What If the Web Became Simple Again?

Dave Winer recently wrote about something he calls the Web of Markdown (http://scripting.com/2026/10/06/005559.html). The basic idea is almost absurdly simple: instead of wrapping everything we publish online in increasingly complicated websites, why not publish documents directly as Markdown files? A title, some text, a few links, perhaps an image. That’s basically it.

I like ideas like this, especially when they sound slightly too simple at first. Quite often that means they are questioning assumptions we have stopped noticing. And when it comes to the web, we have accumulated quite a few of those assumptions over the years.

Take this blog post. I write some text, put it into WordPress, and from that moment the text becomes part of a much larger technical system. WordPress stores it in a database, a theme turns it into a page, CSS decides how that page looks, plugins add functionality, other plugins add security, and still more software handles caching, analytics, image optimisation and search engine optimisation. All of that may be useful, but it is still remarkable how much machinery is needed simply to put a few hundred words on the internet.

That is probably why Winer’s idea appeals to me. The early web was largely about documents and links between documents. Today, the document itself often feels like just one small component inside a much bigger software environment. The Web of Markdown turns that around and asks a much simpler question: what if the document becomes the main thing again?

The file itself becomes the publication

Imagine that I write this post as a file called web-of-markdown.md and put that file online. In this model, the file is not just source material that eventually gets turned into a website. It is the publication itself.

A Markdown reader could display it nicely. Another application could show it in dark mode or with larger text. An RSS reader could discover it. A search tool could index it. An AI system could analyse it. I could download it, archive it locally or move it to another server. The same document could be used by all of those tools without changing the original content.

That is a subtle but important difference. The article is no longer trapped inside one presentation layer. The Markdown file contains the actual content, while different applications decide how that content should be displayed or processed.

Content first, presentation second

I find that very appealing, partly because it fits with something I keep returning to: content should not be too tightly coupled to the software that happens to present it today. On the current web, publishers decide almost everything about how readers experience an article. Fonts, colours, spacing, menus, sidebars, pop-ups and page width are all part of the website. That can be useful, but it also means the content and the presentation are tightly connected.

Markdown changes that relationship. The publisher mainly defines structure: this is a heading, this is a paragraph, this is a link and this is a quotation. The reading application can then decide what those elements should look like.

At first, that may sound like a step backwards. We have spent decades making websites prettier and more sophisticated, after all. But perhaps separating content from presentation again would actually be useful. The same Markdown document could appear on a normal website, in an RSS reader, in an e-book, in a local knowledge base or in some future reading application that does not exist yet. The content itself would remain the same. Only the way we look at it would change.

And yes, I immediately thought about RSS

Anyone who has read this blog for a while will not be surprised by that. I never stopped using RSS, and the Web of Markdown feels like a very natural companion to it. RSS essentially says: here are my new articles. Markdown could then say: and here is the article itself. That combination is almost beautifully simple. A feed handles discovery, Markdown carries the content and hyperlinks connect everything together.

A reader could see a new item in a feed, retrieve the Markdown file and display it. Or store it. Or index it. Or pass it to another application. The traditional website would still be useful, but it would no longer be the only meaningful way to access the content.

That distinction matters. The website becomes one possible interface, rather than the place where the content fundamentally lives.

Then I started thinking about AI

This is where the idea becomes much more interesting in 2026 than it might have been ten years ago. Large language models are very good at working with clean, structured text, while modern websites are often anything but clean. A typical web page may contain menus, advertisements, cookie notices, recommendation boxes, tracking elements and all kinds of other material that has little to do with the actual article. Software first has to work out which part matters before it can process the text itself.

Markdown is almost the opposite. The content is already there in a simple and predictable structure. Headings are obvious, links are obvious, quotes are obvious and the text is easy to extract.

Suppose a few hundred technology publications offered their articles as Markdown. A local script could monitor their RSS feeds, retrieve new Markdown files and store them on my own machine. A local LLM could then analyse that collection without having to fight its way through hundreds of different website layouts.

I could ask what has been written about European cloud sovereignty over the past two weeks, or which developments around private 5G appeared in German, French, Korean and Italian sources. The system would not necessarily need Google or a conventional web search at all. It would simply work with the documents I had chosen to collect. For me, that is where the idea stops being merely interesting and starts feeling practical.

It also connects to the tools I have been building

Over the past few months, I have been experimenting quite a bit with what I call automated editorial products, multilingual news monitoring and local LLMs. One thing I keep running into is that finding and retrieving information is often harder than processing it.

The web was designed for people to visit pages. It was not necessarily designed for software to reliably extract the actual article from every site. Every website is different. Some provide useful RSS feeds, others provide only partial feeds, some depend heavily on JavaScript and others wrap the actual story in large amounts of unrelated material.

At the same time, I have also been experimenting with much simpler ways of publishing journalistic websites. I have been playing with tools such as Hugo (https://gohugo.io/) and Docsify (https://docsify.js.org/#/), precisely because they allow me to strip away much of the usual CMS complexity. Instead of constantly thinking in terms of databases, plugins and admin dashboards, I can work much closer to the actual text files themselves.

That may seem like a technical detail, but for me it is really about changing the publishing model. With Hugo, Markdown files can become the source for a complete site. With Docsify, a collection of Markdown documents can effectively become the site itself. In both cases, the content remains much more visible and portable than when everything disappears into a CMS database.

