Blockchain Papers

Lukáš Zelieska, Radovan Vojtko, Cyril Dujava

No abstract is available for this record.

Hao Sui, Jiale Zhang, Bing Chen, Di Wu · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Massimo Terenzi

The rise of blockchain and cryptocurrencies come with the promise of decentralizing transactions and disrupting the power of market intermediaries. Despite these promises, scholars argue that the risks associated with cryptocurrencies are still unclear. Some preliminary works investigate the manipulative role played by the circulation of problematic content on platforms such as Reddit, Twitter, Discord, or Telegram. Nonetheless, the research still lacks a clear and comprehensive picture of how widespread the phenomenon is across the whole ecosystem. Despite its prominence, Facebook is understudied in this context. To fill this gap, this work focuses on the role played by Meta’s main platform, as a venue employed to reach a wide audience prone to potential manipulative practices or scams related to cryptocurrencies. As part of a broader investigation on coordinated disinformation in Africa, we have come across a cluster of Facebook groups sharing content related to cryptocurrencies. The links shared by these networks revealed a very prolific cluster of 152 groups dedicated to Airdrop and Bounty initiatives for new cryptocurrencies. We collected a list of recent posts created by these groups between November 2021 and January 2022 (378,513 URLs). A preliminary analysis of these URLs pointed out an overwhelming presence of links to Telegram (47%) that highlights the central role played by this platform in this specific ecosystem. This paper explores the overlap between the cryptocurrency community and social media, analyzing how crypto-related projects are disseminated as a new type of problematic content on Facebook and Telegram.

Kevin K.W. Ho, Dickson K.W. Chiu, C. H. Au, Francis Dalisay · 6 authors

This position article summarizes the panelists’ presentations and discussions at the panel “Fake News, Misinformation, and Privacy: How COVID-19 Pandemic Changed Our Society,” held at the 15th International Conference on Information Resources Management (Conf-IRM 2022) on October 18, 2022. The panel discussed their views on (1) how to stop the spreading of health misinformation; (2) how information sources affect online health information behavior; (3) how news literacy increases people's desire to seek out information by increasing their skepticism; and (4) how political beliefs, trust, and privacy concerns affect people's decisions during COVID-19. This article also discusses how blockchain and distributed ledger technologies can help tackle the fake news and misinformation problem.

Chengxiang Jin, Jiajun Zhou, Shengbo Gong, Chenxuan Xie · 5 authors

Blockchain technology revolutionizes the Internet, but also poses increasing risks, particularly in cryptocurrency finance. On the Ethereum platform, Ponzi schemes, phishing scams, and a variety of other frauds emerge. Existing Ponzi scheme detection approaches based on heterogeneous transaction graph modeling leverages semantic information between node (account) pairs to establish connections, overlooking the semantic attributes inherent to the edges (interactions). To overcome this, we construct heterogeneous Ethereum interaction graphs with multiple triplet interaction patterns to better depict the real Ethereum environment. Based on this, we design a new framework named multi-triplet augmented heterogeneous graph neural network (MAHGNN) for Ponzi scheme detection. We introduce the Conditional Variational Auto Encoder (CVAE) to capture the semantic information of different triplet interaction patterns, which facilitates the characterization on account features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAHGNN is capable of addressing the problem of multi-edge interactions in heterogeneous Ethereum interaction graphs and achieving state-of-the-art performance in Ponzi scheme detection.

Geordan Shannon, Alix Faddoul, Alexander Lai, Tony Lai · 7 authors

Planet.Health addresses imagination and coordination challenges for planetary health through innovative approaches to social organising. This report presents the findings from the inaugural Planet.Health event in 2022, including the Planet.Health unconference. An unconference is a participant-driven event format that provides flexibility for emergent ideas and connections. In this (un)conference report, we share the challenges, achievements, and lessons learned during the initial year of activities in the leadup to and following the Planet.Health unconference event. We also discuss how the intersection of web3 and planetary health—a major focus of the first year—provides an alternative lens for envisioning, innovating, and coordinating beyond conventional social and institutional frameworks. We explore the potential impact of web3 technologies and decentralised social, economic, and financial networks and highlight the implications of these approaches for addressing planetary crises and supporting a flourishing human–environment relationship. As a new contribution to the planetary health field, this work emphasises the importance of building decentralised systems to foster creative actions and inspire global engagement for planetary wellbeing. The report concludes with some practical insights on how we begin to build and sustain decentralised social networks, including a discussion of the benefits and limitations of these approaches.

