Deterring a potential Chinese attack on Taiwan requires demonstrating that the West is capable of unity and resolve.

Those Chinese also predict that transatlantic unity between Europe and America will crumble and that sanctions will fail to break Russia’s will, not least as European voters protest against high energy prices and flows of refugees from Ukraine.

China is doing Europe a favour by explaining how it expects the West to be a loser from the conflict in Ukraine.

Chinese officials pre-emptively instructed the Europeans not to threaten their leader.

that China will face a serious cost if it helps Mr Putin circumvent Western sanctions on Russia, or provides military aid

Mr Michel and Ms von der Leyen were expected to express the EU’s horror over Chinese fondness for economic coercion.

Instead Mr Michel and Ms von der Leyen were due to raise human rights at the summit, touching on such thorny topics as China’s iron-fisted rule over Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong.

hina’s preferred agenda involved the signing of memorandums, and talks about reviving the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI), a trade pact heavily backed by Mrs Merkel.

EU governments are horrified by China’s refusal to urge Russia to stop the war.

In 16 years as chancellor, she promoted an accommodating approach that treated China as an invaluable source of economic opportunity and a potential partner on such issues as climate change, albeit one prone to disappointing lapses on human rights.

CHINESE LEADERS wanted the mood to be “business as usual”.

governments are increasingly keen to limit cross-border information flows, often invoking national security

forcing these positions to be filled locally.

Amid supply-chain disruptions from the pandemic, now compounded by Russia’s war in Ukraine, and a geostrategic contest with China, Western politicians are in a protectionist mood.

being in the same time zone as your client.

For these reasons, proximity matters.

It is harder to do so for high-value projects at the heart of their business, which require constant communication, continuity and confidentiality

McKinsey estimates that compensation costs have risen by 20-30% over the past year.

A ballooning Indian “talent cloud”

Wages for new hires in India can be as little as $5,000 annually, less than a tenth of the going rate in rich countries.

it possible for companies to untether from their physical headquarters not just peripheral functions but parts of their ever more digital core business

Earlier this year JPMorgan Chase, an American bank, announced it would add 6,000 people to its substantial Indian business to work on the cloud, cyber-security and AI. IBM has opened a cyber-security centre in India to cater to its Asian clients.

great migration to the cloud offers further opportunities.

All these innovations required sophisticated software. A lot if it has been developed in India since early 2020. And there is more to come.

All manner of businesses are digitising ever more of their operations. They are moving more activities to the computing cloud. And work is becoming more remote. India’s low-cost, competent coders can help with all three.

In the last financial year they reached an all-time high of $150bn, or 5.6% of Indian GDP (see chart 1).

The industry’s three giants, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys and Wipro, became household names at home and familiar to chief executives of big businesses abroad, who had outsourced their companies’ countermeasures against the feared “millennium bug”,

As the Wild West phase ends, brands should also embrace new analytical tools that help them gauge the performance of influencers

who disclose to their audiences that their posts are paid

They should expect more regulation on consumer protection: China’s crackdown may also include limits on spending and content rules

the most popular marketing strategy of the 2010s—ads targeted through Google and Facebook—is under threat as new privacy standards, including on Apple’s iPhone, make it harder to spy on potential customers.

The boundary between entertainment and e-commerce is blurring.

ignoring influencers is a mistake.

They are quick to adapt to newer platforms like TikTok and to the ever-changing algorithms of older ones like Instagram.

Influencers’ networks reach new audiences, particularly younger shoppers.

an elite of under 100,000 of them who have over 1m followers

Total spending on influencers by brands could reach $16bn this year.

For all firms with brands—and together those brands are worth over $7trn—it is time to realise that influencing is more than just a hobby.

This week China promised a tax-evasion crackdown on social-media influencers, who are paid by brands to promote products online to armies of followers.

To be a top-ten brand, says Flavio Cereda-Parini of Jefferies, an investment bank, you have to know how to play the digital game. If you don’t, “you are not going to be top ten for very long.”

Regulators around the world, as well as some social-media platforms, are beginning to clamp down on influencers who do not tag their content as advertorials.

Before the latest clampdown Chinese authorities had already forced 20,000 influencer accounts to be taken down last year on grounds of “polluting the internet environment”.

A host of younger and more unpredictable brand ambassadors is harder for brands to control than one or two superstars on exclusive contracts with good-behaviour clauses.

Influencer-led live-streamed shopping events in China by Louis Vuitton and Gucci were ridiculed for cheapening their brand.

