Battling Archetypes

Decoding Trolls
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Battling Archetypes applies the Twelve Tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method to the folkloric structures hiding inside modern propaganda, memes, and geopolitics. Each episode decodes how Russia, MAGA, and other Disinfolklorists archetype reality — and how Counter Disinfolklore can unmask the wolf in sheep’s clothing.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ www.disinfolklore.net

  1. vor 5 Tagen

    Podcast | In Defence of "Ancient Ukraine"

    We say ancient Greece and ancient Egypt without a flicker, and we call a Bronze Age culture in Kazakhstan the first Aryans — every one of them a modern name thrown back over a people who never bore it. The homeland of the whole Indo-European family is the Dnipro Valley. So, by the rule we already use for everyone else, there is an ancient Ukraine. To withhold the name is not scholarly caution. It is a double standard. And there is a war behind it. Say ancient Greece, and nothing in you objects. Say ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, ancient China — all of them slide past without a snag. Now say ancient Ukraine, and for a great many people, something catches: a small resistance, a raised eyebrow, sometimes a flat correction. “But Ukraine is a modern country.” That catch — not the linguistics, not the archaeology, just the catch itself — is what this is about. Because of all the things worth defending about this work, the plainest is the right to use two ordinary words. Part of what people feel here is simply correct. Modern Ukraine is a modern state. Its present borders, its flag, its seat at the United Nations are 20th-century phenomena. The herders who lived in the Dnipro Valley 5,500 years ago did not call themselves Ukrainians. They did not know the word, and could not have pointed to a country on a map that did not exist. All of that is true. But notice that every word of it is just as true of ancient Egypt. The people who raised the pyramids did not call themselves Egyptians. That is a Greek word, Aigyptos, laid on them long after. And the people who live in Egypt today are, for the most part, Arabic-speaking Muslims, whose language and faith and much of their ancestry arrived more than a thousand years after the last pharaoh — about as discontinuous from the pyramid builders as a population on its own soil can be. By that same standard, ancient Egypt should be an outrage. But it troubles nobody. It troubles no one because everyone already understands, without being told, what an anachronistic name is for. Ancient Egypt does not claim that the modern nation descends in an unbroken line from the pharaohs. It names the ancient people of that land using the land’s modern moniker, because the land’s modern moniker is the handle we have. Ancient Britain does the same. The modern English are largely descendants of Anglo-Saxon incomers, not the people who raised Stonehenge, nor the Celts — the Pretani tribe — who, after being eradicated by the Romans, then the Germanics, and then the Normans, survive as a rump in Brittany in France and in Cymru, which is Wales, in the west of the country. No one accuses a book on ancient Britain of bad faith. Ancient Greece names the Hellenes, who never called themselves Greeks at all; Graeci is a Roman’s word for them. Every single one of these is a modern label thrown backward over a people who never wore it. Naming a People by a Country They Would Reach a Thousand Years Later In fact, we go much further than naming the ancient people of a land by that land’s modern name. We routinely name an ancient people by the modern name of a different land — one their descendants would reach only a thousand years later. Consider the Sintashta culture, dug out of the steppe of what is now Kazakhstan. When the Sintashta graves were discovered about 20 or 30 years ago, deep inside them were the exact copy of burial customs and funereal feasts that had been written down in the Rig Veda in India around 1100 BCE. Archaeologists and experts had assumed that these burial practices and funereal ceremonies, written down in the Rig Veda from around 1200 to 1100 BCE, had been invented. And then we find, thousands of kilometres away, the exact facsimile of them from 2000 BCE. Every account you will read calls these people the first Aryans, or Indo-Iranians, and the names are borrowed wholesale from India and Iran — lands the Sintashta themselves never saw. Remember, 2000 BCE; but their customs do not appear in India, or we have no evidence of them appearing in India, for another 900 years. Iran and Aryan as identities did not exist in their time. They arose, as I have noted elsewhere, from a religious reform by Zoroaster that came along long after the Sintashta culture had risen and passed. Zarathustra — Zoroaster — is about 1400 BCE, so about 500 years between the Sintashta and when the Zoroastrian reforms came in and the whole idea of the Arya, meaning the centre of a community, arose. From the Sintashta’s own standpoint, there was no Iran, no India, no Veda; it was 2000 BCE, no Zoroaster — only the grass and the chariot and the horse. But we call them Aryans anyway, reading the rich later record of their descendants — the Vedic hymns, the Zoroastrian fire — back into a preliterate people who would have found every one of those words meaningless. It is, in my own phrase for it, anachronistic yet defensible. And it is defensible: the back-propagation is sound because the descent is real. We have the archaeogenetic evidence of it. We have the archaeological evidence of it. And we now have the textual evidence. “The first Aryans” for the Sintashta is the loose kind: it names the people of one place by the later name of a country their great-great-great-grandchildren’s grandchildren would build somewhere else. We accept the loose kind without a murmur. Ancient Ukraine only ever asks for the tight kind — the easier, safer, more literal move. If we grant the harder courtesy to the steppe of Kazakhstan while refusing the easier one to the steppe of Ukraine, that is not a principle. It’s a preference dressed as a principle. If the naming rule is the same for everyone, why does ancient Ukraine alone catch the throat? The Catch Is a Lag, Not a Position The reason is not about Ukraine at all. It’s about us, and what we happen to have read. We grant the back-propagated name confidence, evidently, wherever a dense later record makes the deep past feel anchored. Egypt has its monuments and its hieroglyphs; Greece its Homer; Rome its libraries; India and Iran their scriptures. The Dnipro homeland left no writing, and the knowledge that it is the homeland is genuinely recent. It arrived in force only with the archaeogenetics revolution after 2015, when the reading of ancient DNA — together with the linguistics, the archaeology, the comparative mythology, and the isotopes, the strontium locked in ancient teeth that tells us where a person grew up — converged on a single answer. So the hesitation over ancient Ukraine is not a considered position. It’s a lag. The moniker has not yet caught up with the evidence. Most of us still carry the mental map we were handed in school. That map is out of date, and the correction is not a fringe claim. Multidisciplinary scholars have known since 2015 that all Indo-European language, religion, and culture — all living Indo-European languages, from Ireland to India — go back to the Yamnaya of the Dnipro Valley around 3600 BCE: the herders of Mykhailivka, from whom the ancient DNA now traces every living branch of the family. And I note — two days ago the Russians destroyed a Russian colonial-era mansion which I visited in a village near Mykolaiv, on the right bank of the Dnipro. Some of you might have seen the pictures of it. Another war crime by Russia. But anyway. I’m with the linguist Don Ringe, author of the definitive study on the origins of the Germanic languages, including English, on the location. In 2006 he wrote that it was the rivers and valleys of Ukraine that made the most sense; and then in the new edition, 2017, he said the evidence strongly points there. Nikitin et al.’s Nature paper, which I’ve spoken about before, from the 5th of February 2025, establishes beyond all reasonable doubt that the Yamnaya, and Mykhailivka village on the right bank of the Dnipro, was the centre of the Yamnaya community from whom all living Indo-European languages emanate. Steinmeier, the Nebra Sky Disc, and “Southern Russia” So what kept the answer from being heard for so long was not the absence of evidence. Some of you might remember, around the beginning of the war, I tweeted a lot about Steinmeier, who is currently German president. On my way back from Ukraine — I left Ukraine on the 29th of January 2022 with my cat, and we drove over the border into Poland, anticipating the invasion — I visited an amazing place called Halle in Germany, because I wanted to see the Nebra Sky Disc there. They have this most amazing museum in Halle, which I stopped in on my way back from Ukraine, and the exhibition catalogue had an introduction by Steinmeier. The exhibition I’d gone to see was about the Corded Ware culture from this part of Germany. And Steinmeier — who had spent eight years trying to troll Ukraine into accepting the Steinmeier formula, which was allowing Russia’s so-called elections in Donetsk and Luhansk in exchange for a later promise to give Ukraine back control of its borders — Steinmeier, who clearly had engaged with Ukraine, like myself, a lot, was still referring to this area of Ukraine as southern Russia in this catalogue. That gives you an idea of what I now call the data-resistant archetype of the Potemkin State: that they could not refer to the homeland as just steppe ancestry, or Pontic-Caspian steppe, or southern Russia. They couldn’t see it as being Ukraine — as having just the same status as ancient Greece, or any of these other cultures I mentioned. Ukraine Is Not One More Culture — It Is the Source Here’s the part the catch hides, because it stops people at the threshold. Ukraine is not one more ancient culture among many asking to join the club. It’s the source. Greece, Rome, the Germanic North, the Celtic West, the Indo-Iranian East — the papers in all of my work in Finding Manuland trace them one by one, based on PACA, peer-reviewed, gold-standard archaeogenetic, isoto

