Hyundai’s move to buy SoftBank’s re­main­ing 9.65% stake in Boston Dynamics for $325 mil­lion is not just cleanup from an old deal. It gives Hyundai full con­trol of one of the few hu­manoid ro­bot­ics com­pa­nies with real fac­tory work in sight.

Hyundai Motor Group is ex­pected to ap­prove the pur­chase on June 22, clos­ing out SoftBank’s last piece of Boston Dynamics and turn­ing the Waltham, Massachusetts ro­bot­ics com­pany into a wholly owned Hyundai busi­ness. The price is $325 mil­lion for the re­main­ing stake, ac­cord­ing to the deal terms, and it fol­lows the put op­tion SoftBank re­tained when Hyundai bought con­trol of Boston Dynamics in 2021.

You should read that as a sig­nal, not a foot­note. Hyundai paid about $880 mil­lion for an 80% stake in Boston Dynamics in the 2021 trans­ac­tion, valu­ing the com­pany at roughly $1.1 bil­lion at the time. SoftBank had bought Boston Dynamics from Alphabet in 2017, af­ter Google had ac­quired the ro­bot­ics lab in 2013. It was a strange own­er­ship path for a com­pany whose ro­bots be­came fa­mous on YouTube long be­fore they be­came ob­vi­ous com­mer­cial prod­ucts.

That part is chang­ing. At CES in Las Vegas on January 5, 2026, Hyundai and Boston Dynamics showed the elec­tric Atlas hu­manoid ro­bot in pub­lic, with the Associated Press re­port­ing that the life-sized ro­bot stood up, walked around the stage and was re­motely pi­loted for the demon­stra­tion. The use­ful de­tail was not the stage­craft. It was the de­ploy­ment plan. A pro­duc­tion ver­sion of Atlas is ex­pected to be­gin work at Hyundai’s elec­tric ve­hi­cle plant near Savannah, Georgia, by 2028.

Boston Dynamics has spent years mak­ing ro­bots that looked too good to be busi­nesses. Spot, its four-legged ro­bot, be­came the first ob­vi­ous com­mer­cial suc­cess. Atlas is the harder test be­cause hu­manoid ro­bots have to jus­tify them­selves in places where tra­di­tional au­toma­tion al­ready ex­ists. Business Insider re­ported in January that Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter said Atlas would need to learn new fac­tory tasks in a day or two and reach 99.9% re­li­a­bil­ity be­fore it could be truly use­ful on the floor. That’s a high bar. It’s also the right one.

Hyundai’s ad­van­tage is that it does­n’t have to imag­ine the first cus­tomer. It owns the fac­to­ries, the ve­hi­cle pro­grams and now the whole ro­bot­ics com­pany. The Verge re­ported from CES that Hyundai plans to start Atlas with parts se­quenc­ing at its Metaplant in Georgia, then move to­ward heav­ier and more com­plex op­er­a­tions by 2030. If you’re build­ing ro­bots for the phys­i­cal world, that kind of con­trolled de­ploy­ment mat­ters more than a per­fect demo video.

The sup­ply chain is part of the story too. Hyundai Mobis, the group’s com­po­nents arm, has been tied to ac­tu­a­tor pro­duc­tion for Atlas, which keeps one of the ro­bot’s most im­por­tant hard­ware sys­tems closer to Hyundai’s own in­dus­trial base. Frankly, that is the dif­fer­ence be­tween treat­ing ro­bot­ics as a side bet and treat­ing it as a man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pa­bil­ity. A hu­manoid ro­bot is only as use­ful as the parts, ser­vice net­work and pro­duc­tion dis­ci­pline be­hind it.

The field around Boston Dynamics is no longer sleepy. Tesla has shifted part of its Fremont fac­tory story to­ward Optimus af­ter end­ing Model S and Model X pro­duc­tion, a move re­ported by Axios and The Verge ear­lier this year. Figure AI has pushed hu­manoid ro­bots into BMW fac­tory tri­als. Unitree has made lower-cost hu­manoids im­pos­si­ble to ig­nore. None of those com­pa­nies has Boston Dynamics’ long record in lo­co­mo­tion, but they don’t need to. They need to make ro­bots cheap enough, use­ful enough and re­li­able enough to win spe­cific jobs.

That is why full own­er­ship mat­ters for Hyundai. Boston Dynamics does­n’t have to beat every hu­manoid ri­val in every mar­ket. It has to make Atlas work in­side Hyundai plants first, where the tasks are known, the lay­out is con­trolled and the pay­off can be mea­sured in pro­duc­tion up­time rather than con­fer­ence ap­plause. If it works there, Hyundai gets a ro­bot­ics plat­form and a proof point at the same time.

SoftBank has moved on to a big­ger AI bet

For Masayoshi Son, the Boston Dynamics exit looks small be­side SoftBank’s cur­rent AI in­fra­struc­ture cam­paign. The Wall Street Journal re­ported in April that SoftBank is form­ing Roze AI, a new ven­ture meant to use ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence and ro­bot­ics to build phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture, in­clud­ing data cen­ters. Tom’s Hardware, cit­ing the Financial Times, re­ported that Son is aim­ing for a $100 bil­lion val­u­a­tion for Roze and a pub­lic list­ing as soon as this year.

That puts the $325 mil­lion Boston Dynamics pro­ceeds in per­spec­tive. SoftBank is not walk­ing away from ro­bot­ics as an idea. It is mov­ing to­ward ro­bots as part of the AI build­out, tied to data cen­ters, en­ergy, land and con­struc­tion. Boston Dynamics is a prod­uct com­pany with hard en­gi­neer­ing prob­lems and a slower rev­enue curve. Son now wants the in­fra­struc­ture layer.

Hyundai wants the ro­bot on the fac­tory floor. That is a nar­rower bet, but it is eas­ier to judge. By 2028, Atlas is sup­posed to be do­ing real work in Georgia, not just walk­ing across a stage in Las Vegas. If Hyundai can turn that into re­peat­able man­u­fac­tur­ing value, the SoftBank exit will look less like a tidy cleanup and more like the mo­ment Hyundai stopped bor­row­ing a ro­bot­ics fu­ture and de­cided to own it out­right.

Also read: Texas just rewrote the rules for con­nect­ing AI data cen­ters to its power grid • Elastic’s $85 mil­lion bet on DeductiveAI is a sig­nal that AI-native ops tool­ing is now ac­qui­si­tion cur­rency • The U.S. gov­ern­ment just told ASML one of its most re­stricted ma­chines may be in­side China

Please en­able JS and dis­able any ad blocker

At the time of writ­ing (2026 – 06-18), Google Workspace ap­pears to be start­ing to warn users from Firefox that they must use Chrome. This was for a Google Workspace Business Plus ac­count and work­space, from an up to date browser and OS.

