from the the-last-gasps-of-antitrust-reform dept

I think I’ve extensively explained at this point why the $111 billion merger between Paramount/CBS and Warner Brothers is a gargantuan pile of shit that will indisputably harm labor, consumers, markets, creatives, and potentially even national security. It doesn’t matter the company names; every single major media merger of this type ends badly for everyone but the trust fund brunchlords at the top.

Not only that, every single merger involving this particular company (Time Warner, Warner Brothers) in the last quarter century has resulted in nothing but layoffs, price hikes, shittier product, and a lot of whimpering. And there are ample signs that the Paramount folks are even less competent than past suitors, including the AT&T executives, who quickly got too far out over their skis.

While the Trump DOJ has unsurprisingly rubber stamped Larry Ellison’s clumsy effort to dominate what’s left of U.S. corporate media, states keep hinting at the fact they’ll file a collective antitrust lawsuit.

That’s certainly the case in Oregon, where Attorney General Dan Rayfield is asking for a 60 day pause in deal finalization while his office investigates both the deal — and apparently the Trump cronyism that has helped enable it. Rayfield, for one, accuses Paramount of refusing to adequately respond to state AG requests for information about the deal’s impact:

“We’re not going to let Paramount Skydance play hide the ball so they can rush through their massive merger. Oregonians have a real stake in this deal – in our film industry, in our economy, in the choices they’ll have as consumers. Paramount had every opportunity to hand over records and answer a few basic questions. Instead, it is trying to run out the clock and evade scrutiny. We’re asking the court to make sure Oregonians get the answers they’re owed before this deal closes, not after.”

Rayfield says that Paramount has been particularly cagey when asked for data on its interactions with the Trump administration and Trump DOJ. Including details on a federal government influence campaign Paramount internally calls “project warrior”:

“Paramount has not complied. According to court papers, the company declined to accept service of the request, waited weeks to respond, and ultimately sent objections on the day its documents were due – objections the state dismisses as a baseless tactic to avoid turning over the records. Paramount has told Oregon it does not intend to close the deal before July 16 but has not agreed to hold off any longer while the state’s investigation continues.”

So while the $111 billion deal is abjectly terrible, it’s not quite yet a done deal yet. I’d suspect that a joint antitrust lawsuit featuring the handful of states that still care about such a thing will arrive sometime in the next month or two. While it might not succeed in scuttling the deal, it could extend the timeline in a way that could prove costly for Larry Ellison, David Ellison, and their debt-riddled proposal.

Larry is comically over-leveraged on AI, and should an AI bubble pop coincide in significant regulatory delays for his media domination bid, things could get very interesting. As an aside, I’d like you to notice how when the state lawsuits come, all the Republicans who spent last election season pretending they were suddenly interested in antitrust reform will be absolutely nowhere to be found.

Filed Under: antitrust reform, consolidation, Dan Rayfield, hollywood, larry ellison, media mergers, oregon, regulatory approval

X has made a “tweak” to its algorithm to boost the visibility of posts to users’ “mutuals” — the people they follow who follow them back, head of product, Nikita Bier, said Monday.

“We noticed this data was missing from the algo and it made your friends appear less in your replies. This resulted in the reply section feeling more like a battleground with people you don’t recognize.”

The change may not drastically revamp the site’s user experience, but may make X feel a little bit more like a community rather than a torrent of disparate voices shouting into the digital abyss.

Bier noted that the change would also “help clusters form around interests more easily, which many people have asked for.”

X has introduced a number of changes lately — many of which seem designed to make the site a bigger hub for creators. Earlier this year, the site changed how it compensates accounts in an effort to incentivize original content rather than mere aggregation, and, earlier this month, it also introduced a video editor designed to make it easier for users to work on the platform.

This tweak follows changes that Meta’s Threads has been making to its algorithm aimed at creating communities, largely as a differentiation from its main rival X. For instance, last month Threads rolled out a Your Algo feature, which lets users privately control what they see in their feed. It also reached 500 million monthly active users.

