Disinfolklore

About Disinfolklore

Decoding Trolls's "Battling Archetypes" podcast applies the Twelve Tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method (see Disinfolklore.eu) to the folklore-like structures hiding inside modern propaganda, memes, and geopolitics. Each episode decodes how Russia, MAGA, and other Disinfolklorists archetype reality. Infolklore, by contrast, is a first-order creative practice: the active, conscious, Code of Positive Trolls-observant deployment of folklore-like archetypes in the service of generosity, right, patience, creative Mana, focus, and insight. This channel helps us learn to see the immanence of Infolklore and Disinfolklore in our information streams. www.disinfolklore.net (https://www.disinfolklore.net?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Disinfolklore

Category

news · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

21 Dec 2024

Latest episode

15 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

73 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   15 Oct 2026

   Podcast | Real Ukraine, Future russia, and Tools Three and Four

   This week brings a little more of Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-outflank-dugin-dont-rebut), and a bit of the principles of Infolklore. It also brings the end of Future russia, Real Ukraine (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/p/podcast-future-russia-the-pattern). Or, as I now call it, Real Ukraine, future russia, with a small r. President Zelenskyy is playing a blinder My view is that President Zelenskyy is playing a blinder, as the English would say. He has been dealt quite a bad hand over the last few weeks. We are going through one of those cycles we have all been through many times before. He has flushed out Donald and Putler by offering this ceasefire. He knows, of course, it will never be taken up. So it is a safe offer. He also knows that no action he takes, or Ukraine takes, will help get aid from the United States and from Donald. So he models peacefulness and a wish to make a deal. It will not help with America. But it builds capital for after the midterms, and for the long term. I see him trolling America, Donald and russia along. He knows well what Donald and the people around him do not seem to understand, or do not care to, because of whatever compromise is going on. The more you offer peace to the russians, the more they think you are weak. That goes for Donald too. So they think Ukraine and America are very weak. Constitutionally, peace is almost impossible for them. Remember Lavrov’s and Peskov’s words this week: no, we will not take a break. So it is very easy to troll the russians. Reflexive control works very well on this front. I focus on the front. What may be happening east of the Donets River is a very important milestone in Ukraine’s battlefield success. The mid-range strikes go on. There are these Academy Award-winning strikes on the data centres, and now Sberbank’s, which is a beautiful hit. When I was a diplomat in Dnipro, I went to see the board of PrivatBank when the state took it over. We talked about the vulnerability of data centres. It never crossed my mind, as I sat in that room with the then CEO of PrivatBank, that Ukraine would one day destroy Sberbank’s new data centre. Let’s hope to see more of those. That is what I focus on, rather than all the Starlink noise. Real and future russia Real and future russia is my new analytical lens. I use it to look at any national or nationalist movement. Such a movement may define itself by looking backwards. But it must mainly define itself by looking forwards. In Ukraine’s case that means building a modern European state without corruption, along the lines the European Union models. It means a state brilliant at nurturing its children’s destinies, educating them properly, and turning out critically minded humans. It means looking away from the Soviet legacy. That is a movement all countries must go through, in my humble opinion, in varying degrees and at various times. Future russia, real russia, will be the russia around St Petersburg and Moscow, with a few forests around them and a population of perhaps 20 million. It has a good chance to be a good state. It has good universities, museums and human capital. It will have to pay its debts, as will all the other former Ruschist Federation countries. But whenever we hear any russian, with a small r, speak about the past, mining grievance, Peter the Great, any of that nonsense, past glories in any disguise, we know it is old russia speaking. Historical russia. That person must be given no power and no entitlement to control of the information space or of economic resources. That should be a condition of any economic aid from the European Union, China or any other great power. Talking about history and the past is a luxury. A country and a national culture can afford it when they are not murdering people by the million in pursuit of a historical goal that was untrue and never existed, instead of building a modern nation state. An apparent contradiction This is where I ended a couple of weeks ago. There may seem to be a contradiction here. My main intellectual project, as many of you know, is to re-centre Ukraine in the story of humanity over the past 6,000 years: of Indo-European linguistic, cultural, religious and human development. Yet I also hold an absolute ban on entertaining any historical russia. The Bolshoi, the ballet, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, all of that imperialist nonsense, however wonderful some of the art is, and however derivative of Western European art in many cases. Future russia is asked to leave its history alone and live on the map, within the borders it ends up with after its withdrawal from 100% of Ukraine. So why should Ukraine not do the same? Because re-centring Ukraine is not a claim on anyone’s land. It is a claim on our attention. The difference between the two is the difference between the historical lens and the real lens. Identity is wholly a function of stories The narrow version of the project affords Ukraine what every sovereign culture already has. Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 1 Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 2 Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 3 Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 4 Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 5 Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 6 In 1777 Johann Gottfried Herder asked where Germany’s Shakespeare was. As I have written, “The modern nation state was created after Herder’s 1777 plea to unite the 10 German tribes behind a set of stories (folklore or more accurately folksongs) typifying Germanness. The Brothers Grimm, Goethe and later Wagner answered that call. And 90 years later the first unified German state was created.” Identity is wholly a function of stories. Some of you will remember that I came to this realisation in eastern Ukraine. russia understands it too. That is why it is so brilliant at Disinfolklore, and why Donald is. Disinfolklore also creates identity, by telling mean stories and injecting meanness into our minds. It creates just as strong a sense of identity as the positive stories do. Think of Greece. We think of Athens and ancient Athens. But the first capital of modern Greece was not Athens. Choosing Athens was a way to attach some of that ancientness to the modern state of Greece, a wholly new, invented country, like Germany, like Switzerland, like Belgium. And this week we saw Rubio, the complete ingénue, in front of the Acropolis, talking about Western civilisation, or values he learned as an undergraduate, probably when Huntington was all the rage. It was such an embarrassment. Huntington took a whole set of Indo-European cultures and chose Islam as his main dividing line. Given what I have looked into of ancient Iran, and since it was ancient Iranian scholars who largely systematised Islam, I see Islam as an Indo-European religion, as I see Christianity. By making their war in Iran, they are doing what Huntington asked of them. But for him to stand before the Acropolis banging on about this is just so embarrassing. If you saw any of his speech, he is probably the worst orator ever. He has absolutely no sense of pace, for such a portentous speech meant to lead into his presidential ambitions. That is, if he is not in The Hague, or in prison, guilty of war crimes. My point is this. We know all about ancient Greek. But the modern Greek state is related to it only through stories, and by having its capital at Athens. It is the same with Germany, and with Italy, also a fairly recent state, from around 1870. The collectors and the states they made The same work made most of the states we now take for granted. “You see most European states alive today are a function of the national consciousness wrought from the folklore collectors’ work, inspired by Ossian, Herder and Brothers Grimm,” I wrote in November 2024. The Ossian tales turned out, in the end, to be faked. “States which had never existed before - Greece, Finland, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Belgium,.. were all created out of this work.” All of us who take part in the national cultures of the states we belong to have won the lottery in many ways. Others have not. The Assyrians, the Kurds, the Palestinians. Tens of thousands of amazing cultures and peoples never made it. Then there are the Manchu, who ruled China for centuries. Around 1911 they lost power in a revolution. Today you would be lucky to find more than a handful of people who identify as Manchu. Great cultures disappear all the time. They lose control of the states they ran. I believe this is what will happen to russia. It will be well deserved. They should not regret it or be afraid of it, because it has happened countless times before. It does not involve mass death. It involves new memories. Take Vilnius. Polish schoolchildren still learn Pan Tadeusz, Mickiewicz’s poem that opens