Putting human agency back into technology. Brussels, 🇪🇺. • tech, governance, science, politics, philosophy, infrastructure, cats, terrible puns • blog: https://berjon.com/ • fmr W3C, NYT, ScienceAI, Protocol Labs • he/him/Ishmael • Signal robin.77
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The architectural consideration that dominates ChromeOS is how to cram as many Google OKRs down your throat without the device crashing — I tried it extensively, I'm intensely unimpressed. I do agree that an web-like OS like FxOS still makes sense. It may yet happen!
I don't think people understand quite well enough that browsers are *hard*. If you want to get a sense of how hard, try Mary's excellent in-depth coverage of one small issue.
☠️Europe has got to wake up and do better. News and arts depend on advertising. This sector is worth *billions* to Europe's economy, and Google has drained the value from it for years. A fine can't prise open the market. To balk even at that? Speeches about sovereignty are fine words until we act.
The European Commission cannot be allowed to get away with its pre-ordained, broken process to hire Europe's most important data protection official. We will pull on every lever we can to protect Europe's ability to defend privacy and the rule of law. 👊
I approve!
You're my first subscriber!
For those who are into that sort of thing, you can now subscribe to my blog (berjon.com) by email. Just click on "subscribe" at the top right. It's just notifications when I post, which isn't often. RSS/Atom are as always available just by pointing your feed client to the site.
I'm happy to announce that today is my first day at the #IPFS Foundation. I'll be working on tooling, #DASL, #IPLD and related tech like #ATProto. With a focus on geo. So I'm doing more #geospatial things again. Stay tuned #FOSS4G.
I mean, it's not rare that my evening routine would be: 1) challenging non-fiction, 2) lighter non-fiction, 3) fiction. So depending on the kind of fiction I can really arrange to get to that point with very limited brain power left :)
Ah, crap, I already have vol 3 :-/
"Broken Angels" by Richard Morgan Less fun than the first one I thought, but still fun in its violent, cybernoirish kind of way.
Now you've gone and made me like Hegel...
And they've grown in scope and use like wildfires (as per Underground Empire), I'd be surprised if there hadn't been an impact. Rumours of OFAC being used against DSA makes it timely too.
I don't have a case in mind but wondering if there might have been speech impacts from OFAC sanctions?
This came to me in a vision
We must expect more strategic thinking of one another in our global fight for democracy, as exemplified here for our American friends in their new civil war.
Soon as I get the money...
Shot / chaser. I struggle to see how these can be the same person. This - should it come to pass - will be (rightly) seen by challenger tech (and Big Tech) as the very capitulation the Commissioner just said Europe could not accept. Let us all hope Reuters is wrong!! www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...
Err, that The Register? The Register is an unprincipled, insanely unprofessional rag. I struggle to find this anything other than on brand, tbh.
"The sources said Ribera wants to focus on getting companies to end anti-competitive practices rather than punish them." www.reuters.com/legal/litiga... False dichotomy... If confirmed, it'll show that @teresaribera.ec.europa.eu's words in the FT about not capitulating were just empty interference.
It's not *all* good, even though I tend to not include things I didn't like rather than give a bad review. If you have questions, happy to help of course!
I never looked at potatoes quite the same.
Thank you! If they're good for even just one person out there, then I'm happy :)
I thought it worked pretty well up to the point they finish the escape from Earth. Then entire second half of the book where they return can be skipped.
The Martian was great though!
"In Praise of Floods" by James C. Scott. This might not be another SLAS or Against The Grain but it's definitely a James C. Scott, giving voice to the complex vernacular urbanism of an ecosystem. A voice we'll miss for a long time, to read with pleasure.
"In Praise of Floods" by James C. Scott. This might not be another SLAS or Against The Grain but it's definitely a James C. Scott, giving voice to the complex vernacular urbanism of an ecosystem. A voice we'll miss for a long time, to read with pleasure.
"Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union allows for the possibility of suspending European Union (EU) membership rights (such as voting rights in the Council of the European Union) if a country seriously and persistently breaches the principles on which the EU is founded..."
What people don't yet understand — what I am just coming to understand — is that Trump is not acting irrationally on climate & energy to "own the libs." Trump (and the GOP) are protecting the trillions of assets held by their fossil-fuel cronies, which would be utterly devalued if we decarbonized.
"Trump's objective—which is aligned with the interests of certain US technology companies—is to implement regime change in Europe." — @alexandrageese.bsky.social Alexandra is, of course, entirely right — and it's high time to push back. www.techpolicy.press/europe-canno...
Yes, much of Ink & Switch's work is 😁
Ha, indeed! That's close to the argument in berjon.com/infrastructu...
This is all correct, and yet I would contend that there is a specific nature to digital technology that pertains to the opacity and fluidity with which its operator can shape it.