Singapore-based video-generation startup PixVerse said today that it has closed its Series C extension, with a total of $439 million raised in the round. The company told TechCrunch that, with the new tranche of funding, its valuation has crossed over $2 billion. With the cash, the company aims to expand its world model offering and reach customers across geographies.

The company closed its initial Series C round in March, led by CDH Investments. While it didn’t disclose the funding amount, Bloomberg reported it to be in the range of $300 million. PixVerse said that investors in the extension round include Alibaba, Lollapalooza Capital, Ivy Capital, Grand Mount Capital, Eastern Bell Capital, Mirae Asset, BlueFocus, and CloudAlpha, joining returning investors iGlobe Partners and OCBC’s Lion X Ventures.

The company was founded by Wang Changhu and Jaden Xie in 2023. Changhu previously worked at ByteDance on computer vision, and Xie was an executive director at investment firm Lighthouse Capital.

PixVerse offers multiple models, including a V-Series video model for consumer and API use, a C-Series video model for professional film and commercial workflows, and an R-Series of world models for game development and world building, which was released earlier this year.

Through its tool, users can generate videos in up to 4k resolution with audio baked in. The startup said that its consumer product has over 150 million registered users and over 15 million monthly active users. The company declined to specify how many of them are paying users but it offers a competitive rate of $4.80 per minute of generation for image-to-video.

Xie believes that despite the huge opportunity for video generation to succeed, only a few companies are making progress in the market.

“OpenAI exited the business when they shut down Sora 2. Other companies like Meta and Tencent are not able to create high-quality video models. So there are only a few companies that can meet the quality bar,” he told TechCrunch.

He said that there is equal opportunity in the consumer and enterprise markets as users are creating videos for fun and also consuming short video content made with AI, while enterprises are using video generation for creative, learning, and marketing use cases.

However, saying that the startup’s model produces a “high-quality” output is hardly a unique qualifier. Xie mentioned that its core strength lies in labeling.

“We think the key difference is not in data, but how you label it, because data is available everywhere. My co-founder worked at ByteDance, where he built core visual understanding technology behind TikTok using AI. Using this tech, TikTok was able to label data accurately and build a strong recommendation algorithm. This experience comes in handy when building a video-generation platform,” Xie said.

The company has big ambitions this year. It wants to expand its enterprise outreach across the globe. The startup already has a deal with its investor Alibaba to deploy the video-generation features.

In terms of product rollout, it plans to launch a new V-Series model for video generation and release a new version of its world model this year. It has 150 employees across offices in Singapore, Beijing, and Shanghai. With the new funding, PixVerse aims to hire more researchers and people in go-to-market function.

Despite its confidence in its own models and products, the video market is heating up. There are players like ByteDance with its Seedance model, former Tencent AI head Dr. Wei Liu’s Video Rebirth, and Kling AI from Asia. In the West, there are competitors like Midjourney, Runway, and Luma. Multiple companies, including Yann LeCun’s and Fei-Fei Li’s startups, are building world models.

The hardest problem in AI is no longer the chip but the megawatt.

For much of the past three years, the global AI race has focused on semiconductors, with governments competing for advanced chips, technology outfits scrambling to secure GPUs, and investors pouring billions into ever larger datacenters. Yet the binding constraint has shifted from compute to the power required to run it.

For anyone trying to energize a new AI cluster today, the bottleneck is rarely silicon; it is grid access, interconnection delays, and aging infrastructure. That was the central message from Envision founder and CEO Lei Zhang at VivaTech in Paris this June, where he argued that AI amounts to an energy revolution as much as a computing one.

The steam engine transformed the industrial age by converting coal into motion, and the GPU now transforms the AI age by converting electricity into intelligence. History offers another lesson: James Watt changed industry through the efficient use of energy rather than by producing more steam. AI faces the same problem today, because the binding constraint has shifted from how many chips can be built to how they can be powered.