with Lithuania, and Vilnius was long thought of as a Polish city. But Vilnius is in Lithuania. Short of the Law and Justice party going in to take it back, nobody talks of this as a problem. It is a perfectly normal development in human relations. So russians should not be afraid of their country disappearing in that way. Ukraine is one of those states. Its songs and its poets, Taras Shevchenko first among them, made a nation of a people the empire called a province. As Timothy Snyder (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/timothy-snyders-move) has written, “The earliest articulation of Ukrainian patriotism by russian subjects came from the left bank, from the new university at Kharkiv, in the 1820s and 1830s.” russia is relentlessly trying to destroy that city today. In August 2022, as russia shelled Kharkiv, I wrote that by destroying the buildings of the university where the idea of modern Ukraine was born, Muscovy could not turn back time. It was too late. From the first days of the full-scale invasion, my mission was, in the words I used later, “to campaign for parity of esteem between Ukraine and other modern nation states which have won the monopoly, by fair means or foul.” There are only around 190 of us with a protected nation state. Ukraine was a founding member of the United Nations. It signed the Charter as a sovereign in 1945. On the eightieth anniversary of D-Day, in June 2024, I wrote of Ukraine taking its rightful place “on the basis of equality and parity of esteem” among the great European peoples who, in the post-war legal order, became “sovereign, secure and prosperous nation states.” Positive nationalism That is positive nationalism. The collectors of the nineteenth century were recording a culture that existed. As I put it in 2024, “the collection of folktale songs during 18th and 19th centuries was a good faith attempt to record actual existing culture”. It gave peoples a voice and, in the end, a state. Its counterfeit came later, in Serbia and its poets in the early 1990s, and in russia, which inspired much of the genocide there. “Serbia and its controller Ruschia, however, inspired by such positive nationalism created a new genre - Disinfolklore.” Disinfolklore takes the collectors’ tools and uses them to plant a negative identity: an enemy, a grievance, a lost land that must be regained, even if it costs millions of souls, much blood and much treasure. Ukraine today is positive nationalism at work. A whole society has mobilised against an unlawful invasion. Soldiers and medics. Drone makers in garages. Volunteers weaving camouflage nets. Teachers holding lessons underground in Kharkiv’s metro. Farmers clearing mines from their own fields to grow food to feed the world. It is exercising the right of self-defence that Article 51 of the UN Charter recognises. Its aim is not a lost province. It is not fighting to take Rostov or Bryansk. As I said in March 2026, “Ukraine has one strategic goal in this war: to destroy russia’s capability to invade Ukraine again, permanently.” That is what I mean when I say President Zelenskyy is trolling Donald and russia to their respective dooms. It is not good enough for Russia to withdraw today, because it might survive as a state on its current borders. That is not the proper outcome of this war, unless russia becomes as contrite as Germany and Japan were. Germany went without half of its country for forty years as a mark of its penance. We see no sign of that among the Ruschists in control today. There are many real russians. Garry Kasparov, Ilya Ponomarev, Sergei Sumlenny and a few others understand what I am saying in their bones. They are not yet a massive force. But as Lenin himself showed, you do not need a massive force to create a new state. You need a bit of luck, and Ukraine on your side. Ukraine’s soldiers are dying for a free and sovereign Ukraine and its civilians, not for a map of lost provinces. A sovereign country does not wait to be rescued. Allies can help, and should help far more than they have. But they cannot be Ukraine’s state for it. Ukraine is doing the rest itself, with its own drones, its own long-range strikes and its own defence industry. When positive nationalism reaches for history, it reaches for true history. It does not let history outweigh the present, or our idea of the future. It does not troll a people into breaking into other people’s lands and defying international law. Even true history does not decide how we see the present. It does not override the post-war legal order, or the protection of human rights and of our dignity as humans, which that order exists to secure. That is the essence of positive nationalism, and of Real Ukraine. A real Ireland, for instance, faces the same questions, and so does England, in Scotland and Wales, and so do other great European countries. Some have achieved statehood. Others may yet, but only if they offer a positive vision of the future: modern European states whose only goal is the self-realisation of their people, in modern knowledge economies, using all the amazing things available to us today. Our ancestors literally died to secure them for us. I said it plainly at the end of 2024: “What matters is the international rules-based order as established.” That is the narrow version, and the limits of what it would mean for Ukraine. But it applies to any movement in any country that harks back to some great mythical past as a way of trolling its people, its voters or its subjects into wars for new territory. Six thousand years The wide version is my real project, the Finding Manuland (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/finding-manuland-i) project. Manuland is “an imaginary community radiating around the hub of the modern state of Ukraine and stretching from India to Ireland”. I gave it that name in the autumn of 2021, towards the end of my posting to Ukraine. For three centuries Europe told itself a different story. The origin of its languages and its gods was placed in India, or in the German forests, or in Greece and Rome. Those mental models were built long before archaeogenetics, and in good faith. “The idea that Western culture was founded in ancient Greece or ancient Rome has been relentlessly promoted, and in good faith.” Ancient Greece is just one daughter of Indo-European culture, privileged because we have amazing written records. Soviet archaeology added a layer of its own. It “managed to troll many linguists, archaeologists, archaeogeneticists, historians and Comparative Mythologists/ theologians into using formulae like ‘Steppe Ancestry,’ ‘Southern russia,’ or ‘Pontic Caspian Steppe’” for the Ukrainian homeland of Indo-European culture. In early February 2022, days before the full-scale invasion, I visited the museum at Halle, home of the Nebra sky disc. Germany’s president, Steinmeier, had written the introduction to its exhibition guide. I wrote that year that, even after all his years on Ukraine, the guide spoke of the people who founded modern Germany as coming from “southern russia” instead of Ukraine. The ancient DNA now says where that story begins. None of these amazing facts licenses modern Ukraine to anything, any more than Rome licenses modern Italy to anything. In April 2022, while France hesitated over Crimea, I made the point as a joke: perhaps Italy could retake Nice. It is basically Rome. Nice belonged to the Kingdom of Sardinia until 1860, when a referendum took it into France. Nobody in Rome thinks the Caesars give Italy a claim on Nice, or that Pericles gives Greece a claim on Sicily. The glory of the ancients belongs to all their descendants and to the land that raised them. It confers nothing on anyone’s army or anyone’s government today. A Historical Ukraine is possible too The lens applies to Ukraine on its own terms, and not only as russia’s mirror. A Historical Ukraine is possible too. It would treat the last 6,000 years as a title deed. Ancient Ukrainians did march from Ireland to India for two thousand years after 4000 BCE. We are the emanation of that, speaking descendants of the Indo-European languages first forged in Ukraine. Historical Ukraine would look east to the Kuban and the country around Kursk and Belgorod, where Ukrainian was long spoken, and call them lost provinces. It would turn Ukraine’s suffering into a doctrine, like the Russkiy mir. It would keep an enemy for ever to explain it. Such voices exist. In September 2022 I wrote: “Muscovy’s rather lucky that President Z is strong enough to ensure Ukrainians settle for ejecting Ruschia from within Ukraine’s 1991 borders.” And in the same post: “Some voices call for restoration of Ukraine’s historical lands.” So Real Ukraine is the 1991 borders. Historical Ukraine could be anything from those borders to all the lands between Ireland and India. Ukraine’s government has held to the 1991 borders through the whole war. That is Real Ukraine speaking, on the record. Real Ukraine keeps its history true and lawful, the terrible parts with the glorious, because true history is the only kind positive nationalism can use. So this is Real Ukraine. It holds 100% of its sovereign territory, Crimea included, having won a war against a country that once covered a sixth of the world’s surface. It holds the stories it has earned by smiting russia. On the anniversary of russia’s retreat from Zmiinyi, Snake Island, I wrote (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/zmiiny-snake-island-attests-to-ukraines): “Immanent in Ukraine is the Mana of the whole of Indo-European civilisation.” The oldest Indo-European story of all is the herdsman Trito (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/saviour-trita-and-dragon-serpent) winning back his stolen cattle, his capital, and “in every iteration of the story since 1,200 BCE Trito ALWAYS wins.” In a hundred years, children in Muscovy will be told: “Don’t go west of the Don. Dragons live there.” Real Ukraine holds its place as the land that nourished the Yamna. Their language, culture and religion now live in the