#Commercial Broadband

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The leading (ISP) Internet Service Provider in Mumbai Ring Networks, Offers internet connection Solutions for Individual Homes, Offices, and Companies.

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Linkty Dumpty

I was supposed to be on vacation, and while I didn’t do any blogging for a month, that didn’t mean that I stopped looking at my distraction rectangle and making a list of things I wanted to write about. Consequentially, the link backlog is massive, so it’s time to declare bankruptcy with another linkdump:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

[Image ID: John Holbo’s ‘trolley problem’ art, a repeating pattern of trolleys, tracks, people on tracks, and people standing at track switches]++

Let’s kick things off with a little graphic whimsy. You’ve doubtless seen the endless Trolley Problem memes, working from the same crude line drawings? Well, philosopher John Holbo got tired of that artwork, and he whomped up a fantastic alternative, which you can get as a poster, duvet, sticker, tee, etc:

https://www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/145078097

The trolley problem has been with us since 1967, but it’s enjoying a renaissance thanks to the insistence of “AI” weirdos that it is very relevant to our AI debate. A few years back, you could impress uninformed people by dropping the Trolley Problem into a discussion:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/25/mercedes-weird-trolley-problem-announcement-continues-dumb-debate-about-self-driving-cars/

Amazingly, the “AI” debate has only gotten more tedious since the middle of the past decade. But every now and again, someone gets a stochastic parrot to do something genuinely delightful, like the Jolly Roger Telephone Company, who sell chatbots that will pretend to be tantalyzingly confused marks in order to tie up telemarketers and waste their time:

https://jollyrogertelephone.com/

Jolly Roger sells different personas: “Whitebeard” is a confused senior who keeps asking the caller’s name, drops nonsequiturs into the conversation, and can’t remember how many credit-cards he has. “Salty Sally” is a single mom with a houseful of screaming, demanding children who keep distracting her every time the con artist is on the verge of getting her to give up compromising data. “Whiskey Jack” is drunk:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/people-hire-phone-bots-to-torture-telemarketers-2dbb8457

The bots take a couple minutes to get the sense of the conversation going. During that initial lag, they have a bunch of stock responses like “there’s a bee on my arm, but keep going,” or grunts like “huh,” and “uh-huh.” The bots can keep telemarketers and scammers on the line for quite a long time. Scambaiting is an old and honorable vocation, and it’s good that it has received a massive productivity gain from automation. This is the AI Dividend I dream of.

The less-fun AI debate is the one over artists’ rights and tech. I am foresquare for the artists here, but I think that the preferred solutions (like creating a new copyright over the right to train a model with your work) will not lead to the hoped-for outcome. As with other copyright expansions — 40 years’ worth of them now — this right will be immediately transferred to the highly concentrated media sector, who will simply amend their standard, non-negotiable contracting terms to require that “training rights” be irrevocably assigned to them as a condition of working.

The real solution isn’t to treat artists as atomic individuals — LLCs with an MFA — who bargain, business-to-business, with corporations. Rather, the solutions are in collective power, like unions. You’ve probably heard about the SAG-AFTRA actors’ strike, in which creative workers are bargaining as a group to demand fair treatment in an age of generative models. SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher’s speech announcing the strike made me want to stand up and salute:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4SAPOX7R5M

The actors’ strike is historic: it marks the first time actors have struck since 2000, and it’s the first time actors and writers have co-struck since 1960. Of course, writers in the Writers Guild of America (West and East) have been picketing since since April, and one of their best spokespeople has been Adam Conover, a WGA board member who serves on the negotiating committee. Conover is best known for his stellar Adam Ruins Everything comedy-explainer TV show, which pioneered a technique for breaking down complex forms of corporate fuckery and making you laugh while he does it. Small wonder that he’s been so effective at conveying the strike issues while he pickets.

Writing for Jacobin, Alex N Press profiles Conover and interviews him about the strike, under the excellent headline, “Adam Pickets Everything.” Conover is characteristically funny, smart, and incisive — do read:

https://jacobin.com/2023/07/adam-conover-wga-strike

Of course, not everyone in Hollywood is striking. In late June, the DGA accepted a studio deal with an anemic 41% vote turnout:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/26/23773926/dga-amptp-new-deal-strike

They probably shouldn’t have. In this interview with The American Prospect’s Peter Hong, the brilliant documentary director Amy Ziering breaks down how Netflix and the other streamers have rugged documentarians in a classic enshittification ploy that lured in filmmakers, extracted everything they had, and then discarded the husks:

https://prospect.org/culture/2023-06-21-drowned-in-the-stream/

Now, the streaming cartel stands poised to all but kill off documentary filmmaking. Pressured by Wall Street to drive high returns, they’ve become ultraconservative in their editorial decisions, making programs and films that are as similar as possible to existing successes, that are unchallenging, and that are cheap. We’ve gone directly from a golden age of docs to a dark age.

In a time of monopolies, it’s tempting to form countermonopolies to keep them in check. Yesterday, I wrote about why the FTC and Lina Khan were right to try to block the Microsoft/Activision merger, and I heard from a lot of people saying this merger was the only way to check Sony’s reign of terror over video games:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

But replacing one monopolist with another isn’t good for anyone (except the monopolists’ shareholders). If we want audiences and workers — and society — to benefit, we have to de-monopolize the sector. Last month, I published a series with EFF about how we should save the news from Big Tech:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

After that came out, the EU Observer asked me to write up version of it with direct reference to the EU, where there are a lot of (in my opinion, ill-conceived but well-intentioned) efforts to pry Big Tech’s boot off the news media’s face. I’m really happy with how it came out, and the header graphic is awesome:

https://euobserver.com/opinion/157187

De-monopolizing tech has become my life’s work, both because tech is foundational (tech is how we organize to fight over labor, gender and race equality, and climate justice), and because tech has all of these technical aspects, which open up new avenues for shrinking Big Tech, without waiting decades for traditional antitrust breakups to run their course (we need these too, though!).

