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 · 28 May 2026
Iran's citizens are reconnecting to the outside world, but the state is making sure it happens on its terms. After months of near-total internet shutdown — imposed during the wave of anti-regime protests that erupted in January — connectivity has been partially restored, with tracking firms reporting the country is now operating at roughly 86% of pre-blackout capacity. The remaining 14% is not accidental. It is the architecture of a filtered, surveilled, and throttled information space designed to let commerce resume while keeping dissent on a leash.
The shutdown was among the longest and most comprehensive in the history of authoritarian internet control. When protests swept across Iranian cities earlier this year, the regime's first instinct was the same as it had been in 2019 and 2022: kill the signal. But this time, the blackout lasted not days or weeks but months, inflicting extraordinary damage on Iran's already battered economy. Small businesses that had migrated to Instagram and Telegram for sales were wiped out overnight. University researchers lost access to journals. The medical system, which had come to depend on cloud-based records, reverted to paper.
The partial restoration is not a concession to freedom. Iranian authorities have rebuilt the country's internet backbone with deeper packet inspection, localised DNS routing, and mandatory use of domestic platforms that replicate — poorly — the functions of banned Western apps. VPN usage, once tolerated as a grey-market necessity, is now actively prosecuted in several provinces. The message is clear: you may have bandwidth, but you will not have privacy.
What makes this moment significant is the context. Iran is simultaneously fighting a war with the United States, negotiating under extreme duress over the Strait of Hormuz, and watching its ultra-hardliner faction publicly attack its own negotiators for insufficient maximalism. The internet restoration is partly an economic necessity — sanctions plus blackout equals social implosion — and partly a signal to the population that normalcy is being managed. The regime needs just enough connectivity to prevent total economic collapse, but not enough to permit coordinated opposition.
The pattern is instructive beyond Iran. Russia has been steadily building its "sovereign internet" since 2019. Myanmar's junta has used rolling shutdowns since the 2021 coup. China's Great Firewall remains the gold standard. But Iran's case is the first where a prolonged total shutdown has been followed by a deliberate partial reopening engineered for control. It is the beta test for what authoritarian internet governance looks like in wartime.
For the global technology industry, the implications are serious. Every new filtering capability Iran deploys becomes a product in the authoritarian export market. And every month a country of 88 million people operates at diminished connectivity, the domestic alternatives — clunky, surveilled, but functional — gain market share that will never return to Western platforms, even if the walls come down.
Source: Times of Israel · 28 May 2026
Now — The wartime internet becomes a governance template: Iran's hybrid model — partial restoration with deep surveillance — offers a blueprint other authoritarian regimes are watching closely. Unlike a full shutdown, which carries catastrophic economic costs, the filtered reopening lets commerce flow while choking political speech. Expect variations to appear in Central Asia and the Gulf within a year.
Soon — Domestic platforms entrench even after liberalisation: Every month that Iranians spend on state-approved local apps — for messaging, payments, ride-hailing — creates switching costs that outlast the crisis. If sanctions ease and the war ends, Western platforms will not simply reclaim the market. Iran's "digital sovereignty" push, born of desperation, may produce a durable parallel internet economy, much as Russia's isolation accelerated domestic tech adoption.
