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Reposted by Oskar S.

Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 3d

📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU.

Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.

Signal @signal.org · 5d

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...

signal.org

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Burcu Baykurt @baykurt.bsky.social · 12d

Our special issue is finally out! 🎉

With Antoine Courmont, I had the privilege of working with a stellar group of scholars to examine Google as an urban actor and highlight its uneven, shape-shifting power across cities.

Please read, share, and let us know what you think!

Urban Studies Journal @urbanstudiesjournal.com · 13d

🚨 #UrbanStudies Vol. 62, Issue 13 (October 2025) out now!

✍️ Special Issue "Google, a stakeholder in local governance?"

Guest editors: Antoine Courmont & Burcu Baykurt

This collection explores how #Google has become a key actor in local #politics and urban environments.

📖 buff.ly/veREgdw

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Oskar S. @qualitativresidual.bsky.social · 15d

Very excited to be hosting this upcoming talk for @citiesabit.bsky.social. Registration is open to all :)

Urban Studies Foundation @urbanstudiesfoundation.org · 15d

🔔 Upcoming online talk (Cities Agenda – Sciences Po)

📅 2 Oct 2025 | 17:00–18:30 (GMT+2)
🎙️ Join #USFInternationalFellow Ana Beraldo – Managing ordinary life: (Im)predictability, Violence & Solidarity in Latin American Urban Margins
💬 Discussant: Patrick Le Galès
👉 Register: ow.ly/F5vo50X10H9

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Reposted by Oskar S.

Urban Studies Foundation @urbanstudiesfoundation.org · 15d

🔔 Upcoming online talk (Cities Agenda – Sciences Po)

📅 2 Oct 2025 | 17:00–18:30 (GMT+2)
🎙️ Join #USFInternationalFellow Ana Beraldo – Managing ordinary life: (Im)predictability, Violence & Solidarity in Latin American Urban Margins
💬 Discussant: Patrick Le Galès
👉 Register: ow.ly/F5vo50X10H9

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Oskar S. @qualitativresidual.bsky.social · 22d

AI cannot do your job unless you do your job with AI!

Reposted by Oskar S.

Louis Barclay @louisbarclay.bsky.social · 28d

Q. Who aligns the aligners?
A. alignmentalignment.ai

Today I’m humbled to announce an epoch-defining event: the launch of the 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗔𝗜 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀.

Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers

We align the aligners

alignmentalignment.ai

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Oskar S. @qualitativresidual.bsky.social · Sep 5

Out with ‘abundance’, time for:

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Oskar S. @qualitativresidual.bsky.social · Aug 8

So good!

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Oskar S. @qualitativresidual.bsky.social · Aug 7

Horrible news. I owe an enormous debt to Michel’s work. A truly transformative thinker and an unbelievable loss. My thoughts are with his loved ones.

www.csi.minesparis.psl.eu/articles-ved...

Michel Callon (1945-2025)

www.csi.minesparis.psl.eu

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William Clare Roberts 🇵🇸 @marxinhell.bsky.social · Aug 6

There is a new Chotiner interview that really underscores what is unique about Israel's genocide in Gaza: it would be very easy for the world to stop it if only a few countries wanted to.

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Reposted by Oskar S.

@bobhudson.bsky.social @bobhudson.bsky.social · Aug 6

On the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima…

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Reposted by Oskar S.

Luke LeBrun @lukelebrun.ca · Aug 5

The British media outlet ITV also went on a Jordanian airdrop and simply ignored the Israeli government’s illiberal demands:

www.itv.com/news/2025-08...

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Oskar S. @qualitativresidual.bsky.social · Aug 4

Calibri Bold looking ass logo

Chris Sommerfeldt @c-sommerfeldt.bsky.social · Aug 4

Andrew Cuomo's debuting a new campaign logo and slogan ("to build a new NYC") at his presser in Midtown, where he's expected to make a law enforcement-related announcement.

His campaign says the logo's supposed to evoke both a rising sun and the crown of the Statue of Liberty.

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Oskar S. @qualitativresidual.bsky.social · Jul 18

Extremely stoked to share a recent publication of mine in the journal Cities! Based on research I conducted last year, I look at what happens when 'innovation' takes root as a policy priority for city governments, through the prism of 'digital twin' projects.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

City digital twins and the urban laboratory: The practice and politics of ‘sandbox urbanism’

City Digital Twins (CDTs) are digital platforms that combine urban data to support city monitoring through predictive simulations and the visualizatio…

www.sciencedirect.com

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Reposted by Oskar S.

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · Jul 22

on reddit, the website at the end of the internet nymag.com/intelligence...

