Battling Archetypes

Decoding Trolls
Decoding Trolls
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Decoding Trolls's "Battling Archetypes" podcast applies the Twelve Tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method (see Disinfolklore.eu) to the folklore-like structures hiding inside modern propaganda, memes, and geopolitics. Each episode decodes how Russia, MAGA, and other Disinfolklorists archetype reality. Infolklore, by contrast, is a first-order creative practice: the active, conscious, Code of Positive Trolls-observant deployment of folklore-like archetypes in the service of generosity, right, patience, creative Mana, focus, and insight. This channel helps us learn to see the immanence of Infolklore and Disinfolklore in our information streams. www.disinfolklore.net

  1. 5d ago

    Podcast | Grass Whispering Infolklore

    Principles of Infolklore (Ep 6) Let’s go back to the principles of Infolklore. Some of you will remember how I am deducing The principles of Infolklore. Previous episodes: Ep 1 - Aug 20 Ep 2 - Aug 27 Ep 3 - 3 Sept Ep 4 - 10 Sept Ep 5 - 17 Sept I use a combination of my own written work, what scholars would call a vocabulary. I use that as a lens to look at the transcripts of Volya Radio, of RIA Melitopol and of RIA Pivden. I had noticed that they are particularly interesting artefacts. They appear to practise what I call the Code of Positive Trolls. I have theorised it since February 2020. I am using a neural network algorithm, a frontier model, in a kind of recursive loop, which I think is the technical term. It goes through the archive again and again and again. We start with some principles in mind and look for them in the words spoken on Volya Radio. Then we find out whether they are general principles of Infolklore that turn up elsewhere in the text. Then, with those in mind, we go back through the whole data set again, and again. So every week I speak to you, new and interesting aspects of the data set are emerging. So are new understandings, on my part, of what constitutes Infolklore. Many of you know I have been writing about Disinfolklore for three to four years. I was writing about it without that moniker for almost a decade. That began when I was posted to eastern Ukraine, at the end of January and early February 2015. I spent that time, as I am always banging on about, in Russia-occupied Luhansk and on that bridge. What the Law Is For I want to continue where I left off, under the heading of what the law is for. Ukrainian Arts and Culture, the 15th of June 2025. Some of us might remember that show. Two guests, Tatiana and Alexey, and a host asking them about a grandmother’s house. The talk is of rushnyky, the embroidered towels. “Ukrainian embroidered Rusniki” Given at weddings, the guest says. They symbolise prosperity. “And they hang them around the icons.” Then the old house at grandma’s. “and it’s made out of clay, the walls out of clay,” Flowers painted on the walls, as a charm. I remember well visiting Petrykivka, about fifty kilometres from Dnipro. That form of flower painting is protected by UNESCO. Some Russian nesting dolls adopt it as if it were Russian. In fact it is Ukrainian. Perhaps all of us remember that amazing painted house in Kherson region, flooded and destroyed when the Russians blew the dam. So, flowers painted on the walls as a charm. It was never winter there, one of them says. It was always spring. And the wind in the grass. “and the grass, shepochka, whispered.” “how can you not be a poet when you hear the grass whispering?” And then, without any change of tone, the year of the independence vote. Alexey was a student, he remembered, going door to door. “and giving the pamphlets or leaflets” “for like going to vote for independence” He knocked on the door where Tatiana lived, and nobody opened. He went further down the street. Then he came back and knocked again. “I was persistent.” That is what he told Ukrainian Arts and Culture, on Volya, on the 15th of June 2025. They met leafleting for independence. Nothing in that whole hour looks like law, or like Right as the post-World War II legal order defines it. No European human rights convention is named. No crime is charged against the Ruschists. Nothing is argued. It is a lawful hour from end to end. A lawless hour, you might say. And yet it is a morally lawful and pleasant hour, from end to end. The right to take part in the cultural life of your own community is in the Covenant of 1966, in article fifteen. The right of a people to determine its own future is the first article of both Covenants: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and its twin. A clay house. Icons under embroidered towels. A boy with leaflets who would not go away. That is not the law being honoured in the way Will or Mockers honour it when they speak about the law of the sea. That is the thing the law exists to protect. Said out loud on a Sunday, with no enemy in the sentence. The swans The war is in the hour all the same. Tatiana’s brother is at the front as they talk. The painted walls took Mockers straight to another house, in Oleshky. The artist Polina Raiko painted her whole house. It was partly destroyed. Near the war, flowers painted on a clay wall take on a beauty that the same flowers far from it do not have to that extent. At the time, I posted pictures of Polina’s house, showing the swans on its walls. I also posted the photos of the swans going by the town hall after the Russians blew the dam. The fake governor of the day was speaking to camera, saying everything is fine, as the swans went by. Apollo flew on swans to the Azov Sea in Greek myth. Back, as the Greeks did not know then, to where the Greeks came from. A thousand years before the Greek language was formed, out of a daughter language, from Ukraine. Right, over the longue durée And so, Right. Right is the second of the elements in the Code of Positive Trolls. The Code of Positive Trolls is the mental algorithm I use to help me discern Disinfolklore, Infolklore and neutral Mana, neutral energy, in memes. The second element is Ethical Discipline. Right often means the post-World War II legal order. But Right is not only the honouring or the breach of the law of war. A story that carries the thing the whole order was written to keep safe supports that order. In this hour, that thing is a clay house. The boy with the leaflets was asking a people to choose its own future. A house like that is only safe in a country free to make that choice. Over the longue durée, the vote and the front are one act of independence, decades apart. The story moves the listener towards the law without ever naming it. Where no law is invoked, we judge a story by the whole Code of Positive Trolls. It is a moral judgement. That is the deepest sense the word Right carries. Deeper than the article in the Covenant. Right, in the end, is whether a thing passes the whole Code of Positive Trolls. The Energy in this one moves towards what is Right. Not away from it. Towards it. One book counts. One book remembers. And the book that says why either of them is worth keeping is a grandmother’s house, with flowers painted on the clay. The grass whispered. And he knocked on the door, and he was persistent. I Won’t Say Winning Good Morning Kyiv, the 14th of September 2025, an hour and thirty-five minutes in. A host is running through what the autumn holds for Russia, and it is good. Then he reaches for the obvious word and stops. “I won’t say winning.” He says it once more, longer, with the reason and a replacement in the same breath. “I’m not going to say winning until we’re won, until the full territories would be taken back, but on the ascendancy, you’d have to say, wouldn’t you?” That was Good Morning Kyiv, on the 14th of September 2025. And the co-host takes the replacement without a pause. Yeah, absolutely. On the ascendancy. Not winning. That is the whole practice of Infolklore on Volya, in real time, in ten seconds. Here is the claim in one sentence. The discipline we can hear best on this station, on Volya Radio, runs on our own first choice of word, spoken aloud, cancelled, and replaced in the same breath. And it runs one way. The refusal falls on Ukraine’s winning and never on Russia’s losing. Two sorts of folk-shaped story travel this war. One is told to work on you, for somebody who will not give his name. The other, the kind I call Infolklore, is told in the open by people who give their own time and energy to defending the law the world wrote down after 1945. What they tell has to pass every practice of the Code of Positive Trolls. This hour is about how they choose their words. The Word Cancelled Nine months after that morning, a different show and a different voice, and the same word goes back in the box. Booms & Woe then Ming and Will, the 8th of June 2026. “I’m not going to say winning. I’m going to say Ukraine is on the ascendancy in a number of areas. Russia is clearly losing.” There it is, both halves in one mouth. Ukraine is not winning. Russia is clearly losing. He does not hedge the second. The refusal to say winning turns up six times, on five separate mornings, across fifteen months, in at least three different voices. The refusal to say losing turns up nought times. A rule that only runs one way is not a tic. When a word is taken back, the doubt goes against our own side’s success. Never against the enemy’s collapse. The cancellation is not always about modesty. Often it is about precision. Sometimes the precision runs against Russia in a way that costs a good line. Booms & Woe then Will & Ioana, the 6th of April 2026, on the Ruschist economy. “I won’t say small business failings.” “But they’re not failings. Those businesses are just going underground to the black market.” The Russian press was saying failings. Failings would have been a lovely word to read out on a show that enjoys Russia’s woes. He put it down, because the shops had not failed. They had gone under the counter. That is a smaller and truer thing. Sometimes there is no side to it at all. Good Morning Kyiv, the 21st of March 2026, a host on how Ukraine is using a particular missile. “I won’t call it air defense because they’re essentially using it like you would use close air support.” The first word was wrong for the job the thing was doing. I won’t call it air defence. So it went. That is all. The habit fires on any word. That is what tells me it is a habit. And once, the cancellation ran the other way, upwards, towards the grander word. The person doing it said so. This Week in Absurdistan then Booms & Woe, the 12th of December 2025, a host reading a summary of somebody else’s analysis. “I wou