The real risk: AI competing with society for energy

The numbers behind the argument are stark. Goldman puts US datacenter power demand at 31 GW in 2025, rising to 66 GW by 2027, while assuming only about 72 percent of scheduled facilities arrive on time because electricity, not construction, is what typically slips. The IEA estimates that datacenters consumed roughly 1.5 percent of world electricity in 2024, a share rising to 3 percent by 2030 as AI-specific demand triples.

The structural mismatch sits at the heart of the problem: AI models iterate every six months and chips refresh annually, while power grids have changed little in decades. Rack densities that sat at 5 kW are climbing toward 200 kW, and the IEA notes that AI server power density rose elevenfold between 2020 and 2025, with a further fourfold rise expected by 2027, straining the supply chains for power electronics and transformers that keep a cluster stable. The growing gap raises broader questions about where the energy will come from and who will bear the cost.

Around the world, communities are asking whether AI infrastructure should draw on electricity that households, factories, hospitals, and public services also depend upon, with familiar concerns surfacing about consumer bills, manufacturer access to limited grid capacity, and the burden that ever-larger models place on public infrastructure.

Those questions have moved beyond the purely technical into the societal, because the future of AI cannot rest on a model in which humanity competes with AI for power.

Mission Gobi: Let AI follow energy

Envision’s answer, Mission Gobi, unveiled at VivaTech, aims to develop 5 GW of green AI computing capacity across deserts and arid regions by 2030. For decades energy followed computing, and Mission Gobi reverses that logic on the premise that in the AI era, computing may need to follow energy.

The logic is grounded in geography, because deserts offer some of the world’s richest solar and wind resources alongside vast expanses of low-cost land, with the additional advantage of little competing residential or industrial demand. Rather than drawing power from homes, factories, and public services, Mission Gobi seeks to build entirely new renewable energy systems dedicated to AI, expanding the available supply instead of asking society to share a fixed pie.

The philosophy reduces to a single idea: compute should chase power, not the other way around.

The economics matter because electricity determines whether a facility is viable, with power consistently accounting for the single largest operating cost at a datacenter and some estimates placing it at as much as 60 percent of the operational budget.

Building energy-native AI infrastructure

Envision splits the system into three layers: an intelligent operating hub, Physical AI powered by its Tianji Weather Foundation Model and Dubhe Energy Foundation Model, and advanced power infrastructure. Together they integrate generation, storage, grid, power electronics, computing, and large-scale AI models into a unified architecture.

The challenge lies in coordinating renewable power rather than merely generating it, because AI facilities require stable, high-quality electricity while solar and wind output fluctuate continuously. Envision argues that large-scale predictive models can help balance generation, storage, and demand in real time.

The concept has already moved beyond theory. In Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, Envision runs a 2 GW system on 100 percent renewable energy, coordinating wind, solar, storage, hydrogen, and compute in real time, while a gigawatt-scale AI and computing campus in Ulanqab is being developed as a demonstration of what energy-native computing infrastructure could look like.

A 5 GW pledge is ambitious, but the underlying read is sound: retrofitting decades-old city grids for gigawatt AI loads is a difficult undertaking, and purpose-built renewable compute, sited where power is cheapest, offers a credible alternative.

SpaceX looks up, Mission Gobi looks out

Envision is not alone in recognizing energy as AI’s defining constraint. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has explored concepts for orbital datacenters powered by uninterrupted solar energy in space, and the vision rests on the same recognition: the future bottleneck of AI may lie in energy rather than silicon. Both approaches seek to place computing where energy is most abundant.

The two visions diverge in geography, with one reaching upward beyond Earth’s atmosphere and the other outward toward deserts and Gobi regions, though both start from the same premise: AI should not compete with humanity for power.

A new blueprint for AI infrastructure

If the industrial age was built around coal and the electrical age around power grids, the AI age may be built around energy abundance. The success of future AI infrastructure will not be measured by GPU counts and model sizes alone. It will also depend on whether the industry creates new energy supply, eases pressure on communities, and enables technological progress without reducing others’ access to power.

