Der Faschist Peter Thiel, der die Demokratie offen ablehnt, erhält den Axel Springer Award. Und das soll auch ein Zeichen für Meinungsfreiheit und offene Debatten sein. Noch Fragen? www.welt.de/wirtschaft/a...

In eigener Sache: Peter Thiel erhält den Axel Springer Award 2026 - WELT

Unternehmer und Investor Peter Thiel ist der diesjährige Preisträger des Axel Springer Awards. Die Auszeichnung soll auch ein Zeichen für Meinungsfreiheit und offene Debatten sein.

welt.de

Just out! My introduction to a new special issue in @sciasculture.bsky.social on "Tech Oligarchy" - go check it out and the papers in the special issue (under "Latest" articles) #techoligarchy #assetization #techbro #bigtech www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Tech oligarchy

Published in Science as Culture (Ahead of Print, 2026)

tandfonline.com

💥 New piece in Big Data & Society. Towards a new paradigm of “datafied development”: Epistemic, infrastructural, economic, and geopolitical domains. By Mohammad Amir Anwar, Nanna Thylstrup, Julian Posada and I journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Ob ihr es «bürgerlicher Autoritarismus» oder «radikalisierter Konservatismus» oder «faschistische Politik» nennt, ist mir eigentlich egal, die Frage ist doch, was man dagegen tun kann www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

EU accused of creating ICE-style immigration enforcement system

Officials say law will improve migration management by allowing more deportations of undocumented people

theguardian.com

This Anthropic/White House spat is funny. Anthropic spent months declaring that its model is so powerful at finding bugs it threatens the world's digital infrastructure. The WH says OK it's banned then Now Anthropic and its allies have to say actually you know it isn't "uniquely good" at that stuff

✨ New in Big Data & Society ✨ “Agents of erasure: Following the deletion of public sector data through its value chain” by @frederikschade.bsky.social. 🔓: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... #personaldata #deletion #valuechain #publicadministration

New from 404 Media: we've seen internal documents that show Microsoft is explicitly planning to "make people addicted" to its new AI assistant 'Scout' which the company just announced. It is a clear goal according to the documents, with addiction being the first phase www.404media.co/microsoft-wa...

Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to its New AI Assistant, Internal Documents Reveal

Planning documents for "Scout" say the plan is to "make people addicted" to the tool before adding new features.

404media.co

If you 👍 the Pope's recent Encyclical, you'll 😍 our new paper, shifting the conversation about "ethics" to one about political economy. Catch it here in pre-print before its release next month! #academicsky

danah boyd@zephoria.bsky.social · 2mo ago

In "Reckoning with the Political Economy of AI," @cyberlyra.bsky.social, Ben Shestakofsky, Alex Taylor, and I are particularly keen to understand how the project of AI involves numerous "decoys" that misdirect critics' attention, undermining efforts to hold AI to account. arxiv.org/abs/2604.16106

Rich Sutton warned that computational scale ultimately outperforms human expertise. Does his "bitter lesson" hold true when reproducing our own custom methods with LLMs? We find: the bitter lesson is sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter, and sometimes inapplicable. deep-culture.org/the-occasion...

🚨 New piece “Governing by dismantling: tech oligarchy and the stifling of public data infrastructure“ Together with Bokar N’Diaye, @ktmac.bsky.social, @nannathylstrup.bsky.social, and @dmuravyov.bsky.social, we trace how tech oligarchs access, merge, and dismantle public data infrastructures. 👇

Science as Culture@sciasculture.bsky.social · 3mo ago

📢 NEW ARTICLE JUST OUT! "Governing by dismantling: tech oligarchy and the stifling of public data infrastructure," by @louravn.bsky.social, Bokar N'Diaye, Katie Mackinnon, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, and @dmuravyov.bsky.social is another addition to our Forum on Tech Oligarchy 🔗 doi.org/10.1080/0950...

The backlash to revelations of sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners aims to raise the cost of speaking out | Yuli Novak

The backlash to revelations of sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners aims to raise the cost of speaking out | Yuli Novak

Israel’s response to recent New York Times reporting detailing the horrific sexual violence inflicted on detainees seeks to silence those who assert the basic fact of Palestinian humanity

theguardian.com

The world’s "safest" AI provider now runs on the world’s dirtiest data centre: Musk’s Colossus. Powered by 35 methane generators, most unauthorised. A massive slap in the face to locals - led by @keshaunpearson.bsky.social & co - and to all those who thought Claude was the responsible choice 🙄🤢

Ketan Joshi@ketanjoshi.co · 3mo ago

We tried to warn you about Anthropic. Now they're using xAI's ultra-polluting community-killing nightmare data centre to power your toxic claude relationship All the new paid subs from @rutgerbregman.com and @quitgpt.bsky.social's campaign, now powered by Musk 🫠 www.anthropic.com/news/higher-...

Mich stört's eigentlich nicht, wenn die Faschisierungsthese als «linksradikal» bezeichnet wird, aber doch, wenn man glaubt, sie dadurch schon entkräftet zu haben. Linksradikale haben aus guten Gründen ein geschärftes Sensorium für Faschisierungsprozesse, gehören sie doch zu ihren ersten Opfern 1/

Publication alert! New article out in Big Data & Society on digital phantoms and synthetic data in medical physics. We explore the making of digital reference objects for human bodies and how they are used in construction of ground truths, as known, & even perfect truths. doi.org/10.1177/2053...

