Let’s look at how scanning informational units / memes for immanent characters might help us better interpret manipulation techniques, in real time. We look for the Mana in the Meme. So today, the character of the Mana we’re hunting out in the data entering our mindstreams is what I designate as a “character.”
In the Disinfolklore Analytical Method for parsing Disinformation, a ‘character’ can correspond to a real person, fictional beings, countries, fictional animals (Russia acrchetyping as a ‘bear’ is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and a perfect example of a perennial character in Disinfolklore), and in fact any existent.
I will talk about character and characters in Disinfolklore. But maybe I will start quickly with just a brief precis, as it were, of what I mean by Disinfolklore, because maybe not everyone here is aware of how I conceive of Disinfolklore. So in 2016, I detected my first Disinfolklore galaxy in Russia-occupied eastern Ukraine.
Now I detect multiple Disinfolklore galaxies. Make America Great Again, MAGA, Russian, Chinese Communist Party, and others are spreading through our biological and computational neural networks. like translucent triffids rewilding the Garden of Eden. So here we have a perfect example of the narrative form that I try to capture with my moniker, Disinfolklore.
So we have this idea of folkloric characters. So in this case, triffids, which are a fictional plant, people of a certain generation, who grew up on the island of Britain will remember the day of the Triffids. I think it’s a book from the 1930s. The Garden of Eden itself is a tale, is a folkloric reflex, obviously with a very deep and religious and important patina. Nevertheless it’s a folkloric story. The kind of story which if we read in folklore we would be quite quite accustomed to read such stories in folklore but because any Christians who are listening here will be aware it’s inside the Bible.
So it has this very serious tinge to it and of course the idea of Disinfolklore galaxies spreading through our biological neural networks is very important to the idea of Disinfolklore, which is also a cognitive, a theory of cognitive perception. and how our emotions are used through stories to hack our rational thought systems.
So there are biological neural networks. And the idea of the computational neural networks, of course, we are dealing, those of us here listening who are dealing with with twitter and x are constantly being trolled by uh computational neural networks i have a great relationship with my for you feed which i i hear a lot of people complaining about their for you feed but i have no complaints about mine it is it is a great algorithmically driven inspiration to me every day it serves me up content that really inspires me and which uh doesn’t annoy me and anything that does annoy me or people who annoy me I just block and weed out the the the bit so i have quite a good relationship with my computational neural network but of course many of the choices we make in today’s world are the product of computational neural networks by that i mean neural network mainly i mean neural network algorithms which are usually in the form of as we encounter them the choices they they are offering us multiple uh different choices but i’m quite zen with them.
So this idea the Disinfolklore galaxies spreading through our biological computational neural networks like translucent triffids rewilding the garden of eden so triffids invaded the world and the day of the triffids the book the triffids these massive plants basically take over the world And this is what I fear and what I see, saw this word, which is very common in American English, but it doesn’t exist in Irish or English, England English or Scottish English, which is trolling. So I think probably dragnet is a play on this word.
common word in American English where cops troll for criminals. And we see it in when I was researching the moniker trolling and looking into its uses in contemporary culture. It comes up a lot in regional newspapers. So I, for instance, created a dragnet using the internet. And at the beginning of my research in February 2020, I then had access to the Factiva all source, 35,000 source database for information. And I did a search for trolls and trolling. At that time, I got 65,000 results and I went through all of them and a goodly portion of the results which dealt with fishing or trolling in the context of looking for prey on the internet.
Mainly it came from police. So I suspect dragnet is a play on trolling, which is not to be confused with trolling is, as you describe it, it’s using a net. So I think probably in American English, maybe dragnet is the equivalent of trawl, as in T-R-A-W-L, which is different from troll. Trolling, for those of us who don’t know, is so it comes into American English as commonly used in the context of policing from phishing discourse. And And maybe this fisher is listening to this. But from my understanding of it is trolling, you throw the bait into the ground or rather onto the water on a line.
And the bait wanders around the water. So you have this idea of movement and wandering. And it eventually ensnares its prey. And that, as I understand it, is trolling as in fishing. And then it went from there into police discourse. And then in the early days of the internet, what we call searching was called trolling, interestingly enough.
