Week 18/2026
Personne ne sait ce qui se passe aujourd′hui
NSFW
This week's song is from the French Band The Troublemakers (what a name!). It's called "Get Misunderstood" (what a title!).
Instruction manual: Listen to this on a bicycle, preferably in the morning of a sunny day in spring, alone, with a day full of joyful events ahead of you.
Apparently (at least according to a YouTuber, I couldn't verify this), the track's first sample is from Jim Jarmusch's wonderful movie Down By Law from 1986 (40 years!).
So, no matter whether you have or have not seen Father Mother Sister Brother recently (see Weekly 14/2026) you need to watch this. It's Tom Waits and Roberto Benigni (and Jim Jarmusch) in their early prime - and it's - for whatever reason - currently freely available on YouTube.
Here's more on the band that shouldn't be confused with the Svedish punkband Troublemakers. The latter are not really my taste, but fun too 😄
Retrospect
Media
I was in ZIB with a short statement on the EU age verification app.
When being interviewed, I was not yet aware of the (potential) security flaws coming with the app (which is a pity),
I also gave a short interview to Der Standard on the fact that one of Austria's registered trusted flaggers - ZARA - will need to stop its anti hate speech activities due to the potential loss of public funding by the Federal Chancellery.
There's an online-petition on the matter that got more than 50.000 signatories within less than a day (and counting)
and several members of the government indicated on Wednesday that they will fill (parts of) the funding gap.
The hate speech/fake news topic was also quite prominently covered at the second iteration of the conference "Acht Tische für die Vierte Gewalt". It was a remarkably well attended event with lots of relevant input, masterfully arranged by Gabriela Bacher and Sebastian Loudon.
Dr. Andy Kaltenbrunner gave a terrific keynote on the Medienhaus Wien study on Austrian media funding.
Despite the many high level people in the audience and the excellent preparation/moderation, I was, however, disappointed by the interventions after Kaltenbrunner's talk. I counted: It was 12 men en suite, not a single woman, commenting/asking/criticising. Women were - completely - silent (silenced?) in this first round.
The keynote was followed by several very relevant short statements, among them (alumna of "my" LLM-program) Julia Haas (OSCE - Rep on Freedom of the Media) and much respected and admired long term friend Dr. Maria Windhager.
A very interesting initiative was presented there as well:
Here's their website:
At the end of the day, Vice-Chancelor Andy Babler gave insights on his view of current media (law) developments.
The whole event was not only covered in apricot-coloured light (as one can see on the pictures above), but also stood under Chatham house rule, so that I can't report on content here today, but summaries will be published soon.
AI in Kyoto and Vienna
We had the pleasure to welcome Prof. Hiroki Habuka, Research Professor at Kyoto University Graduate School of Law, The Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Law and Policy (KILAP) for an internal AI workshop at our department.
It was - again -a superinteresting exchange of opinions, with Hiroki explaining the concept of agile government, the outstandingly AI-supportive legislative state of play and the ongoing efforts to regulate high risk AI scenarios (not necessarily: system) in Japan. It became, once again, apparent to me how much the European regulations are influenced by cultural and philosophical factors (Kant!) that are not universal and that many European approaches are just - excuse my French - naive. The Europeam debate would gain a lot if we were not constantly looking into EU, US and China only. Christoph kindly closed the session with a well developed overview about his research on copyright and AI-model (input) data.
Drei Länder Tagung Kopfschmerz 2026 (Three Countries Headache Conference 2026)
Thanks to Koralmtunnel, Klimaticket (and my bicycle for the trips from/to the stations), a trip to Klagenfurt can be done in half a day easily nowadays (3 hours 10 minutes per leg only!). That's precisely what I did after Hiroki's visit, in order to give a keynote at Drei Länder Tagung Kopfschmerz 2026 later on Thursday and to learn interesting things about headache, migraine and legal and illegal drugs used to treat them.
