It’s always interesting when people say that they don’t like water, as it’s the main ingredient of our bodies and covers most of our world. As more and more of us turn to sustainable ways of consuming water (and thus avoid the clunky water bottle pileup in the recycling bin), reusable water bottles are on the rise, becoming as much of a symbol of status as intense hydration. Aarke presents the new To-Go Bottle for sparkling water, adding an elevated portability to our most earthly element. With an airtight vacuum seal that keeps beverages cold and bubbly, this stainless-steel bottle will keep you hydrated in style.

A completely stainless steel interior, makes for easy cleaning (they’re even dishwasher-safe!) and less buildup of bacteria, a common concern among water bottle enthusiasts. (Now – if anyone has recommendations on a great bottle brush, you’ll have to let us know). The bottles are designed to work with the Carbonator 3 and the Carbonator Pro, so you can keep drinks fizzy and chilled for up to 24 hours. The Carbonator 3 has To-Go Bottles in two sizes – the Large 1L and the Small 650 ml version – while the Carbonator Pro’s To-Go Bottle will be available available later this year in a 800 ml size.

Produced with over 90% recycled stainless steel, the To-Go Bottle not only lightens the load on the planet in its use, but in its creation as well. Sustainability is highly considered at the Swedish brand, deeply committed to lessening the burden of production at every step in the cycle. From utilizing post-consumer product to creating products designed with longevity in mind, they help us imagine a world where single-use is a thing of the past. Double-walled and vacuum-insulated, the To-Go Bottle is a sleek companion for in the home or outdoors.

“For years, sparkling water at home has been an easy, more sustainable alternative to store-bought water. But once people step outside, they often end up buying single-use plastic bottles,” says Jonas Groth, Co-Founder of Aarke. “The Aarke To-Go. Bottle in stainless steel changes that – helping people bring their own sparkling water and skip single-use plastic.”

Founded in 2013, Aarke was created by industrial designers Carl Ljungh and Jonas Groth to offer a refined take on everyday functions. A deep understanding of nature helps them design intuitively and thoughtfully, creating delightful spaces within moments frequently overlooked. Breaking down the process of human habit offers insight into how seemingly mundane rituals can be elevated, bringing meaning and beauty to all the little facets of life.

To learn more about the To-Go Bottle from Aarke, please visit their website here.

This post contains affiliate links, so if you make a purchase from an affiliate link, we earn a commission. Thanks for supporting Design Milk!

While traditional rammed-earth houses have weathered centuries unchanged in the mountains of Zhejiang Province, China, a striking aluminum lattice building presents itself among the landscape. The Z Museum in Songzhuang Village, designed by TEAM_BLDG, sits over 400 meters above sea level, nestled deep within the mountains. Here, 20mm x 40mm aluminum tubes become the warp and weft of a monumental fabric, each element painted red on three sides and white on one.

Visitors begin in an adjacent rammed-earth structure, experiencing a “prologue hall” that preserves the village’s traditional spatial character. The transition into the main building becomes a journey through material time – from earth to aluminum, and shadow to the central light well that vertically connects all three floors. This vertical atrium functions as both practical circulation device and poetic gesture, allowing natural light to weave through the building’s core much as shuttle passes through warp threads.

The architects dissected the original monolithic structure into four interconnected volumes, creating a quartet of forms. The architects kept the rooftop terrace deliberately minimal – uniform materials and absent functional zoning allow visitors to fully experience nature and relaxation. This restraint transforms the building’s crown into a contemplative viewing platform, positioning the museum as lens through which to perceive the landscape.

There was special attention paid to the treatment of interior-exterior boundaries. Original window openings were reconfigured in response to the surrounding landscape, creating a secondary framing. This strategy allows curated views of village life to dialogue with displayed artworks, dissolving the traditional separation between museum and context. The building becomes a viewing apparatus, framing the village as it would an exhibited textile.

For more information, visit team-bldg.com.