Wenrui Zuo, Aravindh Raman, Raúl J. Mondragón, Gareth Tyson

Web3 social media strives to eliminate the need for centralized management by building upon on technologies such public ledgers and smart contracts. This has generated significant hype, but creates many notable challenges, many of which remain unaddressed. One such challenge is content moderation. Specifically, the immutable nature of blockchain means that it becomes impossible to retrospectively delete posts. This means that illegal content posts cannot be moderated or removed. In an attempt to overcome this, Web3 platforms, such as memo.cash, allow users to filter out posts from their personal timelines. Taking memo.cash as a use case, the goal of this work is to study the efficacy of the approach, and identify associated challenges. A particularly unique feature of memo.cash is that users must pay money (satoshi) for each social action (e.g., posting and blocking other users). We conjecture that this may impact the nature of moderation, particularly among poorer users. To explore this, we gather data from memo.cash covering 24K users, 317K posts, and 2.57M user actions. We investigate how the need to pay may impact the moderation system and propose potential solutions to address the challenges that arise.

Sachin Banker, Joowon Park, Eugene Y. Chan

Despite its relatively brief history, cryptocurrency has already had a profound impact on the economy, with some predicting that it will eventually replace traditional fiat currencies. Historically, it had dark associations with illegal activities in the early days, although perceptions and associations likely have, in recent years, changed for the better. Thus, understanding how people perceive the morality of cryptocurrency currently forms the motivation of the current research. We, in particular, examine associations dependent on political ideology. Across both a large-scale analysis of Twitter posts ( N = 959,393) and controlled survey research ( N = 487), we find that cryptocurrency is currently best understood as being more strongly linked to conservative vs. liberal moral foundations. Cryptocurrency-related posts were more likely to express conservative moral foundations (Authority, Purity, and Loyalty) rather than liberal moral foundations (Fairness and Care), and individual endorsement of these conservative moral foundations was associated with increased interest in crypto investment.

Alexander Shevtsov, Despoina Antonakaki, Ioannis Lamprou, Ioannis Kontogiorgakis · 6 authors

On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, starting what is now known as the Russo-Ukrainian War, initiating an online discourse on social media. Twitter as one of the most popular SNs, with an open and democratic character, enables a transparent discussion among its large user base. Unfortunately, this often leads to Twitter's policy violations, propaganda, abusive actions, civil integrity violation, and consequently to user accounts' suspension and deletion. This study focuses on the Twitter suspension mechanism and the analysis of shared content and features of the user accounts that may lead to this. Toward this goal, we have obtained a dataset containing 107.7M tweets, originating from 9.8 million users, using Twitter API. We extract the categories of shared content of the suspended accounts and explain their characteristics, through the extraction of text embeddings in junction with cosine similarity clustering. Our results reveal scam campaigns taking advantage of trending topics regarding the Russia-Ukrainian conflict for Bitcoin and Ethereum fraud, spam, and advertisement campaigns. Additionally, we apply a machine learning methodology including a SHapley Additive explainability model to understand and explain how user accounts get suspended.

Cristian Nicolae Buţincu, Adrian Alexandrescu

Disinformation and fake news are used by multiple actors to manipulate and influence the public with the purpose of gaining a series of advantages. This paper describes a promising solution to the increased spread of disinformation on the Internet. Our approach leverages blockchain technology combined with both crowd intelligence and federated artificial intelligence to develop efficient capabilities that address the disinformation phenomenon. The blockchain-based architecture of the platform creates a decentralized ecosystem that ensures transparency and trust, enabling the users to make correctly informed decisions in the face of disinformation. The key differentiating factor of the platform is the incorporation of both crowd and artificial intelligence in a system that can identify and respond to disinformation quickly and efficiently. The presented architecture can be used to build reactive and proactive platforms to effectively challenge disinformation.