So when I read about the Web of Markdown, it immediately clicked for me. It did not feel like some abstract or theoretical idea at all, because in a way I am already experimenting with parts of it myself. I am trying to see how far you can simplify an editorial or journalistic website before you start losing something important, and so far I increasingly find that you can remove quite a lot.

Now imagine a world where publications simply say: here is the feed, and here is the Markdown. That would make building independent news-monitoring tools much easier. It would also make those tools less dependent on large search engines and other intermediaries.

Your own little web

That part interests me a lot. Because then my local-first preference comes into play. Suppose I follow 500 publications and automatically store their Markdown articles locally. Over time I would build my own searchable information collection. Not Google’s index. Mine.

I could run normal full-text search across it, add embeddings, use a local LLM, organise documents by subject, country, language or source, and keep an archive of material I consider useful. If I wanted to move everything to another computer, I could simply copy the files. No complicated export process would be required. No proprietary format would stand in the way. I would not have to wonder whether some service would still exist five years from now. Just files.

I have written before that I increasingly like software that leaves me with something boring when the software itself disappears. Plain files are excellent at being boring, and Markdown files are particularly good at it.

The website becomes one possible view

None of this means I suddenly want websites to disappear. I like websites. I run websites. And Markdown obviously cannot replace everything we do online. Shops, web applications, interactive visualisations and elaborate multimedia experiences need more than plain text files. That is fine. The interesting part is not that Markdown should replace the web, but that the website may no longer have to be the primary version of every piece of content.

Imagine writing an article once as Markdown. That same file could be used to generate the website version, appear in an RSS reader, become part of an e-book, feed a local archive or be processed by an AI system. The website then becomes one presentation of the content rather than the content itself.

That may sound like a small architectural difference, but it changes the relationship between content and platform quite fundamentally. Instead of publishing into WordPress, Drupal or whatever system comes next, you publish a document. The CMS merely decides how one audience sees it.

It feels almost like the old web

What I like most about the Web of Markdown is that it does not actually feel very futuristic. In some ways, it feels old. A document has an address. The document contains links to other documents. Readers follow those links. People publish things and other people read them. Software helps with navigation and discovery. That was more or less the basic idea of the early web before we surrounded every article with platforms, algorithms, analytics and increasingly complex software stacks.

Of course, a Markdown web would not remain simple forever. Spam would appear. Search engines would index it. AI-generated rubbish would probably flood parts of it. People would invent extensions, standards and frameworks, and eventually someone would undoubtedly find a way to make Markdown complicated too. That is what we do. Still, the underlying principle remains attractive.

Maybe the document should matter again

For years we have treated the website as the basic unit of online publishing. Perhaps that assumption deserves another look. Maybe the fundamental unit should simply be the document: something I can create in any text editor, store anywhere, move between systems and keep independently of the software that happens to display it today. A document that humans can read and machines can process. A document that does not care which CMS I use. A document that may still be perfectly usable twenty years from now. And preferably one that I actually own.

The funny thing is that none of this requires some revolutionary new technology. Markdown already exists. RSS already exists. URLs already exist. Hyperlinks already exist. And tools like Hugo and Docsify already show that publishing on top of plain text files is not some nostalgic fantasy. It can work today. Perhaps we do not need to invent the next web. Perhaps we only need to remove a few layers from the one we already have.

Taiwan’s Hunt for China’s Hidden Chip Operations

Taiwan has spent the past six years hunting something that sounds almost like the plot of a spy novel: Chinese technology companies allegedly operating undercover on the island. According to an article over at Rest of World (see here: https://restofworld.org/2026/taiwan-china-chip-investigations), Taiwanese authorities have investigated 166 cases involving companies suspected of hiding their Chinese connections while recruiting engineers and gaining access to semiconductor expertise.

One engineer thought he was working for an American chip company, only to discover that most of his colleagues and meetings were actually based in Nanjing, China. And this matters because Taiwan is not just another place where chips are made: it produces more than 60% of the world’s semiconductors and around 90% of the most advanced ones.

The methods described in the article are often surprisingly simple, with Chinese companies allegedly using local firms, foreign registrations or other structures to disguise who is really behind an operation. Sometimes the goal appears to be access to technology, but very often it is also about something equally valuable: the people who know how to design and manufacture advanced chips.

Salaries offered by Chinese companies have reportedly reached several times normal Taiwanese levels, which makes talent poaching a very real problem rather than an abstract geopolitical discussion. Taiwan has responded with raids, tougher legislation and increasingly strict protection of technologies it considers essential to national security.

What makes the story particularly interesting is that the dividing line between normal international recruitment, illegal investment and actual industrial espionage can sometimes be surprisingly difficult to define. It is another reminder that the global chip battle is not only being fought with new fabs, export controls and billions in subsidies, but also quietly in offices, job interviews and employment contracts.

What If an App Was Just a File?

I sometimes get the impression that we have already decided what software is supposed to look like. You download an app. Or, increasingly, you don’t download anything at all and simply open a website. You create an account, log in, store your data somewhere in the cloud and perhaps pay a monthly subscription.

