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 · 3 May 2026
In New York City, scientists have been scooping buckets of water from the East River — and finding an entire city's biological inventory inside them. Using environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis, researchers discovered they could identify hundreds of species from a single water sample: fish, birds, mammals, insects, bacteria, even traces of the humans and pets living upstream. The technique costs a fraction of traditional ecological surveys and misses very little.
This is not a story about rivers. It is a story about how the cost of knowing is about to collapse.
Environmental DNA works because every living organism sheds genetic material constantly — skin cells, mucus, waste, pollen. Water collects it all. What once required teams of biologists doing months of fieldwork now requires a bucket, a filter and a sequencing machine. The New York study showed that a few litres of murky urban river water contained a richer, more accurate biodiversity snapshot than years of conventional monitoring had produced.
The implications run far beyond ecology. Cities spend billions monitoring water quality, tracking invasive species, managing public health threats, and assessing environmental compliance. eDNA offers a single, cheap, scalable method that could replace or supplement dozens of expensive monitoring programmes simultaneously. A bucket of water becomes a general-purpose urban sensor.
The technology is already being tested in contexts that would have seemed absurd five years ago. Researchers in other programmes have used eDNA from seawater to detect the presence of whale sharks hundreds of metres away. Conservation groups track endangered amphibians by sampling the ponds they visit. Biosecurity agencies look for invasive species before they establish visible populations. The New York work demonstrates that the same logic applies to the most complex environment of all: a dense human city.
What makes this a weak signal rather than established science is the gap between proof of concept and infrastructure. No city currently runs a continuous eDNA monitoring grid. No regulatory framework treats eDNA data as legally equivalent to traditional species surveys. No insurance company prices environmental risk based on what a bucket of water reveals. All of that is coming.
The enabling technologies are converging. Portable DNA sequencers — devices like Oxford Nanopore's MinION that fit in a pocket — continue to drop in price. AI-powered bioinformatics can match genetic fragments to species databases in hours rather than weeks. Cloud computing makes it feasible for a mid-sized municipality to run analyses that five years ago required a university lab.
The ethical questions are real. If a water sample can detect the genetic traces of specific people, the technology sits at the intersection of environmental monitoring and mass surveillance. Who owns the biological data dissolved in a public waterway? The answers do not yet exist.
But the direction is clear: the physical world is becoming as readable as the digital one, and the sensor that reads it may turn out to be nothing more sophisticated than a bucket.
Source: Anthropocene Magazine · May 2026
Short term (now–12 months): Several cities are likely to begin pilot eDNA monitoring programmes for water systems, drawn by the dramatic cost savings. New York's proof of concept arrives as municipal budgets worldwide are squeezed by the energy shock from the Iran conflict. A monitoring tool that replaces expensive fieldwork with cheap water sampling will attract immediate interest from cash-strapped environmental agencies. Expect the first commercial eDNA-as-a-service startups to secure seed funding within the year.
Medium term (1–3 years): Regulatory bodies will begin grappling with whether eDNA evidence is admissible for environmental compliance. If a bucket of river water shows an endangered species downstream from an industrial site, does that constitute proof of habitat presence? Courts in the EU and Australia, where environmental law is most developed, will likely be the first to rule. Meanwhile, the biosecurity application becomes urgent: eDNA could detect invasive species at ports and borders months before visual confirmation, potentially saving billions in ecological damage.