Sachith Mankala, Audhav Durai, Anvi Padiyar, Olga Gkountouna · 5 authors

Increasing public concerns about the environment have led to many studies that have explored current issues and approaches towards its protection. Much less studied, however, is topic of public opinion surrounding the impact that cryptocurrencies are having on the environment. The cryptocurrency market, in particular, bitcoin, currently rivals other top well-known assets such as precious metals and exchanged traded funds in market value, and its growing. This work examines public opinion expressed about the environmental impacts of bitcoin derived from Twitter feeds. Three primary research questions were addressed in this work related to topics of public interest, their location, and people and places involved. Our findings show that factions of of the public are interest in protecting the environment, with topics that resonate mainly related to energy. This discourse was also taking place at few similar locations with a mix of different people and places of interest.

Juan Ángel Lafuente, Javier Ordóñez, Mercedes Monfort, Belén Gill de Albornoz Noguer

No abstract is available for this record.

Md. Anisul Islam Mahmud, A. A. Talha Talukder, Arbiya Sultana, Kazi Iftesam Amin Bhuiyan · 7 authors

The growing popularity of online news has prompted concerns regarding (i) the socio-political influence over news dissemination, (ii) the waning freedom of news media, (iii) and a facile news evaluation process. A piece of news having the power to capture a large audience and sow the seed of bizarre consequences on a national scale should be prudently evaluated before reaching the mass. In quest of making a substantial profit, and sometimes due to inevitable socio-political influence, news with biased heading outpours mass media, resulting in ambiguity and mass manipulation. In this paper, we suggest a blockchain, smart contract, and incremental machine learning-based news evaluation procedure for the Bengali language to overcome these challenges. Weighted synthesis of machine classification and human expert opinion in a decentralized platform are synthesized to evaluate news. With continuous data, the Natural Language Processing (NLP) model is incrementally trained, and the best version of the model is used to detect deprived fake news. During experiments, the NLP model with initial training and testing accuracy of 84.94% and 84.99% was increased to 93.75% and 93.80% after nine rounds of incremental model training. On the Ethereum test network, the protocols have been installed and tested. The simulation demonstrates successful implementation of our proposed system.

Lady Joanne Tjahyana

Cryptocurrency is a speculative investment due to its volatility which could result in significant returns but also could end in crashes. Terra blockchain collapsed when its stable coin UST failed to maintain its peg to 1 USD and caused its sister coin LUNA to drop by more than 90% only in a few days. Terra LUNA itself has gained success and attracted many investors that became a strong community called Lunatics. Using Netnography; this study tried to observe crisis response strategies from Do Kwon, founder and CEO of Terraform Labs, and from Terra LUNA official Twitter account during the crash. Also, this study used community sentiment as an indicator to measure the success of the strategies. In addition, this study observed the interaction of the community during the crash period and how they overcome the crisis together. The results show that mortification and corrective action are the most effective strategy to generate positive sentiment. However, denials toward rumors cause more negative sentiment within the community. Despite the recovery plan from the Terra network, the Lunatics community also has its ways of recovering from the crisis. This study also revealed that community influencers' roles are crucial in controlling rumors during the crisis.

Manoel Fernando Alonso Gadi, Miguel‐Ángel Sicilia

Abstract Event studies in general rely on having a high-quality curated database of events. In this paper we introduce CryptoGDelt2022, a news event dataset extracted from the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT) containing more than 243 thousands cryptocurrency related news events between the 31st of March 2021 and 30th of April 2022. The dataset is enriched with supervised machine learning scores for Relevance, Sentiment and Strength. Supervised Relevance Score measures how related to Cryptocurrency the topic is using news web scrapped from Yahoo in general and from the Cryptocurrency part of the site, after a comparison of approaches; Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), BERT and Naive Bayes, Naive Bayes was chosen and the hyper-parameter tuned model reached accuracy: 97.84 % in the train set and 91.70% in the test set. Supervised Sentiment Score measures the negative, neutral or positive tone of the news, after hyper-parameter tuning, the retrained FinBERT model achieved accuracy of 92.63% in the train set and 86.11% in the test set. Supervised Strength Score measures how strong the news by using the abnormal return using Fama French 3-factor model as target output variable, after hyper-parameter tuning, the trained Naive Bayes model reached accuracy of 63.34%. The work concludes that GDELT is more reliable source of event when compared to news selected from cryptocurrency specialized websites as it presents a more balanced positive and negative number of news. All data sets and Python Jupyter Notebooks are available in the project's GitHub.