“media impact value” (MIV)

They are video editors, scriptwriters, lighting specialists, directors and the main talent wrapped into one.

He and Viya, a fellow influencer, flogged $3bn-worth of goods in a day, half as much again as changes hands daily on Amazon.

(Instagram is best for all-stars with over 2m followers and TikTok for niche “micro-influencers” with up to 100,000 followers and “nano-influencers” with fewer than 10,000).

Such star-led campaigns can feel aloof to teenagers and 20-somethings who prize authenticity over timeless glamour.

Brands’ global spending on influencers may reach $16bn this year, more than one in ten ad dollars spent on social media.

One in 2020 from the National Bureau of Statistics in China, where influencers gained prominence earlier than in the West, estimated its contribution to the economy at $210bn, equivalent to 1.4% of GDP.

On March 29th news reports surfaced that China’s paternalistic authorities are planning new curbs on how much money internet users can spend on tipping their favourite influencers, how much those influencers can earn from fans, and what they are allowed to post.

For consumers, influencers are at once a walking advert and a trusted friend.

Their fame stems not from non-digital pursuits, as was the case with the A-list stars who used to dominate the ranks of brand ambassadors, but from savvy use of Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok.

Apple and Google take a cut of up to 30%, which is thought to contribute a fifth of the operating profits at Apple and Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

you cannot “pass laws against trade-offs”.

Apple allows sideloading on its desktop computers without calamity.

The DMA, which is on track to come into force next year, would force mobile platforms to allow third-party app stores and “sideloading” of apps directly from the web—something Google permits but Apple does not.

A bigger threat comes from the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), approved in draft form on March 24th.

A bill before America’s Congress would force app stores to allow payment alternatives and let apps advertise other ways to sign up.

Its high-octane venture capitalism and, increasingly, its capitalists and capital have infused technology scenes from Stockholm to Shanghai and São Paulo.

Venture investments across the Atlantic have shot up from less than $40bn in 2019 to more than $93bn last year—pulling nearly equal with Silicon Valley, according to CBInsights, another data provider.

The Brookings Institution, a think-tank, recently estimated that 31% of tech jobs are now offered in “superstar metro areas” such as Silicon Valley, down from 36% before the pandemic.

now they no longer have to be physically present to get access to capital, talent and know-how.

Zoom makes it easier for people to interview for a new job and for entrepreneurs to pitch to potential investors. In the words of Mike Volpi of Index Ventures, a VC firm, “This has created a much more efficient market.”

Promising startups can raise money in days rather than weeks.

everyone seems suddenly obsessed with the decentralised “web3” (which they are)

ike a college reunion these days

free and open, connected, prosperous, secure, and resilient

to mitigate online radicalization,

the internet, and cyber space.

ew regional initiatives to improve collective cybersecurity and

to improve their cyber capacity.

catalyze investment in transparent, high-standards infrastructure, and build digital connectivity—doubling down on our economic ties to the region while contributing to broadly shared Indo-Pacific opportunity.

nnovative network architectures such as Open RAN by encouraging at-scale commercial deployments and cooperation on testing

We will develop new approaches to trade that meet high labor and environmental standards and will govern our digital economies and cross-border data flows according to open principles, including through a new digital-economy framework.

o build regional connectivity with an emphasis on the digital domain,

Barrasso flagged China’s membership in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) – a multilateral trade agreement that primarily reduces tariffs and other trade barriers in the region – as an example of how Beijing is currently “winning” on the economic front.

the IPEF makes “open principles” governing cross-border data flows; supply chains “that are diverse, open and predictable” and “shared investments in decarbonisation and clean energy” its key goals in addition to labour and environmental considerations, according to a White House fact sheet.

aims to improve environmental and labour standards as part of what the administration calls a “worker-centred” trade policy.

How firms handle redundancies also sends signals to prospective employees, customers and investors.

Callousness affects the morale of those who are left behind: recent research suggests that a toxic corporate culture is more likely to lead to employee attrition than any other factor.

saving 3,000 jobs is worth the loss of 800 workers.

Click here to view original web page at www.economist.com

Yet they will continue to be taken, posted and shared. As Ukraine demonstrates, real life is increasingly lived online, both at peace and at war.

Russian disinformation campaigns seem to be targeting Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, crafting messages that tap into pre-existing anti-Western or anti-American sentiments, says Mr Miller. A team at Demos used semantic analysis of accounts pushing pro-Putin hashtags on Twitter and found a preponderance of activity in South Africa and India. Public opinion on the conflict in Asia is not as definitively anti-Russian as in the West. Cyril Ramphosa, South Africa’s president, recently tweeted that “the war could have been avoided if NATO had heeded the warnings” about its eastward expansion.