Long term (3–10 years): The convergence of eDNA, portable sequencing, and AI creates the possibility of a "biological internet" — a continuous, real-time reading of the living world flowing through water systems, soil, and air. Cities could monitor public health threats, biodiversity loss, agricultural runoff, and even illegal dumping through a network of automated water samplers. The privacy implications become profound: if the technology can identify individual humans from environmental traces, the same tool that protects ecosystems could erode personal privacy in ways no one has legislated for. Source: Anthropocene Magazine · May 2026 ---
Foreign Affairs has published a sharp assessment arguing that Libya's apparent political stabilisation is illusory. Washington's recent dealmaking with Libyan factions has produced surface-level calm but has not addressed the country's fundamental split between rival governments in Tripoli and Benghazi. The analysis warns that Libya needs genuine political unification, not brokered arrangements that entrench warlords. With oil prices elevated by the Iran conflict, Libya's crude production makes it a prize that external actors — Russia, Turkey, the UAE — will continue to fight over through proxies. Source: Foreign Affairs · May 2026
A small city in Wisconsin has successfully blocked the construction of a massive data centre, offering a template for communities resisting the infrastructure demands of AI expansion. Menomonie — population 16,000 — organised against the facility over concerns about water use, energy consumption and the transformation of agricultural land. The case illustrates a growing tension across the American Midwest: tech companies need rural land and cheap power for AI computation, but the communities that have both are increasingly saying no. Source: Reasons to be Cheerful / Next City · May 2026
Europe's police agency has warned that the US-Iran war will have "immediate repercussions" for EU security, including heightened risks of terrorism, violent extremism, organised crime and cyberattacks. Europol spokesman Jan Op Gen Oorth told EFE that he expects a surge in cyberattacks against European infrastructure and an increase in AI-powered online fraud exploiting war-related information chaos. The warning is notable for its specificity: this is not generic threat-level language but a direct operational assessment linking the Middle East conflict to European criminal activity. Source: Arab News / EFE · May 2026
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is visiting Australia to strengthen the bilateral alliance, part of a broader regional strategy she has been building since a recent visit to Vietnam. Simultaneously, she is pushing domestically for revision of Japan's constitution — unchanged since 1947 — arguing it must reflect modern security realities. She stopped short of explicitly naming Article 9, the pacifist clause, but the intent is clear. Japan is accelerating its shift toward a more assertive defence posture, and the Iran war has provided political cover. Source: Bloomberg / The Japan Times · May 2026
Human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski has given his first major interview since being freed from a Belarusian prison in late 2025, following American-brokered mediation. His account is devastating: he describes being "traded like merchandise" and returning to a country that has been "bled dry," with nearly one million citizens having fled in five years. Bialiatski's testimony is a reminder that while global attention focuses on Iran, Europe's last dictatorship continues to hollow out its own population. Source: NRC Handelsblad · May 2026
An underground operation is smuggling Starlink satellite internet terminals into Iran to circumvent the regime's internet blackout during the war. An operative named Sahand told the BBC he sends the devices into the country to help Iranians show "the real picture" of what is happening. The network operates despite the Strait of Hormuz blockade complicating physical logistics. It is a powerful illustration of how satellite technology is making it increasingly difficult for authoritarian regimes to maintain information control during conflict. Source: BBC World · May 2026
The International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators reports that the 2024–25 season drew 118,491 visitors, following 122,072 the previous year. Despite growing environmental concern and tightening regulations, the six-figure barrier is now firmly behind. The numbers raise uncomfortable questions about the continent's ecological carrying capacity and the effectiveness of voluntary industry self-regulation. Antarctica has no sovereign government to impose limits — just a treaty system designed for scientists, not cruise ships. Source: Mercopress · May 2026
India's leather and footwear industry has formally requested duty-free import of crust and finished leathers, as raw material costs spike from the Iran conflict's disruption of global supply chains. The sector — which employs millions of workers, many in small towns — is being hit by a combination of rising transport costs, restricted petroleum-based chemical inputs, and weakening export demand. It is a granular example of how a Middle Eastern war reshapes livelihoods thousands of kilometres away. Source: Hindu BusinessLine · May 2026 ---
Jan Stenbeck built his fortune connecting people — Tele2 broke Sweden's telecom monopoly, Millicom brought mobile phones to frontier markets. He understood that infrastructure shapes power. He would have recognised immediately what happened in Menomonie, Wisconsin.
