exposes

It’s Friday and the world is falling apart, so let’s just take a short mental health break with some interesting news out of the field of archaeology, where tech is enabling some fascinating new discoveries. A new lidar-powered analysis of land in the Amazon basin has provided evidence of a previously unknown urban center of “mind blowing” complexity. To be clear, that doesn’t mean ancient aliens or long-lost technology, just that it far exceeds the expected levels of organization and population that scholars…

To its advocates, cryptocurrency is, at its heart, a libertarian project to free mankind from the shackles of government—most of all its power to debase a “fiat” currency by printing more of it. Do Kwon, the South Korean creator of the stablecoin TerraUSD, regularly equated fiat currency to “state violence.”So when inflation took off, crypto’s supporters were triumphant. Bitcoin’s value “is telling us that the central banks are bankrupt, that we are at the end of the fiat money regime,” venture capitalist and bitcoin…

Russian propaganda flooded the Donbas region of Ukraine. Research shows that Kremlin disinformation was not effective.A study of the propaganda that flooded Donbas for years reveals a failure to build pro-Russian “in-group” identities in the region, despite Vladimir Putin’s claims of support.According to a study of thousands of stories from media outlets churning out propaganda in Ukrainian Donbas following Russia’s first invasion, Kremlin disinformation has long neglected any coherent or persuasive narrative to develop…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain A study of thousands of stories from media outlets churning out propaganda in Ukraine's Donbas in the years after Russia's first invasion suggests that the Kremlin's disinformation campaign has long neglected any coherent or convincing messaging to foster support for Russia in the war-torn region.…