Later — Ethiopia's war may be over, but its violence is not: The Foreign Affairs analysis of Ethiopia's post-Pretoria trajectory carries a warning that extends far beyond the Horn of Africa: peace deals that freeze conflict lines without addressing the underlying grievances do not end wars — they transform them. Two and a half years after the agreement that halted the Tigray war, armed violence has metastasised across Amhara, Oromia, and the southern regions. Ethnic militias that were never party to the deal see no reason to disarm. Federal security forces, overstretched and underpaid, alternate between counterinsurgency and predation. The pattern is familiar from Colombia, Myanmar, and the DRC: a headline peace that satisfies international donors while ground-level killing continues, often at comparable or even higher rates. For any country — from Sudan to Ukraine — approaching a negotiated settlement, Ethiopia is the cautionary case: the hardest part of ending a war is not signing the document. It is building the political architecture that makes the document mean something to the people with guns. Source: Times of Israel · 28 May 2026; Foreign Affairs · 28 May 2026; Rest of World reporting ---
Brazil's lower house approved a constitutional amendment ending the notorious *escala 6x1* — six working days followed by one day off — and reducing the standard work week to 40 hours. The vote, passed in two rounds on Wednesday night, was raucous: lawmakers sang, traded provocations, and one pastor argued for more time for sex. President Lula is banking on the measure as a centrepiece of his re-election platform. The cost to government — compensating micro-entrepreneurs and Simples-regime firms — could reach R$50 billion annually. Brazil's labour market is about to discover whether European-style hours can coexist with an emerging-economy tax base. Source: Folha de São Paulo · 28 May 2026
Israel's military declared a new swathe of southern Lebanon — everything south of the Zahrani River — a "combat zone" and ordered residents to move north, warning it would act "with great force" against Hezbollah. The announcement followed more than 120 strikes on Lebanon the previous day. The move imperils an already fragile ceasefire and threatens to open a second active front alongside the Iran-US war, dragging Lebanon's battered civilian population deeper into a conflict most had hoped was winding down. Source: BBC World, South China Morning Post · 28 May 2026
In a significant escalation of the Iran-US conflict, Kuwait was targeted by what appeared to be Iranian missiles and drones, hours after fresh American strikes on military sites in southern Iran. Oil prices rebounded after a 5% drop the previous day. The Hormuz chokepoint remains effectively closed, and a draft peace framework reportedly proposes restoring commercial shipping and pulling back US forces — but Iran's ultra-hardliners are publicly demanding maximalist terms, making any deal fragile. The Gulf's smaller states are now on the front line. Source: Bloomberg, Times of Israel, Hindu BusinessLine · 28 May 2026
A deadly spike in malaria cases across rural Zimbabwe is exposing the collision between climate change and funding cuts. Warmer, wetter conditions have expanded mosquito breeding grounds, while international health funding — particularly from US sources — has been slashed. Rural clinics report treatment shortages. Zimbabwe's public health system, already fragile, is buckling under a disease that the world had been pushing toward elimination. Source: Al Jazeera · 28 May 2026
Two decades and more than $3.6 billion in World Bank funding have failed to fix Nigeria's electricity crisis. Business Day Nigeria reports that chronic underinvestment in transmission, endemic corruption, and policy incoherence have left Africa's largest economy with per-capita power consumption below that of a refrigerator. The analysis raises hard questions about whether multilateral development finance can work at all without functional governance beneath it. Source: Business Day Nigeria · 28 May 2026
The Jetour T2, made by Chery subsidiary Jetour, has been named South Africa's Car of the Year 2026 — the first Chinese vehicle ever to win the title. With over 3,200 units sold since its November launch, the SUV's victory signals how rapidly Chinese automakers are penetrating markets where legacy brands once dominated unchallenged. South Africa, a bellwether for pan-African consumer trends, may be the leading edge of a continental shift. Source: Mail and Guardian · 28 May 2026
Chief Megaron Txucarramae, 75, of the Kayapó people, has publicly vowed to carry forward the legacy of the legendary Chief Raoni in defending Amazon indigenous rights. Megaron's decades of activism — from land demarcation battles to opposing illegal mining — represent a generational transition in Brazilian indigenous politics at a moment when deforestation pressures and mineral extraction demands are intensifying under global energy disruption. Source: Straits Times · 28 May 2026
Illinois lawmakers passed a bill requiring companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to submit to third-party audits confirming they meet safety standards. Governor Pritzker has said he will sign it. The law goes further than any existing US state regulation, effectively creating a compliance benchmark that could shape federal debate. For AI companies, Illinois just became the jurisdiction that matters most after Washington. Source: Wired · 28 May 2026 ---
The most revealing technology story this week is not about a product launch or a policy shift. It is about a single Google engineer who allegedly made more than $1.2 million on the prediction market platform Polymarket by betting on outcomes he already knew — specifically, details of Google's 2025 Year in Search campaign. Federal prosecutors say Michele Spagnuolo risked over $2.7 million in wagers using confidential information from inside the company.