Inside Russia, Mr Putin has kept a tight grip on the narrative by tightening the flow of information. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have all been banned; users on TikTok cannot create new content. Wartime censorship laws make calling the war a war punishable by up to 15 years behind bars. Russian authorities have created Telegram chatbots for citizens to inform on those spreading “incorrect information”.

“There is no systemic, reliable way to look across these platforms and see what the information ecosystems look like,” laments Brandon Silverman, co-founder of CrowdTangle, a social analytics tool.

In the West, Russian narratives have gained little traction. That may be because the reality is too stark to spin. Western platforms have also taken tougher stances towards the disinformation spread by Russian state media. But Russia has also made less of an effort to reach western audiences, reckons Carl Jack Miller of Demos, a think-tank in London.

“They’re using crap from the second world war,”

“We witness how a new narrative about Ukraine is being born and it gives us strength, gives us courage,” says Ms Tsybulska.

Diplomats in Europe say similar shifts in public opinion there have helped galvanise support for tougher sanctions against Russia and a more liberal approach to refugees from Ukraine

When Russia invaded in 2014, Ukraine’s internet culture, like its economy as a whole, was oriented towards Russia. The most popular social network was VK, a Russian platform. In recent years, Ukraine’s tech scene has boomed; many developers and designers work for Western technology companies.

One group packages content aimed at Russians; another produces patriotic clips for a domestic audience; a third focuses on TikTok; a fourth churns out memes; yet others work to archive photos and videos from social media for what they hope will be future war-crimes tribunals.

“Everybody is an information warrior these days,”

a chatbot on Telegram that allows citizens to send videos and locations of Russian forces

a meme-style image that contrasts “Nestle’s positioning”—a picture of a healthy child—with “Nestle’s position”—a picture of a dead child.

Telegram

“It’s organic for him to use technology,” says Mr Fedorov, who ran digital operations for Mr Zelensky’s presidential campaign in 2019. “He wants to share, wants to spread the word, wants to convey his emotions—like a normal person.”

It helps to have a charismatic, social-media savvy leader in Mr Zelensky, a former TV star.

their power depends less on the information they convey than on the experience they express.

in “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”, Roger Fenton’s iconic image of a cannonball-strewn road during the Crimean War.

The evolution of social media and communications technologies plays a role too. The shifts can be seen in Ukraine itself: when Russia began its war in 2014, just 4% of Ukrainian mobile subscribers had access to networks of 3G speed or faster; this year, more than 80% are on high-speed networks, according to Kepios, a research firm. In 2014 just 14% of Ukrainians had smartphones, reckons Kepios; by 2020 more than 70% did, estimates GSMA, a telecommunications industry body. When Mr Putin launched the recent invasion, 4.6bn people were using social media globally, more than double the number in 2014.

When Russian bombers began pounding Syria on behalf of Bashar al-Assad in 2015, 30% of Syria’s population was online. In Afghanistan at the time of the American withdrawal, the figure stood at less than 20%.

Some 75% of Ukrainians use the internet, according to the International Telecommunication Union, part of the UN.

to push for a “digital blockade” of Russia by global technology firms.

The war in Ukraine is not, as some commentators rushed to declare, the “first social-media war”. Israel and Hamas have long sparred on Twitter as well as IRL. During Mr Putin’s previous invasion of Ukraine, in 2014-15, digital sleuths used selfies that Russian soldiers posted online to prove their presence on the battlefield in the Donbas region. (Russia subsequently barred soldiers from carrying smartphones while on duty.) Nor is the war in Ukraine the first conflict to appear on a new generation of social networks such as TikTok, which launched in 2016. Videos from the war in Syria have long circulated there; those interested could also find plenty of clips from Nagorno-Karabakh, the disputed enclave that Armenia and Azerbaijan fought over in 2020.

The ministry's announcement came as Ukrainian officials said that humanitarian convoys ran into several issues on Thursday, including Russian troops confiscating aid and blocking buses.

Since its low in early March the rouble has jumped, and is now approaching its pre-war level. The main benchmark of Russian stocks plunged by a third, but has since stabilised. The government and most firms are keeping up with their payments on foreign-currency bonds. A run on banks that saw nearly 3trn roubles ($31bn) withdrawn came to an end, with Russians returning much of the cash to their accounts.

