(This was going to be a review of Vitalik Buterin’s book Proof Of Stake but reality kept getting in the way of my writing it so rather than nothing I just wrote this up which is what I took from the book. I certainly think anyone interested in the problem…

— So when did you realize that philanthropy was for you? Jules was working on micromicrotransactions. Microtransactions are small payments for small things; instead of subscribing to an online paper, you pay a small amount, say 25 cents, for each article you want to read. Similarly, you buy songs instead of albums, episodes instead…

For many years Putin was a sort of blank canvas, and imposing competence and rationality seemed like the natural thing to do. Early commentators constantly talk about his non-descriptness, apart from a few surprising word choices, and an image one gets of him is as a sort of political martial…

There’s increasing talk of nuclear war. Today, the main story is the supposed ‘dirty bomb’ the Russian minister of defence claimed Ukraine was going to use, but more generally one sees propagandists wishing or fearing (maybe) for a nuclear war, and if one follows Ukrainians on Twitter you’ll read that…

I’ve been wondering for the last while whether the way users react to messages on social media can in any sense be a good guide to sentiment. There are many reasons to think not. For the case I’ve been looking at, the arguably interesting data comes from a channel, TASS…

One of the benefits early optimists saw in social media and the blogosphere of roughly the first decade of the new millennium was the possibility of democratizing opinion, giving a voice to all and overcoming the asymmetry that arises from the fact that in previous models of mass media the…

A couple of weeks ago, I asked whether Russians were turning against Putin by looking at how they, or at least Russian-speaking readers on some popular Telegram channels, were responding to stories about him. I’m inclined to think that the evidence I presented, in the form of a number of…

Noam Chomsky is for many perhaps the leading public intellectual, and his work on the criminality of the United States and the way that criminality is masked by propaganda is one of the lynchpins of the worldview of a whole generation of people, including myself — his writings provide a…

Yesterday, September 19, the head of the DPR, Denis Pushilin, discussed with his colleague from the LPR, Leonid Pasechnik, the need to synchronize further actions on the referendum. Voting is expected to be electronic. The authorities of the Kherson region announced a statement on the issue of a referendum on…