⚡️Nice journal reference here1 and citation to my work on Disinfolklore.
Does two things of particular value to me as a writer:
1. Is a record that I created the Portmanteau ‘Disinfolklore.’
2. Correctly categorises ‘Disinformation’ as a particular form of ‘Disinfolklore.’
Thus giving me the whole field (which I’d be too humble to have claimed too loudly) while confining all the work focussing on Disinformation to a local province or region of my field.
Prof Yolles cites my work, the result of @peterjukes visionary decision to commission for @BylineTimes an early piece on Disinfolklore in Byline Supplement. Thanks Peter Jukes Thanks Prof Yolles.
That oeuvre, now heavily developed into a 1m+ word corpus, sliced, diced and served up in 1,000+ easily digestible passages, is now presented https://www.Disinfolklore.com in a very innovative format.
⚡️Previously we talked about archetypal disinfolklore and literacy. We talked about archetypes and what I mean by archetypes — we have a good introduction. We also talked about character and how characters occupy stories that we find in our information space. Those characters can be humans or mythical creatures or countries or anything invested with energy in any memes.
The third tool - look for the mana in the meme!- in my arsenal of twelve tools in my disinfolklore arsenal — clever people will notice I haven’t spoken about the second tool, which is incoming-outgoing troll radars. We’re going to skip to three and come back to that another week. I want to talk about mana and energy — and looking for the mana in the meme.
What “Look for the Mana in the Meme” Means
What I mean by “look for the mana in the meme”: a meme in my book — literally in my book, a metaphorical book — can be any informational unit. That could be a visual meme that passes into our inner mind in a flash, in a millisecond. Or a meme could actually be a whole book or a film or something much longer or more durable or substantive — a visual, a song, or a poem.
When you’re looking for the mana in the meme, just the act of trying to work out what is the energy inside this meme — and I use mana and energy interchangeably — because what I try to look for is what is the immanence. Mana is an immanence as well. What is immanent in this meme?
I’m affected emotionally by it. My emotions are moved. My mood is affected. My intentions change as a result of this meme, this newspaper article. I was about to make a cup of coffee; now I’m just sitting aghast at what has been done. Or I intended to donate to Ukraine, but now I see it’s useless, so I donate to Palestine Action or something like that. My intention changes as a result of this meme. My mood has changed — I’m now depressed or I’m overjoyed. The Spider Web attack excited us all, but as we know, after that comes the comedown.
The Four Dimensions: Moods, Intentions, Attitudes, Motivations
By looking for the mana in the meme, you’re trying to identify — either after your emotions have been triggered and your moods have been changed, your intentions have been changed, your attitudes — I use these four words to describe it: moods, intentions, attitudes, and how memes affect these different aspects of our being, which will be contingent on something in the meme itself.
Either after my mood or my intention or my attitude has been affected by the meme, or before it, I’m looking for the mana — the energy, the layers of energy. That in itself is a practice that I try to integrate into my own work when I’m scanning my timeline or listening to the news. Whenever I feel my emotions being triggered, I try to look for what’s the energy in this meme.
We Don’t Care About the Sharer’s Intention
The great thing about this is we don’t care about the intention of the person that shared it. It may have been me this morning sharing some well-sourced article in Politico or something I found on Telegram. I’m not part of Telegram. My intention wasn’t to troll you or to fool you or outrage you or to trick you — it was just to express my own pain. That doesn’t matter if I’m assessing this particular meme. What matters is what is the energy in this meme.
If we uncouple the layers — the lack of these weapon systems — when we know in our heart of hearts that Trump, America, Manafort behind him and all of this, they are a dead loss. We put ourselves in the position of the MAGA people, or those people who are relying on Donald — some woman who he’s trying to troll, some guy who’s trying to sell an apartment to — we end up being put in that position if we fall for these trolls. I think most of us certainly listening here right now have a better self-respect than to fall for Donald’s trolls, and this is just yet another one: “Oh, I will give the weapons, I won’t give the weapons, if there’s peace...”