Whether deserts become the preferred destination for future computing remains to be seen. What is becoming clear is that the next phase of the AI race will be defined not only by who builds the most powerful models, but by who can build the energy systems capable of sustaining them.

The path forward runs through creating new energy supply rather than reallocating existing capacity away from households, factories, and public services.

Contributed by Envision.

The Jscrambler client-side web security company disclosed that a threat actor published a malicious version of its npm package that has been downloaded almost 1,500 times.

The malicious Jscrambler package spanned releases 8.14, 8.16, 8.17, and 8.20 and included information-stealing malware that executed during the ‘preinstall’ hook.

“Today, we identified the unauthorized publication of a malicious version of our jscrambler npm package, which is used with our Code Integrity product,” Jscrambler says in a warning on Saturday.

“This incident was limited to that package and did not affect any other Jscrambler products, including Webpage Integrity,” the company said.

Although Jscrambler reacted quickly, the malicious package lasted for two hours before the developer deprecated it and released the safe version 8.22.

The affected package was a dependency for four other Jscrambler packages, which the vendor has also deprecated and replaced with new versions.

Statistical data from Node Package Manager (npm) shows that the malicious package was downloaded 1,479 times during the two-hour window.

Jscrambler is a commercial platform for protecting web and mobile JavaScript applications from reverse engineering and tampering.

Its npm package has 17,000 weekly downloads and enables app developers to upload their JavaScript to Jscrambler’s service to protect the code from alteration. This helps defend against real-time modifications like injecting malicious code.

Application-security company Socket detected the compromise and analyzed the unauthorized Jscrambler release. The researchers say that the package included an infostealer that targeted multiple types of sensitive data:

• Source code and project files
• Developer credentials and secrets (Git, SSH, environment variables, CI/CD tokens)
• Cloud credentials and secret managers (AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes)
• AI coding tools and MCP configurations (Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code, Zed)
• Cryptocurrency wallets and seed phrases (MetaMask, Phantom, Coinbase, Exodus, Trust Wallet)
• Browser data (cookies, saved credentials)
• Messaging and collaboration apps (Slack, Discord, Telegram)

Socket reports that the malware used strong per-string obfuscation via the ChaCha20-Poly1305 encryption algorithm, which made it difficult to reverse-engineer the code.

According to Jscrambler, the compromise was possible due to compromised npm publishing credentials, which the company has revoked.

Following the incident, additional security controls have been implemented for the publishing pipeline.

Developers who have used the malicious npm packages should treat their environments as compromised, rotate all secrets, and restore from safe backups.

Jscrambler recommends that customers make sure that they are using the latest version of the product.

Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.

The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.

Get the whitepaper

Criterion has announced The Complete Kubrick, a 30-disc 4K UHD plus Blu-ray collector’s set arriving on October 20, 2026, with a listed price of $599.95. That is not casual movie-night money. That is “I may need to explain this charge to another adult” money. But if any filmmaker was going to justify this kind of physical media overkill, Stanley Kubrick is on the very short list.

Kubrick has always been one of those directors I return to when I want to be reminded that cinema can be cold, furious, absurd, beautiful, cruel, and technically obsessive all at once. Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and Full Metal Jacket are not films I merely admire on the shelves in my film collection. I have watched them dozens of times. They shaped how I think about war films, political satire, military authority, moral cowardice, and the specific terror of men in rooms making decisions that ruin other people’s lives.

Paths of Glory remains one of the most devastating antiwar films ever made because it does not need battlefield sprawl to make its point. Dr. Strangelove is still horrifying because it is funny in exactly the wrong way. Full Metal Jacket never lets you get comfortable with its structure, its violence, or its view of how institutions break people before sending them somewhere worse.

That is the appeal of this set. Kubrick is not a casual background viewing director, unless you are the kind of person who folds laundry to A Clockwork Orange, in which case we should probably alert someone.