Reddit's relationship with Al is similarly tense: As a training corpus, Reddit is immensely valuable; after years of unauthorized scraping, the company has official licensing deals with Google, which sometimes turns its content into Al-generated search "Answers," and with OpenAI, which uses Reddit's vast archives to give its chatbot depth and outside sourcing and to help it sound like a normal person - or at least a normal redditor. Meanwhile, Reddit moderators are battling a flood of inauthentic content generated by chatbots that were trained, of course, on Reddit. They're getting tired while users, less certain that other commenters are real - and less sure of their ability to tell and noticing the rising tides of slop elsewhere - are drifting into mutual suspicion.
Huffman suggests that, just as Reddit was rewarded for offering an alternative to more baldly growth-and-ad-driven social media, it could serve a similar role in the post-ChatGPT world as a refuge for actual human interaction in a sea of generated text.
"Social media made Reddit make more sense, and I think now that the web is kind of dying, sadly, that evolution helps Reddit make more sense," he says.
"Reddit in that era is, Reddit is not social media.
And now, we're entering this new era where Reddit is not AI."

It's a powerful pitch, to the extent it remains true.
But it doesn't quite capture just how strange and risky Reddit's position is in 2025. Being one of the last islands of humanity on a dying web may make you more appealing to, well, humans. But it also makes you even more valuable to the companies doing the killing. Reddit is an alternative to a web that's harvested, polluted, and depleted by tech firms in a race to dominate Al. It's also an increasingly valuable data source for tech firms in a race to dominate AI. How long can it be both?

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Reposted by Oskar S.

Louise Amoore @amoorelouise.bsky.social · Jul 22

I’m going to say it… that’s what a machine learning political order does. It intensifies a politics by trialling and experimentation. The hackathon has been policy space for a long time. www.cambridge.org/core/service...

www.cambridge.org

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Oskar S. @qualitativresidual.bsky.social · Jul 18

In sum, I find that a sandbox approach to urban governance produces social entropy. It accelerates the perpetual recomposition of social and technological networks—much happens but nothing is done. This weakens governance capacity and makes collective action more difficult.

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Oskar S. @qualitativresidual.bsky.social · Jul 18

The aggregate dynamic is one of constant yet non-transformative activity. Perpetual movement from one project to the next, none of which can sucessfully install durable change. I call this dynamic 'sandbox urbanism'—play for play's sake, without the ability to stabilize and export new technologies.

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Oskar S. @qualitativresidual.bsky.social · Jul 18

Entrepreneurial actors adjust the definition of their objectives to suit the existing interests and practices of local actors. Local actors, conversely, get to participate in 'innovation' without the need to reorganize or change. Innovation can proceed apace without creating much novelty at all.

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Oskar S. @qualitativresidual.bsky.social · Jul 18

In short, I argue that these experiments in public-private innovation put competing institutional logics of flexibility & stability, change & continuity in tension with one another. In the negotiation between these logics, projects like the digital twin proceed along the path of least resistance.

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Oskar S. @qualitativresidual.bsky.social · Jul 18

Extremely stoked to share a recent publication of mine in the journal Cities! Based on research I conducted last year, I look at what happens when 'innovation' takes root as a policy priority for city governments, through the prism of 'digital twin' projects.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

City digital twins and the urban laboratory: The practice and politics of ‘sandbox urbanism’

City Digital Twins (CDTs) are digital platforms that combine urban data to support city monitoring through predictive simulations and the visualizatio…

www.sciencedirect.com

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Oskar S. @qualitativresidual.bsky.social · Jul 17

In a parallel life, I designed political posters. Some of them were pretty damn good. Here’s one of my favourites, for @suebigoil.bsky.social and @avilewis.bsky.social

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Oskar S. @qualitativresidual.bsky.social · Jul 16

It doesn’t work!! Its unreliable and I spend more time checking its output or finessing prompts than I would just doing the work myself :)

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Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics @sciencespo-cee.bsky.social · Jun 20

#VendrediLecture 📚

A quoi servent les "jumeaux numériques" de villes ?

Oskar Steiner, doctorant, a étudié l'exemple de ceux fournis par Dassault Systèmes.

A lire dans @metropolitiques.bsky.social ⤵️

#SmartCity

cc @edr-sciencespo.bsky.social @scpo-research.bsky.social

La fabrique des jumeaux numériques urbains : le cas de Dassault Systèmes

Provenant du monde de l'industrie, les jumeaux numériques sont de plus en plus mobilisés dans la gestion urbaine. Or, ces outils, présentés par les acteurs privés qui les conçoivent comme un moyen de ...

metropolitiques.eu

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