I’ve written a book laying out a shovel-ready plan to give tech back to its users through interoperability, explaining how to make new regulations (and reform old ones), what they should say, how to enforce them, and how to detect and stop cheating. It’s called “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation” and it’s coming from Verso Books this September:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

[Image ID: The cover of the Verso Books hardcover of ‘The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation]

I just got my first copy in the mail yesterday, and it’s a gorgeous little package. The timing was great, because I spent the whole week in the studio at Skyboat Media recording the audiobook — the first audiobook of mine that I’ve narrated. It was a fantastic experience, and I’ll be launching a Kickstarter to presell the DRM-free audio and ebooks as well as hardcovers, in a couple weeks.

Though I like doing these crowdfunders, I do them because I have to. Amazon’s Audible division, the monopolist that controls >90% of the audiobook market, refuses to carry my work because it is DRM-free. When you buy a DRM-free audiobook, that means that you can play it on anyone’s app, not just Amazon’s. Every audiobook you’ve ever bought from Audible will disappear the moment you decide to break up with Amazon, which means that Amazon can absolutely screw authors and audiobook publishers because they’ve taken our customers hostage.

If you are unwise enough to pursue an MBA, you will learn a term of art for this kind of market structure: it’s a “moat,” that is, an element of the market that makes it hard for new firms to enter the market and compete with you. Warren Buffett pioneered the use of this term, and now it’s all but mandatory for anyone launching a business or new product to explain where their moat will come from.

As Dan Davies writes, these “moats” aren’t really moats in the Buffett sense. With Coke and Disney, he says, a “moat” was “the fact that nobody else could make such a great product that everyone wanted.” In other words, “making a good product,” is a great moat:

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/stuck-in-the-moat

But making a good product is a lot of work and not everyone is capable of it. Instead, “moat” now just means some form of lock in. Davies counsels us to replace “moat” with:

our subscription system and proprietary interface mean that our return on capital is protected by a strong Berlin Wall, preventing our customers from getting out to a freer society and forcing them to consume our inferior products for lack of alternative.

I really like this. It pairs well with my 2020 observation that the fight over whether “IP” is a meaningful term can be settled by recognizing that IP has a precise meaning in business: “Any policy that lets me reach beyond the walls of my firm to control the conduct of my competitors, critics and customers”:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

To see how that works in the real world, check out “The Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy,” a magisterial piece of scholarship from Sarah Lamdan, Jason M. Schultz, Michael Weinberg and Claire Woodcock:

https://www.nyuengelberg.org/outputs/the-anti-ownership-ebook-economy/

Something happened when we shifted to digital formats that created a loss of rights for readers. Pulling back the curtain on the evolution of ebooks offers some clarity to how the shift to digital left ownership behind in the analog world.

The research methodology combines both anonymous and named sources in publishing, bookselling and librarianship, as well as expert legal and economic analysis. This is an eminently readable, extremely smart, and really useful contribution to the scholarship on how “IP” (in the modern sense) has transformed books from something you own to something that you can never own.

The truth is, capitalists hate capitalism. Inevitably, the kind of person who presides over a giant corporation and wields power over millions of lives — workers, suppliers and customers — believes themselves to be uniquely and supremely qualified to be a wise dictator. For this kind of person, competition is “wasteful” and distracts them from the important business of making everyone’s life better by handing down unilateral — but wise and clever — edits. Think of Peter Thiel’s maxim, “competition is for losers.”

That’s why giant companies love to merge with each other, and buy out nascent competitors. By rolling up the power to decide how you and I and everyone else live our lives, these executives ensure that they can help us little people live the best lives possible. The traditional role of antitrust enforcement is to prevent this from happening, countering the delusions of would-be life-tenured autocrats of trade with public accountability and enforcement:

https://marker.medium.com/we-should-not-endure-a-king-dfef34628153

Of course, for 40 years, we’ve had neoliberal, Reaganomics-poisoned antitrust, where monopolies are celebrated as “efficient” and their leaders exalted as geniuses whose commercial empires are evidence of merit, not savagery. That era is, thankfully, coming to an end, and not a moment too soon.

Leading the fight is the aforementioned FTC chair Lina Khan, who is taking huge swings at even bigger mergers. But the EU is no slouch in this department: they’re challenging the Adobe/Figma merger, a $20b transaction that is obviously and solely designed to recapture customers who left Adobe because they didn’t want to struggle under its yoke any longer:

https://gizmodo.com/adobe-figma-acquisition-likely-to-face-eu-investigation-1850555562

For autocrats of trade, this is an intolerable act of disloyalty. We owe them our fealty and subservience, because they are self-evidently better at understanding what we need than we could ever be. This unwarranted self-confidence from the ordinary mediocrities who end up running giant tech companies gets them into a whole lot of hot water.

One keen observer of the mind-palaces that tech leaders trap themselves in is Anil Dash, who describes the conspiratorial, far-right turn of the most powerful men (almost all men!) in Silicon Valley in a piece called “‘VC Qanon’ and the radicalization of the tech tycoons”:

https://www.anildash.com/2023/07/07/vc-qanon/

Dash builds on an editorial he published in Feb, “The tech tycoon martyrdom charade,” which explores the sense of victimhood the most powerful, wealthiest people in the Valley project:

https://www.anildash.com/2023/02/27/tycoon-martyrdom-charade/

These dudes are prisoners of their Great Man myth, and leads them badly astray. And while all of us are prone to lapses in judgment and discernment, Dash makes the case that tech leaders are especially prone to it:

Nobody becomes a billionaire by accident. You have to have wanted that level of power, control and wealth more than you wanted anything else in your life. They all sacrifice family, relationships, stability, community, connection, and belonging in service of keeping score on a scale that actually yields no additional real-world benefits on the path from that first $100 million to the tens of billions.

This makes billionaires “a cohort that is, counterintutively, very easily manipulated.” What’s more, they’re all master manipulators, and they all hang out with each other, which means that when a conspiratorial belief takes root in one billionaire’s brain, it spreads to the rest of them like wildfire.

Then, billionaires “push each other further and further into extreme ideas because their entire careers have been predicated on the idea that they’re genius outliers who can see things others can’t, and that their wealth is a reward for that imagined merit.”

They live in privileged bubbles, which insulates them from disconfirming evidence — ironic, given how many of these bros think they are wise senators in the agora.

There are examples of billionaires’ folly all around us today, of course. Take privacy: the idea that we can — we should — we must — spy on everyone, all the time, in every way, to eke out tiny gains in ad performance is objectively batshit. And yet, wealthy people decreed this should be so, and it was, and made them far richer.

