I find this chart by Anthropic about theoretical vs. actual AI usage, from @pbump.com's latest newsletter, very funny, and I think it's worth explaining why, and also please push back on any of this if you disagree, as I may write about it in the future. 🧵

Here’s Oona’s piece in @verfassungsblog.de on the tiered application of the laws of armed conflict, creating a vacuum of accountability. The EU’s weakness toward the Trump regime is flabbergasting. What about introducing consequence for Hegseth’s “no stupid rule of engagement” comment?

Spoke with @houstonpublicmedia.bsky.social about the California social media addiction case. Listen in here: www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/sho...

There is a great deal of schadenfreude in watching every AI company's carefully crafted alignment scheme to avoid existential risk do a faceplant on first contact with the most obvious features of the society it operates in.

#EUIUpFront: @streinz.bsky.social and Anna Pisarkiewicz discuss what Europe's digital sovereignty means beyond laws. @eui-law.bsky.social @eui-schuman.bsky.social 🎥 loom.ly/7qpznT4

Here‘s the full list of organisations Trump is withdrawing from. Just to highlight one: Trump is withdrawing from the ILC, showing the US disengagement from international law www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

We’re withdrawing from the International Law Commission??? This whole list is absolutely insane. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

The EU readies tougher tech enforcement in 2026 as Trump warns of retaliation, but how to reconcile this New Year’s resolution with EU digital omnibus dismantling digital rulebook? ⁦‪‬⁩ ⁦‬⁩ @teresaribera.ec.europa.eu @bmoens.bsky.social @digitalmario.bsky.social giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Has anyone done good work on privacy-preserving social graph portability? So that you could, say, bring your Insta graph over to Bluesky without revealing info to either side about what your graph is?

Watch the EU's flagship speech on one of four US tech platforms, three of which are actively trying torch the EU's digital regulations. Oh and EBS.

On First View: Pietro Ortolani, @cgoanta.bsky.social, @sarahvahed.bsky.social, and Alan Sanfey test some behavioural assumptions in the DSA. People are strange when you're a stranger. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

🇪🇺 For today’s #SOTEU to succeed, @vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu must go beyond Draghi’s recipe. Address citizens’ real concerns—housing, cost of living—while making EU more independent: bolder stance on US/Russia/China, Ukraine peace talks, suspend EU-Israel ties www.reuters.com/business/von...

Last year, Colorado signed a first-of-its-kind AI measure into law, but the state recently held a special session where lawmakers held frenzied negotiations over whether to expand or dilute its protections. Tech Policy Press spoke to two Colorado Sun reporters closely tracking the talks.

In German: I have written a small bit about the ways the EU could build Social Media as a public infrastructure: www.sz-dossier.de/gastbeitraeg...

Die Bundesnetzagentur soll künftig einen großen Teil der KI-Aufsicht übernehmen. Ringsum ist jedoch ein Mosaik aus weiteren Zuständigkeiten geplant. Das geht aus dem Gesetzentwurf aus dem Digitalministerium hervor, den wir veröffentlichen. netzpolitik.org/2025/referen...

1/Great conversation w/ Daniel Kurtz-Phelan @foreignaffairs.com on the weaponization of the world economy. As the economic weapon proliferations, is the US or the world ready? Not if you decapitate the expertise needed to navigate this new world. www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/ris...

New paper on a new topic in @policyr.bsky.social I analyse the EU’s AI Act and its place in the global governance of the AI. Examining the economy of AI + the contents of the Act, I conclude that expecting a ‘Brussels effect’ is neither apt nor useful. …. policyreview.info/articles/ana...

Remember: This is not about regulation. It is about the future of democracy and national security in Europe. Viewing it as a deal/regulatory tradeoff will not end well. www.ft.com/content/5820...

🌍 Looking for summer reading? Explore our Citizenship Lit Database for the latest research ⚡ From non-resident citizens’ vote choice in plebiscites, to refugees paths to naturalisation in Germany, citizenship trials in India, postcolonial legacies in the Caribbean & more 📖: tinyurl.com/5n7pr623

Digital Constitutionalism has become a widespread analytical framework and linguistic toolbox for studying digitization, particularly in Europe. In the recently published Oxford Handbook on Digital Constitutionalism, I reflect on some of its discursive continuities with...

The most inspiring read of my summer. James Bridle’s Ways of Being is a beautiful and thought-provoking essay on the entanglement of humans, nature and technologies, and ideas about what intelligence is and how to build ”smart” machines. #STS #AI

Just want to give props to Open House New York, which has been organizing themed city-wide scavenger hunts — focusing on water infrastructure, public works, and libraries — for the past several years! ohny.org/project/scav...

Incredible scenes as the University of Warwick refuses to answer an FOI on the cost of an advertorial photo feature on their chief marketing officer in Vogue Singapore because it is a 'trade secret' www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/cost...

The University of Michigan is now claiming that students have an ‘ethical responsibility’ to use AI.

Any EU media policy nerds flying this sky?

