LONDON — British Prime Minister Andy Burnham confirmed Friday he will legislate to ease restrictive non-compete clause rules for workers — but stopped short of committing to a ban.
Burnham said in a speech in Manchester that he wants to “make sure that non-compete clauses will no longer be a barrier to hiring for our most promising start-ups and scaling firms” — but did has yet to set out the extent of the crackdown.
The scope of the new rules will come later, ahead of legislation. POLITICO first reported the planned crackdown Thursday.
The government’s action would be the “Bosman ruling for the innovation sector,” Burnham said at a government-backed innovation summit in Manchester. That’s a reference to a 1995 European Court of Justice decision that changed how star players are transferred between football clubs.
Potential changes to non-compete clauses in workers’ contracts began in 2025 under Burnham’s predecessor Keir Starmer. The proposals ranged from a total ban on non-compete clauses to a partial ban, such as allowing non-compete clauses only for workers earning more than a set salary threshold, or limiting their length.
The vow from Burnham comes after intense lobbying lobbying for and against the restrictions in workers’ contracts. U.K. tech start-ups claim the curbs are undermining economic growth, while City firms and trade bodies, including TheCityUK and the Managed Funds Association, are against any changes.
We’ve been following this conversation here in The Editors’ Blog about what AI is, what it can do and whether it can possibly live up to its hype. It’s worth considering the question from what we might loosely call not only the supply side but also the demand side. From a very broad perspective, the history of the last three decades has been one defined by the fact that you have too much capital chasing too few productive investments. That’s the driver of the recent history of cycles of booms, bubbles, over-investment and busts: the Asian Financial Crisis, the Dot Com Bust, the Global Financial Crisis, perhaps soon the AI Bubble Collapse, along with many smaller of regional ones.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman named French President Emmanuel Macron as the world leader who stands out for their approach to AI in an exclusive interview with Decoded by POLITICO.
“The person that came to mind as you were saying that is the French president,” Altman told Decoded co-author and POLITICO senior tech reporter Brendan Bordelon in response to being asked who has impressed him the most with their AI policy or plans for the technology.
“I think [Macron] is extremely thoughtful and has been for a long time about where this is going and what the shape of it needs to look like,” Altman said.
The recognition is notable because Macron has sought to use his leadership to push AI safety on the global stage, and because the French president is months away from leaving office.
After two terms as president, Macron is barred from running in the next election in April 2027. The far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, who is leading in the polls, is advocating a policy of deregulation on AI, three senior party officials told POLITICO.
Le Pen’s National Rally party also wants to become less dependent on foreign tech companies and is considering reviving a proposal for a sovereign wealth fund to channel money toward French tech leaders such as OVH or Mistral, as well as favoring French companies in public contracts.
Some party figures have even threatened to repatriate French capital invested in American tech — €80 billion, according to party official Alexandre Loubet — without specifying how.
Macron himself has been a major champion of the French AI lab Mistral. Next month he’ll host the annual Paris Peace Forum — one of his pet diplomatic projects — to focus on AI safety and the risks technology poses to children and teenagers.
The Altman interview appears in Monday’s debut edition of Decoded by POLITICO and its accompanying daily podcast, covering global technology and focused on the personalities, political shifts and policy battles shaping the future of the world.
Read the full Decoded newsletter for more.
Also check out the full interview on YouTube and listen to the podcast here.
There’s a funny game I’ve been playing with my three-year-old iPhone lately. The objective is to drain my battery as often as possible to degrade its health enough that Apple Care covers the replacement. A new battery would make my phone feel brand new — or at least new enough to avoid buying the latest iPhone, which isn’t really any better than my old-timer.
I can’t play this game forever. In a few years, I expect Apple to stop supporting my model, as it has with countless other geriatric devices, in a tradition that’s become derisively and even conspiratorially known as planned obsolescence. At that point, the new iPhone will probably cost hundreds of dollars more than mine did a few years ago, thanks in part to a global memory shortage that’s driving up the cost of gadgets and arguably making them worse. Apple raised the prices of iPhones by $100 this year, and not just the latest models either. Last year’s models got a price hike, too. As with so many other consumer goods right now, we’re spending more to get less.
“It just doesn’t feel that revolutionary anymore,” said Lee Vinsel, a professor at Virginia Tech and the co-author of The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession With the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most. “When a technology settles down and you’re being asked to pay more for it and it doesn’t feel like you’re getting that much more, it’s frustrating.”
This isn’t the first time in recent history that American consumers have been faced with the degradation of an expensive item they’ve come to rely on. In the 1970s, the American automotive industry went through what’s become known as the Malaise Era. During a decade-long period, from about 1973 to 1983, a cascade of external factors, including rising oil prices and new safety and emissions regulations, upended Detroit’s deeply ingrained tradition of building big, beautiful, and very inefficient cars. What American consumers got instead were models like the Ford Pinto that cost more and underperformed. Ultimately, this embarrassing decade changed the way Americans bought cars (less Chrysler, more Toyota; fewer muscle cars, more minivans).