Photography by Jonathan Leijonhufvud.

Butterfly joints don’t always get the recognition they deserve. In traditional Korean wooden architecture (called hanok), woodworking, and masonry, these graceful connectors – known as nabi-jangbu – quietly hold everything together with precision, tucked out of sight within beams and frameworks. Rather than hide this essential element, designer Jin Kim, founder of the studio JAYUJAJE, brings it into the spotlight. Designed as a sculptural ode to Korean joinery, the Bugak stool transforms the humble butterfly joint into both a structural anchor and a captivating focal point – one that invites interaction and reveals a hidden surprise.

At first glance, the Bugak stool appears to be a minimalist, unassuming seat. Its soft curves and graceful silhouette are grounded by warm wood grain in two tones that adds just the right amount of visual texture. But look closer: at the center, a butterfly-shaped detail subtly hints that there’s more than meets the eye. With a gentle press, the form depresses, then slowly rises to reveal a concealed interior shelf – an unexpected surprise that brings added function to the design. Fittingly, bugak means to reveal, highlight, or elevate – precisely what this piece does for a once-hidden structural detail.

By spotlighting the butterfly joint, Kim flips the script on traditional construction. In Korean joinery, these connections are typically hidden, silently reinforcing a structure from within. But in Bugak, that quiet connector becomes the main character. It not only holds the stool together – it defines its silhouette and invites new ways of engaging with it. Through this small but powerful gesture, Kim turns an age-old craft technique into something interactive, poetic, and completely contemporary.

To learn more about the Bugak stool by Jin Kim of studio JAYUJAJE, visit www.jayujaje.com.

Photography courtesy of JAYUJAJE.

Today's links

• Antitrust defies politics' law of gravity: Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2020, 2024
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Antitrust defies politics' law of gravity (permalink)

In 2014, I read a political science paper that nearly convinced me to quit my lifelong career as an activist: "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," published in Perspectives on Politics:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

The paper's authors are Martin Gilens, a UCLA professor of Public Policy; and Northwestern's Benjamin Page, a professor of Decision Making. Gilens and Page studied a representative sample of 1,779 policy issues, analyzing the effect that the preferences of different groups of people had on the outcome. They wanted to find out what drove policy: money, or popularity?

It's money. It's totally, utterly money. When billionaires want something, it literally doesn't matter how much the rest of us hate it, they're gonna get their way. When billionaires hate something, it doesn't matter how popular it is with the rest of us, we're not gonna get it. As Gilens and Page put it:

economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

I know the cynics out there are hollering "no duh" at their computers right now, but bear with me here. Gilens and Page's research shows that you and I have no voice in policy outcomes. Based on these findings, the only way we can change society is to try and woo oligarchs so they champion our cause. This reduces democracy to a competition to see who can pour the most honey into a plutocrat's ear. Mass mobilizations – millions of people in the streets – only matter to the extent that they bring a tear to a billionaire's eye.

This just shattered me. I've been haunted by it ever since. I've tried some tactical gambits based on this data, but honestly, I don't want to improve the world by swaying the ultra-rich. Mostly, I've spent the decade since I read the Gilens/Page paper working on mass mobilizations and mass opionion-influencing. I reasoned (or maybe rationalized) that while oligarchs were running the nation now, that was subject to change, and that was a change that I was sure wouldn't come from America's plutocrats committing mass class-suicide.

Then, something incredible happened. All this decade, a tide of antitrust vigor has swept the planet. The EU has passed big, muscular tech competition laws like the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and has by God enforced them, and have patched the enforcement weaknesses in the GDPR. EU member-states – France, Germany, Spain – have passed their own big, ambitious national laws that go further than DSA/DMA. Even Ireland – a country that deliberately prostrated itself to US Big Tech – is getting in on the act, with the country's Social Media Czar railing against the "enshittification" of tech:

https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/chairman-of-irish-social-media-regulator-says-europe-should-not-be-seduced-by-mario-draghis-claims/a526530600.html

