Late Babylonia Delayed

Today I wanted to post about what I learned about the fascinating world of Babylonia after Nebuchadnezzar during my PhD, or things other people are making and learning like my friend Tod Feinmann’s new Figure-Eight Shield and a field of stakes from Early Iron Age Denmark very similar to contemporary fields of sharp stones from Iberia and Ireland.

Unfortunately, I have to spend my limited free time this weekend looking for alternatives to my main email provider the Swiss nonprofit Proton Ag. Although the Proton Foundation’s website begins with words like:

Proton was created to serve the world, and the non-profit Proton Foundation ensures that this can never change. … Our legally binding purpose is to further the advancement of privacy, freedom, and democracy around the world.

Their CEO seems to have dressed for Halloween as a bullying deluded Silicon Valley startup exec [404 media]:

Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” … In the last few months, Yen set up an email address for employees to contact if they come across anything blocking adoption of AI at Proton, so leadership can “ruthlessly smash everything that stands in the way of AI velocity;” … “Due to insufficient velocity,” Proton is not on track to achieve its annual recurring revenue target by the end of the year, one internal document obtained by 404 Media reads. Proton’s year-over-year growth is also “far away from what the market today considers to be good,” and, “By all metrics that matter, we’re an underperforming company.”

Again, Proton is not a company but a nonprofit. They have no responsibility to make profits for anyone, and no obligation to please the stock market. Their board don’t even have to attend social events with the people cosplaying capitalism in California. They can hang out with academics and civil society advocates in Switzerland!

I think anyone who has worked for a boss like that, let alone done demanding technical work under a boss like that, can see where this leads. The boss in question doubled down [archive.ph] by explaining that this was a “failure of communications” (ie. us peons must not understand his brilliant vision, but we will accept it if he speaks slowly and uses simple words).

I have now ended my paid subscription to their services. Unless Proton changes its CEO and CTO, by 25 November I should have moved my public email address to a new provider. I first signed up to Protonmail in 2015 and have been a paying subscriber since 2019. You can see how to cancel a Proton subscription here. There are many promising alternatives with encryption in transit and encryption at rest such as Mailbox and Posteo in Germany, Runbox in Norway, or Fastmail in Australia (although Oz is a Five Eyes country and Fastmail appears to have engaged in union-busting). Almost any source of email is better for you and better for the world than Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo!

(scheduled 1 November 2026)