Swifty Decoding Interview

Decoding interviewed by Ronan Swift.

Hello everybody, I'm Ronan Swifty and this morning I'm going to be talking to At Decoding Trolls. Hi, I'm Decoding Trolls. Great to be with you. Nice to meet you, Ronan. Thanks for stepping into my podcast arena. I want to get onto the name because I know it's a project of yours, Decoding Trolls.

I can understand the decoding bit, I think. But the troll side of it for me that was always trolling was something that I just associate with people being nasty to other people online. What is it that you understand by troll and trolling and is there more to it than what I originally thought?

I see trolling as it's about movement. And my definition of trolling is emotion, moving activity of body, speech, and mind. And most conceptions of trolling focus only on the medium like the internet. And so we focus on a particular form of communication in a particular arena. I researched many different aspects of trolling through academia, myself participating in groups online, and that led me to look into the linguistic root of trolling, which in fact led me into folklore, which is the origin of the metaphor of trolls. And eventually I realized that actually trolling on the internet is merely one form of communication.

And if we are going to understand how trolling on the internet works, then it's a good idea to look at how we troll each other in real life as well. And so that led to me to this conception that trolling is any form of communication which moves the emotions of another person.

And then I realized actually sometimes I'm trolling myself internally. And so this is partly how I arrived at the definition of trolling is any emotion moving activity of body speech and mind and so we can fit how our any sentient being trolls us our cat for instance wants some food and or they're running around our legs as we're coming in with lots of shopping and there's lots of children around and we we feel a bit annoyed or great joy, and that that feeling of emotion is what's essential to trolling, whether it's online or in real life. And it can be positive or negative. It doesn't have to be negative?

Absolutely, yeah. So once you see trolling as any emotion-moving activity of body, speech and mind, then we need a way to determine the quality of the troll to ascertain, is it positive, neutral, and the clue there is in the trial, neutral, no movement, or negative.

And so that led me on a hunt for a way of determining the quality of particular, I call them, I mean, informational units or memes, where meme can be isn't isn't a cartoon online it's any informational unit whether it's a sound or a word or a whole essay for instance well that's probably a bad example and so then once you see it as every form of communication you need you need a way of thinking okay because we get trolled positively all the time by our lover our romantic partner uh will um will have particular routines and we'll have particularly routine nice routines with our pets or our lovers or our wives or our husbands or our children which bring us great joy and what we're doing is purposefully moving their emotions and that that's positive And so I was hunting for a way of determining what's positive and negative and neutral. And that's how I arrived at what I call the code of positive trolls. I see.

So you've got a code, a checklist of sorts to determine that positive or negative or neutral. And that's the decoding part of the title.

Checklist is a great idea. And I actually hadn't made that link before. The code of positive trolls and decoding. Back in my past, I trained as a lawyer. So I was looking for a code. in terms of a law code criteria that that say judges use in cases to say to try and you know they often have these four limb tests to see whether you have the right to to do something without criminal liability for instance but I recognize that that now that the code is actually in the decoding as well that's really cool I got it from I was hunting around for this code and I found it actually in Tibetan Buddhism in and the Dalai Lama's form of Buddhism which is summed up into six by six criteria And if you perfect each of these six criteria, then in Buddhism, according to Buddhists, you will achieve enlightenment. Obviously, we're not looking for enlightenment when we're online or dealing with a really annoying situation and we're trying to resist making it worse by trolling the emotions of the person we're dealing with. But we are looking for codes which are proven, which have worked, and billions of Buddhists have run their life to a more successful or less successful extent according to these six criteria that I then rebranded as the code of positive trolls. And the idea is that you have this algorithm, these six criteria that you intuit, you learn them very quickly. And because billions of Buddhists have used this, what they call the six perfections, it's clear that humans can do this.

And if you proof any communication that's emanating from you, according to these six criteria, then you should be, if not achieving enlightenment, you should avoid or you have a chance of avoiding. trolling others in negative ways, in ways which you don't want to do, but equally when you're receiving communications from people, if you can run the sensory inputs, so what I call, I talk about having a troll radar. So we have this idea that we're now proofing communications as they're moving into our minds according to these six criteria. And if they contravene any of these six criteria, then we run a new battery of tests.

So that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to ensure that we don't get manipulated, our energy doesn't get manipulated negatively by others, and we're trying to avoid ourselves accidentally negatively manipulating others and so I use these six criteria to decode trolls my own trolls outgoing and incoming trolls as well and I've been using this for three years now I think the listeners are on tenterhooks as regards

what this code of six is because it's been mentioned a lot so Is it helpful just to list them all?

Totally. So, generosity, patience, ethical discipline, right, is the same as ethical discipline, patience, energy, manas, mana, what I call mana, energy, focus, and insight. So six of them. So generosity, so is the message you are communicating to someone else an act of generosity? equally is the message you're receiving from someone else.

Say it's a post about migration and they're saying, you know, our house is full, we can't take any more migrants, they're stealing our jobs, they're eating our dogs. That is not generous. So sometimes trolls fail that. The second one is right, ethical. discipline. It's always wrong to breach the laws of the land, international law, and this set of ethics are, in the context say of migration, set by the Refugee Convention, which every most countries in humanity have signed which means that if you have a well-founded fear of persecution you have the right to seek asylum so this idea of illegal migrants illegal asylum seekers not only is that not generous but it's a breach of the law and it's not right in that sense patience you want to communicate that you are yourself patient and obviously Most of us fail on this front a million times a day. So it's an aspiration. But if you see in the message, some of us in work will have done these courses on how to avoid being trolled or phished online. And they'll always say one of the... one of the triggers for this is is someone putting you in a pressure cooker situation are they saying you have to use five seconds to press this button uh respond to this email immediately otherwise your bank accounts will be uh so that so this is where the patience element comes in that when you're receiving these trolls if they're putting you in a patient's thing So a political campaign like Donald's campaign will say, vote for me to save America. And you've got five days to save America.

And sometimes, again, you will need to react quickly. So this is why I say it's just... if it contravenes, if the incoming troll or your outgoing troll contravenes this patient's criterion, then you should run another battery of tests to make sure, okay, is this, is someone trying to phish my email or my bank accounts?

And what I mean by the The fourth criterion, which is energy or mana, or another way of putting it is joyous perseverance. But the mana is basically you're looking for the energy in the meme. So the energy that you are communicating to other people and that is in the meme that they're communicating to you, simply by looking for what's imminent in it, and trying to come to a decision about what it is. We've all been in herd situations, maybe at a football game or a concert, where we got lost in the crowd and we are receiving the emotions of others and we're transmitting them and we become panicked, for instance, in cases of where there's a fire or something like that. So by the fourth criterion, what I mean is look for the energy that you are communicating onward and make sure that you're consciously aware of what it is and that the energy that you're communicating is is how you want to communicate.

I mean, a lot of people, a lot of us have a problem saying no. And sometimes we try to communicate this, we communicate this in a bad way. And so you're looking for the manner in the meme. You're looking for the manner that you're communicating outwards and which others are communicating to you.

And if it's bad energy, then that will fail the code of positive trolls. The fifth criterion is focus. So in order to do this, you need to be focused. You need to be focused on your outgoing communications and your incoming communications. And insight. Is it insightful? So we all enjoy a joke and things which don't matter.

But we should look into, li