minds of more than half of humanity, across the whole space between Ireland and India. That place is territorial, not ethnic. It is a ground shared by all of us who descend from it, and owned by none of us, Ukraine included. The History Provocation Put it to the test of what I call the History Provocation (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/p/podcast-when-history-becomes-war). What makes history a provocation is what it does. Historical russia’s history claims its neighbour’s land, names an enemy, and drags every audience back into the past. Real Ukraine’s 6,000 years claim no one’s land. They need no enemy. They ask for parity of esteem. That is the whole difference. The job of Real Ukraine is the job of every real country: to build its future. Its economy, its human capital, its universities and engineers, the farms of its black earth, the young people who will come home when the war is won. It rests on the people who get up every morning and build it. Engineers, farmers, shopkeepers, bus drivers, programmers, teachers. The deep past is there to be proud of, to be studied and to be visited. It is not there to be fought over. If russia wants to argue on history’s ground Suppose Future russia still wants to argue on the ground of history. It will lose there too. russia takes its name from the Kyivan Rus’. Moscow’s claim to be the Third Rome is ironic “when we discover that in ancient Ukraine is the origins of the actual First Rome.” Even Moscow’s church turns out to be imported. In 2021 the historian Ievgeniia Sakal completed a doctoral thesis at Yale, The Imported Church. It “shows that the key texts of the russian Orthodox Church were rarely russian in origin. The russian Church coopted texts of late Byzantine origin, texts produced by Ukrainians and Belorusians, and texts produced by Catholics and Protestants in the West.” Belarusians, like my own ancestors. Having faced “a legitimate and sophisticated Ukrainian Church”, she writes, the russian Church “was forced to adopt the scholastic culture of the Ukrainian Church”. Byzantium, the Ukrainians and Belarusians, the Catholic and Protestant West: every source it borrowed from is Indo-European, and so is the language of its scripture. So if Future russia still wants to play the game of Historical russia, it should know how the game ends. Historical russia is Ukraine. Rus’ was Kyiv’s name before it was Moscow’s, and the Moscow that calls itself the Third Rome took its church learning from Kyiv and from the rest of the Indo-European world. The history of the land of Ukraine runs far deeper than Rus’. Ancient Ukraine is the matrix of every living Indo-European language, religion and culture, of the Greek in which the Gospels reached the world, and of much that Christianity carried across Europe. On history’s ground, Ukraine wins, and wins everything. But that is not the ground we argue on. We argue on what is real today: sovereign territory, the law and the record. The longer view of history is not a title deed. It is the story of all of us. The bones of Potemkin On 1 October 2022 I wrote that “the real Potemkin is buried in Kherson”, and wondered whether he would still be there when the russians left. He was not. On 3 November the New York Times reported from the city as the occupation administration pulled out: “They even took the bones of Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin, the 18th-century commander who helped Catherine the Great conquer southern Ukraine.” The German Catherine, the so-called Great. Eight days later Ukraine was back in Kherson (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/humanitys-future-began-in-kherson). Historical russia left the city carrying its history in a box. Ukraine kept the city, and the steppe around it that nourished the Yamna 6,000 years before. Future russia will have to decide which it wants to be: the russia that carries the bones, or the russia that lets them go. I will keep working on this idea. We can use the dichotomy to tell the russians we can do business with in future from the kind who would drag us back into the past, so that we can avoid them. Outflank Dugin: the Cheburashka artefact Now to Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut. You may remember that I began with the Cheburashka artefact. Here it is again. Someone corrected my pronunciation, and I am sure I still have it wrong. This is what Dugin, a so-called philosopher, wrote: “Cheburashka is not an innocent creature. He is a toxic mutant. A demon of the moon. His true name is Sherdbar Shemot Shertatan: the demon in the name of Satan. Cheburashka destroys the traditional identity of the russian child. He is not a bear. He is not a hare. He is a rootless cosmopolitan. He has no parents. He has no nationality. He might be Jewish, though. He is a symbol of liberal post-humanism, sent to destroy the russian archetype.” As I say in the preface, that is all you need to know when deciding whether Dugin is a philosopher. Philosophers do not write in those terms about a children’s cartoon. Security-service operatives do. They are trying to hack minds, to brainwash people, to attach the security service’s archetype of what russia means to a cartoon character and inject it into the minds of unsuspecting russians. It is a monstrous perversion of what any real philosopher would do. The thesis is in the title. Outflank Dugin, don’t rebut. To outflank him, I simply set out the Cheburashka artefact and then walk through the twelve tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/disinfolklore-twelve-tools-to-deploy). Last time I covered Tool One, archetypal literacy. Tool One, in this week’s news This week, whenever Donald talks about making peace, he is playing the Merciful Sovereign, implausibly. When the AfD politician says all that German money has been wasted on Ukraine, she is playing the Protective Sovereign, protecting your money. We know it is nonsense. If German money is not spent on stopping the harm to Ukraine, the russians will be at Germany’s door. They already are. So archetypal literacy helps us discern the Mana in memes in real time. Today the Mana, the energy, in all the Starlink business is coercive control. We know how Donald and Putler operate. And from this new film about Elon, they are coercive control addicts (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/mana-of-coercive-control). Winning people’s consent freely does not interest them. They have to force it. Their addiction to coercive control runs so deep that even with a losing case, like trying to force Ukraine to surrender to genocide, they keep doing it. Whether they cut off Starlink, or pretend to want peace, or pretend to care about Ukrainians, we can spot the archetype immanent in their actions. Once we see that archetype, we can judge that they are coercive control addicts. Ukrainians and their leaders did that long ago. They are navigating their way. And, I believe, they are trolling russia further towards its doom, by refusing to submit in any way that gives russia hope and makes it double down. Tool Two: troll radars, incoming and outgoing Tool Two is the troll radars, incoming (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/incoming-troll-radar) or outgoing. The question is this. Is the artefact I am meeting incoming to my mind, a russian or MAGA apparatus deployment directed at me? Or is it outgoing from my mind, something I am about to transmit? When we ask, should I share this, should I voice this, the outgoing troll radar applies. When it is coming in, the incoming troll radar applies. Put to the Cheburashka artefact, the question returns: incoming. It is a piece of russian apparatus communication directed at its reader, and it needs immediate cognitive gatekeeping. Tool Two licenses the conscious gatekeeping that follows. I should have given a spoiler alert. None of this is especially original. All that is original is the attempt to give a memorable mental algorithm, parts of which we might recall in the moments we need them. The name comes from my Stanytsia Luhanska bridge years. The russian occupation forces on the far side of the bridge included, by their own designation, bridge-troll operators. Their job was to harass, demoralise and confuse the Ukrainian and OSCE personnel approaching the crossing. I learned fast to develop radars for the bridge-troll deployments in real time, to keep my team and myself alive and on top of things. I learned to tell a genuine logistical question from a deployment designed to confuse, and a genuine concern from a deployment designed to delay. The detection tool was a literal radar. I learned to switch it on every morning on my way to work on the bridge. The tool transfers exactly to work in the information space. It worked in real time with the russian occupiers I had to negotiate with. And I can switch the incoming troll radar on when I read the news or my timeline, or when a particular piece of news troubles me. Much of what we are seeing at the moment fits the archetype of the information bomb (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-plagued-by-information-bombs), which I spoke about last week in terms of the plague. Does anyone remember the plague? There was one for a while. Nobody remembers it now. It was an information bomb. It exploded, dissipated and left. Now a new information bomb is sucking up all our energy, our anger and our emotion. The incoming troll radar can help us notice it before we let it fully into our minds and get really activated by it. The outgoing troll radar (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/outgoing-troll-radar) matters just as much, for our own mental hygiene and for others. It is the question we ask of our own work. Am I about to deploy something? This paragraph I am writing, this post I am about to retweet, this message I am about to forward to a friend: is it generous, ethical, patient, focused, insightful? Today I had this experience for about the nine-hundredth time over one particular issue. There has been