We had this kind of competition. for the meaning of trolling in the context of internet culture. And for instance, way pre-Google, there was a troll, internet troll search engine, early form of search engine. And obviously that came from the phishing, from phishing discourse. And I think this competition,
So James may have misspent his youth reading grim fairy tales. Wendy, on the other hand, was probably interested in Nancy Drew and trolling for criminals. And I may have spent my misspent youth on... um on various different uh chat chat boards in the early days of the internet where uh trolls and trolls and goblins and uh this phenomenon from early computer culture trolls was there was a factory in in southern california in oakland um where the copyright was owned for Troll Dolls. And this pops up in the literature constantly over the decades. It’s now resolved, but there was like a 40-year struggle between the copyright owner, the trademark owner for Troll Dolls and various different franchises. And in the end, he won.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Trolls entered into early computer lore, computer culture, which was born basically within miles of Oakland, California, and this troll doll. And so the three of us have different origins for the word trolling, and we’re all using them slightly differently. And out of this competition becomes embedded... an idea of a word a moniker troll and at a certain point the the meaning of it becomes relatively stable so no one really uses trolling now in the context of internet search for instance it’s still used for looking for criminals and in various other forms.
I think the dominant use of the term trolls and trolling nowadays is in the context of what I call my definition of trolling, having gone through this data set, is emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind. And so any time... We’re moving emotion.
This idea of movement is intrinsic to the TR sound, the TR sound in travel, transition, trans, transcend, and in oodles of other words.
So movement is in there. And this idea of moving emotions, which is common, whether it’s an evangelical preacher driving the emotions of their audience, in uh on the internet all of us are being trolled each day by the aforementioned neural network algorithm which is driving the r4u feed and uh equally we’re trolled a million times a day by our pets by our lovers by our children um by advertisers and so for me this is common this is the essence i hoped i would find an essence for uh for trolling that i could then character.
“Pro-palestinian uh organization” which is a new character that has entered our information space since the bombing of um Iran uh last week and i i predicted last week that on this very show that pro-palestinian that the the war i’m not going to call it hybrid war the war the pushback the blowback would take the form of so-called pro-Palestinian protests. We have seen them in Times Square. We have seen two fighter jets in England be daubed with paint by so-called pro-Palestinian protests. so-called activists.
We have seen an organization called Palestine Action in the United Kingdom. It’s about to be proscribed. And we have just, today, I’ve seen reported that a group of 150 so-called pro-Palestinian activists have broken into a warehouse of a company in Belgium, and the company makes materiel for Ukraine, for the Ukraine war.
So we understand the genetic link between October 7th, Hamas, between Hamas, Iran and Russia, and we understand this is not in any way controversial. These are very related organizations with related tactics and are part of October 7th, which conveniently provoked a divisive furore around in most Western countries, completely out of character and out of proportion to the fuss over Ukraine. And I don’t know, Jane, if you’re in North America somewhere and this graffiti was painted there, then there’s two clues in it which make me feel that it’s inauthentic. The first is no one cares about Ukraine, basically, apart from a few of us, really.
But of course, in the information space, the idea that Ukraine has been cared about more than any other issue is has taken hold and so many people low information people will think oh we’re doing everything for ukraine but the people who listen to this space understand how little we’ve done for ukraine so that assumption in there makes me very suspicious and then the russian uh we know we have lots of documentary evidence um including from the metro mitrovkin archive which is an archive of documents that were smuggled out by one of the leading lights in the KGB and that has been published under the editorialship of Christopher Andrews from Clare College, Cambridge. the college next to the one that I attended, and is a fantastic source for, if you suspect the Russians are up to some trick, then generally speaking, you will find its origins referenced in the Mitrohkin archive.
We know that Andropov, we also know from proper documents that Andropov explicitly authorized the use of anti-racist and anti-black graffiti in New York City in the 1960s.
We know that the Dividing the Democrats memorandum, which was written by Pat Buchanan, who is an advisor of Trump even today, and emerged, I found it, in the archive related to Watergate.
We understand the symbiotic connection between this use of racial division by the Russians and also by the far right, connected to Donald Trump. And we also have some great reporting, some of which I contributed to, of the anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic graffiti in Ukraine, which was paid for by a Ukrainian oligarch, Jewish, by the way, but on behalf of Russia. That was in Rolling Stone towards the beginning of the war.
So we have this pattern, we have this technique of trying to stir racial division in order for Russia to gain. And that... Those two elements in that particular form of graffiti,
as well as the yawl, which seems like a very artificial way of trying to appeal to Black people, makes me suspicious about it, especially in the context of now. we have again this re-emergence of so-called pro-Palestinian peace movement. And the war, and I was going to talk about this in a bit because it’s very important, the war we will see the blowback from because we have an understanding of the Disinfolklore connected with the Ukraine war. And October 7th, and also an understanding of what Russia’s party tricks are from looking at documents like the Matrokin archive or simply listening to mockers and reading the telegram channels and Ukraine’s critique of them over the past three years.