The case is a near-perfect parable for the collision between two forces that are reshaping markets simultaneously: the explosive growth of prediction markets and the porousness of information inside technology companies. Prediction markets are designed to aggregate dispersed knowledge into prices. They work best when participants know different things. They break when one participant knows everything — which is precisely what insider trading law exists to prevent in conventional securities markets.
But prediction markets occupy a regulatory grey zone. Polymarket, which operates offshore and has already tangled with US regulators, is not a stock exchange. Bets on Google's search trends are not, in any traditional sense, securities. Yet the information advantage Spagnuolo allegedly exploited is indistinguishable from the kind that would land a Wall Street trader in prison. The question now is whether prosecutors can make existing insider-trading frameworks stretch to cover prediction-market wagers — and if they can, what that means for the entire prediction-market industry, which depends on the legal fiction that its products are not securities.
The deeper issue is cultural. Google employs roughly 180,000 people, many of whom sit on commercially sensitive information every day. The company's internal security culture — despite enormous investment — clearly failed to prevent one engineer from monetising what he knew on an external platform. If prediction markets continue to grow, every large company with proprietary information becomes a potential leak source, not because employees are malicious, but because the incentive to trade on what you know is now frictionlessly accessible from a phone.
Jan would have appreciated the irony: the company that organises the world's information couldn't organise the confidentiality of its own.
Source: Wired, TechCrunch · 28 May 2026
The tenth edition of Gallery Weekend Beijing is showcasing a young generation of Chinese artists whose work has turned conspicuously introspective. Artnet reports that across the city's galleries, the dominant mood is personal, psychological, and deliberately small-scale — a marked departure from the monumental ambitions that defined Chinese contemporary art a decade ago. In a country where public expression carries increasing risk, the retreat to interior space is both aesthetic choice and survival strategy. Source: Artnet News · 28 May 2026
At Shanghai's Museum of Art Pudong, artist Sang Huoyao has unveiled a new series of abstract ink paintings — and arranged for one of the first viewers to be his own humanoid robot. The project blurs the line between creator and audience, asking whether a machine that can process visual data is also capable of something resembling aesthetic experience. It is conceptual art that takes its own question seriously enough to build the hardware. Source: Artnet News · 28 May 2026
A set of four bronze frog fountain sculptures by François-Xavier Lalanne — the very first he created in the series — will go under the hammer at Christie's. Lalanne's playful bestiary has long occupied the border between art, design, and garden ornament, which is precisely what makes it endure. The frogs, cast in an era before "collectible design" was a market category, now command prices that would have amused their maker. Source: Artnet News · 28 May 2026
The fashion world is watching a real-life thriller: the scion of Spanish fashion giant Mango was arrested last week as a suspect in the death of his father. He has since stepped down from the company. The case has gripped Spain, blending dynasty drama, corporate governance, and criminal investigation in a story that no screenwriter would dare pitch as fiction. Source: Vanity Fair · 28 May 2026
In a philanthropic initiative curated by Galerie Philia, designer Gisela Simas led workshops where Brazilian schoolchildren transformed fallen trees into functional furniture. The project introduced children to design thinking through hands-on making — a rare programme that treats craft as education, not decoration, and takes seriously the idea that design literacy should start before university. Source: Wallpaper · 28 May 2026
Dezeen's editors picked out the most striking pieces from New York's design week: from conceptual furniture to dozens of nightlights to innovative student work. The week's tenor was handmade, experimental, and deliberately anti-industrial — a counterpoint to the AI-everything mood of the broader tech world, and a reminder that the urge to shape physical material with human hands shows no sign of diminishing. Source: Dezeen · 28 May 2026 ---
