t telling a complete lie. There’s no denying Trump managed to lock in the support of a substantial number of working-class Americans (mostly but by no means exclusively white ones)—otherwise, there’s no way he could have scored 77 million votes. But to argue that Trump is the workers’ champion, that he’s a warrior battling the powerful and wealthy on behalf of the rest of us? That’s where the story completely falls apart.
|