    1 Std. 14 Min.

  2. 18. Juni

    Podcast | The Lie as Binding Agent, the Pickup Artist, Their God Is War, and the Vanished Koshchei

    I am going to continue today the series on The Beast from the Abyss, this brilliant book by a renowned Ukrainian historian. Last week, you may remember, I got to her chapter on the deep folk — which is the moniker that the Russist former deputy prime minister of Russia, Vladislav Surkov, used. He used this term, deep folk, to describe, highly ironically, the Russians, and Larysa is basically parsing this troll into its parts and making a play on the words. Previous episode: The title of the book is The Beast from the Abyss, and she draws the parallel between the abyss and the deep folk — the emptiness of the so-called deep folk of Russia. The Lie That Holds the Room Together So you have a manufactured folk defined by a manufactured enemy. Now the question Yakubova spends her hardest pages on: what holds it all together? Real people are bound by 10,000 real things — language, kin, a song your grandmother sang, the shape of a particular hill. What binds a people drained of all of those? This is very apt, because those of us who were listening to Will earlier today heard him answer a question by Ming about when he expects the collapse to come — which many are cataloguing at the moment, including Beefeater. Yakubova’s answer — Larysa Yakubova’s answer — is the most unsettling part of her whole book, The Beast from the Abyss. The binding agent is the lie itself. Not one lie: the lie as an atmosphere, all-pervading, the medium everyone swims in in Russia and no one is expected to believe. Everyone knows the official story is false. Everyone knows everyone else knows, and repeats it anyway. Knowingly, together, in public, that shared knowing repetition becomes the bond. You’re not asked to believe the lie. You’re asked to repeat it. This produces what Yakubova, citing the sociologists she draws on, names as the terminal symptom: a mass so hollowed out that it denies its own subjecthood, gives up, voluntarily, being the author of its own acts. Sit with what that means. To deny your own subjecthood is to give up being an author of your own acts. “I didn’t decide. I’m not responsible. I just flow where the people flow.” It’s the abdication of the self as the price of admission. True selflessness. “None of This Is On Me”: The Distributed Tyrant Here is what the Russist apparatus wants us to think. None of this is on me. I’m a small person in a vast river. I didn’t start the war. I don’t make policy. I just live here. Judge the Kremlin, not me. Register the mana. It is relief — the narcotic relief of laying down the weight of being a moral agent. No guilt, because no agency. No shame, because no choice. It feels like innocence to the Russist. It is the most dangerous counterfeit the Russist apparatus makes, because it counterfeits the very faculty you’d need in order to refuse it. Name the archetype. This is the merciless sovereign in a mask. Not the tyrant on the dais, but the tyrant distributed — smeared so thinly across 40 million shrugging shoulders that no single shoulder feels the weight. Coercive control’s masterpiece is not the dictator who commands. It’s the population that has agreed, together, to stop being able to say no, and to call that condition peace. Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it patient? No. It depends on never stopping to think. The river only carries you while you don’t plant your feet. Is it true? Is it right? No. The deepest lie is here, because “I have no subjecthood” is the one statement that refutes itself. Only a subject can disown its subjecthood. Is it generous? No. It’s the refusal to extend reality to anyone, oneself included. This is Disinfolklore, and it’s the engine room. Everything else runs on this drained, knowing, lie-bound consent. The Other Half: Yakubova’s Real Deep Folk Now the other half — because without it, everything I’ve said curdles into the very thing my Disinfolklore framework exists to refuse: a story that paints a whole people as monsters. Yakubova — Professor Larysa Yakubova of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, NAS — she does not do that, and neither do I. Because Yakubova has a deep folk of her own, a real one, and she sets it deliberately against the manufactured one, edge for edge, so you can see exactly what the counterfeit is a counterfeit of. She points to the Greeks of Mariupol, the Rumeika-speaking communities who had lived on that coast for centuries — in her account, a unique people carrying a vanishing language, a thread of real human particularity the war was actively erasing. And she points to the village folk, the ordinary unarmed people who, in the first days of the full invasion, walked out into the roads in front of Russian armoured columns and, by nothing but standing there as a real person in a real place, made the machine stop. No weapons. Just subjecthood planted in the road. Feel the difference in the mana. Feel it in the energy, in the charge of those actions, because it is total. The manufactured deep folk gives you belonging without a self. The real deep folk gives you a self that belongs — rooted, specific, named: a grandmother’s actual language and an actual hill. This is the mother and the maiden in her true register — not weaponised grief for bogus children performed for cameras, but the genuine article: the rooted folk who protect what is real with their bodies and their presence. The babushka in the road is not denying her subjecthood. She is spending it — staking the whole weight of one real person against 40 tons of steel. That is the exact inverse of the drained mass. And it is why the war is underneath everything: a war over Tool 4 in the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, which you’ll see at disinfolklore.eu, where the 12 tools are. A war over who gets counted as a real us, and who gets painted into the outer dark. Tool 4 is inner/outer realm switching: inner realm occupied Luhansk defining itself against the outer-realm monsters across the Donets River, the Ukrainians. Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it true? Yes — Yakubova’s real folk is made of particular, checkable, rooted things: a language with a name and a people with a coast. Is it generous? Yes. The woman in the road treats even the boy in the tank turret as someone who might still choose. Is it patient? Yes. Rootedness is the most patient thing there is; it was there before the column and intends to be there after. This is in-folklore — the genuine folk energy the counterfeit was built to imitate and replace. The Hinge: A Forgery of a Folk That is the hinge of Yakubova’s whole argument, and of this episode. The Russian deep folk is not the opposite of a folk. It is a forgery of one — a real human substrate drained of its content and refilled with a manufactured enemy, until the measureless emptiness can be pointed at Mariupol and feel like destiny. The Beast from the Abyss is Larysa Yakubova’s name for what crawls out when you do that to a people. The abyss is not somewhere else. The abyss is what’s left in a folk after the self has been surgically removed by Disinfolklore. Here’s the single thing I want to carry through in this part of the episode. When we hear the comfortable story — ah, it’s just the regime, the people are hostages — hold it up to the light the way Larysa Yakubova does. Some are hostages, yes: the real folk. The Mariupol Greeks and the woman in the road are the regime’s victims. But the manufactured mass that performs the lie and denies its own subjecthood — that one is not a hostage. It is, in her account, the machine itself. The co-author. The manufactured consensus is not a by-product of the Russian central apparatus. It is the apparatus — the engine that turns a whole country into a weapon. This is why Larysa Yakubova warns that the West missed the birth of its ontological enemy by seeing Ukraine through — and I quote — “the eyes of the Kremlin.” Look through the apparatus’s own eyes and you see the deep folk the way Surkov wanted you to: eternal, humble, real, mystical, soulful. And you miss the surgery that made it. The recognition carries its own antidote — the one hopeful thing in this dark chapter of her book. If the disease is the denial of subjecthood — I am not responsible, I just flow — then the cure is the restoration of subjecthood. The babushka in the road has already shown you what that looks like: one real person planting her feet, refusing to flow, becoming again an author of her own acts. That the way out exists at all is the promise I’ll redeem in the final episode of this miniseries. The machine is not eternal. A drained people can be refilled. But that is the end of the road, and we’re not there yet. In the next part I’ll go to the altar — because a manufactured folk needs a manufactured god to bow to, and the god the apparatus installed has a face, and a liturgy, and a single commandment. Their god is war. An Experiment: The Method Handed to a Teenager But first, I’d like to try a little experiment. This week a friend spoke to me — two friends, actually — about their children, and they were wondering how they can explain to them, how to make them more resilient to, basically, pickup artists. That’s my translation of how they put it. I thought about it for a bit, and then I thought: maybe I can make the Disinfolklore Analytical Method help them. The method I worked on was built, obviously, to read state propaganda — Russian bridge trolls, troll farms, presidents trolling each other online. So here’s a test of whether it’s actually powerful rather than merely clever. Does the same machinery work on a problem in your daughter’s or son’s life? It does. And watching it transfer is the whole demonstration. The archetype is prior to the domain. The instrument that reads a Kremlin meme reads a charming stranger at a party, because both are

