Jack Hardinges
@jackhardinges.bsky.social
240 followers 230 following 180 posts
Data optimist. Interested in: data infrastructures, governance, platforms, AI, the commons, value, funding, etc. Working with: Foresight (1m eye scans for disease detection), Icebreaker One (data for net zero) + Creative Commons (preference signals).
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jackhardinges.bsky.social
"Rewilding the web means recovering what Otlet, Nelson, Hall, and Richardson all glimpsed: a civic, literary, interconnected, and collaborative commons that resists enclosure and keeps the web alive" mamund.substack.com/p/the-hyperm...
The Hypermedia Commons We Missed
It’s time to ask: do we want a plantation of transactions, or a living commons of creativity?
mamund.substack.com
jackhardinges.bsky.social
"A global advertising infrastructure built and governed to operate in the public interest.. would be able to capture funds that currently fuel our broligarchic dystopia.. [and] reshape privacy norms and incentive structures across the entire internet" www.techpolicy.press/how-wikipedi...
How Wikipedia Can Save the Internet With Advertising | TechPolicy.Press
Robin Berjon explores how principled advertising on Wikipedia could fund a democratic digital future.
www.techpolicy.press
jackhardinges.bsky.social
*'digital ID = good or bad'
jackhardinges.bsky.social
seems to me the important/interesting stuff is less 'digital ID good=bad', and more about scrutiny of/safeguards for where its use is mandated? i.e. right to work and right to rent the thin end of the wedge?
jackhardinges.bsky.social
"Loyal agents:

- Enabling AI agents to securely transact on behalf of consumers
- Defining duties of AI agents to consumers
- Ensuring agents are effective and aligned with consumers' preferences"

loyalagents.org#focus-areas
LoyalAgents - Consumer Reports & Stanford
A research collaboration to enable a marketplace of secure, trusted consumer-centric agents.
loyalagents.org
jackhardinges.bsky.social
"Microsoft is in talks with select UD publishers about.. a two-sided marketplace that would compensate publishers for their content used by AI products, starting with its Copilot assistant" www.axios.com/2025/09/23/m...
Scoop: Microsoft looks to build AI marketplace for publishers
Copilot would be the first buyer in the Publisher Content Marketplace.
www.axios.com
jackhardinges.bsky.social
'AI as normal technology' has really gotten under my skin over the past few months: AI not as speculative 'intelligence', laden with hype or doom, but instead as a powerful, but controllable, tool with gradual diffusion similar to technologies like electricity
www.normaltech.ai/p/a-guide-to...
A guide to understanding AI as normal technology
And a big change for this newsletter
www.normaltech.ai
jackhardinges.bsky.social
reading this OKF report

imo it's right to question the impact and role of openness + open licences..

..and take an interest in other "modes of governance and ways of sharing value"..

..but I don't think it's useful to bend the definition of open to encompass those modes okfn.org/en/projects/...
From Open Data to Sustainable Data Commons – Open Knowledge Foudation
Better governance mechanisms and legal tools to grow and sustain the data commons
okfn.org
jackhardinges.bsky.social
"While this appears to be positive for transparency, it's actually more problematic than it seems.. These numbers cannot be used to meaningfully compare systems because each company employs different methodologies and assumptions" huggingface.co/blog/sasha/e...
🌎 What kind of environmental impacts are AI companies disclosing? (And can we compare them?) 🌎
A Blog post by Sasha Luccioni on Hugging Face
huggingface.co
jackhardinges.bsky.social
"more than 18,000 Spotify users have joined Unwrapped, a collective.. that allows them to pool and monetize their data.. each Spotify user only earned about $5 in cryptocurrency tokens" (via @ldodds.bsky.social) arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...
Spotify peeved after 10,000 users sold data to build AI tools
Spotify sent a warning to stop data sales, but developers say they never got it.
arstechnica.com
jackhardinges.bsky.social
there's a £650k tender out for the National Data Library. it's looking for a supplier with "robust knowledge of federated data architecture", to be based out of Manchester www.stotles.com/explore/noti...
jackhardinges.bsky.social
late to it, but v good: "We are the world's first AI alignment alignment center, working to subsume the countless other AI centers, institutes, labs, initiatives and forums into one final AI center singularity" alignmentalignment.ai/caaac
Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers
We align the aligners
alignmentalignment.ai
jackhardinges.bsky.social
good article on the battle to define AI that's taking place within the IETF AI Preferences Working Group: www.businessinsider.com/google-micro...
jackhardinges.bsky.social
"Introducing a new model for data stewardship.. TRANSFER Data Trust is a member-owned copperative. Our governance model facilitates distributive justice in contemporary art" transfer.art/trust/vision
Vision — TRANSFER
transfer.art
jackhardinges.bsky.social
“Oracle’s new market cap, near a trillion dollars, up nearly 50% [has been] driven largely by this one apparently non-binding deal with a party that doesn’t have the money to pay for the services” open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...
Peak bubble
It’s hard to see how this won’t end badly
open.substack.com
jackhardinges.bsky.social
"We’re watching the construction of a fundamentally different internet.. in the name of stopping AI companies, even though the real result will be to concentrate even more power in the hands of large tech companies while making the internet less useful for everyone" www.techdirt.com/2025/09/08/w...
We’re Walling Off The Open Internet To Stop AI—And It May End Up Breaking Everything Else
A longtime open internet activist recently asked me whether I’d reversed my position on internet openness and copyright because of AI. The question caught me off guard—until I realized what h…
www.techdirt.com
jackhardinges.bsky.social
"the Alan Turing Institute positioned itself as 'the police officer, not the innovator'... reflected by the institute’s output from 2018 onwards, which skewed heavily towards a specific ideological interpretation of responsibility and ethics" www.chalmermagne.com/p/how-not-to...
How not to build an AI Institute
What went wrong with the Alan Turing Institute?
www.chalmermagne.com
jackhardinges.bsky.social
"the Cancer Loyalty Card Study.. analysed historical loyalty card data from 273 women.. to investigate whether purchases of over-the-counter pain and indigestion medicines could reveal symptom patterns before women sought medical help" www.sdruk.ukri.org/our-work/cas...
Shopping data and cancer research
Shopping data and cancer research - how loyalty card data on over-the-counter medicines could help spot ovarian cancer earlier.
www.sdruk.ukri.org