At this time, Firefox ac­cess still seems to work but I’ve no idea for how long.

| 📝 Update as of 15:31Z 2026 – 06-18 | Google sup­port called and claim this will only hap­pen for ad­mins try­ing to ac­cess https://​ad­min.google.com and that it is­n’t block­ing, it’s just a rec­om­men­da­tion. They said they will not be doc­u­ment­ing this pub­licly | | ——————————— | :———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————- |

Specific warn­ing

Icon in­di­cat­ing that the user may soon lose their ac­cess to their ac­count. Secure your de­vice for safe app ac­cess To help keep your data se­cure, make sure that your de­vice meets your or­gan­i­sa­tion’s se­cu­rity re­quire­ments Next steps

Download Chrome Browser and sign in with your work ac­count

This was from a web­page with url https://​ac­cess.work­space.google.com/​re­me­di­ate?url­params=REDACTED

Screenshot be­low

Response from Google sup­port

Absolutely noth­ing use­ful, re­peat­edly trans­ferred around and took ages.

«««< HEAD «««< Updated up­stream =======

Emailed up­date from their sup­port af­ter they called me

I’m pub­lish­ing this in full, none of this ac­tu­ally ad­dresses the is­sue or an­swers any­thing I asked on the call

Emailed up­date from their sup­port

I’m pub­lish­ing this in full, none of this ac­tu­ally ad­dresses the is­sue

[redacted per­sonal in­for­ma­tion about my­self and the sup­port staff] I ap­pre­ci­ate you ac­cept­ing my call ear­lier.

To en­sure your users have the best, most se­cure, and fea­ture-rich ex­pe­ri­ence with Google Workspace ser­vices, it’s cru­cial to use up-to-date, com­pat­i­ble web browsers. Using sup­ported browsers pro­vides ac­cess to the lat­est fea­tures and of­fers im­proved se­cu­rity and per­for­mance.

Here are the browsers com­pat­i­ble with Google Workspace:

Google Chrome: We rec­om­mend and fully sup­port the lat­est ver­sion of Google Chrome. Chrome typ­i­cally up­dates au­to­mat­i­cally, en­sur­ing ac­cess to all Google Workspace fea­tures and func­tion­al­ity.

Mozilla Firefox: Google Workspace works well with Firefox. We sup­port the cur­rent and the pre­vi­ous ma­jor ver­sion. Please note that Firefox does not cur­rently sup­port: Offline ac­cess to Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Client-side en­cryp­tion in Google Meet.

Apple Safari: Google Workspace also works well with Safari. We sup­port the cur­rent and the pre­vi­ous ma­jor ver­sion. Safari does not cur­rently sup­port: Offline ac­cess to Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Desktop no­ti­fi­ca­tions in Gmail.

Microsoft Edge: Google Workspace works well with Microsoft Edge. We sup­port the cur­rent and the pre­vi­ous ma­jor ver­sion.

Key Recommendations:

Keep Browsers Updated: Always en­cour­age users to run the lat­est ver­sions of these sup­ported browsers. For Firefox, Safari, and Edge, when a new browser ver­sion is re­leased, we be­gin sup­port­ing that ver­sion and stop sup­port­ing the third most re­cent ver­sion. Enable Cookies and JavaScript: To use Google Workspace ef­fec­tively, en­sure that both cook­ies and JavaScript are en­abled in the browser set­tings. Unsupported Browsers: While some func­tion­al­ity might work on older or un­sup­ported browsers, we can­not guar­an­tee full fea­ture avail­abil­ity or per­for­mance. Users may en­counter is­sues or find some ap­pli­ca­tions do not open cor­rectly. Mobile Access: For the best ex­pe­ri­ence on mo­bile de­vices (Android, iPhone, and iPad), please use the ded­i­cated Google Workspace mo­bile ap­pli­ca­tions, which are built specif­i­cally for these plat­forms.

By fol­low­ing these guide­lines, your or­ga­ni­za­tion can max­i­mize the ben­e­fits and se­cu­rity of­fered by Google Workspace.

For fu­ture ref­er­ence, please check and re­view these ar­ti­cles: Supported browsers for Google Workspace | Support & trou­bleshoot­ing | Google Workspace Help Service-specific Google Workspace re­quire­ments | Support & trou­bleshoot­ing | Google Workspace Help

Should you have any fur­ther ques­tions, we’d be happy to pro­vide as­sis­tance. This case will be closed in the next 3 busi­ness days, you can al­ways re­ply to this mes­sage within the next 30 days and the case will re­open.

Thank you for choos­ing Google Workspace, and I hope you have a won­der­ful day!

Kind re­gards, [redacted]

Why do I care?

My team need to make sure that their soft­ware works in mul­ti­ple browsers, and I per­son­ally pre­fer us­ing fire­fox and don’t want to be forced to use Chrome for no dis­cern­able ben­e­fit.

Okay, but did­n’t your ad­min con­fig­ure $enterprise_feature

Sadly not, I’m the ad­min and can con­firm the fol­low­ing

We haven’t con­fig­ured, and don’t use IAP (Identity Aware Proxy) - I’ve used this be­fore and yes that is Chrome only due to how it does de­vice ver­i­fi­ca­tion

This is­n’t be­cause of “Context Aware Access” this is an en­ter­prise only fea­ture, and we’re on Google Workspace Business Plus

Every sin­gle time a post about at­proto hits Hacker News, some­body asks in the com­ments: “But where are all the Bluesky in­stances?”. The prob­lem is, there are no in­stances in at­proto! The ques­tion is a cat­e­gory er­ror. Instances are a Mastodon-brained con­cept, and I wanted some­thing I can link to that ex­plains this clearly.

So this is that post.

RSS and Google Reader

I know RSS is still be­ing used some­where (podcasts?!) but its hey­day is ar­guably be­hind. Which is a shame. For a few years, which some of us might fondly re­mem­ber as the golden age of the web, it felt like blog­ging was a cool thing.

Now look at this pic­ture be­cause it’s go­ing to be im­por­tant:

al­ice’s­blog­cat’s­blog­bob’s­blog­googleread­er­feedly

As a re­minder, you pub­lish stuff on your own blog, which you can ei­ther self-host or host on a pop­u­lar blog­ging plat­form. But then every­one’s stuff gets ag­gre­gated into apps like Google Reader and Feedly, or col­lec­tive blogs like Monologue (RIP).

Note that host­ing and ag­gre­ga­tion are two sep­a­rate things. Your posts don’t “live” in an app like Google Reader. Apps are mere pro­jec­tions of the Blogosphere.

Seriously, make sure this thought sears into your brain; it’s go­ing to be es­sen­tial.

Facebook and Such

Here’s what you could call an evo­lu­tion of this con­cept.

We put a box around the whole thing so that every­one is en­closed in the same space so we can show ads and stuff. Also, let’s leave only one app (we can let al­ter­na­tive apps live for a while, but not for long). That’s tra­di­tional so­cial me­dia.

al­ice’s­postscat’s­posts­bob’s­posts­face­book­the face­book news­feed

Oh no, now we have cen­tral­iza­tion!

Oh no, run­away net­work ef­fects!

Oh no, bla bla bla.

What do we do?

We need to de­cen­tral­ize this some­how.