    48 Min.

  3. 11. Juni

    Podcast | The Beast from the Abyss

    The Sovereign Writes His Enemy a Letter This week, the President of Ukraine did something a head of state almost never does. He sat down and wrote his enemy a letter — an open letter to Vladimir Putin, published in English on the official website, for the whole world and, more to the point, for all of Russia to read. Here on Decoding Trolls — I’m Decoding Trolls, I work mainly online at disinfolklore.eu, and also disinfolklore.net, decodingtrolls.net, and powerofmana.net, which are three interwoven projects, but my main body of work is on disinfolklore.eu — I spend most of my time pulling apart the dark folklore the Kremlin pumps into the world. Tonight I want to do something I don’t do that often: I want to hold a piece of Infolklore up to the light. This letter is a near-perfect specimen of Infolklore, and it teaches us more about how the Code of Positive Trolls actually works than a month of theory. Let’s get our eyes in. The Mocker Takes the Podium I reference M’ockers on purpose here, because Mockers, like me, decided on her moniker before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and through all of her work each day on Volya Radio she mainstreams the act of the mocker. As I am programming my neural network algorithm, the Mocker and the mocking tone has become actually very engineering-relevant — because if you can detect the mocking tone, which frontier models can do, then you can distinguish Infolklore, from Disinfolklore which is never humorous but does mock, on the basis of the rightness of what it’s mocking. M’ockers on X, for instance, will always be mocking aspects of Russian society which are not right. President Zelensky — as a lawyer, and as a comedian, and as an actor, as an honest actor. He is the most honest acting head of state there is in the world today, whereas Putler pretends he acts as sovereign on behalf of the siloviki and doesn’t admit that he is an actor — but he is an actor. President Zelensky, as all public figures do — they do act in a dramatic sense, but also in the sense of fulfilling their functions — there’s no hiding the fact that he is at heart an actor, an artist, and a true artist, and a great artist, perhaps one of the greatest artists ever, as we see with his career spanning Servant of the People and now taking care of global security. The first thing the letter does is mock. Listen to the register. Ukraine’s long-range drones, he said, “paid a visit to the opening of your forum in St Petersburg.” “Paid a visit” — over a thousand kilometres, to crash the showpiece economic forum — and he calls it a social call. Longtime listeners know the figure I mean: the Mocker, the positive troll who reads the enemy’s spell aloud, names it, and turns it inside out. The Russian propaganda machine spends fortunes staging a forum to project a serene, prosperous, unbothered Russia. One ironic sentence and a drone, and the stage set is punctured — by the artist, by the Comedian. Mockery Welded to Verifiable Fact Here’s the discipline, and this is the whole game. Mockery on its own is cheap. Grievance dressed up as wit is exactly what the other side does — that ressentiment-soaked sneering we decoded in Putin’s Astana press conference last week. What makes this mockery Infolklore and not just noise is that it is welded to a verifiable fact. “We have video confirmation of every one of your losses,” he writes. These are not empty claims. The Mocker who earns his place doesn’t vent. He surfaces, frames, and outflanks — with the receipts. “This War Is Your Personal Choice” Then comes the move which I want you, and all of us, to tattoo on our brains. “Whatever you may say about NATO, geopolitics, or the Russian language, this war is your personal choice. A war without a real cause.” Stop. That is the Counter Disinfolklore in a single breath. For 12 years the apparatus has wrapped this war in costume after costume — denazification, encirclement, protecting Russian speakers, defending traditional values — and President Zelensky declines every costume at once and names the naked act. The cosy great-power deal cooked up in Alaska — Baked Alaska, anyone? — “Ukrainian and European issues are not decided in Anchorage.” Every time, he strips the mask and names the act. Picking the Lock on the Tsar’s Channel Now the part that makes the letter genuinely radical — and here’s a thought I owe to a conversation I had this week. I was on The Eastern Border podcast of Kristaps in Latvia on Saturday. We did a two-and-a-half-hour session which was really fascinating and a really great conversation — I implore you to listen to it, and also listen to The Eastern Border; I look forward to his episodes every week. He did recently a really interesting one on food quality in Russia — he and his wife dug very deeply into the phytosanitary rules and the quality of food there. As we know from listening to Mockers talk about the butter, and the meat glue in the butter and suchlike — you should really avoid that stuff. But anyway, that’s an aside. A ruler’s deepest power isn’t tanks. It’s the monopoly on speaking to his own people. The Tsar decides what Russians are told, what they’re allowed to want, who gets to define their interests. That channel — ruler to ruled — is supposed to be his and his alone. Putler’s alone. This letter picks the lock on that channel. Read who it’s actually talking to. “They do not like our drones. They do not like gasoline shortages. They do not like your endless war.” That’s not addressed to Putler. That’s addressed over his head, to Russians — telling them what they want, what their ruler costs them, and that “the majority of Russians would respond positively to peace. And you know it.” A foreign president standing in the Kremlin’s own living room, talking past the host to the family. That’s why this is more than just a clever letter. It’s a usurpation. Not a march on Moscow — a letter that quietly annexes the one thing a Tsar can’t afford to lose: the trust of the people he claims to speak for. Wounding the Prideful Sovereign It’s engineered to wound a very specific target. Think about who Putler has to be. He is cast, by the men who put him there, in the role of the prideful sovereign: serene, eternal, untouchable, the fake strongman who never tires. The whole performance runs on pride. So look where the letter aims. “Age is beginning to take its toll.” The mutiny: “June 23rd will mark another anniversary of Prigozhin’s mutiny, and silence will not erase this fact from history.” “Your own officials, businessmen, propagandists look at you with obvious fatigue.” Here he is piercing the heart of Abramovich — who, we subsequently found out, was in Kyiv. So now the Russist siloviki will be thinking Abramovich was moaning to President Zelensky, while they met, about the fatigue. When President Zelensky mentions the businessmen, he is driving a dagger right into the heart of the coalition that keeps this war going. “The first ruler of Russia ever to go begging to Pyongyang.” President Zelensky mentions North Korea — which the Russists made a joke of until two years ago, when they started importing their men to try and liberate their own territory of Kursk. “Fully dependent, for the first time in Russian history, on Beijing.” These aren’t insults thrown out at random. They are purposive trolls, each one a needle into the armour of the performance, placed by someone who knows exactly how the prideful sovereign is wired. You don’t roil the state with these lines — you roil the actor playing the state. Refusing Fake Virtue: Mana and Name in Sync Here’s where a lot of pro-Ukrainian content fails the Code, and this letter doesn’t. It would have been easy to drape the whole thing in halo light. He doesn’t. “It is not as if we in Ukraine are concerned about the fate of Russian soldiers,” President Zelensky writes flatly. “But I do care about Ukrainians.” No pretence of caring about everyone. No fake universal compassion. He even tells you the brutal exchange ratio — one Ukrainian for five or six dead Russians — and says it still matters, because these are my people. That refusal to fake virtue is the tell of the real thing. Mana and name in sync. The letter says what it is: an adversary’s hand extended honestly, with the receipts on the table and concrete offers attached. A full ceasefire. An all-for-all prisoner exchange. The return of the stolen children. That’s not a propaganda artefact. That’s Infolklore. Because I won’t sell you a fairy tale, one honest flag: this is a weapon. A beautifully made weapon, but a weapon all the same. It’s built to corner a man. The line “we can work towards that fatigue” sails close to the wind. The casualty numbers are Ukraine’s own, and they flatter Ukraine. But here is the difference that the Code of Positive Trolls is built to catch: every one of those claims is falsifiable. You can check a drone strike. You can count losses. You can verify a returned child. That is the opposite of Disinfolklore. So that’s the lesson. The same tool — mockery — that the Kremlin uses to poison, this letter uses to heal: to surface a lie, name it, and outflank it. Same instrument, opposite hands. The Code is what tells them apart. And the deepest move of all wasn’t a drone or a number. It was a man standing in his enemy’s house, turning to his enemy’s own people and saying: I think you want peace, and I think you know it. And he is the man who can deliver them peace. That’s not just answering propaganda. That’s picking the lock on the throne. Glory to the truth-tellers. Putler’s Reply: The Man Who Won’t Say the Name So I wanted to talk then about Putler’s response. Obviously, they found it a bit rude. I find it a bit rude when they plant mines between the dead