no progress whatsoever in how the other side presents the data. For about the fifth time, I wrote a reply. It was very well argued. But immanent in it was my extreme annoyance that, six months on, we seem to be getting nowhere. I half knew, even as I wrote it, that I would never send it. I have written so many versions. By the time I had perfectly sculpted it, I had decided not to send it. My outgoing troll radar stopped me. Had I sent it, I would regret it now, because it would make no difference. In six months I will still be going round this cycle. But the concept helped. It stopped me expressing my anger in a way that would help neither me nor the other person. The outgoing troll radar, like everything in the Disinfolklore method, runs on the Code of Positive Trolls (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/code-of-positive-trolls). Is it generous? Is it ethical? Is it patient? Is it focused? Is it insightful? Had I sent that message today, it would not have been generous. It may have been right. It certainly was not patient. Its energy was my annoyance. Was it insightful? Quite, I thought, the way I had worded it. But everything else outweighed that, and the person I sent it to would have been really upset. On the other hand, there was a photograph doing the rounds today that I had not looked at closely. It was of hands, in the aftermath of a russian strike. I am sure we all saw it. On Twitter now it is impossible to hide the photos, as you could in the past. So I have to scan past them. But I had read that it showed a mother and her daughter, holding hands as they died from the russian missiles. The mother-and-maiden archetype really worked on me. When I came across it again today, I looked more closely and saw that the description was true. I took the decision, knowingly, to share it. Those who promote russia, or the terrible things MAGA is doing to facilitate russia’s war crimes, must face the consequences of what they do. After a lot of thought, it made me feel a little better to make that small contribution. Maybe it will meet the eyes of someone who had sympathy for Putler or for Donald, and they will realise what is at stake. That was a knowing decision. The outgoing radar asks: am I about to transmit a russian apparatus deployment unwittingly? It prevents the unwitting transmission. Of the two, the outgoing radar is the more important. Tool Two, in full operation, keeps both radars on continuously, especially when we are out in the world or on our timeline. All the tools are on Disinfolklore.eu, my reworked website. I spent a lot of time on it this week, with new colours. It is great. Tool Three: look for the Mana in the meme Tool Three is look for the Mana in the meme (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/look-for-the-mana-in-the-meme). Mana. The word is universal in human cognition. It appears under different names in every human society we have evidence for. The Romans had numen, numinous power. Numen is also the name of the MAGA political consultancy linked to Brad Parscale, caught up in a huge scandal in South America at the moment, in Argentina, and in Romania, and probably in Bulgaria and elsewhere. But the Romans had numen first. The Sanskrit-speaking Vedic Indians had brahman, sacred force, and prāṇa, vital breath-power. The Chinese had, and have, chi or qi, the vital animating energy that moves through bodies, places and texts. The Tibetan Buddhists have byin rlabs, blessing-power transmissible from teacher to student. The Avestan-speaking Iranians had khvarenah, the glory that legitimates the sovereign. The Hebrew Bible has kavod, the glory that fills the tabernacle. The Christians have grace. The Quakers have the light. The Wiccans have power. The Polynesian and Māori speakers, from whom the English word is borrowed, have Mana. Robert Codrington introduced the term to Western anthropology in 1891, and Marcel Mauss universalised it in his Essai sur le don, The Gift, of 1925. The Jungians have psychic energy. The surrealists have X-energy. The synchronicity-readers have the unobserved coincidence-pattern. English speakers, under a hundred different working names, have it too. Charisma. Aura. Gravitas. Authority. Energy. Different words, same underlying observation. There is some quality, some charge, some energy, some Mana, that attaches to certain people, places, objects, texts, words and sounds, and gives them outsized effect on the people they meet. I use the word Mana as the shortest working English term for that universal observation. It deliberately echoes Manu, the first human in Indian culture. And Mannus, the first human in the Germanic tradition. And Manannán, the pre-eminent pre-Christian deity of Ireland. And Manawydan in Welsh, and Menua in the Armenian highlands. So Mana seemed the right word. But it describes a universal quality, noticed universally. In the Indo-European inheritance the same observation is carried by the M-N- sound family: mind, meaning, human, monarch, mantra, and moon itself. All descend from one Proto-Indo-European root first spoken on the Ukrainian steppe, at Mykhailivka village in Kherson Oblast, just over the border from Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia, roughly 6,000 years ago. Mana sits at the headwaters of that river, of the Don, the Dnipro, the Donets, the Dnister and the Danube. Mana, chi, prāṇa, numen, byin rlabs, khvarenah, grace, X-energy. The same phenomenon, observed independently by every cognitively serious human tradition. So when you meet a meme that has a particular grip on your mind and your emotions, that grip is what I call, for short, the Mana in the meme. Tool Three asks: what is the Mana in this meme? What energy does the artefact carry? Is it positive, negative or neutral? Generative or destructive? Uplifting or degrading? Put to the Cheburashka artefact, the question returns strongly negative Mana. The artefact’s energy is aimed at destroying a beloved object of childhood affection, to reroute tender attachment into suspicion of hidden enemies in one’s own community. The Mana is annihilation dressed as protection. The verdict is uniformly negative. A second example, to fix the tool. Consider this artefact. “Saint Patrick crossed the Irish Sea in a small open boat with a handful of monks, carrying a Latin book, and converted a pagan island to a literate Christian one within a hundred and fifty years.” The Mana of that sentence is positive, generative, brave, civilising. Deploying it would serve a hopeful, uplifting view of Irish cultural inheritance. Compare: “The Welsh people are essentially a remnant population of slaves descended from the conquered Britons, displaced by superior Anglo-Saxon stock to the marginal western mountains.” That sentence carries strongly negative Mana. It degrades. It dehumanises. It dispossesses. It is also, incidentally, untrue, archaeogenetically and linguistically. But Tool Three is not yet the truth tool. It asks only about the Mana: the energy, the direction of the meme, the feeling you get when it touches the Mana inside you, your own energy. Tool Seven will ask about truth. Now the harder half, which is why the Patrick specimen sits here rather than a cleaner one. Its Mana is positive, and its history is wrong. Patrick did not arrive in an empty religious field. He came to a country with its own gods and its own Indo-European inheritance. What followed looks less like a rupture than like one Indo-European religion, Christianity, exploiting its likeness to another (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/why-not-celebrate-st-patricks-day). Old wine, new bottle. The word pagan does the concealing work, because it names what was already there as an absence. So the tool returns positive, and the tool is right. Mana valence is not truth value. A sentence can be generative, brave and civilising in its energy and false in its history at the same moment. Generous Mana conceals better than hostile Mana does, because it disarms. That holds for a meme on a timeline, for history in a book, or for how another human being relates to us. The Welsh sentence puts a reader on guard. The Patrick sentence does not, and needs it more. Let that be a lesson. When Donald is being nice and generous to you, that is when you are really in trouble. In a way Tool Three is the simplest tool. It asks the question a careful reader already asks: what kind of energy does this thing carry? The tool just gives the question a name and a discipline. Apply it consciously. Detecting Mana is part of every careful reading. Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut Episode 1 Episode 2 - July 23 Ep 3 - July 30 Ep 4 - Aug 6 Ep 5 - 10 Sept Ep 6 - 16 Sept Ep 7 - 23 Sept podcast-grass-whispering-infolklore (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-grass-whispering-infolklore) Tool Four: the inner and outer realm One more tool, the last for today. There are twelve in the Disinfolklore analytical method, and this is Tool Four: the inner realm and the outer realm. Every human mind, in this framework, has two realms. The inner realm is the realm of the family, the body, the household, the close circle: the things one tends and is responsible for. The outer realm is the realm of the polis, the nation, the foreign country, the world. The Mexicans, as Donald would say. The two realms have different rules. The inner realm runs on relationship and care. The outer realm runs on rule and reciprocity. Mature cultures and mature individuals understand the distinction and run both realms competently. Pathological cultures and individuals confuse them. They treat inner-realm subjects by outer-realm rules: the parent who runs the family like a corporation. Or they treat outer-realm subjects by inner-realm rules: the politician who treats the state like a private fiefdom. Not looking at you, Donald. Russia’s apparatus deployments characteristically target one realm or both, in calculated ways. The Cheburashka artefact targets both. It targets the inner realm by taking a tender object of childhood, a cartoon character beloved in Russian families, and recoding it as a hidden enemy inside the household: a cosmopolitan with no parents, no nationality, possibly Jewish, sent to destroy the Russian archetype. So Dugin says. It targets the outer realm by recoding the same object as a cultural and political threat at national level. It sneaks into the nursery, the inner realm, but what it is really after is the outer realm. Cheburashka becomes a symbol of liberal post-humanism in the great continental war that Rubio, too, is trying to fight against Western liberalism. The artefact’s craft lies in firing on both realms at once. Tool Four asks: which realm is this meme’s deployment targeting? Once you have the answer, you know what kind of defensive gatekeeping to apply. If the inner realm is targeted, the deployment is going for the listener’s family, childhood and emotional substrate. Tighten the gatekeeping there. Don’t let them in. If the outer realm is targeted, the realm of our governance, our community, our country, the deployment is going for the listener’s political and civic substrate. Much of the patriotism in modern populist movements is, from my perspective, completely fake, and it targets the outer realm. Tighten the gatekeeping there too. If both are targeted at once, you are looking at a high-craft apparatus deployment doing several things at the same time. If you do not have the mental energy, the capacity or the brainpower for it in that moment, or at all, the best thing is to put up the incoming troll radar and get out of there. Delete the meme. Delete the email. Do not get involved. But if you are going to push back and fight back, understand how complex it is, so that you can plan your strategy accordingly. I’ll leave it there for this week. Principles of Infolklore Ep 1 - Aug 20 Ep 2 - Aug 27 Ep 3 - 3 Sept Ep 4 - 10 Sept Ep 5 - 17 Sept Ep 6 - 23 September Russia cognitive warfare map https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/4a6cab62740646d48b36cbbce9d47814/page/Page (https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/4a6cab62740646d48b36cbbce9d47814/page/Page) Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe (https://www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   7 Oct 2026

   Podcast | Plagued by Information Bombs and Actor Sovereigns’ Costumes

   I thought we’d start off with a bit of plague. That’s a joke. We’re actually going to start with a bit of Disinfolklore (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/disinfolklore) about a plague. A non-existent plague, in my humble opinion. We’re going to look at the plague story as a story, as an item of Disinfolklore, which is what all this is about. A story, not a pathogen It’s been a very busy week. In the first week of October a story went around the world. A laboratory in Siberia. A worker taken ill. A test tube, perhaps. Very graphic. All of us can remember test tubes from school. I’d be surprised if they even use test tubes these days. Pneumonia, as someone quipped. Let’s just hope Donald doesn’t work out there’s a P in pneumonia. We’ll never hear the end of it. That’s a play on his Democrats thing, and the B at the end of dumb. If he finds out there’s a P at the beginning of pneumonia, perhaps plague, he will never stop plaguing us with his pneumonic plays on words. Two hundred people under observation. A hospital closed. All units of Disinfolklore. Then a denial, another unit of Disinfolklore. Then a second case, reported. Another unit of Disinfolklore. Then a cover-up, alleged. Another unit of Disinfolklore. Then all the anti-vaxxers, who suddenly seem to care. They didn’t care about Covid. In fact they thought Covid was a conspiracy. Now they are tweeting like crazy about a plague. A non-existent plague, that is. Within three days the President of the United States had offered Russia help. I predicted that a couple of days before it happened. Structurally, this struck me as an alibi. Russia built it to provoke exactly this kind of reaction from friendly countries. He said he’d call Putler about it. So this episode is not really about bacteria. I don’t do epidemiology here. I don’t do fact-checking. That’s not what Disinfolklore is about. Look at the wording of the people whose job is to be careful. The State Department is “monitoring the situation”. The CDC is monitoring “reports”. The World Health Organisation is following up on “the reported death”, and asking for clarity on “media reports” of a second case. Appeal for volunteers! The main reviewer of a submitted draft journal article I have co-authored requested that I find human coders to see if the findings of archetypes in stories can be replicated. If you’re willing to help on this please send me an email (dutiful-raffles0r@icloud.com), message, dm me on X, or comment here and I’ll send you a link. Above is a screenshot of the web app I’ve created for this purpose. It’s quite a simple task: the App (see screenshot above) shows you items of Disinfolklore from Russia-occupied Ukraine. Then it asks if you see any specific archetypes in the short story extracts. If you don’t see any, you just tick ‘None!” And whichever you see you just tick them. Will take about two hours and then you save it/download it. It would mean a lot to me and my co-author as this is the last remaking issue to address with the paper on Disinfolklore! All anyone outside has is reports. Yet my timeline is full of doctors opining on every dimension of this as if it were real. People are expressing concern for the non-existent dead lab technician. They argue over whether she was eighteen or twenty-three. Pictures are sent around. The people who don’t believe the story do the same thing, sending round pictures of this very Russian-looking person in Siberia. But all anyone outside has is reports. Those of us who have spent the last three or four years in the Ukrainian information space have been through cycles like this many times. The scale of this troll is pretty big. So the unit of analysis here is the story. It’s one piece of Disinfolklore, with many dimensions to it. Disinfolklore is folklore’s counterfeit. It takes the storyteller’s tools and uses them to put a meaning in our minds. This episode asks how this one was detonated, what it is for, and why so many clever, educated, well-meaning people carried it for nothing. They’re not even being paid for it. Three readings I posted three readings of this story as it broke. Here they are as I wrote them. The first, on the sixth of October: “Plague: What an information bomb! All those peeps who believe Covid wasn’t real falling for this troll.” The second: “Russian Plague: Why this information warfare bomb now? The plague is not real. This is an example of Combat Propaganda. Russia wants back into the family of civilised nations: its message is: You need Russia. Cooperate. We must be friends. Look: if you’re friends then you can get information on the plague.” And maybe build a golf course and a Trump Tower in Siberia on the side. And it goes on. The second main goal is to associate Russia with plague in our minds. For those of us who listen to all the Russian Disinfolklore in the Ukraine information space, that association is easy. But the rest of the world needs to be convinced, constantly, that Russia is the bear they should not poke. So this is a version of the Nuclear Apocalypse troll, which no longer works. That is according to Gideon Rachman, who wrote in the FT this week. He wrote that Russia’s nuclear apocalypse threats don’t seem to work any more. However, this is not a good thing, was perhaps his line. The bottom line is that the Nuclear Apocalypse troll no longer seems to work. A secondary objective is to confirm for the security elite which runs Russia how dumb the rest of the world is. “Even governments which know this is a troll must play along with it as it’s too hard/impossible to explain to their citizens that this Disinfolklore Galaxy wrought of the plague troll is NOT real.” These are just my hypotheses about why on Earth Russia might do this. I don’t know why. There are probably a hundred different reasons. But they’re certainly going with it. It’s playing out the way these things always play out, only on a global scale. The third piece I wrote: “Plague: Ruschist Biolab troll. Distract from whatever else is going on: Look at us! Feel sorry for us! Help us! … Look away from Ukraine! Neatness of the tale is its tell.” And at its end: “We fall for the troll and perpetuate it. We will believe opposites. … ‘Surrender to us or die’ is Ruschia’s perennial message.” Three readings, one claim. The thing to analyse is the information bomb. It works whatever lies beneath it. That is what the rest of this piece shows. The three laws A hundred and fifty years ago the anthropologists Edward Tylor and James Frazer named the Laws of Sympathetic Magic. I did a five-episode series on the laws of sympathetic magic (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-touching-on-contagion-in) almost a year ago now. Four decades of laboratory work by the psychologists Paul Rozin and Carol Nemeroff showed that educated, scientifically literate adults reason by these laws every day. Offer people a sweater and they will wear it. Tell them it once belonged to Hitler, laundered and sterilised, and most refuse. “Once in contact, always in contact.” That’s one of the laws of sympathetic magic, the Law of Contagion. Things once in contact go on affecting each other, at any distance, forever. Think of the great love of your life. Your lost love. Contagion is analogous to my word Mana (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/mana-of-disinfolklore). Mana is an energy passing between us. It passes in conversation, when we’re with people, and when we read their words on the page. Mana is my word for that energy. The scientists call it the Law of Contagion. Then the Law of Similarity (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/jurisprudence-of-sympathetic-magics). The image equals the