Mastodon and Its Instances

I say “Mastodon” here be­cause if I say “ActivityPub” in­stead, a crowd of peo­ple will show up and say that ac­tu­ally what I’m de­scrib­ing is how Mastodon chose to im­ple­ment ActivityPub. Whereas ActivityPub by it­self does not re­ally spec­ify how to ac­tu­ally use it in prac­tice. I’m sure this is all very in­ter­est­ing—but I di­gress.

How do we de­cen­tral­ize a so­cial net­work?

Let’s build a ver­sion of what we saw ear­lier, but make it self-hostable. Then every com­mu­nity can have their own “little Facebook” or “little Twitter”. We’ll call them in­stances. They’re kind of like coun­tries—be­cause you live “inside” one of them:

al­ice’s­post­salex’s­post­san­n’s­postscat’s­post­scrow’s­postscal­i’s­posts­bob’s­posts­bree’s­posts­boba’s­posts­mastodon in­stance #1mastodon in­stance #2mastodon in­stance #3the news­feedthe news­feedthe news­feed

But wait, this opens a bunch of ques­tions.

How do you choose which in­stance to join? Maybe you’re a mem­ber of a few over­lap­ping com­mu­ni­ties. Well, I guess you’re just gonna have to pick which com­mu­ni­ty’s ad­mins you trust the most with han­dling your iden­tity and data.

Okay, now an­other prob­lem—what if my friend’s on a dif­fer­ent in­stance? How will they see my posts? Since each in­stance is ba­si­cally its own lit­tle Facebook, they have no shared source of truth. So they have to send mes­sages to each other:

al­ice’s­post­salex’s­post­san­n’s­postscat’s­post­scrow’s­postscal­i’s­posts­bob’s­posts­bree’s­posts­boba’s­posts­mastodon in­stance #1mastodon in­stance #2mastodon in­stance #3the news­feedthe news­feedthe news­feed

This net­work topol­ogy might re­mind you of war­ring fief­doms in Ancient China.

If Alice-from-instance-#1 fol­lows Bree-from-instance-#2, the two in­stances make an agree­ment: Bree’s posts will be for­warded to in­stance #1 so that Alice can see them. That’s called “federation”. You post on your in­stance, and then it gets for­warded to other in­stances whose users wanted to hear from you.

This pic­ture has a few in­ter­est­ing im­pli­ca­tions:

You “belong” to your in­stance. You’re not Alice, you are Alice-from-instance-#1. That’s why your Mastodon lo­gin is lit­er­ally [email protected]. “Where you’re from” is an im­mutable part of your iden­tity. (Somehow, this man­ages to be even more re­stric­tive than coun­tries and na­tion­al­i­ties.)

If your in­stance’s ad­mins pick a fight with an­other in­stance’s ad­mins, they may choose to “stop fed­er­at­ing”, and no longer for­ward any posts be­tween them. That could be a sur­pris­ing rea­son why you’re no longer see­ing posts from your friends.

If your in­stance goes down, your iden­tity ceases to ex­ist. People who fol­lowed you fol­lowed you-from-that-in­stance, not some ab­stract pla­tonic “actual you”.

Oh, and the ar­rows be­tween in­stances scale as O(n²). This might not mat­ter much now, but it could mat­ter if this ap­proach to so­cial net­work­ing be­comes pop­u­lar.

at­proto

Now for­get all of that—full re­set.

The mis­take was when we drew this box:

al­ice’s­postscat’s­posts­bob’s­posts­face­book­the face­book news­feed

Erase the box.

Go back to this:

al­ice’s­blog­cat’s­blog­bob’s­blog­googleread­er­feedly

We have host­ing where things ac­tu­ally “live”, and apps ag­gre­gate from them. This worked for blogs just fine, so why would­n’t it work for lit­er­ally every­thing else?

al­ice’sstuff­cat’sstuff­bob’sstuffapp #1app #2

Like RSS, but for all kinds of stuff.

That’s at­proto.

So Where Are All the Bluesky Instances?

Now you know! There are no in­stances in at­proto.

Instances are these Mastodon-brained things:

al­ice’s­post­salex’s­post­san­n’s­postscat’s­post­scrow’s­postscal­i’s­posts­bob’s­posts­bree’s­posts­boba’s­posts­mastodon in­stance #1mastodon in­stance #2mastodon in­stance #3the news­feedthe news­feedthe news­feed

They’re those iso­lated bun­dled host­ing+app fief­doms that send stuff to each other.

Compare this pic­ture to at­proto.

In at­proto, we cut host­ing apart from the ag­gre­ga­tion at the net­work level:

al­ice’sstuffalex’sstuffcrow’sstuff­cal­i’sstuff­boba’sstuffat­pro­toapp #1atprotoapp #2atprotoapp #3bree’sstuffann’sstuffbob’sstuffcat’sstuffatproto host­ing #1atproto host­ing #2atproto host­ing #3

There are no in­stances at all! There’s host­ing you can swap, and there are apps that ag­gre­gate from every­one’s host­ing. It’s very much like RSS and Google Reader.

The de­cen­tral­iza­tion of at­proto is richer in struc­ture than “many copies of one app”:

If you want to swap your host­ing, you can. I lit­er­ally did this to­day. Aside from three or four UX snags, it was all au­to­matic. My at­proto stuff is at Eurosky now. If I were more ad­ven­tur­ous, I could host all my data my­self too for free on Cloudflare.

If you want to swap your host­ing, you can. I lit­er­ally did this to­day. Aside from three or four UX snags, it was all au­to­matic. My at­proto stuff is at Eurosky now. If I were more ad­ven­tur­ous, I could host all my data my­self too for free on Cloudflare.

If you want to try new apps or make new apps, you can do that too! Check out Tangled and Semble, which have noth­ing to do with Bluesky. I’ve made my own app re­cently (and it’s open source). I rec­om­mend you to try your hand at it too.

If you want to try new apps or make new apps, you can do that too! Check out Tangled and Semble, which have noth­ing to do with Bluesky. I’ve made my own app re­cently (and it’s open source). I rec­om­mend you to try your hand at it too.

You care about de­cen­tral­iza­tion? You have full agency here. Decentralize away.

Free Yourself from the Instance Brain

Now you see why every de­cen­tral­ized so­cial me­dia dis­cus­sion is de­railed by this.

Mastodon users mea­sure de­cen­tral­iza­tion by the num­ber of in­stances be­cause that’s the only thing you can do in Mastodon. If there’s only one type of “box”, and each box is “an app cou­pled with host­ing”, the only thing you can do is to host more of these boxes and get them to talk to each other. They’re iso­lated by de­fault.

In at­proto, every app is a pro­jec­tion of the whole Atmosphere, just like Feedly and Google Reader are pro­jec­tions of the en­tire Blogosphere. You mostly “decentralize” by swap­ping your host­ing, and/​or by mak­ing and try­ing new apps. Running many full copies of the Bluesky data­base server is pos­si­ble, but it’s not any more use­ful than run­ning many copies of Google Reader. People do set them up (cue Blacksky), but they arise to meet some­one’s spe­cific needs (like a dif­fer­ent mod­er­a­tion phi­los­o­phy). There are other ap­proaches too: this Bluesky client has no ded­i­cated data­base at all, and it just hits a free com­mu­nity-run cache of every­one’s host­ing. Shared net­work in­fra­struc­ture like Relays has been cheap to run for a year now.