    56 Min.

  4. 4. Juni

    Podcast | Tyrant Performing the ‘Reasonable Man’

    I’ve called this the Reasonable Man. This is about Putler’s Astana press conference on the 29th of May 2026. I watched it, and I was amazed by Putler’s reasonableness. I noticed this faintly weary man who really only wants the facts established and the books balanced, who lends money rather than gifting it, who speaks openly and honestly, who keeps saying “I say this without irony.” I caught myself, somewhere about the 20-minute mark, beginning to relax — and that is the moment to name. https://www.powerofmana.net/p/the-moon-the-menses-and-the-maternal Tonight’s anchor is Tool One of the 12-tool analytical method called the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, at disinfolklore.eu, which I, Decoding Trolls, am elaborating on over these podcasts and over all of my life for the past three years. The single hardest archetype to see is the one that arrives dressed as your friend. All of us will have experience of this, especially in conversations about Ukraine. Shaw’s Test: Reasonable vs Unreasonable There is an irony in my title that an erudite colleague of mine in eastern Ukraine would savour. He once called me, only half-mockingly, an unreasonable man — in Bernard Shaw’s sense: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to herself, and therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person.” My sin, in his telling, was a habit of asking my superiors the questions that undermined their authority. Totally innocent questions on my part. Hold on to that, because it turns out to be the whole method. The tyrant performs the reasonable man — adapted, accommodating, asking only for facts. The antidote is the unreasonable person: the troll radar that refuses to adapt to the costume and keeps asking the question the calm was built to stop. Here is the claim of this piece, stated up front the way I state everything. The performance of the reasonable man is the costume the merciless sovereign wears to the press conference. The wolf in sheep’s clothing — the sheep’s clothing of the reasonable man. The calm is not the opposite of the threat. The calm is the delivery system for the threat. By the end, I’m going to show you that Duncey Putler obligingly names his own method out loud, in his own words, and then dares us not to notice. In everything I do as Decoding Trolls, everything is proofed against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it generous? Is it true? Is it right? Is it patient? I name the archetype, because once you can see the archetype operating, you cannot unsee it. Recognition halves the mana. The Drone in Galați: Accusation in a Mirror Let me begin. The drone he had only heard about. A journalist from TASS opens with the news of the hour. A drone has come down on a residential building in Galați, in Romania, a NATO member. Europe says it’s Russia. Why didn’t they shoot it down? Watch what Putin does. He does not answer. He performs not knowing. This is a trick many of us who watch Donald closely have noticed him also perform. Putler said: “I only just learned, before walking into this hall, that some event occurred with a supposedly ours drone. If you’d be so kind as to repeat it for me, I say this without jokes, without irony.” Then he demands proof and dismisses the accuser: “Frau von der Leyen wasn’t in Romania. She didn’t examine the wreckage.” Then the pivot, the real move: “We know Ukrainian drones have flown into Finland, into Poland, into the Baltics. The first reaction was always, oh, the Russians are coming. Then it turned out they were Ukrainian. Blown off course.” Here’s what the apparatus — the Russian apparatus, which has cast Putin in the role of sovereign — wants us to think. Putin is the only calm adult in the room. The Europeans are hysterics, shouting before the forensics are in. It was probably a stray Ukrainian drone anyway. Register the mana first: the feeling before the thought, the energy, the disarming calm. A man so unbothered, so reasonable, asking only for evidence. That feeling is the costume. Name the archetype underneath it and the voltage halves. This is accusation in a mirror — the oldest move in the combat propaganda playbook, where you perform the violation and then, before anyone can prove it, hand the violation to your victim. Proof it against the Code. Is it true? The honest answer, “we don’t yet know,” would survive. Putler doesn’t stay there. He says no one can name the origin until an examination is done, and in the very same breath he supplies the answer. Is it generous? No. It calls the bereaved hysterical. This is Disinfolklore. It violates the Code of Positive Trolls. Standing on the Ground: Romania’s 28 Breaches The counter is the ground that the apparatus needs us not to stand on. Romania says Russian drones have breached its airspace 28 times since Moscow began bombing Ukraine’s Danube ports. The Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, did not reach for forensics. He said Russia’s reckless behaviour is a danger to us all, and that the Alliance stands ready to defend every inch of allied territory. I noticed both the United States and NATO archetyped it as reckless behaviour — which I know from criminal law is: either you were reckless, or you did the act intentionally. By archetyping the act as reckless, they are giving Russia a get-out. No matter. The keeper of the open account does not need an autopsy on every single drone when the pattern is 28 breaches deep. The question is never “can you prove this one?” It is: who has been flying into NATO airspace for three years? The Bridge Troll Dressed as Friendship: Armenia Some of you will remember the bridge troll, the archetype from the beginning of my work on the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska between 2015 and 2017. He went on with this press conference to talk about what I now see is the archetype of a tollgate. The tollgate dressed as friendship — the obstacle to be overcome, the exchange between you and he. This is where you have to keep your guard highest, because the next move is delivered as love. He went on at length about Armenia, giving Armenia advice about the cost of moving towards the European Union. I won’t dwell on it, but I will dwell on its meaning. The mana here, the energy, is not fear. It’s something warmer and more dangerous. It’s gratitude. You’re positioned to thank Moscow for its honesty. Name the archetype and the warmth curdles. This is the bridge troll, the keeper of the threshold who sets the toll for passage, fused with coercive control. I’ve stood on the literal version of that bridge at Stanytsia and watched armed men decide who crosses. The toll schedule is the threat — and note the tell Putin volunteers unprompted: “the crisis in Ukraine began with attempts to join the EU.” That is not analysis. That is: look what happened to the last neighbour who tried the other road. It’s a threat. I’ve written before about how we — not we, because we are — we must get better at recognising Russian threats, because they are masked through reasonable men acting as the toll keeper. Proof it. Is it patient? No — he’s demanding Armenia makes a choice “as early as possible,” before the bill can be weighed. It’s manufactured urgency. It’s inevitability farming. Urgency — whether it’s someone socially engineering your ID or your data, or in geopolitics — is always the red flag the Code is built to catch. Is it generous? No. The entire world’s weight is loaded onto a small economy and dependency is dressed as benevolence. Is it true? The 14 percent of GDP reduction is real, because Russia controls every lever in it. This is Disinfolklore, again delivered by the reasonable man. The Mother and the Maiden: Starobilsk Converted to Kyiv Some of you will also remember the mother and the maiden archetype, which I look at as being the base for most Disinfolklore. The centre of gravity of the whole performance of Putin in this press conference in Kazakhstan, the most engineered to switch off your judgement by switching on your grief. Asked about his strikes on Kyiv, Putler turns the question into an indictment of Ukraine and of the journalists in front of him. Again, another trick we see Donald do. “Our strike too was in response for their crimes against children in Starobilsk. Our strike on the Kyiv region. They deliberately killed our children.” Is this mass media? No. It’s the means of mass dumbing-down. It’s brilliant — a terrible, stupid little pun. Mass media becomes the means of mass stupefaction. It does three things at once: it grieves, it accuses, and it pre-discredits anyone who might check. What the apparatus wants us to think: Ukraine murders Russian children, Russia’s strikes on Kyiv are righteous revenge, and any outlet that doesn’t lead with the dead children is a lie machine. Feel the mana, because it’s overwhelming by design. Protective fury — the oldest and most weaponisable charge in the whole folk store. This is the mother-and-the-maiden’s grief and the martyred commanders. It must be avenged. Fused and loaded. I will name the archetype precisely. It is the merciless sovereign performing the grief of the very people he targets, laid over an accusation in a mirror: the documented mass killer of civilians performing mourning in order to license the next strike. I’m going to be more careful here about what the apparatus is, not less, because the method has to work the same no matter who is pointing it — or it’s worth nothing. So here is exactly what I claim. We’ve all seen the TV programmes from Russian TV demonstrating the Rubicon unit were operating out of this facility. Ukraine denies hitting the dormitory, calling the Russian account manipulation. A local resident told Reuters the site was a former base hit first by rockets. Reuters was not able independently to verify anythin