Digital phantoms in medical research: Synthetic data and the pursuit of ground truth - Charlotte Högberg, Peter Winter, 2026

Digital phantoms are virtual representations of the human body used in medical research to test equipment, train medical professionals and develop or validate a...

doi.org

«Dass er zur Erstellung der Bilder auch noch Elon Musks energiefressenden und grundwassersaugenden Bildgenerator ‹Grok› nutzt, stört ihn nicht. Das aber offenbart … ein mangelndes Bewusstsein für die ideologische Ausrichtung solcher KI-generierter Bilder mit ihrem Hang zur Retro-Nostalgie …» 🎁

Memes für grüne Energie: Social-Media-Kampagne „Heimatstrom“

Mit KI-Bildern in faschistischer Ästhetik werben linke Influencer für grünen Strom. Sie wollen die Mitte der Gesellschaft erreichen. Aber zu welchem Preis?

faz.net

What’s the difference between latent space, vector space, feature space, and embedding space? @louravn.bsky.social spelled it out for you in this short blog post deep-culture.org/whats-the-di...

Out in July! "School of the South: The Colonial Roots of French Theory". More details & pre-orders here: www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?b... @politybooks.bsky.social

School of the South: The Colonial Roots of FrenchTheory

School of the South: The Colonial Roots of FrenchTheory, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Jean-François Lyotard, Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière: the...

politybooks.com

🚨 CfP: SI on "Boundaries, boundary concepts, and datafication" in Digital Culture & Society 🚨 ℹ️ Together with Yana Boeva (@dropsmops.bsky.social) and Sarah R. Davies, we invite proposals to our SI. See here for more details: www.sowi.uni-stuttgart.de/abteilungen/... #boundaryconcepts #STS

Our “Temporalities of AI” symposium starts tomorrow in Rome, and will be free to stream over Zoom on Friday, Monday, and Tuesday. Here’s more info & the schedule! www.biblhertz.it/events/45218...

Temporalities of AI

What are the temporalities of neural networks? How do machines encode time, and how do they structure our experience of time? What are the consequences of a neural network’s attempt to simulate tempor...

biblhertz.it

As OpenAI makes the same sort of restricted release for 5.5, I think it’s important to remember that what David is saying here about evading distillation could be the really significant shift — even if it’s also true that these systems find a lot of vulnerabilities in code.

David Crawshaw@crawshaw.io · 4mo ago

Prediction: Glasswing is mostly misdirection. I am sure it is better than and thus finds more security bugs than Opus. But Opus was the change in kind. This is marketing cover for fact that top-end models are now gated by enterprise agreements and no longer available to small labs to distill.

«Beide Spitzenkandidaten, Cem Özdemir von den Grünen und Manuel Hagel von der CDU, wollen Palantir-artige Datenanalysen. Nur will Özdemir aufgrund ethischer Bedenken nicht die Original-Software aus den USA nutzen, sondern lieber mit Partnern aus Europa eine Alternative entwickeln.»

Verhaltensscanner und Palantir: Was das Wahlergebnis in Baden-Württemberg sicherheitspolitisch bedeutet

Das baden-württembergische Landtagswahlergebnis gibt der grün-schwarzen Koalition freie Hand für ihre Überwachungspläne. Geht es nach den Spitzenpolitikern, kann bald jedes Dorf videoüberwacht werden,...

netzpolitik.org

Just Published: 'The Infrastructural Unconscious: Do Computers Dream of Carbo-Silico Pipelines?' in "Reckoning with Everything: The Becoming-Environmental of Computing" edited by Bernhard Siegert and Benedikt Merkle, and published by @mesonpress.bsky.social .

Agreed. substack.com/@rileysociol...

Dylan Riley (@rileysociology)

I may be a bit late to the game on this, but I saw something today that alarmed me. Two professors on line were essentially boasting about how they use AI to make decisions about what constitutes a “s...

substack.com

✨ We’re excited to share the first articles from AI & ARCHIVES — a special issue of the new journal Cambridge Forum on AI: Culture and Society (Cambridge University Press). www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

👇

Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal@ranjodhdhaliwal.com · 7mo ago

Just published: "A few notes on the scalar foundations of foundation models," a position paper in which I discuss the need for rejecting large-scale vague AI, and talk about fascination as a technological operation. Available open-access at doi.org/10.1017/cfc.... .

✨Welcoming Fabian Offer for the next #CriticalAI Seminar (online) on his upcoming book "Vector Media" on January 13, 2026 5:30-7 PM (Amsterdam)✨ The talk presents a new history and theory of the vector space in contemporary #AI systems 🗓️ Register here: www.create.humanities.uva.nl/events/2-cri...

#2 Critical AI Seminar Series: Vector Media

January 13, 17:30-19:00 (CEST): Vector Media This talk presents a new history and theory of the vector space in contemporary artificial intelligence systems. I will argue that the inevitable bias of s...

create.humanities.uva.nl

CfP ✨Consider submitting to this fantastic panel on Deep Learning and Culture at the STS NL Conference ✨ Organised by @louravn.bsky.social @annaschjoett.bsky.social Dasha Simons, Paula Helm and Tobias Blanke (@d-eepculture.bsky.social)

Louis Ravn@louravn.bsky.social · 8mo ago

🚨 Call for presentations: “Deep Learning and Culture” panel 🔍 We're organizing a panel on “Deep Learning and Culture” at the STS NL Conference (Uni of Twente, 17-19 April 2026). 📮 Please submit your abstract here: www.utwente.nl/en/bms/sts-n.... Deadline: 07 Jan. 2026. See you there :)

❗ We are urgently looking for a new Lecturer in Cultural Data & AI at the University of Amsterdam: werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies... The deadline for applying is very soon: Jan 4th. You’ll work with @tpoell.bsky.social, @riederb.bsky.social, @dluitse.bsky.social, @louravn.bsky.social, me, & more

I have a new paper out in @jhokjournal.bsky.social - "Loss: A notion of error in machine learning." It attempts to draw some wider historical comparisons than are perhaps usual. I would love to know what you think. journalhistoryknowledge.org/article/view...