The Practice: Look for the Mana Before You React
That’s really what I try to do. We have the power to look in any of these memes and just look for the mana. That’s what I’d like to try and encourage us all to do over the coming week: when you come across anything that affects your emotions, your moods, your attitudes, your intentions — try this practice of asking, what is the mana?
Everything mentioned there, James, is a perfect example of disinfolklore. This is an entire universe — a sub-universe, or galaxy — in the whole disinfolklore universe. Various characters are commenting on stuff. The Kyiv Independent’s intentions are always very good, but it’s caught up inside this kind of news cycle and hysteria as well.
This is a great example of what I mean by disinfolklore: all of these different stories and emanations of stories and emanations of emanations of stories. If we’re going to categorise them all in terms of today’s news, all of it is negative from the perspective of all of us. It’s depressed all of us. In that, we can probably see what’s going on.
My first reaction was, “Oh, wow, they’re still getting Patriot interceptor missiles.” I’d assumed they weren’t getting any more. None of us know anything about this. We don’t know how many have been delivered, how many are in stock, whether Donald is doing this on purpose or why.
I have to say, even I was interested in Macron’s phone call with Putin. I try not to get too caught up in it because of all these other stories which are going on, which we are very much involved in and affected by.
It was just one example of looking — trying to look at the individual artefacts, their sources. I don’t doubt the Kyiv Independent’s intentions, but I don’t think they’re adding to or helping us understand precisely what’s going on in all of that story.
I am always suspicious when I feel depressed by a piece of news, because they sculpt these memes so perfectly to have this impact on people just like us. When we spot this impact, we should, I think, be quite suspicious of the information that we’re reacting to.
Mana in the Meme: A Universal Practice
Looking for the mana in the meme should work on any form of information, whether it’s your mother saying something to your girlfriend or your child. You’re not really looking at the intentions behind it. You’re looking at what’s immanent in the actual informational units themselves — the stories you hear and feel.
Sometimes it’s a Russian disinfolklorist designing a meme to hack our rational thought systems, to bypass our incoming and outgoing troll radars — which clearly this has, for most of us who are affected by this piece of news. Other times it can be our newly indoctrinated MAGA family member or a trusted news source like the Kyiv Independent, conveying the meme into our minds, unconsciously furthering the disinfolklore galaxy’s designers’ ends. Often we ourselves are unknowingly communicating onwards disinfolklore.
This is why I’m not going to talk too much about that, because there’s no way for me to escape it either. I can’t talk about these interceptor missiles apart from what I’ve said — trying to contextualise it against the attacks on civilians in Ukraine, which terrorise tens of millions but kill a tiny number. The war won’t be won by that. We all understand that rationally. Therefore, the impact of Patriot interceptor missiles on how the war ends is small — very small. We know that rationally. This is a 1,200-kilometre-long frontline, and there’s just oodles of things which have been going on this week which are much more important, and stuff which hasn’t been going on which is much more important — like Ukraine’s capacity to hit the oil infrastructure, the blowing up of tankers, the blowing up of factories 1,200 kilometres from the border. There are just oodles of other things.
If we focus on this other thing that we don’t know anything about, that could well be furthering the intentions of the designers of these memes.
The Danger of Communicating Onwards
We communicate onwards this disinfolklore, which infects the moods, intentions, attitudes, and motivations of those whom we’re influencing. Someone on Volia Radio this morning — one of our great friends — was telling this woeful tale, absolutely woeful. I’m glad I know about it. At the end of it, Mockers had to say to them, “Look, you’re killing us. You’re killing us.” The person explained, “I read about this and I just needed to share it.” I was thinking: actually, you didn’t need to share it. Let it be a cul-de-sac. Why are you inflicting this on all of us? Then we get this energy, this really sad story in our minds. Of course, I do this all the time by accident. I’m trying not to. That’s part of what I’m talking about here.
Sometimes we do communicate onwards disinfolklore in this outraged way, which affects the moods, intentions, attitudes, and motivations of those we’re influencing in precisely the same manner as the originator of the item of disinfolklore imagined we would.