Leaked data from Microsoft’s Xandr ad-targeting database reveals how the commercial surveillance delusion led us to a bizarre and terrible place, as reported on by The Markup:

https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/08/from-heavy-purchasers-of-pregnancy-tests-to-the-depression-prone-we-found-650000-ways-advertisers-label-you

The Markup’s report lets you plumb 650,000 targeting categories, searching by keyword or loading random sets, 20 at a time. Do you want to target gambling addicts, people taking depression meds or Jews? Xandr’s got you covered. What could possibly go wrong?

The Xandr files come from German security researcher Wolfie Christl from Cracked Labs. Christi is a European, and he’s working with the German digital rights group Netzpolitik to get the EU to scrutinize all the ways that Xandr is flouting EU privacy laws.

Billionaires’ big ideas lead us astray in more tangible ways, of course. Writing in The Conversation, John Quiggin asks us to take a hard look at the much ballyhooed (and expensively ballyhooed) “nuclear renaissance”:

https://theconversation.com/dutton-wants-australia-to-join-the-nuclear-renaissance-but-this-dream-has-failed-before-209584

Despite the rhetoric, nukes aren’t cheap, and they aren’t coming back. Georgia’s new nuclear power is behind schedule and over budget, but it’s still better off than South Carolina’s nukes, which were so over budget that they were abandoned in 2017. France’s nuke is a decade behind schedule. Finland’s opened this year — 14 years late. The UK’s Hinkley Point C reactor is massively behind schedule and over budget (and when it’s done, it will be owned by the French government!).

China’s nuclear success story also doesn’t hold up to scrutiny — they’ve brought 50GW of nukes online, sure, but they’re building 95–120GW of solar every year.

Solar is the clear winner here, along with other renewables, which are plummeting in cost (while nukes soar) and are accelerating in deployments (while nukes are plagued with ever-worsening delays).

This is the second nuclear renaissance — the last one, 20 years ago, was a bust, and that was before renewables got cheap, reliable and easy to manufacture and deploy. You’ll hear fairy-tales about how the early 2000s bust was caused by political headwinds, but that’s simply untrue: there were almost no anti-nuke marches then, and governments were scrambling to figure out low-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels (this was before the latest round of fossil fuel sabotage).

The current renaissance is also doomed. Yes, new reactors are smaller and safer and won’t have the problems intrinsic to all megaprojects, but designs like VOYGR have virtually no signed deals. Even if they do get built, their capacity will be dwarfed by renewables — a Gen III nuke will generate 710MW of power. Globally, we add that much solar every single day.

And solar power is cheap. Even after US subsidies, a Gen III reactor would charge A$132/MWh — current prices are as low as A$64-$114/MWh.

Nukes are getting a charm offensive because wealthy people are investing in hype as a way of reaping profits — not as a way of generating safe, cheap, reliable energy.

Here in the latest stage of capitalism, value and profit are fully decoupled. Monopolists are shifting more and more value from suppliers and customers to their shareholders every day. And when the customer is the government, the depravity knows no bounds. In Responsible Statecraft, Connor Echols describes how military contractors like Boeing are able to bill the Pentagon $52,000 for a trash can:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/06/20/the-pentagons-52000-trash-can/

Military Beltway Bandits are nothing new, of course, but they’ve gotten far more virulent since the Obama era, when Obama’s DoD demanded that the primary contractors merge to a bare handful of giant firms, in the name of “efficiency.” As David Dayen writes in his must-read 2020 book Monopolized, this opened the door to a new kind of predator:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

The Obama defense rollups were quickly followed by another wave of rollups, these ones driven by Private Equity firms who cataloged which subcontractors were “sole suppliers” of components used by the big guys. These companies were all acquired by PE funds, who then lowered the price of their products, selling them below cost.

This maximized the use of those parts in weapons and aircraft sold by primary contractors like Boeing, which created a durable, long-lasting demand for fresh parts for DoD maintenance of its materiel. PE-owned suppliers hits Uncle Sucker with multi-thousand-percent markups for these parts, which have now wormed their way into every corner of the US arsenal.

Yes, this is infuriating as hell, but it’s also so grotesquely wrong that it’s impossible to defend, as we see in this hilarious clip of Rep Katie Porter grilling witnesses on US military waste:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJhf6l1nB9A

Porter pulls out the best version yet of her infamous white-board and makes her witnesses play defense ripoff Jepoardy!, providing answers to a series of indefensible practices.

It’s sure nice when our government does something for us, isn’t it? We absolutely can have nice things, and we’re about to get them. The Infrastructure Bill contains $42B in subsidies for fiber rollouts across the country, which will be given to states to spend. Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin breaks down the state-by-state spending:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/us-allocates-42b-in-broadband-funding-find-out-how-much-your-state-will-get/

Texas will get $3.31B, California will get $1.86B, and 17 other states will get $1B or more. As the White House announcement put it, “High-speed Internet is no longer a luxury.”

To understand how radical this is, you need to know that for decades, the cable and telco sector has grabbed billions in subsidies for rural and underserved communities, and then either stole the money outright, or wasted it building copper networks that run at a fraction of a percent of fiber speeds.

This is how America — the birthplace of the internet — ended up with some of the world’s slowest, most expensive broadband, even after handing out tens of billions of dollars in subsidies. Those subsidies were gobbled up by greedy, awful phone companies — these ones must be spent wisely, on long-lasting, long-overdue fiber infrastructure.

That’s a good note to end on, but I’ve got an even better one: birds in the Netherlands are tearing apart anti-bird strips and using them to build their nests. Wonderful creatures 1, hostile architecture, 0. Nature is healing:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/11/crows-and-magpies-show-their-metal-by-using-anti-bird-spikes-to-build-nests

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/15/in-the-dumps/#what-vacation

Next Tues, Jul 18, I'm hosting the first Clarion Summer Write-In Series, an hour-long, free drop-in group writing and discussion session. It's in support of the Clarion SF/F writing workshop's fundraiser to offer tuition support to students:

https://mailchi.mp/theclarionfoundation/clarion-write-ins

[Image iD: A dump-truck, dumping out a load of gravel. A caricature of Humpty Dumpty clings to its lip, restrained by a group of straining, Lilliputian men.]