Then this Belgium case which came up today is just a perfect example. Why would a so-called pro-Palestinian group destroy material which is banned for Ukraine if it is not on behalf of Russia.
So this is almost so obvious they’re trying to get caught and make it obvious. And we know the Russians do this. It’s not enough for them to manipulate. We have to know they are manipulating. It’s part of their strategy. And so what we will see over the coming time will be Chinese Communist Party, Russian and Iranian-driven proxies in our communities using TikTok and Telegram specifically.
We will see Tetushiki fake demonstrations.
We will see really stuff which will make the post-October 7th protests in Colombia and other universities happen. in in my alma mater in Cambridge as well uh looked like um child’s picnics and so that so it’s interesting you you raised that you you raised that issue of that graffiti um James and on the genetic link that I mean that article is 23 years old and I um I looked into it quite considerably because of what we talked about in the second show about the Indo-European roots.
So as I understand it, what we now know from an ancient genetics demonstrates this not that any of this matters today for people in Gaza who deserve to be able to live in peace and not be hassled or killed or whatever but the the Palestinians emanate from the Aegean.
At some point their language changed from an Indo-European language. They’re mentioned in the Bible and they got a really bad press in the Bible from the Jews, but they are an Indo-European country, Indo-European language speaking people originally, genetically, come from the Aegean and their forebears had originally come from ancient Ukraine, but we had Indo-Europeans.
They came around 1000 BCE, around the time various different tribes were coalescing into what became and what has become the Jewish community. The Jewish community, by definition, are genetically distinct because they have interbreeded for, at this point, 3,000 years, basically. So the idea that there is no genetic difference between them and Palestinians is just not right.
It’s not correct. And we know a lot more. The whole genome. So that article is from 2001. As I remember, the whole genome was only... and it was like of a worm or something. Talk about character because one of the really powerful aspects of the Disinfolklore analytical method is that we can look at particular characters in memes, in stories, in our information space and get an idea of what their typical behaviors are. And then when they behave differently from those archetypes that we form, then we can pick up data information from them. And obviously the opposite as well.
And so this week, for instance, the pro-Palestinian activist has suddenly become a character in Disinfolklore in a way that I hadn’t noticed so much before and hadn’t impacted on Ukraine. Another character is which I detected through this again this recurring theme anti-Andre Yermak theme. So in Disinfolklore we look at our information space and whichever theme we’re interested in, say, Ukraine, and we have thousands of different characters and the characters can be individual humans or they can be places, they can be Bobovna or Mockers’ boom of the day. The idea of character isn’t tied to seagulls or humans or even sentient beings. And On the contrary, and also that the dissent folklorists can archetype, for instance, Ukraine as weak. And when Rubio talks about the character Russia, that it can’t be beaten on the battlefield today, what he is really doing is archetyping Ukraine as weak, and indeed the West as weak, but it’s not obvious in it. So these are all characters.
And the character which I think, I believe, is behind the recurrence of these anti-Andrey Yermak stories is tied to the Dividing the Democrats memo, which in the Nixon White House, but also to Ukraine, and is the character who Paul Manafort, who is, again, he is in the inner fold, back inside the inner sanctum of Donald’s foreign policy.
He, as many of us here will know, between 2004 and 2014, his job was to divide Ukraine between Russian language speakers and Ukrainian language speakers and to dominate the Russian language speaking Ukrainians. He did this through storytelling. He learned at the feet of Pat Buchanan and various characters who were around Donald, who were around the beginning of MAGA. And so if we’re looking out for characters in our story world, whether it’s specifically Ukraine or MAGA or American politics, then the dyed black haired Paul Manafort as a character is a really important character. And if you’re not aware of Paul Manafort and you are trying to discern a pattern in
what’s happening today, then I humbly suggest that is a gap in one’s knowledge. Now, there’s many characters I’m not aware of and I become aware of all the time, but Paul Manafort is particularly important and key to understanding what Donald is doing now, today, over the past few weeks, this whole two weeks thing. These are all very...
cleverly exploited strategies by them. These are not done by accident, I believe. And Paul Manafort, for instance, had Yulia Tymoshenko jailed the princess in the high tower for three years. And Paul Manafort, we’ve seen the invoices from the evidence when he was put into prison.
for acting as a foreign agent for Ukraine, for Yanukovych, and for tax evasion. We saw, and I was very privileged, because I always wanted to see this stuff, and then when he was busted in all the court documents, we could see the presentations Paul Manafort used to make to the... leaders in Western countries justifying Yulia Tymoshenko’s imprisonment.
