Rudyard Kipling was right!
“San Francisco has only one drawback — ’tis hard to leave.”
I thought I would be here for two years, maybe. And then go back to New York. And here I am, still here. The city has given me more than I have given it. The rush of a modern gold rush. Friendships. Little chance meetings that transformed who I am as a person. People have come, people have gone.
Booms. Busts. Booms. Busts. Booms.
Still here!
Charles Moore, School
“San Francisco has only one drawback — ’tis hard to leave.”
I thought I would be here for two years, maybe. And then go back to New York. And here I am, still here. The city has given me more than I have given it. The rush of a modern gold rush. Friendships. Little chance meetings that transformed who I am as a person. People have come, people have gone.
Booms. Busts. Booms. Busts. Booms.
Still here!
Charles Moore, School of Architecture, UCLA, said that “one of the basic human requirements is the need to dwell, and one of the central human acts is the act of inhabiting, of connecting ourselves, however temporarily, with a place on the planet which belongs to us and to which we belong.”
23 years later, it looks like I have found that place. I don’t yearn to leave.
23 years ago my biggest regret was missing opening day at Yankee Stadium. Today, the Yankees are opening their season at the Giants’ stadium. Everything comes full circle.
For thirty-odd years, broadband has been sold as a one-way pipe. The download speed was all that mattered. Bigger the number, better. No one cared about the upload speeds, because the internet was mostly something you consumed. Streaming video, loading pages, pulling files from the cloud. Upload was an afterthought.
All that changed when the pandemic came around, and with it came how we used and interacted on the network.
And if you use upload as a core part of the internet experience, ca
For thirty-odd years, broadband has been sold as a one-way pipe. The download speed was all that mattered. Bigger the number, better. No one cared about the upload speeds, because the internet was mostly something you consumed. Streaming video, loading pages, pulling files from the cloud. Upload was an afterthought.
All that changed when the pandemic came around, and with it came how we used and interacted on the network.
And if you use upload as a core part of the internet experience, cable broadband is losing again. Not only to some of the fiber providers, but to the upstart, tiny rivals, those pesky municipal broadband providers. They certainly have come a long way since I went to Truckee in 2004 to write about their nascent muni-broadband network being put in place by the local utility.
A new report from Ookla, studying 13 months of Speedtest data from 14 of the largest municipal broadband providers in the U.S., makes that case plainly. Eight of those 14 municipal ISPs beat their local competitors on median upload speeds.
In 2004, I had a core thesis: broadband would decentralize opportunity (it has,) let entrepreneurs build from anywhere (and they do,) and break Silicon Valley’s grip on who got to participate in the tech economy, and it has. I believed it. The municipal networks being built in places like Cedar Falls, Iowa and Truckee, California felt like the capillaries of a new nervous system.
Of course, thesis and reality are two different things, as I have learned time and again.
It didn’t quite happen that way. The infrastructure spread, but the change didn’t happen. At least not at scale. Startups still clustered in San Francisco and New York. The dream of Bend, Oregon and Overland Park, Kansas as legitimate alternatives to the Valley remained a pipe dream. It still is.
What finally forced the shift wasn’t better pipes. It was a pandemic that left people with no choice but to work from wherever they were. Twenty years of broadband expansion did what it couldn’t do alone: it became the foundation for a behavioral change that only a crisis could trigger. And when that crisis hit, it also changed the need for speed, in a direction no one saw, or bothered to even think about. The need for better upload speeds has become the new need for speed.
Overnight, our typical internet usage changed. Upstream video is now part of everything from going to school, talking to doctors, and shopping. We don’t even think twice about FaceTiming, nary a thought about what network we are using, Wi-Fi or 5G.
According to the latest OpenVault Broadband Insights report, upstream usage surged 21.7% year-over-year in 2025, the fastest-growing metric. In a side-by-side comparison of fiber and DOCSIS subscribers, fiber subscribers with symmetrical 677 Mbps service consumed 93 GB of upstream bandwidth in Q4 2025. DOCSIS subscribers provisioned at an average of 17 Mbps upstream, used 56 GB. That’s a 66% gap, on identical customers, explained almost entirely by what the network allowed them to do. OpenVault concluded that latent upstream demand already exists on DOCSIS networks. People will use the pipe if you give it to them.
Ookla’s data shows what consumers want. Connexion, the municipal provider in Fort Collins, Colorado, delivered over 300 Mbps upload speeds. Comcast’s Xfinity, its main competition in that market, started at 28 Mbps upload and, to its credit, pushed that to about 99 Mbps by December 2025. Still less than a third of what Connexion delivers. In Georgia, OptiLink, another municipal provider, clocked upload speeds in the 230 to 250 Mbps range against Spectrum’s low-20s.
Why is municipal broadband winning on upload? They built new fiber networks. Fiber is symmetrical by nature. The cable industry spent twenty years architecting its networks around download-heavy TV and streaming. Now it is scrambling to retrofit with DOCSIS 4.0, mid-split upgrades, and high-split architecture to claw back the upload headroom it gave away by design. Comcast and Charter are spending real money on this. They are playing catch up.
Municipal providers aren’t dominant when they face off against private fiber competition. AT&T Fiber is competing with LFT Fiber in Lafayette, Louisiana, pulling 473 Mbps down and 424 Mbps up against LFT’s 113 Mbps and 107 Mbps. GFiber in Utah is outperforming UTOPIA on raw speed metrics. The advantage municipal providers have is specifically over the incumbent cable monopolies.