Unless that changes, the Russian economy may continue to defy the worst predictions.

Yet many big businesses that started during Soviet times are used to operating without imports. If any economy could come close to coping with being cut off from the world, it would be Russia’s.

there is little evidence yet of a big hit to economic activity.

Roskomnadzor, Russia’s official digital censor, said YouTube is “one of the key platforms participating in the information war against Russia” and accused it of harboring videos from far-right Ukrainian groups Right Sector and the Azov Battalion. Searches on YouTube for the two groups primarily showed news videos about the groups and the war.

o the extent that Russia’s military has embarrassed itself, it is more likely to lead to a well-aimed purge from above than a broad revolution from below. Russia’s new energy riches could eventually help it shake loose the grip of sanctions.

territorial concessions and Ukrainian neutrality. The West will also look for any opportunity to de-escalate, especially as we convince ourselves that a mentally unstable Putin is prepared to use nuclear weapons.

Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s).

When Western military analysts argue that Putin can’t win militarily in Ukraine, what they really mean is that he can’t win clean.

despite government and state media warnings of a market frenzy and scams related to the concept.

games like

to virtual narrators explain “current hot topics and knowledge”, and raise their hands to ask questions.

o move around and communicate with audio and their virtual bodies, the company said.

digital avatars, and they can examine historical relics and assemble installations, all in 3D

party conferences and party history lessons.

an article posted on Tencent Holdings’ WeChat by Beijing-based virtual reality (VR) firm Mengke VR,

The Chinese Academy of Governance,

and to continue providing services to Ukraine’s Armed Forces and other military formations as well as to the customers

to continue providing services to Ukraine’s Armed Forces and other military formations as well as to the customers,

confirming that connectivity collapse to 13% of pre-war levels

used by the country's military

the interoperability of services

may impose on a gatekeeper fines not less than 4% and not exceeding 20% of its totalfinesworldwide turnover in the preceding financial year where it finds that the gatekeeper, intentionally or negligently, fails to comply

a European High-Level Group of Digital Regulators

personal data ofminors should not be processed for commercial purposes, such as direct marketing, profiling and behaviourally targeted advertising

refrain from combining personal data for the purpose of delivering targeted or micro-targeted advertising

efrain from imposing unfair conditions on businesses and consumers

Members also amended the Commissions proposal to increase the quantitative thresholds for a company to fall under the scope of the digitalmarkets act to (as opposed to EUR 6.5 billion) in annual turnover in the European Economic Area (EEA) and a marketEUR 8 billioncapitalisation of (as opposed to 65 billion as proposed by the Commission).EUR 80 billionTo qualify as a gatekeeper, companies would also need to provide a core platform service in at least three EU countries and have at least 45, as well as . A list of indicators to be used by the providers of core platformsmillion monthly end usersmore than 10 000 business usersservices when measuring monthly end users and yearly business users should be provided in an Annex to the proposed Regulation.

Theseinclude online intermediation services, social networks, search engines, operating systems, online advertising services, cloud computing, andvideo-sharing services, which meet the relevant criteria to be designated as gatekeepers.

should only apply to large companies that would be designated as gatekeepers.

The proposed Digital Markets Act aims at preventing gatekeepers from imposing unfair conditions on businesses andconsumers and at ensuring the openness of important digital services

create products that are interoperable with smaller platforms.

“Technology and automation defined every piece of this museum, but the adjustments took human intervention,” Mr. Belhoul said. “In the actual installation, it was more about humans than cranes.”

said Majed Ateeq Almansoori, deputy executive director at Dubai Future Foundation, which operates the museum.

“We fed a computer what’s called a parametrically scripted growth algorithm,” he said. “You give it the rules. You say you want this many floors and this much height. You have to teach the algorithm to think, but then you go away on your weekend and see what it comes up with.”

There is a children’s area, a 345-seat theater and a cavernous top-floor that could accommodate as many as 1,000 people for a meeting or event.

a blend of human skill and digital power.

"Suspending Russia from the [UN] Human Rights Council, t

After the legislation is been approved by the Council and the Parliament, the Commission expects it to come into effect around October. Companies running complex messaging apps are likely to be given a grace period to ensure their interoperability.

The DMA sets out a definition of gatekeepers as companies with a market capitalization of at least 75 billion euro (about $83 million) or an annual turnover of 7.5 billion euros, and additionally must provide certain services such as browsers, messengers or social media, which have at least 45 million monthly users in the EU and 10,000 annual business users. This extends to companies largely based in the US, including Apple, Meta, Amazon and Google.

gatekeeper companies must follow additional rules because they are "most prone to unfair business practices,"

"What we want is simple: Fair markets also in digital," European Competition Commissioner Margethe Vestager said in a statement. "We are now taking a huge step forward to get there -- that markets are fair, open and contestable."