object. Like produces like. A thing that looks like another thing is felt to be it. So people constantly mistake the Photoshopped images for the real thing. Donald. Putler on his horse with his bare chest, rather than a scared old man in the basement. I’m not quite sure how to describe Donald. So this story feels a bit like Covid. My timeline filled with experts asking whether anyone else was reminded of February 2022, or 2020. The third is the Law of Opposites. Reverse a sign and it carries its inverse charge, its Mana, its energy, through the same channel. These laws don’t care whether a story is true. They work on the shape of a story. That is why an information bomb can be built out of reports alone. Plague, the bear and the honey-knower Say the word plague. What comes is not a bacterium. It is the Black Death. The cart, the pit, the end of the world. The word carries the charge of six centuries of European memory. My own Cambridge college, Trinity Hall, was founded in 1350 to train lawyers. Most of the lawyers had died in the Black Death. This is the same operation as “Don’t poke the bear (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-the-dont-poke-the-bear-meme)“. The same operation as “We are going to nuke you if you don’t let us have our way”. The old Slavic word for the bear was so feared that speakers stopped saying it. Instead they said medved’, the honey-knower. The real name was lost. The name was in contact with the thing, so the name was dangerous. It’s a huge irony. Or rather it’s not irony, it’s harmony. One of the great war criminals of our age is named Medvedev, and another is Medvedchuk. Honey, both of them. Medvedchuk was the Ukrainian member of parliament who first voiced the Ukraine biolabs troll in the Verkhovna Rada, on behalf of his masters in Moscow. And Medvedev, this week again, was threatening nuclear end days, nuclear holocaust, on everyone. Medved’ means honey lover. So, bear. They are the epitome of “Don’t poke the bear”, and they do what they say they do. The name was in contact with the thing. Medved’, for honey, was in contact with the bear. So the name was dangerous. Now put the word plague beside Russia in every headline on Earth for a week. Everyone is going to Google it, and they will see the plague and Russia. Those of us fortunate enough to come from normal countries, or at least countries which are normal in our lifetime, will find this very odd. Most people live in the normal world. They aren’t in the Ukrainian information space. They haven’t learned what most of us have learned these past three or four years about Russia, and about how the Law of Opposites works. Russia does things you would think nobody would go for. And yet somehow people, even people we know, seem to believe what they’re saying is true. Even though it’s the opposite. The Russians are the Nazis, not the Ukrainians. Sympathetic magic works on all of us We see the Law of Opposites in action the whole time. In fact it is what first sent me to the books and the scholarship. Eventually I found this area of cultural psychology, the work on the laws of sympathetic magic by Paul Rozin, at Penn, and Carol Nemeroff. They took the findings of the nineteenth century, of the people who had gone to Polynesia and discovered the word Mana there. That is a coincidence with the term I use. I don’t get my term Mana from the Polynesian use of it. Those nineteenth-century scholars found all of these aspects of what they thought were primitive humans and human culture. The brilliance of Nemeroff and Rozin’s work is that they discovered, as I did intuitively, that the laws of sympathetic magic operate on all of us, all the time. Not just on so-called primitive people. As far as I know, I’m the first person to apply the laws of sympathetic magic to information warfare. They really help explain how millions of highly educated people became convinced that the vaccine was causing the harm, not Covid. We knew Covid (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/p/key-covid-facts). We knew the superantigen-like insert. We knew its furin cleavage site. We knew its mechanisms. We saw those hospital beds in Bologna. Some of us had people in our lives who suffered terribly from it, and suffer still. Don’t get lost in the woods This week I’ve been trying to tweet my truth out about this. I look at this story as a story. I don’t engage with the characters in it, or the denials, or the worries. This is the same method as Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-outflank-dugin-dont-rebut). Don’t get lost in the woods, because that’s what it’s trying to do. It’ll suck you in. Before you know it, you’re arguing over whether there was a second death. You’re earnestly discussing biosafety standards in Russia. Surely, surely, in a biosafety laboratory they wouldn’t do this, and all of that malarkey. Before you know it, spreading the contagion is part of what you’re doing. Obviously I am spreading the contagion too, by posting my pieces. I’m doing what little I can to bring attention to my perspective, which is that this is a story. It’s a piece of Disinfolklore. It’s like a tale you heard from your grandmother. It’s not something to think of as real, with real consequences. Even if you don’t believe that at first, I’m inviting you to think of it that way. Then when you read these units of news, you’ll have two perspectives on them. One is the normal perspective. Oh gosh, I hope I don’t get the plague. Maybe I should wear a mask. Maybe I should cancel that winter holiday in Siberia. That kind of stuff. The other sits inside brackets. Well, maybe this is just a story. Maybe it’s just an item of Disinfolklore. Maybe it’s just being published by the Russians for some crazy reason. I don’t understand why. I can postulate. There are probably thousands of reasons they came up with it. But it’s perfectly designed. So maybe it is just a story, and I’ll consider it as a story in the information space rather than something real. So Russia and the plague, once in contact, stay in contact. That’s the second main goal I named: to associate Russia with plague in our minds. Why would a state want that? Because it is the Nuclear Apocalypse troll (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/nuclear-disinfolklore), the end days, in a new coat. For years the meaning Russia implanted was simple. Push us and the world ends. Kursk, in August 2024, buried that troll on the fields where Ukraine crossed the line that was not supposed to be crossable. I saw reports this week, unconfirmed, that Ukraine had crossed into Kursk again. So, you know, the world hasn’t ended yet. A troll that no longer frightens A troll that no longer frightens has to be replaced. A plague does the same work. It says Russia is the place the end of days comes from. Surrender or end days. I’m not saying that piece in the FT two days ago was caused by this. But that piece by that FT journalist is a symptom. He’s really a follower. He picked it up from the ether. Finally, the stuff we’ve been watching in the Ukraine information space has reached the mainstream. All those threats against all of our countries. And this Gideon Rachman is writing about it. So he is an indicator of an idea going round the houses. Normal people don’t spend all day talking about Ukraine, or thinking about Ukraine. They don’t watch Julia what’s-her-face and the rest on Solovyov, with Russia threatening Britain, threatening Ireland, threatening America, threatening everyone with nuclear annihilation. Yet even a normal person has managed to pick this up. The contagion runs the other way too. “Is anyone else having a January 2020 flashback right now?” wrote one account, under a CBS headline. A doctor’s post with fifty thousand views opened, “COVID-19 changed the world.” Another quoted a news site: “observers note resemblances to the conditions that some theorized preceded the COVID-19 pandemic.” Covid is the strongest contagion source our generation has. It’s the archetype. It’s archetypal. Russia knows that. It’s a trauma in Russia’s psyche as well. Those of us who remember watching Russia at the long table know it. Archetypal literacy So that is the archetype being provoked in our minds. Again, the Disinfolklore analytical method. The first of the twelve tools is archetypal literacy (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/archetypal-disinfolklore-literacy). End days and plague are archetypes like this. Russia itself is an archetype. For those of us who have watched it so closely, it is a very complicated one. But Covid is a shared archetype, in most of our minds. With archetypal Disinfolklore literacy we can be alert to these when we see them. Genuine Infolklore has archetypes going too. Spotting an archetype doesn’t mean what you see is Disinfolklore. It doesn’t mean it was planned. Nor were all the effects of the troll that do play out planned by those who began it. Perhaps they weren’t that ambitious. Maybe it was a local thing, or a regional thing. Then other people jump on the bandwagon, like all those anti-vax people who suddenly really care about stuff. What’s his name? That guy, the InfoWars guy. He’s doing all-night podcasts on it. And I think he thought Covid was one huge conspiracy. All of this was predictable, and I predicted it the moment I heard the story, though it took me a few days to think it through. Touch a new story to Covid, and the story takes on a new charge before a single fact is known. Similarity: the neat tale Neatness of the tale is its tell. Look at its parts. A laboratory. An accident. A “pneumonia of unknown origin”. A quarantine. A denial. A cover-up, alleged. Each piece matches a piece of the Wuhan story we all carry. The mind does not check a story like this. It recognises it. It’s full of archetypes that we recognise. The image equals the object. If it looks like the start of a pandemic, it is felt to be the start of a pandemic. That is why the professionals reached for it so fast. One commentator noted the place was a weapons-lineage lab with