  2. Sep 19

    Podcast | Demon of the Moon (Ep 2): Over the Longue Durée

    Some of you will remember what I’m doing. I’m deducing, from transcripts, from millions of words of Volya Radio transcripts, what I call the principles of Infolklore. I have re-recorded this podcast, due to audio issues with the original recording of 16 September. I’ve posted it as two parts. This is the second part. The first part is here. Continued from: Infolklore, I remind you, is not just the opposite of Disinfolklore. It’s a positive creative practice. I try to practise it. Most of us probably listen on Volya Radio to Will or Mockers every day. They’re the very epitome of Infolklorists, from my perspective. So the law that we honour on Volya Radio is basically the same since the beginning, since SBU Crime and Punishment. Then it was taken on by other segments on Volya Radio. On the 16th of January 2025, for instance: “In any case, there’s no legitimate target on Russia’s part. Nothing that Russia hits is legitimate because the war itself is a crime. It’s a crime of aggression.” So the war is a crime. This is true. It is the crime the UN Charter was written to forbid. The law of armed conflict binds both sides. The law of armed conflict. The post-World War II legal order. The Geneva Conventions. Regardless of who started the war. This is the whole reason the laws of war exist. A rule that only bound the innocent side would bind nobody. So a Russian shell that lands on a Ukrainian artillery position is a lawful act inside an all-unlawful war. But a Russian artillery shell that lands on a Ukrainian school is not. It is an unlawful act in an unlawful war. The sentence I read you says it cannot be. Principles of Infolklore - Series so far: Ep 1 - Aug 20 Ep 2 - Aug 27 Ep 3 - 3 Sept Ep 4 - 10 Sept Ep 5 - 17 Sept An error in rightness This is an error in rightness. We all make mistakes. And it was made by a person who, in the same hour, refused to show prisoners of war on air, because the Geneva Conventions forbid this. Same mouth, same morning, keeping one article and arguing away the whole of the other. The argument has a second limb, which is the one that costs. In This Week in Absurdistan, on the 13th of December 2024. In the first winter of Volya Radio on X: “Russia invaded Ukraine and Ukraine has every right to occupy Russian territory, Belarusian territory, North Korean territory and fire any goddamn weapon it wants to [?] any of those territories to end this war of aggression against them. That’s what the rules of armed conflict in Geneva and the Hague Convention say.” Any weapon, anywhere in those territories, and the conventions invoked to bless it. The conventions forbid exactly that, in so many words. They forbid reprisals against civilians and objects in particular. Blackout Sunday, and the hostage dialectic Ten months later, on Booms & Woe, the same idea arrived in a plainer coat. If you hit our electricity and our gas, we do the same to you. The Russians understand a knife for a knife. Our word for this on Volya is Blackout Sunday. It was said on the show a hundred times before it came true. Every one of those hundred was a wish for a civilian grid to go dark. Although I note it is usually in the context of the civilian grid, which is helping to feed the Russian war machine. If the Russian war machine does not separate its electricity substations from those that serve civilians, then Ukraine cannot be expected only to hit electricity substations that only serve the military. Especially if there are none. This is the hostage dialectic, which the Russians are so good at. They create of civilians guards. They surround themselves in civilians. Then, after they hit civilians in Ukraine, they cry when Ukraine hits them. That is the Russian hostage dialectic. You cannot win a war provided you take proper precautions not to kill any civilians. But civilians are being held hostage, as they are in Russia, and indeed in Ukraine and Oleshky. People there are starving to death. There is a famine in Russia-occupied Ukraine. That is despite Russia’s duty in law, as the occupier, to ensure the conditions of sustainable existence for those people unlucky enough to be under Russian occupation. You cannot stand back while that is going on without trying to liberate them. A question for the Code of Positive Trolls So whether the wish was Infolklore is a question for the Code of Positive Trolls. It sits on the record beside these conventions. I make no judgement about this. What I’m looking at is transcripts of thousands of hours of talking. I’m looking at the main immanence in them, not the variations from those immanences. All of us are dealing with this war. We are part of this terrible, terrible data stream of appalling acts that Russia is responsible for every day. We all have emotional reactions to them. So I’m not going to sit in judgement on the particulars when the whole itself is determinable as Infolklore, and as conforming to the Code of Positive Trolls. Drone safaris, and the laws of war I posted after one of Zarina Zabrisky’s amazing articles. She is the American journalist who has catalogued Russia’s drone safaris. They have killed over 2,000 to 3,000 people in Kherson. There Russia uses humans to train its drone pilots, by killing children, babies, buses. This is happening every day, and the world hasn’t taken notice. NATO, if it was a serious organisation, even if it didn’t care about Ukraine, would be trying to find a way of solving this problem. How do you solve the problem when you have these genocidal maniacs using first-person view drones, which cost about 500 euros each, and they are hunting civilians in a city? Zarina Zabrisky did an amazing article on how the Russians have mined all the rivers, and the Dnipro, and the riverbeds all around occupied territories. I asked the question carefully, as a lawyer does. It was something along the lines of, well, maybe it’s time to change the Geneva Convention on the laws of war. Laws do change and transform over time. If the ICRC and those signatories of the 1949 Geneva Conventions on the laws of war will not defend them and enforce them, then we may need to change them to laws which they are prepared to enforce. So Ukraine is tied to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, the only country actually enforcing them and staying true to them, while their enemy uses them basically as a guide of what to do the opposite of. Then you can’t win a war by doing this. The Geneva Conventions themselves become an instrument for the enemy. So these are questions we must raise and talk about and think about in a free society. If the Russians are taking advantage of our adherence, our blanket adherence to them, then a lawful government or a lawful operation may decide to change those laws. Understand this about people like me. Russia invaded Ukraine in March 2014 (or, as the European Court of Human Rights now finds, in February 2014). In the first moment, the first milliseconds of hearing about Russia’s invasion, I understood that unless international law was defended at that moment, then we would enter a realm in which no laws applied. That was part of Russia’s objective. Our countries have a legal duty to enforce international law. Ukraine is actually enforcing international law. So if we are not prepared to enforce these laws, then we cannot cry when Ukraine acts in ways which seem, on the surface, to be a violation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Instead, we should be supporting Ukraine properly. We should be enforcing the laws ourselves, or accepting that these laws are constraints and instruments by the enemies of everything we hold dear. So I do not stick religiously to the letter of the law in the 1949 Geneva Conventions. There is this concept in European human rights law called the margin of appreciation. In this case, a state like Ukraine would have to have a very wide margin of appreciation by a court, which the Rashists, as the initiators of this invasion, do not have. Not least because, as I’ve just said, the war itself is unlawful. But activities, any activity within that unlawful war, must be lawful. All of us know practically nothing Russia does adheres to the Geneva Conventions, even if you put brackets around the lawfulness of the war itself. Relief, and a wall of dead bodies On Booms & Woe, on the 9th of December 2025: “Anyway, this soldier with his leg torn off is really, really happy that he’s in hospital. Really happy, he says, really finally at hospital. Woohoo!” She gives him relief. She gives him a reason and an inside. Interiority is the posh way of putting it. He was in the trenches and then he got injured, not killed. He got captured by Ukraine, and he’s now in the hospital recovering. So seven months later, on the same show, a different reader on the same men. “And the only thing they’re building is a wall out of their dead bodies.” A wall out of their dead bodies. There’s no inside there, though it is a description of the reality. The aim of the war splits along the same seam. Russia has lost 10,000 souls over the past week, as I speak to you. They’re up to around 1,400 a day at the moment, because they’re throwing human beings against a wall of defensive drones, knowingly, every day. They’re losing land. They’re not even taking land. So to blame Ukraine for defending itself is not appropriate. The aim of the war splits along the same seam in Good Morning Kyiv and Booms & Woe, on the 12th of October 2025: “That’s really the only way you can survive is by, interestingly, prosecuting a policy of trying to annihilate them, not just defeat them and get them to run off is actually a defensive strategy.” Annihilate, not just defeat. Beside that, in the same year, on the same show, someone reading the youngest Russian dead off a Ukrainian intelligence agency list: “Born in 2006, I’ve got socks older than that. So when they published this information, the main intelligen