Not just the EU, of course. Australia and Canada have taken some big swings at Big Tech, and Canada is pressing ahead with its digital services tax of 3% for onshore earnings of tech companies with more than CAD20m in annual turnover, despite the fact that Trump has promised to end all trade talks with Canada in retaliation:

https://financialpost.com/technology/canadas-digital-services-tax-g7

Antitrust fever has swept both of the world's superpowers. Under Trump I, the DOJ and FTC brought key cases against Facebook and Google, and then Biden's antitrust enforcers went to town on all forms of monopoly, carrying on the Trump cases and reviving some of the law's most elegant weapons from a more civilized age, like the Robinson-Patman Act:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-sues-pepsico-rigging-soft-drink-competition

Admittedly, Trump's FTC and DOJ have carried on some of Biden's work, even as they've killed some of the Biden era's most important cases, and made a general Trumpian mockery of the idea that antitrust law is a tool for economic justice:

https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/weekly-rewind-62725

Trump killing antitrust law is normal. That's what politics have been like for this whole century, and it's what politics are like in every other domain: billionaires get their way on climate, on labor, on whatever bullshit they get into their fool fucking heads:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2025/06/27/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-married-wedding-venice/84349820007/

But it's a mistake to think that Trump killed antitrust enforcement in the USA out of a special conservative deference to millionaires and enthusiasm for corrosive and predatory monopolies. In the UK, four consecutive Conservative Prime Ministers presided over the best competition law enforcement in British history – and it was Labour's Keir Starmer who fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-head of Amazon UK:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

It is completely normal for both "progressive" and "conservative" parties to wield the entire apparatus of state to the benefit of powerful monopolists. The antitrust enforcement – in the US, the UK, the EU, Australia, Germany, France and Spain – are totally aberrant. And it's not just in these countries where political science's law of gravity reversed itself: there've been giant, brutal antitrust cases in Japan and South Korea, and China has passed aggressive tech antitrust laws that strike directly at the giant Chinese tech companies that Cold War 2.0 creeps insist are just branches of the Chinese Communist Party:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/07/backstabbed/#big-data-backstabbing

This is fucking wild.

This is water flowing uphill.

This is pigs flying.

This is hell freezing over.

There is no billionaire constituency for antimonopoly work. Oligarchs aren't funneling dark money to trustbuster orgs. Antimonopoly work strikes at the beating heart of the system that creates and sustains billionaires.

This is a political outcome that the people want, and that billionaires hate, and billionaires are losing.

How is this happening? Why is this happening? I don't know, exactly. I suspect that some of this is related to Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Monopolists corrupt our political system, maim and impoverish workers, gouge their customers on enshittified, overpriced garbage. They are an existential threat to the survival of the human species.

The system is so broken and the mainstream of politics endlessly gaslights us, telling us that corrupt and degraded institutions are either just fine ("America Was Always Great" -H. Clinton) or need to be destroyed, rather than redeemed ("Delete CFPB" -E. Musk). People know that the system only caters to the whims of billionaires and tells the rest of us to eat shit. They hate the fucking system.

Over and over again, we've seen outbreaks of furious, joyous, uncompromising leftist activism: Occupy, Bernie 2016, Bernie 2020, George Floyd, the Women's March, No Kings, Climate Strikes, on and on. Over and over, liberal "centrists" have joined with the right to crush these movements.

Meanwhile, the right has only moved from strength to strength by offering a libidinal, furious promise of root-and-branch change. The only team that's promising radical change is the right. Parties like UK Labour and the Democrats offer austerity and genocide with slightly more polite aesthetics ("[If I'm elected], fundamentally nothing will change" -J. Biden).

I think that centrist suppression of the left has pushed 90 percent of the energy for major change into right wing nihilist movements, but the anti-corporate, anti-monopolist energy has not dissipated. It's formed a kind of invisible political wind that has filled the sails of these antimonopoly projects all over the world.