The story, reported by Next City and republished by Reasons to be Cheerful, is deceptively simple. A tech company proposed a large data centre on agricultural land outside the small city. The community organised, researched, and said no. They cited water extraction, energy load, minimal local employment, and the irreversible transformation of farmland. They won.
Jan would have liked this not because he opposed technology — he was technology — but because he understood that the relationship between infrastructure and community must be negotiated, not imposed. When he built Tele2, he was breaking a state monopoly to give individuals more choice. The data centre story is the mirror image: a community exercising choice against a corporate monoculture that treats rural America as a cheap resource to be extracted.
The deeper pattern matters. AI requires physical infrastructure on a scale the tech industry has not been honest about: water for cooling, electricity for computation, land for buildings. These resources come from somewhere, and that somewhere is increasingly small towns with limited political power. Menomonie demonstrated that limited power is not the same as no power.
Jan Stenbeck was never sentimental about progress. He would not have argued that data centres should not be built. He would have argued that the people who bear the costs should have genuine power in the negotiation. That is what happened in Wisconsin.
Source: Reasons to be Cheerful / Next City · May 2026
At Berry Campbell gallery in New York, "Louisa Chase: The Eighties" is the artist's largest solo exhibition in the city in more than two decades. Chase, who died in 2016, was a prominent figure in the neo-expressionist movement but was progressively written out of a narrative dominated by male peers like Julian Schnabel and David Salle. The show assembles major works from the decade when she was most prolific and most overlooked. It is a corrective that arrives at a moment when the market is actively re-evaluating women artists of the 1980s. Source: Artnet News · May 2026
Director Anselm Chan's film about the death-care industry has become the highest-grossing movie in Hong Kong cinema history. Chan told Monocle that a personal loss inspired the project, and that the local industry needs to take creative risks to usher in a new golden age. The film's success — in a market dominated by mainland Chinese blockbusters — suggests Hong Kong audiences are hungry for stories that are emotionally authentic and culturally specific. It is a remarkable commercial achievement for a subject most producers would consider uncommercial. Source: Monocle · May 2026
Wallpaper has published a career retrospective on Pritzker Prize-winning architect Toyo Ito, tracing his journey from an aspiring baseball player to one of Japan's most celebrated designers. Ito's buildings — the Sendai Mediatheque, the Serpentine Pavilion — are defined by their rejection of rigidity: structures that seem to breathe, flex and respond to their environments. The piece positions Ito as the architect who best understood that buildings should behave more like organisms than monuments. Source: Wallpaper · May 2026
Condé Nast Traveler reports that Philadelphia has quietly become one of America's most exciting cities for Mexican food, driven by regional diversity, culinary storytelling and cultural pride rather than competition or trend-chasing. The scene spans Oaxacan moles, Puebla-style cemitas, and Michoacán-influenced kitchens. It is a food story rooted in immigration patterns that most national outlets ignore — Philadelphia's Mexican community has grown steadily while media attention fixated on Texas and California. Source: Condé Nast Traveler · May 2026
London studio Kasawoo has built The Root, a prefabricated, relocatable holiday cabin on the Greek island of Zakynthos. Clad in deep-red timber planks and measuring just 20 square metres, it sits among olive groves on family land alongside old ruins. The design principle: "Nothing is superfluous." It is a small project that embodies a large idea — that architecture can be both radically minimal and emotionally rich. Source: Dezeen · May 2026
The New Yorker revisits Jonathan Swift's self-composed epitaph, inscribed in St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, and asks whether it contains a final layer of satire that scholars have missed. Swift wrote that he lay where "savage indignation can no longer lacerate his heart" — but the essay argues the phrasing was deliberately ambiguous, designed to be read as both sincere grief and ironic self-mockery. Three centuries on, the greatest satirist in the English language may still be trolling his readers. Source: The New Yorker · May 2026 ---