That’s more or less how software works these days. And then something like Capsule (https://withcapsule.app/) comes along. The basic idea is wonderfully simple: What if an app was just a file?

I like that question. Especially because lately I have been experimenting quite a bit with building small tools myself. Not because I suddenly want to become a software developer. I don’t. But vibe coding has made it remarkably easy to turn a small idea into something that actually works.

My recently built Photo Toolkit is a good example. I regularly receive photos that are several megabytes in size, while for a website I often need something closer to 300 kB or less. So I built a little tool that watches my Downloads folder and automatically creates a smaller version whenever a new image appears. That’s it. It solves one very specific problem.

And that is increasingly how I look at software. Instead of searching for one enormous application containing 87 features of which I need three, why not build something small that does exactly what I need? Capsule takes that idea in an interesting direction.

The application is the file

A Capsule is a .capsule file containing the application itself, its interface and its data. The interface can be built using familiar web technologies such as HTML and CSS, while the data can be stored locally using SQLite. Everything travels together.

That means a Capsule behaves almost like a document. You can copy it. Put it on a USB drive. Back it up. Send it to somebody. Move it to another computer. But instead of opening a document and reading some text, you open a small application.

That distinction sounds trivial, but I think it is rather interesting. For decades we have been used to separating applications and documents. LibreOffice Writer is the application; the .odt file is the document. A photo editor is the application; the JPEG is the file. Capsule asks what happens if you bundle those concepts together. The data and the little application needed to work with that data simply become one thing.

This fits remarkably well with vibe coding

This is where things become particularly interesting for me. Vibe coding has changed the economics of tiny software projects. Previously, if I needed a very specific tool, I had roughly three choices. Find something that already exists, use a spreadsheet as a good-enough solution or convince somebody who can actually program to build it. Now there is another option. I can try building it myself.

I have been doing exactly that lately. Small tools, experiments and utilities. Some work surprisingly well. Others mainly teach me something. And that is fine too. But building the application is only part of the story. Suppose I build a little tool for keeping track of interesting websites for Just Me. Perhaps it contains the URL, some tags, a few notes and an indication of whether I have already written about the site.

Technically, building something like that isn’t particularly complicated anymore. But then come all the other questions. Where do I host it? Do I need a database? Do I need a server? How do I deploy updates? Do I need authentication? What if I want to give the tool to somebody else? Suddenly my tiny personal utility has become an IT project.

With the Capsule approach, the answer could simply be: here is the file. That is appealing.

Small software for small problems

There are plenty of things for which I don’t need a platform. A source tracker for an article. A little database of websites. A project log. A reading list. A collection of RSS feeds. A simple research tool. A small inventory. An interactive checklist. Or perhaps some weird little utility that only makes sense to me. Especially that last category is becoming interesting.

Traditional software has to make economic sense. If you are going to spend weeks or months developing an application, you need enough users to justify all that work. Vibe coding changes that calculation. If building something takes an afternoon rather than several weeks, an application with exactly one user can suddenly make perfect sense.

Capsule potentially removes another piece of friction by making distribution ridiculously simple. The application doesn’t necessarily have to become a service. It can simply remain a file. There is AI functionality around this idea as well. You can describe what you want to build and generate a Capsule containing the interface and database structure, and then continue changing it using prompts. That makes the idea even more interesting for people who don’t consider themselves developers.

And it can stay local

There is another aspect that fits rather nicely with the way I increasingly like to use computers. Capsules can work locally. The data lives in the file on your own machine. You don’t need cloud storage simply because somebody decided that every application in 2026 apparently needs cloud storage.

Obviously, sometimes you do want the cloud. If an entire team needs to work with the same information, a single local file probably isn’t going to be the answer. If you need real-time collaboration, central management or access from teni different devices, there are plenty of good reasons to use web applications and cloud services. But sometimes I just want a tool. No account. No login. No subscription. No server. Just open the thing and use it.

Capsule currently provides desktop software for macOS, Windows and Linux, with .deb, .rpm and AppImage packages available. Android and iOS versions are also planned.

It also feels strangely familiar

What I perhaps like most about Capsule is that the whole idea combines something very modern with something almost boringly old. The modern part is obvious: AI-assisted coding, HTML interfaces, SQLite and tiny custom applications created for very specific purposes. The old part is the file. And files are actually rather brilliant. We know what to do with them. You can copy a file. Rename it. Put it in a folder. Back it up. Put it on an external disk. Send it to somebody. Archive it for ten years.

More importantly, there is something very understandable about ownership when it comes to files. If the file is sitting on my laptop, I have it. That sounds ridiculously obvious, but compare it with many modern online services. Your information sits inside somebody else’s database and you are allowed to access it through their application. Usually that works perfectly well.Until it doesn’t.

More experiments, please

I don’t know whether Capsule will become successful. I don’t know whether .capsule files will become something we routinely exchange with each other. And I certainly don’t expect them to replace conventional applications, websites or SaaS platforms. That’s not really the interesting part anyway.

What I like is that somebody looked at the way we currently build and distribute software and asked whether there might be another way. There usually is. And combined with vibe coding, ideas like this could make personal software much more interesting. Not personal software in the sense of software that knows everything about you, but software that you create specifically for yourself.