Cable broadband has ruled the roost for so long, but it is facing all sorts of competition. Not just from muni-broadband, but from other emerging technologies.
Fixed wireless started stealing cable’s lunch, though it seems like it has had its boom moment. Each of these shifts had one thing in common. An infrastructure change forced behavior change. And behavior change exposed infrastructure’s limits. This is the unending yin-yang of any and all technologies.
Communities that bet on municipal fiber, often against fierce lobbying from the cable industry, are sitting on a quiet infrastructure advantage. Most of those cities built symmetrical fiber because it was the technically correct thing to do, not because they predicted an upload-heavy future. They got lucky. Or maybe being technically correct is its own kind of luck.
The cable industry will catch up eventually. DOCSIS 4.0 is real and the upgrades are happening. But “catching up” is not the same as being ahead. And in infrastructure, being first matters more than being right on paper.
It might have started with Zoom in the pandemic, but we are now going to be living with applications and services that will see us transform from being content consumers to data sources. Live commerce, cloud gaming, AI voice and video agents, and spatial computing are already starting to tiptoe into our digital life. It is hard to predict what is the next big thing. After all, video conferencing needed its pandemic moment to become a mainstream behavior.
Pop some popcorn. Put some butter. Add some salt. Because opportunists (politicians) are pointing their muskets at villains (tech bros), using children’s welfare as the ammunition. In case you were wondering, I am talking about the battle between New Mexico AG and Silicon Valley’s villain in chief.
The next bout is on May 4. So mark your calendars. Why?
This week two verdicts came in quick succession. First, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for knowingly
Pop some popcorn. Put some butter. Add some salt. Because opportunists (politicians) are pointing their muskets at villains (tech bros), using children’s welfare as the ammunition. In case you were wondering, I am talking about the battle between New Mexico AG and Silicon Valley’s villain in chief.
The next bout is on May 4. So mark your calendars. Why?
This week two verdicts came in quick succession. First, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for knowingly enabling child predators on Instagram and Facebook. Then, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube negligent for designing platforms that addicted a young woman who first used YouTube at age six and Instagram at nine.
On the surface this is big win for ambulance chasers. However it could be much bigger if politicians actually have the best intentions that go beyond winning the next elections. History tells me, they are what I said they are, opportunists.
Let’s be honest about what New Mexico AG is. He is an elected official who identified the most despised man in American technology, a category that has never been more unpopular, and filed suit. Zuckerberg is the perfect patsy. Ian Fleming couldn’t have created a more perfect caricature of a villain for our post social age. Weird. Awkwardly dressed to appear cool. Black AR glasses.
Rich, arrogant, visibly indifferent to the damage his products caused, and now on record in two courtrooms defending decisions his own safety teams told him were harming children. The internal documents that came out in both trials showed the same pattern: engineers and safety researchers raising alarms for years, recommendations made and ignored, Zuckerberg choosing growth. None of this is new. I wrote about Facebook’s growth-at-any-cost DNA back in 2018. The pattern has not changed. Only the courtroom has.
New Mexico AG smelled blood. A politician at the end of the day, doing what politicians do. Scoring points against the current villain in chief, building a reputation on the wreckage of someone else’s failure, and calling it justice. The “independent monitor” he is asking for is the tell. And that is not how change happens. That is a patronage job dressed as accountability. That said, underneath the political theater, the structural demands are real. And if a judge grants even a portion of them, they could change daily life for two billion people.
Think about what your daily experience on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok or YouTube actually is. You think you made some choices. Pat yourself on the back. You have been fooled into thinking that you were the one making the choices. Now, let’s get real.
You open the app and a feed appears. Like I did. This morning. I went to Instagram to see what my “pen friends” were doing. I didn’t see a damn thing. What I saw, I didn’t choose. Neither do you. You see what they want you to see.
An algorithm shows you what it wants to show you, trained on everything you have ever paused on, liked, or watched past the halfway point. It is the ultimate illusion, where perception is conflated for reality. It has one job: keep you there. The most reliable way to do that, as the internal research showed and as the companies knew, is to surface content that provokes anxiety, outrage, desire, or envy. Those are the emotions that generate engagement. Engagement brings in the moolah. The loop is the product. I called this trap back in 2018. The feeds have only gotten more sophisticated since.
Layer in the design features built around that loop. Infinite scroll, so there is never a natural stopping point. Autoplay, so the next thing starts before you have decided you want it. Notifications calibrated to pull you back at the moment your attention drifts elsewhere. Variable reward, the unpredictable appearance of a like, a comment, a new follower, built like a slot machine. None of this happened by accident. All of it was tested, measured, and optimized.
This is what the courts are now calling a design defect. And to understand why that matters, you need to understand the wall that has protected these companies for thirty years.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, is the founding legal pillar of the modern internet. It says platforms cannot be held liable for content posted by their users. It is why Facebook is not responsible for a defamatory post, why YouTube is not liable for a radicalization video, why the whole architecture of user-generated content was able to exist at scale. Every time someone tried to sue a social platform for harms caused by what users posted, Section 230 was the wall. Case dismissed.
