Week 17/2026

And if I only could

Nikolaus Forgó

17 Apr 2026 — 7 min read

On the way to HS Campus Wien. Home of the FavAC.

NSFW

This week's song is another reference to the 80ies:

Kate Bush, Running up that Hill

It's interesting for many reasons, one of them being that it's an excellent and early example of (Fairlight CMI) synthesizer uses. She was quite ahead of her time with this; another reason why this is a remarkable song is its second, even more profound success in the 2020ies, primarily thanks to a Netflix series (Stranger Things, more on this in Deutschlandfunk - haven't seen this yet).

I spent quite some time with the song last week - again, after endless hours in the 80ies and 90ies - thanks to the beautiful 100 songs series from ORF mentioned last week, dedicating a noteworthy 20 minutes episode to it.

BTW: There's a (not so) funny update about Alphaville - the 80ies-band I wrote about last week. In a recent Instagram post they state that Trump has used their hit "Forever young" for political purposes without their permission.

NTV has more on this and my interview with Thomas Höhne has more on the legal implications of such uses.

Retrospect

DEMGES

Barbara Prainsack and Astrid Mager had done a terrific job in organising two mind opening days at the Austrian Academy of Sciences at their beautiful premises in central Vienna

with in and for DEMGES - Democracy in Digital Societies. The event's very timely topic was Agentic AI in Hybrid Societies.

I learned a lot, in particular, from Andreas Kunar on some technical aspects of agentic AI. Kunar is from the 4future foundation, offering 101-introductions into current technology issues. He was followed by Werner Illsinger, representing the same institution and offering a more humanities-oriented approach to the topic.

Kunar spoke, inter alia, about Project Glasswing

a recent Anthropic-initiative to secure critical software against agentic AI. The problem is well described: AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities. Companies such as Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks collaborate here.

I then chaired a session with a very impressive presentation from Ilona Kickbusch on (agentic) AI and public health.

Prof. Dr. Jutta Weber then gave a presentation on AI and warfare, in a session chaired by Prof. Dr. Martin Kornberger.

I needed to leave then, but Barbara gives a more complete overview about the whole event on her LinkedIn.

Media

Prof. Dr. Matthias Kettemann (University of Innsbruck) and I appear in an article on social media bans for the youth in Exxpress and gave an interview to Kleine Zeitung that I can't read as it is behind a paywall.

LLM and Hackathon

Two extraordinary teaching sessions happened this week.

On Sunday, I had the privilege to teach in "my" LLM-program on information and media law. IT-Law.at - which is an NPO on IT-Law founded by students of the program's second round in 2001, with more than 300 members now one of the largest scientific societies in the domain - kindly invited students and me for lunch before we worked quite intensely on IT regulation in 2026.

I was very positively impressed by the students' very educated views on how their future might develop and how legal professions will change under the influence of AI.

IT-Law will celebrate its 25th birthday in the evening of September 24th 2026. Put this in your agenda, I'm sure that this will be a relevant event and a nice party (but it's members only, so check out to become a member in due time, it's worth it!).

On Monday, we closed this years Legal Tech Hackathon at Hochschule Campus Wien. We had, again, six very smart ideas and a winner, "Framz", developing a secure file exchange between lawyers. I was also quite impressed by another idea, Pledgebook, suggesting a register for lien on movable property. The third price went to NextAct (further explained in a LinkedIn-post of one of the students) .

#arsboni

Prof. Dr. Oskar J. Gstrein gave an excellent introduction into digital autonomy as a concept (and why it's possibly more useful than digital sovereignty).

Prospect

Media Funding Reform

Medienhaus Wien finished the study on media funding reform recently. I have served as an advisor to this endeavour and am looking forward to its presentation and debate. It's the most profound study I know in the field, with more than 180 pages a long read, and with lots, lots, lots of information about Austria's media system and its regulatory environment. I wholeheartedly recommend to read it.

First reports and reactions come in while I am finishing this newsletter, including Der Standard, Horizont (Paywall), ORF, Salzburger Nachrichten (Paywall). The funniest statement so far comes from Austrian publishers' lobby group VÖZ that I translate to "Leave everything as it is, but give us (more) money so that we can leave everything as it is."

One of the occasions to go into detail on the study's statements will be a by invitation only, Chatham house rules event on Tuesday that I will attend; it's the second iteration of "Acht Tische für die Vierte Gewalt":

The list of participants looks really good and Andy Kaltenbrunner will give a keynote presenting the study.

I am quite sure that the topic will be "interesting" in all details - politically, legally, socially in the weeks to come:

Austrian Headache Society

The Austrian Headache Society organises their yearly three country conference next week and I am scheduled for a keynote on Thursday, April 23,in the evening.

Registration needed, no stream (as far as I know).

Inheritance Law

The Vienna Legal Literacy Project will do an episode on inheritance law on Wednesday, 22nd of April at 19.00 that I will support technically.

Look and Feel

Banksy

Reuters has a very long and profound article on Banksy's "real" identity - that I found ironically in a Reddit thread on Barbour jackets.

The Seven Deadly Sins

I found a marvelous and inspiring book: Daniel Uchtmann's Die sieben Todsünden.

The book is a very creative fusion of an audio and a coffeetable book: When buying the printed edtition one also gets access to several hours of podcast-like audio material, in particular interviews with people having some relation to one of the sins - for example Anne Brorhilker speaking about greed (more on her also in Weekly 03/2026 and 30/2025). On top of this, Uchtmann reviews one painting each from KHM's fundus that represents the specific sin - the paintings' facsimiles are in the printed book, one can listen to Uchtmann's presentation in the podcast.

The publisher, sisigrant, was unknown to me before, but this is an interesting (and quite reasonably priced, 40 €) work and a very interesting example how to merge printed and audio content in an economically (hopefully) feasible way.

Here's a trailer (with a well known microphone, hello Shure SM7B):

I have known and admired Daniel for some time. He is an art historian, working at KHM and a brilliant art educator. He has been so kind to speak about one of KHM's pictures at the Sommerdiskurs of Sommerhochschule Wien (almost) every year. His - masterful - presentations are absolute highlights of the whole event, each year.

Here are two examples that I had the privilege to record:

There's an interesting episode in Fabian Burstein's very nice Bühneneingang-podcast with an interview of Stefan Lassnig and Edith Meinhart on parallels and synergies between book and podcast publishing that I thought of when reading Daniel's book.

night.sky.music

On Wednesday, I attended a cello-concert, given by Peter Hudler, combined with a lecture on the sky and its stars in spring, delivered by Dr. Michael Feuchtinger, in Vienna's planetarium. The music line up was a little special going beyond classical boundaries, from Bach to Jimmy Hendrix and with some Viennese singing, but I liked it, as well es the profound information of what one could see in the sky if one looked up into the sky and took note.