  3. Sep 17

    Podcast | The Demon of the Moon (Ep 1)

    So let’s start with the beginning of chapter three of Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut. This is the sixth part of my show reveal of that monograph. That integrates the twelve tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method, applied to the Rashist state apparatus. I have re-recorded this podcast, due to audio issues with the original recording of 16 September. I’ll post it as two parts. This is the first part. The second is here. Continued from: The Disinfolklore analytical method has twelve tools. They’re available on Disinfolklore.eu. They divide into four groups. Tools one through five are detection. Tool six is a metaphorical bridge. And tools six through eleven, taken in series, constitute the Code of Positive Trolls. The Code of Positive Trolls is the ethical instrument that adjudicates what to do once one has detected a potential troll. So, the entire Code of Positive Trolls itself, all six elements in it. Generosity. Ethical discipline, or Right. Patience. Mana, or energy. Focus. And insight. Those are the six elements. They’re collectively also the means we use to determine whether something is Infolklore or Disinfolklore. That is what Mockers and Will do daily on Volya Radio on X. And it is what all of you often do in the discussions there. The twelfth tool, the final one, is what I call, rather grandly, cryptotypic literacy. That’s the deep grammar instrument that reads the substrate. The foundation. The underpinning beneath the surface deployment of a troll. So for instance, we see this whole bevy of movement from the United States administration this week. They are modelling their willingness to go for Russia, Russia, Russia. However, the substrate. I think most of us feel it. And today Mockers, on Volya Radio’s Spaces on X, spoke for us all. She expressed a wee bit of scepticism about all this suddenly happening in the very week we’ve seen Trump Jr. have his wedding paid for by an odious Rashist oligarch. So we can be sceptical about these particular manifestations of willingness to go after Russia. That is what I mean by the substrate. There’s something underlying things. It’s a rather grand way of talking. But it’s something that we do all the time, especially when we’re in the realm of Disinfolklore literacy. We’re constantly looking. We’re looking at what’s underneath the particular moves that we see Donald make. There’s always something underneath all of it. So cryptotypic literacy is about the deep underlying layer underneath the surface. Running information through the method I’m going to introduce each of these tools in plain English. I’ll just do a couple tonight, because there’s a few other things I want to get onto as well. Then I’ll apply the full toolkit to the Cheburashka artefact. Cheburashka is the Russian Mickey Mouse. Then I’ll apply it more rapidly to the Mausoleum Emperor artefact. I haven’t spoken to you about it, but we’ll get to it in a week or two. And I’ll also apply it to the Europe Projection artefact, and to the Mariupol boat artefact. I’ve talked about that one before. It involves Daria Dugina. She also features as a bit part in my book Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut. I am revealing the book to you here gradually, episode by episode. Once you have that twelve-tool Disinfolklore analytical method in your mind, it’ll be in your hand like it is in mine. I’m continually running information through it. And we should be able to apply it ourselves. If not systematically, step by step, then certainly there are little elements in it which will, hopefully, recur and occur to us in important moments. I try my best to apply these things as I go through my day and I’m hit with particular pieces of information. That might be from the Ukraine war discourse. Or in my private life, or in work, or in art, or in any particular situation I’m in. This method should work to help us interpret better the reality in which we are embedded. The six perfections, and focus The previous chapters and the previous episodes of Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut introduced the Code of Positive Trolls. It is the six-perfection ethical instrument that sits at the methodological heart of the approach. I derived the six elements in the Code of Positive Trolls from the six paramitas of Mahayana Buddhism. Generosity. Ethical discipline, Right. Patience. The third, joyous perseverance, or Mana, energy. The fifth is meditative focus. That’s what it’s known as in Buddhism. And I put it to focus. So we’re focused on Ukraine, as an example of how we can apply the method. But we can use it in other discourses, like MAGA discourse. We’re focused on getting to the truth. We’re focused on rightness. We’re focused on helping Ukraine, in this context. Other people and other sides are focused on the opposite. They’re focused on destroying the post-Second World War legal order. So Donald’s focus is always about passing the buck, passing blame. So that can be quite a good way of looking at data: to be focused, and to understand what you’re focused on. And that way we are not distracted. Where the Code came from I derived the Code of Positive Trolls and its six elements from the six paramitas. I learned them from a particular lama who introduced them to me. And five years after being introduced to them, I was scratching around for an evaluative framework. I wanted to determine the difference between what I call a positive troll, a negative troll, and something which is neutral. Neutral. It doesn’t move us at all. This instrument, I thought, wow, this is amazing. It works. So, for instance, if this particular meme is about deception, then that comes in under Right. I just worked it through my mind over the course of a few months. And these were actually a particularly rich way of checking whether a particular meme was positive. Whether it had positive energy or negative energy. After working on the idea for a long time, I realised that actually here was a perfect means of coming up with a way of distinguishing between positive trolls and negative trolls. A scientific way. One I could teach a computer to learn how to do. So the Code is an instrument. We apply memes to it, and what is going on in reality. The instrument does not require a reader’s prior alignment with any Buddhist philosophy. It’s not about religion. It’s just a tool I happen to find in that discourse. I mentioned that I learned it from a lama just so you understand. I was looking around for a solution, and this is how I came to it. It only requires that the reader is willing to use it. I’ve spoken before about the principles of Infolklore, and I’ll get to them later. I’ve been deriving them from the transcripts that I have been analysing from the Volya shows. So it’s empirically derived. You tell a computer, okay, I want you to parse this data set, and look at it through the prism of the Code of Positive Trolls. Lo and behold, though it does not surprise me in any way, shape or form, it works very well with what all of Volya Radio has been doing. That is, supporting Ukraine, and talking about the daily diet of Disinfolklore emanating from the Rashists on various registers. From Putler down to the lowliest St Petersburg Linguistics Faculty trained milblogger. And with what we’re all trying to do when we’re on Volya Radio. So it’s quite consoling, for all of you and for all of us who are involved in Volya and helping in the ways we do. But it’s also not really surprising that the Code of Positive Trolls works as an instrument to parse that data. That is because one of the reasons I chose to look at the Volya data set was that I reckoned it would be a really good means of parsing the data through the prism of the Code of Positive Trolls. Allocation So every reading in this book, Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut, runs in two steps. First, what I call allocation. I name what the artefact does. And by artefact, in this sense, it could be a flick of an eyebrow. It could be a visual meme. It could be a whole story involving days or weeks or months, or a movie. Or it could be press conferences, or an element within a press conference. So the lexical unit itself is undetermined. It can be of any size and have any content. That’s the instrument. That’s the tool I’m trying to build with the Disinfolklore analytical method. It should work on any lexical unit of any size. Anything you can interpret with a mind, in your mind, or in a book, or in a movie. It should work on that. So I’m really flexible on what the unit of analysis is, because I want the whole system I’m building to be useful in many different contexts. I just happen to be building it in the context of the Ukraine-Russia war. But it ought to be applicable and useful in every other context we come across in our lives. Whether that’s MAGA, in India and China, wherever. The best way I could get it to do this is to teach the computer lots of different kinds of writing, and kinds of memes. So, first, allocation. Name what the artefact does, in three different ways. It may deploy a named archetype. For instance, the merciful sovereign, or the bridge troll. I’ve spoken before about when Putler is playing the reasonable man. He is trying to model himself as the reasonable man, the merciful sovereign. So that is an archetypal presence. So we can get a grip on that. Some data does not have archetypes in it. It may make a claim. It may make a claim to lawful order. The truthful teller. The strong one. The wronged one. It may be like it often is on Volya Radio, where presenters are actually making a claim about the law. Then the third bit. Maybe it’s naming no character, no archetypal immanence, and making no clear claim. And it may only carry the architectural signature of Disinfolklore itself. So any of the three is a handle, a grip. I talk about gripping. I’m trying to get the computer and the algorithm to grip, a