The Los Angeles plaintiffs found a door in that wall. The jurors were specifically instructed not to consider the content Kaley saw on the platforms. Not because it was irrelevant to her harm, but because content is where Section 230 lives. As NPR reported, the lawyers pursued a case of defective design precisely to get around the high bar set by Section 230.
The entire case was built around the design. Infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic feeds, notification systems. Those are not user posts. Those are the company’s own engineering decisions, made in their labs, tested on their servers, optimized by their employees. CBS News put it plainly: this case centered around how the apps are designed, not the content itself. Section 230 does not protect you from your own product choices.
The jury answered yes to seven specific questions per defendant. Were they negligent in the design or operation of their platforms? Was that negligence a substantial factor in causing harm? Did they fail to adequately warn users? And did they act with malice, oppression, or fraud? That last finding triggered punitive damages.
The pipe (aka the Social Media platform), not what flows through it. That argument won and opened new legal ground that can change everything that comes next.
If the design is the defect, the remedy is redesign. Not a warning label. Not a terms of service update. The product itself has to change.
Not surprisingly, I have some suggestions. Actually pretty simple ones that even politicians can grok.
Start with defaults. Right now every addictive feature ships on by default. Flip that. Ship the product in its least addictive form. Chronological feed. No autoplay. Scroll that ends. Notifications off until you choose otherwise. Every addictive feature requires an explicit, informed choice to activate.
That is consent architecture. And it is exactly what these courts have been asking. Did you warn users? Did you get meaningful consent? The answer, established now by two juries, is no.
Real age verification is the other demand with teeth. But it is also a hairball that will unwind a lot of the internet, security and privacy. That is for experts with more gravitas and knowledge than me.
Instagram’s Adam Mosseri knows what is coming. His year-end memo was full of language about authenticity, credibility signals, and platform responsibility. The same language is now showing up in court filings. At trial, he testified that there is always a tradeoff between “safety and speech.” That is a telling formulation. Safety as a constraint on the product, not a foundation of it. When I pushed on what Instagram is really positioning itself to become, he pushed back. But the architecture he described, who posts rather than what is posted, is exactly the consent architecture these courts are now demanding.
The practical problem for the platforms is simple. You cannot run two different algorithmic systems in one product without everyone noticing. Once you build the less addictive version for minors, the question becomes impossible to avoid. Why is that version not the default for everyone? Why is the more addictive version what adults get, when they never consented to it either?
The legal fight is about children. The logic does not stop at eighteen.
The tobacco parallel is everywhere in the coverage this week. It is the right one, but people are using it loosely. The important part of the tobacco story was not the $206 billion settlement. What changed behavior was what came alongside the money: mandatory disclosure of internal research, advertising restrictions, forced redesign. Joe Camel did not die because of a fine. Joe Camel died because a court said you cannot market this product to children, and you cannot keep making it more addictive than it already is.
The companies held out for decades. Denied the science. Attacked the researchers. Then they did not.
But here is where the parallel gets uncomfortable. Tobacco did not go away. It became Juul. I wrote about Juul back in 2018, when Silicon Valley was celebrating a $15 billion e-cigarette company as a tech startup. I called it Camel 2.0 then. Same addiction, new delivery mechanism, new investors, new PR. As a former smoker who nearly lost his life to cigarettes, I was livid. Tobacco companies figured out how to sell the same addiction in a cuter package, and Silicon Valley helped them do it.
Zuckerberg will do the same. He is too good at survival not to. The feeds may change form. The addiction machine will find a new name. Addiction is a lucrative business. It always finds a way.
Meta and YouTube have already announced appeals. They have the money and the lawyers to fight this for years. And they will. But discovery in each new case keeps producing documents. The internal research keeps surfacing. The bill keeps growing. Eventually it is cheaper to change than to fight.
Zuckerberg’s doctrine is simple: two steps forward, one step back, and make it appear as if he is changing. His superintelligence memo last July was the latest example. Talk about the future, avoid the present, and let the lawyers handle the rest.
That is the logic of the crowbar.
All eyes on Santa Fe on May 4. There just might be enough structural change. And if consent architecture is put in place, then we can all feel the glow, for a moment. Billions of people deserve a different default. Till the battle starts again. Like Juul.
March 25, 2026, San Francisco
PS: I want to apologize for sending two long emails in a single day. I had no intention of doing so. I was definitely not going to write about Meta or social media. I was thrilled to just nerd out about broadband today. However, I can’t help myself when it comes to Facebook and Zuckerberg and their shenanigans. I have been covering them since they were a tiny startup.
I have been a writer long enough to know this in my bones: jargon sucks. It is a crime against writing. It abuses your readers and your listeners. And it is a sure sign you do not know what the heck you are talking about. If you cannot explain something in plain terms to your mom, you do not have a clue. You are reading from a script, pretending to be master of the universe.
And yet.
Listen to any podcast. Scroll any LinkedIn post. Skim any Twitter thread. You are drowning in it. The
I have been a writer long enough to know this in my bones: jargon sucks. It is a crime against writing. It abuses your readers and your listeners. And it is a sure sign you do not know what the heck you are talking about. If you cannot explain something in plain terms to your mom, you do not have a clue. You are reading from a script, pretending to be master of the universe.
And yet.
Listen to any podcast. Scroll any LinkedIn post. Skim any Twitter thread. You are drowning in it. The calling card of the clueless and the pretentious. Jargon!
And it is the lingua franca of corporate America, as new research shows.
