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 the five 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.
So I wanted to go through the four, I won’t go through the four parts today, or five parts rather, over the next week or two to remind us of the system so that we can, for instance, apply it to this idea of a peace process of which Ukraine isn’t part of. It’s not a voluntary part of it.
It’s obviously sticking in there as long as it can to maintain intelligence support for as long as it can. But as I understand it, Ukraine last year spent 5 billion euros on drones and 80 or 70 or 80% of Russian casualties were caused by those drones. So that’s 5 billion.
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, what are they called, SMTs or the SPTs, The anti-aircraft thing that the Italians make,
I think, is it with the English or the French or some of the Germans, seem to be doing very well with that. So the United States is no longer the indispensable ally. But, you know, 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, they kind of will expect Ukraine to maintain its politeness. And it’s an investment in Ukraine’s future, but I don’t see it as an existential need for them. So then 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. And this has always been the plan, the people behind MAGA and Donald, which is basically municipal law should be, should trump international law. That for me, 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. I’d say it’s to replace the international law which constrains individual sovereigns from certain activities. It prescribes a certain set of activities, the contravening human rights, contravening various laws, laws of the sea, laws of armed conflict, genocide convention. These are all constraints on the sovereign.
And both MAGA and Russia and many oligarchs around the world don’t want any constraint on sovereigns. And so when we hear them trying to talk about recognising sovereignty, Crimea recognizing the taking of a territory. On the one hand, it will be America doing what Russia did when it brought Zaporozhye into its constitution.
It just ruins the entire constitutions of America. as it would do with Russia. It will have no effect on other countries like the European Union, other powerful countries, or Japan in terms of recognition. They’re not going to fall. They’re not going to suddenly recognize them. But Taiwan and everyone will accelerate their nuclear weapons programs and it will
have real-world... effects on that on all of those but apart from all of that what I see happening and it happens in almost imperceptibly is it changes our realities and normalizes what was previously impossible and so this is what I talk about distant folklore
universe and this is why Wendy when I see articles particularly like this one about recognizing Crimea it just kind of jumps out as, oh my God, they are going to do this and this is what the implications are going to be. And in my own small way, I’ll just try to set that, lay those out.
But I hope people who have power are trying to... lay this out. And I hope there’s a plan. Maybe the plan involves leaks. Maybe that’s why Whitcoff looked so terrible in Miami, because he was spending nights going through all his conversations for the last six months, which someone has, perhaps, and that they’re all going to leak them.
I don’t know. But anyway, So I declared our distant folklore universe in February in Munich. And 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 now. 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 at the moment. Those whom we entrust with securing our conditions of civilized life don’t seem to understand this flow between, on the one hand, culture, art, films and literature. and geopolitical security.
Donald, of course, does, because he talked incessantly about Alphonse Capone. He talked about Hannibal Lecter. He brought in these archetypal characters from art. He archetypes himself as the Joker or as a magus or seer or... And so he gets it, but many of our leaders don’t. But President Zelensky certainly gets it, and that’s part of my argument.
And this is partly why there’s such easy marks for Russian and MAGA distant folklore. So this is, I’m talking about the straight-laced geopolitical actors and commentators who don’t really get this flow between art, culture, and films. And for them, they can’t really understand Donald as a as an artist, as an archetyper, as someone who archetypes at scale.
And the 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. And 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 and go to when I find myself in a state of confusion. For instance, when... I saw this last Friday night about America recognizing Crimea. And I don’t go into despair or put out tweets going, oh, this is terrible.
I just try and think it through and think, what will happen if this happens? What are they up to? Is it likely to happen? So, and today I’m going to offer you a perspective on what I call our distant folklore universe, which is, and I’m also going to offer a means to escape the troll memes,
wrap us up inside when we fall for MAGA or Russian distant folklore. None of this is easy. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have all the answers. And 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 that 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. So today we live in a true distant folklore universe.
The fabric of every dimension of our lives, our work, personal relationships, life choices, fates are fused with aspects of Druid-y-Don and Duncy-Putin’s memetic onslaught. That is as true today as as it was in February when I first spoke about this in Munich. And then you’ll all of course remember the White House visit happened a few days
after my Munich speech, which affects all our moods, motivations, intentions and attitudes. So it’s moods. Increasingly, I’m focusing on moods. Because it’s kind of the moods which are affected by this news about peace plans, about Ukraine being forced into capitulation. Oh, can they do that? Is it going to be due? And we’re just depressed by it.
And the aggregate of us all being depressed is, oh, Ukraine can’t win. And this is really what they’re attacking on a civilizational scale, on a country scale, this fear. this malaise, they’re trying to create this sense of malaise and these are being formed by what I call distant folklore 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 distant folklore. So we had all of the archetyping of Elmo and Druidy Don in the White House that day, those days in January. and the totality of our infospace 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 it was 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, And it’s kind of hard to see these institutions being restored.
