Hi there, from an airport gate waiting for a flight to Athens.

Over the past week, I’ve moved this newsletter to a different service: Substack.

As a subscriber, nothing fundamentally changes for you. And the main site for this newsletter remains the same — www.subvrt.org. Except, you’ll now be receiving the newsletters from a different address: subvrt@substack.com (instead of mehran@subvrt.org). Please add this new address to your contacts to ensure the newsletter doesn’t go to spam.

I won’t bore you with the technical reasons for the switch (unless you want them, in which case ping me). But it amounts to: going for cost and internal discoverability vs customisation and speed. Like everything, the move is an experiment, so we’ll see how it goes.

The move also means a few things for the newsletter:

• Good: Substack has a range of new features, and I’ve been able to implement some of them in the newsletter, and will do more going forward. E.g. I now made a voiceover for my piece on the hidden cost of technological progress (which continues to be one of my most-viewed posts). Just click on the bar at the top of the piece to hear it.

• Bad: There might be broken links, and odd design issues in older posts. The newsletter is still not looking how I’d like it. The feeds for the podcast are temporarily not working. I will fix all these in time.

• Ugly: There’s no post this week. I’ll be back next week.

Incidentally, for reasons I don’t yet know, I’ve noticed an uptick in subscribers since I activated the Substack account last weekend. So for those of you joining — welcome! There are top posts listed on the (newish) About page if you’d like to go through them.

See you next week, and good luck with your projects.

cheers

Mehran

PS I know some of you are based in Athens, and this is a late invitation, but tonight myself and DiEM25 colleagues will be at this event for Julian Assange. So if you’re in town, please come along. It’s a screening of his documentary, and a talk given by his wife and others.

PPS On Tuesday, I did a live YouTube discussion with DiEM25 on the Greek train tragedy, which has so far claimed 57 lives. The crash goes to the heart of Greece’s systemic problems and privatisation in general, and though it’s a difficult topic, I think you’ll get something out of it. If you prefer podcast format, the episode will be out on the DiEM25 podcast later today.