And one of the elements in there, and this goes back to the graffiti, James, that you mentioned, is one of the crazy strategies which Paul Manafort executed in order to destroy sympathy for Yulia Tymoshenko and to increase empathy for Yanukovych, his boss, who had campaigned on the grounds of moving Ukraine closer to Europe.
So again, exactly similar to what Georgian Dream has done. So when you understand characters and you’re looking for characters and patterns, the character of Russian Disinfolklore, the characters of their strategies, the people they act through. And then once you’re looking for them, you can identify them. And that really helps discern. So the stories you read,
the Disinfolklore you read on Telegram, aren’t just existence independent. of other stories, they actually have imminences in them. Their energy is similar to other stories. And so one of the bizarre things Paul Manafort did is, and I’ll post it in the purple space, but he, right now, he, he,
Yulia Timoshenko had gone into power in a coalition with this party called Svoboda, which means freedom in Ukrainian. And they are a far-right nationalist party, but I have reason to believe they’re a Russian creation. And my reasoning for this is I was once brought to a meeting in Dnepro with Svoboda by a Russian diplomat.
who wanted me to meet them. And one of the first things I noticed in the room was a copy of Mein Kampf in English, in a bookshelf full of books in Russian and Ukrainian. And I was carefully placed in a seat beside this.
And you’d have to be pretty dumb not to work out what they were trying to do. And because of this, when I learned that Paul Manafort had, as part of his campaign, he had used the fact that Julia Timoshenko had been in coalition government with Slobodan. as a reason why we shouldn’t have any sympathy for her.
So this is again fitting this pattern of Russian and the connection between Paul Manafort and Russia is several fold. His work in Ukraine was paid for by four pro-Russia oligarchs including Oleg Deripaska who’s been in the news this week, Dmitry Firtash, and again we know this from the House Intelligence Committee reports which were
done in the wake of the 2016 elections. He worked for Yanukovych and was paid, I think it’s something like about $35 million by Yanukovych, who, as we know, was the pro-Russia candidate, despite he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. We know this because he then ran away to Russia. They rescued him and they were still talking,
they’re probably still fantasizing about making him president in in Ukraine. And so if you’re aware of Paul Manafort as a character in this story, then it’s really key to understanding even what’s going on in our information space this week when we see Newsweek writing an article about how
American lawmakers on both sides are getting a bit sick of Andre Jormack. And if you remember Victoria Sparks, towards the beginning of the war, she has been briefing against Andre Jormack for a long time. And so if you were neutral, as I was on this issue long before the... the full-scale invasion,
because Andrei Yermak has often been the subject of gossip and unfavorability. And Victoria Sparks was briefing senior American lawmakers that he was, in fact, Russian, a Russian spy. And when you see all of this popping up again, because you’re aware of characters and you’re looking for characters, it enables you to interpret the
the particular Disinfolklore this week, and then elements like the use of accusing Yulia Tymoshenko of, by association, being anti-Semitic, um by association with this tiny svoboda party which is no political sport which i have good reason to believe is itself a russian uh proxy a russian organization
under the guise of ukrainian um nationalism you get a sense for how complicated these um these plans and these concocted plans are and if you explain this if you try to explain this stuff to normal people who don’t spend their time thinking about ukraine or thinking about Disinfolklore, you sound like a nutcase.
But this is how they operate. And it’s well documented. And I’ll send you the stuff with the Times of Israel. And so then, if you know all of this, and someone tells you that October 7th, was a hijacking of the pro-Palestinian cause as well, and this could well have been planned by the Russians,
then it all seems a lot more plausible. When you’re looking for characters and you understand characters, there is no purple space, which is fair enough. But anyone can find these documents. Oh, I’ll send them to you in a message and you can post them, James. with Paul Manafort. But that’s what I wanted to talk about,
this idea of characters, and Paul Manafort specifically because of this news about Andrei Yermak, which is like the perennial troll popping up again and again and again, and has been at least since 2019. He almost came to blows with Surkov, who is Russia’s curator for Ukraine, at that time. meeting in Paris in 2019.
And yeah, so characters in Disinfolklore. So I wanted to talk about that and the pro-Palestinian movement being a character, but also Paul Manafort-like characters in a film. that they grow and you learn more about them. And as you learn more about them, then when they pop up and different symbols pop up associated with them,
you understand in the news, on Telegram or... I remember two days ago, if you’re online, the old ceasefire, there is a ceasefire, there isn’t a ceasefire. And this gave me very strong flashes of my time in Eastern Ukraine. where it was my job to monitor ceasefires and ceasefires within ceasefires, within ceasefires, hundreds.