The Exit Door Still Works

Something interesting seems to be happening. Not something huge. Not a movement, as far as I can tell. There are no conferences about it, probably no consultants writing whitepapers about it, and I haven’t seen anyone invent a clever acronym for it yet. But here and there I am beginning to notice people who are simply saying: enough.

They are leaving social media. Or they stop using AI. Some replace their smartphone with something considerably less smart. Others dramatically reduce the amount of time they spend online. And occasionally someone seems to disappear from the online world almost completely.

I find this interesting. Not because I am planning to follow them. I like technology far too much. I like tinkering with computers, the internet, websites, strange protocols, Linux, AI, small apps, obscure tools and all the other digital stuff I keep writing about here. I also happen to think smartphones are incredibly useful devices, even if we have probably allowed them to occupy a somewhat ridiculous amount of our lives. And AI? I use it. Quite a lot, actually. I am interested in what it can do, where it goes wrong and what it might turn into.

So this isn’t going to be one of those I deleted everything and suddenly heard the birds singing again posts. Still, I admire people who make a different choice.

There is something wonderfully stubborn about it

What makes these decisions particularly interesting is that the people making them are often not in a position where technology is irrelevant to their lives. Quite the opposite actually. Some are developers, consultants, designers and writers. And almost always freelancers. People whose professional lives have been closely connected to the internet for years. Sometimes their online presence isn’t merely something they do after work. It is (or was) part of how they find work.

Deleting a social media account is easy enough when it is mainly where you post holiday photographs and argue about football. It becomes a rather different decision when that same network is where potential customers know you from.

Stopping with AI is also one thing if you rarely use a computer professionally. It is another when you work in software development and seemingly every company on the planet is currently trying to work out how much AI it can squeeze into its products and processes.

Choosing not to participate may therefore have a price.

Or perhaps not. Maybe these people will discover that very little changes. Perhaps customers will continue to find them – via email or by calling them. Maybe their work becomes better because they have fewer distractions. Perhaps being the developer who doesn’t use AI will eventually become an interesting professional position in itself.

But you don’t know that beforehand. And that is exactly why I think it is rather brave.

We are usually very good at adding things

Technology has a peculiar direction. We always add stuff. We get email, and keep email. Then we get instant messaging. Then social media. Then Slack and Teams. Then smartphones so all of those things can follow us into the supermarket. Then smartwatches so we don’t even have to take the smartphone out of our pocket. And now AI is being added to practically everything as well.

What we are much less good at is saying: actually, I don’t want this anymore. Or perhaps even more radically: I know this could be useful, but I still don’t want it. That is an interesting distinction.

You don’t have to believe that smartphones are evil to decide you don’t want one. You don’t have to believe AI will destroy civilisation to decide that you prefer to write code, text or anything else without it. And you don’t have to believe social media is fundamentally broken to decide that you would rather spend your time somewhere else. Technology doesn’t always have to be rejected because it failed. Sometimes you can reject it simply because you don’t like what it does to your life.

The financial part intrigues me

There is another aspect of these stories that I find particularly interesting: how do you make it work financially? That question is probably especially obvious to me because I see quite a few of these choices being made by people who work independently or whose professional reputation is closely tied to their online presence.

If you are employed by a company with a comfortable salary and decide to delete LinkedIn, that is one thing. If you are a freelancer whose next assignment might come from someone who has been reading your posts for three years, it is something else entirely.

The same applies to AI. Imagine being an independent software developer today and deliberately deciding not to use the technology that clients are constantly hearing will make developers dramatically more productive. Maybe you can explain why. Maybe your clients agree. But it is still a bet.

I like the fact that some people are apparently willing to make that bet. Not because I necessarily think they are right. But because they have thought about the role technology plays in their lives and concluded that not using it is an available option. We tend to forget that.

When Europe Starts Backing Up America’s Climate Data

There is something both reassuring and deeply depressing about scientists building an ark for data (see here: https://e360.yale.edu/features/germany-us-climate-data). That is more or less what is happening in Germany at the moment. Apparently the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) in Hamburg is preparing additional storage capacity for copies of important climate data from the United States. The project even has an appropriate name: CMIP7-ark. CMIP is a project of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP).

The idea is relatively simple. Climate research produces enormous amounts of data, much of which is stored at research institutions and government organizations. Scientists around the world depend on that information. Historical measurements, climate simulations and long-running datasets are especially valuable because you cannot simply recreate decades of observations if they disappear.

Normally, you would probably assume that data stored by major American scientific institutions is reasonably safe. But that assumption is apparently no longer considered sufficient.

According to an interesting article in Yale Environment 360, German researchers and research organizations are increasingly concerned about the long-term availability of American climate data. The German Research Foundation has therefore established a program to create safe copies of publicly available U.S. scientific datasets. The program has a budget of $35 million.

In Hamburg alone, DKRZ plans to add around five petabytes of storage capacity for backups of climate simulations. For comparison: DKRZ already stores around 254 petabytes of data. It looks like CMIP7-ark is not the only project. Other initiatives with names such as SHIELD and SEND — Secure Endangered Earth Data — apparently are doing similar things. The objective is essentially to make sure that important scientific information remains available, regardless of what happens to the original repositories.