I’m not saying the iPhone is the same as the Pinto. (For starters, your phone isn’t bursting into flames upon impact.) However, there is something to the idea that the iPhone — and possibly the consumer tech industry in general — is suffering through its own age of malaise. External factors are forcing companies like Apple to break away from a longstanding bargain with its customers, one that promised significantly better products at or below the same price point. Instead, we’re getting mediocre new devices that cost more.
What’s happening with Apple now, and what happened to American cars during the Malaise Era brings to mind another term, too: enshittification.
Coined in 2022 by the science fiction novelist Cory Doctorow, the term specifically refers to tech platforms that degrade products and squeeze profits out of users; Doctorow writes, “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
I think the crappy cars of the 1970s can teach us a lot about enshittification. First, that it’s not unprecedented for everything to get worse and cost more, especially in a world where wars lead to oil shock or AI bubbles lead to product shortages. And second, that these episodes offer people like you and me an opportunity. They represent a chance to do something different, to escape the product cycle any given company has looped you into.
Enshittification is a great excuse to be a more empowered consumer.
The rapid buildout of AI data centers has put computer memory in high demand, and there are basically only three companies that make the stuff: Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung Electronics. As early as last August, there were warnings that everything from cars to smartphones would rise in price, and that’s exactly what’s happened. Apple has raised prices on its gadgets by as much as 29 percent. Samsung and Google have done the same for their devices.
Memory manufacturers have known since the pandemic that they needed to build more capacity, but they pulled back on those plans after consumer demand slowed down a couple years ago. That was right around the same time that investors started pouring billions into the AI industry, and demand for memory surged as data centers needed massive amounts of it to keep ChatGPT and Claude alive.
All of the companies are doing fine in this crisis. The memory manufacturers are posting eye-popping profits. Meanwhile, the market intelligence firm IDC predicts that global shipments of smartphones will fall nearly 17 percent this year, but the total market value will increase by more than 6 percent. How? Higher prices, of course.
“Forget the prices most of us were used to paying for any consumer electronics,” Francisco Jeronimo, vice president for data and analytics at IDC, told me. “Even when the crisis gets better, prices will come down, but not to the same price level that we saw a year ago.”
The memory crisis is not getting better tomorrow, either. Jeronimo said that “there’s no light at the end of the tunnel,” although IDC expects that the situation might start to improve by early 2028. Tarun Pathak, a research director at the market intelligence firm Counterpoint, told me this is not a one-year problem, but it’s not a decade-long crisis either. Until the shortage ends, however, you can expect innovation to slow, at least somewhat, and for prices to keep climbing.
My dad is not a car guy, but when I was growing up, he liked trading cars. The worst one that ever graced our driveway was a 1978 Lincoln Continental, a land yacht that weighed nearly 5,000 pounds. We nicknamed it “The Grey Ghost” because it was often dead. Once, on a family vacation, we couldn’t turn it off for two days for fear that it wouldn’t start back up and we’d have no way home. Cars like this defined the Malaise Era.
Many automotive historians place the beginning of this period at 1973 for a few reasons. That was the year that OPEC issued an oil embargo on the United States, leading to fuel shortages and spiraling gas prices. Suddenly, the gas-guzzling muscle cars of the 1960s didn’t look as appealing as something smaller and more efficient, like the Volkswagen Beetle, for instance.
This was also around the same time that car manufacturers were making big changes to their models in order to comply with the 1970 Clean Air Act, which called for the industry to reduce emissions in new automobiles by 90 percent over five years. This challenge led to underpowered and less reliable engines. Detroit, after all, had designed its whole manufacturing process around gas-guzzling muscle cars. Congress then enacted the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards in 1975, requiring cars to be even more efficient. (The One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 eliminated the penalties for violating these regulations.)
“There was a whole host of cars that appeared on the scene that were anything but desired by the public,” said John Heitmann, a professor emeritus at the University of Dayton, who studies the history of the automobile. “It’s epitomized by cars like the Chevy Vega, Ford Pinto, of course, which actually I think was a better car than it’s ever given credit for.”
Rising fuel costs and new regulations in the 1970s, not to mention double-digit inflation, contributed to higher prices for those cars, too. Adding insult to injury and partly driven by new safety standards, automotive design also took a weird turn during this period, leading to huge bumpers, fake wood paneling, and vinyl roofs.
“In a nutshell, that was the Malaise Era and it marked, some would say, the end of the love affair with the car,” Heitmann added.