His films are built for repeat viewing because the details keep changing on you. The framing. The sound. The silence. The faces. The rooms. The way a joke in Dr. Strangelove starts out funny and then turns into a mushroom cloud. Presentation quality is not some luxury add-on with Kubrick. It is part of the experience, right up there with existential dread, institutional cruelty, bad men in sealed rooms, and the uncomfortable suspicion that somebody may ask you to surrender bodily fluids if you stop posting cheerful messages about how wonderful it is that New York City is being run by a Communist.

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What You Get in The Complete Kubrick

Criterion says the set brings together Kubrick’s thirteen features and three shorts, all restored in 4K, with their original soundtracks alongside restored and remastered 5.1 mixes. The package also includes more than 25 hours of interviews, documentaries, and behind-the-scenes materials.

Criterion’s listed feature lineup includes Killer’s Kiss, The Killing, Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut. Criterion’s special-features listing also specifies that Fear and Desire is included among the thirteen features restored in 4K.

The short films include Kubrick’s early documentary work, and outside coverage of the set lists Day of the Fight, Flying Padre, and The Seafarers, with Day of the Fight included in both its original and RKO versions.

The major technical and collector details are:

• Release date: October 20, 2026
• Format: 4K UHD plus Blu-ray
• Disc count: 30 discs
• SRP: $599.95 USD
• Films included: 13 features and 3 shorts
• Restoration: all features and shorts restored in 4K
• Audio: original soundtracks plus restored and remastered 5.1 mixes
• Supplements: more than 25 hours of interviews, documentaries, and behind-the-scenes materials
• Packaging: deluxe box inspired by Kubrick’s archive, with rare photographs, artwork, and annotated documents
• Packaging design: Drusilla Adeline/Sister Hyde Design

Criterion has not yet published a detailed per-film technical breakdown for every disc, so buyers should not assume that every title has the same HDR format, audio configuration, or supplement loadout beyond what Criterion has explicitly listed. The confirmed umbrella detail is that the films are restored in 4K, with original soundtracks and restored/remastered 5.1 mixes included in the set.

The Supplements Are a Big Part of the Price

The headline number is the $599.95 price, but the extras are where Criterion is trying to justify the scale of the release.

The set includes Kubrick’s international version of The Shining, a new 4K restoration of Vivian Kubrick’s behind-the-scenes documentary Making “The Shining”, newly recorded commentary tracks with filmmaker Lee Unkrich and author Michael Benson, rare films from Graphic Films and computer-animation pioneer John Whitney that inspired the special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey, unseen Lolita screen tests with James Mason and Sue Lyon, and rare Full Metal Jacket behind-the-scenes footage.

Criterion also lists a newly recorded conversation with novelist Jonathan Lethem and film historian Kevin Wynter on Kubrick and authorship, plus an essay by author and critic Nathaniel Rich.

That is not filler. For Kubrick, the context matters. These films have been examined, argued over, imitated, worshipped, misunderstood, parodied, and dissected for decades. A serious box set needs more than transfers. It needs production history, alternate perspectives, archival material, and enough scholarly weight to make this feel like the early Chanukah present I will absolutely justify buying for myself in December instead of the new winter boots my children probably need.

Why the Price Might Make Sense

$599.95 is a lot of money. There is no point pretending otherwise. But the math is not completely insane once you break it down.

At the listed Criterion price, the set works out to about $20 per disc across 30 discs, or roughly $38 per included film or short if you divide the price across the 16 works. If you count only the 13 features, it comes to about $46 per feature.

That does not make it cheap. It does make it less ridiculous than the sticker shock suggests, especially if you are someone who would eventually buy most of these titles individually on 4K anyway.

The real question is whether you want Kubrick as a unified collection. If you only care about 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and A Clockwork Orange, this is probably not the smartest buy. But if you care about the full arc from the early independent work through Eyes Wide Shut, the value proposition changes and you get to see Nicole Kidman when she still had those curly locks and before she made those annoying AMC Movie trailers.

That is why a complete set has a stronger case than another loose pile of individual UHDs.

Who Should Buy It

This is for Kubrick collectors, Criterion completists, film students with irresponsible credit cards, and anyone who wants a single archival-style edition of the director’s entire feature output.