When we see someone from MeidasTouch sharing — which is a great media outlet in America — sharing a Donald tweet, and we read the tweet, or we read Marco Rubio sharing the same tweet, and one of them is expressing outrage and getting us to feel shocked, and the other is trying to get us to go, “Well, Donald’s great” — the effect is the same. This meme has been shared and then we share it onwards.
Part of what I try to do myself is not share onwards these things, whether visual, audible, or ideas — and conversely, to share things which may affect things positively, not negatively. I’m looking for the energy in memes that is positive.
If we share onwards this disinfolklore, which affects the moods, intentions, attitudes, and motivations of others in precisely the same manner as the originator of the item of disinfolklore intended — in the context of one of Donald’s Truth Social untruths, they don’t care. They just want this to be shared. The effect is the same: it’s manipulating us or others into mental or physical activities that accord with the disinfolklore galaxy’s malign designs for us and our communities.
It’s better we learn to look for the mana energy inside memes and informational units before we share them onwards, whether that’s telling someone about them or talking too much about them.
Manafort, Politico, and the Recurring Ukraine Story
James and Wendy, you and I could have a two-hour discussion right now about where we think this story came from. We’ve all seen stories in Politico during this war which are improper. We know Politico is sadly owned by a friend of MAGA.
I’m really interested at the moment in Paul Manafort and his name — of course, “Mana” in “Manafort.” This hypothesis I have that he is advising Donald, we know that, but he is operating on behalf of the Russian oligarchs and trying to create some sense of peace between them and Donald. That kind of thing is important — relatively neutral in that it’s just an interesting question. Everything that happens seems to fit what he has been up to since 2016.
I recall the fuss in July 2016 when Manafort wrote to Donald’s best friend at the time, Tom Barrack — who was later convicted for acting as a foreign agent for, I think, one of the Emirates — and then he got the act of arming Ukraine removed from the Republican Party platform at the 2016 convention. Here we are, nine years later, and exactly the same story is electrifying our info space. Once again, Ukraine is the centre of everything.
For me, that’s quite a positive. It’s still really central to American politics at a time that that terrible bill is going through Congress. It could be a distraction from that, but who knows? I’m looking for the mana in the meme, the energy, thinking through all these dimensions — all the things I’ve talked about — as distinct from getting outraged or depressed about something we don’t know that much about.
Gabriel Gatehouse and the “Ukrainian Nazi” Archetype
For instance, in the case of any story about Ukrainian Nazis — this week we saw some really disappointing material. People I had already written off. This guy, Gabriel Gatehouse, who is a BBC journalist — I really enjoyed his show on one of Russia’s chief ideologues, Vladislav Surkov, which in my early days trying to learn about all of this, I found really interesting. All of the facts that Gatehouse elucidates about Surkov, who is a Russian ideologue.
Then Gatehouse tweets this nonsense about the head of MI6’s ancestors — the new foreign intelligence service chief in the UK — without any self-awareness that he’s completely falling for the troll and perpetuating this “Ukrainian Nazi” archetype. It didn’t surprise me with him, but it did sadden me, because someone like him holds himself up as a great interpreter of Russian disinfolklore, and yet he just gets triggered into perpetuating this archetypal character of the Ukrainian Nazi. He should have known better than to do that. It doesn’t surprise me, but it does disappoint me.
Titushky: Fake Demonstrations from Ukraine to Europe
Going back to protest actions, demonstrations — most people aren’t aware, including perhaps the people you were speaking to today, Wendy — they aren’t aware of how demonstrations can be organised in a fake way.
When I first came across the term titushky around 2017, I didn’t know anything about it. The idea that demonstrations weren’t organic was a real surprise to me. A guy came to me in Dnipro when I was working for the OSCE there, who was one of the chief organisers of titushky. He could get a crowd of people in any period of time, really quickly, any size, any dimensions. He could get you 200 grannies to protest outside a law firm in an hour. He could get you younger people, tracksuits, violent people, whatever.
He came to me and to my mission because he was under a bit of pressure from some other titushky leader. I think he just wanted a bit of protection. I spoke to him at length. He came to our office and explained what he did and how it worked.