What really stands out to me about this period, however, is the fact that consumers pushed back against the idea of spending more money to buy worse cars — and actually came out ahead. German and especially Japanese carmakers, who had anticipated the new regulations, made great cars throughout the 1970s, and American consumers started to consider foreign-made vehicles. By the 1980s, these companies had gained a strong foothold in the US.
In other words, a decade of crappy American cars turned loyal Ford customers into Toyota drivers. And while it’s hard to imagine that a few more years of lackluster devices will turn Apple fans into Android users (especially because all devices are getting more expensive), it’s clear that waning enthusiasm for the annual iPhone upgrade is shaking up the industry. I’m not just talking about the $2,000 foldable iPhone, either.
A key difference between buying a car in the ’70s and ’80s and buying a new phone today relates to switching costs. If you wanted to ditch your boat-like Lincoln, you could just buy or lease a Toyota Camry and drive away. If you’re sick of boring iPhones and want to try a Google Pixel, however, you’re looking at a big headache that involves moving your data from one platform to another and learning a new operating system.
Apple has made it difficult to leave its ecosystem, sure. But much like car drivers in the ’70s, we do have options, and buying a new iPhone every two years isn’t inevitable.
The secondary market for smartphones is thriving, and refurbished devices are practically as good as the new ones. You can buy a refurbished iPhone 15 Pro, which is the phone I use and love, for about $550. The price of a new iPhone 18 Pro is more than double that, and as far as I can tell, the main differences between the two models are a new chip and some marginal camera upgrades. And while Apple might argue that AI features in its current iOS require more processing power, you would also have to be a power AI user to really care about that.
Meanwhile, all kinds of gadgets are also getting easier to fix thanks to new right-to-repair legislation being enacted across the country. Similar laws in the European Union, which went into effect this year, also aim to “create a system that favours repairing a product over purchasing a new one.” Such an ambitious raft of regulations could even reshape how manufacturers design their products worldwide. Apple devices are already becoming more repairable ahead of EU battery regulations that are set to go into effect next year.
I find myself wondering if regulations like these will reshape the consumer tech industry the way that environmental regulations transformed the auto industry half a century ago. Again, cars and phones are very different machines, but they’re each essential to millions of people’s lives.
“People treat their cars like precious objects and we worry about them,” said Kyle Wiens, co-founder and CEO of iFixit. “We need to start thinking about electronics as something that we’re going to baby and treat carefully and preserve as long as we can.”
Let me tell you, taking care of your things and keeping them for a while is fun in the same way I imagine tending to your classic car was once fun. While I have stayed in the Apple ecosystem, I haven’t bought a new Apple product in years. My phone, once I finally get that battery replaced, will last a couple more years. My Apple Watch, which I bought refurbished, will get a new battery and a new life soon too. Now if we could only figure out a way to make batteries last longer, these devices could last as long as classic cars.
You’ve probably seen these reports of an employee of the AI company Anthropic who quit his job and issued a warning on X that suggested AI could, in next few years, escape control and lead to the extinction of humanity. These sound like not just wild but science fiction-type claims. And they’ve lurked around frontier AI labs for years. It’s one of the many weirdnesses of the AI world and those who lead it. The basic pitch: AI is awesome. We need to built it as quickly as possible. Also it might lead to human extinction. Quite an attractive offer! There’s always been a strong sense among many observers that these claims or suggestions or warnings are part of the AI hype machine itself, albeit of a kind of contradictory or paradoxical variety.
But this warning by the ex-Anthropic employee, Jacob Coxon, seems different and is unquestionably being reacted to very differently. That’s the one part of this that is new and real – the reaction to this warning/comment etc is much bigger and operating in the tech, financial and general media. Wired has a good interview with him here. (I think you can read it as a free article if you haven’t read other Wired articles this month.) The gist is that Coxon says it’s imperative to create a regulatory structure, or at least an ad-hoc agreement that can slow the competition between OpenAI and Anthropic, the two most advanced AI engines and research entities. (The inflection point people are focusing on is something called “recursive self-improvement,” which is when this generation of AI model builds the next one.) The problem is that you really need an agreement that brings China into some common framework too. Because they’re in this same hunt, running these same risks, even though I think the common consensus is that Chinese companies are running at least somewhat behind the most advanced U.S. companies. China’s strength has been building models which are only a bit behind the U.S. models but at dramatically lowest costs.
State officials and elected leaders who once championed tax exemption deals with the executives of companies like Amazon, Google and Meta for the development of data centers in their states are now having second thoughts — and some states are taking steps toward making those deals a thing of the past.
It’s a sign that elected officials are belatedly taking notice of voters’ fears about data centers, unregulated AI advancement and the broader agenda of the tech industry. Rampant construction of new data centers around the U.S. has prompted panic about spikes in the cost of electricity, drained water supplies, pollution and artificial intelligence stealing human jobs. It’s underscored by the extreme economic uncertainty that everyone is facing — except, maybe, tech executives and the people who design their messaging.