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has ruled that films using AI-generated actors or AI-written scripts are ineligible for Oscar consideration. The decision, reported by TechCrunch, establishes what may be the most consequential creative-industry boundary against generative AI to date. It does not ban AI as a tool in production — visual effects, editing assistance, pre-visualisation — but draws a hard line at the replacement of human creative labour in the two categories that define cinema: performance and writing. The ruling matters beyond Hollywood. It establishes a precedent that other creative institutions — theatre, publishing, music awards — will be pressured to follow or explicitly reject. It also creates an enforcement problem: as AI-generated performances become indistinguishable from human ones, how will the Academy verify compliance? The answer will likely require new forms of production documentation and audit trails, an entirely new bureaucracy of authenticity. Source: TechCrunch · May 2026
The Japan Times reports on a growing disconnect: for all the public fascination with artificial intelligence, the word "sustainability" has virtually vanished from mainstream AI discourse. Energy consumption from AI training and inference continues to climb, data centres demand ever more water and electricity, and yet the industry's public narrative focuses almost exclusively on capability and competition. The piece argues that the omission is strategic — acknowledging AI's environmental footprint would complicate the growth story that sustains current valuations. As the Iran war drives energy costs higher, the tension between AI expansion and energy scarcity will become harder to ignore. Source: The Japan Times · May 2026
Sifted has polled venture capitalists to identify fifteen European hardware startups to watch in 2026. The list signals a shift in investor appetite: after a decade dominated by software and SaaS, money is returning to physical products — sensors, robotics, medical devices, energy hardware. The trend reflects a broader recognition that the AI era requires physical infrastructure, not just code. European startups have a structural advantage here: strong engineering traditions, established manufacturing supply chains, and an industrial base that never fully deindustrialised. Source: Sifted · May 2026 ---
118,491
118,491
That is how many people visited Antarctica in the 2024–25 season, according to the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators. The previous season drew 122,072. Before the pandemic, the number was around 74,000.
The continent with no permanent human population now receives more annual visitors than many small nations receive tourists. Antarctica has no immigration authority, no hotel inspectors, no environmental police force. It is governed by a treaty system designed in 1959 for a handful of research stations, not a six-figure tourism industry.
The industry is self-regulated through IAATO, a voluntary body. But voluntary regulation is only as strong as the incentives to comply — and with Antarctic cruise tickets selling for $10,000 to $50,000 per person, the incentives point firmly in the direction of growth, not restraint.
What makes the number significant is what it reveals about governance in a warming world. As ice retreats, more of Antarctica becomes accessible for longer seasons. The same climate change that makes the continent scientifically urgent makes it commercially attractive. No institution currently has the authority or the mechanism to impose binding limits. The Antarctic Treaty system was built for science. It was not built for this.
Source: Mercopress / IAATO · May 2026
In perspective
That is how many people visited Antarctica in the 2024–25 season, according to the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators. The previous season drew 122,072. Before the pandemic, the number was around 74,000. The continent with no permanent...
8 — Today's Wisdom
A bucket of dirty river water from the East River contains more biological information than years of traditional field surveys. It sounds like science fiction, but it's already reality. Researchers in New York have shown that environmental DNA from a single water sample can identify hundreds of species, from fish and birds to bacteria and traces of the people living upstream.
This isn't about biology. This is about the cost of knowing things being on the verge of collapse, and that changes everything.
I've been building companies for thirty years, and the pattern I've seen repeat itself time and again is this: when the cost of information drops dramatically, so does the power of those who made their living from information being expensive. Telecom monopolies fell when the cost of a call approached zero. Media's gatekeepers fell when the cost of distribution vanished. Now it's the physical world's turn. When a municipality can monitor its water, its air, and its biodiversity with a simple sensor instead of an army of consultants, power shifts again. From experts to everyone. From central authorities to local communities.
There is, of course, a dark side. If water can identify individual people, we end up in a surveillance landscape that no legislator has prepared for. But the direction of the technology is clear, and it points toward radical transparency. My advice is the same as always: don't build walls against that trajectory. Build tools that make it fair.
Johan Staël von Holstein
Serial entrepreneur · wakopa.ai