A while ago, I wrote about what appears to be a rhetorical alignment between Western libertarians and the Kremlin’s messaging. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the divide between East and West regarding libertarianism has become more evident. In some European libertarian circles, those who adopt such views are derogatorily referred to as […]

Given the interest in Elon Musk’s flirtation with the Kremlin view on Ukraine, the topic of the Western tech world’s openness to Kremlin narratives has emerged again. I’ve gotten a small spike of interest in a presentation I made at SXSW in 2018. So I’ll share it here again in a downloadable form. If I […]

The US has released the kernel of another intelligence assessment that describes the Kremlin’s global malign influence machine. Following the liberal tradition, it produces facts, allowing the public the make up its mind. This is in contrast to the authoritarian model that relies more on producing narrative. Democracies argue in facts. Authoritarians play with meanings. […]

The film director Brian De Palma had this to say about director’s careers… “We don’t plan them out, we happen to be working on one thing, then another happens, then another thing is delayed. Then we do the thing we can do at the time.” There is a lesson in this for the great debate […]

The strategy of declassifying intelligence around Russia’s intentions to invade Ukraine has recast the global narrative about Russia, and possibly about authoritarianism too. The way the White House declassified and shared intelligence on Putin’s military intentions has effectively now robbed Russia of narrative control. But the campaign to forewarn the public of an imminent invasion has […]

…and information disorder, untruths, trolling, disinformation. The virtual event is an effort to resurrect the global language of democracy after its rough start in the new century. One of the traits of this era is escalating complexity of systems. No form of government knows that better than liberal democracy — just look at the news and […]

Too much information, too much contradiction and too much confusion. In this era, how do we even think about where democracy stands in the world? The former president of Estonia Toomas Hendrik Ilves, in a speech in honour of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, offers a clear-eyed assessment of the state of democracy today in competition […]

This is a big week for the prospect of meaningful regulation of social media in the US. The testimony of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has raised hopes of legislative reform for Facebook. But in the drive for government action, are reformers forgetting how much personalisation has change political communication? We’re in a different world now. […]

This short podcast is not so much a criticism of disinformation research but rather a critique of the expectations around it  – or possibly the unexamined expectations around it. I refer to these three articles. 1) https://www.npr.org/2021/08/04/1024791053/facebook-boots-nyu-disinformation-researchers-off-its-platform-and-critics-cry-f 2) https://harpers.org/archive/2021/09/bad-news-selling-the-story-of-disinformation/ 3) https://www.niemanlab.org/reading/facebook-sent-flawed-data-to-misinformation-researchers/ Music by Lesfm from Pixabay/ Image

I wanted to push a little deeper on the question of how (or even why) US foreign policy should be more in sync with the middle class. So I’ve recorded a podcast that discusses this potential new direction in US democracy – the effort, however early, to ensure that US foreign policy goals support working […]