The Wall Street Journal has a new report out this week examining 10 different states that had previously granted tech companies sales tax exemptions for the equipment needed to run data centers. In each of those states, officials are now having second thoughts. The piece focuses especially closely on Ohio and the work that state legislators did more than 10 years ago to encourage Big Tech investment in the state by offering the sales tax exemption, and the ways in which the artificial intelligence surge of the last four years has resulted in over $1.5 billion in savings for tech companies developing data centers there.
After substantial public pushback, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine back in May placed a pause on new applications for sales-tax exemptions, and some state lawmakers are pushing for the sales-tax exemption to be repealed. Several other states are considering similar actions to end or pause these ongoing tax breaks for tech companies, which “seem to have more money than God,” as one Ohio lawmaker, state Rep. Tristan Rader (D-OH), put it to WSJ.
Elected officials and politicians across the political spectrum are grappling with how to address the sweeping and righteous outrage against data center construction in rural and urban communities across the country. The notable exception is President Trump, who has maintained his allegiance to his big tech friends — who are funding his ballroom, and who donated to his inauguration, among other things. He memorably told Americans that only communities who want to be “backwards and poor” should oppose the new construction. His Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, is proposing a federal policy change that will make it easier for data center construction to move forward without input from the public.
Republicans are struggling with how to walk the line, but the backlash has been so severe back home that many are fully breaking with the Trump administration on the matter. Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott recently announced that he was placing a pause on the ability for new data center projects to be connected to the state’s power grid. Sen. John Thune (R-SD) and Vice President JD Vance have attempted to carve out a reasonable place for Republicans to stand should they not want to bow down whole hog to tech oligarchs, like Trump. The two have both independently suggested that states should look at mandates for tech companies to “be putting power back into the grid” as one way to address Americans’ concerns that the mammoth AI facilities are spiking electricity costs.
As Rader, the Ohio Democrat, said above …
WSJ: More Money Than They Ever Imagined—and No Clue How to Spend It
You may have seen by now the deadly warning from an Anthropic researcher who resigned from his job and warned that unregulated AI models had the potential to destroy humanity in the next four years.
“I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic,” Anthropic research Jason Coxon, who worked on training models, said on X. “Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt,” he continued.
Lawmakers across the political spectrum are calling on Congress to do something to prevent what Coxon and others from Anthropic have been forecasting.
The call is coming from inside the house.
— Lori Trahan (@RepLoriTrahan) September 9, 2026
Safety researchers are resigning, powerful AI models are breaking out of their labs, and companies are racing ahead anyway.
It's past time for Congress to get off the sidelines and do its job. We can start with my bipartisan FRONTIER… https://t.co/P32aesPI8V
Congress needs to convene a special session on AI and what the future of the U.S. looks like. There are very real impacts to society as we know it. Partisan politics aside, there are massive implications of a race towards super intelligence. This is not a doomer post, as some of…
— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) September 9, 2026
I’ll bring your attention to one matter in today’s edition of Where Things Stand that is less existential than the threat posed by America’s tech oligarchy. The White House apparently got involved in the recent mystery surrounding Fox News’ ousting of longtime Fox Business News host Maria Bartiromo.
Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro said during an interview with Newsmax Tuesday that the White House reached out to network executive to let them know they were dismayed by the decision.
“But suffice it to say that Suzanne Scott got a call, and basically the White House let her know that that kind of thing is totally unacceptable,” Navarro said, referencing the Fox News Media CEO.
Navarro went on to complain about how “out of control” Fox News is, suggesting that the network has become anti-Trump — a suggestion that flies in the face of how often the network bolsters the president’s agenda. After news of Bartiromo’s ouster broke, reports surfaced suggestion the longtime host reportedly shared details of internal editorial decisions with the White House.
“The bigger story here is, forget about anybody thinking that Fox is a conservative network that’s friendly to MAGA, that’s friendly to Trump,” he said. “They’ll feed you some red meat over there — the easy stuff, the trans stuff, stuff like that — but when it comes down to MAGA things, Suzanne Scott gets rid of everybody over there who wants to talk about MAGA issues.”