In his first major policy intervention since taking office, Pope Leo XIV has called for the economic gains generated by artificial intelligence to be distributed universally rather than concentrated among technology companies and their shareholders. The statement, reported by Noema Magazine, goes further than his predecessor's cautious framings of AI as a moral concern: it explicitly links AI governance to distributive justice, arguing that systems trained on humanity's collective knowledge produce wealth that belongs, in some meaningful sense, to everyone. The declaration gives Catholic social teaching a concrete policy demand — and hands governments in the Global South, where the Vatican's influence remains substantial, a moral framework for taxing or regulating AI profits that flow overwhelmingly to Silicon Valley and Shenzhen. Whether or not secular policymakers listen, the Pope has inserted the Church into the AI governance debate as a player, not merely a commentator. Source: Noema Magazine · 28 May 2026
Nature reports on a new class of "interception" drug trials aiming to prevent lung cancer before it develops — a genuine paradigm shift from treatment to pre-emption. The approach uses targeted compounds in high-risk individuals (heavy smokers, people with precancerous nodules) to arrest cell transformation before malignancy. If the trials succeed, the implications extend well beyond oncology: the entire logic of cancer medicine shifts from reactive to prophylactic, with enormous consequences for health economics, insurance models, and the pharmaceutical industry's revenue structure, which currently depends on expensive late-stage treatment. Source: Nature · 28 May 2026
Robinhood has launched "Agentic Trading," letting users empower AI agents to execute stock trades and even credit card purchases on their behalf. The move makes Robinhood one of the first major consumer financial platforms to offer autonomous AI decision-making over real money. The fine print matters enormously: liability for bad trades, the opacity of agent reasoning, and the systemic risk of thousands of AI agents responding to the same market signals simultaneously. Robinhood is treating this as a feature launch. Regulators should treat it as a stress test. Source: Fast Company · 28 May 2026 ---
86
86%
That is the share of pre-blackout internet capacity now available in Iran, according to connectivity tracking firms. The missing 14% is not a technical limitation — it is a political choice. It represents the bandwidth reserved for surveillance infrastructure, filtered DNS routing, and the suppression of VPN access that the regime has built into the restored network. For comparison, during the 2019 Iranian internet shutdown, connectivity dropped to near zero for about a week. The 2022 shutdown following Mahsa Amini's death lasted longer but was patchier. This time, the blackout ran for months, and the rebuild has been engineered from the ground up as a control system.
The number 86% sounds almost normal. It is designed to. A country at 86% connectivity looks, from the outside, like it is recovering. Trade can resume. Banks can clear. Hospitals can function. But the 14% gap is where speech lives — where encrypted messaging, international social media, and uncensored search reside. Iran has discovered that you do not need to turn off the internet to silence it. You just need to turn off the right 14%.
Source: Times of Israel · 28 May 2026
In perspective
That is the share of pre-blackout internet capacity now available in Iran, according to connectivity tracking firms. The missing 14% is not a technical limitation — it is a political choice. It represents the bandwidth reserved for surveillance...
8 — Today's Wisdom
Iran's government has found a formula that should worry anyone who cares about open societies. They didn't shut down the internet permanently. They built it back up, but with surgical precision removed exactly the parts that enable free communication. 86 percent of capacity is back. Banks work, hospitals can run their systems, merchants can process payments. But the 14 percent that's missing isn't a technical problem. It's encrypted messaging, independent search, international platforms where people can organize without the state listening in.
The genius of it, if you can call it that, is that the model looks reasonable from the outside. A country with 86 percent connectivity looks like a country returning to normalcy. No dramatic blackout generating international headlines. No total isolation that wrecks the economy. Just a quiet, methodical removal of everything that makes the internet a tool for freedom rather than merely for commerce.
And that is precisely why it's dangerous. The model works, and others are watching. Russia is already building its own filtered network. Myanmar runs rolling shutdowns. But Iran has demonstrated that you don't have to choose between economic functionality and political control. You can have both, if you're sophisticated enough.
The answer cannot be passivity. It has to be building technology that makes censorship more expensive than freedom. Open protocols, decentralized networks, encryption by default. Technology can build walls, but technology can also tear them down. It's a race, and the free world cannot afford to lose it.
Johan Staël von Holstein
Serial entrepreneur · wakopa.ai