It is also for home theater owners who understand that Kubrick’s films are not merely “content.” They are image, sound, rhythm, geometry, silence, and discomfort.

Be honest with yourself: if you are seriously considering this set, you are not buying movies. You are reporting for inspection. Full Metal Jacket people know the drill: R. Lee Ermey is screaming, Vincent D’Onofrio is unraveling in real time, and somewhere in the room a $599.95 $479.96 Criterion preorder is sitting there like the world’s most expensive jelly doughnut.

The Bottom Line

Criterion’s The Complete Kubrick is expensive, but it is not a lazy cash grab. The set includes 30 discs, 13 features, 3 shorts, 4K restorations, original soundtracks, restored and remastered 5.1 mixes, more than 25 hours of extras, rare archival material, new commentary tracks, and deluxe archive-inspired packaging.

That is the right kind of excessive.

For casual viewers, this is overkill. For serious Kubrick collectors, it may be one of the biggest physical media releases of 2026. Start saving.

Where to Pre-order

Available October 20, 2026

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A dozen states have sued to block Paramount Skydance’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. The suit, led by California attorney general Rob Bonta, was filed in federal court in California’s Northern District, CNBC reports.

The timing is pointed. The Justice Department approved the roughly $110bn deal last month without conditions or divestitures, after an eight-month review.

The states are, in effect, doing what the federal government declined to do. It was flagged as a possibility last week, and now it has happened.

What the states are actually claiming

The complaint alleges a violation of the Clayton Act, which bars mergers likely to substantially lessen competition. It identifies three markets.

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Those are wide-release theatrical distribution, top-grossing or blockbuster theatrical distribution, and basic cable licensing. The states put the combined company at 27% of wide-release distribution, 30% of anticipated blockbusters, and 27% of the basic cable bundle.

Bonta framed the harm in consumer terms. The merger would mean higher prices, lower quality, and less content, he said, hurting cinemas, cable distributors, and audiences.

He also reached for a political register. America has no kings in government or in its economy, he said.

Paramount’s defence is not weak

The company called the suit fundamentally flawed and wrong on both the facts and the law. That is boilerplate, but the underlying argument is more serious than the rhetoric.

Paramount contends the market has been redrawn by Netflix, Amazon, and Apple, making a share of theatrical distribution a poor measure of power. On this reading, the states are litigating a business that is already dying.

There is precedent on its side, too. Disney absorbed most of Fox’s Hollywood assets in 2019 on much the same reasoning, and regulators let it.

The irony is that the challenger Paramount beat is the strongest exhibit for its case. Netflix had a deal for Warner’s studios and HBO Max, walked away rather than be outbid, and authorised a $25bn buyback instead.

Why this is a tech story

Strip away the studio lots and this is about the Ellisons. Paramount is chaired by David Ellison, but the bid was financed and guaranteed by his father Larry, the Oracle co-founder.

Larry Ellison is a Trump supporter and adviser who has sat on a White House board advising on artificial intelligence. Last year the administration granted him and Oracle a controlling stake in TikTok’s US operations.

Consider what that assembles. Oracle supplies infrastructure that a large share of American commerce and government runs on, and the same family would now control TikTok’s US arm, CBS News, CNN, two major streamers, and a wall of cable channels.

That concentration of distribution on top of infrastructure is the part that should interest anyone who covers technology. It is not a claim of wrongdoing, and Bonta’s complaint does not rest on it, but it is the reason this deal is bigger than Hollywood.

The process questions

The DOJ’s approval has itself become contested. The Wall Street Journal reported that senior officials fast-tracked clearance before career attorneys weighing a challenge could intervene, a characterisation the outgoing antitrust chief has denied.

Paramount’s chief legal officer is Makan Delrahim, who ran the DOJ’s antitrust division in Trump’s first term. He led the failed attempt to block AT&T’s takeover of Time Warner, the same assets now in play.

