Neu❗ Wie untersucht man historische Praktiken mit digitalen Medien? Bedienungsanleitungen, Lehrbücher, Zeitschriften als "Digitale Überreste": mein Beitrag 📖 zur Methode der historischen Praxeologie in Heft 177 der Fotogeschichte 📷, hg. von @pauliks.bsky.social u. Jens Ruchatz. #Mediengeschichte

‘Blueskyism’, Political Violence, and Open Social Networks Under Authoritarianism on how the last weeks have shifted the threat model for open social networks: from fighting platform decay to the threat of authoritarianism connectedplaces.online/blueskyism-p...

Words to live by! Robert Redford will surely be missed.

… there’s still time to disenchant #AI, provincialize it, make it uncompelling and uncool … 👉 https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the-intellectual-situation/large-language-muddle

Yet another democracy doomscrolling Sunday if you look online. Yet, in the meantime free and open elections are happening in the towns and villages of Germany's North-Rine Westphalia. Peacefully, with people smiling on a sunny day. Democracy is still out there, and it is a beauty.

Verbraucherschutz-Sammelklage gegen Meta wegen der Profilbildung mit Meta Business Tools bei Drittanbietern www.meta-klage.de

When Switzerland invests in public AI, it does it right. Apertus can even speak Swiss German! Try it out: 👉 publicai.co

🚨The Critical AI Seminar Series returns in 2025/2026 ✨ This year we will have four talks and are beyond excited to welcome @amoorelouise.bsky.social & @alexcampolo.bsky.social, Fabian Offert, Helene Ratner & @nannathylstrup.bsky.social and @thaophan.bsky.social ✨ Sign up: bit.ly/uvacriticala...

Die „blaue Welle“ ist AfD-Rhetorik, um Stärke vorzutäuschen. Lasst uns nicht ihre Narrative verstärken, sondern die Erfolge der Demokrat*innen feiern! Teile diesen Post und zeig, wo die AfD verliert!

I cannot overstate just how awful this stupid fucking bill proposal is - adding backdoors into encryption on OS level - "sniff" every single message before it gets encrypted AND SAVE IT CENTRALLY - let a goddamn hallucinating "AI" mark people as criminals it needs to be stopped, post haste

As it turns out I can only 9h-timeshift my body for about a day. Which makes four days of transatlantic online conferencing at #4S2025 a physical impossibility. Caffeine will only get you so far with Zoom. What's the equivalent to jetlag? A zoomlag?

This Sat. Sept 6 we have three very exciting #dataloss panels at #4S2025! While some of our team won't be there in person, we are all thrilled to host these critical discussions examining loss and erasure as constitutive forces in digital systems. Join us tomorrow through the links below!

Is it really more than 30 simultaneous panels at #4S2025 in Seattle? Let's call it massively parallel STS! How shall we make sense of this distributedness though? It's even a more puzzling experience for people attending online.

We'll kick off the panel on "Network Imaginaries: Past, Present, and Future" at #4S2025 soon! See you at 1:30 PM (Pacific Time/Seattle Time) or whatever your time zone is! My talk on "Blockchain vs. AI" actually is the latest I ever gave ... It will be close to midnight by Central European Time.

We're excited to be at the Society for Social Studies of Science conference. Swing by our table, we'd love to connect with you! #4S2025

One of my favorite German academic publishers, Bielefeld's transcript Verlag, has this customs notice on its webpage now.

I love this message by ChatGPT that notifies me of my data analysis limit. Well, I could come back tomorrow after 16:35. That is quite something, isn't it? Or I could get a pro account. Oh, how much I love LLMs in search of more money to compute!

We used to talk about writing as a cultural technique. Which means talking about enskilment, too. It is hard to imagine an academic world where this is delegated to Large Language Models. The same is true for reading, btw. Alas, Matt is probably right concerning new transactional economies.

Die Zukunft des Lesens lesen: ab nächste Woche in Handel!

No way!

Hier sind ja keine Jüngeren, aber für die Jüngeren: Ein nicht geringer Teil der historischen Ablehnung von staatlichen und privaten Datensammlungen, inclusive Volkszählung, bezieht sich auf das Führen und Nutzen von Listen im deutschen Faschismus und den mörderischen Konsequenzen.

Any comments on Spotify's music industry platform streaming economy? After the second raise, I think of moving to Deezer ... 👉 www.heise.de/en/news/Prem...

The amount of spam in my academic inbox is really devestating. Yet it really shows after two weeks of vacation! Sadly enough, my Thunderbird spam filter training does not keep up with it.

journals.sagepub.com/toc/nmsa/27/... Special Issue: Digital Twinning Editors: Christoph Borbach, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Tristan Thielmann

Bowker, Geoffrey, and Susan Leigh Star (1999), Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/6352.001.0001

AI prompt injection for manipulating peer review: Are we really that screwed by the mere allure of #LLM s as a stress relief? If I try to imagine this as a humanities practice, we'll end up in a mess. Let's call all of this machine unlearning in the meantime. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

You really need to hear and see this! It is yet another fantastic work by artist Tim Otto Roth. vimeo.com/1102923991

Wenn der famose Medizinhistoriker Cornelius Borck dem Spiegel ein Interview gibt, lohnt sich die Lektüre allemal! ($) 👉 www.spiegel.de/geschichte/g...