Shane Littrell, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell, has created the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR) to measure how susceptible people are to what he defines as “a semantically empty and often confusing style of communication that leverages abstruse corporate buzzwords and jargon in a functionally misleading way.” Now that sentence itself is a perfect example of jargon. Littrell should follow his own advice.
Jokes aside, his research shows that many people cannot tell algorithmically generated nonsense (sentences assembled from real corporate vocabulary but stripped of meaning) from actual quotes from Fortune 500 executives. Littrell surveyed more than 1,000 office workers.
Ouch!
Like I said, jargon is the clutch of the clueless. The research shows that individuals who score higher on “corporate bullshit receptivity” perform worse on work-related decision-making tests. They see their boss as a visionary transformational leader, inspired by empty corporate mission statements. People who are receptive to this stuff tend to produce more of it. They are not cynics playing the game. They actually believe the words work.
Now look around Silicon Valley. We have our own dialect and it is getting worse. Tech bro slang these days ranges from “vibe coding” to “agentic workflows” to “founder mode” to “10x” to “unlock.” With every year, I hear more and more MBA speak, with extra reverence for whoever invented the latest term.
Littrell’s research draws a line between jargon and bullshit. Jargon can be useful when it carries real meaning for people who share context. Bullshit mimics the structure and rhythm of jargon but is empty on purpose, or by accident, or because no one bothered to check. Sadly, even well-meaning jargon meanders into bullshit. “Product-market fit” once described something real.
I have been a WebPass customer for years. Fast, reliable, founder-run. When there was a problem, you could reach someone who gave a damn. It was the kind of internet service that made you forget you were dealing with a utility.
Then Google bought it.
That should have been the warning sign. Google buys things it should have no business touching. It launches products without a plan. Its decisions to get into new markets are a map of some mediocre executive’s ambition.
I watched
I have been a WebPass customer for years. Fast, reliable, founder-run. When there was a problem, you could reach someone who gave a damn. It was the kind of internet service that made you forget you were dealing with a utility.
That should have been the warning sign. Google buys things it should have no business touching. It launches products without a plan. Its decisions to get into new markets are a map of some mediocre executive’s ambition.
I watched the service slowly get worse. More outages, stagnant speeds, the kind of indifference that sets in when a product becomes a line item rather than a mission. Like it was for Charles Barr, founder of WebPass. When Barr was running the show, the speeds went from 50 Mbps to 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps. All for less than $50 a month. Eventually the speed went to a gig per second. It was one of the fastest in the country.
Since then, as competitors like Sonic were pushing 10 Gbps across San Francisco, my WebPass connection sat frozen at 1 Gbps. The founder used to pick up the phone. Now I was just another entry in a spreadsheet at Alphabet, buried inside “Other Bets,” a division whose name tells you everything about how seriously Google took it.
Google is a company where nobody has real product conviction anymore, just bonus targets and quarterly metrics. It wears a veneer of innovation, but in reality it is a financially optimized extraction machine run the McKinsey way.
Anyway, now comes the news I didn’t want to hear, but knew was going to happen anyway.
Google has sold the whole thing, Google Fiber (including WebPass), to Astound Broadband, owned by Stonepeak, a private equity group. They are calling it a “merger.” It is not a merger. A merger implies two equals coming together to build something. This is a flip. Google wanted off the hook for a money-losing division, and they found a buyer. Customers are just assets in the transaction, transferred like furniture.
Here is the most telling detail. So far, Alphabet has not filed an 8-K with the SEC as part of the announcement. An 8-K is what public companies file when something material happens. Google’s lawyers apparently concluded that losing your internet provider did not rise to that level. GFiber sat inside “Other Bets,” a segment that in 2025 generated $1.54 billion in revenue across everything Alphabet deemed non-core, while losing $16.8 billion. GFiber itself was less than half a percent of Alphabet’s total sales. To their investors, this was a rounding error. To you, it’s your internet connection. That gap tells you everything about where you stood in the relationship.
Then there is Dinni Jain, the CEO of GFiber who will now lead the combined company. His story is presented as reassurance, a steady hand, a cable industry veteran, a man with a Vermont farm who talks about patience and humility. A banker turned cable guy turned Google, and humility. Lolz.
But look at the actual career. He started at NTL, a UK cable company that filed Chapter 11 in New York in 2002. At the time, its $10.6 billion bond default was the largest in US corporate history. He left a year before the collapse. Moved to Insight Communications, a cable operator largely owned by the Carlyle Group, which Time Warner Cable bought for $3 billion in 2012. He became COO of Time Warner Cable, which in turn was acquired by Charter. Every company he has run has been consolidated, absorbed, or flipped. He made enough money to retire to a farm in Vermont in search of humility. And pigs have wings too.
He was hired as Google’s third CEO “out of retirement” to run the fiber unit in 2018.
To stabilize a business in freefall.
He did real work. Under Jain, GFiber cut support calls in half and moved to ten-minute technician appointment windows. In 2024, he hired GFiber’s first-ever CFO. That tomTomed the real plan. You don’t hire a CFO to run an internet service. You hire a CFO when you are preparing to sell. He stabilized GFiber well enough to make it sellable. And now it is being sold.
Let me tell you what Astound actually is, because the name was invented to obscure it. And while we are on the subject of names, notice that Google rebranded “Google Fiber” to “GFiber” before this deal closed. Scrub the Google brand, hide the Astound connection, give customers nothing to search for. That is a classic private equity move. Polish the turd before you sell it.