Ooh, thanks, I'll have to watch that.
Well, that's where digital makes things complicated. You do need jurisdictional infrastructure but it also need interoperability. So you can't escape larger-scale forms of governance.
I know, I know what you mean :) You're not wrong! But also, short metonyms can be useful.
It did, it's just that the 90s went all the way to ~2016.
RTFT: "Europe exports data and imports products refined from it, and we build our society on foreign-controlled infrastructure that sets terms for our laws and governance. Sounds familiar? Our friends in the global majority can see it from miles away: .. neocolonialism."
It's not an American habit to know that the built environment has governance properties and influences institutional arrangements (formal or informal) in ways that enable and constrain laws. Working with the fact that artefacts have politics isn't to be against other forms of governance too.
THAT WAS A LOT MORE ACCURATE DORIAN
I would say that "sceptical" is a very charitable position :)
And basically all of the tech industrial strategy out of the EC is "let's make another SAP!"
I honestly think it's not that much a problem of capital. A lot of change could be brought around with not that much money, and a lot of it would be for public infrastructure — such that startups would then need even less capital.
And they're not ready for that. The era has changed. This started before Trump I even, even though that and Brexit were the obvious events. But there's no going back to the international global rules-based order that they are comfortable operating in.
My read (which of course could be wrong) isn't so much that the problem is US-centric as it is misunderstanding the geopolitical shift. If they somehow manage to avoid the worst from Trump and if the US somehow returns to normal, the geopolitics will still have irretrievably changed.
Not all information technology! Books are pretty cool and don't do that either!
"Tech isn't about innovation, it's about power and networking chokepoints for power." Strong thread below (on an interesting FT opinion piece) And all very aligned with e.g. Nieborg & Poell's interesting research on institutional platform power journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Oooooh, I didn't have that one, thank you!
But a protocol like AT has the right kind of properties (in a way that AP does not) to create unbundled governance and to support democratic systems. You also need infrastructure and funding. But protocols are key to eliminating chokepoints and integrating unbundled governance.
I really don't think he is. I would say it's an incomplete position (not because Mike's wrong but because you can't fit a whole book in a single article). It's not just any protocols and not just with any architectural properties. Some protocols are easier to capture and harder to govern.
Yes! I mean, it's not like they don't say it out loud: www.wsj.com/articles/pet... If you look at OKRs at the tech monopolies, which drive all internal incentives, they're very commonly moat-oriented (even if they might not be as explicit as Thiel).
It is! But beyond a raison d'être I think it's also a raison de l'utiliser, bordel.
Right, that's a very cool approach, but things get trickier when you need interactivity and potentially arbitrary HTML. You *do not* want to allow arbitrary embedding, you want to be super careful with JS, etc.
I also think that fragmentation is overstated as an issue. It's certainly true that greater integration would help a lot with some things, but when I talk to the people building digital infra in India, they have to deal with a fragmented space too and it hasn't stopped them.
Exactly! My hope is that by repeating these things eventually something will coalesce…
We still have the capacity to turn this around, a lot of it actually. But for that to happen, we need leadership whose understanding of reality has moved on from watching reruns of The West Wing. It's not clear that we have it.
Our friends in the global majority can see it from miles away: the dynamics that best capture Europe's position today are those of neocolonialism. The end state isn't to become a formal colony but having to choose who to be a client state of.
The idea that we'd could somehow balance out tech markets by becoming good at something new has no path to success. Europe exports data and imports products refined from it, and we build our society on foreign-controlled infrastructure that sets terms for our laws and governance. Sounds familiar?
Tech isn't about innovation, it's about power and networking chokepoints for power. You can innovate all you want, if you don't control or neutralise existing chokepoints your innovation will almost certainly fail to garner any real market success. Silicon Valley is about moats not research.
You can read it in how they talk about AI. In their minds, competition in the rest of tech is lost for Europe but that's OK because Europe can gain a comparative advantage in a new disruptive space — AI — by spray-and-pray funding for innovation. Small problem: that world doesn't exist anymore.
Abe puts his finger on a key issue: the EU is built for a globalised world that simply no longer exists. You see it in the tech strategy of Commission leaders whose brains haven't yet left the Long 90s: their approach makes sense if you believe in innovation and comparative advantage.
The Brussels Defect: "the faith that global politics is all about markets, multilateralism and economic regulation." Oof. As brutal as it is true. 🧵
You're not wrong, too much of the European private sector is telco like in its approach to business. Hopeless, zero vision. But there are many great SMEs that mostly need a way to coordinate change.
Are you referring to a specific Eurostack report? One of them is very focused on open source but the others are more about infrastructure. But either way I don't think that those reports should be detailed. The details should come from verticals, primarily.
…a prototype for that part. Happy to share or discuss!