🏦 So the Trump administration isn't just pro crypto. It is also passing bills against Central Bank Digital Currency. #stablecoin vs. #CBDC 👉 abcnews.go.com/Politics/hou...

The most classical of classic STS articles ♥️

Captain it's Wednesday

WeTransfer just changed their TOS giving themselves permission to train AI on any content you transfer and produce derivative works based on content you transfer that they are allowed to monetize and you are not allowed payment for. Stop using WeTransfer.

Fucking hell!

Okay, while I'm here, something sound studies and media tech history folks may find of interest: the Ray Dolby papers were recently processed and are now available for research at Stanford's Silicon Valley Archives. A bunch of stuff has been digitized too: exhibits.stanford.edu/dolby

I am currently about to sign a contract with Taylor & Francis. As a guest editor for the Internet Histories journal, that is. This is still pending for all the reasons stated here. Not sure how to decide on this in the end though.

International Journal of Language and Law (JLL): New Special Issue "Artificial Intelligence and the Language of Law" edited by Agata de Laforcade, Laure Clément-Wilz and Ilaria Cennamo Now Open Access at www.languageandlaw.eu/jll #LanguageAndLaw #LegalLinguistics #AI

It’s available in print!

"Would you pay $169 for an introductory ebook on machine learning with citations that appear to be made up?" Brilliant illustration of the current state of commercial publishing.

Against agentic AI

🕸️ Valérie Schafer has written this beautiful piece on ”The Datafied Web“ – RESAW Conference at Siegen University (4-6 June 2025) 👉 u-si.de/csXM5. Enjoy! 🔗 datafiedweb.net #RESAW25 #DatafiedWeb #WebHistory #WebArchiving #WebArchives #DigitalHeritage #Datafication

Im Kontext der @re-publica.com-Session zum digitalen Euro sprach Petra Gehring mit @benjaminseibel.bsky.social u.a. über digitales Zentralbankgeld. Diese Podcast-Folge, das Video zur Session mit @sebgiessmann.bsky.social und ein Blog-Post sind nun online. Alle Links hier👇 zevedi.de/aktivitaeten...

In this visually inspiring architectural history of the wire and its representations, art & architectural historian Carlotta Darò illuminates the relationship between telecommunications, technology, and architecture. "The Architecture of the Wire" is available now: mitpress.mit.edu/978026255163...

Translated, freshly revised + OA! @sebgiessmann.bsky.social The Connectivity of Things (MIT Press) explores 6 layers of network cultures, download: direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon... At Warwick next Wed (10am, FAB0.08), he proposes a 7th layer of extractive, clashing infrastructures: Blockchain vs. AI.

Really looking forward to doing network history and critique @cdi-warwick.bsky.social next week! #blockchain #ai #media

🕸️ Here's a great conference report on #RESAW25 "The Datafied Web" at Siegen University by Lesley Frew 👉 ws-dl.blogspot.com/2025/06/2025...

This is an interesting interview for all you (media) theory buffs out there! Even while I am likely to disagree with some points I am still looking forward to reading Leif Weatherby's forthcoming book. We are surely in need of more heterodox theories of #LLM s, machine learning, and so-called #AI!

A History of Researching the Datafied Web An opening statement prepared for the #RESAW25 conference, 5-6 June, University of Siegen, Germany. Collaborative Research Center (SFB 1187) "Media of Cooperation." www.annehelmond.nl/2025/06/07/a...

Blockchainbasierte Infrastrukturen und Transaktionen, das Entstehen digitaler Aktenformen im 21. Jahrhundert und das Signum der ›Eineindeutigkeit‹ nimmt sich Sebastian Gießmann vor: link.springer.com/chapter/10.1... – Blockchain vs. generative KIs &c. [XML, EPUB, PDF]

💡On to #RESAW2025 day 2! 🎤We begin with Jonathan Gray’s KEYNOTE “Public data cultures”, which explores how data is made public on the Internet amidst the rise of social media, platforms and AI. ⏳09:00 a.m., Unteres Schloss, US-C 114 📚Chair: Tatjana Seitz 📍 University of Siegen 🔗 datafiedweb.net

💡The first #RESAW25 day concludes with @nannathylstrup.bsky.social’s Keynote “Vanishing points: technographies of data loss”. ⏳18:00 p.m., Unteres Schloss Hörsaal, US-C 114 🗓️ RESAW 2025: 📍 University of Siegen | June 4 - 6 🔗 datafiedweb.net