The only reason I know about Astound is because when I lived in New York I signed up for an upstart called RCN. It wanted to take on Time Warner Cable. And Verizon. And AT&T. I like upstarts. My whole life is betting on the underdog. Monopolies suck, destroy innovation, and throttle progress. RCN convinced me that my apartment needed them just by existing. Sucker, that was me, because in a few months I found that what seemed like startup gold was spray tan on a tin can.
I moved to San Francisco. And because I am like a jilted lover, I kept tabs on that shit show. Being a broadband nerd made it simple. So now you know why I am not “astounded” by Astound. I know the genesis.
In February 2017, private equity firm TPG bought RCN, a cable operator in New York, Boston, Chicago, and DC, for $1.6 billion, and simultaneously bought Grande Communications in Texas for $650 million. A year later, TPG added Wave Broadband on the West Coast for $2.36 billion. Then came the bolt-ons. enTouch in Texas, Digital West in California, WOW!’s Chicago and Maryland markets for another $661 million, Harris Broadband in central Texas. In January 2022, they stapled all of it together under a new name, Astound. The name came from a small Bay Area provider Wave had previously acquired.
In August 2021, before the rebrand, Stonepeak bought the entire platform from TPG for $8.1 billion, $3.6 billion in equity plus $4.5 billion in assumed debt. That is a leveraged buyout. The debt sits on the balance sheet and has to be serviced from operating cash flow, which means it has to be extracted from customers.
Last July, Astound had to refinance. Stonepeak injected another $400 million, pushing debt maturities out to 2029 and 2030. They called it good news. What it actually was: a company under pressure, buying itself more time.
Now add GFiber and WebPass to that debt stack.
The playbook is not complicated. Low introductory pricing, step-function rate increases after twelve months, retention discounts for customers who call to cancel, and underinvestment in everything that doesn’t show up on a cash flow statement. The BBB and Trustpilot reviews are a graveyard of billing complaints and broken promises.
Astound makes the old Comcast look almost saintly. At least with Comcast you knew what you were getting. Astound is as dodgy as there are angles in a tapeworm. Google Fiber’s reviews on Yelp are already failing grades on billing, customer service, support, and performance. Under a PE regime, it is only going to get worse.
Game is the game.
And debt is the game PE plays. Stonepeak has billions in debt to service. That debt requires predictable and increasing cash flow. The easiest way to get more cash flow from a captive broadband customer is to raise prices. There is no mystery here.
What angers me most is the language. The GFiber email I received, and I suspect you got one too if you’re a customer, promised that “nothing is changing about your service.” Not the speed. Not the price. Not the “extraordinary customer experience.” This is the kind of sentence that only gets written when everything is about to change. Companies actually keeping their promises don’t need to make them this explicitly.
“Nothing is changing” is corporate for: we need you to stay through the deal close.
The regulatory picture offers little comfort. The FCC under Chairman Brendan Carr views consolidation favorably. The current commission is not going to save you. California’s Public Utilities Commission is the one real lever. The CPUC has actual teeth. It forced Verizon to make concrete commitments before approving the Frontier acquisition.
Citizens can engage that process. Advocacy groups can push for price locks, service standards, build-out requirements. It won’t block the deal, but it might constrain the worst impulses of a PE-owned operator trying to wring cash from a captive customer base. Given the demographic profile of WebPass customers, none of the consumers are going to complain. They will just pay-up.
Here is the worst part. There is a better option in San Francisco. Sonic.net. And no, it’s not available in my building. A lot of tech people are soon going to find out that Google has sold their internet experience to a terrible company, with a patchwork infrastructure and a poor customer track record.
Let me be specific about that infrastructure. Astound is not one network. It is five or six different networks, built at different times, by different operators, using different equipment, stitched together under a single brand with a management layer on top. As of today, 86% of Astound’s footprint is still HFC, the old hybrid fiber/coax cable architecture from the 1990s. Only 14% is genuine fiber-to-the-home.
Their broadband upgrade path runs through a Harmonic virtualized platform that can theoretically be migrated to fiber someday. Notice the word “theoretically.” Their mobile service rides T-Mobile’s network. Their TV runs on TiVo, distributed through a DirecTV streaming partnership. Their WiFi hardware is Amazon eero. None of these are bad choices individually. Together they describe a company that has outsourced every layer of its stack to someone else.
Google Fiber changes the mix somewhat. GFiber brings about 2.8 million locations passed across 15 states, approaching 1 million subscribers, all on genuine fiber. Markets include Kansas City, Austin, Atlanta, Nashville, Salt Lake City, and a recent expansion into Las Vegas. WebPass adds fixed wireless and ethernet connections in dense urban markets. That is a real fiber asset being dropped into a predominantly HFC platform. Whether the combined company upgrades the HFC side to match, or lets the GFiber advantage erode to fund debt service, is the question that determines what kind of company this becomes. History suggests the latter.
The founding promise of WebPass was simple. Fast internet, honest pricing, people who answer the phone. Google broke that promise through neglect. Astound will break it by design. These are two different kinds of failure, but the customer ends up in the same place.
Photo by Chris Michel
A few days ago, the Day One journal app gave me a prompt: what is the one word that would describe you. That made me think hard. I was thrown for a loop.