  4. Sep 10

    Podcast | Mana-stripping through monikoring

    AfD’s Don’t poke the bear troll - final part of Chapter Three of Outflank Dugin In 2024 Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, at that point the second largest party in the Bundestag, gave a parliamentary speech. Germany’s continued military support for Ukraine, she said, was poking the bear. The bear, Russia, had legitimate security interests in its near abroad. The West’s expansion of NATO since 1991 had been a provocation. Responsible German statecraft would consist of stepping back and acknowledging the bear’s domain. “As ever, there’s multiple parts to this episode. Each is stand-alone- you don’t need to have tuned into the previous episodes of any of these series, to understand what I’m talking about. In case you do want to go back: Today, we’re completing chapter two of my monograph Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut (Episodes One, Two, and three of this series, an essential introduction to the ‘Outflank’ dimension of the Disinfolklore method are linked to here). Today is the second part of Principles of Infolklore series, episode four (the first part of episode four is here) - episodes One and Two of the Principles of Infolklore). And the second part of my comparison of Ukraine’s counter Disinformation system development experience with my experience developing Disinfolklore system, using the July 2026 Springer Press book as my spring board (the first part is here). Recently I used the ‘Outflank’ method in another context: Weidel’s speech is the third example in chapter two of Outflank Dugin, the book I started reading to you here about two months ago. This is the fourth episode of it, and the end of the chapter. The line “don’t poke the bear” is the Russian security apparatus’s signature. It is archetypal Disinfolklore. It is not Weidel’s coinage. It is not the AfD’s coinage. It is a line that has circulated in Russian state-aligned Western European political discourse, in various translations, for at least two decades. It is the canonical Provocation Logic deployment at the geopolitical scale. This is Part 5 of Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut. Continued from: The outflanking response to Weidel’s speech was not to rebut her account of NATO expansion. The outflanking response was to name the deployment, as I have just done. Here is the “don’t poke the bear” signature. It surfaces in this speech. Its Mana, its energy, is immanent in this speech, in that report, in this podcast, in that op-ed. The signature is the same in every case. It is the Russian security service apparatus’s. To repeat the signature is to deploy the apparatus’s vocabulary. Whether the speaker is a Ruscist state operative, openly, or a Bundestag party leader who lives in Switzerland, or a captured Nobel NGO like Amnesty, or a children’s-cartoon-demonology-writing fake philosopher in Moscow, is structurally beside the point. The deployment is the deployment. This is what looking for the Mana in the meme means. Once we begin to look for the Mana in the meme, and we see such a deployment, we take it on the surface. On the level of what is immanent in the meme, in the lexical unit. It does not matter who is saying it. Your best friend, your mother, your father, or the leader of a political party in Germany. Once the signature is named, once the Mana is named, a reader has the equipment to recognise it again in different clothes, in a different costume. They do not need to rebut every fresh deployment. They register that the signature is present here. That is what we can do in our lives, to our friends and among our friends. Talk about what I have just talked about. Do not refute the nonsense about NATO expansion. Do not use folkloric tropes to demonstrate our approval of Russia’s war of annihilation. Decline to amplify it in those terms. The deployment loses its purchase by being correctly named. Mana-stripping the sorcerers Outflanking operates, finally, at the level of vocabulary. This strand concerns what I call the Russian security apparatus’s senior actors. Dugin, in my book, is also referred to as Sorcerer Dugin. Saucerer Dugin. The actor philosopher. Putin’s Rasputin. The Russian security apparatus’s primary philosopher. The captured philosopher. The wise-counsellor operator. The demonology writer. The demon-of-the-moon inventor. The anti-Semite. The children’s-cartoon defamer. The manufactured philosopher. None of these is an insult for the sake of it. Each is a calculated Mana-stripping. A removal of the gravitas vocabulary the Russian security apparatus has built around this fake philosopher, and a substitution of working vocabulary that names what he actually does. He acts. He performs the role of a philosopher, of a wise-counsellor archetype, on behalf of the Russian security service, in order to reach minds that would not be reached by other kinds of memes. His job is to justify the continuation of the war of annihilation against humanity. He does it with his long beard and his robes. The same move applies to the other Russian apparatus actors. Putler himself is the Chief Sorcerer. Duncey Putin. The Village Dunce. The failed emperor. The cosplay Tsar. Margarita Simonyan I call Maid Maryon Simonyan, the bridge-troll-in-chief of Russia Today. The Wagner founder Prigozhin was, until his airplane apparently fell out of the sky in August 2023, the Chef Saucerer. That is sauce, as in what a chef cooks up. A play on his earlier career as Putin’s caterer. Another archetype which entered our minds. And notice how that folkloric trope, the idea of the cook, the chef, put everyone off understanding that he, in my view, was Putler’s chosen successor. He was about to succeed Putler when he had his disastrous experience in Bakhmut. But we all thought of him, and all the Russia experts thought of him, as a mere chef. That is how names, the symbolic energy in names, can disarm us or trick us. The word philosopher, applied to Dugin, is itself a piece of Russian security apparatus marketing. Every time a Western journalist writes “the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin”, they mint that idea. The journalist is performing a small piece of free marketing for the Russian security apparatus. They do not understand what they are doing. What they are repeating is a hyper-normalised phrase which does not correspond to reality. This is a person who spends his time calling a beloved cartoon character, Cheburashka, a demon of the moon, with a fake Semitic, and anti-Semitic, etymology to boot. Whether they know it or not, the journalist is a ventriloquist for the Russian security state. The vocabulary is part of the deployment. To use the working vocabulary, to call Dugin the children’s-cartoon defamer instead of the Russian philosopher, is to refuse to perform the apparatus’s marketing. To call Russia’s senior leader Duncey Putler is to deny him the gravitas the apparatus has constructed around him at enormous expense, in blood and treasure, over 25 years. The Mana-strip is small, repeated, deliberate and structurally important. It is also old. The English language has been doing this to bullying authority figures since before there was an England. Old Boney was the English working-class moniker for Napoleon Bonaparte. Wee Georgie for King George IV. Stupid Don for an American president of the early 21st century in his second term. Ratko the Butcher for the Serbian general who organised the Srebrenica massacre. The Mana-strip is part of the English-speaking culture’s historical resistance to authoritarian self-mythologising. It is a tradition. I am drawing on it deliberately. You are invited to draw on it too. The next time you find yourself about to write “the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin”, pause. Find more accurate vocabulary. Judge anyone who uses those terms accordingly. If you have a way into their mind, try to explain to them what they are doing and how they are doing it. After a few times, maybe they will understand. The apparatus’s senior fake philosopher. The children’s-cartoon demonologist. The wise-counsellor archetype operator. The fake-Orthodox sanctioned individual. Any of them is more accurate than philosopher. Any of them does the small, repeated Mana-strip work that the outflank, don’t rebut method calls for. Outflank, don’t rebut. Five steps The method, in its compact form, is three words. Outflank, don’t rebut. In practice it is five steps. One. When a Russian state apparatus deployment surfaces, or a MAGA apparatus deployment surfaces, do not rebut it. Do not amplify it by writing the counter-essay. Do not share the meme unadulterated. Do not transmit it by explaining while refuting. Two. Name the deployment for what it is. Name its type. Provocation Logic. Accusation in a Mirror. What archetype is it? What archetypal identity is inside it? Look for its Mana. Try to understand what its energy is. Is it an alibi for stealth genocide? Necropolitical conqueror? Manufactured wound? Captured-philosopher demonology? Merciless sovereign? Merciful sovereign? Chapter three gives more vocabulary for the naming. Three. Direct the attention of the people listening to you, or reading you, to the substrate. The underlying level the deployment is parasitising. That is for future weeks. Four. Strip the deployer’s Mana. Refuse the Russian security apparatus’s vocabulary about its own actors. Use working vocabulary instead. Mint your own terms for these ne’er-do-wells. Five. Apply the Code of Positive Trolls, the six-perfection ethical instrument I introduce in chapter three, and apply it symmetrically. Generosity. Right. Is it right to kill so many people? Is it right to take land? Is it right to lie? Patience. Is it patient to overcome all of the planning regulations to knock down the East Wing? Is it patient to make it impossible for the first Black leader of the Smithsonian to keep their position? No, it is not patient. Mana. What is the ene