This is why “counting Bluesky in­stances” is so mis­lead­ing. What mat­ters is:

Are peo­ple mi­grat­ing to al­ter­na­tive host­ing?

Are peo­ple try­ing and mak­ing new apps?

Separating host­ing and apps fixes bro­ken in­cen­tives in closed and in fed­er­ated so­cial. Coupling host­ing and apps was the orig­i­nal sin, and the fix is sim­ple.

Keep our stuff out­side the apps; let the apps ag­gre­gate over it.

al­ice’sstuff­cat’sstuff­bob’sstuffapp #1app #2

Like RSS and Google Reader.

Tom Di Mino, a self-taught AI en­gi­neer and an am­a­teur lin­guist, claims to have ac­com­plished a feat that has eluded lin­guis­tics ex­perts for over a cen­tury: de­ci­pher­ing a Bronze-age Minoan writ­ing sys­tem known as Linear A.

His claims are cur­rently be­ing re­viewed by lin­guis­tics ex­perts at Rutgers and Cambridge. While I’m caveat­ing, I will also men­tion that I know Tom so­cially.

Di Mino, who is based in the Hudson Valley, has stud­ied clas­si­cal his­tory, lin­guis­tics, and lan­guages since he was 18. He has been read­ing up on Linear A for 7 years, and has vis­ited Crete twice. He be­gan to work on de­ci­pher­ing Linear A in January this year, and says the ma­jor in­sight came to him on May 22.

If Tom Di Mino has de­ci­phered Linear A, it would be an earth­quake in the field of lin­guis­tics. When a re­lated Minoan script, Linear B, was de­ci­phered in 1952, it made the front page of the New York Times.

Linear A maps to an ex­tinct Semitic lan­guage

Di Mino be­lieves that Linear A be­longs to an ex­tinct Semitic lan­guage that was a pre­cur­sor to bib­li­cal Hebrew, the way that Latin is a pre­cur­sor to Italian.

Di Mino is not the first to ar­gue that Linear A was Semitic. Prior at­tempts to prove it, how­ever, in­clud­ing a 1957 ar­ti­cle pub­lished by Cyrus Gordon in the jour­nal Antiquity, did not un­lock trans­la­tions the way that Di Mino’s so­lu­tion ap­pears to, and Gordon’s work did not gain wide­spread ac­cep­tance in the field.

Some back­ground on Linear A and Linear B

Linear A is a Minoan script that ap­peared some­time around 1800 BC and was used un­til 1450 BC, when Crete was con­quered by Mycenaean Greeks. The Mycenaeans adopted the Minoan sym­bols as their own, with some mi­nor re­vi­sions. The Mycenaean-Greek ver­sion of the sym­bols are known as Linear B. Both scripts were found on var­i­ous tablets, vases, and other ar­ti­facts from the era.

Both scripts use syl­la­bles, not let­ters, as their core el­e­ments. The syl­la­bles are gen­er­ally con­so­nant-vowel pairs.

The two sys­tems have 60 core syl­la­bles in com­mon, and they both also use lo­gograms — sym­bols that rep­re­sent a whole word (“cow”), not just a syl­la­ble.

Linear B was de­ci­phered and iden­ti­fied as Greek in 1952 by Michael Ventris, a British ar­chi­tect, cryp­tog­ra­pher, and am­a­teur lin­guist, like Di Mino. Ventris’s break­through may not have hap­pened with­out prior work on Linear B by Alice Kober, a pro­fes­sor at Brooklyn College.

Kober and Ventris used gram­mat­i­cal and sta­tis­ti­cal analy­ses to look for pat­terns in the lo­ca­tion of the sym­bols (e.g. the first syl­la­ble was more likely to be a vowel) and how the sym­bols shifted.

There are many more in­scrip­tions as­so­ci­ated with Linear B than Linear A, how­ever, which made it eas­ier to de­ci­pher. Also, many Linear A in­scrip­tions are in­ven­to­ries cat­a­loging the trade of dif­fer­ent com­modi­ties, so they don’t tell us much about the lan­guage.

Because Linear A and Linear B have 60 sym­bols in com­mon, and be­cause Linear B has been de­ci­phered, ex­perts could guess what the over­lap­ping Linear A sym­bols sounded like but did­n’t know what the sounds meant. And there were 13 ad­di­tional sym­bols in Linear A that did not ap­pear in Linear B. For those, no sound val­ues have been ac­cepted.

The key that un­locked Linear A

On May 22, Di Mino was an­a­lyz­ing a se­ries of Linear A prayer in­scrip­tions that ad­hered to a for­mula. (Don’t worry, you don’t have to un­der­stand the for­mula, but I’m in­clud­ing it for the nerds.) IOZa2 (Iouktas): A-TA-I-*301-WA-JA · JA-DI-KI-TU · JA-SA-SA-RA-ME · U-NA-KA-NA-SI · I-PI-NA-MA · SI-RU-TE · TA-NA-RA-TE-U-TI-NU · I (Also see Figure 1 be­low.)

On May 22, Di Mino was an­a­lyz­ing a se­ries of Linear A prayer in­scrip­tions that ad­hered to a for­mula. (Don’t worry, you don’t have to un­der­stand the for­mula, but I’m in­clud­ing it for the nerds.)

IOZa2 (Iouktas): A-TA-I-*301-WA-JA · JA-DI-KI-TU · JA-SA-SA-RA-ME · U-NA-KA-NA-SI · I-PI-NA-MA · SI-RU-TE · TA-NA-RA-TE-U-TI-NU · I

(Also see Figure 1 be­low.)

In the for­mula all of the words in each line of the in­scrip­tion were known (based on their over­lap with Linear B syl­la­bles) ex­cept for the first word.

In the for­mula all of the words in each line of the in­scrip­tion were known (based on their over­lap with Linear B syl­la­bles) ex­cept for the first word.

The first word was the same verb root, ap­pear­ing in dif­fer­ent re­gional forms across five sanc­tu­ary sites on the is­land.

The first word was the same verb root, ap­pear­ing in dif­fer­ent re­gional forms across five sanc­tu­ary sites on the is­land.

The verb con­tained 5 known Linear B signs and “*301”, which ap­peared to be a Linear A-only sign, “na,” which Di Mino used to un­lock the root “nawaya,” which means “to dwell.” In Hebrew, Akkadian and other Semitic lan­guages there is a 3 syl­la­ble con­so­nant sys­tem. N-W-Y is used for verbs and nouns mean­ing “to dwell or in­habit”.