#arsboni
After having read Die Presse Rechtspanorama on Monday (Paywall, but for UNIVIE staff and students accessible via RDB Rechtsdatenbank), - and also due to the "interesting" role of lawyers in the ongoing (and disturbing) ORF- Me Too - debate -
I decided spontaneously to invite Clemens Handl (alumnus of "my" LLM-program) to discuss his text
in #arsboni. He was spontaneous and friendly enough to do this with me right on Wednesday.
The Vienna Legal Literacy Project did an episode on inheritance law
Last not least, Hannah and Julia from the department launched an episode of ProBono with NOYB (the NGO founded by Max Schrems).
Prospect
#arsboni
Prof. Dr. Jens Meier - whom I met at the Wiener Bluttage 2026 a few days ago (see Weekly 14/2026) - kindly accepted to speak again about (a variation of) his topic at the event on Monday, April 27th, at 18.00.
This sounds very much like a technical/medical topic - but you will see that it's highly relevant for the regulatory debate on AI!
Podcasts!
I was kindly invited as a guest to two podcasts I regularily hear: Bühneneingang and Lawpreneur. Recordings will take place in the next days to come I will enjoy to step into a different role there, see other studios, mics, lights etc. and to fail even harder than normal in covering things I know too little about.
I don't want to spoil anything here, but #arsboni will keep me busy as well in the upcoming days and weeks with quite some interesting sessions to come.
Birthday Party
Friday afternoon will bring a wonderful birthday party.
Franz-Stefan is not only an outstanding academic and brilliant teacher, he's also one of the most active innovators, diplomats and leaders our faculty has - and a dear friend and role model. I expect this to be the perfect party with many, many friends, students and colleagues from all over Europe. May he feel how much the audience admires him and how much he deserves the admiration.
Lange Nacht der Forschung
I will then move to UNIVIE's main building where the long night of reasearch takes place, with the department having a booth.
If you read this on Friday, April 24th, you can still drop by spontaneously! It would be great to see you there and to discuss matters of AI regulation!
Look and Feel
Running and Cycling
I couldn't run at the Vienna City marathon this year, but I was one of the many thousand cheering and - again - very impressed by the marvelous vibes one could feel in the city all day long. About 10 of us from the department ran, here's an arrival of one of the teams.
The marathon is also a great opportunity to see how beautiful central Vienna can be if it's not suffocated in traffic jams.
I watched an nice documentary on how cities can change when traffic priorities are moved to bicycles on YouTube
This is interesting for many reasons. First, because it shows how far people (in this case: Ingwar Perowanowitsch) can get wit 0 budget documentaries today - this is a professional and influential film made by one individual with little to no money. Second, because it contains lots of information I was not aware of (such as the children in Amsterdam protesting against cars in the 70ies changing the city planning forever). And third, because it shows by examples such as Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Paris, which potential Vienna would have here.
Fascism and Enshitification
Two book recommendations for this week, both quite close to my work topics.
The first is Rainer Mühlhoff's "Künstliche Intelligenz und der neue Faschismus".
I managed to read this now, after Susanne Beck's recommendation in ars boni 623. Mühlhoff himself had appeared in #arsboni 475 (together with Prof. Dr. Hannah Ruschemeier).
It's is a very good example for a German/European big-tech criticism, making, inter alia, the claim that what we are seeing today is a variant of technology fed fascism. Personally, I would be more reluctant to use the term and I would also have appreciated more input on what follows from the diagnosis, but it's still a relevant read. One of the arguments that I found specifically relevant is that fascism is always prune to technology, like with Nazi Germany and IBM, (consider also IBM and the holocaust).
I am also currently reading
which has a similar argument and is very interesting to read. It is very well written and: funny.
While doing some research about the author, Cory Doctorow, I stumbled across his website (and blog and - whatever) https://pluralistic.net/ which is an unbelievably rich resource of interesting stories facts, etc. about the internet and everything coming with it. I'm having a hard time to understand how one can collect so much content so "easily".
and I have a new daily newsletter (probably more than 20 now and counting - how should I ever read all this ...) in my inbox now.
Have a wonderful week and take care of yourself!
Kind regards
Nikolaus (Forgó)