Ever since then, I’ve been tuned into this phenomenon of people being paid to protest — agents provocateurs. I’ll always remember what he said when I asked him, “How did you get into this game?” He said, “Well, in my first year at university, I just realised I had a talent for organising people.” At the time in Ukraine, there were these huge protests which had been organised by Kolomoisky to protest that his bank, PrivatBank, had been nationalised.
In my mind, because of these protests, Kolomoisky went from being a bit of a hero — because he had raised and funded two battalions, Dnipro I and II, in Dnipro, which held Russia back. There’s a reason why Russia can’t to this day take all of Donetsk and all of Luhansk, and it’s because they’re rubbish on the battlefield. They cannot. Any of us who listen to Chuck Pfarrer will understand the mechanics of it. You don’t need to listen to Chuck Pfarrer to understand the second army in the world is bogged down 1,200 kilometres east of Kyiv — that’s the battle space.
The informational battle space — they’re trying to win on that front, and Ukraine’s allies can be depressed or not. Ukraine, from my perspective, we’re in a lot better state than we were two years ago. I actually have absolutely zero concern today when I heard that Macron has spoken to Putin. I don’t think for a second Ukraine is going to be abandoned.
I’m watching all of the new factories being built, the Danish model being extended outwards. The NASAMs are going to be, I think I’m right in saying, manufactured inside Ukraine. Every time you turn around, Norway’s dropping another few billion on the table as well. They should. The Scandinavian countries — everyone is tooling up.
I have no concern that I did have two years ago. That doesn’t mean other people can’t have concerns. When you understand that there are these fake demonstrations and you’ve read the FBI indictments about them that have happened in the United States over the past few years, then you can really look beyond the news of these post-October 7th Palestine actions.
I’m in no way denigrating anyone who supports a free Palestine and a Palestinian state. I’m merely talking about the post-October 7th manifestations which will be used by people in America and in Western countries — and already are — to create tumult and chaos.
Once you know about these facts, when you hear about these demonstrations, you’re looking for: what is the energy inside them? Could they be fake? Is there a Russia connection? Is there an Iranian connection? Is TikTok involved? Is the CCP involved? Is Telegram involved?
There was some anti-immigrant stuff in Ireland recently organised by Telegram up in Ballymena in Northern Ireland — a place which is actually unusual for unrest because it’s so monolithic. Telegram was involved in organising protests there which turned violent over two Romanian boys. When I looked into it, once I saw that Telegram was involved, I thought, okay, well, here we go.
I think this is one example on these fake demonstrations. We can help educate people who don’t know that much about it.
Titushky’s Redemption
Titushky, by the way — the first Titushky — last I heard, he was actually in the Ukrainian army. He did organise violent protests in favour of Yanukovych for Paul Manafort, Trump’s adviser — the jailed Paul Manafort, who was jailed for working as a foreign agent without registering it and tax evasion. Now he’s back in the inner fold.
Manafort’s energy — the strong energy of Manafort — is in all of what is going on. I see it in almost everything happening at the moment. Titushky, last I heard about a year ago, was in the Ukrainian army and fighting for Ukraine. He had been paid to launch these fights against protesters, but now he’s fighting for Ukraine. That’s a positive — it’s both true and positive.
I wouldn’t just talk about positive things. I’d also talk about giving people the information so they know there is such a thing as fake demonstrations. Those of us who come from innocent backgrounds in America or Ireland or England — we just wouldn’t imagine that the gilets jaunes in Paris, that the people who sparked that might have been paid by the Russians and organised by Surkov.
Once you find out that this is possible and also very prevalent, then you can look for the energy in similar kinds of protests. Tell people, try and explain it as I do online, as I’m doing right now. Especially if my prediction comes true over the coming months, we’re really in for a rocky few months or years because of this attack on Iran and the blowback that’s going to come from it.
Hopefully next week I can talk about incoming and outgoing troll radars.
See Maurice Yolles, 2025. “The Psychological Impact of Technology: Narrative Memetics and Psychosocial Contagion in Digital Network,” Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics, in: Patrizia Gazzola & Gandolfo Dominici (ed.), Technology and Society - Boon or Bane?, pages 16-43, Springer.