📱@eui-law.bsky.social‬ researcher Michael Fitzgerald unpacks the gap between EU tech regulations and how platforms actually respond. By analysing cases involving Facebook and YouTube, his research shows why regulating Big Tech is so complex & where solutions might lie. ⚖️ https://loom.ly/VXbI9X0

STS. You’re talking about STS. Small but mighty. Also, a lot of modern media studies.

5. Today I read a paper by @sabinaleonelli.bsky.social and Alexander Mussgnug that I think illustrates this point perfectly. philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24891/1/Phil...

1. The philosophy of science sometimes gets an unearned reputation as a purely academic exercise that offers little by way of concrete tools for advancing research. This is wrong. And today, as we grapple with how AI is changing the nature of scientific activity, it's desperately wrong.

A thread on transcription and AI. One reason I don't use AI to transcribe (besides the fact that AI is hugely detrimental to the environment & is coming for our jobs) is that it can't tell the difference between original documents & new notes added by staff members to whom documents were sent. 🗃️ 1/?

"Critical data would become inaccessible, websites would go dark, and essential state services like hospital IT systems would be thrown into chaos," says Robin Berjon, a digital governance specialist who advises EU policymakers. www.bbc.com/news/article...

1/Just back from Europe and exactly this is the problem -- no strategy. Europe keeps letting the US set the terms on Ukraine/Trade. Without a clear alternative and changing facts on the ground Europe will keep getting rolled. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/16/w...

All reports in this thread are from the collections of Northwestern University's Transportation Library. Materials we've digitized can generally be found in HathiTrust. Learn more and search our catalog here: www.library.northwestern.edu/libraries-co...

Deutschland hat die EU-Richtlinie zur Cybersicherheit nicht umgesetzt, obwohl die Frist längst verstrichen ist. Vor zwei Wochen hat das Bundeskabinett ein Gesetz auf den Weg gebracht. Der Entwurf hat jedoch erheblichen Nachbesserungsbedarf, zum Beispiel beim staatlichen Umgang mit Sicherheitslücken.

3 💡 conclusions from this @timeshighered.bsky.social piece based on @altmetric.com data: 1️⃣ Academic twitter is dead 2️⃣ Bluesky is the most promising alternative 3️⃣ There is a lot of underused 🦋 potential with many dormant (institutional) accounts #academicsky www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

I agree with several parts of this (and parts resonate with our Faculty paper), but it doesn’t address the elephant in the room: how to stop AI undermining the process of acquiring the foundational skills, particularly the knowledge needed to allow critique, for many of the aspirations in this blog.

We have written about this here in relation to the OSA and DSA in work led by @petroster.bsky.social dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

"People can go to the company’s website to request that the company “Do Not Sell” their personal data or to invoke their “Right to Delete” it — but they would have had trouble finding the form, since it contained code excluding it from search results" themarkup.org/privacy/2025...

Those of us in STEM must vocally affirm that the humanities are our allies, and no department is expendable. Arguing we can survive by cutting whole disciplines isn’t just inhumane, it’s nonsensical. The humanities tell us why we’re here in the first place, and what to do about it! This isn’t hard!

"A living visual archive on cybernetics in the expanded field. Browse and contribute images of all kinds: diagrams, schematics, photos, graphic elements, and other visual fragments."

The Internet was once a shining beacon of potential and opportunity. Then it was destroyed. My latest newsletter is over 10,000 words about how it happened, who's responsible, and how we can build a better, fairer Internet. whatwelost.substack.com/p/how-the-in...

So you may wonder, why read 100 pages about economic security history? My new Article is about resource competition, power, and trade multilateralism through the analytic lens of the Cold War. It is broken up into four Parts. I'll use this 🧵 to explain the key findings from each.

This is a fabulous response by my colleague Kevin Munger to "that" Economist piece about the EUI. Perhaps @spignal.bsky.social and @jhooper.bsky.social might be interested! kevinmunger.substack.com/p/i-guess-th...

"We must protect and cultivate the ecosystem of human knowledge" is such a bleak sentence

Interesting work from Turing, adding to the growing evidence that significant performance gains — and possibly real-world utility — can still be gleaned from smaller and previous-generation foundation models www.turing.ac.uk/blog/why-we-...

an interesting, contrarian response to "phones killed attention" arguments. the nut is that these complaints come from a class who are themselves most distracted (journalists, academics, etc) and who equate loss of attention to *their* work with loss more generally www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

💭 The Road to a #PressFreedomAICommons 💭 We are joining forces with @globalfreemedia.bsky.social to make Public Interest AI differently and affect the historical moment we are going through. 👉🏾 Our initial thoughts by @avilarenata.bsky.social & Scott Griffen: buff.ly/MlcZ3Iq

Problem's going to keep getting worse, McKinsey suggests investing in power infrastructure companies because data centers will grow from 5.2% of total US power demand to 11.7% in 2030. All of this while Republicans are wrecking our wind and solar power sectors. www.mckinsey.com/industries/p...

Breaking: the court ruling in Wikipedia's legal challenge to the Online Safety Act categorisation regime has just been handed down. The court dismissed Wikipedia's challenge. This is bad. This is very bad. wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/08...