    53 Min.

  5. 28. Mai

    Podcast | The Three Moves of the Apparatus Campaign Elevation Doctrine

    Today I’m going to talk a bit about the Starobilsk incident, using the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, and I’m also going to talk about some examples from what I call the Luhansk Corpus, which I’ve been talking about for the last few weeks. We’re in the midst — not even one hundredth of a way through — what I have to talk about. This corpus is 10,000 propaganda items that I collected while I worked in Russia-occupied Ukraine, and between Russia-occupied Ukraine and government-controlled Ukraine, between 2015 and 2018 in Luhansk, and then afterwards in Dnipro. Today’s Topic: The Starobilsk Incident The first thing I’m going to talk about is the Starobilsk incident. Some of you probably didn’t hear about it, but it was a really interesting example for me to apply the Disinfolklore Analytical Method to. The moment I heard the President of the Rushist Federation mention a school in Starobilsk — which is a town I know very well, I used to go through it a lot when I lived in Severodonetsk, so it has that personal connection to me as well — and the moment I heard President Putin talk about it and talk about this, what I call the manufactured wound archetype, basically, it reeked of this, and I recognised the pattern. I thought, as the English might say, there was something rum about this. I tuned in. Russia’s defence ministry announces in Putin’s name that international journalists are invited to come and see for themselves that Ukrainian forces are surrounded in Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, and Kupyansk. The apparatus — which is how I refer to the entire collection of actors operating the Russian Federation — offers a five-to-six-hour ceasefire to enable the tour. 12th of December 2025: Putin claims at a press conference, based on a briefing from Gerasimov, that 15 Ukrainian Armed Forces battalions are blocked inside Kupyansk. Fifteen battalions. He invites journalists again to come and verify. On the same day, Volodymyr Zelensky turns up in Kupyansk himself, records a video address on his iPhone at the entrance stele, 1.15 kilometres from Russian positions, 500 metres from the grey zone. DeepState map confirms the coordinates. 22nd of May 2026: the apparatus elevates a strike on occupied Starobilsk to a campaign. Putin calls it a terrorist strike. Peskov calls it a monstrous crime. Six Russian official spokespersons issue coordinated naming within 12 hours. Russia requests a UN Security Council emergency session. Within 36 hours, 90 missiles and 600 drones land on Kyiv and Bila Tserkva, as all of us will know — where the Oreshnik fell, and some garages. The Chernobyl Museum was hit. We had an interesting discussion about this on Ming and Joanna’s show earlier in the week. I think Lexicon and I were convinced — and indeed I think Ming as well — that this was a hit on purpose. The Oreshnik, the nut tree or the walnut tree, the nuclear-capable hypersonic missile, is fired for the third time in this war. What we’re looking at is not three discrete events — which many people will see them as, but not us, and not me through the Disinfolklore Analytical Method. We’re looking at one eight-month campaign elevation doctrine that has been running in continuous deployment since at least last October. The Starobilsk strike of last Thursday is the latest instance. It’s not the first, and it will not be the last. This is Disinfolklore in real time. The Apparatus Does Not Improvise Its Archetypes The thing about the apparatus is that it does not improvise its archetypes. It deploys them again and again on the same template. What looks like news in your morning headlines, or on my evening television, or in our social media feeds, is on closer inspection the apparatus running the same play it ran last quarter, and the quarter before that, and the quarter before that. The play I want to walk you through tonight is what I’m going to call, for the rest of this episode, the Apparatus Campaign Elevation Doctrine. It is one specific kind of Disinfolklore deployment — the kind that begins with an apparatus invitation to international journalists and ends with a hypersonic missile in Kyiv. The doctrine has a name and a shape and a budget line. When I talk about Disinfolklore being a narrative form, what I’m talking about is the actor who is the acting president of the Rushist Federation. He’s an actor. He’s deployed on certain stages at certain times, and he speaks fluent Disinfolklore. His Disinfolklore is then ventriloquised, puppeted through the voices of other members of the apparatus until it becomes like a cacophony, like a chorus, like a vibration in our brain, until it meets the ears of a child in Kyiv who’s suddenly very frightened. That’s why I call it Disinfolklore, and the whole operation is a Disinfolklore operation. The Budget Line: $458 Million for Information Warfare The budget line is documented. In November of last year, the Jamestown Foundation — a serious-grade Western think tank that most of us will be aware of and respect, not a partisan source — published a piece by Yuri Lapayev showing Russia’s draft 2026 budget cuts military spending by $2.4 billion compared to 2025, while raising the state-funded media budget by 54 percent, $458 million additional. The apparatus is, in plain print, defunding its army to fund its information warfare. Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha put the same funding on the public record. This is not a hidden doctrinal shift. This is the apparatus that has openly chosen to substitute information warfare for kinetic capability. The campaign elevation doctrine I’m about to walk through is what those $458 million are for. The Three Moves of the Doctrine The shape of the doctrine is three moves. Move one: the apparatus invites international journalists to verify an apparatus claim about a Ukrainian territory the apparatus does not actually hold — Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, Kupyansk, Krasnoarmiysk, Starobilsk. The invitation is the deployment. The apparatus does not need the journalists actually to arrive. The apparatus needs the invitation to circulate in Western media as evidence that Russia has nothing to hide. Move two: the apparatus produces its own evidence substrate. Telegram-distributed photographs from occupier-installed regional leaders; casualty figures from the apparatus’ human rights commissioners; all-actors framing statements from the apparatus’ foreign ministers; official namings from the Kremlin press secretary; and, at the apex, a head-of-state — an acting head of state, an actor, a stage actor, an acting head of state — personal statement from Putler himself. The evidence substrate is the apparatus’ product. Western media absorbs the substrate as if it were independent reporting. Move three: with moral cover now installed, the apparatus executes the actual operation — the strike, the barrage, the mass attack on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. The Western press’s headlines treat the execution as retaliation for whatever the stage-one invitation and evidence substrate had named. The cycle closes. This is the doctrine. Eight months of it now in public view. Let me walk you through how it ran in dates before we get to last Thursday. October 2025: Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, and the Encirclement Archetype 13th of October 2025: Russia’s Defence Ministry announces that Putler has ordered international journalists, including from Ukraine, to be allowed into Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, and Kupyansk. Note the counter-move when President Zelensky, who has the right to do this, ordered his army not to attack a small square kilometre inside Moscow for over a period of two hours. Russia, the announcement says, will halt hostilities for five to six hours so journalists can confirm the encirclement of Ukrainian forces. Notice this archetype of encirclement: of Ukrainian forces, cauldron, kettle. For Ukrainians these are sacred terms, because anyone who was in Ukraine in September 2014, just after the first Minsk agreement was signed, will remember the Ilovaisk kotyol, where Ukrainians had surrendered and then they were slaughtered and taken prisoner. The same troll happened again in Debaltseve, just after I arrived in Ukraine — after Minsk 2 was signed — Debaltseve, which is or was an important railway junction, was inside Ukrainian-controlled territory. After signing this agreement, the Russians went on the advance, and once again they killed a lot of Ukrainian soldiers in a cauldron or a kettle. Even the use of these terms — to people who don’t pay attention to these things — they won’t understand their archetypal content and their historical content. Ukraine’s Response: Tykhyi, Syrskyi, and the Centre for Countering Disinformation Ukraine’s response is immediate and on the record. Heorhii Tykhyi — please forgive my pronunciation, I’m in the same category as Mockers, although I know she’s better than me at this point — spokesperson for Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry, warns journalists not to participate. Russia broke the same promise during the battles for Ilovaisk in 2014, a ceasefire offered to allow Ukrainian troops to retreat, which Russia then violated, killing several hundred Ukrainian soldiers in what would become known as the Ilovaisk Massacre. One of my friends lost his lovely restaurateur chef brother, Andrei, in that. The Foreign Ministry is reminding journalists that this is what Russia’s humanitarian offers look like. Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, states publicly that there is no blockade of Ukrainian forces in Pokrovsk or Kupyansk. The encirclement claim is false. The invitation is propaganda. Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation publishes the structural analysis. The Centre surfaces a detail worth dwelling on: the invitations to German journalists come from a man named Vladimir Sergienko, former assistant to Jürgen Schmidt, an AFD member of the Germa