Khizar Qureshi, Tauhid Zaman

Cryptocurrencies are highly speculative assets with large price volatility. If one could forecast their behavior, this would make them more attractive to investors. In this work we study the problem of predicting the future performance of cryptocurrencies using social media data. We propose a new model to measure the engagement of users with topics discussed on social media based on interactions with social media posts. This model overcomes the limitations of previous volume and sentiment based approaches. We use this model to estimate engagement coefficients for 48 cryptocurrencies created between 2019 and 2021 using data from Twitter from the first month of the cryptocurrencies' existence. We find that the future returns of the cryptocurrencies are dependent on the engagement coefficients. Cryptocurrencies whose engagement coefficients have extreme values have lower returns. Low engagement coefficients signal a lack of interest, while high engagement coefficients signal artificial activity which is likely from automated accounts known as bots. We measure the amount of bot posts for the cryptocurrencies and find that generally, cryptocurrencies with more bot posts have lower future returns. While future returns are dependent on both the bot activity and engagement coefficient, the dependence is strongest for the engagement coefficient, especially for short-term returns. We show that simple investment strategies which select cryptocurrencies with engagement coefficients exceeding a fixed threshold perform well for holding times of a few months.

Momčilo Bajac, Maja Vojinović

In this paper we start from the assumption that social dynamics and cultural-civilizational progress cannot be viewed separately from the social history of the media as complex technological-communication structures. In this paper we deal with the influence of new disruptive technologies DLT (Distributed Ledger Technologies) better known as blockchain technologies which, thanks to the latest technological solutions, have great potential for transforming the media and journalism as a profession, thus we have explained the technological concept on which they are based. We will discuss the concept of personalized blockchain journalism and propose a user economy model that guarantees the financial sustainability of the platform. Observing information as a user experience, we have discussed the possibility of adequate cognitive response of users in conditions of information saturation, and raised the issue of structuring information in designing a journalistic platform on the blockchain, as an ecosystem that will distance itself from existing polluted media space. Finally, we have proposed a topic for further reflection and scientific research, which is the latest technological transition based on quantum computing, artificial intelligence and the Metaverse, which will provide a completely new user experience in 3D virtual space, where user avatars will rely less and less on traditional media and journalism as we know it today.

Poonam Rani, Vibha Jain, Jyoti Shokeen, Arnav Balyan

No abstract is available for this record.

Elena Musi, Myrto Aloumpi, Elinor Carmi, Simeon Yates · 5 authors

Misinformation constitutes one of the main challenges to counter the infodemic: misleading news, even if not blatantly false, can cause harm especially in crisis scenarios such as the pandemic. Due to the fast proliferation of information across digital media, human fact-checkers struggle to keep up with fake news, while automatic fact-checkers are not able to identify the grey area of misinformation. We, thus, propose to reverse engineer the manipulation of information offering citizens the means to become their own fact-checkers through digital literacy and critical thinking. Through a corpus analysis of fact-checked news about COVID-19, we identify 10 fallacies–arguments which seem valid but are not–that systematically trigger misinformation and offer a systematic procedure to identify them. Next to fallacies, we examine the types of sources associated to (mis-/dis-)information in our dataset as well as the type of claims making up the headlines. The statistical patterns surfaced from these three levels of analysis reveal a misinformation ecosystem where no source type is exempt from flawed arguments with frequent evading the burden of proof and cherry picking behaviors, even when descriptive claims are at stake. In such a scenario, exercising the audience’s critical skills through fallacy and semantic analysis is necessary to guarantee fake news immunity.

Luis Antonio Loredo Camou

Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, have recently become a conversation topic among the general population. This paper will explore the information available in Reddit regarding crypto assets. Unlike other social platforms, Reddit allows analyzing the general population sentiment while conveniently organizing information by topic. We study the benefit of sentiment variables derived from Reddit's crypto forums to forecast volatilities and returns. While volatility forecasts seem to benefit from Reddit sentiment variables consistently, results are not statistically different from a benchmark. In contrast, returns present mixed forecasting results but show statistical differences from the proposed benchmark. We also offer evidence that the Reddit variables gain importance in market-wide and asset-specific events.

