Why JansBrief exists
Jan Stenbeck was the smartest person I ever met. Not smart in the way academics are smart. Smart in the way that changes the world. He saw what nobody else saw. He understood that mobile telephony would revolutionise countries that hadn't even laid copper wire yet. He broke state socialist monopolies when everyone said it was impossible. He built empires out of ideas.
Every day Jan received a binder. Two people read all the world's important newspapers and magazines for him and pulled out what mattered. The things others missed. The faint signals that foreshadow great change.
I worked with Jan. I learned from him. And I have never forgotten that binder. JansBrief is my tribute to him, a modern version: global, AI-driven, available to everyone with ambition.
In memory of Jan Stenbeck
1942 — 2002
Jan Stenbeck
Tele2, Millicom, MTG, Metro
In today's edition · 25 May 2026
On Sunday, Pope Leo XIV will present his first encyclical — and its subject is not poverty, migration, or war. It is artificial intelligence. The document, prepared over months with input from Silicon Valley executives, Western diplomats, and Vatican theologians, represents the first time a sitting pope has devoted an entire encyclical to a single technology. It arrives at a moment when no government, no legislature, and no multilateral body has produced anything resembling a coherent ethical framework for AI. The Vatican is stepping into that void.
The backstory matters. According to Politico Europe and the Straits Times, technology firms and Western diplomatic missions have been actively lobbying inside the Vatican as the encyclical took shape. This is not a pastoral letter written in monastic isolation. It is the product of a deliberate collision between the world's oldest moral institution and its newest industrial force. The firms want the papal seal of reasonableness — a signal to regulators worldwide that AI development can be trusted. The Vatican wants relevance in a century that has largely stopped listening to it.
What makes this significant is the asymmetry. The EU's AI Act is procedural, a compliance checklist. The US has swung between executive orders and their cancellation. China regulates AI as a matter of state control, not ethics. The G7 Hiroshima process produced voluntary commitments that nobody tracks. Into this regulatory patchwork steps a 2,000-year-old institution with 1.4 billion nominal followers, no enforcement mechanism, and an enormous soft-power footprint in the Global South — precisely the regions where AI is being deployed fastest and governed least.
Encyclicals carry a specific weight in Catholic tradition. They are not infallible pronouncements, but they shape policy in countries where the Church retains influence: the Philippines, Brazil, much of sub-Saharan Africa, Poland, Mexico. If Leo XIV frames AI labour displacement as a justice issue, or data extraction as a dignity issue, the ripple effects will reach regulatory debates in Manila, Brasília, and Nairobi long before they reach Brussels.
The timing also reflects something subtler. The new pope — the first from the Americas — is testing whether moral authority can substitute for technical authority. He doesn't need to understand transformer architectures. He needs to articulate what a just society looks like when machines make decisions about credit, health, policing, and employment. That is a question the engineers have shown no interest in answering, and the politicians have shown no ability to frame.
The risk is sanctimony without specificity — another "AI must serve humanity" platitude. The opportunity is that a single document, read by parish priests in Lagos and São Paulo and Cebu City, could shape public expectations in ways that no white paper from a Beltway think tank ever could.
Source: Politico Europe · 24 May 2026 / Straits Times · 25 May 2026
Now — Catholic development networks gain a policy tool they never had: The encyclical gives every Catholic-majority country a ready-made vocabulary for discussing AI harms. Legislators in the Philippines, Colombia, and the DRC who have lacked the technical staff to draft AI policy now have a document they can cite. Expect parliamentary motions referencing papal language within weeks, particularly on labour displacement and surveillance.
Soon — AI firms face a legitimacy front they didn't plan for: Tech companies have staffed up for battles with the EU and the US Congress. They have not prepared for a moral authority that speaks in terms of dignity rather than market competition. If Catholic development organisations — Caritas, Misereor, Catholic Relief Services — begin conditioning aid projects on AI ethics criteria derived from the encyclical, the operational impact on AI deployment in the Global South could be substantial and largely invisible to Silicon Valley.
