On 20th November – two months ago – I received a media request from the Slovak newspaper SME, asking whether I could help them put the quality of Slovak railways in a European context. Given I spent a lot of
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What happens when Grokipedia writes about you (I’m lucky, but there are cautionary lessons)
This morning, quite inadvertently, I stumbled upon the article about me on Grokipedia, the xAI / Elon Musk alternative to Wikipedia. More about Grokipedia on Wikipedia here. And – much to my amazement – it is reasonably accurate, and much
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Broken chains
“I don’t miss Twitter but I do miss many of the people who are still on there” wrote Christina Pagel on Bluesky this morning. Christina is exactly one of the people that I am very happy that Twitter brought into
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X: reputational poison, even if you try to reduce your use of it. Exit is the only option
A friend messaged me yesterday, asking if I had seen the job ad for Rector of the College of Europe (Mogherini has resigned as Rector since I last wrote about this topic). And my friend sent me the link to
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Musk wants to abolish the EU, while European Commissioners keep posting on X
Transatlantic geopolitical battles came to a head this past week, as the European Commission finally fined X €120 million under the Digital Services Act. Musk’s response: to demand the EU be abolished (a stance backed by ex-Russian President Medvedev, also
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On Federica Mogherini, and the third scandal in six years to rock the College of Europe
Back in 2003-04 I was a Masters student in the politics department at the College of Europe. Respect for procedure and for the Rule of Law, and the European Union as a community of law, were common themes throughout the
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Using the internet without agency
Once a year I am invited to run a workshop at the University of Maastricht about online communication in European Union politics. This time, as always, the students were bright, motivated and funny and it’s interesting working with them. But
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News stories, and what happens if the person on the receiving end knows the topic
From a friend a few days ago on Signal: “Empfehlenswerter F.A.Z. Beitrag: Wie die Bundespolizei Züge an der Grenze kontrolliert” (“Recommended F.A.Z. article: How the federal police check trains at the border“) I open it. And it is terrible. Sure,
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Are we tired of text? Or are we just tired?
Once in a while there is a bout of introspection on Bluesky that the network will never take off roughly because text based social networks are somehow passé. See this from this morning for example. The same critique is levelled
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From X and Meta, onto LinkedIn and Bluesky – that’s out of the frying pan into the fire in the era of Trump
A post this morning caught my eye – German tech commentator Sascha Pallenberg had content about the cancellation of the Jimmy Kimmel show banned on LinkedIn. I tried to see if I could replicate the ban (here and here) but
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If you’re a “thought leader” about anything in European politics, it’s imperative you practice what you preach in terms of the tech you use
Von der Leyen’s State of the Union speech today was full of references to tech sovereignty. You probably read on X, WhatsApp or Substack. Or maybe on Facebook, Instagram, or perhaps even watched on TikTok. You might even have read
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All the wrong people
A couple of weeks ago, an old friend in Brussels I know from EU politics messaged me on Signal asking me how I was. “I can’t reply fully now” I told him, “I am in rural Romania on #CrossBorderRail.” “Oh
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