[chetanagblog]

Commercial Satellite Broadband Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.23% during the forecast period and market is expected to reach US$ 9.97 Bn. by 2030.

[robpegoraro]

Weekly output: the CIA's SXSW sales pitch, Amazon unveils Project Kuiper receivers, NASA's plans for privately owned space stations

This week went by fast, between my spending the first two days of it in Austin for SXSW and then spending all of Wednesday at the Satellite 2023 conference in downtown D.C. And then St. Patrick’s Day came around–which this year reminded me of how great it was to return to Ireland last summer, the first trip I made there with my Irish passport. 3/15/2023: The CIA’s SXSW Sales Pitch: We Need Your…

[luxe-pauvre]

Before the pandemic, there was a real world, and this fake one, real friendships and “friends”, political communities and “followers”, genuine political expression and “likes”. The risk, when interactions with other human beings are narrowed to these remote, glancing and often combative exchanges – simulations – is that, once the lockdowns are over, people will bring the culture of the virtual into the real, creating even angrier, more impatient, more superficial, more transactional, more commercial and less democratic societies. Forging stronger bonds in a post-pandemic world, if one ever comes, will require acts of moral imagination that are not part of any political ideology or corporate mission statement, but are, instead, functions of the human condition: tenderness, compassion, longing, generosity, allegiance and affection. These, too, are the only real answers to loneliness, alienation, dislocation and disintegration. But the fullest expression of these functions across distances as easily spanned by viruses and flood waters as by broadband cables and TikTok videos, requires both society and government. What’s needed is nothing less than a new social contract for public goods, environmental protection, sustainable agriculture, public health, community centres, public education, grants for small businesses, public funding for the arts. It won’t be a new New Deal. The dangers are graver because decades of a world, both real and virtual, shaped by Reaganism and Thatcherism, has left the waters rising, all around us, and the forests on fire. Governments rest on a social contract, an agreement to live together. That contract needs renewing. But the problem, in the end, isn’t with society, or the social fabric. It’s with governments that have abandoned their obligations of care.

Jill Lepore, Is society coming apart?

[writeouswriter]

.....what do you mean "dial up the internet?" did you have to call someone to turn it on for you?

I... I honestly can't tell if this is a joke or not. 😭

But I'll take it as serious because apparently everyone else prior to 2015 was having fun on their nice and fast internet here except me, which is fair! So congrats on being one of today's lucky 10000.jpeg.

It does technically involve the telephone, but not exactly in that way. I'm not calling anyone, but the internet itself is, sort of?

Wikipedia describes dial-up Internet as "a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network to establish a connection to an Internet service provider by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telephone line."

Basically dial up is a now outdated form of internet that used a standard phone line and analog modem to access the Internet at data transfer rates of up to 56 Kbps. It was released commercially around 1992 but fell out of popularity in the early to mid 2000s after the introduction of commercial broadband in the late 1990s, except in rural or poorer areas where it tended to persist for a little while longer. (Hello from the rural areas.) Anyway, a dial-up connection is the least expensive way to access the Internet, but is also the slowest connection. (When I was a kid, I tried to watch a three minute video of the "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" song, and it took me at least an hour to load it without buffering. Though text based pages or images would maybe take a few minutes or so, so it wasn't like completely unusable.)

Also, due to how it's set up, you can't use the telephone (home phone) while connected, and if you were to try, it would make what we all know as the classic internet sounds, that you've probably heard even if you didn't know what it was: Pshhhkkkkkkrrrr​kakingkakingkakingtsh​chchchchchchchcch​*ding*ding*ding*. That's terrible phonetics, but I just took that off a search, I wasn't gonna try to type the sound out myself. This, anyway: X.

It honestly baffles me when people don't know what dial-up is, makes me feel old, but I can't hold it against anyone because if you didn't live in a rural area, most people got high speed or some variant thereof really really early on, and most people younger than me and even some older have always had it, so dial-up internet Georg (me), who still couldn't get a single image of a Nicolas Cage meme to load 8 years after the invention of the iPhone is an outlier and should not have been counted, apparently.

On that note, the store where I work at has frequent power outages, which always knocks out the internet to the debit machine, so I'll be like, sorry, we're on dial-up, and some people will smugly be like "oh I bet you don't remember dial-up," and I'll be like, "No, I, I had dial-up like all through high school," and their eyes will go wide, but I think it's mostly because 1. I look like I'm 12, but I'm very much not 12. and 2. Again, people not used to the rural experience, catches 'em off guard.

[usafphantom2]

Boeing is using Fortnite game technology to update the B-52s

Will this "hyper-realistic" modeling tool help give the program a Victory Royale?

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 23/09/2023 - 12:27 in Military

A popular Fortnite game engine is helping Boeing modernize 60-year-old B-52 bombers for another three decades of service.

To see how the new Rolls-Royce F-130 engines would work in the U.S. Air Force's B-52 Stratofortresses, the plane's manufacturer resorted to Unreal Engine 5, the software that powers the Fortnite shooting game. The 3D environment of the game engine allows pilots and maintainers to virtually interact with an updated digital representation of the B-52, such as starting and turning off an engine.

It is a "powerful and really impressive tool," said Jennifer Wong, senior director of bombers at Boeing.

Wong said that commercial digital software, such as the "hyper-realism features" of Unreal Engine 5, reduces costs and delivery time.

“We learn faster and are able to adjust faster when we talk about models than [when] we learn after bending metal,” she told reporters last week at the annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference event of the Air and Space Forces Association.

The virtual environment gives USAF “unprecedented access” to modifications from the beginning and gives feedback to Boeing long before they start upgrading the aircraft, Wong said.

This is part of a modernization effort called the Commercial Engine Replacement Program, or CERP, which will replace the eight Pratt & Whitney TF33 engines in each jet to keep the bomber flying.

The program is much larger than just the engine replacement, Wong said, as Boeing will also update the aircraft's displays, cockpits and other avionics systems.

Rolls-Royce is on track to complete the initial engine tests by the end of the year and begin the "critical project review" in the first quarter of 2024.

