Last week I went on Bloomberg and discussed the state of the AI bubble with a clarity that rattled even the sweatiest boosters, mostly because I spoke with clarity about an investment frenzy whipped up through hype, deceit and mythology. Some were equal parts frustrated and angry that I don’t have money in the market, or, as they’d put it, “skin in the game.”

I get it! When your entire worldview is dictated by what a series of venture capitalists and psuedo-journalists on Twitter want you to believe, it must be difficult to imagine someone having “morals” or “beliefs” or that one might hold a position that wasn’t entirely based on greed or tribalism. It must be confusing — upsetting, even! — to hear that somebody is willing to accurately and vociferously tear into a tech industry largely controlled by people with no regard for their users or workers, who are willing to bathe their products in mediocrity all because it’s the thing that everybody else is doing.

This is a hysterical era perpetuated by liars, cowards, imbeciles, craven boosters and the easily-fooled. Those excited about generative AI are either the victim or the perpetrator of a con centered around a technology to ingratiate at the highest cost possible.

Amazon has been freed from a requirement to deploy the first 1,616 satellites in its Amazon Leo broadband internet constellation by July 30.

The looming deadline had been a condition of the FCC’s 2020 license for the network, when it was known as Project Kuiper. But in January, Amazon asked for a two-year extension of that deadline, citing the limited availability of commercial launch opportunities.

Instead of pushing back July’s interim deadline, the FCC issued a conditional waiver. Amazon is still required to deploy all 3,232 of its planned Gen 1 satellites by July 30, 2029, as originally mandated. Amazon Leo currently has 331 satellites in orbit, with another 36 due for launch next week.

Famously vengeful Knicks owner Jim Dolan has long spied on people at his iconic arenas. WIRED goes deep inside the operation that allegedly tracked a trans woman, lawyers, protesters, and more.

Digital Realty has filed permits to redevelop a downtown Seattle building into a six-story data center, lab and retail project, as the City Council moves toward a one-year moratorium on new data centers.

A team inside Microsoft has been quietly building a platform for devices that run AI agents instead of apps, based on Android instead of Windows. The first two concept devices, a desktop hub and a wearable badge, are headed to pilots with some big-name businesses.

As major news outlets cut off the Wayback Machine, journalists and advocacy groups are rallying to protect the Internet Archive’s vast collection of web pages.

This month, USA Today published an excellent report that revealed how US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement delayed disclosing key information about the impacts of its detainment policies. The authors used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to compile and analyze detention statistics from ICE and track how the agency had changed under the Trump administration. The story is one of countless examples of how the Wayback Machine, which crawls and preserves web pages, has helped preserve information for the public good. It was also, Wayback Machine director Mark Graham says, “a little ironic.”

USA Today Co., the publishing conglomerate formerly known as Gannett that runs both its namesake paper and over 200 additional media outlets, bars the Wayback Machine from archiving its work. “They're able to pull together their story research because the Wayback Machine exists. At the same time, they're blocking access,” Graham says.

WASHINGTON, June 5, 2026 — Another state is set to hold an additional bidding round for locations where tentative broadband grant winners back out before signing contracts under a $42.45 billion broadband expansion program.

The Texas Broadband Development Office said four of its tentative grant winners rescinded their awards, leaving 31,000 homes and businesses without a planned broadband connection. That’s about 13 percent of the state’s BEAD locations.

The state was optimistic it would finalize a still-pending contract with Amazon, which refused its Nebraska award.

It may sound like yet another rollout of a dystopian surveillance state network of facial recognition cameras — but the New York Department of Transportation’s latest initiative has a far more tame goal in mind: tracking modes of transport to improve street design.

According to the Gothamist, the New York Department of Transportation has added 100 roadside sensors across the city in order to pick up data on vehicle, bike, and pedestrian traffic.

THE HOUSE IS taking steps to join the Senate in a crusade for stronger data privacy in Massachusetts. While giving more “teeth” to consumers by letting them take large data collectors to court, the bill the House passed unanimously on Thursday would also allow some sensitive data to be sold if the consumer agrees.

In its redraft of a bill approved by the Senate eight months ago, House lawmakers signed off on frameworks to limit collection and sale of private data, ensure consumers have a right to know about what data is being collected, opt-out of some data collection, and have their data deleted on request.

“Without exaggeration, we are living through the largest unregulated extraction of information in the history of civilization,” said Rep. Tricia Farley-Bouvier, of Pittsfield, on the House floor.

Starcloud, (formerly Lumen Orbit) a startup building solar-powered data centers that operate in space, announced $170 million in new funding Monday, vaulting it to unicorn status with a $1.1 billion valuation. The Redmond, Wash.-based company is now the fastest in Y Combinator history to hit that milestone, reaching the billion-dollar mark just 17 months after its accelerator demo day.

The meteoric rise follows a period of heavy skepticism.

Philip Johnston, Starcloud’s CEO and co-founder, said the company was “fairly roundly pilloried” in its early days. “If you go back to some of the comments on X when we announced, people said it was impossible and we couldn’t do it.”

Starcloud is engineering satellites equipped with solar panels, radiation shielding to protect the electronics from the harsh environment of outer space, communication devices, and a cooling system adapted from International Space Station technology to manage the heat generated by high-performance computing.

The proposed legislation would remove the state’s existing constitutional requirement to define and regulate telecommunications as a public utility, the very deregulation that telecom monopolies operating in the state have been lusting after for years.

With a country fed up with the rising cost of living demanding that all political leaders focus relentlessly on meaningful affordability issues, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, you would think every elected Democrat would’ve gotten the memo by now, even as Donald Trump admits that “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.”