I have always struggled to describe myself. Not sure how others see me versus how I see myself. This is not the first time I have had to confront this question. As a child and as a young man, I dealt with this same challenge.
I have been thinking about this for a few days. It is hard to use one word to describe
A few days ago, the Day One journal app gave me a prompt: what is the one word that would describe you. That made me think hard. I was thrown for a loop.
I have always struggled to describe myself. Not sure how others see me versus how I see myself. This is not the first time I have had to confront this question. As a child and as a young man, I dealt with this same challenge.
I have been thinking about this for a few days. It is hard to use one word to describe a whole person. It is a strange way to think of yourself. I came up with many descriptors, but they are not the whole thing. I knew that already. Still, I wondered why they were the fragments that I chose to put down on paper.
When I offered my fragments to Claude, it pointed out that the underlying theme to them all, the one that ties it all together, makes me a “seeker.” And almost instantly I realized that’s the word that describes me best, more than anything else.
I have always believed that you need others to see you better than you see yourself. Just as I am able to see, learn, and appreciate others better. In this specific case, Claude found an underlying correlation.
Over the years I have amassed many fragments of self. The phrases I ended up using to describe myself.
Curious. Interesting. Sarcastic. Optimistic. Cool. Forever young. Worry wart. Uptight. Indecisive waffler. Taste maker. Curator. Never finish. Early adopter. Careless.
Curator and Taste are real. But they are outputs. Descriptive of what I produce. Seeker is the reason I am. The AI pointed out that most seekers are better at outward motion than the inward one. Or maybe the AI was just doing what it is trained to do: be a sycophant, aimed to please, saying what you think you need to hear.
But, I do trust my own view of things. And of me. More than AI, or more than any other person. I just lack the vocabulary to describe myself for myself. Words are very important, but when it comes to the self and labeling myself, they have failed me.
Because words are your salvation, your reason to be, as a writer you feel your verbal shortcomings more acutely.
“We know more than we can tell.”
Michael Polanyi.
And while Polanyi was writing about science, it applies here too. Charles Taylor, in Sources of the Self, points out that articulation isn’t just description. It changes how you see what you know. The gap between awareness and articulation is something we don’t think about enough.
But we should.
As I came closer to my own fragments, I realized that the glue that holds them together is a fundamental quality I don’t even think about. Caring.
Curiosity means I care enough to dig deeper. My sarcasm is a mask for caring enough to be disappointed. I worry because I care too much to let go. An indecisive waffler? Maybe I don’t want to get it wrong. You get the point. The fragments point to just one thing. And I didn’t even realize it. It took a long few days of introspection to even come to this realization.
Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, had it right: language chops up something that was never meant to be fragmented. I suppose that’s where it all started. Where my fragments of self managed to hide the one word that describes it all.
Maybe because you are too close to yourself. Too clouded to see clearly. And that’s why you have to go outside to get a better perspective. Or maybe that’s the journalist in me. A larger perspective, a bigger context, a lens that’s not so close.
Weirdly, this translates in my photography as well. I find beauty in a landscape through its contours and its outlines, not in its details. And even when I get close, I always seek the essential.
So maybe “Seeker” is the best descriptor. What fuels the seeking is that you care. I care about a lot of things. Not sure why. But I do. Maybe I will never know. Maybe that’s the point.
Ancient philosophers across all traditions, Western, Zen, or Vedic, point out that seeking is noble. But the seeker has to make peace with the idea of never arriving.
The news cycle has been moving at hyperspeed and sometimes it is really hard to keep up with so much information, most of it not much more than a drop in the bucket. So, I did what I usually do. Take a step back from it all, and decided to just slow down the cycle around my own interests. As a result, most of my writing this week is a bit more personal.
Whether it was celebrating my 23 years in San Francisco or simply using AI to identify the right phrase to describe myself, it was quite fun
The news cycle has been moving at hyperspeed and sometimes it is really hard to keep up with so much information, most of it not much more than a drop in the bucket. So, I did what I usually do. Take a step back from it all, and decided to just slow down the cycle around my own interests. As a result, most of my writing this week is a bit more personal.
Nonetheless, I took the time to enjoy reading what others are writing, especially the longer, less covered articles.
Here are seven stories I recommend.
American Diner Gothic. Robert Mariani writes that economic stagnation, the death of regional culture, and the internet have converged to produce a new American type he calls the “dinergoth.” The pierced-up, anime-watching, gender-fluid Amazon warehouse worker who streams on Twitch and dreams of voice acting. I don’t normally even think about this. Now I do. [The New Atlantis]
When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History. Quanta Magazine interviewed 19 current and former natural language processing researchers to tell the story of what happened to their field when the transformer arrived. This is a fantastic read. Read it, and then read it again. [Quanta Magazine]
How Oregon’s Data Center Boom Is Supercharging a Water Crisis. Rolling Stone and FERN investigate what happens when Amazon builds data centers on top of an aquifer already poisoned by decades of agricultural runoff. The water used to cool the servers evaporates, but the nitrates don’t. The wastewater gets sprayed back onto farmland. It seeps into the same wells people drink from. It leads to miscarriages and others losing a kidney. This is ugly. [Rolling Stone]
Despite Doubts, Feds Approved Microsoft Cloud Service. Oops. Microsoft has a history of overpromising and underdelivering. Microsoft cloud is no different, as federal reviewers found out after five years and 480 hours. They wanted to verify how Microsoft protects sensitive government data in its cloud. They couldn’t. One reviewer called the documentation “a pile of shit.” They approved it anyway. [ProPublica]
The $165 Billion Annoyance Economy. The “annoyance economy,” the cost of being on hold, fighting cancellation flows, disputing junk fees, navigating health insurance bureaucracy, costs American families $165 billion a year. This is capitalism gone wrong, and it rankles me no end. [Business Insider]
How AI-Assisted ABS Will Impact MLB. It was Opening Day 2026. And it was also the introduction of robot umpires. Cornell researchers studied what happens when you replace human umpires with an automated ball-strike system. A nice reminder that “more accurate” and “better” are not always the same thing. [Cornell]
Operation Red Wings: The True Story Behind Lone Survivor. Reality is not a movie. Politico Magazine revisits one of the most mythologized events in recent military history and finds a story far more complicated than the book or the movie. Read it slowly. [Politico]
What I wrote this week, ICYMI:
Jargon Sucks — A short rant on why we hide behind words that mean nothing.
