Believing the little lies
Some thoughts on despair and trying to avoid it
Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of AI, Law, and Otter Things! I hope this email finds you well. It seems we can have high hopes for the rest of 2025, as Florence’s metallic pigeon flew successfully in and out of the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral. Unless you are working on GDPR implementation, as it seems that the trilogues for the procedural reform are making things even messier. So much for actual simplification — as opposed to legally uncertain terms that favour established players and some up-and-coming national champions.
This week, we also saw some hiccups in the techno-legal infrastructures that underpin laws about technology around the world. As per the latest news, harmonized standards for the AI Act are not expected to be published before 2026. Meanwhile, MITRE’s Common Vulnerabilities and Exploits (CVE) programme had its funding renewed for 11 months in a last-minute decision. While other databases, such as ENISA’s EU Vulnerability Database, already exist, the centrality of CVE to global tracking of cybersecurity risks would have created major trouble for private and public actors even outside the US. And there is little to prevent such a gap from emerging in the near future.
On a lighter note, my corner of the internet was set ablaze as my precious em-dashes seem to have become one of ChatGPT’s written tics.1 That quickly devolved into a discussion between em-dash and en-dash apologists, bringing some fun right before the Easter break.2
Today’s newsletter continues the alternation between substantive and meta essays, as I want to briefly rant about the kind of despair that one can face when doing research under the current state of worldly affairs. After that, you’ll see the usual content: recommendations, opportunities, and otters. Hope you enjoy it!
Dealing with despair in research
Life as an academic researcher can introduce or amplify various kinds of harms to mental health. Over the past few years, these harms have gained some attention, as the Covid-19 pandemic and other crises took their toll over scholars at all points of their careers. I am not particularly qualified to speak about how to address those harms or their systemic effects,3 though I can say that at an individual level psychiatric help has been incredibly useful. What I want to do, instead, is share a first-person perspective on a specific source of mental distress: the despair one might face in seeing their works produce little to no concrete ripples in the world.4
This particular kind of despair can take various forms. One of them concerns the belief that one is studying a relevant object of study. Why should one study privacy law, if individuals often act as if their privacy does not particularly matter? Why bother with day-to-day questions of legal practice if you believe (unlike myself) that AGI is right around the corner? And so on.5 Such questions can arise either from self-doubt (am I doing the right thing?) or from a mismatch between what one sees as a topic worthy of study and what is funded by potential employers and grant agencies. Each of those has its peculiarities, but they both can lead a scholar to lose hope that they are doing something meaningful.
Despair might also relate to one’s reach within a scholarly community. It can be crushing to notice that, after putting all that effort in marshalling arguments, nobody is willing to listen to one’s points, for one or more among a myriad of reasons. One’s voice might go unheard because the arguments are not particularly good (and how do we get better?) but also to factors such as seniority,6 affiliation,7 language,8 gender—or even something as prosaic as actually speaking to the wrong audience. All of those scenarios can lead to the frustrating sensation that one’s words are being ignored.
In some disciplines, one can find joy even without that much of an audience: engineers can point to working processes and products, pure mathematicians can refer to the sheer beauty of the constructs they deal with,9 philosophers can pursue the life of the mind, and so on. But, personally, I find that validation by internal coherence is much less fruitful in the case of legal scholarship, which is after all concerned with some kinds of social practices.
Another kind of academic despair comes from seeing that the kind of scholarship one does fails to produce any particular impact in the world. This second strand of despair is somewhat correlated to the first one, but not totally. Hypothetically speaking, one might be in the minority position among scholars and still find their positions echoed by, let’s say, the Court of Justice of the European Union. Conversely, even legal scholarship that is well-received by people working on a given field might fail to get traction among the actors who are responsible for interpreting the laws it covers. An ethno-nationalist government, for instance, is unlikely to pay attention to the most rigorous scholarship one might deploy in anti-discrimination law, or even try and weaponize that work for its own purposes. In such situations, despair comes not just out of one’s individual lack of reach, but from the very failure of an entire scholar community in leaving a meaningful imprint in a particular context.
Faced with individual and systemic reasons for ineffectiveness, it can be easy to fall prey to despair. Common responses to this risk include self-defence through cynicism and fatalism: looking at human behaviour as craven and at structural factors as unchangeable. I certainly am not immune to cynicism in some matters. Ultimately, however, I found this posture eroded any interest in research: for me, it leads to a distorted view of the objects of study, overlooking possibilities for change and part of what motivates people and organizations for action. If that works for you, by all means keep doing it, I am not your employer. Yet, this “realism” can easily lend itself to an apathetical world view,10 and apathy is death.