The verb con­tained 5 known Linear B signs and “*301”, which ap­peared to be a Linear A-only sign, “na,” which Di Mino used to un­lock the root “nawaya,” which means “to dwell.” In Hebrew, Akkadian and other Semitic lan­guages there is a 3 syl­la­ble con­so­nant sys­tem. N-W-Y is used for verbs and nouns mean­ing “to dwell or in­habit”.

Once de­ci­phered, Di Mino saw that the prayer was sim­i­lar to sub­se­quent Hebrew prayers but was ad­dressed to a Goddess.

Once de­ci­phered, Di Mino saw that the prayer was sim­i­lar to sub­se­quent Hebrew prayers but was ad­dressed to a Goddess.

While Cyrus Gordon had pre­vi­ously pro­posed links be­tween ded­i­ca­tion tablets in Linear A and sim­i­lar tablets in Akkadian and Phoenician that he had trans­lated, Di Mino claims to be the first per­son to iden­tify the links be­tween the Linear A in­scrip­tions and Hebrew prayers.

While Cyrus Gordon had pre­vi­ously pro­posed links be­tween ded­i­ca­tion tablets in Linear A and sim­i­lar tablets in Akkadian and Phoenician that he had trans­lated, Di Mino claims to be the first per­son to iden­tify the links be­tween the Linear A in­scrip­tions and Hebrew prayers.

This in­sight not only un­locked the verb in the prayer in­scrip­tions, but it may also shed a broader light on the use of lo­gograms in Linear A.

This in­sight not only un­locked the verb in the prayer in­scrip­tions, but it may also shed a broader light on the use of lo­gograms in Linear A.

Di Mino claims that his in­sights into lo­gograms in Linear A ad­di­tion­ally help to re­solve prob­lems with some trans­la­tions of Linear B, which val­i­dates his find­ings.

Di Mino claims that his in­sights into lo­gograms in Linear A ad­di­tion­ally help to re­solve prob­lems with some trans­la­tions of Linear B, which val­i­dates his find­ings.

Di Mino used Claude Code to build a suite of Python scripts that query, cross-ref­er­ence, and or­ga­nize the dig­i­tized Linear A cor­pus (drawn from the GORILA and SigLA data­bases), en­abling sys­tem­atic hy­poth­e­sis test­ing at a scale that would have been im­prac­ti­cal to do man­u­ally.

Di Mino used Claude Code to build a suite of Python scripts that query, cross-ref­er­ence, and or­ga­nize the dig­i­tized Linear A cor­pus (drawn from the GORILA and SigLA data­bases), en­abling sys­tem­atic hy­poth­e­sis test­ing at a scale that would have been im­prac­ti­cal to do man­u­ally.

Artifacts

Di Mino’s re­search has led to:

Proposed read­ings for 40 of the scrip­t’s signs, in­clud­ing 13 signs whose pho­netic val­ues were pre­vi­ously un­known. He also re­solved the sound val­ues for 5 Linear B signs which were un­known to this day.

Proposed read­ings for 40 of the scrip­t’s signs, in­clud­ing 13 signs whose pho­netic val­ues were pre­vi­ously un­known. He also re­solved the sound val­ues for 5 Linear B signs which were un­known to this day.

A lex­i­con of 408 Linear A terms trans­lated into English

A lex­i­con of 408 Linear A terms trans­lated into English

A 9-page draft of a man­u­script ti­tled Ya Diktu: Grammar of the Minoan Peak Sanctuary Libation Formula, which may form the foun­da­tion for a sub­mis­sion to a peer-re­viewed sci­en­tific jour­nal

A 9-page draft of a man­u­script ti­tled Ya Diktu: Grammar of the Minoan Peak Sanctuary Libation Formula, which may form the foun­da­tion for a sub­mis­sion to a peer-re­viewed sci­en­tific jour­nal

Figure 1. A sum­mary of the sym­bols in line 1 of the Minoan prayer in­scrip­tion. Credit: Tom Di Mino, Ya Diktu: Grammar of the Minoan Peak Sanctuary, June 2026.

Robert Caskin “Bobby” Prince III, beloved hus­band, fa­ther, grand­fa­ther, brother, un­cle, vet­eran, at­tor­ney, mu­si­cian, com­poser, and friend, passed peace­fully into Heaven’s Musical Gates on June 16, 2026. Born March 12, 1945, in Madison, Indiana, Bobby was the el­dest son of the late LTC Robert C. Prince, Jr. and Dorothy Humber Prince. As the son of an Army of­fi­cer, his child­hood in­cluded fam­ily moves to Birmingham, Alabama, be­fore set­tling in Athens, Georgia, where he was raised and where the seeds of a re­mark­able life in mu­sic were first planted. Bobby grad­u­ated from Athens High School and at­tended the University of Georgia. During his youth and early adult­hood, he per­formed with many tal­ented mu­si­cians and bands through­out the Athens mu­sic com­mu­nity, in­clud­ing the area’s orig­i­nal “Jesters,” along with his gifted beloved brother, David Prince. Music re­mained a con­stant thread through­out his life and was shared with fam­ily, life­long friends, and fel­low mu­si­cians. Bobby served in the United States Army dur­ing the Vietnam War as a pla­toon leader. Following his mil­i­tary ser­vice, he pur­sued ca­reers in coun­sel­ing and law be­fore ul­ti­mately be­com­ing one of the pi­o­neer­ing com­posers and sound de­sign­ers in the video game in­dus­try.

His in­no­v­a­tive work helped de­fine an era of gam­ing and in­flu­enced gen­er­a­tions of play­ers around the world. Through his com­po­si­tions and sound de­sign for land­mark ti­tles in­clud­ing Doom, Doom II, Wolfenstein 3D, Rise of the Triad, and Duke Nukem 3D, Bobby helped es­tab­lish video game mu­sic as a re­spected art form. In 2006, the Video Game Industry hon­ored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2026, the sound­track to the orig­i­nal Doom was se­lected for preser­va­tion in the Library of Congress, en­sur­ing that his ground­break­ing work would re­main part of America’s cul­tural her­itage for gen­er­a­tions to come.

In 2005, Bobby be­gan a won­der­ful new chap­ter when he met and mar­ried his soul­mate, Connie Freeman Prince. Together they made their home in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, where they shared twenty-one years filled with en­dur­ing love, mu­sic, cre­ativ­ity, faith, laugh­ter, and de­vo­tion. One of their most trea­sured mem­o­ries be­gan with Bobby’s un­for­get­table mar­riage pro­posal at Dollywood. After ar­rang­ing for a gi­ant mes­sage to be dis­played on the pass­ing Dollywood Express Train, he sur­prised Connie by ap­pear­ing with a song and a pro­posal on one knee—a mo­ment that per­fectly re­flected his cre­ativ­ity, ro­mance, and joy­ful spirit. As cre­ative part­ners, Bobby and Connie wrote songs and sto­ries, pro­duced mu­si­cal record­ings and videos, per­formed to­gether, and brought in­spi­ra­tion and joy to many through their shared gifts.