Josh Kovensky and Layla A. Jones report on the Trump administration officially moving to exclude certain noncitizens from being counted in the upcoming Census, finding that the new, official policy is actually more extreme than the draft version that TPM was first to report on in August: Trump Admin Officially Moves to Reshape National Political Power With New Changes to 2030 Census
Kate Riga covered oral arguments today in the abortion pill mifepristone case before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals: Appeals Court Skeptical That Louisiana Can Sue FDA Over Mifepristone Being Mailed into the State
John Light helps unpack the convoluted legal situation in Missouri regarding which maps to use in the upcoming election — and what it reveals about the Trump administration’s approach to sowing legal chaos in the election administration process this fall: Dueling Missouri Court Decisions Give Us a Preview of the Kind of Midterm We’re in For
Making Sense of That Big Story Saying Netanyahu Was Warned About Oct 7
Jeffries says Trump is too ‘corrupt’ to focus on Americans’ struggles
Trump says he’d consider pardoning Michael Cohen
Associated Press will stick with Lake Ontario over Trump’s renamed ‘Lake America’
During a tense vote on a data center being built in her drought-stricken Arizona district last summer, Tucson City Councilmember Nikki Lee made an unlikely pitch: “We’re going to get a little out-of-this-world for a second, so just bear with me.”
Like many of her constituents, Lee did not want Project Blue, a sprawling 290-acre data center, gobbling up an ounce of her local drinking water. “We need to put data centers where they belong,” she said, and “we don’t think data centers belong in the desert.”
President Donald Trump’s recent bluster aside, it’s possible that the only thing as bipartisan as loving Dolly Parton is hating data centers, whose construction has become so controversial, so costly, and so backlogged here on Earth that companies like Google, Meta, and of course, SpaceX, are actively flirting with the idea of flinging them into orbit instead. Soon after the Tucson City Council rejected Project Blue’s attempt to connect to city utilities, Amazon Web Services, the secretive intended beneficiary, pulled out of the project, and another Jeff Bezos company, Blue Origin, filed a plan with regulators for tens of thousands of possible new data centers, this time, destined for orbit.
Sure, launching a hyperscale AI data center into space is still unprecedented engineering-wise, carries an unfathomably large price tag, could engender its own severe environmental risks, and may or may not draw unwelcome attention from the hunters among the stars. But for AI companies, such trade-offs might still be preferable to the terrestrial roadblocks, among them an explosive populist backlash and a 12-year wait to connect to the power grid.
Next Thursday, Google plans to launch a pilot satellite capable of processing basic AI queries into orbit, the most significant test yet in what’s become a burgeoning race to power AI from space. For now, the satellite won’t approach the levels of computing power at a hulking terrestrial data center like Project Blue. But it is a major step toward a future in which many or even most of our AI queries will be powered not from the outskirts of a city like Tucson, but from a blinking data center circling the skies.
SpaceX’s gargantuan initial public offering earlier this summer was predicated on the idea that it would launch a thus-far-unrealized fleet of orbital data centers to fuel much of the AI economy. The company — whose rockets Google will use to launch its pilot — claims that by the end of this decade, possibly as early as 2028, it will have successfully assembled an AI data center in orbit, with plans to eventually harvest a staggering 100 gigawatts of new solar energy for AI annually, equivalent to one-fifth of all US electricity consumption last year. (As always, that’s a very iffy promise.)
Still, as Google’s overtures clearly demonstrate, it’s no longer a question of if large-scale space-based data centers could be technically feasible, but rather when they’ll be ready to launch, and perhaps more importantly, whether the math of using them to power something like AI will make much financial sense anytime soon. As of now, building a one-gigawatt data center in space would cost about $51.5 billion, according to an analysis by aerospace engineer Andrew McCalip, compared with $16 billion for one on land.
“They’re not breaking any rules of physics. Yes, there are going to be engineering challenges, but they are all solvable with enough time and money,” said Jason Aspiotis, a leading space systems engineer who now leads an orbital data center startup. “The gray area is, well, what about the economics?”
But even if this astronomically kooky plan does take off, it may not change much for those of us left on terra firma: Our energy bills will remain high, even if data centers aren’t there to drive them up. Our earthly infrastructure — affordable housing, public transit, and more — may be just as hard to build as ever. Harder even, maybe, given that crucial resources and untapped tax revenue will be literally rocketing up out of our reach.
No, if these tech giants succeed, it will not fix what’s wrong here on Earth, but merely prove once again their exemption to the gravitational forces holding the rest of us down.
My father spent most of his career working in the satellite industry, and would sometimes let me waltz inside the quaint little data center housed in his office, a room I remember as roughly the size of my school’s computer lab, hosting rows upon rows of servers that I couldn’t touch, churning with a cool, mechanical hum as they crunched zeroes and ones.
AI data centers work similarly to that server room but on an exponentially larger scale, requiring far more land and energy to run, and much more extravagant cooling systems. Sending his office’s data center into orbit would have been extraordinarily difficult, and getting one of the facilities that powers modern LLMs aloft would be an even larger, more ambitious undertaking. But the benefits — namely, “cheap space (no pun intended) and power,” as my dad put it to me recently — are even more enticing.