There is actually a broader lesson here that goes well beyond climate science. We have become accustomed to thinking of digital information as something almost abstract. Data is “online”, therefore it exists. But of course that isn’t how it works. Somewhere there is a server. Or a storage system. Or magnetic tape. Someone maintains it. Someone pays for it. Someone decides whether it remains accessible. And sometimes there is only one really important copy.

That suddenly makes scientific data surprisingly vulnerable. Not just to political decisions, but also to cyberattacks, war, natural disasters, technical failures or simply a lack of money and maintenance. The Yale article mentions examples ranging from datasets in the United States to scientific information threatened by the war in Ukraine.

So perhaps this German initiative points towards a much more resilient model for scientific information in general. Instead of assuming that one institution or one country will preserve important datasets forever, make multiple copies and distribute them across organizations and countries.

That is basically the same principle we use for important personal files. One copy is not a backup. And one backup sitting next to the original isn’t a particularly good backup either. For information that may be important to researchers for decades — perhaps centuries — geographically distributed copies suddenly sound remarkably sensible.

So yes, I think this is a good development. Important scientific data should probably never depend on a single institution, storage facility or even country. If projects such as CMIP7-ark eventually lead to a more distributed international infrastructure for preserving scientific data, that would be valuable. But at the same time, it is of course rather sad that we apparently need projects like this in the first place.

Europe Is Finally Building 348 IRIS2 Satellites

A while ago I wrote a post called The Space Economy Is Taking Off (https://justme.website/tech/the-space-economy-is-taking-off/). My point was that we tend to think about space as something rather exotic. Rockets. Astronauts. Mars. Perhaps the Moon. But space is rapidly becoming an economy in its own right. Satellites, launch services, communications, Earth observation, navigation, data services and all sorts of applications that are built on top of them. And Europe has quite a lot to gain from that. So it is good news that IRIS² is finally moving from plans, meetings and PowerPoint presentations to actual hardware.

348 satellites

IRIS² stands for Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite (https://www.euspa.europa.eu/eu-space-programme/secure-satcom/iris2). It is an EU programme to build a European satellite communications infrastructure consisting of satellites in both Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and Medium Earth Orbit (MEO).

The current architecture calls for 348 satellites, combined with a dedicated ground infrastructure. The idea is to provide secure and resilient communications for European governments and other authorised users, while also making commercial connectivity services possible. Think of it, in very simplified terms, as Europe building its own large-scale communications infrastructure in space. That sounds rather ambitious – because it is.

But the interesting thing is that we are now starting to see contracts being signed to actually build the thing. At the end of August, European satellite company SES awarded German space company OHB a contract worth almost €1 billion (https://www.ohb.de/en/news/ohb-has-been-awarded-a-contract-worth-nearly-1-billion-for-the-development-and-production-of-eighteen-satellite-platforms-for-iris%C2%B2). OHB will develop and manufacture 18 MEO satellite platforms for IRIS². These are not exactly CubeSats either. Each satellite will have a maximum power output of around 15 kilowatts and a launch mass of approximately 2.6 tonnes.

Then, in September, Eutelsat gave Airbus and Thales Alenia Space the go-ahead for the first layer of the LEO part of IRIS². That first layer alone will consist of at least 66 satellites, scheduled for delivery in 2029. Airbus will build the platforms and integrate the satellites, while Thales Alenia Space supplies the payloads. More here: https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-09-airbus-starts-the-development-of-iris2-satellites-on-behalf-of-eutelsat.

Europe needs infrastructure of its own

There is obviously a strategic argument for IRIS². Europe increasingly depends on digital infrastructure that is not necessarily European. That applies to cloud platforms, software, semiconductor technology and AI, but also to communications infrastructure. Recent geopolitical developments have made it increasingly difficult to pretend that this doesn’t matter. Satellite communications have become important infrastructure for governments, emergency services, critical infrastructure and military operations. If terrestrial networks are unavailable, damaged, attacked or simply don’t reach a particular location, satellites can provide an alternative route.

ESA says IRIS² is intended to allow authorised government users to communicate securely and continuously during critical operations, like emergencies, the protection of critical infrastructure and security missions (https://www.esa.int/Applications/Connectivity_and_Secure_Communications/IRIS2_reinforced_and_accelerated_as_implementation_advances)

Having access to such a network is obviously useful. Having a network that Europe builds and controls itself is something else entirely. That doesn’t mean Europe suddenly becomes independent of every non-European technology company. Nor does it mean that IRIS² solves every sovereignty problem. But it does mean that Europe will have an important piece of communications infrastructure of its own. And I think that matters.

It is also an industrial programme

Money spent on IRIS² doesn’t simply disappear into space. A substantial part of it flows into European companies, factories, engineers, researchers, suppliers and technology development. Look at the companies already involved: SES, Eutelsat, Hispasat, OHB, Airbus Defence and Space, Thales Alenia Space and Aerospacelab (a Belgian startup). Behind those companies is a much larger supply chain consisting of specialised manufacturers, component suppliers, software companies, engineering firms and research organisations. ESA explicitly says the programme is designed to create opportunities for start-ups, SMEs and mid-sized companies developing innovative space technologies as well. That is important as well.

