Robin Berjon

We all know that the GDPR et al. aren't working great. Alas, the current proposals to fix that — in what EU jargon calls an "omnibus" — make it way worse. This counter-proposal is: better for people, simpler for businesses, *much* stronger on security, competition, sovereignty, and online safety. 🧵

Very useful insights here. The bit about how everyone thinks they’re the comms expert hero is painfully familiar. I’d say all this is also in tension with investing resources in our own digital infrastructure, where we wouldn’t need to do all this. Unfortunately, an overlooked long-term strategy.

(I swear this isn’t going to be a hype thread for my own book. But, also, here’s the preorder link): bookshop.org/p/books/vapo...

We are thrilled to have helped @waag.org launch oso.social Oso is a Dutch language social media platform built on the AT Protocol, and a demonstration of what is possible with an open, decentralized tech stack, build on shared code and infrastructure on @eurosky.social

I’m not a political journalist, so was gladly surprised at the community I found here last night. To Americans anxious about the upcoming elections, a key thing we learned in Brazil that might help you: DO NOT engage with the far-right online. Don’t share rage bait. Amplify your people. Ignore them.

People don’t understand why I keep noting that BlueSky is not a bubble, it is a counterpublic. It serves its own organizational function: you can see in realtime in January 2025, on multiple types of social media, shouting that an executive order is instruction to an agency. This one stuck.

Trending in Slovakia today:

Samwise Gamgee said it perfectly.

What's striking to me are the rules of engagement and the methodology of action here, which more or less is predicated on burying liberal delusions about "debate" or the "marketplace of ideas". The rules were ultimately very simple: amplify your own message and suppress your opponent's.

Lessons from our siblings in Brazil.

The mobilization itself was already not something I ever expected to see, but to actually win? Hell, to double the winning margin from the 2022 runoff? Genuinely surreal. Maybe child raping billionaires *don't* have to run the world with a shit-eating grin. Maybe that can stop.

fixed it ✌🏼

🇧🇷 ✊🏻 🇷🇸 ✊🏻 Keep it going!

I remain a chronological feed guy, but I do regularly switch to fu to see things surfaced to me, and it's really good.

A month ago, I found myself in the unexpected position of founding an AI startup. Today, the Inference Co-op adopted its first real governance charter. We can't make AI good, but we can own our choices, and make them together. Want to join? https://inference.coop

So excited about the news and events sections of oso.social. Check it out!

We're shipping CoPE-B-S1, an open-weight decision model tuned for safety use cases. It's a significant step forward for our CoPE family of models in a few ways. A thread: blog.zentropi.ai/meet-cope-b-...

The 17yo doing unintentional discourse: "Beans on toast is essentially a taco."

How I arrived on @mu.social

In the age of AI, how can a platform know whether an account belongs to a real human, not a bot or AI agent? Should every platform have to verify this itself, collecting personal data? At #Trefdag26, @robin.berjon.com and I demonstrated a different model that separates the responsibilities:

Arc is on the shortlist for 'company with the dumbest version of ai psychosis' award imo, killing off their own beloved product to make a much worse version of the same thing but with ai arc.net

🇫🇮 Finns are reading news from the USA and drawing correct conclusions.

"We no longer have America as an ally on climate," EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra tells the Europa Power conference in Strasbourg. It's not every day you hear such an acknowledgement from the 🇪🇺Commission.

I'll admit that I've never been impressed by his for the, either in the philosophy of physics or in politics. Still, this is a level of cooked brain I would nothave imagined.

oh no

Live on stage #Trefdag26. @david.athumi.eu and @robin.berjon.com

Today is #Trefdag26. Looking forward to the keynote of @robin.berjon.com and @david.athumi.eu about Identity Verification. Afterwards, come to the booth of @athumi.eu to talk about it and test it!

Not that I want to get rid of http, but anyone else notice we could create a parallel web using webtil.es and a browser extension that turns records into ways to surface webtiles that read them and basically pages and apps live as records and read records and everything is local first & no servers?

Everyone's commenting on how vacuous and sloppy the piece is (which it is), but why does it exist? None of the involved need a shitty @foreignaffairs.com article for their careers. This is the piece I'd place if I were preparing for an AI bailout: you need it for empire reasons.

Not everyone seems to realize that the origin of the machine view of life is not scientific at all. It dates from the 17th century (Descartes) and it's the expression of a monotheist view opposing pagan views of nature. A living being is like a perfect machine made by God, not an autonomous being.

So Anthropic lost $80billion in six months. How insane is that?. Well it makes it the fifth biggest company loss in history. In only six months. It’s also bigger than the Irish bank bailout €64billion.

Trump "was never going to support Ukraine, and was going to take the Russian side; the signs were all there," former US General Ben Hodges tells @shonamurray.bsky.social. "What he has done to Ukraine was entirely predictable."

In this spirit, the DMA must be extended to social media. The European social media industry has been asking for this for the longest time. We know that we can take this market by storm if it is ever opened up to competition and freedom of movement.

Given perfect storm of war, inflation, interest rate hikes, soaring energy and food prices, we must be prepared for an extended period of global political instability. Thread

So much of the politics we have consists in selling the future to protect the past, and then acting all shocked when the future riots.

As Merz and Macron find an agreement to further water down EU emission regulations for cars, I go back to these words, from a peer-reviewed study into the reasons why China overtook Europe on clean tech.

Is there a good book on the 1848 revolutions that I should read?

At dasl.ing, we work at the forefront of next-generation technology for democratic networks and highly-colourful websites. Many said we couldn't push the frontier any further. But we worked hard and @mosh.bsky.social found a breakthrough to make the site even more colourful. Tell us you love it!

@flo-bit.dev Have you considered event series for atmo.rsvp?

We Tricked you: The answer is just 18 users! @wsocial.eu says users must be verified before posting, yet 18 of the top 25 posters aren't verified and created half of all content on W (+250k posts). Find out which VIPs can post on #WSocial without verification! #WSocialFacts #cloWned 🤡 #Wned

This is where we are after two years of Europeans groveling to Trump. Europe has to change tack and start putting serious pressure on the US and on Putin. The US cannot both be a dominant NATO member and side with Putin. Europe has leverage, it should use it.

If Trump sides with Putin, I don't think that Europe has a choice other than to openly enter the conflict. Do we? If Ukraine falls, there's no way Putin stops there.

The playbook used for W Social is the same as for "We Don't Have Time": - Pick a hot issue (climate, sovereignty) - Raise mostly from a lot of smaller investors (who aren't so technically literate and won't perform serious diligence) - Use that network to look big - Use others' fame - Lie, lie, lie