Those clos­est to Bobby knew him not only for his ex­tra­or­di­nary ac­com­plish­ments but for his kind­ness, hu­mor, hu­mil­ity, gen­eros­ity, cre­ativ­ity, and deep love of fam­ily. Whether com­pos­ing mu­sic, telling sto­ries, play­ing gui­tar, shar­ing laugh­ter, or of­fer­ing en­cour­age­ment, he ap­proached life with grat­i­tude and an open heart.

Bobby is sur­vived by his de­voted wife, Connie Freeman Prince; his sons, Robert Caskin Prince IV and Andrew (Cristy) Prince; his cher­ished grand­daugh­ter, Anabel Prince; his sis­ter, Patricia Clark; his sis­ter-in-law, Woodie Prince; nieces Ellen Moore, Lori (Kelvim) Escobar, Molly (John) Seawright, and Tiffany Thomas; nephews Mark (Christine) Moore, Neil Moore, David (Elizabeth) Prince II and Gabriel Prince; great-nieces Kaylin Prince, Caroline Prince, and Julia Moore; great nephews Trenton (Cassie) Epps, Frankie Moore, and Nathaniel Moore; Jackson and Davis Prince, and many more beloved great-nieces, great-nephews, ex­tended fam­ily mem­bers, and dear friends. He was pre­ceded in death by his par­ents, LTC Robert C. Prince, Jr. and Dorothy Humber Prince, and by his beloved brother, David Prince, and brother-in-law, Bob Clark. Bobby was also deeply loved and adored by Connie’s fam­ily, who em­braced him as their own, and by a large cir­cle of ex­tended fam­ily mem­bers and cher­ished friends whose lives were for­ever en­riched by his friend­ship, mu­sic, hu­mor, and love.

Connie and the fam­ily wish to ex­press their deep­est grat­i­tude to the count­less “Earth Angels” at Dollywood and Beyond, whose prayers, kind­ness, en­cour­age­ment, and lov­ing care sur­rounded Bobby through­out his ill­ness. Special thanks are ex­tended to the physi­cians, nurses, ther­a­pists, care­givers, and staff of the VA, UT Medical Center, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Covenant Health, Enhabit Home Health, and Amedisys Hospice, whose com­pas­sion, skill, and de­vo­tion brought com­fort, dig­nity, and sup­port through­out his fi­nal jour­ney.

While many through­out the world will re­mem­ber Bobby for the mu­sic and sound­scapes that helped de­fine a gen­er­a­tion of gam­ing, those who knew and loved him per­son­ally will re­mem­ber some­thing even greater: a man of tal­ent, in­tegrity, hu­mil­ity, faith, laugh­ter, and love whose great­est joy was shar­ing his wit and wis­dom with fam­ily and friends.

Bobby Prince’s Legacy lives on through his Music…His Love lives on through our Hearts.❣️

Stay Tuned for Future Announcements of Bobby’s ‘Celebrations of Life.’

To send flow­ers or plant a memo­r­ial tree in mem­ory, please visit our flower store.

Court records be­long to the pub­lic. Yet any­one seek­ing ac­cess to fed­eral court fil­ings through PACER, a gov­ern­ment soft­ware sys­tem that stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, is usu­ally re­quired to pay hefty fees to search for and view doc­u­ments. PACER’s fees have long acted as a bar­rier that makes it hard, es­pe­cially for low in­come peo­ple, to see and un­der­stand the work pro­duced by our own pub­lic ser­vants.

That’s why EFF joined a broad group of or­ga­ni­za­tions sup­port­ing the Open Courts Act of 2026, leg­is­la­tion that would mod­ern­ize the fed­eral courts’ elec­tronic fil­ing sys­tems and elim­i­nate PACER fees.

The bill would re­place the ag­ing PACER and CM/ECF sys­tems with a mod­ern, uni­fied plat­form de­signed to im­prove pub­lic ac­cess, strengthen cy­ber­se­cu­rity, and re­duce long-term costs. Supporters note that PACER cur­rently col­lects more than $150 mil­lion an­nu­ally in fees from the pub­lic, de­spite court records be­ing pub­lic doc­u­ments.

The Open Courts Act would also make court records eas­ier to find, ac­cess, and un­der­stand. The leg­is­la­tion builds on a sim­i­lar pro­posal, also sup­ported by EFF, that pre­vi­ously won bi­par­ti­san sup­port in the Senate Judiciary Committee but did not be­come law be­fore the end of the con­gres­sional ses­sion.

This is not a new is­sue for EFF. More than a decade ago, we crit­i­cized PACER’s pay­walls and the re­moval of some court records from on­line ac­cess, ar­gu­ing that the pub­lic should not have to pay to read the law and the ju­di­cial de­ci­sions that shape it. The Open Courts Act would move U.S. courts a big step closer to that goal.

In ad­di­tion to EFF, the bill is sup­ported by Fix the Court, the group push­ing this bill for­ward; the Free Law Project, which main­tains RECAP, soft­ware that has cre­ated a large archive of le­gal opin­ions and other court records; as well as civil so­ci­ety groups, open gov­ern­ment watch­dogs, and me­dia groups.

Public ac­cess to the courts is a cor­ner­stone of de­mo­c­ra­tic ac­count­abil­ity. Let’s elim­i­nate un­nec­es­sary bar­ri­ers to court records, and bring the fed­eral ju­di­cia­ry’s tech into the mod­ern era.

Read the full let­ter sup­port­ing the Open Courts Act of 2026

Last week, Senators Ted Cruz and Ron Wyden in­tro­duced the Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression, or JAWBONE Act. The bi­par­ti­san leg­is­la­tion cre­ates a fed­eral cause of ac­tion against gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials who co­erce or at­tempt to co­erce broad­cast­ers, in­ter­ac­tive com­puter ser­vices, or AI providers into tak­ing ac­tions against law­ful, First-Amendment-protected speech, and es­tab­lishes a trans­parency sys­tem for gov­ern­ment com­mu­ni­ca­tions with those in­ter­me­di­aries about user ex­pres­sion.

We thank the Senators for their lead­er­ship on this im­por­tant is­sue. Jawboning oc­curs when the gov­ern­ment pres­sures pri­vate com­pa­nies to cen­sor speech pro­tected by the First Amendment, and it’s not al­ways ob­vi­ous to the pub­lic or to the vic­tims what has ac­tu­ally hap­pened. Deleting posts or can­celling ac­counts be­cause a gov­ern­ment of­fi­cial or agency de­manded it or even made threats in mak­ing those de­mands—just like spy­ing on peo­ple’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions on be­half of the gov­ern­ment—raises se­ri­ous free speech con­cerns. Among other things, this bill would pro­vide a new le­gal right to bring claims against the gov­ern­ment in fed­eral court, in ad­di­tion to what the First Amendment pro­vides.