Later — A Chinese mine disaster exposes the fragile geology beneath the AI supply chain: The encyclical warns about AI's human costs in the abstract. This week, a deadly coal-mine accident in China's Shanxi province made those costs grimly concrete. The disaster sent coking-coal futures to their daily limit and mining stocks surging, as Bloomberg reports — a reminder that the physical infrastructure powering AI's data centres still depends on extraction industries where safety is negotiable and workers are expendable. Coking coal feeds the steel that builds server farms; thermal coal generates the electricity that runs them. When a single mine collapse can jolt global commodity prices, the distance between a papal encyclical on human dignity and the pit face in Shanxi is shorter than it appears. The pope's moral framework and the miner's helmet lamp illuminate the same question: whose bodies absorb the cost of technological progress? Source: Politico Europe · 24 May 2026 / Straits Times · 25 May 2026 / Bloomberg · 25 May 2026 ---
Turkish riot police forced their way into the offices of the country's main opposition party days after party leaders vowed to defy a court ruling that removed them from their posts. The raid marks a sharp escalation in Ankara's campaign to neutralise political opposition through judicial mechanisms backed by force. The images — doors broken, lawmakers shoved aside — will resonate across a region where Turkey once positioned itself as a democratic model. Source: BBC World · 25 May 2026
Three main candidates closed their campaigns on Sunday ahead of next week's first round. Paloma Valencia of Centro Democrático, Abelardo de la Espriella of Defensores de la Patria, and Iván Cepeda of Pacto Histórico held massive rallies in different cities. The vote will determine the successor to Gustavo Petro, whose turbulent presidency reshaped but did not resolve Colombia's deep divisions over land, security, and the peace process with armed groups. Source: Mercopress · 25 May 2026
Peru dispatched four tonnes of food to Bolivia, joining an international effort to supply cities cut off by 19 days of road blockades maintained by highland peasant movements. Argentina had already sent planes. The blockades have exposed Bolivia's extreme vulnerability to internal supply disruption — a country with no seaport now effectively landlocked from itself. Source: Mercopress · 25 May 2026
Egypt sent fighter aircraft to the United Arab Emirates as the ongoing military confrontation with Iran tests the cohesion of Arab states. Abu Dhabi had publicly criticised regional neighbours for insufficient defence cooperation. The deployment signals a quiet but significant militarisation of Gulf alliances that goes well beyond the diplomatic frameworks of recent years. Source: Financial Times · 25 May 2026
Huawei announced that its latest Kirin processor for smartphones has been designed to circumvent US export controls on advanced chipmaking equipment. The claim, if validated, would represent a significant step in China's push for semiconductor self-sufficiency and would undermine the core logic of Washington's technology containment strategy. Details on fabrication node and performance remain scarce. Source: Nikkei Asia · 25 May 2026
After months of viral videos showing tourist misbehaviour — drunken fights, scams, public indecency — Thailand cancelled its generous visa-free entry programme. The move affects travellers from 93 countries and territories and represents a striking reversal for a country whose economy depends heavily on tourism revenue. The government framed it as a crime-reduction measure. Source: South China Morning Post · 25 May 2026
Syrians in Hasakah and Kobane voted in legislative elections — the first time these formerly Kurdish-administered areas have participated in the central government's electoral process. The vote is a marker of how dramatically Syria's internal map has shifted since the fall of the Assad regime, though questions about genuine political pluralism persist. Source: Al Jazeera · 25 May 2026
Nigeria's President Tinubu is lobbying for the creation of an African commodity exchange, a platform that would allow the continent to price and trade its own raw materials rather than ceding that function to London, Chicago, and Shanghai. The initiative is framed as a test case for the African Continental Free Trade Area. Sceptics note that previous exchange proposals have stalled on infrastructure, regulation, and political will — but the alignment with AfCFTA gives this attempt a different institutional anchor. Source: Business Day Nigeria · 25 May 2026 ---
On Paris's oldest bridge, the French artist JR has wrapped the Pont Neuf in an enormous trompe-l'oeil installation that transforms the structure into what appears to be a natural stone grotto — arches dripping with painted stalactites, the masonry seemingly dissolved into geological time. The work is an explicit echo of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's 1975 wrapping of the same bridge, but where Christo concealed the Pont Neuf in gold fabric, JR has revealed something that was never there: a cavern beneath the city, the river flowing through stone.