Boeing will also replace the current B-52 radars with Raytheon's active electronic scanning radar, called AESA. The radar is already used in the U.S. Navy's F/A-18E/F Super Hornets jets.

"When we say things like 'the B-52 will have capabilities similar to those of fighters in the future', that's what we mean. Eventually, the B-52 will be able to have some notion of capacity similar to that of a fighter and a little of that visualization that is currently on the F-18 platform," Wong said.

The new radar will allow the B-52 to track multiple targets simultaneously, Wong said. Other updates to the radar program include a new broadband radome, which protects the radar antenna, large digital touchscreen displays for browsers and manual controllers.

"This will allow us to continue to improve resources in the future, because the advance will be made through software, rather than hardware changes in the future," Wong said.

Raytheon recently announced that it has delivered the first AESA radar to Boeing for the program.

These modernization programs are crucial, since the B-52 could fly even beyond the 2050s, according to Colonel Scott Foreman, leader of the Air Force's B-52 program. Foreman pointed to the A-10 Warthog, almost half a century old, as an example of an airplane that is still flying after several attempts by the U.S. Air Force to retire it.

“Even if we're saying 2050, I have no reason to believe that he can't fly for a long time after that,” Foreman said at the AFA conference.

Boeing said it will have all the B-52s modified with the new radar by the end of fiscal year 2031 and the engine replacement program completed by the end of fiscal year 2036.

Source: DefenseOne

Tags: Military AviationBoeing B-52H StratofortressCERPUSAF - United States Air Force / U.S. Air Force

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Fernando Valduga

Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, he has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Daytona Airshow and FIDAE. He has work published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. Uses Canon equipment during his photographic work throughout the world of aviation.

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IMAGES: How was Air Sunday at the Air Force Academy

23/09/2023 - 11:52

A U.S. Air Force F-35A Lightning II aircraft designated for the 158ª Fighter Wing, Vermont National Guard, taxis at Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany, on June 9, 2023, in preparation for Air Defender 23. (Photo: U.S. Air Force / Tech Sgt. Anthony Plyler)

MILITARY

About half of the US F-35 fighters are not ready to fly

09/22/2023 - 9:30 PM

MILITARY

Modernized A-50U AWACS aircraft is delivered to the Russian Air Force

09/22/2023 - 16:00

The U.S. Army announced the delivery of the first two AH-64E Version 6 Apache Guardian attack helicopters, but only provided photos of the two previous AH-64D they replaced, being prepared for a flight back to the United States. (Photo: U.S. Army)

HELICOPTERS

U.S. Army Aviation Unit in Europe receives new Apache helicopters

22/09/2023 - 14:00

MILITARY

Germany acquires 13 state-of-the-art LUNA drones and new radar for Eurofighters

09/22/2023 - 11:00

MILITARY

VIDEOS AND IMAGES: F-35A fighters operate from a highway for the first time

22/09/2023 - 09:00

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[anyab]

Devastation’ at Tulkarem refugee camp following Israeli raid

An Israeli raid on the occupied West Bank camp, which led to the death of six Palestinians, also left “devastation” behind, after military bulldozers destroyed roads and other vital infrastructure, says Faisal Salama, who heads the committee that provides services to residents.

Salama told Al Jazeera the army destroyed all the entry points to the camp and closed them using earth mounds and other barriers. It also demolished five houses and detained more than 50 Palestinians.

“The army destroyed water pipes and power networks, as well as cell phone towers and poles for broadband services, and damaged more than 100 commercial stores as well as 120 homes,” Salama said.

“This is the third raid on the camp since October 7, and the fifth in the past two months. These incursions are part of the policy of collective punishment carried out by the Israeli occupation.”

Via Ayman Nobani [Reporting from Nablus, occupied West Bank] for al jazeera november 22 2023

[xtruss]

This long exposure photo of the sky above Gunnison National Park in Colorado shows the movement of light—coming from both natural and artificial sources. The thousands of satellites in orbit around the earth can shine millions of times brighter than objects farther away in space, getting in the way of astronomic observations. Photograph By Babak Tafreshi

It Looked Like A Bizarre Alignment of Meteors. It Was Something Else.

Astronomers are calling arrays of thousands of Satellites, like that of Starlink’s, “Mega Constellations” because of their overwhelming presence in the night sky.

— By Terry Ward | August 11, 2023

A fleet of UFOs, a bizarre alignment of meteors, a drone show: These are just a few of the things SpaceX’s Starlink satellites have been mistaken for of late.

National Geographic photographer Babak Tafreshi, however, knew exactly what he was seeing on a recent July evening in California’s Pinnacles National Park, when a “caravan of satellites” paraded across the sky, aligned as if they were perfectly-spaced stars.

“I see them very often because there are just so many of them,” he says. “People react because they have no idea what it is.”

These satellites bring broadband internet to some of the planet’s most remote reaches. They are usually seen in low-earth orbit (around 186 miles from ground) on their way up to their final orbit at 342 miles high. As they rise, they grow dimmer and spread out until they’re mostly out of sight of the naked eye, which can take up to several weeks. Astronomers call these massive arrays of satellites “mega constellations.”

In recent months, these satellites are being launched more frequently, often with over 50 satellites at a time, by Elon Musk’s commercial space company. Sightings of Starlink mega constellations are also becoming more common, says David J. Helfand, a professor of Astronomy at Columbia University.

The satellites are making it much more difficult for astronomers to do their jobs, he says. “When a satellite goes through the field of view of a telescope, it’s extremely bright,” Helfand says. “The objects we’re trying to study–distant galaxies and stars–are 20 million times fainter than satellites. So when one of these streaks goes across the image, it completely obliterates the image.”

At least 6 percent of the 2021 images from the Hubble Space Telescope were “compromised or completely ruined” by satellite interference by Starlink satellites, he says. “That’s when there were only 1,500 Starlink satellites…Now there are three times that amount.” And many more are on the way.

Satellites: An Invaluable Tool, An Astronomic Obstacle

In a February press release, SpaceX said they’d launched “nearly 4,000 satellites” over the last five years. They aim to send up to 42,000 satellites into its mega constellation in coming years, according to Space.com. SpaceX did not respond to National Geographic’s request for comment.