An orbital data center need not negotiate with an elected official like Lee over precious water rights to the Colorado River, though it would need to install bigger-than-football-field-sized heat radiators to keep itself cool. You can’t simply launch something that big into orbit, meaning a space-based hyperscale data center — the size of which would likely rival that of the International Space Station — would need to be assembled piece by piece, probably by robots. And while the sun would provide an endless supply of solar power to process your ChatGPT queries, it would also inflict incessant radiation on delicate circuitry. If something breaks, you can’t send a technician up to fix it. Many experts are also concerned that if an excess of space junk, which extraterrestrial data centers would inevitably produce, begins colliding like bumper cars in Earth’s low orbit, it could knock out the orbital infrastructure we already rely on, like GPS navigation and weather satellites.
Even plastic decays in space, said Sven Bilén, a professor of aerospace engineering at Penn State, who, like Aspiotis, believes that early orbital data centers will probably be “processing data from space, like spatial imaging satellites or weather satellites, as opposed to, you know, cat videos” or AI-generated reality TV slop.
But even if AI is not the lowest-hanging fruit for deploying compute into space, it is certainly the deepest-pocketed, meaning that many investors and companies like SpaceX and Google seem quite willing to shoulder the start-up costs anyway. And considering how difficult it’s gotten to build data centers on Earth, or at least in the United States, it’s indeed possible that space could become the cheaper, or at least most convenient option, more quickly than one might think.
“In some form or another, in five years, we are going to have some orbital data centers in space for sure,” Krishna Muralidharan, who leads the Center for Semiconductor Manufacturing at the University of Arizona, told me, but it’s hard to say right now whether those consist of just a few expensive prototypes, or the beginning of a much bigger swing toward orbital compute. “Only time will tell whether you’re going to have a business case for it.”
So, is it better to have a data center in space or in your backyard?
David Reid, a member of Virginia’s House of Delegates representing Loudoun County, home to more data centers than anywhere else on Earth, says the question has repeatedly come up at his town hall meetings. Reid is the rare politician — apart from the president, anyway — willing to defend terrestrial data centers, calling them a “money-printing machine” for local schools and infrastructure. Having spent decades working in the defense and technology sectors, he is doubtful that the math on orbital data centers will ever make sense.
“I believe this is, for lack of a better term, fictional nonsense,” he said, and is “creating a distraction from the fact that local officials here on Earth still need to make better zoning decisions.”
If most of the AI industry can eventually be powered by space, as SpaceX claims, it will require millions of sprawling new satellites, in an orbit currently dotted by fewer than 20,000 of them. Though “space is really big,” as Elon Musk has put it, one million satellites would still profoundly and, likely irrevocably, transform our night sky into one in which data centers outnumber visible stars.
“Will humanity notice if there are fewer stars in the sky? Well, not so much right now,” given light pollution in many cities, said John Barentine, an astronomer and environmental advocate for the night sky. “But what if they’re replaced by these artificial stars in the night sky? Is that the point at which people will say, ‘Wait a minute, we don’t want this. We want the benefits, but we don’t want this as a consequence.’”
This is, of course, the tension also at the heart of building data centers here on Earth. To some extent, they’re the most tangible representations of how little power we have to shape the course of a transformative new technology that few trust, and even fewer asked for. It’s one thing to object to a hulking data center, but it might be another altogether to see the sigils of our digital overlords illuminating the firmament. Would a place like Tucson, one of the most beautiful places to stargaze in the world, prefer a Project Blue to a starscape marred by blinking servers in the sky?
Update, September 24, 10:35 am ET: This post was originally published on September 3 and has been updated to include information about a pilot satellite capable of processing basic AI queries that Google is launching soon.
In response to my post about this data center backlash outside of Kansas City (specifically Independence, Missouri), I’ve been fielding the range of ideas people have about hyperscale AI data centers. As you’d probably expect, the vast majority of people are against them and excited to see this kind of backlash through the architecture of local government. But there’s a small but vocal group saying: no, this is all a kind of NIMBY moral panic driven by anger at Big Tech when a lot of these deals, maybe most, actually are good deals for the local communities.
The last part isn’t totally crazy. Or at least they’re certainly on to something that a big part of the punch behind the data center backlash is fueled by a broad politico-economy anger about tech platforms, AI, and nascent oligarchy which in this one set of circumstances people can actually fight back against. I discussed this in a post at the end of last month. Part of the big sour mood that seems to pervade every nook and cranny of our society today is focused on Big Tech, the central and most visible moneyed power in the U.S. today. Everyone has this sense that these guys can simply do anything and there’s no accountability — no democratic control — over any of it. It’s their world and we’re just living in it. But here you have a case where you need to build a super big data center, where finally you have to come and ask permission from some sleepy town council or county commission. And all that pent up powerlessness just comes out as, No! Or, really, Fuck no! And along with that is comment that amounts to, I don’t even care what you’re doing. The answer’s still no. Because you guys have way too much power and someone has to say no to you.