the security service involved. That was one of my hypotheses. Russia wants to remind us that it has biolabs, that it is working on biological weapons. Some of us have forgotten Salisbury and Novichok. We have forgotten all those grim, archetypally rich ways of imposing death on people. They became archetypal Disinfolklore in our information space, associated with Russia. They pass the message: don’t mess with Russia, don’t mess with Russia, we will do these terrible things to you. This story reminds us. So how do you get that into people’s minds? You invent a tale. You issue photographs of a Russian settler, occupying the lands of the Yakuts in Siberia. Then doctors and clinicians in Virginia or California think, oh God, that could have been me. And you’re like, no, it couldn’t be you. You don’t work in a mad country where they make biological weapons, probably without precautions. A country that would then exploit your death, if you even existed. You’re not the same. It’s not the same culture. But things that look alike sound alike. So she’s called a scientist. Some people say she’s eighteen, some twenty-three. One picture of her like this, another like that. Is it AI? All of these questions are another sign of how this information bomb is released and communicated. Another tweet found that a pandemic exercise had been run there years earlier, and wrote, “It’s weird how they run exercises before these outbreaks.” Every detail was read as a resemblance to something already feared. Nobody asked what the resemblance was for. There is a person at the centre of it. A photograph went round of the young woman the reports name. Strangers grieved her. Others answered that she had probably worked on biological weapons and did not deserve their grief. Both camps were arguing about a character in a story. That is the Law of Similarity at its sharpest. The photograph becomes the emblem of the tale, and the tale wears a real face. Whatever happened in that laboratory, if it exists, the woman in the photograph has been drafted into a story she did not write. If she exists. She is made to carry its charge for millions of people who will never know anything else about her. They will forget this whole thing in a month or two, without ever knowing whether there was any truth in it. Opposites: we will believe opposites The third law of sympathetic magic. “Is it? | is it not?” I wrote. “Ruschia needs just to win news cycles.” Like Donald. It’s just to win the news cycle. They know that three days later the people writing the news won’t remember. None of us will remember, because more abominable things will have happened two days later. So it doesn’t matter what you win today’s news cycle with. It’s counterintuitive, but we will believe opposites (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/p/podcast-and-pensees-130-paradoxes). We will believe it’s the vaccine causing the harm, not the virus, whatever the scientific evidence, whatever the empirical evidence, whatever we see with our own eyes. Watch the story feed on its own contradictions. Local reports said a test tube broke. The national health agency said “pneumonia of unknown etiology”, and no organism linked to her work. The head of a neighbouring republic said possibly plague. Russia told the World Health Organisation no case of plague had been registered. Then came a second case, reported. Then “Russia accused of covering up plague outbreak.” Each denial fed the story as well as each admission did. If the hospital was closed, that proved danger. If it was opened, that proved a cover-up. A Harvard public health professor told CNN the response was “disproportionate to what would happen if a lab worker was exposed to plague. That’s the tell.” A sharp observation. But once again the story’s own features were read as evidence about a pathogen. They are evidence about a story, a piece of Disinfolklore. This is the device I called the legitimacy gap in my episodes on the laws of sympathetic magic. The British Empire’s formula for Tibet, “Chinese suzerainty, Tibetan autonomy”, was built to mean neither and to be used both ways. The plague story has two official positions, plague and not plague. Neither affirmed, both in use. We will believe opposites. That is the Law of Opposites. Coercive power moves through the gap. Accountability needs to know which position the actor holds, and the gap exists so that nobody can. The category error So why do clever people, like us, fall for it? I wrote in 2022 that we often make a category error when we see disinformation as merely words. The doctor, the epidemiologist and the news editor are trained to ask one question of a report. Is it true? That’s the right question for a medical bulletin. It’s the wrong question for an information bomb, and for Disinfolklore. The bomb is built to make you check it. While you are checking, it does its work. An epidemiologist posted, “I’m an epidemiologist. It’s time to be scared now.” She was not wrong to care. She was answering a story with the tools of her field. Her field has no box for Disinfolklore. It has no box for a story that exists to be answered. This story pulls her in as one of its communicators, one of its contagion-passers, by its very nature. In an episode I’m going to do very soon, on Putler and his Valdai evening, this figure has a name. The earnest researcher goes into the woods to check the arch Disinfolklorist on the record, and comes out hypnotised. Some of you might remember that early in the war I realised what was going on with Scholz, and even Macron, with Putler along the long desk. They were being hypnotised by absolute nonsense. By balderdash. Three hours of nonsense about dates and this grievance and that. You are left completely disorientated, and ready to accept any troll injected into your mind. This is what’s going on with this information bomb. None of this is a fault in any of our characters. Especially not in all the medics who have popped up on our timelines. These are careful people doing careful work. They had no reason to look for this pattern, because their training has no word for it. Disinfolklore is that word. Then there’s the other half of the audience. “All those peeps who believe Covid wasn’t real falling for this troll.” The people who spent four years telling us a real pandemic was a hoax met this story and believed every word. One said Covid was “a completely fabricated narrative”. In the same breath he took the plague story as fact, and used it to prove Covid was a lie. A famous broadcaster went live with “Russia Braces For Lab Leak Catastrophe”, to nearly half a million views. We will believe opposites. Sceptic and believer alike end up carrying the same story. Both point at Russia as the place where the world’s fate is decided. Why now Put the week back around the story. On the first, second and third of October, for the first time in this war, Russia struck the bridges of Kyiv over the Dnipro. Six strikes in three days. Three of the city’s six road bridges closed, in full or in part. On the fifth and sixth of October, two merchant ships were sunk and a third set ablaze in the Black Sea economic zones of Romania and Bulgaria. Both are NATO members. At least two seafarers were killed. One ship was carrying Ukrainian corn. On the sixth of October Russian drones hit a hospital in central Kryvyi Rih. Thirteen people were killed and more than a hundred injured across Ukraine that day. On the front, Russia was losing ground. Ukraine’s Operation Vivaldi in the Lyman direction retook villages and took more than two hundred and fifty prisoners. It broke the northern jaw of the pincer Russia had planned around the fortress cities of Donetsk oblast. That is the week. The story the world talked about was a laboratory in Siberia. “Look at us! Feel sorry for us! Help us! … Look away from Ukraine!” The alibi Here is one of the parts that matters a lot. On the first of October, at the Valdai Club, Putler said Russia had tried to enter “the family of civilised peoples”, as he put it, and had been pushed out. Five days later the plague story offered a way back in. Cooperate. We must be friends. Putler was, after all, the very first foreign leader to offer help to GWB after the Twin Towers fell. If you are friends, you can have all of the information. The President of the United States took the offer. He said the United States was ready to help Russia. He said he would call Putler about the plague. “I am. The pneumonia plague, if you call it. That’s a disease.” A week in which Russia sank ships off NATO coasts and bombed a hospital became, in the White House, another Disinfolklore meme. It became a week to model cooperation with Moscow over a germ. That is what the information bomb buys. Not belief in plague. An alibi. A humane reason, which no reasonable citizen could object to, for a leader to sit at the table with the man bombing Kyiv’s bridges. Every government that knows better must play along with this troll. It cannot tell its citizens what I’m telling you right now. The thing everyone is talking about is nonsense. It is a story built to be talked about. That’s the truth. As you know, I worked as a ceasefire monitor in occupied Luhansk (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-the-bridge-at-stanytsia-and) from 2015 to 2018. I saw this structure there every week. It ran from the small scale up to the macro scale, in a hundred local stories. One of those stories led me to discover the Disinfolklore analytical method, and indeed the Disinfolklore narrative form. I maintain this is a narrative form. Once you know it you can see it in new data, and that is my case about this information bomb. A shelling blamed on the other side. A disease rumour. A martyr with a face. Each was built to make the outside world argue about details while the real thing went on. The plague story is the same structure. It’s only the biggest one yet. How to hear the next one So when the next one comes, ask different questions. Not, is it true? Ask what it touches. Contagion. What does