Seeker — I used AI to find the right word to describe myself. The answer surprised me.
23 Years — A short photo-filled love letter to San Francisco on the anniversary of making it home.
“One should not only photograph things for what they are, but for what else they are.” — Minor White
I have not been out in the wild making landscapes for a while now. Almost a year. However, I have found new subjects to explore. San Francisco, obviously, remains my favorite muse. California is my darling. But at home, I have been exploring how to push myself creatively. And one arena I have been exploring is fountain pens — my other lifelong hobby.
I write with
“One should not only photograph things for what they are, but for what else they are.” — Minor White
I have not been out in the wild making landscapes for a while now. Almost a year. However, I have found new subjects to explore. San Francisco, obviously, remains my favorite muse. California is my darling. But at home, I have been exploring how to push myself creatively. And one arena I have been exploring is fountain pens — my other lifelong hobby.
I write with them. I cherish them. I collect them. What I wasn’t doing was photograph them.
I also found that most fountain pen photography is quite boring. The sameness of it. Product shots, meant more for a sale than for enhancing the beauty of objects so lovingly created. I wanted to do something different. More abstract. More me.
As the philosopher Dōgen said: “Not to seek reality apart from appearances, nor to cling to appearances as reality.”
I am trying. In the process, learning. To find beauty in the things I use to create words, which have a beauty of their own.
Two new tools have made this possible.
My friend Kiran Karnani of Harlowe sent me a couple of small portable lights — the Sol — that attach to the iPhone via MagSafe. LEDs with the ability to change color and temperature. With two of them, you can muck about with color, with shadow, with the way light wraps around a hard object and makes it feel alive. I don’t intend to become a macro expert. But these lights give me enough control to mean what I’m doing.
The second tool is a ShortStache Shift Diopter made by PolarPro. They sent me review units in 49mm and 82mm sizes. I have been using the 49mm version in combination with my Leica Q3 43, which has a built-in macro mode. A diopter, to put it simply, is a close-up lens — a secondary optical element you screw in front of your lens. It reduces the minimum focus distance and increases magnification, letting you get closer than your lens could otherwise focus. Particularly useful for macro work. Shift diopters come in three strengths — +2, +4, +8 — each pulling you closer to the subject. (I also have a Leica ElPro e52, and will do a comparison separately.)
Shift diopters opened creative possibilities I didn’t expect. The selective focus, the way sharpness falls away at the edges — it isn’t a technical compromise. It’s an aesthetic choice. I decide what matters, and the rest becomes part of the abyss.
It is an edit. Just like writing itself.
What I am really trying to do and in the process understand is how much of my approach to landscape photography translates to pens. Can I get to the very essence of their existence — not the whole object, but the fragments that tell the story? The light catching a section of celluloid until it stops being “pen” and becomes color, curve, depth.
The most important thing I keep reminding myself: leave something unexpressed. Give the viewer room to imagine the landscape. Rather than show it all.
I want to make pen photographs that feel that way. Nothing resolved. Nothing explained.
“In all things, irregularity is intentionally preferred.” — Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness
An update to More Magic Math from OpenAI
The final mad dash to IPO is on for the big AI companies. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic have all made their intentions clear. And nothing could be more obvious about OpenAI’s intent than today’s new funding announcement. A few things have changed since I wrote that piece. Some confirm my thesis, and one surprise, though not really.
So, the company says the round closed. $122 billion in committed capital, up from the $110 billion
The final mad dash to IPO is on for the big AI companies. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic have all made their intentions clear. And nothing could be more obvious about OpenAI’s intent than today’s new funding announcement. A few things have changed since I wrote that piece. Some confirm my thesis, and one surprise, though not really.
So, the company says the round closed. $122 billion in committed capital, up from the $110 billion announced in February. Does committed mean money has passed the transom? We won’t know. What we do know is that at a post-money valuation of $852 billion, the anchors are Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank. Microsoft participated again, though not clear for how much. The additional $12 billion came from a who’s who of institutional money, including a16z, Sequoia, BlackRock, Blackstone, Fidelity, Temasek, D1, and Dragoneer. The FOMO gang!
So many brand-name investors show up at the last minute because none of them want to miss out on the sweet IPO pop. It surely will win them points with their own (limited partner) investors. I guess FOMO is also an affliction for the super rich.