"Carcinization" is a curious biological phenomenon: given enough time, across many environments, many species will evolve into crabs. The body-type of a crab, with its low center of gravity, sideways gait (useful for evading predators), ease of concealment and protected organs is suitable to many different environments:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
Lately, I've watched the American Big Tech platforms as they underwent their own form of technocarcinization, which is when every tech company turns into Facebook.
For a long time, it seemed to me that you could make sense of the tech platforms by placing them into one of four quadrants on a 2×2 grid, in which one axis denoted "control freakishness" and the other, "surveillance."
Each quadrant had its own canonical company. The most surveillant/least controlling company (top left) was Google. They would let you roam the whole wide internet and exert no control over your conduct, but would spy on you wherever you went. The least surveillant/most controlling company was Apple, who imprisoned you in its manicured walled garden, but promised never to spy on you. The non-spying/non-controlling option is free/open source tech (of course), which doesn't care what you do, and doesn't watch you do it. And the most spying, most controlling company was Facebook, a company whose products did everything they could to imprison you within their virtual walls, from which vantage they could effect maximal surveillance.
I've used this comparison many times over the years. I included in my 2023 book The Internet Con, along with the joke that Tiktok's position on the grid was so far up and to the right (maximum surveillance and control) that we'd had to put its logo on the back cover. Enough people took this joke seriously and wrote in to complain that they'd gotten a misprint without the logo that we added it to the paperback:
https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con
The grid was useful, until technocarcinization started to push all the tech companies into that top right quadrant. Apple is no longer the company that protects you from surveillance – they're the company that spies on you, having secretly added a total surveillance system to the iPhone to target ads to you:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
Apple can't even claim to protect you from third-party surveillance. Sure, they block Facebook from spying on you, but they have barred ICE Block, an app that tells you if there are ICE chuds hunting in your neighborhood, looking to kidnap you and send you to a concentration camp. Apple declared ICE mercenaries to be a "protected class":
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply
And thanks to Apple's control-freakery – which prevents you from overriding Apple's decisions about your own devices – once Apple decides to spy on you or sell you out to fascist goons, there's nothing you can do about it:
https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/
Then there's Google, the company that ran a free-range livestock operation in which you could roam wherever you liked, because they could always find you when it was time for the slaughter. For years now, Google has been moving inexorably to the kind of control-freak nonsense that you used to only find in one of Apple's crystal prisons.
For example, every year or two, Google floats a proposal to use secure hardware in your device to rat you out if you've got an ad-blocker, privacy blocker, or other aftermarket add-on that lets you choose how you experience the digital world:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai
It's an idea they just can't quit, despite the fact that it's fucking abominable and everyone hates it:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/12/compelled-speech/#quishing
Google used to pride itself in its ability to send you to the open web, viewing search as a conduit to other peoples' resources. Now, with AI search summaries, Google is harvesting the open web and then eating the seed corn, keeping searchers inside of Google's walled garden:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/29/arsonist-firefighters/#im-feeling-lucky
Google also took the idea of a free/open browser and ran with it, rehabilitating some discarded Apple code and turning it into Chrome, the internet's most dominant browser – by far. Now, Google is nerfing that browser's plug-in architecture in a way that blocks all kinds of user-tunable options, including and especially ad-blocking:
https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock
And Google has also announced that they're going to turn Android into an iPhone, making it both technically challenging and radioactively illegal for you to install software of your choosing on your own property:
Google is adopting every one of Apple's worst practices, and Apple is adopting all of Google's worst practices, and so they're both turning into Facebook: technocarcinization!
What's driving this technocarcinization? Well, the obvious answer is that the more Facebooklike a company becomes, the more ways there are for it to rip you off. Surveillance can be monetized by selling your data, by ad targeting, and by surveillance-based pricing and wage-suppression:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/21/cod-marxism/#wannamaker-slain
Control lets platforms block competing products, extract massive junk fees to the businesses they connect you to, and control repair and end-of-life, forcing you to replace hardware by blocking parts and independent service:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/10/markets-are-regulations/#carney-found-a-spine
It turns out that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product" is only half-right. The other half is, "even if you pay for the product, you're the product." Pay, don't pay: companies will productize anyone they can. And thanks to our enshittogenic policy environment – where the worst ideas of the worst people make the most money – you can always be productized:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/10/say-their-names/#object-permanence
This is independent of the kind of person running the company. Facebook is run by Mark Zuckerberg, a cringe halfwit whose only successful idea was to offer Harvard bros a way of nonconsensually rating the fuckability of female undergrads. Everything he's done since was an acquisition (Whatsapp, Insta) or a flop (metaverse, Libra), or both (Oculus). Zuck owns the majority of the voting stock in the company, which means he has total control over its actions. He can ignore or fire his board members at will. He is the move fast/break things guy, whose every foolish whim can become policy that impacts billions of people.
