It’s exactly a year since I detected the system-wide effects of the aggregatation of MAGA and Russian Disinfolklore artifacts invading our minds, information space and reality. In February in Munich at the Pirate Party security conference I declared what by then I had archætyped as a “Disinfolklore Universe” to be operating inside all of our minds and cultures.
Today I want to begin a series of several parts of the “Battling Archetypes” paper I conceived for the first time exactly a year ago and which I spoke about in embryonic form at the Munich meeting in February.
I wanted to go through the four — or five parts rather — over the next week or two, to remind us of the system so that we can apply it to this idea of a peace process of which Ukraine isn’t a voluntary part. It’s obviously sticking in there as long as it can to maintain intelligence support.
As I understand it, Ukraine last year spent 5 billion euros on drones, and 70 or 80 percent of Russian casualties were caused by those drones. So the amounts of money and the technical needs of Ukraine — they have everything they need, basically, at a minimum. It would be very nice if they can maintain intelligence support and other particular munitions. But even the Patriots — we see these things, the SAMP/T, the anti-aircraft system that the Italians make, I think with the French — seem to be doing very well. The United States is no longer the indispensable ally.
I totally admire the patience of the Ukrainian side. They want to keep America on board, mainly because the deep state, if there is one, and the people who will succeed Donald — God willing — will expect Ukraine to maintain its politeness. It’s an investment in Ukraine’s future, but I don’t see it as an existential need for them.
So what are the Americans and the Russians doing? They are altering our culture, changing our approach to international law, trying to return us to the social conditions of the 1930s. This has always been the plan of the people behind MAGA and Donald: that municipal law should trump international law.
If you were to say to me, “What is Russia’s game? What is the project by invading and occupying Crimea?” — that’s what I would say. It’s to replace the international law which constrains individual sovereigns from certain activities. It proscribes a certain set of activities: contravening human rights, contravening various laws — laws of the sea, laws of armed conflict, the Genocide Convention. These are all constraints on the sovereign. Both MAGA and Russia and many oligarchs around the world don’t want any constraint on sovereigns.
When we hear them trying to talk about recognising Crimea, recognising the taking of a territory — on the one hand, it will be America doing what Russia did when it brought Zaporizhzhia into its constitution. It just ruins the entire constitution of America, as it would with Russia. It will have no effect on other countries like the European Union, or powerful countries like Japan, in terms of recognition. They’re not going to suddenly recognise it. But Taiwan and everyone will accelerate their nuclear weapons programmes, and it will have real-world effects.
Apart from all of that, what I see happening, almost imperceptibly, is it changes our realities and normalises what was previously impossible. This is what I talk about as the Disinfolklore universe. This is why, Wendy, when I see articles particularly like this one about recognising Crimea, it just jumps out: they are going to do this, and these are the implications. In my own small way, I try to lay those out. But I hope people who have power are trying to lay this out too. And I hope there’s a plan. Maybe the plan involves leaks. Maybe that’s why Witkoff looked so terrible in Miami — because he was spending nights going through all his conversations for the last six months, which someone perhaps has, and they’re all going to leak.
I declared our Disinfolklore universe in February in Munich. I thought it was appropriate to be talking about that at a Pirate Party security conference event, because those who founded the Pirate Party get what I’m about to speak to you about. There’s a flow between, on the one hand, culture, art, films, literature about pirates, and geopolitical security. This is especially apt as we see these attacks on Russia-connected cargo vessels.
Those whom we entrust with securing our conditions of civilised life don’t seem to understand this flow between culture, art, films and literature, and geopolitical security. Donald, of course, does — because he talked incessantly about Al Capone, about Hannibal Lecter. He brought in these archetypal characters from art. He archetypes himself as the Joker, or as a Magus or seer. He gets it. But many of our leaders don’t. President Zelensky certainly gets it, and that’s part of my argument.