    58 Min.

  6. 21. Mai

    Podcast | The Don’t Poke the Bear Meme: AFD and Russian Information Projection

    What I’m trying to do is also communicate a form of literacy. I learned to see archetypes in data and in stories in 2016, in Russia-occupied eastern Ukraine, in a story I’ve told before. I’ve spent the last 10 years unpacking that insight into what I call the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, whose main exposition is on the disinfolklore.eu website, where we have the 12-tool way. For people who want a bit more detail, they’ll look in there, they’ll see all the origins — it’s about a million and a half words, divided into about two and a half thousand short passages, purposefully like that so that it’s very accessible. I also publish on disinfolklore.net, decodingtrolls.net, and powerofmana.net. Those three projects’ Substacks you can subscribe to, and they all meld into one. I’m currently building — well, I’ve completed this week — the building of the architecture of a training set to fine-tune an open-weights LLM, large language model, locally. That’s very exciting. The architecture is based on the 12-tool way, and based on the contents of disinfolklore.eu. The Don’t Poke the Bear Meme: AFD and Russian Information Projection The first thing I wanted to talk about today was really because it’s kind of in the news. Many of you have heard me talk about the most successful Disinfolklore meme ever, which is “don’t poke the bear.” It’s probably obvious to people, when I get your eye in, that this is Disinfolklore, because it’s about the bear, it’s from fairy tales, it’s from folk tales. This week we saw Russia projecting that meme, that piece of Disinfolklore, into our information space, through the mainstream of the German information space, through a political party which has been funded by the Russians. The AFD may have been founded in a virtuous way, although it was founded to deal with migrants — and the entire Syrian migrant crisis was on purpose provoked by Russia accelerating its carpet bombing in Syria in September 2015, when it wanted a bit more leverage at the so-called mythical negotiation table. That had a lot of concatenating effects, including Law and Justice being elected on an anti-migrant Polish nationalist agenda in Poland, Orbán consolidating his position, Brexit being done, and Merkel famously allowing in one million Syrian migrants to give them a path to citizenship. I’m sure they’re contributing greatly to German society and the German economy now, so it’s not all bad, and amazing lives have been changed by it. However, AFD consolidated its power out of this, out of this othering, and we see it projecting this “don’t poke the bear” troll. On its surface, it’s a piece of folk wisdom. It sounds reasonable. It sounds cautious. It sounds like the kind of thing a thoughtful person might say to counsel restraint: don’t provoke Russia, don’t escalate. The Mana in the Meme: Russia as Bear Don’t poke the bear — attend to the mana. In my understanding, the mana is the energy, the charge in the meme. What is the energy imminent in this meme? First, the mantra: look for the mana in the meme, which is one of the 12 tools. First, the bear. Russia is a bear — not a government, not a collection of decision-makers, not a bureaucracy with budgets, logistics and internal politics. A bear: a force of nature, unchallengeable, primordial, amoral in the way that nature is amoral. You do not blame the bear for mauling you. You blame yourself for getting too close. The archetype is the wild, the untameable, the power that cannot be reasoned with but only accommodated. This is not analysis — it’s mythology. Its function is to strip Russia of agency and responsibility simultaneously. The bear does not choose to attack; it is provoked. The causality is reversed. The victim is the author of their own destruction. The Poke: Infinitely Elastic Provocation Second, the poke. What constitutes poking? In practice, everything Ukraine does to assert its sovereignty is poking. Joining NATO? Poking. Joining the EU? Poking. Speaking Ukrainian? Poking. Existing? Poking. The concept is infinitely elastic. It expands to encompass any action by any party that Russia finds inconvenient. Because the bear is a force of nature, the pokee has no legitimate grievance. You do not file a complaint against a thunderstorm. You take shelter. The implicit instruction of “don’t poke the bear” is: submit. The Don’t: A Command Third, the “don’t.” This is a command. Not a suggestion. Not an analysis. Not an invitation to consider multiple perspectives. A command addressed to a potential victim, instructing them to modify their behaviour to avoid provoking their own destruction. The entire moral weight of the meme rests on the victim. The aggressor, the bear, has no moral weight at all. It simply is. The Charge: Pure Mana This is pure mana. The factual content of the phrase is zero. There’s no claim to fact-check. There’s no argument to rebut. There’s only a charge. Notice the RG in “charge,” the same RG in “energy.” It’s the same RG in “reign” and in “right” — this is the second most important cryptotype, which I write about. There’s only a charge. A dense package of archetypal energy — again, the RGE in “energy,” “right,” “reign,” “regency,” “regiment” — that, once received, restructures the recipient’s perception of the conflict. Russia becomes nature. Ukraine becomes the provocateur. The West becomes the foolish hiker who ignored the warning signs. All of this happens below the threshold of conscious evaluation, in the half-second between hearing the phrase and feeling its truth in your gut. Naming as Disarmament The mana tool — look for the mana in the meme — asks you to notice this, to slow down, to feel the charge, and then to name it. Naming is the beginning of disarmament, real disarmament. Once you can say “this meme encodes the archetype of the untameable wild, and deploys it to invert the moral relationship between aggressor and victim,” the mana loses its grip. Not entirely, not permanently — mana is resilient. Naming it creates a gap, a space between the charge and your response. In that gap, adjudication becomes possible. You can decide whether or not to share the meme. You can decide whether or not to support AFD. You can make a decision to step back and stop yourself becoming emotionally moved by this, or scared. 847 Instances in the Luhansk Archive I found 847 instances of bear-related metaphors in the 10,000-item foundational corpus of the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, which is what I call the Luhansk Archive — this collection of propaganda items that I collected while in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, and hand-labelled according to the archetypal imminences within it. Not all of these 847 instances were “don’t poke the bear” specifically, but they all drew on the same archetypal reservoir: Russia as elemental force, Ukraine as irritant, the West as naive interloper in a drama it does not understand. The consistency was remarkable. It was not the consistency of a coordinated campaign — though coordination was certainly part of it — but the consistency of a deep cultural archetype being activated and amplified across thousands of individual acts of communication, which reached over a million ears almost every day. This is what makes Disinfolklore so difficult to counter, or even to perceive if you’re caught up in fact-checking. It’s not imposed from the outside. It resonates with something already present in the cultural substratum. The mana was already there. The propagandist merely increases the volume. The mana has been collecting its energy and its charge for 6,000 years, from the first Indo-Europeans who stood on the edge of forests on the steppe in ancient Ukraine, to those who returned to tell stories of the elemental bear. That is the mana charge. That’s when the mana charge in this particular meme began collecting. This week we saw AFD activating it inside the minds of all of us, unbeknownst to us. Perhaps they don’t even know what they’re doing, but they received their orders and they followed them. Unpacking the AFD Statement: The Twelve Signatures Let’s look at what it means when AFD said that, by helping Ukraine with its attack on Russia, Germany was provoking Russia and making an attack on Germany more likely. That was communicated through this meme of “don’t poke the bear.” 1. Inner / Outer Realm Sleight of Hand The first aspect of it is inner/outer realm sleight of hand. As many of you will know, inner/outer realm switching, othering — what Donald does when he others migrants, or women, or Iranians, or trans, or whatever. This is in-realm and out-realm switching. I call it the witch switch — switching scapegoats. It had this geographical positioning for me on the bridge in eastern Ukraine, on Stanytsia Luhanska, where, depending on where you stood, the inner realm of Russia-occupied Luhansk was being protected from people like me and outsiders and Ukrainians by the Russians, by the merciful sovereign. Inner realm equals the Germans — that’s her constituency, even though she lives in Switzerland. Outer realm: the bear, Russia, framed as predator. Ukraine, the actor actually defending itself, has disappeared from the analytical frame entirely. This deletion of the victim from the analytical space is itself a recurring signature. Some of you will remember I wrote a piece a few weeks ago on Palantir and Maven — all of this hand-wringing by certain people in the American chain of command about the advent of automated targeting — and Ukraine was completely absent from this. It turned out the only AI involved in this was a decision about which targets to take; humans were involved in pressing the button. Whereas Ukraine is dealing with this issue on a technical level hundreds, if not over a thousand, times a da