What makes this worth attention is not the spectacle — Paris has no shortage of spectacle — but the logic of the gesture. JR has spent two decades pasting giant photographs on surfaces that power ignores: favela walls, border fences, the hulls of container ships. The Pont Neuf is the opposite — a monument so celebrated it has been painted by every generation since the seventeenth century. By turning it into a cave, JR inverts the relationship between nature and civilisation that the bridge was built to assert. Bridges conquer rivers. Grottos surrender to them.
The installation is temporary. The adhesive prints will be removed, and the Pont Neuf will return to being the Pont Neuf. But for now, Parisians crossing from the Right Bank to the Left walk through what feels like the interior of the earth. It is public art that does what public art rarely manages: it makes a familiar place genuinely unfamiliar, not through addition but through transformation.
There is a deeper resonance. Paris is a city that has spent centuries armoring itself against nature — channelling the Seine, paving over marshes, burying its dead underground. JR's grotto suggests that the stone remembers what the city forgot. It is whimsical, yes. But it is also a quiet reminder that every bridge is a negotiation with a force that was there first.
Source: Artnet News · 25 May 2026
The Jia Art gallery in Shanghai, designed by Foster + Partners, opens with a stepped silhouette wrapped in tubular glass facades inspired by flower petals in the adjacent Changfeng Park. The building is intended as a social hub — part gallery, part public square — and represents Foster's bet that China's art infrastructure boom has survived the property downturn. The ribbed glass diffuses Shanghai's harsh summer light while maintaining transparency from inside. Source: Dezeen · 24 May 2026
German shipyard Lürssen has delivered Nausicaä, a superyacht designed entirely by Marc Newson — hull, interiors, every detail. It is rare for a single designer to shape a vessel this large from stem to stern. The result reportedly sets new standards for integrating technology and design at sea, though the aesthetic is Newson's trademark: organic forms, aerospace-grade materials, obsessive refinement. Whether you admire or despise superyacht culture, the craft is undeniable. Source: Wallpaper · 25 May 2026
Monocle's correspondent highlights a New York design week dominated not by furniture or architecture but by small objects — lamps, tools, tableware — where ideas and materials collide at intimate scale. The shift reflects both economic reality (smaller objects, smaller risk) and a philosophical turn: after years of "experience design" and immersive spectacles, designers are returning to things you can hold. Source: Monocle · 25 May 2026
Monocle maps six independent retailers across Thailand — from Bangkok to Chiang Mai — that combine local design, thoughtful curation, and architectural ambition. These are not luxury boutiques transplanted from Paris. They are Thai entrepreneurs building retail identities rooted in local materials and aesthetics, selling to both domestic and international audiences without surrendering to the global homogeneity of "curated lifestyle." Source: Monocle · 25 May 2026
Thousands marched in Madrid on Sunday demanding affordable housing, organised by the tenants' union Sindicato de Inquilinas. The protest called for civil disobedience against landlord exploitation and attacked what organisers called "rentismo" — the extraction economy of speculative property ownership. Spain's housing crisis has become the country's most potent political mobiliser, surpassing even unemployment. Source: El País · 25 May 2026
Vanity Fair's centennial essay on Miles Davis confronts the full paradox: the man who made *Kind of Blue* also abused the women in his life. The piece refuses both hagiography and cancellation, instead offering a musical roadmap through Davis's five-decade career while holding the violence in view. It is the kind of cultural criticism that respects the audience enough to let them hold two truths simultaneously. Source: Vanity Fair · 25 May 2026 ---
Chinese firm GigaAI announced the first commercial deployment of humanoid household robots — units capable of doing laundry, making beds, and assisting elderly residents. The initial 100 pilot units will go to employees' homes this month, with broader deployment planned for Wuhan. If the claim holds up, it represents a significant leap from the warehouse-and-factory robots that have dominated the sector. The implications for elder care in ageing societies — Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy — are enormous, though the gap between promotional video and reliable daily performance remains the industry's chronic credibility problem. Source: Fast Company · 24 May 2026