If Europe wants a serious space economy, it needs more than a few successful rocket launches and interesting start-ups. It needs demand. It needs customers willing to buy satellites, communications systems, antennas, electronics, software, security technology and ground infrastructure. IRIS² creates exactly that kind of demand. A contract worth almost €1 billion for OHB isn’t just a contract for 18 satellites. It helps finance engineering teams, manufacturing capacity, expertise and probably a whole collection of suppliers that most of us have never heard of. The same applies to Airbus and Thales Alenia Space.

And once companies have developed technologies, production methods and expertise for IRIS², that knowledge doesn’t have to remain inside IRIS². It can potentially be used for other satellite programmes and commercial services as well.

Build things and you learn things

There is also something else that is easily overlooked when governments discuss innovation. You don’t create technological expertise simply by saying that innovation is important. You have to build things. Preferably difficult things. A 348-satellite constellation spread across different orbits, combined with secure ground infrastructure and demanding communications requirements, certainly qualifies. Engineers will have to solve problems involving satellite platforms, payloads, antennas, networking, cybersecurity, ground stations, power management, production, launch integration and constellation management. Factories will have to learn how to manufacture satellites in larger numbers. Airbus, for example, says it will use its serial-production facility in Toulouse for the first IRIS² LEO layer.

Security, economy and technology

This is why I think IRIS² is interesting on several levels at the same time. It gives Europe a communications infrastructure that it can control itself. It improves resilience by adding another communications layer for governments, critical infrastructure and emergency situations. It puts substantial amounts of money into the European space industry and its supply chain. And perhaps most importantly in the longer term, it forces European companies to develop, manufacture and operate advanced technology at scale.

Those things reinforce each other. A stronger European space industry gives Europe more technological options. More technology creates new products and companies. Those companies create expertise and jobs. And having that expertise makes it easier to build the next generation of European space infrastructure.

This is exactly what I meant when I wrote that the space economy is taking off. Space is gradually becoming another part of our economic and digital infrastructure. And Europe should not simply be a customer in that economy. It should be building a substantial part of it. IRIS² is a very big step in that direction.

So Apparently Facebook Might Keep You Posting After You’re Dead?

I thought dying was a reasonably reliable way of stopping your social-media activity. Apparently, even that may eventually become optional. Because Meta has been granted a patent for technology that could allow an AI to simulate a user of a social network when that person is no longer around. The patent has the wonderfully reassuring title Simulation of a user of a social networking system using a language model.

See here for more: https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-granted-patent-for-ai-llm-bot-dead-paused-accounts-2026-2?utm_source=chatgpt.com and https://patents.justia.com/patent/12513102?utm_source=chatgpt.com.

Basically, an AI could learn from the things you have posted, liked, commented on and interacted with, and then use all that information to behave a little bit like you. Sounds like typical AI. But then it gets interesting. The patent explicitly talks about situations in which somebody is absent from a social network for a longer period. Perhaps you have simply decided that spending three hours a day scrolling through Facebook isn’t actually improving your life. Fair enough. But the patent mentions another possible reason for your absence. You might be dead. And your AI version could potentially carry on.

I find this a genuinely bizarre idea.

Now, I can imagine some situations in which technology like this could actually be useful. Someone who knows they are seriously ill might want a few messages to appear after their death. A birthday message for their children, perhaps. A final note to friends. Maybe even a couple of posts saying goodbye. We already do something similar with letters and videos.

But there is quite a big difference between:

“Here are five messages I wrote before I died. Please publish them afterwards.”

and:

“Here is an AI that has studied everything I ever posted. Just let it carry on being me.”

The first is still you. The second is somebody’s statistical approximation of you. That difference becomes even more interesting when money enters the picture. Imagine that you have built a very successful social media account. Perhaps you have thousands of followers. Every post generates hunderds of comments, likes and shares. People spend time looking at your content. The platform serves advertising around all that activity. Your account has commercial value. Then one day you stop posting. Perhaps you simply decide that social media is no longer for you. Perhaps you disappear for what the patent calls a longer period. Or perhaps you die.

Normally, that would mean the end of the content stream. No more posts and no more comments. So, no more engagement. And obviously: No more advertising around all that engagement. Unless, of course, an AI version of you could simply continue. And that is where I start to feel rather uncomfortable about this idea.

To be absolutely clear: having a patent does not mean that a social network is about to introduce this. Companies patent enormous numbers of ideas that never become actual products. At least not yet. But the patent does make the possibility technically and commercially imaginable. And once you look at it that way, some fairly strange questions appear. If the AI keeps posting after I have left a social network, are those still my posts? If it responds to somebody, have I responded? When a racist or otherwise offensive message appears on my account, how do I prove that it wasn’t posted by me, but by an AI? If it expresses an opinion I would probably have expressed, is that my opinion? And who decides when it should stop?

There’s something else I find particularly odd about all this. For years, a lot of people have been putting enormous amounts of themselves into social networks: photos, conversations, friendships, opinions, jokes, arguments, interests, political discussions, holiday pictures, and thousands upon thousands of small signals about who we are. Until now, we mostly thought of that as data about our past behaviour. AI potentially turns it into something else: training material for a future version of ourselves.

I’m not on Facebook, but I can imagine that, for many people, a Facebook profile used to be something of a digital archive. You could scroll back and see what someone actually said ten years ago. An AI-generated account would be fundamentally different. It could start producing things that the original person never said at all. Perhaps they would have said them. Perhaps not. We will never know, will we?