Yet in California, a go-for-the-jugular attack on the state regulatory agency that has made the Golden State a national leader in addressing the affordability crisis at the heart of the digital divide is being led by *checks notes* a Democratic state lawmaker.

California Assemblymember Tasha Boerner, a Democrat from Encinitas, is trying to fast-track legislation she authored known as Assembly Constitutional Amendment 9. It aims to strip telecommunications oversight authority away from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and shift it to a more easily lobbied state legislature and a hypothetical state broadband office that doesn’t yet exist.

Massachusetts lawmakers have voted to pass privacy protections that grant the state’s residents new rights over accessing and deleting their data held by big tech giants. The bill also bans companies from selling their users’ precise location data.

Lawmakers in the Massachusetts House passed the state’s Consumer Data Privacy Act in a unanimous 146-0 vote on Thursday, months after all of the Senate’s 40 lawmakers voted in favor of advancing its own bill in September. Now, the bills will be combined in the Senate, and sent to the state governor’s office, where it is expected to be signed into law. It’s not immediately clear when that will happen.

The lawsuit, filed by a nonprofit and Box Elder County residents, comes as celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary has agreed to scale back the size of the data center plan.

It looks like industry mergers and acquisition activity is in high gear lately. It’s hard to remember a week when there wasn’t a press release about upcoming M&A activity in the telecom sector, and I have been writing a similar blog every six months. Following is some of the most recent activity.

In the ISP Space. T-Mobile announced it entered two joint ventures to acquire 50% of three U.S. fiber businesses – GoNetspeed, Greenlight Networks, and i3 Broadband. T-Mobile seems to be gobbling up last-mile fiber properties all over the country.

TDS Telecom announced plans to buy Granite State Communications, a telco in New Hampshire with more than 11,000 service addresses.

Truvista Fiber is buying the municipal fiber network from the City of Commerce, Georgia, with plans to expand to reach residential customers.

Microsoft used its Build conference to unveil seven in-house AI models, including a reasoning model it says draws even with Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.6 — part of a push to depend less on the AI partners it has invested billions in.

Last year I wrote one of my favourite pieces ever — The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble — and followed it up with The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble Volume 2 several months later. Sadly, I’ve realized “volume” is a terrible way to structure something like this,

because each volume is more of an update, which is why today’s newsletter will move to a versioning system.

The AI bubble is a psyop, a melodrama, a financial crisis, and a mask-off moment for the Business Idiots that run the vast majority of our economy. It is the largest-scale exploitation of ignorance in history, gnawing at the intellectual weaknesses of society by presenting just enough information or just enough proof to substantiate a trillion-plus dollars of investment and manufactured consent for a technology that, based on how many discuss it, doesn’t actually exist.

And it’s revealed how many rich and powerful people are either (or both) credulous and woefully ignorant.

To be clear, LLMs are real and do some things, but they don’t do any of the things that Dario Amodei is talking about when he says that AI will wipe out 50% of white collar jobs.

We’re four years into this joyless slog and people are still talking about AI’s “potential” and what it “will” do and that we’re in the early innings of a technology that, for the most part, is still doing exactly what it was doing at the beginning with refinements that never come close to reaching the vacuous heights of boosters’ promises. 

Anthropic’s high-profile spat with the Pentagon gave it a killer marketing advantage, burnishing its public image as a principled AI company that puts values over profits — unlike more mercenary rivals such as OpenAI or Google. But Anthropic’s double standard on authoritarianism suggests the nearly trillion-dollar firm is as calculating and ethically flexible as any of its competitors.

In a recently published policy paper arguing a full-throated embrace of data center nationalism, Anthropic said that “it’s essential that the US and its allies stay ahead of authoritarian governments like the Chinese Communist Party,” lest the world fall into the grips of tech-powered tyranny. Anthropic and its peers, the company claims, will form a bulwark of democratic values, protecting societies at home and abroad from repression.

Left unmentioned in the document — and seldom publicly acknowledged — is the fact a slice of Anthropic is owned by the Emirati dictatorship of Abu Dhabi, a repressive and authoritarian monarchy.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — The Nashville Zoo is pushing back against a proposal to build a nearly 70,000-square-foot data center on the edge of its property in South Nashville, warning the project could harm thousands of animals — including some of the rarest in the world.

DC Blox, the company behind the proposal, wants to build the facility in the Grassmere Business Park, directly adjacent to zoo property. An online petition against the project has gathered more than 180,000 signatures.

The Nashville Zoo says a proposed DC Blox data center next door threatens its 3,000 animals, including some of the rarest in the world.

The road is dusty and trash-strewn. My friend and collaborator Colby Groves is hanging out the car window as I drive, gazing at a patchwork of solar panels lined up behind a chain-link fence.

“This has to be it,” declares Colby, balancing a large camera on his lap, hoping it doesn’t bounce off as we traverse a series of bumps and divots.

We are in this land of scorching sun and heat, searching for a large Amazon solar installation in San Bernardino County, California. This is the home of the desert tortoise and Joshua trees, but more recently, it’s become a plaything for greedy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

As demand for electricity continues to rise in the United States, policymakers and utilities are increasingly concerned about how to meet consumers’ needs cost-effectively, especially because it takes an average of five years for new energy projects to connect to the grid after they are proposed.

But one underused approach, called Surplus Interconnection Service (SIS), can shortcut that wait by allowing new power generation or storage to be added in months instead of years. That’s because SIS resources are colocated with existing power plants and share their access to the grid.