Shehan Edirimannage, Mohamed Nabeel, Charith Elvitigala, Chamath Keppitiyagama

Blacklists are a widely-used Internet security mechanism to protect Internet users from financial scams, malicious web pages and other cyber attacks based on blacklisted URLs. In this demo, we introduce PhishChain, a transparent and decentralized system to blacklisting phishing URLs. At present, public/private domain blacklists, such as PhishTank, CryptoScamDB, and APWG, are maintained by a centralized authority, but operate in a crowd sourcing fashion to create a manually verified blacklist periodically. In addition to being a single point of failure, the blacklisting process utilized by such systems is not transparent. We utilize the blockchain technology to support transparency and decentralization, where no single authority is controlling the blacklist and all operations are recorded in an immutable distributed ledger. Further, we design a page rank based truth discovery algorithm to assign a phishing score to each URL based on crowd sourced assessment of URLs. As an incentive for voluntary participation, we assign skill points to each user based on their participation in URL verification.

Nektarios Aslanidis, Aurelio F. Bariviera, Óscar G. López

This paper revisits the linkage between cryptocurrencies and public disclosed preferences, proxied by online searches. We show that cryptocurrencies are not related to a general uncertainty index as measured by the Google Trends data by Castelnuovo and Tran (2017). Instead, cryptocurrencies are linked to a Google Trends attention measure specific for this market. In particular, we find a bidirectional flow of information between Google Trends attention and cryptocurrency returns up to six days. Moreover, information flows from cryptocurrency volatility to Google Trends attention seem to be larger than those in the other direction. Finally, we report a significant tail dependence between cryptocurrency returns and Google Trends. These relations hold for the five cryptocurrencies analyzed and different compositions of the proposed Google Trends Cryptocurrency index.

Victor Chang, Karl Hall, Qianwen Xu, Le Minh Thao Doan · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