And so there is a permanent, 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. So even though we might win certain battles and the Supreme Court might rule that or this, The real world impacts are in many cases permanent.
We never return to the world the way it was before. And obviously all of us hope something, some deus ex machina will come on the stage and we’ll just go back to how things were. But obviously that’s never going to happen, how things were in 2014. So we just have to try and...
keep control of our perceptions of how things are developing and evolving in my humble opinion. And the totality of our conception of America now is occupied by actors playing leaders in superhero costumes. This character, Jared Kushner, who is he? 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 just kind of bring on stage and we just gaze at them and think, oh, that’s kind of a bit weird, especially as you were going on about Hunter Biden, who was never really on stage. for so many years. And now you’re completely Zen with this guy.
He’s married to a mall, to a gangster, a gangster mall, gangster’s mall or a gangster. He is a gangster. He’s a gangster’s mall or he’s the son-in-law of a gangster. He happens to be president. His father was in prison, was a gangster, but now he’s US ambassador to France.
So just kind of odd archetyping of different characters who are part of our lives with these weird powers over us in the information space. uh we we did have elmo robin and druidy don batman they were dressed up in marvel cinematic universe costumes all that black the black coat that elmo was wearing
they use ai and in real life costumes uh they’re memeing a distant folklore universe using marvelous marvel universe inspired memes is a means of creating a distant folklore universe in our minds and in real life and i focus on this because there we can see it i can draw attention
to it a lot more easily than when when they’re when you see talking heads on tv talking about a peace process and talking about oh here’s jared kushner walking across red square with with this guy, Witkoff, and they’re going to talk to Putler about peace.
And it’s hard to see how abnormal that is because it’s portrayed as normal. So I focus, I try to get our eye in by 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... So their controlled dis-folklore 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 distant folklore universe were being embedded in it just as Russia embeds Ukrainians inside the occupation in distant folklore.
By distant folklore I mean briefly stories that purposefully affect our moods, intentions, attitudes and motivations. in ways that repurpose us to serve the distant folklorists’ memes and means to transform our world. And 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 in the worst moment of their lives, 42 million Ukrainians, in the very worst moment of their lives, If they do tune in to this mad news, they just become deflated or, I mean, on the one hand defiant, but on the other hand,
they just think, oh, is everyone going to abandon us again? Happened. It happened in 1918. It happened during the Holodomor. It happened after, during the Second World War. Is it going to happen again? And they’re playing on that. The Russians are playing on that. And I, for me, that is one of the worst things they do.
So we saw Melania wearing her meme chic costume. designed by a Ukrainian fashion label, Dress X. So we remember her dressed as the gangster’s mall with her big hat at standing behind Don, who was archetyping as Alphonse Capone. But really, it’s not the Italian mafia, it’s the Russian mafia.
Two Ukrainian fashion designers founded Dress X in Los Angeles. They, like the pirate party and me with distant folklore, noticed the porousness between in real life and memes in our cultural space. Dress X identified a market for real world clothes that mimic and riff off a Marvel or Disney World aesthetic. So archetyping through haute couture.
So it’s not archetyping just through news. It’s done through clothes. Elmo dressed as a superhero wearing Dress X. Melania doing the same thing. And so by clothing, Druidy Don, Disney Folklore’s wife, actual memester-in-chief’s first lady, that’s the Ukrainians, what the Ukrainians are doing.
So good luck to them, for they’ve seen what I see and what the pirate party sees. We’re living in a distant folklore universe made up of memes. And the first lady chose Dress X to model Druidy Don’s vision of a distant folklore universe, Alphonse Capone, the gangster’s mall, 1930s,
the social conditions that preceded and provoked World War II. That’s what they’re modeling, that’s what they’re archetyping, in which we’re battered daily by a million hitherto unsayable and hitherto undoable things. So the abnormal becomes the normal. America recognizes armed aggression, the taking of another state’s territory. Even though the United States didn’t recognize Latvia,
Lithuania or Estonia as part of the Soviet Union for 50 or for the entire 45 years, then suddenly now it’s going to recognize part of Ukraine. So the abnormal becomes the normal. We have no anchor except the memester-in-chief’s next whim to latch on to. And 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. And we on Twitter and in Volia and every day in the Volia shows, Mockers and Will and Yonah and others, And of course,
James and Wendy and everyone and Zdena and Genesis Man are all archetyping and disrupting archetypes and using the power we have, such as it is. to change the reality and to transform each other’s minds and to pass around information. So I don’t in any way minimize what we’re doing and what NAFO does. These are really powerful.
And of course, all the people with the big accounts as well are doing. But if you own the memes of cultural production exchange and distribution of memes, then you can archetype at a scale and intensity which others can’t and 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. So does it look like peace when Russia is bombing? No, absolutely it doesn’t. You just think about it for a millisecond.