Trump has been publicly supportive of the Ellisons and has openly discussed CNN’s future. The president’s willingness to comment on a pending media transaction is a break with the convention that antitrust regulators operate at arm’s length.

The FCC has still not signed off, because Paramount holds licences for 28 local stations. Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, has already called it a good deal that should get through quickly.

The money is on the clock

Delay is expensive, which is the point of suing. From October, Paramount owes Warner shareholders roughly $650m for every 90 days the deal slips.

Miss June next year and the bill is $7bn. The financing already involves $80bn of new debt and non-voting stakes from Saudi, Qatari, and Emirati sovereign funds, which makes the combined company a near-certain candidate for deep cuts.

Integration is not waiting for the courts either. Paramount has been consolidating its streaming tech stack in preparation for HBO Max, an asset it is also pushing into markets like India.

All twelve attorneys general are Democrats, and Paramount will say so loudly. But the states cleared a federal review that imposed no conditions at all, and a court, not a press release, will now decide whether 27% of the blockbuster market is a problem.

The takeaway: Manufacturing jobs have long been built around fixed schedules and predictable shifts. At a GE Appliances plant in northwest Georgia, that structure is starting to loosen, replaced by a system where workers pick their hours through an app. The setup is run through staffing firm MyWorkChoice, which maintains a pool of more than 900 people trained to handle different roles across the plant.

The employees log in to an app and choose when to work, signing up for four-hour blocks that fit their schedules. In a typical week, roughly half the pool – around 450 workers – pick up shifts, averaging about 24 hours.

The model took shape during the pandemic, when demand for appliances surged, but the company struggled to keep its lines staffed. “People were buying appliances in record numbers, because they were staying at home and they were cooking,” Tony Gabbert, the plant’s director of manufacturing operations, told NPR. “It was a great time, great problem to have when you’re just selling product so fast that you can’t hardly make them quick enough.”

The bigger issue was labor. Absences and resignations left the plant short by hundreds of workers on some days, forcing salaried staff to step in to keep production moving. That pressure pushed the company to consider alternatives, including MyWorkChoice’s app-based staffing model.

The idea was not an easy sell. “I did say this is crazy,” says Bill Good, vice president of manufacturing. After decades in the industry, he was used to a system built on consistency. Letting workers sign up for short shifts, sometimes just a few hours at a time, raised concerns about stability. “The two-hour increments scared the heck out of me, because I was envisioning people coming and going at a rate that we could not control,” Good says. The company ultimately landed on four-hour shifts and rolled the program out gradually.

The system now operates more like a gig platform than a traditional factory schedule. Workers choose shifts, build their own schedules and are rated on reliability. Those with stronger ratings get first access to available hours. “This is like the Uber of manufacturing,” says Darcy Duvall, the plant’s director of human resources operations.

Their contributions have been key to GE Appliances’ $180 million expansion of the Georgia plant, completed last year, which added 600 new jobs. It has also changed who the jobs appeal to.

Some workers are not looking for full-time roles at all. Ruth Ransom, 68, had considered herself retired before joining the program. She now picks shifts that fit her schedule, often choosing quality-control work over more physically demanding assembly-line roles. “It’s your choice,” she says. “I love it.”

Others use the flexibility to balance multiple jobs. Kwame Crockett started picking up shifts to supplement his work managing and remodeling properties in a mobile home park. He now often works close to full-time at the plant but has chosen not to convert to a permanent role with benefits. “I’ve thought about it,” he says. “But I never know when my other remodeling or anything might kick up. So I might need a vacation or a little time off, you know?”

The trade-off is lower pay and almost no benefits, though MyWorkChoice employees can opt into a group healthcare plan. Duvall says many workers prize flexibility, even with those trade-offs.

The system has also helped retain experienced workers who might otherwise leave. Doris Hamby, who spent 35 years at the plant, shifted to part-time work after her husband died. Now 62, she works three to four days a week while helping care for family members.

What started as a stopgap during a labor crunch has stayed in place. The plant now relies on the app to fill shifts, rather than relying solely on fixed schedules.

Image credit: NPR