Yiannis Kalaitzis

War is not only the threat of violence. It is the collapse of moral and political order: a moment when the rules of coexistence fall apart, laws twist into something else, and human life loses its value, or takes on a new one.

aeon.co/essays/it-is...

"a technology that emerged against an ongoing denial of collective trauma, adapted to a historic moment in ways that persist beyond it"

The EU promised to lead on regulating artificial intelligence. Now it’s hitting pause. Under pressure from the U.S. and tech companies, the EU is backing away from plans to rein in highly risky technologies.

While the regulatory procedures based on laws are always helpful, it is obvious, once again, that the main aspects of the digital sphere (platforms, data, AI etc.) are political issues, because they have to do with power and the inscriptions of it. So, we need political -not legal- answers to them.

"So, if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump, it’s how we stop the next one."

So far so good mr. Mamdani...

"create “public media centers”—publicly-owned hubs in every community federally guaranteed but locally governed+democratically operated. establish new anchor institutions universally available to everyone—not unlike the ideal version of public schools+libraries."

publici.ucimc.org/2025/10/the-...

Researching Christopher Lasch. What impresses me today more than the contents, however, is his stylistic ability to connect widely different phenomena without sounding unhinged. If I talk about Freud, disaster movies, workplace culture and mass media on a single page, people would be concerned.

Harold Rosenberg exhorted artists to take action and resist cliché | Aeon Essays Throughout decades of writing, Harold Rosenberg exhorted artists to resist cliché and conformity and instead take action

Arendt argues that political life, like aesthetics, is characterised by an innate, albeit now widely ignored, human need for self-display through performances that are not labour, or routine, or ritual, but what she, following Rosenberg, called ‘action’.

aeon.co/essays/harol...

The importance of being truthful to yourself in politics or, why people like Trump succeed in persuading people to vote for them.

"A lie creates the immediate impression that one believes something that happens to be false, but that does not mean that one is not what one seems... Hypocrisy turns on questions of character rather than simply coincidence with the truth."

- David Runciman

Introducing the News Atom: a metadata blueprint for journalism in the age of AI Our Indian Fellow Sannuta Raghu presents the News Atom, a concept to wrap each sentence in a news story with metadata about what type of knowledge it contains, if and how it was changed, how it connec...

"Could [journalism] shape the foreground [of AI content] as the sensemaking layer that anchors trust? The News Atom is a metadata blueprint designed to respond to this question."

Read @sannuta-raghu.bsky.social here. She is an inspiration. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/introducing-...

The AI valuation bubble is now getting silly | Nils Pratley The broad parallels are genuinely close to the madness of the late-1990s dotcom bubble

Funny when people thing that we are talking about another sector of the economy and not for an inscription in our cultural paradigm. In other words, it's not so much about the entities behind the digital accelerated sphere, it is about the dominant ideology driving them on.

👀

Zizek is smiling somewhere in the background...

The Story of Shit, book by Midas Dekkers A wonderfully wry, erudite and altogether charming investigation into the most rarely discussed of bodily functions: defecation.

in case this helps
www.textpublishing.com.au/books/the-st...

YouTube video by Max Richter Max Richter - The Departure (Official Audio)

Sometimes you need a departure from reality in order to fully grasp its burden.

Political bias on TikTok and X in Germany TikTok and X recommend pro-AfD content to non-partisan users ahead of the German elections

What is happening when different accounts follow different political parties (in Germany, before the recent elections) and then leave the algorithms to fill the rest of the feed? AfD get's promoted overwhelmingly (in Tik Tok and X), despite the initial preference of the user...

Oh, that's a very interesting read, indeed! I am grateful for that, thank you!

Connective Action and the Rise of the Far-Right: Platforms, Politics, and the Crisis of Democracy Abstract. This volume introduces a “connection action” framework for explaining democratic backsliding. We bring together a mostly political science compar

This was a fascinating read. You might find it interesting, too.

academic.oup.com/book/60493?l...

What Is Political Violence? - Boston Review Pundits and politicians conceal the truth: it’s all around us, perpetrated by our political system itself.

Excellent elaboration by @eric-reinhart.com on what counts as « violence » from anthropological, philosophical and psychoanalytic angles.

“What counts as “violence,” and what counts as “order,” are always political determinations made by those in power”

www.bostonreview.net/articles/wha...

US cash turned Tommy Robinson into the poster boy of UK far right An American tech billionaire was instrumental in funding the far-right figure’s rise to stardom – and even paid for his new set of teeth

Follow the money...

FOLD IT IN, DAVID.

Albania PM’s AI-generated “minister” becomes cause of high tensions and chaos in Parliament (Video) Tirana, 18 September 2025, dtt-net.com - Albania parliamentary majority today in a tense session adopted government’s program without debate amid protest of opposition over AI-generated new “member” o...

It's just the beginning.

"After centuries in which visionaries of all stripes dreamed of what humanity might achieve together, the only indubitable 'progressive' goal that humanity can pursue today, in view of ecological and other threats, is to simply 𝑠𝑢𝑟𝑣𝑖𝑣𝑒."

- Against Progress
Slavoj Zizek

Albania appoints world’s first AI-made minister Diella, who is powered by artificial intelligence, will handle public procurement.

If something goes wrong it would be a technical and not political issue I suppose...

Be aware of Anton!

Seeing Like a Platform Quickly and easily listen to The Tech Policy Press Podcast for free!

And a great discussion.

player.captivate.fm/episode/6295...

Home On the rise of a digital modernity

Amazing book, the title of which hints at the book written by James C. Scott "Seeing like a State". It points to a new epistemology of our era, mapping the ways that power and society interact through and within the digital field. It's open access!

- Seeing like a platform
P.Tornberg, J.Uitermark

The AI paradox.

If an AI program has to spot when a cultural creation (photograph, article etc.) is an AI product or not, what signifies AI's advance, its successful mission or its failure?

#paradox #AI

Your point broadens my argument, we need a public space where we can have in-depth conversations, not only brief messages by a few influencers that dominate the flow.

I've read a lot of posts the last days insisting that Bluesky is the main social media for academics nowadays. The problem, in my view, is that we still don't have something equivalent to the old mailing lists, with a more conversational approach, apt to the opportunities of a today's platform.