By the way, nothing puts more in “t “less is more,” than more itself. In 2024, OpenAI raised $6.6 billion and sold about 4 percent of the company. In 2026, they raised $122 billion, twenty times more, by selling roughly 14 percent. Existing insiders and early employees must be in heaven.
To be clear, the circular financing problem hasn’t gone away. Amazon’s $50 billion is tied to an eight-year AWS contract. Nvidia’s contribution is compute, not cash. When I wrote about this in March, it was just an observation. Now it has a name. Bloomberg, Reuters, and others are now calling it “circular financing.”
OpenAI says it now has a $4.7 billion credit line from JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo. That’s not a lending syndicate. That’s an IPO underwriter roster auditioning for the job. It reminds me of those lining up outside Don Corleone’s room on his daughter’s wedding day. The credit facility is the gift they bring to get in the room.
Now let’s talk about the fix. The $3 billion in investments from individual investors. Axios reports that they are customers of three of the largest banks. Wait, the same three large banks that extended the credit facility and want to be part of the IPO underwriting syndicate. More circular economy at work.
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told Axios, “We are really trying to take to heart our mission, which is AGI for the benefit of humanity and thinking about access. Not just access to the technology, but also access to the economic upside that it’s driving.” That’s a nice line. It’s also an IPO marketing strategy.
OpenAI said it will be included in several ARK Invest ETFs. Cathie Wood, who previously invested in OpenAI through her venture arm, now gets to channel her retail base into pre-IPO OpenAI shares. Think about what that is. A private company, not yet public, getting into retail ETFs. That’s a new thing. It’s smart, too. You create demand before the IPO. You distribute the story. You make millions of people feel like they have skin in the game before you even file. That’s the fix.
ARK is overrated, to put it mildly. ARK’s flagship fund peaked in February 2021, then fell 75 percent. Five years later, a thousand dollars invested then is worth about $573 today. And ARK is the vehicle OpenAI chose to democratize the upside. Make of that what you will.
One last thing. OpenAI is quietly pivoting, shutting down Sora, its much-hyped video app, and concentrating resources on a “superapp” for developers and business users, with coding assistants at the center. Why? Because enterprise is exactly where Anthropic is eating their lunch. The $122 billion has bought more time to beat the competition. And did you notice that CFO Friar is doing all the press versus Sam?
You focus this hard because you want to go public. Fast. After all, you don’t want to be the one without a chair when the music stops. Your move, Dario!
“A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.” — Vladimir Lenin
In 1902, Lenin argued that his revolution needed a newspaper of its own, and that newspaper was (unironically) named Pravda, which means truth in Russian.
“The standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us. We’re not a typical company. We’re driving a really big technological shift.” — Fi
“A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.” — Vladimir Lenin
In 1902, Lenin argued that his revolution needed a newspaper of its own, and that newspaper was (unironically) named Pravda, which means truth in Russian.
“The standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us. We’re not a typical company. We’re driving a really big technological shift.” — Fidji Simo, 2026
Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, explained this to OpenAI staff as to why OpenAI had just bought TBPN. Different century. Same logic to explain an emerging new socioeconomic order, a new post-revolution reality.
To recap, OpenAI, weeks if not months before its public offering, has acquired the Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN). It is a daily, three-hour live tech talk show hosted by founders Jordi Hays and John Coogan. The show had 58,000 YouTube subscribers, $5 million in revenue last year, and a cult following in Silicon Valley. It was profitable, had no outside investors, and was growing fast. As a former media person, any media exit is a good exit. Congratulations to the founders.
Now let’s dig into what OpenAI really bought and why.
Think of TBPN as a room. A room where people in tech come and talk openly, without having to worry about the antagonistic queries that big media is often posing them. They go because it feels like peers talking, not press interrogating.
If you lived through Internet 1.0, CNBC’s morning show had the same vibe. ESPN’s SportsCenter did the same for the cable sports revolution. They don’t speak to power. They amplify power. TBPN made that playbook its own.
The best part of the announcement is where TBPN sits inside the OpenAI org and who it reports to. The show sits under “strategy” (and not communications) and will report to Chris Lehane. He is OpenAI’s chief political operative, the man associated with coining “vast right-wing conspiracy” as a deflection tactic during the Clinton White House years, who built Fairshake, the crypto super PAC that spent hundreds of millions targeting anti-crypto candidates in 2024.
You don’t put an editorially independent media property under your political operative. That’s not a media strategy. That is part of overall strategy. But they still have to sell it as keeping it editorially independent. Pravda was technically editorially independent too.
Anyway, maybe I have lost my rose-tinted glasses, but when a company says “do no evil,” you know what they are going to do. And if a press release mentions editorial independence four times, you know where that is going. And if you have to invent a new phrase, “Editorial Independence Covenant,” then I don’t really need to spell it out for you.
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” — Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928
Bernays, who was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, invented the PR industry. He thought of it as a key part of corporate design. He was hired by corporations such as United Fruit and American Tobacco to do exactly what OpenAI is doing now. Build the perception layer around a product by presenting it as a massive societal shift.
The Soviet term was agitprop. The Silicon Valley term is earned media strategy. A century apart, history still rhymes.
Related Reading
OpenAI: The Fix Is In — How OpenAI is engineering its IPO narrative through circular financing and retail ETFs.
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