How to avoid apathy, then? If you have a clear answer for that, I am all ears. So far, I have been trying a few things to try and preserve some hope in my work. One is to not face this alone: sharing insights with colleagues and learning together is something that reinvigorates me, and one of the reasons why I insist in the no-assholes thing. I have also been trying to find joy in small victories,11 something that does not come that easily to me. Even so, there are many days when I get by through a sort of performative naïveté, acting as if things matter and trying to produce some meaning in the process. Or, as the late, great Terry Pratchett put it in Hogfather:
YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
This helps me most of the time, at least as a regulatory ideal. Of course, it does not and should not preclude self-examination about what and how I research. But at least it reminds me that it is not pointless to care for things.
Recommendations
Michael Howlett, Ching Leong and Tim Legrand, Bad Public Policy: Malignity, Volatility and the Inherent Vices of Policymaking (Cambridge University Press 2025).
Ola Michalec, ‘Models vs Infrastructures? On the Role of Digital Twins’ Hype in Anticipating the Governance of the UK Energy Industry’ (2025) 168 Environmental Science & Policy 104041.
André Naffis-Sahely, ‘The Mismeasure of Bhutan. Ethnic cleansing in the happiest country in the world’ (The Baffler, 31 March 2025) <https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-mismeasure-of-bhutan-naffis-sahely> accessed 22 April 2025.
Irene Solaiman and others, ‘Beyond Release: Access Considerations for Generative AI Systems’ (arXiv, 11 April 2025).
Wayne Wei Wang and others, ‘Artificial Intelligence “Law(s)” in China: Retrospect and Prospect (Part I)’ (2025) 2 Journal of AI Law and Regulation 29.
Opportunities
Next Thursday (24 April), the Luxembourg Centre for European Law will host Professor Diane Fromage (Salzburg) for a talk “Is Meroni back? The Fundación Tatiana Pérez judgment and its implication”.
UNESCO and partner organizations are putting together a Global Forum on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, to be held in Bangkok, Thailand from 24-27 June 2025. The call for papers for this event is open, with a deadline of May 1.
On 10 June, I will be teaching a Nohrcon workshop on procurement and the AI Act. Join us in Paris as we cover the Act’s regulatory framework, its broader regulatory context, and why that matters for procurement in the most varied sectors. Registrations are now open, and spots are limited.
The Vienna University of Economics and Business and various academic partners are hosting the 15th Doctoral Seminar on International and EU Tax Law. Applications are due by 15 June, with the event taking place on 8 and 9 September 2025 in Vienna.
The Future Society is hiring a Director, European AI Governance. They are taking applications on a rolling basis.
Finally, the otters
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This newsletter is essentially otterhuman-generated, except for the occasional synthesized picture. In earlier issues, I would often use Grammarly Pro to review language issues, but I have ceased doing so, in part because I want to keep the newsletter as spontaneous as possible.
I am—of course—an em-dash person.
And I am not making any claim that academia is uniquely harmful. For many people, myself included, it can be a much better environment than other types of workplaces. Even so, one should be able to make an informed choice about pros and cons of the profession.
This means that, for now at least, I will not discuss the kind of despair that can emerge from precarious employment conditions and other material constraints. Not that they are less real, or disconnected from the kind of issue I cover here, but they require a different type of coverage.
My personal variant of this question is Why am I not working on the legal aspects of climate change?, which means that, from time to time, I must remind myself that:
I am not entirely sure there is a great overlap between the three things below:
Legal topics I’m interested in
Types of legal research I am (or could be) good at
Legal questions that matter for climate change law
Even if one issue matters more than the others—for me, it’s climate change; for some people it might be AGI or nukes or something else—somebody still has to deal with the other stuff.
As any early-career scholar can see when pushing back against positions defended by established names in their field, sometimes even when those positions are in fact dicta from the actual positions defended by those people.
Think of how often your favourite scholarly papers cite people not based in the US or Europe.
People often write about law in languages other than English, French, and German, as absurd as that might sound.
Even if they do something like partial differential equations—who am I to judge?
Or worse. See, e.g., John Mearsheimer’s Russian apologetics.
And in the big ones, if and when they come.