Yesterday’s blog looked at AT&T cellular coverage in a typical rural county in Illinois and included the following map. The map shows where AT&T can provide 5G coverage in a moving vehicle in the dark areas, and where somebody standing stationary outdoors could get a 5G signal in the lighter colored areas.

Let’s look at the maps for the other two major carriers in the same areas. The first map below is T-Mobile, and the second is Verizon.

Alternative search engine DuckDuckGo launches 'no AI' web extensions for Chrome and Firefox users.

As its traffic continues to climb, alternative search engine DuckDuckGo is leaning into anti-AI sentiment with the launch of new browser extensions that allow users to set its no-AI search experience, noai.duckduckgo.com, as their default search engine.

Spectrum has expanded its fiber broadband network to bring Internet, Mobile, TV and Voice services to more than 900 additional homes and businesses in Osceola County, Michigan.

"Taxing AI directly ties the solution directly to the problem," wrote Rep. Greg Casar. "If AI use grows quickly, driving layoffs alongside it, the revenue from an AI tax would go up too."

Two leading progressives in the US Congress are calling for a tax on artificial intelligence to fund programs that would help prevent an economic catastrophe for workers displaced by the rapidly advancing technology.

In separate op-eds published Wednesday and Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) warned that AI risks turbocharging existing wealth and income inequality by driving up the fortunes of large companies and their executives, while hurling millions of workers into joblessness without an adequate safety net.

Elon Musk's SpaceX IPO could make him the world's first trillionaire. Learn how ordinary investors may unknowingly fund this risky venture.

Billionaire Elon Musk has ambitions to become the world’s first trillionaire when his company SpaceX makes what is expected to be the biggest initial public offering in history—and money unwittingly invested by ordinary Americans may help him get there.

Progressive media outlet More Perfect Union on Wednesday published a video detailing how the Nasdaq stock market exchange changed its own rules so that SpaceX can be immediately included in index funds without having to wait through the one-year “seasoning” period that used to be required for newly public companies.

SpaceX is a particularly risky bet, 

The launch of the Ojai minivan robotaxi comes after years of development and testing, but arrives amid a challenging time for Waymo.

Waymo has started giving select riders in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco access to its newest robotaxi: an all-electric, minivan-like vehicle that is designed to lower costs and handle the use and abuse of hundreds of thousands of riders.

Waymo said Thursday it will eventually expand access to the vehicle, a modified Zeekr-made minivan called the Ojai (pronounced oh-hi), to more riders and cities. For now, the Alphabet-owned company is offering a limited number of customers free rides in the Ojai to gather feedback and further refine the robotaxi experience.

On Thursday, Anthropic released Opus 4.8, the newest version of its most advanced publicly available model. The model is available everywhere, with standard pricing at the same level as the previous Opus release.

The new model comes just 41 days after Opus 4.7 was released, a much faster upgrade cycle than normal for Anthropic.

The new Opus model comes with a tool called Dynamic Workflows, for coordinating swarms of subagents.

I’ve been in this industry long enough to know the most interesting question is rarely what happened. It’s why rational actors made a specific move at a specific moment.

Last week gave us three important signals that, taken together, say a lot about where mobile is heading:

• The AT&T/T-Mobile/Verizon joint venture announcement
• The FCC’s approval of the $40 billion EchoStar spectrum sale to SpaceX and AT&T
• And SpaceX’s S-1 filing, submitted to the SEC on May 20, timing that was very likely intentional

Individually, each story matters. Together, they tell a much bigger one. Let’s unpack it.

Massive data centers are gobbling up resources across the United States. The boom has just begun—and you may be paying for it.

John Steinbach was shocked to receive a $281 electricity bill in January 2026—a huge spike from the roughly $100 he’d paid the previous month. “It’s just so far beyond any bill that I’ve ever had,” he says. Steinbach, who has lived in his Manassas, Va., home for nearly 40 years, worries his rates will keep climbing as the outsized electricity demand from AI data centers grows. “They’re building them like it’s ‘Field of Dreams’—build it and the electricity will come—but we don’t see how that’s going to happen.”

The contribution of AI data centers to higher bills is just one of the ways the development boom is affecting consumers. The facilities also compete for critical resources like water and land, and they can lower air quality and increase traffic, often while benefiting from changes to zoning laws and huge tax breaks. 

Data centers are not new. Such buildings have been around for decades, housing the servers and other hardware needed to power the internet. But since the introduction of ChatGPT to the public in late 2022, generative artificial intelligence has exploded, requiring mountains of new, power-hungry equipment.

To meet this ballooning demand, and in a race to drive AI’s growth, tech giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have been investing billions to build immense new facilities packed with servers and other equipment. Known as hyperscale data centers, they are far bigger than earlier versions, and are often built in sprawling industrial parks.

I tend to avoid writing about topics that others are already discussing. So I usually avoid the “AI is going to kill us”/”The AI is stealing our jobs”/ “The AI is not as good as I thought” articles.