The DMA will require companies with messaging apps to make them interoperable.

“subject to existing anti-money laundering, counterterrorism, Know Your Customer, and financial transaction reporting requirements and regulations.”

The realistic goal is to make it so expensive and time consuming to hack the chip that no one would bother.

The bill, which Grey consulted on, would direct the US Treasury Department to conduct a pilot program for a version of digital dollars that work just like cash.

As the economy shifts inexorably toward all-digital transactions, a future where our only options are payment apps, banks, crypto, or CBDCs means a future in which every financial transaction is potentially subject to surveillance by the government or private companies.

true digital cash doesn’t exist.

When you send a payment using Venmo, or a bank, on the other hand, you’re just directing them to update your account by moving some numbers around in their books. The same thing is true of cryptocurrencies; the only meaningful difference is that the network as a whole, rather than a financial institution, approves the transactions.

the early faith in crypto anonymity was misplaced. The thing about blockchains is that while your transactions might be hidden behind a crypto wallet address, they are also permanently stored on a public database. It didn’t take law enforcement agencies too long to figure out how to connect those transactions and wallets to the real-world identities behind them.

The ECASH Act would direct the US government to experiment with issuing digital dollars that are stored on hardware, not in bank accounts, and can be used without an internet connection.

A bill introduced in Congress on Monday seeks to re-create the virtues of cash, privacy and all, in digital form.

The only kind of money that leaves no paper trail is paper.

For instance, 5G and quantum computing are poised to enable new growth in AI capabilities, while AI stands to transform the biological sciences, producing significant technological breakthroughs and turning the biotechnology sector into one of the primary drivers of overall economic competitiveness.”

5G technology and artificial intelligence

Schmidt maintained a close relationship with the president’s former science adviser, Eric Lander, and other Biden appointees.

New Google Calendar feature takes the back-and-forth out of scheduling

Predicting the future of technology is impossible – it will happen when it happens. One can try to draw an analogy with the past. It took the airline industry more than 60 years to go from the Wright brothers to jumbo jets carrying hundreds of passengers thousands of miles.

There are proposals to use small-scale quantum computers for drug design, as a way to quickly calculate molecular structures, which is a confusing application because quantum chemistry is a small part of the whole. process. Equally disconcerting are claims that quantum computers will soon help finance. There is no technical literature that conclusively demonstrates that small quantum computers, let alone NISQ machines, can lead to significant optimizations in algorithmic trading or risk assessment or arbitrage. or hedging or targeting and predicting or trading assets or profiling risk. However, this hasn’t stopped some investment banks from jumping into the quantum computing wars.

But despite the continued hype of NISQ coming from various quantum computer startups, the potential for commercialization remains unclear.

The qubit systems we have today are a huge scientific achievement, but they don’t bring us any closer to having a quantum computer that can solve a problem anyone is interested in.

the war is intended to wipe out the possibility of any future that looks towards Europe and some form of liberating modernity.

Yuri Kovalchuk, a close friend who controls a vast media group

like Konstantin Leontyev, an ultra-reactionary 19th-century visionary who admired hierarchy and monarchy,

the onset of the covid-19 pandemic two years ago brought a raising of the ideological stakes.

he told a press conference in Moscow that nuclear weapons and Orthodox Christianity were the two pillars of Russian society, the one guaranteeing the country’s external security, the other its moral health.

Mr Putin formally rejected the idea of Russia’s integration into the West

the new ideology of isolationism

His contract with the Russian people was based not on religion or ideology, but on improving incomes.

an anonymous book called “Project Russia”

Anti-Westernism and a siege mentality are central to their beliefs. Mr Putin relies on the briefs with which they supply him, always contained in distinctive red folders, for his information about the world

the priests are the siloviki of the security services, from whose ranks Mr Putin himself emerged.

Elizbar Orlov, a priest in Rostov, a city close to the border with Ukraine, said the Russian army “was cleaning the world of a diabolic infection”.

The cathedral is a Byzantine monstrosity in khaki, its floor made from melted-down German tanks. But it is not devoted solely to the wars of the previous century. A mosaic commemorates the invasion of Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the country’s role in Syria’s civil war: angels smile down on the soldiers going about their holy work.