I think someone counted 180 different ceasefires at different times in the same geographical space. And so the idea of a ceasefire becomes decoupled from its meaning. And so, of course, we all went through this a few weeks ago when it seems like Ukraine’s allies said to it, can you model,
can you archetype yourself as wanting to have a ceasefire? Because Donald says that he thinks he can persuade Russia to take a ceasefire if Ukraine will. So, of course, Ukraine archetypes itself as wanting a ceasefire. and nothing comes of it. And then we have this bizarre day after the bombing in Iran,
where Donald is tweeting on untruth social, I’ve just arranged a ceasefire and... And now the ceasefire has been breached. The ceasefire is going to everyone’s just going to fire their missiles and then it’s going to then there’s going to be the ceasefire. I mean, it’s just absolutely seems absolutely insane. No pattern to it.
But it did remind me of. of what I experienced in Eastern Ukraine. And out of that experience, I got the idea of archetyping. And I think what Donald was trying to do is archetype himself as not at war with Iran, because in his mind or in the mind of their supporters,
they can now pretend that America is not a protagonist in this war. And of course, this is the mirror image of what Russia, to this day, is pretending it’s not at war in Ukraine. It’s pretending it’s a special military operation, and it’s pretending it’s doing this. Somebody asked, it’s the Ukrainian people.
And in the Iranian context, we’re hearing exactly the same information stuff about how Iranians were going to rise up. And obviously, I don’t know if they’re going to rise up or not. But what I can do is tell you it’s exactly the same pattern we don’t believe in in reference to Russia.
We are now being asked to believe in in reference to in reference to Iran. And the second thing which comes into this idea of character and characters. So ceasefires can be a character. And suddenly ceasefires were very much inside Donald’s tweets and in his discourse. And it’s decoupled from reality.
So there isn’t an actual ceasefire on the ground. And the Russians... in eastern Ukraine never cared about this because the ceasefire is a character in stories, in the information space. It doesn’t correspond to actual actions on the ground. And now this attempt by Donald to disown the fact that he unlawfully, from an international law perspective,
and unlawfully from a United States Constitution perspective, bombed Iran. And now, obviously, the piece de la resistance is the reporting today, which says that apparently it didn’t do anything. And Iran’s just going to be set back a couple of weeks. So basically, America is at war by all meanings of the word war. It has bombed Iran. Today,
I heard them talk about how MAGA Mike Johnson was talking about how we took out the entire leadership in Iran. So there’s very little pretense. that America is not, along with Israel, at war against and with Iran. Yet in the tweets, which so many experts fell for throughout the day, oh, there’s going to be a ceasefire.
And these are the people upon whom we depend to experts and interpret. And they really, they fell for the troll in a huge way all day long and probably are still falling for the troll. And I think the idea that Donald is doing this by accident or the effect of it is not strategic.
It doesn’t hold water to me because it’s exactly the same pattern I saw in in eastern Ukraine and it is also the same pattern that is in like 1984 and all of these great texts that peace war peace of course is a character in Disinfolklore which doesn’t mean
uh peace uh it means uh you know for tankies it means war basically and in russia it means war and now for donald and the people around him they’re pretending there is a ceasefire when there’s no ceasefire they’re pretending they’re not at war when
they’re they are at war and this is exactly the kind of Disinfolklore galaxy the Disinfolklore universe that I feared and forecast and wrote about and spoke about at the Pirate Party Security Conference in February. And the means of wrapping us up inside this are days like we experienced two days ago. I think, was it Sunday?
Well, it depends where you are. I think it was Sunday where I am. I can’t even remember what day it was. But anyway, while this is going on, if we can look at it and go, this is a bit mad, but there’s also a rhyme and a pattern to it.
And the effect of it is to wrap us up inside what I call a Disinfolklore galaxy, in which up is archetyped as down, peace is archetyped as war, war as peace, ceasefire, and all of these different... words and meanings have a certain dynamism about them. And that is what Donald specializes in doing.
And we saw a perfect example of it in his past time when it’s talking about celebrity gossip or, you know, stuff like that. But it’s the expansion of these techniques and tactics from uh from uh from things which really don’t matter into uh kinetic geopolitical
events and into the minds of everyone that um that we as a civilization and as a community in the ukraine community we’ve been going pro-ukraine community we’ve been going through this up and down for for three years but now normal civilians who don’t pay much attention to things don’t know if America’s at war.
In fact, I’m pretty convinced America isn’t at war. And when the blowback starts coming in earnest, no one will really know what hit them. So I just wanted to throw that out there. And I think I was able to do that relatively. Yeah, great. Out.