At EFF, we’re con­tin­u­ing to fight back on be­half of those cen­sored by gov­ern­ment co­er­cion. One re­cent ex­am­ple: we rep­re­sent the cre­ator of ICEBlock, an app that al­lows the pub­lic to re­port im­mi­gra­tion en­force­ment ac­tiv­ity in their com­mu­ni­ties. In June 2025, high-rank­ing fed­eral of­fi­cials be­gan threat­en­ing to in­ves­ti­gate and pros­e­cute the cre­ator of ICEBlock, Joshua Aaron. In October 2025, the U.S. Attorney General de­manded Apple re­move ICEBlock from the App Store, and the com­pany com­plied. The gov­ern­men­t’s co­er­cion vi­o­lated Aaron’s First Amendment rights.

We’ve also filed a Freedom of Information Act law­suit against the same gov­ern­ment agen­cies that threat­ened Aaron and other ser­vices that pro­vided fo­rums to re­port ICE ac­tiv­ity. The law­suit seeks the dis­clo­sure of the gov­ern­men­t’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions with Apple, Google, and Meta that forced the ser­vices to re­move law­ful speech.

When fed­eral of­fi­cials pres­sure pri­vate com­pa­nies into cen­sor­ing pro­tected speech, it can vi­o­late the First Amendment. But, not every com­mu­ni­ca­tion from a gov­ern­ment agency to a plat­form is un­con­sti­tu­tion­ally co­er­cive. Treating le­git­i­mate com­mu­ni­ca­tion and in­for­ma­tion-shar­ing be­tween the gov­ern­ment and pri­vate ac­tors as though it were al­ways un­con­sti­tu­tional would chill the valu­able, good-faith en­gage­ment that sup­ports a health­ier and safer in­ter­net and na­tion for all Americans. This is a com­plex is­sue, and one that is im­por­tant for Congress and the courts to get right.

Finally, con­trary to what many in Congress have been say­ing, so­cial me­dia plat­forms and other in­ter­net in­ter­me­di­aries have their own First Amendment rights to de­cide how they mod­er­ate users’ speech. They are not “state ac­tors” and do not have an oblig­a­tion un­der the First Amendment to al­low all user speech on their plat­forms. EFF filed an am­i­cus brief set­ting out our po­si­tion in 2018, and we’ve said it in many cases since. The Supreme Court rec­og­nized again in the Netchoice cases that these ser­vices have a right to cu­rate and edit their users’ speech, whether or not it aligns with the gov­ern­men­t’s po­si­tion. And, it’s im­por­tant to de­fend that First Amendment right so that gov­ern­ments can­not dic­tate how to edit a com­pa­ny’s site ac­cord­ing to the gov­ern­men­t’s wishes and de­sires. To pre­vent jaw­bon­ing by de­fault, com­pa­nies must be free to cu­rate their plat­forms as they wish.

EFF ap­plauds Senators Cruz and Wyden for tak­ing this crit­i­cal is­sue se­ri­ously, and we look for­ward to work­ing with Congress on this bi­par­ti­san bill as it moves through the process. We hope it lands on the right bal­ance to pro­vide ad­di­tional pro­tec­tions for every­day users around free­dom of ex­pres­sion.

(this is part of a se­ries of posts, the link to the next one is at the bot­tom of the page)

There is a room in Stockholm where a bunch of kids I know hang out. It is a Sverok lokal, which is to say a lit­tle club­house for a gam­ing as­so­ci­a­tion, and it is ex­actly the unglam­orous kind of good you would hope it is. Kids who do not have any­where else to be go there. They play games, they ar­gue about games, they sit around be­ing teenagers to­gether in a warm room that is not their bed­room and is not a shop that ex­pects them to keep buy­ing things. Some of them would be pretty lonely with­out it. It is, by any rea­son­able mea­sure, a small and real so­cial good.

I want to start with the fact that it works, be­cause the rest of this post is about a prob­lem, and I do not want you to come away think­ing the sit­u­a­tion is hope­less. It is not. We know how to make rooms like this. We have made one. The kids are ok, at least those that find this kind of re­source.

Why does it ex­ist?

It ex­ists be­cause it gets a grant. Public money for as­so­ci­a­tions, what in Sweden we call fören­ings­bidrag, in this case handed out by MUCF, the agency for youth and civil-so­ci­ety af­fairs, through a sys­tem that was set up to fund youth or­gan­i­sa­tions. Someone, at some point, de­cided that gam­ing clubs count, so a trickle of money flows to a fed­er­a­tion, and some of that be­comes rent on a room. That is the whole rea­son. Take the grant away and, al­most cer­tainly, no room.

And here is the bit that bugs me. The mar­ket was never go­ing to build that room. Not be­cause the mar­ket is evil, but be­cause there is gen­uinely no money in it. You can­not sell “a place for lonely teenagers to feel less lonely.” The value is real, but it spills out side­ways, onto the kids and their par­ents and the neigh­bour­hood, and no­body can put it on an in­voice. Economists call this a pos­i­tive ex­ter­nal­ity, which is a fancy way of say­ing a good thing that hap­pens as a side ef­fect, that the per­son do­ing it can­not charge any­one for. The dumb ver­sion is: the room makes the world a lit­tle bet­ter and makes pre­cisely zero kro­nor, so left to its own de­vices, the econ­omy does not build it.

So the room only ex­ists be­cause some­one reached in by hand and paid for it di­rectly. Can we teach the econ­omy to see the value there nat­u­rally, with­out need­ing a plan­ning com­mit­tee? Hold that thought. I think it is most of the an­swer, but I want to show you the size of the prob­lem first.

The rooms are dis­ap­pear­ing, and so is a lot more

That Sverok lokal is an in­creas­ingly rare kind of thing. The gen­eral ver­sion has a name, the third place1, the spot that is nei­ther home (the first place) nor work (the sec­ond place). The café, the pub, the li­brary, the club, the church hall, the union that was also just some­where to be. We have fewer of them than we used to2, and the ones that are left ei­ther don’t have many vis­i­tors or want you spend­ing money the en­tire time you are in them.

But it is not only rooms. Look around and you no­tice a whole cat­e­gory of things qui­etly go­ing miss­ing, and they have a sus­pi­cious amount in com­mon.

Nobody vis­its grandma. Partly be­cause grandma is three hun­dred kilo­me­tres away, since every­one moved for work, or partly be­cause grandma her­self maybe is still work­ing. Kids end up in front of a screen in the af­ter­noon, be­cause both par­ents have to be at a job and a tablet is a cheap stand-in for a pre­sent adult. The neigh­bour you used to know. The club some­one used to run. The friend you used to see every week. People re­port fewer close friends than they used to, to the point that ac­tual pub­lic health of­fi­cials now say “loneliness epi­demic” with a straight face3.

Now, I want to be care­ful here, be­cause this is the part where it would be very easy to start wav­ing my arms around. Every sin­gle one of these has many causes. Suburbs and cars. Television, and then phones. A long list of things that have noth­ing to do with me at all. I am not go­ing to claim I have found the one se­cret root of lone­li­ness, and you should be sus­pi­cious of any­one who does. We can­not cleanly un­tan­gle these. That is just hon­estly true.