This is partly why they’re such easy marks for Russian and MAGA Disinfolklore. I’m talking about the straight-laced geopolitical actors and commentators who don’t really get this flow between art, culture, films and security. For them, they can’t really understand Donald as an artist, as an archetyper, someone who archetypes at scale. Same obviously with Duncy Putler. They get wrapped up so easily in Russian or MAGA trolls, like flies in a spider’s web. It’s very hard for them even to understand that they’re trapped inside old thinking.
I’m not saying I don’t get trapped. I get wrapped up in these trolls all the time. I’m just trying to develop tools that help me escape the spider’s web. When I find myself in a state of confusion — for instance, when I saw last Friday night about America recognising Crimea — I don’t go into despair or put out tweets going, “This is terrible.” I just try to think it through: what will happen if this happens? What are they up to? Is it likely to happen?
Today I’m going to offer a perspective on what I call our Disinfolklore universe. I’m also going to offer a means to escape the trolls, the memes that wrap us up inside when we fall for MAGA or Russian Disinfolklore.
None of this is easy. I don’t have all the answers. Whenever you hear anyone talk about disinformation or Disinfolklore as if it happens to other people, as if only stupid people fall for trolls — whenever you hear chatter like that, be certain these people are easy marks for trolls, for MAGA and Russian Disinfolklore. You’ll have heard me say this a lot, most recently with President Biden and his “we’re not going to go for World War III over Ukraine.” We talked about that three weeks ago.
Today we live in a true Disinfolklore universe. The fabric of every dimension of our lives — our work, personal relationships, life choices, fates — are fused with aspects of Druidy Don and Duncy Putler’s memetic onslaught. That is as true today as it was in February when I first spoke about this in Munich.
You’ll all remember the White House visit happened a few days after my Munich speech. It affects all our moods, motivations, intentions and attitudes. Increasingly I’m focusing on moods, because it’s the moods which are affected by this news about peace plans, about Ukraine being forced into capitulation. “Can they do that? Is it going to be?” And we’re just depressed by it. The aggregate of us all being depressed is: “Ukraine can’t win.” This is really what they’re attacking on a civilisational scale, on a country scale — this fear, this malaise they’re trying to create.
These moods are being formed by what I call Disinfolklore — directly through the media memes we consume, or indirectly through our own minds working through these memes and those of others influencing us, from archetypes created and evolving from Disinfolklore.
We had all of the archetyping of Elmo and Druidy Don in the White House those days in January. The totality of our information space was occupied by memes like the Department of Government Efficiency — named after a meme coin, but also after the class of oligarchs who ran, I think, Venice into the ground — and the baseless meme coins. But it’s had real-world impacts. Some studies have talked about millions of people dying as a result of the cancelling of USAID. It’s hard to see these institutions being restored.
This is what I mean by the permanent change in our culture, the permanent change in the architecture of our lives and millions of lives by these people. Even though we might win certain battles and the Supreme Court might rule this or that, the real-world impacts are in many cases permanent. We never return to the world the way it was before. Obviously all of us hope some deus ex machina will come on stage and we’ll just go back to how things were. But that’s never going to happen — how things were in 2014. We just have to try to keep control of our perceptions of how things are developing and evolving.
The totality of our conception of America now is occupied by actors playing leaders in superhero costumes. This character Jared Kushner — who is he? Did he get Epstein’s business, and Epstein got Maxwell’s business? I don’t know, but it’s a whole character set. They bring them on stage and we gaze at them and think it’s a bit weird — especially given they were going on about Hunter Biden, who was never really on stage, for so many years. And now they’re completely Zen with this guy.
He’s married to a gangster’s moll. Or he is a gangster. He’s a gangster’s son-in-law who happens to be president. His father was in prison, was a gangster, but now he’s US ambassador to France. Just odd archetyping of different characters who are part of our lives with these weird powers over us in the information space.
We had Elmo as Robin and Druidy Don as Batman — dressed up in Marvel Cinematic Universe costumes, all that black, the black coat that Elmo was wearing. They use AI and real-life costumes. They’re memeing a Disinfolklore universe using Marvel-universe-inspired memes as a means of creating a Disinfolklore universe in our minds and in real life.
