I'll be hosting a workshop on building self-organization systems. It'll be an exploration into the digital and non-digital extensions of our brains, and the common pitfalls and bottlenecks that sometimes make our systems work against us. 🧠

I was surprised at how complex and multidimensional the discussion already was. Art combined with GDPR, activism combined with legalese, sci-fi combined with academia. All around, a wonderful time.

From a personal perspective, I was excited about everything touching on future narratives – if we can't collectively decide on a vision of a future to work towards, we'll always be fighting fires instead of building up.

No photos of me. Forgot to take. Will go back next year to fix.

I focused on gathering intel on funding for curricula on harms of social technologies, brainstorming values for recommender systems for a potential new social media project for Iceland, and gathering clues on data extraction from social media platforms to analyze political sentiment in Iceland.

• a workshop on scraping social media platforms for public interest research (SUPER exciting)

• a book discussion on data protection law and emotion, and our failure to repeatedly act against our own best interest when it comes to data protection

• the use of AI-powered warfare in Gaza

• a panel on reclaiming personhood during the age of online behavioural advertising and non-consensual personalisation

• a discussion about future visions, using Black Mirror as a tool to explore long-term effects of social technologies, and the science of foresight and scenario matrices

• a gamified approach (it had role-playing monsters!) to debating common arguments against the European Open Web Index (sounds boring, was extremely exciting, let's make this)

• a book discussion around migration, racial capitalism, and Silicon Valley logic powering raids and family separation

• a workshop discussing envisioning alternative futures, solarpunk visions, and roleplaying mindsets to approach the future with + sharing our favourite science fiction

• a panel discussion tackling cyber surveillance and data violence in Palestine

• a panel exploring social media recommendation systems that minimize polarization, providing new ideas for values that these systems could be built upon, and alternatives to addictive design

• a discussion assessing the European impact of Trumpist policies, and asking whether the culture wars will be over by the next election cycle, or whether we're looking at long-term erosion of trust

• a workshop test-driving a tool to assess policies' impact on fundamental rights, highlighting how much of a task it can be to assign numerical values to potential suffering
• a panel discussing how algorithmic regulation erodes rule of law

• a screening of a short film about surveillance in cyberspace by aaajiao, a Chinese artist + and a talk about counterhistory that permanently shifted something in me, although I can't yet properly explain what, and maybe that's the point (link: lnkd.in/gFft8wti)

Key takeaway: we should spend significantly more time discussing how our brains feel like from the inside.