And yet every newsreader in the world is archetyping Russia’s peace efforts or this bizarre spectacle. Oh, does Putla really want peace? And And then Druidy Don himself, who is the most non-peaceful person. And I’m on record as saying, I don’t really believe this Nobel Prize troll. I think that’s an alibi. So he’s trying to archetype as peace,
but we know everything he’s ever done is about conflict and creating conflict and chaos. So again, we know that because we’ve seen his history. And now suddenly we believe he is archetyping himself as peace because he wants a Nobel Peace Prize. And none of it sustains more than five seconds thought, even by the people promoting these trolls.
But these aggregates of phenomenon become archetyped as him looking for peace or that. Then new data is bounced off these archetypes. The missile comes in. Russia sends a missile into Dnipro at rush hour. People lost their eyes. They lost their hands. They were killed. And 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, which is 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.
It needs big daddy America to come in and save it or a mummy to come in and save it. Although all of us who are tuned in very closely, I’m not seeing any signs of Ukraine genuinely wanting to engage in this travesty of a peace process. I just see lots of pressure on, incredible pressure on Ukraine.
So by declaring our distant folklore universe, I’m archetyping the current moment in civilization and our values, reputations, modeling, mental architectures, characters, personalities, interpretations, algorithms, stereotyping. These are all forms, all dimensions of archetyping, as I’m using the term archetyping. Today, values, reputations, modelling, mental architectures, characters, personalities, interpretations, algorithms, stereotyping.
They’re all forms of archetyping, all dimensions as I’m using the term today. Defining something is also a form of archetyping as I’m using it. using the term and I’ll come back to this next week but I’ll leave it at that for now because I’m sure others maybe have other things to talk about and I know James
and Wendy you’ve stuffed the nest and there’s lots of interesting news to talk about out yeah you might well ask that question as the English might say so I think it goes back to this idea of might is right Can you hear me now? You might well ask that, Wendy, as the English might say.
Yeah, I think it goes down to Mitre’s Reich. So they think they’re going to win. So Trenin, who was the doyen of the Russia experts, I think he ran Carnegie, Moscow, and was in Valdei. He wrote recently that Russia has now re-established the supremacy of national legislation over international treaties.
And those who followed the Brexit debate will remember how it was all about getting this one clause in, it was called the Single European Act, which said that European law has supremacy over national law in areas of competency, reserved competency by the European Union. And that was used as the excuse to say, oh, we’re not sovereign.
And so they... They think they can get a... Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, it’s the same thing with the COVID. I think, you know, somehow they think they’re immune to viruses, but it will get them in the end. But it’s mad. It is kind of crazy. But I think they think with Mitre’s Reich...
We can just overcome the law. And it’s the law just in the same way that the mafia runs, has laws and conventions. So perhaps that’s it. And now you have all these New York Russian mafia adjacent Brighton Beach people trying to hoist Ukraine to try and take a whole state and...
And they think they can get away with it because everyone understands the laws. You just watch a few episodes of The Godfather. But I don’t wonder too much at what they think they’re going to get away with on it because it is just nuts. And we can become non-moving, paralysed. I wonder, you just think it’s so mad.
Like even, you know, Pukla’s thing about taking Ukraine. It’s just, it’s so insane. You know, what’s he after? Who cares? We just need to stop him and them. But it’s also a psychological thing, I think, because for certain kinds of personality, people with certain personality inventories, as talked about before, especially writ-wing authoritarian followers and social followers, dominators,
which have scientific means of determining where you chart on those particular psychological inventory scales. The idea of being a sovereign individual, even though you’re using language to think your mummy and daddy helped you and And all of this stuff and all the poor people, you know, make your amazing house. You depend on so many people.
The idea of being a sovereign individual really appeals. So it has a good campaigning effect for these people. And then they project that onto... the international legal sphere. And ultimately, the constraints on people like Pete Hegseth are the Geneva Conventions, as we’ve seen. And, you know, he’s such an idiot.
How many people has Donald got convicted of crimes? I mean, however many, on Jan 6th, I can’t remember the number, but it’s a very significant number of people actually have I do have the number. I did a tweet on how many people who’ve gone to jail for Donald. And now Pete Hegseth and the rest of them,
unless they manage to completely upend and transform reality, which I’m not rooting out, they’re all going to go to prison. They’re all going to die in prison, Witkoff and go, the rest of them. And they must be... looking at that. But so the 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 100, whatever it is, 184 States in the UN Charter, you cannot be a state and not recognize the territorial integrity and Ukraine’s right to self-defense and all of those things.
So, but yeah, I agree with the tone of your question, Wendy. It’s absolutely insane. Like, it’s just insane. Yeah.