I focus on this because there we can see it — I can draw attention to it more easily than when you see talking heads on TV talking about a peace process, or Jared Kushner walking across Red Square with Witkoff, going to talk to Putler about peace. It’s hard to see how abnormal that is because it’s portrayed as normal.
I try to get our eye in: when you see Elmo dressed in a costume, or Donald dressed in his costume with his red hat or his bizarre golf clothes — they’re using their controlled Disinfolklore propagation network, X or Telegram. America buying TikTok from China and compelling other oligarchs to do likewise with theirs — so they own the memes of production and the means of reproduction of the memes of production of this Disinfolklore universe.
We’re being embedded in it, just as Russia embeds Ukrainians inside the occupation in Disinfolklore. By Disinfolklore I mean, briefly: stories that purposefully affect our moods, intentions, attitudes and motivations in ways that repurpose us to serve the Disinfolklorists’ memes and means to transform our world.
Of all the crimes that Donald and his crew are committing, one of the worst is the way they can bring the moods of Ukrainians — 42 million Ukrainians in the very worst moment of their lives — down. If they tune in to this mad news, they just become deflated. On the one hand defiant, but on the other, they think: is everyone going to abandon us again? It happened in 1918. It happened during the Holodomor. It happened during the Second World War. Is it going to happen again? The Russians are playing on that. For me, that is one of the worst things they do.
We saw Melania wearing her meme-chic costume designed by a Ukrainian fashion label, DressX. We remember her dressed as the gangster’s moll with her big hat, standing behind Don, who was archetyping as Al Capone. But really, it’s not the Italian mafia — it’s the Russian mafia.
Two Ukrainian fashion designers founded DressX in Los Angeles. They, like the Pirate Party and me with Disinfolklore, noticed the porousness between in-real-life and memes in our cultural space. DressX identified a market for real-world clothes that mimic and riff off a Marvel or Disney aesthetic. Archetyping through haute couture — not just through news, but through clothes. Elmo dressed as a superhero wearing DressX. Melania doing the same.
By clothing Druidy Don’s wife — the actual memester-in-chief’s first lady — that’s what the Ukrainians are doing. Good luck to them, for they’ve seen what I see and what the Pirate Party sees: we’re living in a Disinfolklore universe made up of memes.
The first lady chose DressX to model Druidy Don’s vision of a Disinfolklore universe: Al Capone, the gangster’s moll, 1930s — the social conditions that preceded and provoked World War II. That’s what they’re modelling, that’s what they’re archetyping. We’re battered daily by a million hitherto unsayable and hitherto undoable things. The abnormal becomes the normal.
America recognises armed aggression, the taking of another state’s territory — even though the United States didn’t recognise Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia as part of the Soviet Union for the entire 45 years. Now suddenly it’s going to recognise part of Ukraine. The abnormal becomes the normal. We have no anchor except the memester-in-chief’s next whim to latch on to.
The power to archetype at will belongs to all of us. But if you own the memes of cultural production, exchange and distribution of memes — the main means through which archetyping outside our minds occurs — then you can archetype at scale. We on Twitter and in Volya — in the Volya shows, Mokrushyna and Will and Iona and others, James and Wendy and everyone and Zdena and Denys Davydov — are all archetyping and disrupting archetypes and using the power we have, such as it is, to change reality and transform each other’s minds and pass around information.
I don’t in any way minimise what we’re doing and what NAFO does. These are really powerful. And of course all the people with the big accounts are doing it too. But if you own the memes of cultural production, exchange and distribution, you can archetype at a scale and intensity which others can’t — which affects people, especially low-information people.
By archetyping in this context, I’m speaking about an aspect of cognition. We model the world, our context. Our mental ideals help us navigate. We create stereotypes — aggregates of phenomena being archetyped as this or that. Then new data is bounced off these archetypes, like “peace.” Does it look like peace when Russia is bombing? Absolutely not. You think about it for a millisecond. And yet every newsreader in the world is archetyping Russia’s “peace efforts” or this bizarre spectacle: “Does Putler really want peace?”