    51 Min.

  7. 15. Mai

    Podcast | Minsking Coyote Lawyer

    Zelensky’s Red Square Coordinates: Sovereign Trolling I was happy to see this week when President Zelensky posted the executive order, for want of a better term, talking about how the coordinates — the very accurate, I think it was eight-digit grid coordinates, or maybe even ten — of Red Square in Moscow would be safe from Ukrainian missiles. I noted with great pleasure how everyone recognised that as trolling, and that interested me. There was no argument that this was what this was about. It was about trolling using the threat of force, or the non-threat of force, but in the sense of weapons. Here is a sovereign with the capacity to direct an army, missiles to kill people, using Twitter. I noted the Prime Minister of Ukraine and many ministers tweeted out the executive order, as did President Zelensky himself. That’s the online aspect of it. It was a very specific message within a complicated concatenation of negotiations that most of us are following on a day-by-day basis, but which most normal people wouldn’t follow. The venue was online in some senses, but everyone recognised it as trolling, not only because it was online. It had real-world aspects to it, and that pleased me enormously, because that was what I noticed about trolling in eastern Ukraine: it is a multi-arena activity that we have a sense of understanding what it is. It’s mainly encountered online, but when something happens like President Zelensky signing that executive order as part of a strategy to get 1,000 Ukrainian hostages back from Russia, we recognise that as trolling. That is in the context of the trolling series, which we’ll go into. Archetypal Literacy and the Luhansk Corpus The second element is this archetypal literacy. On disinfolklore.eu, the website, the main expression of my work, there’s what I archetype: the Disinfolklore Analytical Method as the 12-tool way. The first tool is archetypal literacy. As part of my learning — I’m still learning — to be archetypally literate, to see archetypes immanent in data, I hand-labelled this massive corpus of over 10,000 propaganda items that I collected while working in eastern Ukraine from inside the Russia-occupying media space inside Luhansk. I refer to this as the Luhansk Corpus. These are hand-labelled as the archetypal imminences inside these stories. What I started here about five weeks ago was talking you through these stories and the different archetypes within them. Some of you might remember I was talking about the merciful sovereign. Inside the entire structure of the situation, Putler plays the merciful sovereign by saying that he is rescuing Ukrainians from the drug-addicted leaders and all of that nonsense, and the Nazis and all of that nonsense. When Putler is talking like that, he is archetyping himself as a merciful sovereign. The Mother and the Maiden Some of you might remember from a long time ago — it is a year, over a year now, that we’ve been doing these weekly, and I’ve only missed, I think, one or two weeks — that one of the very first ones I talked about was The Mother and the Maiden. This was an incident in eastern Ukraine where, in a blinding flash, I realised that there was something artificial about the use of this term: underage mother and her underage daughter who were about to be cut into tiny pieces by a Ukrainian Nazi. Again, this is a form of trolling, and it’s a very typical situation in some respects, but it also has real-world effects. It begins in the information space. It passed into my chain of command and down to me as a patrol group leader of a team of international diplomats on the border with Russia-occupied Ukraine. We were dispatched to go into a forest to look for this mother and her underage daughter who were about to be chopped into tiny pieces. As I recounted, what that was doing was trying to archetype, was trying to trigger us — me and my team, and those in my chain of command who ordered us on this ridiculous task — which, even before I even had the word archetype, only me and one other colleague who were sent on this task realised: this is ridiculous, this is not true, this is an artificial situation that we’re being sent on. I subsequently found out that the mother and the maiden are what Carl Jung calls primordial archetypes. As spoken about before, I disagree with Carl Jung on the universality of archetypes. My other work in Power of Mana establishes that all of the different traditions from which Jung was gathering evidence of the universality of archetypes were Indo-European traditions. The Kramatorsk Video: The Switch from Merciful to Merciless This last week we saw this picture, this video — some of us will have seen this — of a mother sheltering her daughter, her young daughter, by a tree in a park that I’ve been to in Kramatorsk, while drones hunted them in the sky. The video lasts for about two and a half minutes. What we have there, for me, was a very significant video, quite apart from the human aspect of it and the barbarity of it. I did my best to share it because it hopefully will bring home to people one of the reasons why the mother and the maiden is a primordial archetype: it moves us. It should move us. It should move people in our lives who don’t really know about the drone safaris. The person filming that in the park may well have had no awareness of Carl Jung or why this particular scene — while that film was being filmed, while the person was standing there (I don’t know if it was a man or a woman who came across this scene while the drone was going overhead) — they themselves had to shelter from it, as we saw in the rest of the video. They themselves, while their life was in danger, were so drawn to the picture of this mother and the maiden, and because they had their phone they were able to film them. There’s a great beauty about these two and a half minutes. It’s kind of like an intermission in reality, where it goes into archetypal Disinfolklore in the sense of that video was capturing the horror of what the Russians are doing. The merciful sovereign Putler is — I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that mother and her daughter, certainly the mother, was probably a native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainian. That is the person like the mother and the daughter that I wrote about in one of my first Disinfolklore pieces, who brought their child to shelter in the drama theatre in Mariupol and then was annihilated. In the moment of their annihilation, they were turned from the person the merciful sovereign was going to rescue — because they were being ruled by a crowd of drug-addicted Nazis from Kiev, according to the Disinfolklore — and in the moment of their annihilation, of being turned into biological dust, they were transformed into Nazis. Now, thankfully, I’ve made the link that in that very moment, the merciful sovereign turns into the merciless sovereign, and that switch is a reciprocal process. Immanent in that video we saw of the mother and the maiden in Kramatorsk last Friday was the transformation in the eyes of people viewing it of the merciful sovereign Putler as he was playing himself into the merciless sovereign, and the further entrenchment of President Zelensky as the merciful sovereign, who, as all of us know, is doing everything in his power to ensure the protection of his people. These are very, very old categories. Apart from that, this is a method to analyse particular situations that I find personally quite useful, and also very rich. Training the Neural Network on the Disinfolklore Analytical Method The point of me hand-labelling these and speaking and doing podcasts is — what I’m also doing is training an artificial neural network algorithm to think like I think. This week I finished creating the architecture and the inputs, the dataset which I input into the neural net, into the large language model to train it. The architecture itself of the neural network which I designed is based on the 12-tool way. The process of doing this is absolutely fascinating. As I’ve mentioned before, I think this is the future for all of us. We will have our own little neural nets running all the time. Some people will never have the ability to train their particular personal neural net. My vision for the Disinfolklore Analytical Method is a module that we can add on to our cognitive system, our cognitive structures. At the moment it’s available on the website. It’s available listening to me and gaining some sense of archetypal literacy, so that we can parse the data and the data streams coming through us into structural elements that help us understand what’s going on when Russia, for instance, is playing the merciful sovereign by saying it’s trying to rescue Ukrainians from something. We know the only harm in Ukraine is being caused by Russia. Equally, in the American example, this method translates perfectly to Donald and what Donald is doing. I talked before about the archetyping of himself as a sovereign through the use of the ballroom from Cinderella, from Louis XIV’s, and also this triumphal arch — again, the RCH, the right — archetyping himself as an emperor. The method should translate into all those things. In order to train the neural network algorithm, and in order to get the architecture, it is necessary to label, hand-label algorithms. This is what I’m going to talk to you right now about, which is the walk-in. Stephanie Baker’s Bloomberg Article on the Walk-In There was a great article in Bloomberg published this week — very, very detailed article — and it was featured on the Daily Telegraph podcast, which I listen to every now and again these days, reluctantly. I do see this story of them kind of becoming more human and more European. Hearing the Daily Telegraph kind of eulogise Kaja Kallas and other people in Europe is a great joy to me, having gone through the whole Brexit malarkey. Th