I suspect there will eventually be useful applications for this kind of ideas. Used deliberately and under the control of the person involved, it might even become a fascinating new way of leaving something behind. But an automated social-media ghost that continues generating engagement because its owner is “absent for a longer period”? That sounds considerably less appealing. Especially when the platform running the ghost also happens to make money from keeping people scrolling, commenting and watching.

The Best Platform Is the One You Own

A few days ago I came across this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kZY7eLm264) by investigative journalist Scott Carney and it reminded me of one of the most important lessons of the independent web: Build your own website. That doesn’t mean you should stop using other platforms. Far from it. Platforms can be useful. They can help you find people, join conversations and get your work in front of an audience. And some of them are genuinely nice places. They may be small. They may be run by people whose ideas about the internet you completely agree with. They may feel like communities rather than companies. But they are still somebody else’s place. That distinction matters.

Friendly platforms are still platforms

In the video Carney discusses his relationship with Substack. And I think it is a particularly interesting one because Substack originally seemed like an alternative to the big social platforms. The basic idea was attractive: writers could publish directly for readers, readers could pay them directly and journalists would no longer have to depend entirely on publishers, advertising or algorithms.

But Carney argues that Substack itself is changing (https://sgcarney.substack.com/p/the-real-reason-that-substack-is). It added Notes, which looks much more like a traditional social-media feed. It introduced the distinction between subscribers and followers, and added video, livestreaming and short clips. In other words, a service built around newsletters and subscriptions gradually started looking more like the platforms it once seemed to offer an alternative to.

That matters because, according to Carney, all that free content and endless scrolling may be good for growing Substack, but not necessarily for the people publishing there. His own follower numbers increased dramatically, while the number of people actually paying for his work did not grow in anything like the same way. He describes the broader problem as subscription fatigue: there are only so many newsletters people have the time and money to pay for.

What I find particularly interesting is his response. He doesn’t dramatically announce that he is leaving the internet or refusing to use platforms ever again. He adapts. He uses YouTube. He works with sponsors, although he says he is very selective about the companies he accepts money from. And he no longer assumes that one particular platform or one particular business model will provide a permanent solution.

You give up control

To me, that is exactly the point. The problem with building your online presence on a platform is not necessarily that the people running it are evil, greedy or waiting for an opportunity to lock you in. They may be wonderful people. The problem is simply that you don’t control what happens next. Because someone else controls the software. Someone else decides how it develops. Someone else can change the rules, the business model or the priorities. The organisation behind it can run out of money, change direction, be acquired or simply disappear.

Your website should be the center

This is why I increasingly think of platforms as satellites. My website is the center. I can post links somewhere else. I can participate in discussions. I can experiment with new communities and services. If one of them disappears tomorrow, that would be annoying. But Just Me would still be here. My articles would still be here. My links would still work. My no doubt bizar collection of posts about Linux, space, music, open source, digital autonomy, industrial technology, old websites and whatever else happens to interest me would still have a home.

To me that is important. Especially now that so much of the internet seems to consist of publishing things inside systems controlled by somebody else.

And there is another reason

There is also a much less serious reason to build your own website: It is fun.

You can change the design because you feel like it. Add a page nobody asked for. Build a ridiculous little web tool. Change your fonts. Break something. Repair it again. Discover that WordPress is doing something mysterious. Spend far too much time solving a problem that nobody visiting your site will ever notice.

That is part of the pleasure. A personal website isn’t just a publishing platform. It is also a project. And unlike almost every other platform on the internet, it can become exactly as boring, complicated, colourful, minimal, experimental or peculiar as you want it to be. Because it is yours. Maybe that is the best reason of all.

LEO Satellites Are Taking Off, But They Can’t Do Everything

Low Earth Orbit satellites have become enormously popular over the past few years. Starlink is obviously the name most people know, but it is only part of a much bigger development. Companies all over the world are building new satellite constellations, telecom operators are experimenting with direct-to-device connections and smartphones are slowly gaining the ability to communicate with satellites without requiring a traditional satellite phone.

It is another example of something I wrote about earlier in The Space Economy Is Taking Off (https://justme.website/tech/the-space-economy-is-taking-off/): space is increasingly becoming an economic infrastructure rather than something mainly associated with governments, science and spectacular rocket launches.

But whenever a technology suddenly attracts this much attention, another question becomes interesting. What can it actually do? And perhaps even more importantly: what can’t it do?

Strand Consult has published two reports that provide some useful context here. They look specifically at Low Earth Orbit satellite networks and the increasingly popular idea of connecting ordinary mobile devices directly to satellites.See here for more information: https://strandconsult.dk/leo-satellites-the-hype-the-facts-and-the-hard-limits/?utm_campaign=31.+august+2026+-+Presse+-+LEO+Satellites+The+Hype+the+Facts+and+the+Hard+Limits505128.

Satellites are very good at filling gaps

The obvious advantage of satellites is coverage. Building mobile towers and fibre networks makes economic sense in cities and densely populated areas. It becomes much more complicated in mountains, deserts, at sea or in sparsely populated regions. LEO satellites can reach those places without having to build a physical network across every square kilometer of land.