  5. Sep 3

    Podcast | The Sberbank Troll & Infolklore (week 3)

    Part One. The Christening of the Sberbank Report Some of us might have seen last week a new character entered into our information space, and its Mana, its energy, doesn’t match its name. This is a core element in the Disinfolklore analytical method, so we can all learn how to do this. That when we see or perceive some piece of information warfare, we look for the Mana in the meme, and then we see if the name of that energy suits it. So if Donald says he wants peace while bombing Iran, then the Mana, the energy, the substance of what he is saying doesn’t match the name. It’s not peace. And obviously that example works for the Russians, and part of what I try to teach myself to do is learn to practise this in real time. And so this is an example of it from last week that some of us who spend our days in the Ukrainian information space might have noticed, this character. And you might remember my piece last year on how Disinfolklore, part of the Disinfolklore method, is to look at memes as characters that we would look at, like in a book. And then that enables us to examine them in ways which we don’t usually examine news stories. Ukraine being a perfect example of a character with female characteristics, according to the authoritarian mindset, who needs to surrender to the man, Russia. And so if we look at that in that analytical way, it does help us. Because people like Putler talk about Ukraine as a woman. Famously, the example I give on the 20th of February 2022, where Putler was giving a press conference. So four days before the full-scale invasion. And he used the term “like it or not, take it my beauty”. And Russians perfectly understood what he meant by this, because they understood the reference point. Which was a song by a Soviet-era hard rock band called Red Mould. And Red Mould had this famous song in the 1980s called “Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin”. So again, archetypal Disinfolklore, in two senses of the word archetypal. And Putler communicates his threat via this piece of Disinfolklore from pop culture that is visible to the Russists, but not to these Western experts that we hear so much about. And the message was very clear, and it was very clear in gendered terms, as indeed that 1980s song is. “Like it or not, take it my beauty.” Perceiving Ukraine as a corpse, and also as the victim of necrophiliac, you know what. And it’s not just me who noticed this gendered speech and this means of threatening, what has come and what has been realised through the same means. He, and the adjudicated horrible word that Donald is, also use these same terms. So I did do a piece last year on gender mainstreaming, and the importance, the lenses of gender as one of the mainstreaming tools in the Disinfolklore analytical method. But I just bring this up in the context of looking at particular elements in stories that we wouldn’t consider to be a character, because it doesn’t seem to be a person. And in this case, I’m looking at the Sberbank report, and some of you will remember this from last week, as one of the examples. A character is born So on the 25th of August, a Telegram outfit styling itself as Black Mirror published screenshots of a Russian language analytical note. Eight scenarios for the end of the war, dated April 2026, probabilities summing to a suspiciously tidy 100%. Every page watermarked with the Telegram channel’s own domain. The hackers claim the note was extracted from the correspondence of German Gref, chairman of Sberbank, with an unnamed interlocutor. Meduza - and some of you will know I am suspicious of Meduza - Meduza covered it the same day, and credit where it’s due, it said the quiet parts plainly. The screenshot’s authenticity is unconfirmed. But then went on to do a whole article about it. So the disclaimer is there, of course. And stated also that the note’s author is unknown. The bank had not commented, Meduza commented, and at the bottom of the article, Meduza appended an update. A financial market source suggested the text smelled of a chatbot, and an AI detection service scored the English version at 83% machine generated. But read the headline noun. Sberbank’s April document. Within four days, the Ukrainian aggregators had shortened it further. Hackers leak Sberbank’s note. Hackers crack Sberbank chief’s correspondence. And by the weekend, the thing arrived on my own desk already wearing its new name. The Sberbank Report. That, listeners, is a baptism. It’s a naming. It’s a naming of energy. And in this, the Disinfolklore analytical method, a troll is any emotion-moving activity of body, speech and mind. And christening an anonymous PDF with the name of Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, is a troll of the first order, because the emotion it moves is trust. I know Ming may laugh at that. The trust at the Sberbank. But I think you know what I mean. And that naming is an enlistment of the listeners. So here’s the detail I focused on. The name outran the legend on day one. And this is something we see a lot, actually. So after four days passed, folklorists know that we won’t even remember, you know, the original qualifications in the articles. And if we want to be cynical, we would say that Meduza is well aware of this. So even the hackers never claimed Sberbank wrote it. Their claim was that the file turned up in Gref’s correspondence with a person they cannot or will not identify. That is provenance as location, not authorship. An inbox is a place PDFs pass through. The maximal true version of this story, a rich man once received an email with this attached, establishes absolutely nothing at all. Every ounce of the document’s new authority was manufactured in the retelling. Tool 3: look for the Mana in the meme Tool 3 tells us not to argue with the source. So we’re not like the European Union’s method, where you look at the behaviour, you painstakingly try and trace it back to Russia. Because in the Disinfolklore analytical method, we’re dealing with matters at great scale, and we don’t really have time to do that kind of stuff. And the stakes are a bit less for us on our timeline for proving provenance. But also mainly because it doesn’t matter if the provenance. Most of us can intuitively know now, and listening to Ming or Mockers or Wendy on any particular episode on Volya will know if things are Russian, basically, because it’s obvious to us. We’re intuitively looking for the Mana in the meme. We don’t believe their denials. We’ve seen the pattern before, and we remember the pattern from before. So we’re not like a newspaper article that seems to forget things one day to the next. And looking for the Mana in the meme tells us not to argue with the source. So we’re not concerned so much with the source itself. We want to read what is immanent. I-M-M-A-N-E-N-T. What is the Mana? What is immanent in the artefact itself? So let’s have a look at it. Let’s read. So the note’s Mana, the note’s energy, is about clock pressure. Time works for Russia. The note says so in nearly those words, four separate times. Every month of delay is priced as a Russian asset and a Ukrainian cost. Its agency grammar is just as legible. Ukraine, it states outright, is not an independent player but an object. So that energy is in there. The puppet. The puppet Mana, rather, whose payoffs are set by others. So this idea that Ukraine is just a proxy for the US or for France or whoever. And that is the energy in a lot of what the note is. Its probability mass tells the same story. The percentages pretend to complicate. Add the scenarios and Russia retains occupied territory in roughly 88 of 100 of the futures, while Ukraine’s 1991 borders are awarded two. So that’s 88 out of two. Its precedents are a matched set, which many of us in this space since February 2022 have seen. Cyprus is invoked four times, Taiwan, Korea. Finland’s amputation is rebranded as a success story. And every analogy, a partition that held, not one that reversed in the victim’s favour. So the Mana there is the support of Russia’s position inside this supposed note. So the energy inside the artefact says, partition is a sober centre. Patience belongs to Moscow. Urgency belongs to you. Now say the name again, the Sberbank Report. It promises the opposite Mana entirely. The system’s cleverest bank, privately despairing of the war, candour smuggled out of the citadel. The name says confession, but the energy says instruction. So I came across this because I saw the headline and I thought, that’s a bit rum. I don’t really get that. So that’s why I went to the memo itself. And the headlines we were seeing, the naming of it, did not match the energy when I looked into it in detail. And I’ve just detailed some of that energy now. The name fails its own audit So the name fails its own audit. Four tells, briefly, for those who like their scepticism itemised. The note cites Sberbank in the third person, once, in parentheses, as one of the outside forecasters of the key rate, next to a mid-tier retail broker. Institutions do not footnote themselves as external sources. Outsiders compiling public forecasts do. The document wears none of the furniture a bank product cannot appear without. No author, no addressee, no classification, no disclaimer. It explains Nash equilibria and prospect theory at textbook level, in a paper supposedly orbiting a CEO who has spent a decade putting Kahneman on Sberbank’s own stages. And I’ve spoken about Kahneman before, and his system one and system two model, as well as all his great work on how our choices are determined by who sets the decision frameworks. And it dates Ukraine’s Flamingo missile combat debut to February 2025, months before that weapon existed. An error no editorial layer caught, because there was no editorial layer. One more, because it matters for the genre. The note’s most probable scena

