In just two weeks, my new book Hyperscale will be out in the world!

It’s the first book from a major publisher to chronicle the data center buildout and the backlash to it, while asking whether we really need to accept the future being foisted on us by Silicon Valley’s tech billionaires. (You can probably guess my answer!)

As the book’s release gets closer, the recommendations have been coming in fast and furious. The Guardian, Literary Hub, New Scientist, and Next Big Idea Club have all put it on their book lists in recent weeks, and it was longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award. That’s all to say that the early buzz is good.

But I need to ask you for a favor.

Hyperscale is the culmination of work I’ve been doing over the past few years. If you enjoy my writing or my podcast, I’m certain you’re going to take a lot away from my book. It’s like the work I usually do, but in a lot more depth, meaning it will give you a much better picture of why data centers are built the way they are, why communities are pushing back, and what’s really driving our AI overlords.

The best way to help me out right now is to go preorder a copy of Hyperscale for yourself. You can head on over to Bookshop in the US or the UK to grab your copy, or find a bunch of other links on the book’s website.

I feel like a lot of readers don’t realize just how important preorders are for authors and their books. It’s not just about selling more copies, but sending a signal. Planet Money explained it well when their own book was coming out:

Preorders are incredibly helpful for authors. If you are buying books to support them, preorders give them an extra boost that can become a snowball. Booksellers look at preorder numbers when they are deciding on things like which titles get the sweet, sweet spot in the window, which are at the top of their website or even just how many copies to stock. They want to pick winners their customers will like, and strong preorders are a predictor of that.

The preorders also all count as first-day sales, so big preorders increase the chance of starting out on a bestseller list, which then leads to more sales and … you can see the snowball.

Basically, you buy a copy of my book, and you’re not only helping me in the direct way, but you’re letting booksellers know that readers are interested so they’ll bring in more stock and display it more prominently. If every person on this email list bought a copy of Hyperscale, its success would virtually be guaranteed.

Go preorder your copy of Hyperscale today. I’d really appreciate it!

Need more convincing? I got my copies of the book the other day, and recorded a video of the unboxing! Find it on Bluesky, Instagram, Mastodon, or basically any of the other social media except X the everything app.

Also, just a head’s up that I’ll be doing a bunch of events over the next few months. I’ll be in Paris on October 17 with Mediapart, Montreal on October 23 for an event with Rachel Gilmore, and London on October 26 with Foxglove and Macrodose. You can already RSVP for the Paris and London events, and the details on the Montreal event will be available soon.

All that will be added to my website, and expect more US and Canada dates in November, followed by European dates in December. Plus, if you follow me on social media, I’ll be sharing events as they’re confirmed.

But the key message: You’d be doing me a big favor if you placed a preorder for my book, whether that’s from Bookshop, another store listed on the book’s website, or simply by going to your local bookstore.

With that all said, it’s time for the recap of good reads and important news you might have missed in September — made available to paid subscribers. In this month’s recap, find great pieces on how a shooter in Canada used ChatGPT to plan the attack, why Paulina Borsook disappeared from tech media, and a new one from Ed Ongweso Jr. Plus, plenty of labor updates and news from the past month you should know about.

Have a great month, and make sure to pick up your copy of Hyperscale!

— Paris

The top 3

• OpenAI said it banned the ChatGPT account of a shooter in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. But there was a second account the shooter used for eight months to plan the attack. Mark Follman details what was in the chat logs for Mother Jones.
• In 2000, Paulina Borsook published a book that skewered the tech industry. After that, she found she could no longer find work as a tech writer. For Wired, Tommy Craggs profiles Borsook and tries to find out why her voice was no longer welcome.
• The longreads put out by my pal Ed Ongweso Jr. are always worth checking out, including his recent one The Future Is Not Tech-Forward.

Labor updates

• More than 200 employees at the Wikimedia Foundation have voted to unionize in the United States.
• Blizzard workers finally have a contract after two years of negotiations.
• An Uber union in British Columbia has just expanded to cover 1,000 new drivers in additional communities.
• Uber announced plans to cut 10% of its workforce, or 3,300 jobs.
• Xbox cut 268 more jobs as part of its restructuring plan.

The other stuff

• Thailand paused all data center projects. South Africans in Cape Town are trying to stop an Equinix data center. Residents in surburban Sydney, Australia forced a company to cancel a major data center project.
• The data center boom is creating an e-waste nightmare we’re already starting to feel.
• The US government is trying to stop Australia’s plan to regulate social media algorithms.
• New legislation in California wants to force data center companies to share more information about their operations and demands.
• Alberta’s government is backing major data center projects, but a majority of the province’s residents are opposed to their construction.
• Officials aren’t using the European Commission’s alternative to Microsoft Teams, called Element Pro, because they say it sucks.
• A series of AI-generated websites seemed designed to influence the answers that chatbots give when users ask about Alberta’s referendum on separation from Canada to encourage them to support separation.
• Brazilian president Lula da Silva banned gambling apps ahead of the country’s elections in October.
• Walmart has committed not to use electronic price tags to change prices based on customers’ personal data.
• Tesla’s Cybercab is under investigation for lacking a steering wheel and pedals.
• Gulf countries are still pushing forward with major data centers projects, even as such infrastructures have become the target of Iranian attacks.
• British Columbia sued OpenAI for failing to warn authorities ahead of a mass shooting, after it detected a user planning violent scenarios with ChatGPT.
• Uber pulled out of Nigeria and Uganda as part of a wider restructuring.
• 1Password found itself in hot water after funding a project by far-right tech bro David Heinemeier Hansson.