That makes direct-to-device satellite communication particularly interesting as an extension of existing mobile networks. A phone could use a terrestrial network most of the time and switch to a satellite connection when there simply isn’t a mobile tower nearby. That sounds extremely useful. And it probably will be.

But space doesn’t magically create unlimited bandwidth

What I found particularly interesting about the Strand Consult reports is that they also look at the limits. Satellites have limited spectrum and limited capacity. A satellite beam covering a large geographical area has to share that capacity between users underneath it. That is very different from a city packed with mobile base stations, each covering a relatively small area and collectively handling enormous amounts of data.

In remote areas, satellites can therefore be an excellent solution. In densely populated cities with huge amounts of traffic, terrestrial networks are much harder to beat. Strand Consult also points to regulatory issues around spectrum and the practical difficulties of scaling direct-to-cellular satellite services globally.

So the idea that satellites will simply replace mobile networks seems rather unlikely. More interesting is the idea that the two will increasingly work together.

And then there is the extreme scenario

The second Strand Consult report takes things a step further. It imagines the year 2045. The last mobile tower has been switched off and all mobile communication has moved into space. The report isn’t predicting that this will happen. It uses the scenario as a thought experiment: if we really wanted satellites to replace terrestrial mobile networks completely, what would we actually have to build?

The answer involves enormous numbers of satellites, spectrum, network capacity, regulation, investment and geopolitical coordination. Which is exactly why I find these reports interesting. The space economy really is taking off. Satellite connectivity will almost certainly become far more important than it is today.

But that doesn’t mean every network belongs in space. Sometimes the most interesting thing about a new technology isn’t discovering what it can replace. It is discovering where it fits.

Europe Just Opened a New Door to Space

I have written several times on Just Me about the space economy. About how satellites, launch services and new space companies are changing the way we think about access to orbit. For a long time, however, one question remained: could Europe really build its own commercial path into space?

This week, we got a very convincing answer. A German company called Isar Aerospace (https://isaraerospace.com/) has achieved something that feels like a turning point: its Spectrum rocket successfully reached orbit and deployed payloads during its second flight. The mission, called “Onward and Upward”, lifted off from Andøya Space in Norway (https://andoyaspace.no/) and made Isar Aerospace the first European commercial space company to successfully deliver satellites into orbit.

Not just another rocket launch

Of course, rockets reaching space is nothing new. Humanity has been doing that for decades. But this is different. For Europe, access to space has traditionally depended heavily on large institutional programmes. Rockets like Ariane have played a crucial role, but the world of space is changing quickly. Thousands of smaller satellites are being launched, companies want more flexible access to orbit, and commercial players are becoming increasingly important.

This is exactly the market where companies like Isar Aerospace are trying to make a difference. The idea is simple: make launching satellites more flexible, more scalable and more accessible. And that requires something more than just building a rocket. It requires building an entire industrial ecosystem.

The machine behind the machine

One thing I find particularly interesting about Isar Aerospace is that the company is not only developing the Spectrum launch vehicle. It is also building the manufacturing capabilities needed to produce rockets at scale. The company follows a highly integrated approach: designing, manufacturing and testing large parts of the rocket itself instead of relying completely on external suppliers. The next Spectrum vehicles are already in production, and Isar Aerospace is working towards a production facility capable of manufacturing dozens of rockets per year.

This reminds me of something I wrote earlier about European industrial ambitions (see here: https://justme.website/digital-autonomy/building-robots-is-not-enough/). The future is not only about making the final product. It is also about owning the knowledge, machines and processes behind that product. Whether we are talking about semiconductors, humanoid robots or rockets, the same principle appears again and again: the real strategic advantage often sits in the manufacturing capability.

Learning from failure

Another reason this story is interesting is that it shows how innovation actually works. The first Spectrum flight in 2025 was not a complete success. The rocket lifted off and cleared the launch pad, but the mission ended after a short flight. Instead of treating this as a failure, Isar Aerospace used the data to improve the next vehicle. That is how innovation always works. Test. Learn. Improve. Try again.

Space is probably one of the clearest examples of an industry where you cannot simply design everything perfectly on paper. Real-world testing is unavoidable.The second flight showed that this approach worked. Spectrum completed key flight milestones, reached orbital velocity and successfully separated its payloads.

Why Europe needs this

There is also a broader strategic dimension. Space has become critical infrastructure. Satellites support communication, navigation, climate monitoring, agriculture, defence and countless other services. Having independent access to orbit is increasingly seen as part of technological sovereignty. This does not mean Europe should build everything alone. International cooperation remains essential. But having European companies that can provide launch services from European soil gives Europe more options. So this is about technological and digital autonomy as well.

The global space industry is becoming more competitive every year. Companies in the United States, China and other regions are investing heavily. Europe needs companies that can move quickly, experiment and build new capabilities. Isar Aerospace is one example of this new generation of European space companies. Fortunately there are more.

The space economy is becoming real

What I like about this story is that it connects technology, industry and imagination. Space is no longer only about astronauts, giant government programmes and spectacular missions. It is also about factories, software, automation, supply chains and entrepreneurship. A small company from Germany launching a rocket from a small launch site in Norway may sound like science fiction. But this is exactly what the emerging space economy looks like.