You can only add more satellites and spectrum for so long - eventually, improving the unit-economics of satellite internet requires adding new *universes*.

It's funny that Musk styles himself the "Technoking," because the thing that ushered in the Century of Tech was *amazing* unit-economics (the internet and computers get better and cheaper as they advance), while *everything* Musk loves is cursed with dogshit unit-economics.

14/

Take cars: Musk *hates* public transit ("there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer"):

wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkw…

He insists that if you just add enough self-driving smarts to cars, and possibly dig enough tunnels, you can somehow beat the inexorable dogshit unit-economics of an automotive society, where every driver who shares the road with you makes your car worth *less* as a transportation system. This is nonsense.

15/

A train, a tram, even a bus, can transport dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people at a time. A bunch of single-occupancy robot-taxis simply occupy too much *space* to be efficient - multiply the number of people by the number of cars by the miles they wish to travel and simply fitting them on the road requires adding so much *more* road that everything gets further apart, meaning more cars, more roads, and more distance. It's a Red Queen's Race that you can't win.

16/

In other words, geometry hates cars, even more than Elon Musk hates public transit:

pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bez…

Then there's AI, the dogshittiest of all the dogshit unit economics. While every successful technology has seen fantastic network effects and returns to scale, each generation of AI has been more expensive to train *and* to operate, and every new AI user makes AI *more* expensive:

wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-mon…

17/

There Is No AI Revolution

Soundtrack: Mack Glocky - Chasing Cars Last week, I spent a great deal of time and words framing the generative AI industry as a cynical con where OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei have used a compliant media and braindead i…

^{Edward Zitron (Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At)}

Computer science hates AI, so naturally, Elon Musk *loves* it. This is a guy who can only succeed by triumphing over physics, geometry, and computer science. He is not going to accomplish any of this.

The common thread joining all of Musk's doomed love-affairs is that all the stuff he's obsessed with is useful in limited ways, but don't work at mass scale. As such, much of their potential will require public financing to be realized.

18/

There's plenty of useful things you can do with AI, but they don't add up to enough to justify the capex that goes into model-training nor the opex that goes into running the energy-hungry, water-thirsty foundation models. There's plenty of useful limited applications for self-driving vehicles, but they're all niches like closed-track airport terminal shuttles or closed-site mining vehicles.

19/

And, as noted, there's many remote and temporary sites that can benefit from satellite broadband, but they don't justify the titanic expense of operating Starlink.

Even space travel is useful as a scientific enterprise, while space colonization is unbelievably stupid and impractical, and has dogshit unit-economics that put even AI in the shade:

pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/ast…

20/

It's not that Musk hates public subsidies. Like the telcoms sector, he's addicted to public money. The only reason Tesla is profitable is its gigantic, Obama-era bailout, and the ongoing clean-energy subsidies that Musk and Trump are warring over:

politico.com/news/2025/01/18/m…

21/

Despite his rhetoric, Musk supports *vast* public expenditures, but only when they are earmarked to his doomed projects so that he can keep trying to make fetch happen, absorbing endless public riches while assuming no public duties.

22/

Musk is no Technoking, but he's a strong contender for Enshittification King: a guy who taps the capital markets and Uncle Sucker for funds he can use to subsidize the initial rollouts of his stupid ideas, in the hopes of becoming so indispensable that he later can squeeze both business customers *and* end users for ever-larger sums to keep the illusion afloat (think of the junk fees he's piled onto Twitter users and publishers).

23/

The thing is, we know how to roll out ultra-fast, reliable, future-proof internet. All it takes is for public subsidies to come with public duties, like a duty to preference futuristic, high-capacity fiber over gimmicks like satellite "broadband." This isn't a leftist plot, either.

24/

Just look at this map of community fiber networks, which are most heavily concentrated in red states (because rural communities aren't gonna get fiber from the private sector, and they skew Republican):

communitynetworks.org/content/…

These are among the only Americans who *like* their ISPs, a sector whose dominant players routinely win annual "Worst Company in America" polls.

25/

Republicans are perfectly capable of providing their voters with an efficient, nutritious high-fiber diet, as they do in Utah, where the "Utopia" initiative is blanketing the blood-red state with publicly managed fiber:

pluralistic.net/2024/05/16/sym…

But the Republican base has spent decades on the receiving end of an expensively funded campaign to get them to view fiber as a literal communist plot.

26/

It's wild, because if you're a swivel-eyed loon who's been kicked off of Big Tech for insisting that Obama told the lizard people to hide 5g nanocites in MRNA vaccines, fiber would let you run your own competing free-for-all service from your garage:

pluralistic.net/2021/01/17/tur…

And of course, governments - unlike corporations - are bound by the First Amendment, so publicly funded systems are far more limited in how they may moderate user speech than private sector systems.

27/

Notwithstanding these 1A strictures, it's not unreasonable to want to have alternatives to publicly run services. I wouldn't want Ken Paxton - or Donald Trump - making moderation decisions for my broadband connection. But public network provision doesn't have to mean that you get your broadband from whatever shitshow is currently occupying your city hall.

28/

Public fiber can also mean "essential facilities sharing" (where competing ISPs can install their own switches in the data-centers where the fiber terminates). It can mean public *conduit* that anyone can lease space in and run fiber through. It can mean a whole infrastructural stack that is available to all comers: public sector ISPs, but also civil society groups, co-ops, tinkerers, universities, and small and large ISPs:

pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eur…

29/

That's the vision that the FCC is running away from, as fast as its little hooves can carry it. Instead of using public funds to provide a public good, they're subsidizing Musk's war on physics and the telco sector's war on maintenance. The country that gave birth to the internet in the 1970s is set to preserve that Nixon-era copper infrastructure thorough the 21st century, even as the rest of the world rockets past us on blazing fast fiber.

30/

Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller *Red Team Blues* and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11:

kickstarter.com/projects/docto…

eof/