Wake up babe, another form of structural power just dropped

Counterattack: Is It Time to Make Digital Regulation Global? How Trade Politics Could Globalise Digital Rules

#Trump is a window of opportunity to advance new bilateral and regional trade agreements. Promoters of digital regulation should use it to move beyond a defensive posture and pivot toward globalising digital rules.

open.substack.com/pub/matteone...

As always. (You got me, damn)

AI agents discovered trolling, another step towards the superintelligence apocalypse.

I learn this morning that Péter Magyar is neither Leon Trotski nor even Clement Attlee. Horror of horror! That he's not in Putin's pocket and wants to be a normal EU member will do for me, for the moment

Facing the reality that brutality and cruelty also have tradeoffs and are not a secret weapon that facilitates an easy victory, they are furious at being embarrassed by their lessers and seeing their theory of the world publicly discredited (not that they would ever acknowledge that)

We are delighted to welcome seven new fellows to the IWM in April: Khalid Bencherif, Richard Cockett, Naja Dyrendom Graugaard, Milorad Ivanovic, @matteonebbiai.bsky.social, @thomasseifert.bsky.social, and John C. Swanson.

👉 Learn more about their work on our website: www.iwm.at/news/new-fel...

A photo of Ali and Fatima in their press vests and hats, smiling at the camera with Lebanon in the background

Two of the journalists assassinated in South Lebanon this morning by Israel were Lebanese correspondents Ali Shoeib and Fatima Ftouni.

They become the 252nd and 253rd journalists killed by Israel in the last two years.

Unprecedented.

(📸 Cradle Media)

www.ft.com/content/4f09...

Genuinely hard to overstate how much of a strategic defeat it would be for the United States if the war ends with effective Iranian control of the Strait.

Conscious Uncoupling | Phenomenal World Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has declared a "rupture" in the liberal order. Can US allies organize themselves apart from the US?

www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/con...

1/ Disruptions mean countries will rush to exit US-led oil order

Worst case scenario for oil companies (best for rest of us) is that people permanently shift...what they call “demand destruction“

i.e short term pain but Long: Iran war will accelerate ongoing STRUCTURAL shift to solar+EVs+batteries

Put the Strait of Hormuz on the blockchain.

by Andrew Yang

we are losing so much talent, progress, and hope for no good reason www.vox.com/future-perfe...

I was in a 2 hour briefing today on the Iran War. All the briefings are closed, because Trump can't defend this war in public.

I obviously can't disclose classified info, but you deserve to know how incoherent and incomplete these war plans are.

1/ Here's what I can share:

North Korea Was Right About Nuclear Weapons Yes, really.

North Korea Was Right About Nuclear Weapons
open.substack.com/pub/persuasi...

Why the US is facing strategic defeat @policytensor.bsky.social

“The Trump administration needs to understand that there are no military solutions here. Talk to the Omanis. Find a diplomatic solution before this brings the whole house down on your heads.”

policytensor.substack.com/p/why-the-us...

In its Friday blog post, Anthropic said a supply chain risk designation, under the authority 10 USC 3252, only applies to Department of Defense contracts directly with suppliers, and doesn’t cover how contractors use its Claude AI software to serve other customers. Three experts in federal contracts say it’s impossible at this point to determine which Anthropic customers, if any, must now cut ties with the company. Hegseth’s announcement “is not mired in any law we can divine right now,” says Alex Major, a partner at the law firm McCarter & English, which works with tech companies.

The government wants to Huawei any company that pursues a radical woke ideology like "no domestic mass surveillance" except it has no legal basis to do so and its rules for compliance are gobbledygook

www.wired.com/story/anthro...

Data really is the new ammo As Europe aims for defence sovereignty, access to US data remains a thorny topic.

"long-range high-precision munitions are completely useless without targeting data: if you don’t know what you need to strike, high-precision is no longer an asset" bindinghook.com/data-really-...

"it’s a little disturbing how closely this discourse follows climate-debate patterns set down 20 years ago by the right. Either a man-made phenomenon isn’t happening or, if it is, it’s not important".
open.substack.com/pub/transfor...

Problem about the loneliness epidemic is, it's everywhere except in representative survey data. Let's look at where the claim comes from. 1/

The EV debate in one picture: Even the smallest, most efficient gas car has a higher life-cycle footprint than the largest BEV.

Size matters. Power matters. Powertrain matters more.

This figure comes from this great paper: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

This effort to curry favor by acting like an insult comic will be forgotten within the Trump administration in a day, but will make headlines and be remembered for decades in the countries being insulted.

Given Trump's mental health status, maybe newspapers are 4D chessing to let Trump believe he actually made that commitment.
World order by performativity

A good explainer of what might happen domestically if Trump chooses the military option on #Greenland

"Restaurants are opening in DC" - Trump, 2026.
"Restaurants are full" - Berlusconi, 2011, right before Italy's debt crisis.

How a billionaire with interests in Greenland encouraged Trump to acquire the territory US president’s friend Ronald Lauder – who first proposed Arctic expansion – is now making deals in the island

1/Its easy to write off Trump as a mad king on Greenland. But it is as much about Court politics -- Trump and his insiders -- than simply a tantrum. Like any King, it is about makeup (hint: Estee Lauder).
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

"there's a third possible response to tariffs, one that's just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law?"

pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/3...

Carney: "American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, a stable financial system... this bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition... recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as a weapon. Tariffs as leverage ... "

🧵 Thread on beautiful data centers:

MareNostrum 4 (Barcelona SCC): Often called "the most beautiful data center in the world," this facility is housed inside the Torre Girona Chapel, a deconsecrated 19th-century church.

When fully installed, it will have a peak performance of 13.9 Petaflops.