These satellites can be seen with the naked eye in the days following their launch (when their orbit is lower to Earth and satellites are still close enough together to appear in a line), and in the hours just after sunset and just before sunrise. Websites like Heavens-Above.com predict when Starlink satellite trains will pass overhead for people looking to spot them.

Starlink satellites travel across the night sky above Yosemite National Park, California. Photograph By Babak Tafreshi

Satellites like Starlink’s have long been used to enhance mobile services like cell phone coverage, internet and GPS navigation for people on Earth. Satellites also make weather forecasting, TV signaling, radio, and military surveillance possible.

But before Starlink launches, there were no “trains of satellites” to be seen, says Tafreshi. SpaceX uses new satellites that can be folded up in the dozens and sent into space on private rocket launches out of Cape Canaveral in Florida and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

“You used to see a couple of satellites at the beginning of the night and it was very cool to see a ‘moving star’ in the sky,” Tafreshi says. “Now, every direction you look there are a few moving above you. They’ve stolen the show from the stars.”

While Starlink satellites in low-earth orbit aren’t the brightest man-made objects in the sky, it’s the sheer number of them that’s worrying, says James Lowenthal, professor of astronomy at Smith College. “Starlink’s appear very bright when they're first launched into low orbit—brighter than the great majority of naked-eye stars,” he says. They become fainter as they are both moved to higher orbit as well as actively controlled to face certain directions–primarily for their own communication, but in part to make them appear dimmer, too.

Other companies with mega constellation projects in the works include Amazon’s Project Kuiper, currently planning a mega constellation of 3,236 satellites for broadband internet purposes. AST SpaceMobile’s BlueWalker 3 will start with 100 satellites and they may be brighter than 99.8 percent of visible stars, according to New Scientist.

Regulating Our Skyscape

When Lowenthal witnessed Starlink’s first satellite launch in 2019, he says he knew “the sky would never be the same again.”

A lack of international regulation and environmental oversight is endangering the sanctity of our skies like never before, says Aparna Venkatesan, a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of San Francisco.

"We have no framework in place to conduct environmental assessments of all phases of satellite constellations, from launches to in-orbit operation to decommissioning,” she says.

Thousands of satellites break down in the atmosphere, leaving an estimated million pieces of space debris “criss-crossing at high relative speeds” and increasing the chance of collision with other space crafts, a 2021 paper asserts. These rockets also leave behind sooty discharge called black carbon, which could cause “changes in the global atmospheric circulation and distributions of ozone and temperature,” according to a 2010 paper.

Satellites contribute to light pollution by reflecting the sun’s light and also by their sheer numbers. Dark Skies organizations are fighting to minimize artificial light at night both to protect local ecosystems, and also to respect communities whose identities are closely tied to the night sky.

“Rapidly growing ground- and space-based light pollution is erasing Indigenous stories and identities—again—as history is painfully repeated for marginalized communities already disproportionately impacted by climate change and other crises,” Venkatesan says.

SpaceX has “done some due diligence,” says Vishnu Reddy, director of the Space4 Center at the University of Arizona, which measures the brightness of Starlink mega constellations and their impacts on ground-based astronomy.

Newer Starlink satellites “don’t reflect as much,” as the first generation satellites from 2019 and 2020, Reddy says, and some older ones have also been “deorbited‚”—falling out of orbit and burning up in the atmosphere.

Lowenthal agrees that SpaceX “quickly heard the alarm from astronomers around the world,” engaging in conversations with astronomers from the company’s first Starlink launch. “What they haven’t done, however, is slow down launches,” he says. “We have always relied on our ability to turn to the night sky for solace and personal connection as well as scientific study…that’s all threatened.”

[itsfullofstars]

Launch of VA258 carrying Eutelsat Konnect VHTS by europeanspaceagency The fourth Spacebus Neo satellite to benefit from ESA’s Neosat programme has launched into space on board the second Ariane 5 launch mission of 2022. The 8.9 metre, three-storeys-high communications satellite – which will deliver high-speed broadband and in-flight connectivity across Europe for its operator, Eutelsat – weighs 6.525 tonnes and accounted for 99% of the 6.62-tonne launch mass. Called Eutelsat Konnect Very High Throughput Satellite, it includes several innovative features developed under an ESA Partnership Project with satellite manufacturer Thales Alenia Space. The satellite was launched at 23:45 CEST (18:45 local time) on 6 September from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, into a sub-synchronous transfer orbit. This highly elliptical trajectory, which loops from close to Earth to up to 60 000 kilometres away from the planet at an inclination of 3.5°, will enable it to transfer into a geostationary orbit some 36 000 kilometres above Earth. After reaching geostationary orbit the satellite – the tallest ever built in Europe – will be tested further before it enters commercial service. The satellite features new antenna deployment and pointing mechanisms used within the antenna tracking system, as well as other innovative features including next-generation batteries and structural panels, all developed under the ESA Partnership Project. Credits: ESA / CNES / Arianespace / Optique vidéo du CSG - P. Piron https://flic.kr/p/2nKwrm7

[gardenerian]

I wonder if Ian and Mickey relate everything to their love like we do 😂 “oh this romantic tune is playing, ah yes my husband” “oh this super sexual song is playing, ah yes my husband”

that's hilarious 😭 we really do that don't we sjkdafh i will always find a way to make it about Them lmao - i bet they totally do this. ian hears literally any sound and is like HUSBAND????

commercial jingle? husband. internet broadband connecting screech? husband. terrible beat poetry at some west side bar? husband. every single song on the radio? HUSBAND.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library on Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

#15yrsago Zoe’s Tale: Scalzi’s smart-ass young-adult sf thriller https://memex.craphound.com/2008/11/12/zoes-tale-scalzis-smart-ass-young-adult-sf-thriller/

#10yrsago UK home secretary wants to overturn human rights treaties and make terror suspects stateless https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/12/theresa-may-british-terror-suspects-stateless-passport

#10yrsago David Nutt wants to make non-addictive, safer synth-booze that comes with a sober-up pill https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/getting-drunk-without-the-hangover-or-health-risks-scientist-seeks-investment-for-alcohol-substitute-drug-8931946.html

#10yrsago Irish Freedom of Information amendment will send FOI fees to infinity https://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2013/11/10/freedom-information-fees-multiplied-new-amendment/

