Week 44/2026

Kritisch und grantig

#UnisRetten, Thursday afternoon

NSFW

Today's weekly is (in my view) a hilarious mixture of Bavarian, Jamaican and American traditions. I smiled a lot when listening to it.

I've never heard of the performer, Phil Höcketstaller, with his nom de guerre "Hundling" before, but am currently going through his YouTube channel.

Deutschlandfunk has more about him and here's his Insta (which was the reason I found him).

The original celebrates its 50th anniversary in December this year.

Retrospect

#unisretten

I spent Thursday afternoon at a demonstration.

It's so annoying and so exhausting that, again, students and staff need to be on the streets - just like in the 80ies and 90ies. So much of work is at stake here and so much of progress at risk.

The good thing was that we were really many, that this got legacy media coverage (here, here, here, here, here) and that there was a lot of creativity and concern on the street.

Let's hope that we still can change things for the better.

php and Reichenau

The significant and long security related shutdowns of many websites on Wednesday ( I don't remember that I have ever seen UNIVIE's services down for a complete working day in the last 40 years) due to a php-vulnerability and the hack of the public administration in Reichenau brought me into an ORF aktuell nach eins interview on Thursday.

This was technically challenging because I needed to squeeze this in between many university appointments. It's therefore (as far as I remember) my first TV live interview ever done from the office. 5 minutes before it started I still ran through the whole house to find the people renovating the top floor and asked them to stop drilling for 15 minutes (which they kindly did). The technical setup is my Osmo Pocket 4 p as webcam, my Hollyland Mark m2 as Mics and my Sanoto bone conduction headphones as headset - all quite improvised. There was a significant delay in the line (again), making communication difficult, but this problem was not on my side. The image in the background is a photograph of Hannover that was gifted to me by dear friends when I returned back to Vienna.

Contentwise, the director was not too happy with the length of my answers, although I really tried to be brief.

RuST

Together with Dr. Niklas Schmidt I was invited to talk about AI agents in law at the RuSt on Friday.

Schmidt gave a very nice overview on practical use cases from a user perspective, I ranted in particular about Austria not having an AI authority yet and the digital omnibus. Travelling there by railway and bicycle was nice

but it's a little bit of a ride from Fürstenfeld to Loipersdorf that is clearly not well prepared to that kind of late arrival and refused to let me in for thirty minutes when I was standing in front of "Schaffelbad" at 9.45 pm. And there's a quite steep elevation gain from Fürstenfeld to Loipersdorf that I hadn't seen on the map either.

#arsboni

Danny Walther informed us about the role of libraries and other information brokers in educating students in AI competemce.

Prof. Dr. Dietmar Jahnel gave very personal and very instructive insights into his career choices and what they might imply for today's students. His company RIDA is at the edge of AI in legal information so that not only his personal but also his substance related opinions are outstandingly relevant to the debate.

The Vienna Legal Literacy project provided a basic introduction into European law and European institutions, given by Prof. Dr. Lena Hornkohl.

re:publica

The conference has managed to put most of their presentations on YouTube now, and there's a playlist with all of them available. That's a huge amount of interesting content and I am proud that my presentation is a tiny part of it.

Rode Award

Markus Wadsak received the award, Dr. Daniela Kraus, Sonja Luef and Dr. Renée Lugschitz held a terrific laudatio, Prof. Dr. Andy Kaltenbrunner gratulated and everybody was happy.

The venue, Nordbahnsaal, was very nice too and an excellent fit. Der Standard published the full - very noteworthy - laudatio.

Bruno Kreisky Human Rights Awards

I spent a wonderful Thursday evening in the "Wappensaal" of Vienna's townhall. The Bruno Kreisky Stiftung für Verdienste um die Menschenrechte awarded this year's prices to Youth Initiative for Human Rights - Kosovo and to Martin Schenk. The winners were truly convincing and every single speech and every laudatio would have been worth a whole journey.

I was, in particular, intrigued by Prof. Dr. Frauke Brosius Gersdorf's keynote address that developed a crystal clear analysis of the threats and dangers media, the judiciary and science are confronted with today and what the law can and has to do to support these independent institutions of power control.

Prospect

FutureTalks

Prof. Dr. Andrej Zwitter invited me to University of Klagenfurt for a presentation on Friday morning.

Free entry, registration requested, no stream.

#arsboni

I will interview Julia and Selen from the department in the laundry on "Gender equality, AI and the future of work in the legal profession". This will be based on their interventions provided at the Women in Law conference in Vienna a few weeks ago.

Look and Feel

Bruno. Der junge Kreisky

This is an interesting, relevant and noteworthy movie about Bruno Kreisky's first years in politics, going back to the late 1920ies and 1930ies, directed by Harald Sicheritz.

The actor playing Kreisky, Nils Arztmann, is brilliant, Thomas Stipsits as a Nazi inmate is is also memorable. The (contemporary rock) music is noteworthy, the storyline with several various, interwoven timelines is well done. The film is currently shown, inter alia, in Bellaria Kino that was nicely renovated and now very much looks like similar program cinemas in Vienna (Votiv, Star, etc.), with a trendy bar.

I learned from the film that Kreisky made his last university exam after law studies at UNIVIE (where he had been banned from for political reasons before) on the day after Austria's "Anschluss" and was incarcerated the day after.

Here's the trailer

The film is a very good and intimate mixture of historic information and personal closeness that give tribute to this outstanding man and politician.

Ice Age 1980

This book literally fell on me. Sandra Račko from Buchhandlung Riedl was so kind to climb on the ladder in their shop to get me another book, and - boom - this one tumbled down.

I took this as a twist of fate, bought it and read it this week - with lots of joy and interest.

It discusses how and why it became cool in the late 70ies and 80ies to be cool and how this coolness was an instrument of survival and protest in a no longer booming economy and society.

The examples chosen are relevant such as Joy Division

that I listened a lot to this week. I also read a lot (eg. here, here and here) about the band's frontman's, Ian Curtis, life and early and tragic death (from suicide, after years with epilepsy, 23 years old).

A few more tracks that are not mentioned in the book came into my mind when understanding and thinking about the topic, such as

here in a version from 2015

or, of course, Klaus Nomi

And from there it wouldn't have been very far to Michael Nyman

The text has an interesting idea and lots of relevant examples on its own. Kraftwerk, for example,

shows somehow the antithesis of some of the big stories told us today. Instead of humanising AI-driven machines, this is about roboterising humans - and the coolness coming with this.

The book's author, Lars Schneider, is professor of french and spanish literary studies at University of Munich. Here's an interview with him on the book.