May 2024 Archives

(I am still elbow-deep in the guts of The Regicide Report, hence paucity of recent blog entries.)

I must admit that I used to be a big fan of conspiracy theories—or applied psychoceramics, as we called it back in the nineties—but the rise of social media has lifted the carpet to reveal a mass of wriggly creepy-crawlies under the rug, some of which are very not nice at all: as witness the rise of QAnon (which is basically the old anti-semitic Blood Libel in a new coat of paint), the enthusiastic adoption of a bunch of really nasty racist conspiracy theories by the far right (who use them to market Nazism via the internet), and so on.

It's quite apparent that right now we're seeing the build-out of a whole new communications technology that hasn't quite hit the public eye yet—ubiquitous satellite broadband and telephony. This is still in the very early stages. Right now my iPhone can in principle send a very limited SOS message to emergency services via satellite if I'm outside of cell service. The next generation of phones will do better, and the days of needing a dedicated satellite phone the size of a brick are numbered.

But this technology is dependent on infrastructure, and the infrastructure in question requires vast numbers of what are essentially cellphone towers in orbit. According to some announced plans, SpaceX's Starlink constellation will ultimately require as many as 45,000 satellites in orbit to provide global service. As we've seen from its military uses in the Ukraine war, even with the need for a bulky base station Starlink has strategic implications: ubiquitous orbital cellphone service (even if its limited by contention ratios) is even more significant. China is planning its own low-orbit comsat constellation, and doubtless there will be others: as with GPS, we now have multiple nations or supranational blocs like the EU running satellite fleets to provide a secure service.