Disinfolklore (5)
Origins of Trolling, Trolls and Troll (a) - Disinfolklore is a new analytical method to parse disinformation.
Russian Disinfolklore, Brexit Disinfolklore and Trump Disinfolklore can be better illuminated if you have a theory of trolls, and trolling to draw on. I first recognised Russian Disinfolklore in eastern Ukraine at Stanitsia Luhanska bridge - a real world manifestation of the situation in the source of the most successful troll tale in contemporary American culture:
Three Billy-Goats Gruff
A Norwegian folk tale collected by Asbjørnsen and Moe. Three goats set off for a pasture. They have to cross a bridge, beneath which lives a troll. Their feet go ‘Trip, trap! trip, trap!’ and the troll calls out: ‘Who’s that tripping over my bridge?’ The youngest goat tells the troll not to eat him, but to wait for the next goat, who is fatter. The second goat says the same, and when the third goat crosses the bridge it announces: ‘It is I! The Big Billy-Goat Gruff!’ It kills the troll.
Sir George Dasent, who translated the story into English in his Popular Tales from the Norse (1859), pointed out that the goat was sacred to the Norse god Thor and drew his chariot; Thor was a great foe of all trolls.
I noticed that artillery duels on that bridge had the effect of trolling the emotions of the Russian occupiers in Luhansk, as well as the Ukrainian defenders (and of course me!). Some nights in the summer of 2016 I documented thousands of what we then characterised euphemistically as “ceasefire violations” but which I now understand as simple trolls. Sure, a mortar or sniper bullet expertly targeted across the Donets River seems different to the trolling activity of someone using a Tweet or radio advertisement as bait to provoke an emotional reaction in someone else. Yet, I noticed Family Resemblance between these emotion-moving activities in different realms, whether in commercial advertising, geopolitics, a war-zone, on the Internet, in two people courting one another, or even in your pet cat trying to provoke you into feeding it.
I would like to anchor this provisional meaning of troll, trolls and trolling in your mind. You do not need to accept it as true. Just keep it in mind as a common denominator meaning for the signifiers “troll,” “trolling,” and “trolls,” in all of their contemporary manifestations. In later episodes of Disinfolklore, I shall illuminate the steps backwards into millennia of Indo-European culture that enabled me to access this Common Denominator definition:
“Emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind.”
A troll can be a person, a personality, an activity or any activity of body, speech, or mind which contains an emotion-moving meme. A flick of an eyebrow, a wave of a finger or mere words can act as a troll. We accept that, say, a Toot or a Tweet as a linguistic artefact may itself be a troll. So there is what’s known in linguistics as semantic spread: the person writing the troll can be a troll! Everything (“any activity”) I recognise as trolling, troll, and trolls in Disinfolklore moves emotions and has the quality of an activity of body, speech or mind.
Sometimes a troll (meaning communication) is an aggregation of extremely complex elements. This is an example of such a highly complex troll. A former U.S. President has been accused of summoning a mob to prevent the orderly transition of power in the United States by this mere tweet. It is a key piece of evidence in his second impeachment. This Tweet (of December 18th 2020) was also a key piece of evidence justifying the House of Representatives’ January 6th Committee’s recommendation that President Trump should be investigated for criminal liability for the January 6th insurrection:
Here, in Disinfolklore I unpack, surface, elucidate and unlayer millennia of cultural artefacts we today label "troll” and "trolling" - wolves in sheep's clothing. In February 2020 I started to look at the use of the terms “troll” and “trolling” in contemporary culture. So I read through sixty-thousand media articles with those terms in the Dow Jones Factiva database of forty-four-thousand sources going back to the early 1970s.
I went down the Word Origins’ route, too. This brought me through the first written texts in Indian culture back across ancient Persia to eastern Ukraine where the first Indo-European language was spoken.
The third route that led me to this Common Denominator definition (“Emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind.”) was from contemporary culture. This led me from Trolls films and dolls, early northern Californian computer culture, through Scandinavian folklore, legal texts (Yeph! There’s even references to trolls in Icelandic legal texts!) and back through all the Indo-European literary and religious traditions. I’ll come back to these underpinnings of the common denominator definition of the phenomena described using the monikers “troll,” “trolls,” and “trolling” later. For now, let’s just try to keep this definition in mind as I deploy the term in Disinfolklore (see Disinfolklore (1) - (4) where I’ve already used the term).
The bridge in Stanitsia Luhanska was guarded by bridge trolls with whom I and thousands of others had to negotiate our passage each day. We were caught inside a war in which the Russian state had deployed never before seen linguistic weapons to conceal its occupation of Ukraine.
Russia, at all levels, uses emotionally resonant messaging wrapped up in Disinfolklore to promote its invasion of Ukraine, and to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty. Sometimes its purpose is to blacken Ukraine’s name - as if any behaviour would justify Russia’s genocide against Ukrainians. At other moments, Russian Disinfolklore is merely aimed at neutralising by-standers. The ‘Tr” element in “Trolling” is about movement - so provoking bystanders into no movement to protect Ukraine is just as important as mobilising forces inside and outside of Russia to attack Ukraine. Trolling is absolutely key to all of these communications strategies, and effective Disinfolklore trolls the emotions of those who encounter it.
Russia’s trolling Disinfolklore bamboozled and confuses those of us whose job it was to respond to the invasion on behalf of the international legal order. This is why I’ll come back again and again to the ideas signified by the words “trolls,” “trolling,” and “troll.” This is also why I am writing Disinfolklore: it’s easier to resist being trolled when you understand what is going on.