B. Ruby Rich

Say the words out loud: alpha—delta—omicron. Add whatever variant(s) have emerged since this article's deadline. Greek-alphabet letters, recited like a chant, singsong, may sound like a nursery rhyme. "Ring around the Rosie," perhaps: the song about the London plague of 1665, or 1347, or perhaps earlier or later, or somewhere else, its words recorded, they say, in 1881.All fall down indeed. In the world of cinema in early 2022, it was the film festivals that were falling down. Rotterdam was the first to cancel. Then, Palm Springs. Sundance was still holding on, with determined signals of a physical presence along with an expanded online platform, until just two weeks before showtime when omicron exploded and the in-person Utah festival folded: online only it would have to be. The Berlinale moved its market online but confirmed its intention to hold in-person screenings (at press time anyway).Suddenly, the hopeful summer of live festivals (Telluride!) was a distant memory, the anxious autumn (New York!) a faraway treasure, though the Saudis managed to stage a cultural splash, the Red Sea International Festival, in December. Back home, grounded, film curators without live audiences, filmmakers with closed sets, distributors with few outlets, professors with no students in classrooms, grounded scholars without a conference bar, Oscar voters with home screens and laptops—and this editor, with a new digital projector—all sought a route out of despair. Often that was a screening, temporarily acceptable with the aid of vaccination proofs or rapid tests, but more likely it was online, with "content" that algorithms and menus offered. By January, movie theaters were still open, but I knew few people over the age of forty willing to enter them.Into this moment blasted . . . not a comet, but a movie about one (and yes, "comet" shares its first two letters with that other five-letter word dominating all life on earth). Don't Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021) is lucky, as "a new-school streaming entity, blessed with optimal COVID-surge timing. Millions who were interested a month ago to see something in a theater now, once again, find themselves back on the couch."1Based on a story McKay developed with journalist David Sirota, it was conceived before but shot during pandemic times, and released just in time for Christmas by Paramount and Netflix. Ah, if only good intentions were everything. This is a movie ostensibly about politics, science, and climate change that comes closer than most to communicating the full horrors of twenty-first century feudalism, corruption, greed, and ignorance (but not, incidentally, climate change) yet is undermined by its splashy multiplex-focused stylistic choices. Even Forbes took notice of the disparity between scientist appreciation and film-critic deprecation.2Any impulse to praise is canceled out by McKay's decision to script the sleazy corrupt president as a woman (Meryl Streep, no less). This colossal misstep throws the entire enterprise into the "ha ha, just kidding" wastebasket. Was it Bernie backer McKay's final revenge against Hillary or a botched attempt to imagine Ivanka there? Either way, to assign the classic misogynist and corrupt traits of Trumpian alpha males to a female character was an insulting misfire.Leonardo DiCaprio is convincing as a nerdy professor happy to sell out for celebrity and glamour (making me curious about the script changes he supposedly demanded). Jennifer Lawrence is spectacular as the whistleblower undone by her own discovery. Rob Morgan, however, is handed the thankless role of NASA's Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe, a Black man so divorced from community and selfhood that he is never seen in the company of Black family or friends or partner, and chooses to see the world end cosseted in whiteness in Lansing, Michigan.3Don't Look Up is a film trapped between political ambitions and genre fidelity. McKay just can't help himself: given the choice, he opts for the easy laugh every time. With one exception. Mark Rylance's character, Peter Isherwell, the gazillionaire head of the tech company BASH, is one part Elon Musk, one part Mark Zuckerberg, one part Peter Thiel, with a dash of Jared Kushner thrown in for good measure. This fascist figure is a thoroughly chilling embodiment of today's technofuturist overlords and deserves to be reincarnated immediately in a future McKay script aimed squarely at technocrats' control of human lives. Watching the film in the midst of the Elizabeth Holmes trial (again, with a woman standing in for the unprosecuted but equally corrupt male royalty of Silicon Valley) lent it extra frisson.A CNN headline interrupted: "The COVID-19 Case Surge Is Altering Daily Life across the US. Things Will Likely Get Worse, Experts Warn." I was still trying to write this editorial. Back home in California, climate change continued to gain momentum. "Many Stinson Beach Homes Could Be Flooded amid Rising Seas within a Decade. Would Building Dunes Save Them?" read another headline.4 Dan Fruchtman, the owner of an A-frame on the beach, was quoted as saying, "The Earth is so fragile. It's a shame what we've done to it." McKay, though, never really addresses climate change; instead, his film is lodged squarely in the "disaster movie" genre of The Poseidon Adventure (Ronald Neame, 1972) or the sci-fi hybrid Escape from New York (John Carpenter, 1981), with its villains updated and the whole world implicated.The theme of an uninhabitable earth, though, summons memories of another film: Bong Joon Ho's Snowpiercer (2013), about a world rendered uninhabitable by a botched climate experiment, leaving the remains of humanity to circle the globe in a perpetual-motion train divided by class. Based in part on the graphic novel Le Transperceneige (1982), by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand, and Jean-Marc Rochette, Snowpiercer was