Druidy Don himself, the most non-peaceful person — and I’m on record saying I don’t really believe this Nobel Prize troll, I think that’s an alibi. He’s trying to archetype as peace, but we know everything he’s ever done is about conflict and creating conflict and chaos. We know that because we’ve seen his history. Now suddenly we believe he’s archetyping himself as peace because he wants a Nobel Peace Prize. None of it sustains more than five seconds’ thought, even by the people promoting these trolls.
These aggregates of phenomena become archetyped. Then new data is bounced off them. The missile comes in. Russia sends a missile into Dnipro at rush hour. People lost their eyes. They lost their hands. They were killed. These archetypes — which in some cases are fluid and dynamic — but sometimes we form what I call data-resistant archetypes. And this is one of the main goals, I think, of this information attack, the so-called “peace process”: to archetype Russia as strong at a time when we know it’s at its weakest, and to archetype Ukraine as weak, as a supplicant — needing big daddy America to come in and save it.
Although all of us who are tuned in closely — I’m not seeing any signs of Ukraine genuinely wanting to engage in this travesty of a peace process. I just see incredible pressure on Ukraine.
By declaring our Disinfolklore universe, I’m archetyping the current moment in civilisation. Our values, reputations, modelling, mental architectures, characters, personalities, interpretations, algorithms, stereotyping — these are all forms, all dimensions of archetyping as I’m using the term. Defining something is also a form of archetyping. I’ll come back to this next week, but I’ll leave it at that for now.
You might well ask that question, as the English might say. I think it goes back to this idea of might is right.
Trenin, who was the doyen of the Russia experts — I think he ran Carnegie Moscow and was in Valdai — he wrote recently that Russia has now re-established the supremacy of national legislation over international treaties. Those who followed the Brexit debate will remember how it was all about getting this one clause — the Single European Act — which said that European law has supremacy over national law in areas of reserved competency by the European Union. And that was used as the excuse: “We’re not sovereign.”
They think they can overcome the law. And it’s the law in the same way the mafia runs on laws and conventions. Perhaps that’s it. Now you have all these New York Russian-mafia-adjacent Brighton Beach people trying to hoist Ukraine, trying to take a whole state. They think they can get away with it because everyone understands the laws — you just watch a few episodes of The Godfather.
I don’t wonder too much at what they think they’ll get away with, because it is just nuts. We can become paralysed. You just think it’s so mad. Even Putler’s thing about taking Ukraine — it’s insane. What’s he after? Who cares? We just need to stop him and them.
But it’s also a psychological thing. For certain kinds of personality — people with certain personality inventories, as I’ve talked about before, especially right-wing authoritarian followers and social dominators, which have scientific means of determining where you sit on those particular psychological inventory scales — the idea of being a sovereign individual really appeals. Even though you’re using language to think, your mummy and daddy helped you, all the people who make your amazing house — you depend on so many people. But the idea of being a sovereign individual has a good campaigning effect for these people. Then they project that onto the international legal sphere.
Ultimately, the constraints on people like Pete Hegseth are the Geneva Conventions, as we’ve seen. He’s such an idiot. How many people has Donald got convicted of crimes? On January 6th — I can’t remember the number, but it’s a very significant number of people who’ve actually gone to prison for Donald.
Now Pete Hegseth and the rest of them, unless they manage to completely upend and transform reality — which I’m not ruling out — they’re all going to go to prison. They’re all going to die in prison: Witkoff and the rest of them. And they must be looking at that. But international law is the constraint, because that provides the standard against which they’re judged.
They can mess around with the US Supreme Court all they want, and indeed the International Criminal Court. But ultimately, the standard has been set by 184 states in the UN Charter: you cannot be a state and not recognise the territorial integrity and Ukraine’s right to self-defence and all of those things.