  6. Aug 27

    Podcast | Volya’s Nest and Counter Disinformation System Development in Ukraine

    Principles of Infolklore, Ep 2: Volya’s Nest The Most Valuable Position in the Room Two hours and forty minutes into my own show, this past February. Decoding Disinfolklore on Volya Radio, the Wednesday slot this station gives me. Ioana, who co-hosts the news shows with Will, had been put to work. She had been asked for her articles, and she delivered: “I posted the links to, I believe, seven of my articles in the commentaries.” The commentaries. The comments. Not the nest. And then she said why: “Let’s keep the nest on Ukraine. So I’m quite okay if people look in the comments, they will see that.” For anyone new here, the nest is the pinned stack at the top of a live room on X, where the receipts go. A host reads a story out, finishes with it, and posts the source above the room, so anyone can retrace the segment, item by item. And what Ioana did that night is the nest’s constitution, spoken in one breath. Her seven articles went into the comments. The nest is kept for Ukraine’s evidence. The most valuable position in the Volya room is reserved, and not for the people who run the room. I have now counted the nest through every broadcast this station has ever made. It is spoken of 8,558 times, across 1,060 of the 1,121 episodes in the archive. That is nineteen broadcasts in every twenty. Not a feature. A constitution. The Name Came First This series flies under a banner, and you have seen it, because it rides at the foot of every post this series ships in. Let me define Infolklore for you. Infolklore is the active, conscious, Code-observant deployment of folklore-like archetypes. When I say Code-observant, I mean it observes the Code of Positive Trolls, which, as many of you know, I created in February 2020 and trademarked at the European Union Intellectual Property Office. The Code of Positive Trolls is six criteria: generosity, ethical discipline (or Right), patience, joyous perseverance (or Mana), focus and insight. Any meme, any lexical unit which I categorise as Infolklore, or which can be categorised as Infolklore by a large language model or automatically, must observe all or most of those elements in the Code. Infolklore is a first-order practice. I have now gone through the Volya Radio archive. Three thousand one hundred and ninety-five hours of it. Twenty-six million words. And in it I found the most amazing reservoir of Infolklore that exists on this earth. This series, which I began last week, is looking at how I parsed that data set for Infolklore. You will see that in my last podcast. So Infolklore creation is a first-order creative practice. It is not just counter-Disinfolklore. That is where I was three years ago, when I created the portmanteau Disinfolklore to describe what I had witnessed in Russia-occupied Ukraine: stories which communicate a sense of meanness directly into our inner minds, using archetypes. That is Disinfolklore, and it is all around us. There is no shortage of it. I would not have bothered to create the creative practice of Infolklore if Disinfolklore were not affecting our world in so many different ways, whether it comes from Russia or America or Brexit England. Disinfolklore is everywhere we look. It is pickling us in its nonsense and in its manipulations. So we not only need to learn how to identify it and understand how it works, which is part of my mission. We also need a means of countering it, in the sense of creating a world in which we are pickled in Infolklore instead. Infolklore is a first-order creative practice. Making the true stories, not just refuting the false ones. Those words were written before I had ever read a Volya transcript. And when they were written, the practice of creating Infolklore had exactly one validated specimen anywhere on earth: the Battle of Kyiv study I spoke about in the last episode. If you look back at my fourth-anniversary podcast for Volya, you will find it on Disinfolklore.net, where I post my podcasts every week. I also post weekly podcasts on PowerofMana.net, which is the Finding Manuland Atlas side of my work, the linguistics side. You cannot understand Russian disinformation, or any form of disinformation, without looking into the linguistics that underpins it. Russian disinfolklorists learn linguistics. In fact, linguistics graduates in Russian universities study Disinfolklore. They study propaganda, what they call combat propaganda, as part of their course. And the reason they do it is the reason you must too, if you wish to understand, underpin and create a system that will help us interpret and create an Infolklore-saturated universe instead of a Disinfolklore-saturated one. That is why you must study it, and that is Finding Manuland at PowerofMana.net. You can subscribe to my work there, at Disinfolklore.net and at DecodingTrolls.net. My main site is Disinfolklore.eu. So here is this episode’s claim. While the name Infolklore sat waiting for specimens, this station built the practice’s operating system. The working rules everything else runs on. The evidence shelf, the source grading, the wish filing, the correction ceremony. You, on Volya Radio, built all of it without the name. Here is the evidence. First, an update on the reading. In episode one I gave you the scale. When I described you to yourselves in those first episodes, the close reading behind them had covered many of your shows. Now all of the shows are part of the analysis. What Are They Trying to Tell Me Now the toolkit proper. Where would you send a truth-seeking audience for evidence? These Volya shows send it straight into the aggressor’s own channels, and they teach the frame for reading what it finds there. Here is This Week in Absurdistan, one of the station’s long-running news marathons, on Rosstat, the Russian state’s own statistics agency: “We never look at it from the perspective of this is the unvarnished truth from Russia. We look at it in the perspective of what are they publishing here and what are they trying to tell me? What kind of story are they trying to tell me?” What are they trying to tell me. I consider people like Mockers much more expert than people like Mark Galeotti, who is pulled in to talk about Russia all the time but who knows nothing about Ukraine, or indeed Russia, in the way that Mockers does. So on Volya we are asking what are they trying to tell us. That is source criticism, the discipline scholars take degrees in, taught as a morning reflex, and aimed at enemy numbers as well as enemy words. And when the enemy admits a terrible thing, the admission becomes a floor. Here is World at War, the strand where the war’s hardest numbers get read, on the abduction of Ukraine’s children: “These are the 100% provable cases with data, that the Russians themselves say 700,000 plus children and women have been abducted to Russia.” And in the same breath: “Even the UN, which has lowballed these numbers, admits that that is extremely low.” That was from a December 2024 episode. Seven hundred thousand, from the abductor’s own mouth. Many of us will remember the day that was publicised. I have the receipts. I have the screenshots, as probably do most of us who listen to Volya regularly. Our phones are full of screenshots of the evidence, of the receipts. The one number the Russists cannot dispute becomes the floor under the charge. The Russists’ confession is the minimum, and the truth sits above it. And it is almost unbelievable to people who have not been paying attention, as many of us who try to explain these matters to people in our real lives find continually. Nobody here pretends this reading is a grim duty. On the morning of Operation Spiderweb itself, the day Ukrainian drones smuggled deep inside Russia burned the bombers on their own airfields, someone in the Volya room said “the biggest pleasure at the moment is also reading Russian Telegram channel.” That was June 2025. Verification on this station is not a defensive crouch. It is a craft, practised with visible enjoyment, on the enemy’s own material. Then the discount turns around and comes home, which is the part that would astonish any propaganda ministry on earth. Here is Ukraine News and russia’s Hybrid War, a show whose own title spells russia with a small r, on our side’s frontline news: “For the last 12 months, the OPSEC, the operational security, when it comes to the front lines in Ukraine, has improved so much that 90% of what we hear from the front lines, it’s only something that the Ukrainian military wants us to hear, or it’s a Russian narrative. So everything that comes from the front lines, we have to take it with a grain of salt.” This is especially relevant at the moment. We have recently had the final announcement, after six months of great, well-kept OPSEC, of Ukrainian advances, and there are now discussions about whether new advances are about to be announced. All of us repeat, again and again, that we would rather not know these things until they are properly confirmed. OPSEC is operational security, the discipline of telling the enemy nothing useful. Grain of salt, aimed at our own side’s good news, because good security means curated news. Everything gets graded here on Volya. Friendly sources included. And in the same segment, the tool I find most elegant: enemy silence used as the debunk. A panic was running that day about a Russian breakthrough, and here is how it was closed: “On Russian telegram there was no party there was no elation if that was a legit breakthrough of the front lines you know the Russians are going to go crazy with it but and they did not which told me that you know it’s not as bad as people trying to pan it out to be” That is the 12th of August 2025. No party on the enemy’s channels, therefore no breakthrough. The absence of celebration, read as evidence. The mirror of the admission floor: what the enemy cannot help boasting about, and what he fails

  7. Aug 20

    Podcast | What is Infolklore?