By this point, I’m sure ~ the algorithm ~ knows I’m not a big fan of, well… it. Not to mention everything it powers. And it seems to be trying to serve me content that recognizes that.

I’m not a big Instagram user, but recently it started serving me content that seemed to echo my feelings about digital technology.

In a video posted by livefromthetrees, an older man with a bushy white beard and an inviting smile let me know I’d scrolled far enough. I was done for the day, could put my phone down, and get on with my life — preferably by going out into nature. It’s a wholesome video, and brought a smile to my face.

My Instagram feed isn’t all that bad anyway. It’s a lot of golden retrievers, people with tattoos, Lord of the Rings content, and the occasional more lefty comedian (think people like Gianmarco Soresi). As I watched these videos of the old man in the woods, I started being served up similar videos. One featured a grandma asking for negative thoughts, dispeling them one by one, then batting them away with a baseball bat.

I wondered if I played these videos enough whether the algorithm would fill my feel with more of this uplifting content, but I also wondered how social media would feel if we saw more content like that than the polarized posts and AI slop increasingly filling people’s feeds. I don’t want to know everything about these people’s lives, but the brief moment they entered my world brightened my day.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think training an algorithm is the fix to our social media woes. But it also doesn’t have to be what people like Mark Zuckerberg have made it — prioritizing ad profits and engagement time over conviviality and actual connection.

Now, to this month’s recap. First, a very cool update on the book front: Hyperscale got a great review from Publisher’s Weekly. “Timely and persuasive, this revelatory account is difficult to ignore,” it says. Don’t forget to preorder your copy to get the full story on the data center boom, the communities it’s affecting, and why it doesn’t have to be this way.

Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I also did some great interviews this past month. Thomas Dekeyser was on the show to unearth the history of people refusing new technology, while Hannah Cyrus and Alison Macrina explained how librarians are on the front lines of informing the public about technology (and helping them ditch AI). Check them out if you missed them!

The top 3 stories in this month’s recap look at the Summer of Ludd, snail-mail subscription clubs, and writers changing their styles in response to AI. Plus, find more important reads, and updates on labor, AI, data center news, and even more!

The full recaps are a special perk for subscribers who support my work. Thank you to those who’ve signed up, and if you haven’t, consider joining today!

I hope your summer (or winter) is going well!

— Paris

I feel like if there was a month that brought home how the data center buildout is pushing up the price of consumer electronics, it was June 2026.

Valve announced its Steam Machine would start at $1049, though many buyers will end up paying more than that, while Microsoft hiked prices of Xbox consoles by another $100-150. Those are staggering prices, but they only affect a certain segment of video gamers. The real blow came when Apple finally gave into increasing component costs, increasing the prices of Macs, iPads, HomePods, and Apple TV by up to 20%. iPhones were left out of this round, but that’s unlikely to remain the case when new models are announced in the fall.

Outgoing CEO Tim Cook had signaled price increases were coming, telling the Wall Street Journal on June 17 that price increases were “unavoidable.” But the amount of the hike and how soon they came seemed to take people by surprise. And this will not be the end. Industry analysis suggests memory and chip prices are going to keep going up for the next few years, and that will force up the prices of all manner of electronics with it. The sub-$500 laptop is already disappearing as cheaper computers becoming completely uneconomical.

When Valve finally disclosed the Steam Machine price, Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais helped explained how much things have changed in a short period of time. “Things that were a year ago, two years ago, commodity things, you’d just pay the normal price for it and it’s all good,” he said, “now you have to negotiate really hard just to secure a few thousand. And there's so many more people in line in front of you.” He suggested the company doesn’t even have long-term contracts, but essentially has to see what it can buy month by month.

Why? It’s all so a bunch of unimaginably wealthy tech companies can try to force us to use their chatbots and image generators regardless of whether we want to, and build massive data centers that are needed to power the technology. All those data centers need a specific kind of memory, and with all the demand major manufacturers are shifting production to the products that the data centers need instead of those that go into consumer electronics.

There are already ample reasons to oppose their project: from the harmful effects of chatbots to the ways data centers are forcing up energy prices and throwing climate targets to the side. But now they’re even making our computers, game consoles, and our phones more expensive all in the name of their pursuit of power and profit.

Where does it all end? And how far will we let the industry go before we force governments to rein it in?

I actually talked about this with Chris Person over on Tech Won’t Save Us, if you want to listen to our conversation. It’s one of many fascinating conversations I had on the show last month. I also discuss the issue in my forthcoming book Hyperscale that’s out in October.

In this month’s recap, the top stories look at how Huawei has thrived despite US efforts to constrain it, how the US sanctioned Chilean officials assessing an undersea cable to China, and how the FSB took over the Russian internet. Plus, plenty of other great reads, labor updates, and news you might have missed from the past month.

Have a great summer! (Or an enjoyable winter, for those of you on the other side of the equator.)

— Paris