Robin Berjon

@robin.berjon.com

14265 Followers 2517 Following

Political technologist, bringing democracy to the internet. Brussels, 🇪🇺. • tech, governance, science, politics, philosophy, infrastructure, cats, terrible puns • https://berjon.com/ • DASL, Eurosky/Mu, Modal • ex W3C, NYT • he/him/Ishmael • Signal robin.77

Children of Time
Grok's coding tool was quietly shipping whole codebases to xAI xAI's "Grok Build" agentic coding assistant was silently uploading users' entire local repositories - from credentials to untracked files, up to 5.1GB per project - to an undisclosed xAI-controlled bucket. The in-product privacy opt-out did nothing to stop it, and the leak only came to light because developers happened to inspect their own outbound traffic, not because xAI disclosed anything.
A cat giving the fingers under a row of five app icons, reMarkable, Signal, Firefox, Mu, and Obsidian.
Slide: "What if tensions over Greenland..."
The random clipart vomit that serves as the default background for WhatsApp.
The game is on in a room with Belgian flags and a MASSIVE disco ball.
Three columns showing Google's share of the total web ad revenue: 1) In a competitive environment, a real but small slice. 2) In a monopoly under competitive prices, a bigger slice. 3) In a monopoly, with supracompetitive prices, a very large slice. The money Google gets the rest of the web doesn't.
Content flowing from now small publishers to a huge single search engine. A trickle of traffic is sent back, but mostly embed boxes, AMP, voice assistant, substitutive products (like News), and AI are used to keep the value flowing back to the search engine alone.
A mutual arrangement, showing content flowing from publishers to search and traffic flowing back, in equal measure.
Things That Make Us Smart
The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources
Belgium beat the US 4-1
Orc: looks like monopolies are back on the menu, boys!
Smiling tuxedo cat sleeping.
My kid cooking while the cat watches with interest.
Commission spokesperson Tomas Regnier also responded to the comments about the commission promoting W, by saying “I think it’s important to distinguish between making a public announcement on the one hand and promoting something on the other." Which is kind of a hard sell when you have Ursula von der Leyen herself stepping out of the G7 conference to, well, promote W.
Venomous Lumpsuckers
Dafuq did I just read meme: Web 4.0
Dear Robin Berjon, On behalf of the European Commission and PPMI (part of Verian Group), we are pleased to invite you to participate in the upcoming online workshop: Workshop: Opportunities for Europe in the Web 4.0 and Agentic AI Era
W's marketing material shows screenshots of posts with highly inflated comments numbers — 687 instead of 11 and 1819 instead of 96.
A room turned into a sober graveyard for artwork.
Les milliardaires ne paient pas d'impôt sur le revenu et nous allons y mettre fin
What We Can Know
Des rhizomes, ainsi que mes pieds munificents.
Francesca Bria in front of the Eurostack.
Mu.social modal showing that I'm verified by npmx, France Atmosphere, and Eurosky.
A post (from Bryan) showing a ROOST embedded event to which you can respond directly inline.
Spiderman pointing meme except they all say "Claude".
Future Internet architecture: software development & delivery infrastructure and open source building blocks for Web 4.0.
Blaine in front of a slide showing Zuckerberg shooting cultural diversity as microbes with some kind of laser.
Ruthanna Emrys in a very cool shirt presenting in front of a slide showing Infomocracy.
Roberta Metsola shakes hands with Mark Zuckerberg in front of a bunch of Meta AI Glasses.
Evolution of the Social Contract
The Faith of Beasts
Index entry for purposiveness giving page range 1 to 270.
An Ubuntu desktop with a few windows open.
Games in the Philosophy of Biology
Platform Decay
Ad for the ECB booth with a spin-the-wheel saying "spin and win with the ECB — come play!"
Packed crowd in the big Council atrium, with floating balloons with flags indicating country booths.
The Major Transitions in Evolution
Outonomy: Fleshing out the Concept of Autonomy Beyond the Individual
"Light" by M. John Harrison
The Beginning Comes After The End
Devant Dieu et les hommes
Me holding my fluffy tuxedo cat Noodle around my neck in manner that Taylor Swift preemptively plagiarised, as the epitome of ruggedly magnetic chic.
A video in which I explain why I use Weenect with one of my cats.
A very green landscape, of many shades, with atmospheric rain clouds and a small white cottage.
Nokia: Connecting People ad
A list of publications on Sifa showing papers that I've participated in.
The EU flag except it's pumpkin faces.
The classic Very Hungry Caterpillar drawing, but instead of a red head and green body it's in the colours of the Hungarian flag, which aren't all that different from the original.
City of Last Chances
L'ordre du jour de Éric Vuillard
A Pizza Hut ad in Belgium advertising their "Chicon" pizza (endives) with a picture of said pizza and a heart in the "o".
Arushi showing a meadowy slide of her talk called "Rewilding the Internet with AT Protocol"
Attie interface showing the feed with my post up top and Aendra.
Slide: 1.09k weekly active apps
Erin's slide: - loose jumbled substrate - Overwhelming saturation - very large shocks
Erin on stage in front of a cyanotype