#10yrsago GCHQ used fake Slashdot, LinkedIn to target employees at Internet exchanges https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/uk-spies-continue-quantum-insert-attack-via-linkedin-slashdot-pages/

#5yrsago A catalog of ingenious cheats developed by machine-learning systems https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRPiprOaC3HsCf5Tuum8bRfzYUiKLRqJmbOoC-32JorNdfyTiRRsR7Ea5eWtvsWzuxo8bjOxCG84dAg/pubhtml

#5yrsago Youtube CEO: it will be impossible to comply with the EU’s new Copyright Directive (adios, Despacito!) https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/i-support-goals-of-article-13-i-also/

#5yrsago Italian prosecutors have given up on catching the person who hacked and destroyed Hacking Team https://www.vice.com/en/article/3k9zzk/hacking-team-hacker-phineas-fisher-has-gotten-away-with-it

#5yrsago Wells Fargo: We can’t be sued for lying to shareholders because it was obvious we were lying https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-wells-puffery-20181109-story.html

#5yrsago Global antiquarian bookseller strike brings Amazon to its knees https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/technology/amazon-bookseller-protest-strike.html

#5yrsago New, “unbreakable” Denuvo DRM cracked two days before its first commercial deployment https://torrentfreak.com/hitman-2s-denuvo-protection-cracked-three-days-before-launch-181112/

#5yrsago How many computers are in your computer? https://gwern.net/turing-complete#how-many-computers-are-in-your-computer

#5yrsago The market failed rural kids: poor rural broadband has created a “homework gap” https://www.wired.com/story/rural-kids-internet-homework-gap-fcc-could-help/

[steamedtangerine]

My family and I having a good laugh at the local news sharing a "concerning health issue" about the "problems with Youtube Shorts"....that kids watching short clips too many times is detrimental to their development, attention span, and addictive sense of gratification. So......

a.) -uh, a little bit too late here, folks. Kids have been watching internet blurbs on YT and FB since the broadband high-speed internet spread of the late 2000's. Quick clicking peeks at gifs and memes is endemic to the internet----and has been for a looooong time.

b.) "Health concerns of the attention span".....so says the blaring TV set that has been sludge-pumping (as compared to the beneficial movie-sludge we should all be taking in on a daily basis ) us with incessant commercial breaks since the 40s. Let's also not overlook how terribly abbreviated and terse and tantalizing MSM news has been for a looooong time. Then they insist you check them out on WWW.BSnewsoutlet.com where even your computer gets addled by all the crappy mutii-media windows and ads jammed into one screen.

[ryanmpendu]

10 Awesome Internet Facts

Here are ten internet – related facts and milestones that have helped shaped connectivity across the South Africa, Africa, and the Earth.

It was in 1974, when the term “internet” was first used as a shortened term for “internetworking” (lame, right?) . At the time, there were several internets, as they referred to collections of linked networks.

The internet emerged in ’89 when a programmer named Tim Berners – Lee wrote the code for the first web browser called World Wide Web along with the standards for HTML, HTTP and URLs. The world also saw it’s first internet service providers (ISPs) starting at the same year. In the US, the first commercial dial-up ISP called ‘The World’ was started in 1989.

Rhodes University located in Makhanda, Eastern Cape, South Africa received the first South African IP Address in ’88.

In ’90, the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers granted South Africa the country code top-level domain .za.

South Africa’s internet user base grew from 2.4 million in 2000, to 5 million in 2008 to 12.3 million in 2012. In January 2021, this number grew to 38.13 million or close to 60% of the population, by contrast, Africa’s average internet penetration is just under 50%

Africa’s first broadband submarine cable system was launched by SEACOM in 2009. The 17 000 kilometers submarine cable connects African countries like South Africa, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania etc. to the internet.

In 2017, China had 756 million people connected to the internet, and India, 391 million people connected to the internet so basically Asia accounts for almost half of the world’s active internet users!

Gauteng is the province with the most access to the internet with 72.2% of the population connected and growing, while Limpopo is the province with the least number of people connected to the internet with 42.6% of the population connected to the internet and growing.

The average fixed broadband download speed in SA is 50 mbps which is an increase from when it was 46 mbps in May 2021. As fibre infrastructure in being rolled out and capacity improved, this number is expected to keep climbing.

The most popular website is…. You guessed it. Google. Facebook is the world’s favorite social media platform with 2.8 billion monthly users and growing.

[smitharaghu]

Deutsche Telekom Stock Review

Deutsche Telekom is a Germany-based company that provides integrated telecommunication services. It operates through five segments: Germany, United States, Europe, Systems Solutions, and Group Development. The Germany segment provides fixed-network and mobile telecommunications services to consumers and business customers. The United States segment provides telecommunications services in the United States market; and the Europe segment offers fixed-network and mobile operations of the national companies in Greece, Romania, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Slovakia, and Austria.

IPO

A major turning point in the world of telecommunications took place in November 1996, when Deutsche Telekom went public. It was the largest IPO in history and the capstone of years of intense effort by Goldman Sachs to establish a presence in the German market.

The company's offering marked a significant step in the development of an Anglo-Saxon shareholder culture. It was also the first telecommunications company to be listed on the Frankfurt and New York stock exchanges, as well as the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

It was the largest ever IPO and it was oversubscribed five times. Shares traded at nearly 20 percent above the issue price on their first day of trading.

In addition to its traditional services in Germany, the company provides telecommunications services throughout the rest of Europe and the United States. Its businesses include fixed network and broadband, mobile telephony, and information technology services.

Today, the company is one of the world's leading telecommunications companies with operations in more than 50 countries and a broad range of products and services. It has a worldwide network of around 248 million wireless and 26 million wireline customers.

The company has been in the forefront of telecommunications innovation, investing extensively in digital technologies to develop innovative new products and services for its customers. Examples include the Internet of Things, 5G technology, video conferencing, and artificial intelligence.

For a company like Deutsche Telekom, it is important to have a diverse product portfolio that appeals to different kinds of users. The company is also known for acquiring and selling companies to generate growth and streamline operations.

Despite its success, the company has faced several challenges in the past few years. It has lost customers to larger rivals, including AT&T and Verizon Communications Inc VZ.N, and it has also experienced a drop in revenue and profits.