What I will say is nar­rower, and I think it holds up: these all rhyme. And the thing they rhyme on is that they are all un­paid. Visiting grandma, rais­ing your own kid, run­ning the club, be­ing a de­cent neigh­bour, keep­ing a friend­ship alive. None of it pays. All of it takes time. And I think one of the rea­sons we have less of it is the same bor­ing rea­son I keep bang­ing on about on this blog, which is la­bor pres­sure.

The thing the econ­omy keeps do­ing

For al­most all of us, a wage is the only way we get a claim on the things the world pro­duces. That is what a salary re­ally is. Not a re­ward for ef­fort, but the one so­cially ac­cepted ticket to food and shel­ter. Economists call this the dis­tri­b­u­tion func­tion of the wage. I just think of it as the only pipe through which stuff reaches you. And be­cause it is the only pipe, you have to feed it. You sell your hours to a job, be­cause the job pays, even in the cases where the gen­uinely bet­ter use of your time is some­thing that does not pay. The af­ter­noon with your kid. The Tuesday run­ning the club. The trip to see grandma.

So you take the shift. And the econ­omy looks at you tak­ing the shift and con­cludes, smugly, that the shift must have been the most valu­able thing you could pos­si­bly have been do­ing, be­cause look, you chose it. Except you did not re­ally choose it. You chose be­tween the shift and not mak­ing rent. The room full of kids, the pre­sent par­ent, the vis­ited grand­par­ent, all of it lost a con­test it was never ac­tu­ally al­lowed to en­ter.

The econ­omy never sits up and goes “hang on, who is go­ing to run the room?” It has no way to say that. It just qui­etly fails to fund the room, fills your af­ter­noon with a job of mar­ginal value, and moves on. If it could talk, the most it would ever man­age, years later when maybe you’ve got­ten away from a sub­sis­tence wage, is a sheep­ish “oh, yeah, that prob­a­bly was not worth it.” And by then the af­ter­noon is gone. You do not get the af­ter­noon back.

This is the same idea as what I have called make-work, just pointed at your liv­ing room in­stead of at the of­fice. It is the econ­omy spend­ing a gen­uinely scarce thing, hu­man time, on out­put worth less than the time, and not even notic­ing, be­cause all the price sig­nals look fine.

This is the same idea as what I have called make-work, just pointed at your liv­ing room in­stead of at the of­fice. It is the econ­omy spend­ing a gen­uinely scarce thing, hu­man time, on out­put worth less than the time, and not even notic­ing, be­cause all the price sig­nals look fine.

Before any­one gets the wrong idea

I need to put a fence here, be­cause “people have less time for fam­ily and com­mu­nity” is a sen­tence that some peo­ple love to fin­ish in an ugly way.

This is not me say­ing the past was lovely and we should go back. It is not a call for mum to quit her job, or for grandma to be con­scripted into un­paid child­care, or for any par­tic­u­lar per­son to go back to any par­tic­u­lar kitchen. That is the op­po­site of the point. The point is that peo­ple have qui­etly been stripped of the op­tion to do the un­paid thing, be­cause the un­paid thing does not pay rent and rent is not op­tional. The prob­lem is not that some­one is shirk­ing their duty. The prob­lem is that we built an econ­omy where the lov­ing, use­ful, un­paid choice is a lux­ury most peo­ple sim­ply can­not af­ford.

So the fix is not to push any­one any­where. The fix is to make the un­paid choice af­ford­able, for who­ever wants it, who­ever they hap­pen to be. Give peo­ple enough room to choose grandma, or the club, or the kid, with­out the al­ter­na­tive be­ing “or starve.”

Three ways to pay for a room

So how do you ac­tu­ally get rooms full of kids? There are ba­si­cally three set­tings.

One: leave it to the mar­ket. As es­tab­lished, you get no room. The mar­ket can­not see things it can­not sell, and a room full of happy teenagers is in­vis­i­ble to it. This is the de­fault, and the de­fault is bad.

Two: pay for it by hand. This is what Sweden does, and it is gen­uinely much bet­ter than noth­ing. The state no­tices a gap and plugs it di­rectly with a grant. It is the im­pro­vised sec­ond pipe, the patch­work of grants and trans­fers we have bolted on, one pro­gramme at a time, to do the dis­trib­ut­ing that wages no longer man­age on their own. It works. Our lokal is proof it works. But it is a patch. Someone on a com­mit­tee has to keep choos­ing to fund it, every sin­gle year. And it only ever reaches the goods that some­body specif­i­cally thought to pay for. Nobody ever wrote a grant for “being a good neigh­bour,” so that one just stays bro­ken.

Three: teach the econ­omy to do it on its own. This is the one I ac­tu­ally want. Instead of the state hand-pick­ing which good rooms de­serve a cheque, you change the rule un­der­neath, so that the peo­ple who would run the rooms can sim­ply af­ford to. You do that by fix­ing the pipe. A ba­sic floor of in­come that every­one gets, funded in a care­ful way I am not go­ing to re­lit­i­gate here (see the next post in this se­ries for that), means the per­son who wants to spend their Tuesdays run­ning the club is not forced to spend them on a mar­ginal shift in­stead. The whole point is to stop the price sys­tem be­ing blind to value that does not hap­pen to ar­rive in the shape of a wage.

Does this re­place the grants?

I am not go­ing to pre­tend a ba­sic in­come mag­i­cally con­jures gam­ing clubs out of thin air. It does not. Somebody still has to start the club, find the room, do all the bor­ing or­gan­is­ing. A floor does not do any of that for you. Targeting and uni­ver­sal­ity each do some­thing the other can­not. A grant can de­lib­er­ately build one spe­cific thing. A floor can qui­etly make a thou­sand un­spec­i­fied things pos­si­ble, with­out any­one hav­ing to choose them in ad­vance.

So I am not even say­ing we should scrap the grants. The floor goes on top of what we al­ready have (again, it is not dif­fi­cult to fund, you just have to do it care­fully! Check out the next post). Keep fören­ings­bidrag. Keep fund­ing the lokal. All I am say­ing is that right now, a room full of kids gets to ex­ist only be­cause a com­mit­tee re­mem­bered to fund it (sounds like a planned econ­omy eh?), and that is a silly and frag­ile way to run a civil­i­sa­tion. We man­aged to build one room al­most by ac­ci­dent. The goal is an econ­omy where rooms like it are the nor­mal out­come.

We have a room in Stockholm be­cause, more or less by hap­pen­stance, some­one funded a so­cial good al­most di­rectly. That is gen­uinely won­der­ful, and it is not enough.

We need to teach the econ­omy how to do that on pur­pose.

The next part of this se­ries looks at Sub-subsistence work as well, and in­tro­duces the so­lu­tion. The post is here.

Footnotes:

The term comes from Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place (1989). Home is the first place, work is the sec­ond, and every­thing good and in­for­mal hap­pens in the third. ↩︎

Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000) is the clas­sic on the long de­cline of this sort of as­so­ci­a­tional life, “social cap­i­tal” in the jar­gon. He blames a whole pile of things, time pres­sure among them. ↩︎

U.S. Surgeon General, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation (2023). It is an American doc­u­ment, but the pat­tern is not unique to America. ↩︎