reborn as an ongoing episodic series (TNT, 2020–). I first saw the film in New York City at a private screening organized by Tilda Swinton. She was trying to drum up support for Bong Joon Ho's vision as the film was being held hostage by its distributor, the Weinstein Company, where Harvey was demanding cuts. Ah, history.It's worth remembering that in the movie theaters of yesteryear there was once Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006), a chilling parable of infertility and global collapse—set, alarmingly, in 2027, now just five years away. And playing right now on a streaming platform near you is Station Eleven, the phenomenal new series based on Emily St. John Mandel's eponymous book that eerily imagined a world wiped out by a viral epidemic, its feral survivors roaming the earth years later. Yes, it could be a moment for dystopian viewing—for a public with a strong stomach and steady nerves. Soylent Green, anyone?In December 2021, Film Quarterly presented a webinar saluting the Pacific Film Archive on its fiftieth anniversary; it turned at one point to the question of in-person screenings for nontheatrical as well as first-run, after a year of streaming platforms custom-built for this sector. MoMA's Rajendra Roy reported on the museum's reopening of its theaters, acknowledging his surprise that the audience was substantially younger.5 He observed that older patrons were more reluctant to return to the risk of in-person gatherings. I wonder, too, whether younger cineastes have become more motivated to engage in communal activity—in classic establishment locations, no less—than they had been in prepandemic times. And if that summer/fall exuberance would survive omicron winter.Traditional distributors—that is, those without wholly owned production/streaming monopolies—greeted the new year with a seemingly contrarian decision.6 They decided to turn the clock back and restore the theatrical window (forty-five days, most often) and permit hopefully lucrative ticket sales to run their course in advance of online availability.7 Wonder how that will go. The studios' calculation was perhaps a reactive move following Scarlett Johansson's widely reported courtroom success (reportedly a $40 million settlement) after she sued Disney for releasing Black Widow (Cate Shortland, 2021) online on Disney+ on the same date it opened in theaters. And notice that it was the star who sued, not the director; presumably, it was her lucrative contract tied to theatrical revenues that was shredded by the day-and-date move. The studio calculations will undoubtedly shape-shift again over the course of 2022.As platforms evolve, it's always important to remember that the classic ones are still in existence and bear scrutiny. Public television, for instance. Way back in March 2021, the very month that lockdown started, fifteen filmmaker members of the Beyond Inclusion collective together with more than one hundred thirty cosignatories, including Stanley Nelson, Laura Poitras, Yance Ford, and other prominent figures from across the documentary field, sent an open letter to PBS (the Public Broadcasting System) demanding diversity.8 The letter in particular called out the system's cozy funding relationship with Ken Burns, to whom PBS has funneled substantial sums of money (for more than two hundred hours of PBS programming over forty years) far beyond anything that has been awarded to projects by filmmakers of color, long consigned to far more modest levels of support.9 PBS defended Ken Burns, and Ken Burns defended PBS, and they all agreed they could do better.Not so simple, PBS! Data, please! Filmmaker Grace Lee, one of the Beyond Inclusion signatories, teamed up with reporter-filmmaker Akintunde Ahmad to launch a podcast with a purpose: Viewers Like Us, its title a riff on public television's own motto.10 In seven episodes that ran from September to the end of December 2021, with Lee as executive producer along with co–executive producers Ken Ikeda of the Association of Independents in Radio and Joaquin Alvarado of Studiotobe, the podcast offered up testimonies from a range of social actors with a stake in public television's future and a commitment to the principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion.11 Their podcast question hung in the air, unanswered: "Why is PBS so white and how exactly did it designate Ken Burns as America's Storyteller?"12Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Paris, where this text was written, cinemas were still open. They flourished all through fall and early winter 2021, their marquees and posters providing a welcome sense of normalcy; with omicron rates rising by the day, though, it was becoming harder to see how that could continue. Posh screening invitations continued to pile up, restaurant reservations were still being made, but a dampening of spirits was undeniable, even out in the streets, as I tested the crowds like an anxious flâneuse who is out of practice.As cinema events began to feel risky, and with more in-person cancellations being announced, I found myself drawn instead to the presence of films in other spaces: exhibited in museums, installed in galleries, with lots of air and space, high ceilings, and (hopefully) less dense crowds. Major shows beckoned with their alternative modes of viewing and public display.13First up was the promising Enfin le cinéma! Arts, images et spectacles en France (1833–1907) (Cinema at last! Arts, pictures, and shows in France [1833–1907]) at the Musée d'Orsay, organized in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), France's National Center for Cinema and Moving Images (CNC), Gaumont, and Pathé, and curated by Dominique Païni, former Pompidou director and former head of the Cinémathèque française (who reportedly oversaw its move to the dismal Frank Gehry building in Bercy on his watch). With gallery after gallery in the immense Orsay filled with