By contrast, Google and Apple are no longer run by their flamboyant founders, who were every bit as prone to folly as Zuck. They were constrained by their shareholders, which meant that the blast-radius of Steve Jobs's worst ideas (like treating his otherwise curable cancer with green juice) were confined to his own person.
Today, Apple and Google are run by bloodless business sociopaths who go to enormous lengths to project an air of sober adulthood. And yet, these people – who would never be caught dead bow-hunting their own livestock or climbing into an MMA cage – have steered their companies into Facebook's quadrant on our enshittification 2×2.
I think this shows just how much the enshittification of tech is a matter of the policy environment, not the personalities of the people involved. Sure, the worst people imaginable run these companies, but the reason they're able to yield to their most venal impulses and succeed is because the world has been re-arranged to make sociopathy and greed into fitness factors. We get technocarcinization because the most fit organism for a landscape without consequences is a zuckerbergian techno-crab:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/
What can we do about it? Well, we're going to have to remake the landscape to punish (rather than reward) enshittification:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
And in the meantime, there is one inhabitant of the 2×2 that hasn't drifted up and to the right: free and open source software. It's still snugly nestled in the low-surveillance/low-control box, and if you live in that box, your life will be much, much better for it.
There's no better time to make the switch: with RAM and storage prices through the ceiling and OSes growing ever-more bloated with AI and spyware (but I repeat myself), this is the moment to rehabilitate that old computer with Linux:
https://www.fosslinux.com/158206/linux-on-older-hardware-revival-guide.htm
The alternative is to be tormented by crabs no matter what you're trying to do or where you're trying to get to.
To Decarbonize Quickly, Think Beyond Electrification https://jacobin.com/2026/06/climate-electrification-homes-cars-decarbonization-tech
Ireland is big tech’s lapdog – and that compromises its EU presidency https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/30/ireland-big-tech-lapdog-eu-presidency-digital-sovereignty
Beyond Denial How Oil Execs Shaped a Landmark Climate Study https://www.propublica.org/article/wedges-climate-research-bp-fossil-fuel-princeton
US Supreme Court just blew up EU-US Data Transfers https://noyb.eu/en/us-supreme-court-just-blew-eu-us-data-transfers
#15yrsago Print-on-demand and donations - report on DIY publishing business models https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/47858-with-a-little-help-heuristics.html
#15yrsago Brazil rises up for free speech in 40 national demonstrations https://globalvoices.org/2011/06/30/brazil-freedom-march/
#10yrsago Grandad builds miniature backyard Disneyland https://abcnews.com/Lifestyle/grandpa-builds-disneyland-inspired-backyard-theme-park-grandkids/story?id=40276633
#10yrsago Elizabeth Warren on monopolies in America, including Apple, Google, and Amazon https://washingtonmonthly.com/2016/06/30/elizabeth-warrens-consolidation-speech-could-change-the-election/
#10yrsago White House plan to use data to shrink prison populations could be a racist dumpster fire https://www.wired.com/2016/06/white-house-mission-shrink-us-prisons-data/
#10yrsago Even if Moore's Law is "running out," there's still plenty of room at the bottom https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/05/13/245938/moores-law-is-dead-now-what/
#10yrsago Black-hat hacker handles are often advertisements https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2016/07/web-semantics-modern-german-black-hat-hacker-handles/
#10yrsago Spotify threatens to report Apple to competition regulators over App Store rejection https://web.archive.org/web/20160630220301/https://www.recode.net/2016/6/30/12067578/spotify-apple-app-store-rejection
#10yrsago Researchers find over 100 spying Tor nodes that attempt to compromise darknet sites https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-24/dc-24-speakers.html#Noubir
#5yrsago Exxon lobbyist confesses to his crimes https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/01/basilisk-tamers/#exxonknew
#5yrsago When the Sparrow Falls https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/01/basilisk-tamers/#rage-against-the-machine
Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales
Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/
Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification
Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/
London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn
South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/
How to Think About AI (Organized Money)
https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/how-to-think-about-ai-with-cory-doctorow
Breaking Points
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJmUbkRqXeE
A.I. Enshittifies Everything (Slate)
https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2026/06/cory-doctorow-thinks-a-i-is-overvalued-and-overrated-and-still-a-threat
A World That Just Might Work
https://aworldthatjustmightwork.com/2026/06/cory-doctorow-ai-use-it-dont-buy-the-hype-dont-feed-the-bubble/
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Today's top sources:
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
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