    The Poison and the Antidote The poison was never hard to find. The poison finds you. Turn on anything Russian and it arrives by the tanker load, free of charge, around the clock. What took months to find was the other thing: the antidote. Here is what I published on the 22nd of July this year, in a Substack piece called It’s Amazing What Regular People Can Do. One challenge sits under everything: we are swimming in Disinfolklore. Infolklore is scarce. Two coined words in that quote. Disinfolklore is my name for folklore-like information told with meanness — stories built to bend our moods and our intentions, our attitudes and emotions. Infolklore is the positive kind: true stories, told with generosity, told by someone with real stakes in a real problem. The first kind, Disinfolklore, is an ocean, and we all swim in it every day, and it’s what motivates all my work. Because we swim in this ocean, I decided to try and work out what this ocean consists of. The second kind turned out to be scarce, almost to vanishing. This episode and this mini-series is the story of the search for it — the search for Infolklore. Months and months and months of failure. The best-loved books in the English language going into a machine, one after another, and coming back stamped: no. Automating Disinfolklore And for those who haven’t been listening: what I’ve been working on since January is actualising my long-held plan, which is to automate Disinfolklore detection — and, in our detection, to create an automatic engine that will enable us, in times to come, to plug in a module the way today we may surf the web or look at ChatGPT. In the future we will have cognitive modules. And what I’m trying to build is for the… So that when we are confronted with the vast amounts of information, and information flows that continue to increase, we will have a means of interpreting it really quickly — as quickly as we really need to. And so I call that cryptotypic engineering, or Automating Disinfolklore. So, my attempts to build this machine. I started off with the 10,000 propaganda items that I collected and hand-coded in Luhansk, which I talk about a lot, back in 2015. And so for much of the year I’ve been teaching a machine to tell the two kinds apart. Where the search ended was really not in any library on earth. And I went through so many texts and types of narrative, from EUvsDisinfo to war college reports to all kinds of different narrative forms. And the search ended, really, in this room, with Volia Radio. And it ended with you. With us. And this whole mini-series is our own practice — but I’m just a bit part in this, with just this short time once a week. The whole series is Volia’s own practice, read back to us as principles. And this first episode is how I came to be reading the Volia Radio transcripts. Great thanks to all at Volya Radio for their great support of my work over the years! Teaching a Machine the Two Kinds So for much of this year I have been teaching a machine to tell the two kinds apart: Disinfolklore, Infolklore and neutral. A frontier model — one of the big AI systems, the kind that can read a whole archive before breakfast. And you teach it by feeding it specimens. What I’m doing is creating training pairs for a locally held large language model. Well — not, I mean, it’s locally held, but it’s held in a data centre somewhere; but it’s proprietary. And here is the real Disinfolklore, and you learn its smell — which I first scented when I was in Russia-occupied Luhansk in 2015 — and real Infolklore, teaching the computer to learn the smell of it, the scent. And half of the job has been relatively easy, in the sense that I’ve managed to gather together a corpus of hundreds of millions of artefacts in Ukrainian, Russian, Chinese: hundreds of millions in each of these languages, and in Hindi, in Dravidian languages, in MAGA language. So that gathering together, that corpus, was relatively easy — the easy half. The graph tells us something about the world we live in, which won’t be a surprise to any of us on Volia Radio, but it also tells us about my motivation in all of this work, which is to try and do something active about it. And I’ve been on this task in various forms since 2015, as I gradually worked out what was going on. And here is how I described the task to you last month. Finding real Disinfolklore to train on is easy — everything we hear from Strelkov will do. We’re going to kill you all. Basically. Finding clean Infolklore turned out to be the hard part. I’ve spent months feeding every kind of text to the frontier model I work with. Sherlock Holmes; even — maybe Ming will appreciate this — P.G. Wodehouse. None of it passes muster. The Reject Pile Wodehouse had company in the reject pile. Sherlock Holmes went in, failed. War college reports went in, failed. The Battle for Kiev study — which I’ll get to in my Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut report — towards the end, the Battle for Kiev study done by John Spencer, a friend of the channel, did go in. And that was really my only piece of archetypal Infolklore: a serious piece of military analysis, by serious people, about the defence of the capital. But what I’m trying to do is build a system that will recognise the archetypal content in any sized lexical unit. And so it needs to be really flexible, and needs to be able to be trained on lexical units which aren’t all in the same format. So that particular war college report gave me a lot of hope — but then I tried others, and it just didn’t work. The EUvsDisinfo stuff didn’t really work. And for the same reason that an academic from the information school in Melbourne found that fact-checking doesn’t work: because it’s a different narrative form. You have to counter magic with magic. So if Disinfolklore manages to meld itself into our minds and alter our intentions and our moods, our attitudes and our motivations, through a means that most of us don’t really understand or can’t detect in real time, then Infolklore — which is a creative practice rather than a countering practice — has to do the same thing. And fact-checking just doesn’t do it. So there’s a lot of value in EUvsDisinfo’s work; it’s the format it presents. And so my own witness writing went in. It failed too. And it failed in its own particular way. The person who named the framework — me — cannot be its neutral witness. And so, I built the instrument; I cannot also be the specimen that calibrates it. There I sat, month after month: a machine hungry for the positive kind, and a whole civilisation of shelves unable to feed it. Conan Doyle could not feed it. The finest comic novelist in the English language, P.G. Wodehouse, could not feed it. The war colleges of two continents could not feed it. And I could not feed it myself. The Wodehouse Failure The Wodehouse failure deserves its own telling. And for those who aren’t familiar with P.G. Wodehouse, he wrote about a hundred — 110 — about the relationship between Jeeves and Wooster: a slave owner, or rather a gentleman, and his servant. And it came closest of anything. And the way it fell short taught me, really, what Infolklore actually is, in some respects. On the 19th of May I proposed to the frontier model the Jeeves and Wooster series as a training corpus for the positive kind, for Infolklore. I was confident that if any books in the English language were going to pass, it would be these sunlit, kindly, perfect books. And the adjudication that came back was, on its face, glowing. Jeeves is archetypally saturated: he’s the trickster servant, the clever slave of Roman new comedy, a figure the stage has carried for more than 2,000 years, still quietly running his master’s life. Bertie Wooster is the holy fool, the indulged innocent, whom the plot punishes and protects in equal measure. When I say archetypally saturated, I mean the stories are full of the old shapes — characters folklore has kept alive for millennia because they do something for us. And on the Code of Positive Trolls, Wodehouse passes everything: generous on every page, patient, non-coercive. Nobody in those books is ever mean to anybody. Temperamentally, Wodehouse is the exact opposite of Disinfolklore. Yet still, it had to be turned away. And I felt this refusal personally. Those books have been friends of mine for decades. I turn to them in times of stress and difficulty because they’re so light, they’re so easy to read, they’re so pleasant, they’re so joyful. But the machine had a reason, and the reason was right. One leg was missing: real stakes. Nothing in Wodehouse refers to a real problem in the real world. Nobody in the Drones Club is under fire. Aunt Agatha, terror that she is, never shelled a city. The stories are true to human nature, and true to nothing that is actually happening to anyone in the real world. That near miss sharpened the definition. And here it is, the finding that the whole season, the whole search, paid for. Infolklore must be true. It must be soaked in the old story shapes. And it must be told by someone with real stakes in a real problem. All three legs, no exceptions — not even for Jeeves. Lexical Units, and the Twelve Tools Those of you who are interested in the Disinfolklore analytical method can look at disinfolklore.eu, my main site. The twelve tools, the twelve-tool way, goes into detail there on each of the different elements in the Disinfolklore analytical method. And that is essentially what I’m looking for in lexical units. When I say lexical unit, I mean a sentence, a word, of any size — and it could be a 20,000-page article, or a one-page article. What I’m building must work, must be sensitive enough to work on every kind of lexical unit, and indeed on images themselves. So that’s the goal I’ve set myself, and it may take me years. The Code of Positive T

  8. Aug 6

    Podcast | The Plight of the Sorcerers: Putler and the Chef, Zelensky and Fedorov; and