paintings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the didactic exhibition sought to retrace the origins of cinema and the mutuality of influence between painting, photography, and cinema. Infuriatingly, however, the fascination was entirely with the precinematic materials; the many screens hung throughout the galleries, stamped in the corner with the telltale "L" for Lumière, were left not only uncontextualized but entirely unidentified and bereft of texts.The public, absent any curatorial assistance, was presumably expected to make its own leap of imagination to link the images on the walls to those on the screens, or else to buy the giant catalogue when exiting through the gift shop to figure out the details ex post facto. True, anyone patient enough to stand in front of any one screen long enough for the digital loop to come full circle (not that long, of course, with those early Lumières) would be rewarded when finally the title appeared and a date flashed by, but that was it: no context, no history, no linkages to the images surrounding the screens. I was dismayed that an exhibition ostensibly dedicated to uncovering cinema's beginnings would turn the medium itself into mere decoration.Off, then, to the newly reopened Musée Carnavalet, dedicated to the history of the city of Paris, where a new exhibition commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Marcel Proust was under way. It was a natural location: the Carnavalet had long been a pilgrimage site for Proustians because of its gallery containing the furnishings of his actual bedroom, complete with the (posthumously revealed as gay) author's actual bed. Now, like Orsay's, its exhibition sought to re-create yesteryear—here, the times of Proust (1871–1922) by definition also a fabled era of Paris.Where the Orsay texts were promulgating a philosophy of visual influences, Carnavalet was content to offer up artifacts and facts, photographs and maps, filling in the one extraordinary life. For cinephiles, Proust is a sort of origin text, his writing having inspired Volker Schlöndorff's Un amour de Swann (Swann in Love, 1984), Raúl Ruiz's Le temps retrouvé (Time Regained, 1999), and Chantal Akerman's La captive (The Captive, 2000).14 Madeleines, indeed. And, freed of any purity impulses, the exhibition included archival footage, again on hanging screens, along with monitors that intrigued with period interviews, such as one of Jean Cocteau talking about Proust, clips from films, and a wealth of information and reflection. I was happier, and just as edified.Ten blocks away, the Marian Goodman Gallery was completely given over to installations by Chantal Akerman. The multiple-screen From the Other Side—an epic installation adapted from her film De l'autre côté (From the Other Side, 2002), her look at the Mexican border and the harsh life of migrants, filmed two decades before their lives and crossings got significantly worse—filled two rooms with monitors, then extended into another room with a single and singular projection: A Voice in the Desert, an excerpt which Akerman had refilmed during the shoot in a desert projection. Upstairs, more modestly in terms of scope, Je, tu, il, elle, l'installation (2007) presented a three-screen redeployment of her film made more than thirty years earlier, when she was in her early twenties, Je tu il elle (1974). With its three sequential chapters now lined up simultaneously, the impossible innocence and youth of the young Chantal filled the screen.Free of the didacticism and explanations of the two museums, the visitor here could wander, immersed in the multiplicity of images and shifts of scale, like a flâneuse in the gallery space itself. Later in January, there was a conference on Akerman: "The Affective Interiors of Chantal Akerman: Aesthetic Passages - Films and Installations," organized by the Cinema and Audiovisual Studies Research Institute (IRCAV, at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3). Just over six years since Akerman's death, her work is more alive than ever.At press time, a wonderful volume arrived in the post. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's delirious fever dream of a film, Memoria (2021), starring Tilda Swinton, has been commemorated with a gorgeous art book of the same name, edited by Giovanni Machini Camia and Annabel Brady-Brown, published by Berlin's Fireflies Press. A compendium of photographs and documents related to the film's production, from early sketchbooks and notes to the shooting script and an interview with Swinton, its editors describe it as "a work of curation." I would call it an archive. A remarkable record of Weerasethakul's working methods over the two years of the film's development and through its production, it reveals (among hundreds of other details) that Swinton's character Jessica, a woman adrift in Bogotá and the was conceived as a character out of Jacques I With A to the year the of the to an Film Quarterly sought to at a December The of the month of year and first of this one the and words have this time, a of to and the one of all for Jean knew in New York City in the when she was out and on the and and she up all the of the that never one to in the corner and And she to engage with film, a at the and the films of the moment in a New York where cinema and where the new young cinema was to life. was else like there never will the of filmmaker a and of the of through the of cultural his of to an of vision and conceived in conjunction with its own shows how on a collective that and with the establishment of the even at in the work and at her own to that are by into the a he the of film history to their and earlier in of a to the of even a the of today's he instead a for the through of It's and The a of and of for a of the of influence and the into to bear on the over the years to the of his films with the political history of itself. 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