However, when the topic of AI intersects with supply chain management and the Bullwhip effect, I have to write about it.

I am not making up the rules here.

One thing is clear: The artificial intelligence boom has sparked one of the most costly technology buildouts in history.

On a Monday night in late April, nearly 100 people gathered in a public library conference room in Bloomington, Illinois. Sipping on seltzer water and snacking on granola bars, the crowd’s focus was on a projector screen, where a title slide read, “Let’s Talk Data Centers!” A few of the event-goers had brought notebooks, their pens poised to take notes during the presentation. Others held up their phones to snap photos of slides showing Illinois’ power grid and maps of its water resources.

The event, first conceptualized by Bloomington librarian Kerrie Parker over the winter, was a joint effort between the library and several area nonprofits to educate people about data centers in central Illinois. Parker, who’s been with the library for 14 years, said she was surprised by the turnout.

But on the heels of a controversial decision to approve a $500 million data center in Sangamon County, Illinois, just southwest of Bloomington, awareness around data centers in the region appears to be growing. At a time when seven in ten Americans nationwide oppose the construction of AI data centers in their area, according to a May 2026 Gallup poll, the turnout at April’s informational session is a testament to the interest in increasing community protections around data centers in central Illinois.  

Tell New York Times, The Atlantic, and USA Today to keep the crucial work of journalists in the Wayback Machine! The news isn’t getting preserved in the Wayback Machine anymore because major media outlets are blocking it. This petition is a demand for them to stop.

Several users on social media reported having their Instagram accounts hacked over the weekend. Meta's own support chatbot was blamed for allowing hackers to hijack accounts.

A few megawatts will humble you fast. Now try a few gigawatts.

The numbers in the announcements have lost their meaning. A gigawatt here, ten gigawatts there, half a trillion dollars for one program. We've read so many of these that the scale stopped registering, which is exactly the problem. Behind every figure is a physical plant that has to be built, energized, staffed, and defended from the community next door. The press release is the easy part. What follows is the work, the cost, and the risk that never makes the rendering.

Working with megawatts is dangerous. Now imagine gigawatts.

 
Walk a live data hall during a load test and you feel it before you understand it. The hum. Heat rolling off the busway. A breaker lineup that could drop half a campus if someone keys the wrong sequence into the controls.

We talk about power like it's a line on a spreadsheet, because that's how it reaches most people, as a number on a one-line diagram. It is not a number. It's a physical force with a short temper, and at scale it does not forgive lazy work.

Now the industry is tossing around gigawatt campuses like they're a footnote in a press release. I'm even becoming immune to these types of projects.

For decades, local broadcasters regarded public-access television with a kind of bemused condescension. It was cable’s civic obligation — the ramshackle corner of the media ecosystem reserved for awkward call-in programs, amateur hosts, low-budget ethnic programming, municipal hearings, church broadcasts, and eccentric local personalities speaking passionately to audiences that often barely existed. Public access was chaotic, technically uneven, aesthetically crude, and culturally unserious. Real television, broadcasters believed, happened elsewhere.

And yet, in 2026, public access suddenly feels strangely ahead of its time.

The recent spectacle of Stephen Colbert’s return appearance on a tiny Michigan public-access program resonated for reasons that extended well beyond novelty. What audiences seemed to respond to was not merely the humor of watching a national television personality descend into hyperlocal obscurity. It was the startling sense of authenticity that accompanied it. The program felt human, unpolished, deeply local, and refreshingly disconnected from the homogenized rhythms that increasingly define modern television.

That reaction should unsettle the broadcast television industry more than it probably does.

“This administration is rushing toward another disastrous war, putting countless American and foreign lives at risk," said Rep. Nydia Velázquez. "Congress must reassert its constitutional authority."

With US military forces prepared to launch an unprovoked attack on Cuba, a group of congressional Democrats on Wednesday introduced a new war powers resolution in a bid to block President Donald Trump from launching yet another illegal war of choice.

Reps. Nydia Velázquez and Gregory Meeks, both of New York, introduced the resolution, which would bar US forces from hostilities within or against Cuba without congressional authorization, as required under the 1973 War Powers Act. The measure is cosponsored by Reps. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and Joaquin Castro of Texas.

Today I’m going to speak from the heart, and tell you that we’re ruled by fucking imbeciles.

AI is a perfect storm of failed concepts and organizations, and the apex of the Era of the Business Idiot, an epoch where we’re ruled by people so thoroughly disconnected from the actual workforce that it was inevitable that a technology would be created specifically to grift them.

Just ask Aaron Levie, CEO of Box: 

WASHINGTON, May 27, 2026 – The Trump administration urged federal judges Tuesday to grant its request to dismiss a lawsuit over the cancellation of $2.75 billion in broadband adoption funding.

In May 2025, the Commerce Department told recipients of grant funding under the Digital Equity Act that the law unconstitutionally directed funding to racial minorities and that the grants were canceled. 

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance urged judges not to dismiss its case over canceled grant funding.