However, the company's management has made efforts to turn its fortunes around, launching new business models and making strategic acquisitions. It is a leader in the telecommunications industry and it continues to seek ways to grow its business and create value for shareholders.

Mergers and Acquisitions

Deutsche Telekom is a diversified telecommunications company with a strong position in Europe and a booming US business. It operates in a number of different sectors, such as payments and commercial real estate tech.

In the US, the company is primarily focused on mobile services. Its subsidiary T-Mobile USA has an excellent record of growth and is a significant competitor to AT&T and Verizon. In addition, it owns Sprint (NYSE:S), which is set to become a major player in the U.S. telecom industry once the merger is complete in 2019.

The company has not made many major acquisitions, but it has done a few small ones over time. These smaller deals, such as the purchase of a Romanian carrier, the sale of T-Mobile Netherlands and its acquisition of Austria’s Telecom Austria, have improved its market position and scale.

Its US telco operations, T-Mobile USA and T-Mobile International, have been growing at very strong rates. These companies have a large customer base and are expected to continue expanding.

T-Mobile US is the second largest wireless service provider in the United States with a customer base of 120 million, behind Verizon. It has a very competitive pricing model and a great reputation in the industry.

However, the stock has not performed well in recent months. This is largely due to the fact that many investors are not aware of the fact that the German government owns 57 percent of the company. It has been criticized by a few legislators who think that the government should reduce its holding before the deal can be completed.

As a result, the stock has been down with other European stocks. If the Euro continues to weaken, this would likely help the stock and also its U.S. assets, which have been irrationally punished by European investors because they are included in a European stock.

To counter this, the company has been increasing its dividend and repurchasing some of its own shares, which are now trading at about a 50% discount to their value. These dividend increases and the repurchases should allow for further growth.

Shareholders

One of the largest shareholders in deutsche telekom stock is the German government and its agency, Kreditanstalt fuer Wiederaufbau (KfW). KfW owns 17.3 percent of the company's shares. It has been buying more shares and reducing its stake in a series of transactions.

Another large shareholder is the United States investment group Blackstone. It purchased 4.5 percent of deutsche telekom stock for $3.3 billion. It is hoping that the purchase will help the company achieve its long-term financial goals and boost shareholder value, according to the company's announcement.

It also plans to use the money to fund future dividend increases. The dividends are a key part of the company's plan to reinvest in new technologies and networks.

The company also recently rolled out an overhaul of its corporate strategy to focus on digitalization and adapting its business models to the changing needs of customers. The changes will make it a software company that sells telecommunication services, rather than just a hardware manufacturer.

This is a big shift from the days when telecommunications networks were made up of monolithic blocks of network elements. Today, companies like DT are disaggregating their technology and moving it into the cloud. This allows them to connect with third-party networks and use their infrastructure to provide telecommunications services.

In the case of telecommunications, this involves billing-software and other backend systems. These backend systems are responsible for collecting and analyzing customer data to make pricing decisions.

If these systems are not able to comply with GDPR, will they be subjected to enforcement action or sanctions by U.S., EU, or German authorities? If not, will they be the target of new private actions for fraud and/or breach of contract?

To protect its data, deutsche telekom stock has "binding corporate rules" that it has promised to abide by. These rules are "binding" on all of the company's subsidiaries and any of its other companies that can be required to comply with them or have already adopted them on a voluntary basis.

But what if deutsche telekom stock's subsidiary T-Mobile USA doesn't subscribe to these "binding" corporate privacy rules? Does it still have to comply with the "binding" rules, or is there something in the corporate law that prevents it from doing so?

Dividends

One of the coolest perks of being a shareholder of this German company is the opportunity to participate in its annual dividend payout. The company pays out an impressively large sum each year, and it has a long and distinguished history of making its shareholders happy. Despite its size, the company manages to stay on top of its game thanks to some innovative corporate strategies and a healthy dose of luck. In a nutshell, there's a reason why this stock has been a KfW staple for so long. The company is also one of the few surviving German telecoms. If you're on the hunt for a good value telecommunications stock, deutsche telekom should be at the top of your list. You'll be rewarded with top-notch service and competitive paycheques, not to mention a hefty chunk of the local economy.

After all, it's not every day that you get a free piece of the country's largest phone company, let alone one of the most innovative and coveted German telecommunications companies in the business.

[luxe-pauvre]

Before the pandemic, there was a real world, and this fake one, real friendships and “friends”, political communities and “followers”, genuine political expression and “likes”. The risk, when interactions with other human beings are narrowed to these remote, glancing and often combative exchanges – simulations – is that, once the lockdowns are over, people will bring the culture of the virtual into the real, creating even angrier, more impatient, more superficial, more transactional, more commercial and less democratic societies. Forging stronger bonds in a post-pandemic world, if one ever comes, will require acts of moral imagination that are not part of any political ideology or corporate mission statement, but are, instead, functions of the human condition: tenderness, compassion, longing, generosity, allegiance and affection. These, too, are the only real answers to loneliness, alienation, dislocation and disintegration. But the fullest expression of these functions across distances as easily spanned by viruses and flood waters as by broadband cables and TikTok videos, requires both society and government. What’s needed is nothing less than a new social contract for public goods, environmental protection, sustainable agriculture, public health, community centres, public education, grants for small businesses, public funding for the arts. It won’t be a new New Deal. The dangers are graver because decades of a world, both real and virtual, shaped by Reaganism and Thatcherism, has left the waters rising, all around us, and the forests on fire. Governments rest on a social contract, an agreement to live together. That contract needs renewing. But the problem, in the end, isn’t with society, or the social fabric. It’s with governments that have abandoned their obligations of care. Liberalism didn’t kill society. And conservatism didn’t kill society. Because society isn’t dead. But it is pallid and fretful, like a shut-in staring all day long at nothing but a screen, mistaking a mirror for a window. Inside, online, there is no society, only the simulation of it. But, outside, on the grass and the pavement, in the woods and on the streets, in playgrounds and schoolyards and ballparks, in council flats and shops and pubs and agricultural fairs and libraries and union halls, society hums along, if not with the deafening thrum of a steam-driven machine, then with the hand-oiled, creaking clatter of an antwacky wooden loom.

Jill Lepore, Is society coming apart?