    Putin’s Chef Problem: The Plight of the Sorcerer So on the 26th of May 2023, I published a piece called Putin’s Chef Problem, the plight of the sorcerer. And I posed the question: how can Sorcerer Putin survive if he passes the reins to the Chef, the creature he trained and empowered? Yet how can Sorcerer Putin survive if he doesn’t stand aside to enable his sorcerer’s apprentice to take over? This is the plight of the sorcerer, and it’s featured in Indo-European stories for millennia. And since early March 2022, Putler’s magical, manipulative powers have been noticeably on the wane. Nothing has gone right for him — even for those who dutifully surrendered to his bespelling needs. I first noted how President Zelensky’s magical powers to curse, outwit and humiliate the sorcerer Putin were growing, in proportion to Putler’s loss of power, by the end of March 2022. And as I wrote then, on the 23rd of May 2023: until recently I had ignored Putler’s apprentice, the Chef, who is now at the height of his powers. Every day since 2012, the Chef’s trolling Disinfolklore has featured across global media. His Disinfolklore even got Trump and Brexit voted in. Only now, instead of the Chef’s Disinfolklore being the concealed trolling output of his St Petersburg Disinfolklore war-magic production factories — the Internet Research Agency — the Chef today is the star of the show himself. Why, and how, has this happened? The answer is simple. So I wrote, on May 26th, or 23rd, 2023: Putin’s Rasputin, this turbulent priest of the St Petersburg underground, is ready to take over the chariot. These days the magician apprentice doesn’t even disguise himself, or his ambition. Just an iPhone and grainy footage, and his every muttered thought — and trolling grandfather glasses — is front-page news across the earth. The Chef Saucerer has sacrificed 100,000 Ukrainians’ lives since 2016. And like every Indo-European monarch for millennia, he boasts of the human sacrifices he’s made. From these sacrifices his power and authority emanates. The magician Chef has vaporised entire cities in central Europe — Popasna, Bakhmut, and the rest. Seventy-five thousand Ruschists have died at his command in six months of Bakhmut. And before this, his Nazi-worshipping soldiers, in his Nazi-branded Wagner Group, had murdered hundreds of thousands of Syrians. Yet the Chef’s power as the Apprentice Magus is such that the New York Times and the rest breathlessly quote, and report verbatim as truth, his every bespelling utterance — like they did before with the butcher Putin of Grozny. Then, now, they do with the Chef. Unknowingly, Western leaders and opinion formers promote the Chef, as before they promoted his sorcerer master, Putin. Every Western website reference eulogising the butcher of Bakhmut, with his trolling grandpa glasses, is echoed back into Ruschist information spaces as evidence that the West respects the Chef and will accept him as the new sorcerer monarch. The Chef’s Internet Research Agency bespelled America and England. That was his time as Putler’s apprentice. Now the sorcerer master, Putler, who created him, cannot destroy the Chef without destroying himself. Nor can Putler promote the Chef while being certain that, once promoted, the Chef won’t destroy Putler. That is the plight of the sorcerer. So: the Chef Saucerer against the Chief Sorcerer. Why I Bring This Up: Two Tellings of One Story So why do I bring this up? Two summers ago I wrote about Putler’s plight, and it’s the oldest story we have about power changing hands, and Putler was living out its darkest version. Now, in the past few weeks, Volodymyr Zelensky has stepped into the same story. He’s living out the bright one. The two tellings sit at opposite poles of a single tale that is 6,000 years old, and watching them side by side tells us almost everything about the difference between the two countries. Georges Dumézil. A master holds a power, and an apprentice grows into that power. One day the apprentice is ready to make his own way, and the master still needs him. How do the two part without one destroying the other? That is the whole plight, in one question. The young one always rises — that was never in doubt. The only question the story ever asks is whether the rising costs a life. The Mahabharata gives the good answer, and it’s worth holding in mind. The demons free the apprentice from the master’s belly, and they do it without killing the master. Both men honour the bargain. Nobody dies. The power moves, and the two who carried it are both still standing when it settles. That is the rare ending. The plight is dangerous precisely because that ending is rare. The Dark Telling: Putler and the Chef Look first at the dark telling, because you already know it. Putler was the chief sorcerer. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Chef, was his apprentice — the alchemist who turned mercenaries and African gold into power the master could use. By the summer of 2023 the apprentice was ready, and the master would not let him. Prigozhin forced the question the crude way, with a mutiny: the march on Rostov, a column pointed at Moscow, and for one evening the master submitted to the apprentice in front of the whole world. Then the plight resolved the way it resolves when there is no honour in the room. Two months later, Prigozhin’s plane fell out of the sky — allegedly. The master kept his power by destroying the apprentice. That is what the passing of power looks like when a society is sick at the top: paranoia in the palace, blood on the runway. It is the serpent’s answer to the question. This story offers a far better answer, too. The Bright Telling: Zelensky and Fedorov Now the Ukrainian side, and the same story turned to the light. Mykhailo Fedorov — whom I never forget — comes from Vasylivka, which is right on the contact line in Zaporizhzhia. He has stood at President Zelensky’s side for seven years. He built Diia, and the state that fits into a phone. He built the Army of Drones, and he’s the face of the modern, un-Soviet way of fighting this war. Six months ago President Zelensky moved him to defence, and he moved him there to do a hard thing, which was to break the paralysis with the old command. On the 15th of July, President Zelensky dismissed him. The official reason was a cabinet reshuffle. The real reason was a fight that had frozen the top of the war effort, between Fedorov and the commander-in-chief, the last powerful man of the Soviet military generation. And here the ancient story shows its shape, because the people did not accept the dismissal. Crowds filled the squares, three generations deep. Fedorov’s trust rating leapt from 35 to 65 per cent in a single week, and 72 per cent of Ukrainians said the dismissal was wrong. Within days, President Zelensky dismissed Syrskyi instead. Well — the crowds had their scalp. They stayed in the squares anyway, and they remain in the squares, although I look forward to hearing an update from Lexicon, still calling for the young man to be given his seat back. Magister and Minister: The MN Vocabulary of Rule Read that through the old frame, and every piece falls into place. Zelensky is the Magus I have been archetyping him assince the end of March 2022 — the magister, the master. In Dumézil’s map of our societies, the first function is the one who holds the magic and the law of rule. And the ministers — the magister, minister — the ministers serve directly under it. That’s hardwired into our language and into our governance for 6,000 years, since this idea of organising community was formed in Mykhailivka, which is the village about 20 kilometres south of where Mykhailo Fedorov grew up, and the place where Alexey Nikitin’s paper, published in Nature on the 5th of February 2025, put beyond all reasonable doubt the origins of the Yamna, from whom all living Indo-European languages emanate — in that community, on the Dnipro. The words themselves carry the story: magus, magister, minister, monarch, mandate. The whole vocabulary of who may rule carries the MN sound, because that is the sound our language family has carried its idea of sovereignty on since before writing. Fedorov is a minister under the magister. That is not a clever overlay on the news; it’s the story’s own word for where he stands. Fedorov is also the apprentice, and his seat is the warrior’s seat: defence is the strong right arm every sovereign needs and every sovereign fears. He is ready. He is trusted. He carries a power the master cannot make for himself. That is the apprentice of the plight, exactly. The Demons Whispering And the demons are whispering. On the Ruschist side I named them once as the men of the Ozero Cooperative, the grey figures around the throne. On the Ukrainian side they are the wily remnant of the Soviet-era power bloc — and every adviser who leans to the master’s ear to say the young man is too popular; that a minister the people love is not a minister but an heir; that the one who broke the old command will one day break you. And I remind you of Veronica, who runs under the callsign Luna, and whose father was an Opposition Bloc councillor and now, it is reported, serves the occupation administration. Veronica, whom Yermak consulted over the past few years on every major appointment in government, supposedly because he believes in her authority, her capacity as a medium — though some of us might be quite sceptical about a lawyer doing that, and perhaps might suggest, or suspect, there’s a certain amount of tradecraft about it. We’ve now seen the texts between Yermak and Veronica from after Yermak was defenestrated, metaphorically speaking, at the end of the year. She advised him to speak to our friend, President Zelensky, and suggest to President Zelensky that Fedorov, if he takes Yermak’s seat in the presidential administration

    Podcast | The Plight of the Sorcerers: Putler and the Chef, Zelensky and Fedorov; and
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About

Decoding Trolls's "Battling Archetypes" podcast applies the Twelve Tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method (see Disinfolklore.eu) to the folklore-like structures hiding inside modern propaganda, memes, and geopolitics. Each episode decodes how Russia, MAGA, and other Disinfolklorists archetype reality. Infolklore, by contrast, is a first-order creative practice: the active, conscious, Code of Positive Trolls-observant deployment of folklore-like archetypes in the service of generosity, right, patience, creative Mana, focus, and insight. This channel helps us learn to see the immanence of Infolklore and Disinfolklore in our information streams. www.disinfolklore.net

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