But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Zohran Mamdani just won the NYC Democratic mayoral primary election. That wasn't supposed to happen. The worst people on Earth showered the hereditary King of New York with so much money it was coming out of his fucking pores and he still ate shit. Guys who've got so much money they were able to get Columbia University to collude in shipping its students off to gulags for having the temerity to oppose genocide tried to do it to Mamdani and we kicked their teeth in.

The world is organized around the whims of billionaires, but it doesn't have to be. Most of us are not esoteric authoritarian freaks pining for a CEO of America who'll track us all using mandatory Fitbits and assign us jobs based on an AI's estimation of our cranial geometry. Those ideas are not popular. Now, it's true that this century has been defined by extremely unpopular ideas winning the day. But anything that can't go on eventually stops.

Sure, they smeared Jeremy Corbyn and replaced him with Austeritybot 3000, and Labour is collapsing as a result, and if an election were called today, Nigel Farage would sweep the board, assuming the PM's seat ahead of a Ba'ath Party style majority.

But on today's Trashfuture podcast, I learned about the leadership contest for the Green Party, in which genuinely progressive candidate, Zack Polanski, is running:

https://backzack.com/

Labour has walked away from voters. The Tories are in chaos. The Libdems permanently discredited themselves in the coalition government. The youthquake that buoyed up Corbyn was driven by a desperate hunger for change. The party grandees that purged Labour of everyone who wanted a better country have created a massive constituency that's up for grabs.

I'm desperate for change, too. I've joined the Greens, and I'll be voting for Polanski in the leadership race:

https://join.greenparty.org.uk/join-us/

(Image: Frank Vincentz, Petri Krohn, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• What is a democratic socialist? https://coreyrobin.com/2025/06/26/what-is-a-democratic-socialist/

• Republicans are flagged more often than Democrats for sharing misinformation on X’s Community Notes https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2502053122

• Decon: Dual system offering an emergency decontamination tool for Chemical Crowd Control Agent (CCCA) exposure and app for protestor mobilization https://nedc.mesausa.org/team/california-2025/

• Promises The ‘Trump Phone’ Would Be ‘Made In USA’ Lasted 1/100th Of A Scaramucci https://www.techdirt.com/2025/06/27/promises-the-trump-phone-would-be-made-in-usa-lasted-1-100th-of-a-scaramucci/

• Digital Services Tax to stay in place despite G7 deal https://financialpost.com/technology/canadas-digital-services-tax-g7

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Secret Congressional policy reports published https://web.archive.org/web/20050629020405/http://www.opencrs.com/

#20yrsago Brazil to US pharma co: slash AIDS drug prices or lose patent https://web.archive.org/web/20190918065156/https://www.ft.com/content/816699fe-e50a-11d9-95f3-00000e2511c8

#20yrsago Hilary Rosen: Killing Napster didn’t bring market control https://web.archive.org/web/20050629010724/http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/hilary-rosen/the-wisdom-of-the-court-_3259.html

#15yrsago Canadian cops’ history of agents provocateurs and the G20 https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/27/canadian-cops-history-of-agents-provocateurs-and-the-g20/

#15yrsago Stiglitz: spending cuts won’t cure recession https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/osborne-s-first-budget-it-s-wrong-wrong-wrong-2011501.html

#5yrsago Snowden on tech's Oppenheimers https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/27/belated-oppenheimers/#oppenheimers

#5yrsago Santa Cruz bans predictive policing https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/27/belated-oppenheimers/#banana-slugs

#1yrago Copyright takedowns are a cautionary tale that few are heeding https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1
  https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/

• Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059

• Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4
  https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place

• Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16
  https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/

• DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

Recent appearances (permalink)

• If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw

• Forward Kentucky
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMxBBMBkZs

• Democrats Abroad
  https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/demsabroadca/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-e34blmg/a-ac0jn7i

Latest books (permalink)

• • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance."

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583.

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627.

Upcoming books (permalink)

• Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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