Economics

In 2001, in the trough of the dotcom bust, a generation of telecom engineers had just finished laying down what may be the single largest infrastructure overbuild in modern American history. By the most widely cited industry estimates from the early 2000s — Telegeography, Tier1 Research, FCC reports of the period — somewhere upwards of eighty percent of the long-haul fiber installed during the 1998–2002 buildout had never been lit. Hyperscaler usage since roughly 2010 has consumed a meaningful chunk of it, but even now, by every credible reconstruction I can find, long-haul utilization across the US remains well below half....

When you look at a medieval cathedral today, you’re looking at the frozen expression of a completely different operating system. These weren’t just buildings — they were manifestos in stone, declaring that human life should run on divine time, not mechanical time. But by 1300, something had shifted. Town bells weren’t just calling people to prayer anymore. They were calling them to work. What changed? The West had installed its first major software update....