The core idea is simple: make the resources you need to render a Lexicon (or part of it) available as blobs, and reference them from an event that states the lexicon it handles. Index those and you know what to pick dynamically. The execution is a little tricky to make safe, but I have…
Thank you!
I don't think that most of it needs to happen top-down, there's a lot of pent-up demand for action, a little bit of ambition expressed at the top as well as some convening could already go a long way!
The latter!
Just for giggles I had to look it up. 0.2 intentional homicides per 100,000. Two gun related homicides per year for all of Japan.
The sign of a successful technology is how much you have to spend lobbying to keep it relevant, right?
I think the politics can be sorted if they have even just a bit of vision. This has support from industry and CSOs and unions and academia and many citizens — and even some sovereignists. But they'll never get traction by waffling.
Quite!
It definitely does!
And here's a longer, if incomplete, take: berjon.com/digital-sove.... Not to mention the suite of Eurostack reports. As well as an *excellent* own-initiative report from ITRE specifically for the Commission to read. So… can we get this tech sovereignty thing finally started?
Why the inaction? There's demand for leadership from all sectors of society. It looks like a political slam dunk that's not happening because no one involved knows what needs to be done. Here's a short overview: www.politico.eu/article/digi...
I would be less worried about inaction if there were at least observable attempts at fixing the problem, or even a clear recognition that it exists. But all we're getting is cute doggies and Directors congratulating themselves on achieving symbolic results with zero impact. bsky.app/profile/robi...
At the end of the day, I have no idea if Virkkunen is competent or not. What I *do* know is that tech sovereignty has been an EC priority since 2019 (see www.politico.com/news/2019/10...), that we're in the second half of 2025, and that if you judge on impact practically no work has been done.
What we have is: • Mostly toothless DMA enforcement on what matters most • No discernible strategy across most problems of digital infrastructure • Vague positions on AI that are mostly industry talking points • No strategy on tech power versus democratic resilience, just "innovation" blah Etc.…
Now, hey, don't get me wrong: I like dogs. Dogs are rad. But the geopolitics are basically Weimar With Nukes openly pushing to make Europe a client state, a strategy of which tech infrastructure is a key driver. It's, like, bad. So could we have Dog Day, but also some tech sovereignty?
@alexandrageese.bsky.social spotted the answer for us: right as Trump is (predictably) torpedoing the US/EU trade deal, we find @hennavirkkunen.bsky.social… celebrating International Dog Day — 🐶❤️ bsky.app/profile/alex...
At the last NGI Forum, when asked what I would like to have next to address the threats of tech authoritarianism, I answered that the first thing I wanted was a European Commissioner in charge of Tech Sovereignty. Was this too harsh? 🧵
What we have is: • Mostly toothless DMA enforcement on what matters most • No discernible strategy across most problems of digital infrastructure • Vague positions on AI that are mostly industry talking points • No strategy on tech power versus democratic resilience, just "innovation" blah Etc.…
Now, hey, don't get me wrong: I like dogs. Dogs are rad. But the geopolitics are basically Weimar With Nukes openly pushing to make Europe a client state, a strategy of which tech infrastructure is a key driver. It's, like, bad. So could we have Dog Day, but also some tech sovereignty?
@alexandrageese.bsky.social spotted the answer for us: right as Trump is (predictably) torpedoing the US/EU trade deal, we find @hennavirkkunen.bsky.social… celebrating International Dog Day — 🐶❤️ bsky.app/profile/alex...
It is, actually, the job of the press to be the opposition to authoritarianism.
I've been telling people in W3C this for a while, too. Internet governance is completely a brainchild of the 90s and it shows badly. Is your second book out yet? 😁
For the longest time it felt like the 90s would never die — and then they're gone. I wish politicians on the left would get the memo.
'Immigration doesn't bother me but it seems to bother everyone else' – Everyone. This is what happens when the media runs away with Hard Right narratives.
Summer may be coming to an end (in this hemisphere) but CIDs are forever! Join us for an hour of beDASLing fun at CID Congress 4. lu.ma/sjohnvw9
The test suite you're showing was made specifically to fix that issue. People have made a million choices and libraries and specs, but without a test suite there is no reality. Of course, what the first step does is uncover problems. That's the point! Now we're going fail by fail to make interop.
You might also wish to be in touch with @makeworld.space :) bsky.app/profile/make...
Including the ones in their own building...
Data gains value in volume. The more you show up to a digital platfom youre protesting, the more strength you're feeding your enemy. The only winning move is not to play (on your opponents field)
Not currently but I'm curious?
Has he ever done anything else? I think he just stumbled into it.
This bleeds into another debate too. I'm not sure that Twitter treated as a utility is that much better because the service is much more versatile — and therefore shaped — than electricity or phones. But yes: we can build social media infrastructure that works right. Like AT!