    43 Min.
  8. Podcast | The Creature of Moral Ambivalence and The Grandmother at the Checkpoint

    6. Mai

    Podcast | The Creature of Moral Ambivalence and The Grandmother at the Checkpoint

    Some of you may remember that two weeks ago I started a new series, looking at trolling and trolls. I am interspersing each week: one week on archetypal analysis of what I call the Luhansk archive, and then I move into the trolling. Trolling as Emotion-Moving Activity Just to remind everyone how I conceive of trolling: it is an emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind. I arrived at that definition through the story I am telling you tonight, and that I told you last time — that trolling is about movement, and what binds the use of artillery in eastern Ukraine, which I witnessed a lot, with Donald’s trolling about Iran, or anything else on the internet, with indeed President Zelenskyy’s trolling about his ceasefire offer this week and Ukraine’s great response to that. What binds all of these uses of the term trolling — which do describe the phenomena I have described — is movement, and the movement of emotions. What unites an artillery barrage with a tweet, or with the kind of way you might communicate with your pet cat, or the way someone you love communicates with you when they are trying to persuade you to do something that initially you did not want to do, but it is in your interests — this is all about a movement of emotions, and there is an activity which moves the emotions. I just wanted to fix you on that as we go through this. The Journey from Factiva to Eastern Ukraine What I am doing is bringing you on the journey I went on, which is: how do you link that aspect with the use of trolling as a term — trolls and trolling — for a phenomenon that most of us did not have any awareness of before, say, 2010? I did not have any awareness of trolling before about 2018 as a signifier. I remember the moment I received an email from a friend who just mentioned, oh, they were on YouTube trolling some people. I did not know what he was talking about at the time. I do remember that. What that signifier describes has been around forever, and I can say that with certainty because I have looked into what it means. The meaning which I deduce from the Dow Jones Factiva database of the uses of the term trolling and trolls — 65,000 uses of those terms in the world’s largest database of media, 33,000 media sources — that was my starting point. My friend used this term, it intrigued me, and I did not know what he was talking about, but I was seeing it a lot around. I wanted to see how this term has been used over time. That led me on this journey. It was my insight in eastern Ukraine that actually the meaning of this phenomenon — that has a meaning in early computer culture from California, and also with the advent particularly of Facebook and Twitter around 2008, this explosion of the use of trolls and trolling in the media around the world — what united those uses with what I was seeing in eastern Ukraine was the fact that there was a troll: as a person, as a metaphor to describe a person, or as a metaphor to describe a tweet, or what I now understand as any emotion-moving activity. The activity could be a flick of your eyebrow. It could be a tweet by the President of the United States. It could be a piece of legislation. All of these phenomena are united by the fact that they are emotion-moving activity, and they do move others’ emotions. Two Springs: Fishing and Folklore Last time I spoke about this, I was talking about looking at the term, how it arose in the Oxford English Dictionary, and how it went from fishing — from the discourse of fishing. It was used as a metaphor to talk about how you troll for souls. That was some of the earliest uses. Then in 2006, the Oxford English Dictionary, the definitive account of the English language, used the term from computer culture for the first time — trolling for bait, in the sense that my friend used it. That was a proposed amendment in 2006. There are these two springs from which this idea of trolling and trolls comes. One is fishing, and that goes back to the 13th century. The other is folklore. Today I am going to talk about folklore, and the connection there obviously with what I was doing in Ukraine: I was on a bridge with bridge trolls. The troll’s tale described the structural situation that I was in in eastern Ukraine. There were all these colliding meanings and associations which I have spent years trying to work out and work through. First spring, fishing. Second spring, folklore — the creature under the bridge. On the older of the two streams that fed the word troll, the Scandinavian folk creature: the bridge, the billy goats, the Moomins, and the long moral ambivalence of the figure in the folk imagination, before it met the English verb at the bottom of the hill. I took you on the first of the two streams that fed the word troll. I took you on the angler on the river in 1606, the clergyman who wrote that God trolls for souls. Tonight I will take you on the second stream. This one is older, it is colder, and considerably stranger. The Creature of Moral Ambivalence The creature is not unambiguously malign. The creature is not unambiguously benign. The creature has a long, murky career as a figure of moral ambivalence. To understand what happened to the word in the last 30 years — because this is really what I am doing, telling you about the development of this word in most of our lifetimes, and the development of the practice of trolling from early computer culture in California, to the use of trolling as a weapon of war by Iran, by Russia, indeed by Ukraine, and by the United States of America — you have to see what happened to the figure across the last thousand years. When I say that the troll is ambiguous: we do associate trolls with negative connotations, but the literary history we have also has them as positive creatures. Why is this significant to the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska, where on one side you had the Russian bridge trolls protecting their inner realm, Russia-occupied Ukraine? From the perspective of the inner realm, they were using their Disinfolklore to convince the people inside Russia-occupied Ukraine that those imprisoning them were actually protecting them from Ukrainian bogeymen, from Ukrainian Nazis. From that side, from the inner realm of Russia-occupied Luhansk, you look at the bridge troll and you are being brainwashed into thinking that is a positive creature. If you are MAGA, you look at Donald as someone who is going to protect America. He is standing on the bridge. He is protecting the inner realm of white-dominated America from the marauding migrants who are coming in over the bridge. From the perspective of MAGA adherents, or those who fall for the Donald troll, he is a positive creature. Obviously, from all of our perspectives — I am making assumptions here, but I think it is a good assumption to make — from our perspectives, he is a troll in a negative sense, and he is destroying the inner realm of America. That ambiguity depends on where you stand. Understanding that helps us understand the complexity of the act of trolling, where you can very gently troll someone into doing something that is in their best interests, and vice versa. Yet it is the same activity you are really doing. It is persuasion, it is courting, it is expressing love. It is like if your child or your pet is trying to get you to do something. Old Norse: A Category, Not a Creature The Old Norse word trolls — spelt troll, without the S, in the sagas — does not, in the oldest attestations, name a single specific creature. It names a category. In Indo-European culture, we have this category with different monikers everywhere. The category is something like: a supernatural being, larger and stronger than a human, not clearly divine, usually hostile, sometimes intermarriageable with humans, often associated with remote places — mountains, forests, caves, the underside of bridges, the far side of rivers. Every one of those elements can be found in the Prose Edda, which is one of the earliest texts in a Germanic language, and in the Heimskringla, and in the Icelandic family sagas of the 13th century. The creature is pre-Christian in origin, and most of the surviving texts were written down after the Christianisation of Iceland in 1000 AD, and the Christian scribes have already imposed a layer of demonisation. You find trolls who are pitiable or even noble. One of the oldest story types in the corpus that I collected is the story of a human hero who is trapped in the wilderness — on a mountain pass, in a cave during a storm at night, on a lonely road — and is rescued from the wilderness by a troll woman, who turns out, under hideous exterior, to be a supernatural figure of rescue. Here we have, in the other series I am doing, where we talk a lot about the merciful sovereign — when Donald or Putler create the crisis and then act as the merciful sovereign to get the Hormuz Strait open. This is an essential aspect of the early use of the troll. The troll woman gives the hero food, shelter, a magical object, crucial knowledge. The hero goes on to do his great deed because of the troll woman’s gift. This is not the story the Grimm brothers would later tell about ogres. It is a story that acknowledges that the creature outside the human community has gifts the community cannot provide, and that the hero who needs those gifts must be willing to accept them from the figure the community fears. Three Billy Goats Gruff: Moral Simplification Three Billy Goats Gruff — which is the foundational story for me on the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska, because I realised that not only was it a structural description of what I was going through there, but it is a structural description of all encounters with the other world and all encounters in interaction zones — in airports, on the Hormuz Straits, wherever you have one community defining itself against an outer realm community. The Three Billy Goats Gruff is reall

    51 Min.
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Battling Archetypes applies the Twelve Tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method to the folkloric structures hiding inside modern propaganda, memes, and geopolitics. Each episode decodes how Russia, MAGA, and other Disinfolklorists archetype reality — and how Counter Disinfolklore can unmask the wolf in sheep’s clothing.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ www.disinfolklore.net

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