Amazon is pushing ahead with its Prime Air drone delivery programme, targeting the south suburbs of Chicago as its next expansion zone. CEO Andy Jassy has said the company intends to scale drone delivery to 500 million packages a year worldwide over the next decade. What makes the Chicago expansion worth watching is the context: these are not affluent test markets but working-class suburbs where delivery infrastructure is thin and last-mile costs are highest. If drones can cut delivery times and costs in areas that traditional logistics underserves, the model shifts from novelty to necessity. The questions — airspace regulation, noise, safety, community consent — remain largely unanswered. Amazon is building the network first and negotiating the social contract later. Source: Fast Company · 24 May 2026
Fast Company publishes an argument from a veteran engineering leader — with stints at Microsoft, Snap, and Google — that AI coding tools will expand the engineering profession rather than hollow it out. The logic: as AI handles routine code generation, the bottleneck shifts to system design, architecture, and the judgment calls that determine whether software actually solves the right problem. The parallel is the spreadsheet, which did not eliminate accountants but created millions of new analytical roles. The argument is plausible but conveniently self-serving for someone whose career depends on engineers remaining valuable. The truth likely lies in a messier middle: more engineers at the top, fewer at the bottom, and a painful transition in between. Source: Fast Company · 24 May 2026 ---
93
93
That is the number of countries and territories affected by Thailand's cancellation of its 60-day visa-free entry programme. The decision, triggered by a wave of tourist misbehaviour documented on social media, reverses one of Southeast Asia's most liberal entry policies.
The number reveals something larger than a visa rule change. Thailand welcomed nearly 35 million tourists in its peak years, and the 60-day visa-free regime was designed to make that number climb further after the pandemic. But the social contract underlying mass tourism — visitors spend money, hosts tolerate inconvenience — has broken down in ways that spreadsheets cannot capture. When the costs are measured in viral videos of drunken assaults rather than in GDP shortfalls, the political calculus shifts overnight.
Ninety-three countries is nearly half the world's sovereign states. Revoking their access in a single stroke suggests a government that has concluded the reputational damage of open doors exceeds the economic benefit. It is a template that Bali, Barcelona, and Amsterdam are watching closely.
Source: South China Morning Post · 25 May 2026
In perspective
That is the number of countries and territories affected by Thailand's cancellation of its 60-day visa-free entry programme. The decision, triggered by a wave of tourist misbehaviour documented on social media, reverses one of Southeast Asia's most liberal...
8 — Today's Wisdom
The Pope writes an encyclical on AI, and the interesting part isn't what he says but that no one else has said anything at all. Not the EU, whose AI Act is a bureaucratic form. Not the US, which oscillates between executive orders and their revocation. Not China, which regulates AI as an instrument of power. None of them have even attempted to articulate what a just society looks like when machines make decisions about credit, healthcare, and policing. So the Vatican does it instead.
I find this revealing. Not because a religious institution has the answers, but because the political class has abdicated so completely that a two-thousand-year-old church can step in and own the entire conversation. That says more about our politicians than it does about the Pope.
And this is where I get frustrated as an entrepreneur. Those of us who build companies know that whoever sets the framework owns the game. While tech companies lobbied the Vatican for a stamp of legitimacy, and while governments sat silent, an institution without a single chip or a single line of code seized the initiative. Priests in Lagos and São Paulo will read this document aloud to their congregations. It will shape the expectations of hundreds of millions of people in exactly the countries where AI is being rolled out the fastest.
Whoever articulates the principles doesn't need to build the technology. But whoever merely builds the technology without principles will sooner or later find themselves building for someone else's.
Johan Staël von Holstein
Serial entrepreneur · wakopa.ai