it look like? Similarity. What happens when it is denied? Opposites. Who gets to sit at a table because of it? And what has been happening in Ukraine this week? Russia creates content. Then through the firehose of falsehood it disguises its trolls in a million different Disinfolklore threads. We fall for the troll and perpetuate it. We need not do so. “Surrender to us or die” is Ruschia’s perennial message. That Mana, that energy, is the contagion inside information bombs like this week’s. What is at stake is whether we get wrapped up in what I called, in my Munich speech (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/p/pensees-96-my-munich-speech) in February 2025, the Disinfolklore Galaxy. A Disinfolklore universe (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/disinfolklore-universe). The plague is just one more costume for this. That’s all I have to say about that story. I’m aware that I don’t want to perpetuate it. But I do think I have one perspective worth bearing in mind. Moscow, not Valdai I’ll come back to the principles of Infolklore (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-what-is-infolklore), and to Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut, in future weeks. But I’ve spent a lot of the past couple of weeks on Putler’s speech at Valdai. On the first of October, in Moscow, a discussion club named after a lake it does not meet by received the President of the Ruschist Federation. He spoke for three and a half hours. The Kremlin published the transcript. It runs to 486 paragraphs and 20,716 words. That transcript is one piece of Disinfolklore. One unit. One meme, twenty thousand words long. Disinfolklore, as we know, is folklore’s counterfeit. It takes the storyteller’s tools and uses them to plant an enemy, a grievance and a lost land in our minds. It is a narrative voice. It is a way of injecting ideas into people’s heads. The Valdai evening is that voice at full length. This is what the twelve tools (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/querydisinfolklore-twelve-tools-to) of the Disinfolklore analytical method found in it. It’s not what Russia experts found in it. That is the point. What I don’t do First, what I don’t do. I don’t do psychology. I’m not giving you an insight into Putler’s mind. By accident it may be an insight into the mind of the Ruschist security state. But we have that already. We have had it for hundreds of years. So nothing in this evening at Valdai is new in that sense. What is new is the material, and the patterns in it. Those patterns will be used in the next speech, by the next exhibitioner of the apparatus. Whether that’s Putler, or Dugin, or Simonyan, or any of them. The same patterns run through them all. That’s the reason to do it. I don’t fact-check. The record on this war is done. The International Court of Justice has ruled. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled definitively, and we talked about that when the judgment came out. The General Assembly has voted many times. The International Criminal Court has issued its warrants. There are over 250,000 crimes on the record, being investigated by Ukraine, and thousands of memes. Nobody needs a podcast to prove that Russia invaded Ukraine unlawfully, or that it is a plague on humanity. That is done. QED, quod erat demonstrandum. The trap is that the speech is built to make you check it. My own first draft of this analysis fell into that trap. It went into the woods to fact-check Putler, paragraph by paragraph, and it came out hypnotised. That is an archetype in its own right. The earnest researcher sets out to check the arch Disinfolklorist on the record, and ends up self-hypnotised by his nonsense. Every Russia expert does this. Every AI does it, unless it’s told not to. You spend hours and millions of tokens checking things that don’t matter. While you’re checking, the voice is doing its work on you. Parsing in real time So what do we do instead, in the Disinfolklore universe? We parse the thing in real time. The aim is that you, listening to the next speech from the next apparatchik of the apparatus, can hear it in the moment. Oh, this is what he’s doing here. Aha, he is repeating this. I understand why he’s repeating this. Ah, but that word has just moved. He’s talking about Russia here. But actually that’s a different Russia from the Russia of 1899 he was talking about. Now he means the Russian Federation, whereas five minutes ago he meant the Soviet Union. That word, that meaning, has just moved. It is a skill to see this in real time. It’s the skill I’ve been trying to teach myself, and that’s why I spent so long on this text. The floor, counted In the question session, Putler spoke 11,580 words out of 15,332. That is three quarters. The moderator, who is the Valdai club’s own director of research, spoke 1,100 words. Some discussion. So, fifteen thousand to Putler and eleven hundred to the club’s own director of research. Nineteen guests between them spoke another 2,600 words. Fourteen of the nineteen reach us through the Kremlin’s interpreter. Not one of the nineteen is from Ukraine. Ukrainian words reach the hall only in Putler’s report of them. A discussion club, counted, is an audience for the king. Think about the archetype of the monarch holding court. I think it’s what Donald does by those helicopters. You know, giving interviews beside those helicopters, so noisy. He’s holding court. These are his courtiers. Before Putler has given anything, the moderator thanks him for finding the time to meet them. Then: “I think that from your position you see better.” That is what the moderator says to Putler. The better view is conceded before a word is spoken. This is the monarch, given the better view. Every verdict that follows comes from a place the house has already granted. They have granted Putler the place of monarch, the wise man, the wise counsellor. Putler answers, “Ladies and gentlemen! Colleagues!” Oh, how humble. A colleague among colleagues. This is a court dressed as a symposium. The name keeps the symposium, a gathering by a lake in the provinces. The club’s first meeting was held by the lake, near Veliky Novgorod, and the venue has moved from year to year since. This year the place line says Moscow. The name supplies the discussion. The place supplies the throne room for the monarch. I wrote in October 2022 that Duchamp showed us how mad it is that ordinary objects, gilded and placed in a gallery, transform into art. Bunker grandfather’s racism goes in. Serious pensées come out. Valdai is the gallery. Putler says as much himself. He announces that his words will be studied by many hundreds or even thousands of experts, “your colleagues”. That includes me. The reader is cast before the reading. I am cast as one of the experts studying his every word. How can I subvert this? Well, I’m doing it now. You are given your part. I am given mine in the first hour, and the part is the earnest researcher, writing everything down. The costume So the starting point is that Putler is an actor. He delivers lines on behalf of the Ruschist security state. That state has existed in its totality for hundreds of years. It puts on a new costume, new clothes, every few decades. Tsar, commissar, general secretary, president. It’s always the same archetype underneath. Tonight the costume is the sovereign-president’s. I said on the fourth of October that he is a ventriloquist, giving lines for the security services establishment. That is the whole thesis of Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut, the book I’m going through slowly with all of us over these weeks. In my Future Russia episode (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/p/podcast-future-russia-the-pattern), half of which I delivered last week, I said Putler plays the role of the tsar, like an actor. I’m not using this as a metaphor. It is actually the perspective I have on him. If you hold it, or entertain it for a while, it helps you read the data differently. It can show you what is going on. Putler is really just a puppet of the security state (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-actor-not-the-philosopher) he serves. But he gives the image. Again, the Law of Similarity and the Law of Contagion. He gives the image of someone in charge, of a sovereign, and then people believe he is one. Both are the same point. The man is the costume. I’m not saying Putler is wearing a costume. I’m saying he is the costume, for the Ruschist Nazi state. Twice in the evening the costume, the disguise Putler is wearing, names what stands behind it. Once in earnest, in the middle of the all-weapons answer about Kaliningrad: “And it is not about the surname of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief or the President of Russia.” The office speaks. Humble. The man does not matter. He says so. And once as a joke, in the exchange on artificial intelligence: “I use the Administration of the President of the Ruschist Federation.” The moderator replies, “That is an absolutely indestructible force.” The hall laughs. The costume, the mask, has just told the hall who writes the lines, and the hall has laughed. So it’s not just me saying Putler is an actor. Putler is playing the role of the sovereign. He says so himself, twice, in this one evening. The assessor and the repeater What parts does the costume play? Reading the words, it plays a small repertoire. This is what the Disinfolklore analytical method excavates. The two parts it plays most are the assessor and the repeater. Those of us who study Indo-European linguistics will know this. So will anyone from Eastern Europe who knows a Bogdana or a Bogdan. In ancient Iranian, baga means the allocator. The baga was the allocator of the house, the treasurer, if you like. The one who shares out the resources. The boss man. It was usually a man. Then the word was celestialised, and Baga became a god. Then it came back down to Earth in the names of the ruling class in Mongolia, the Bogd. So the assessor is a very old role. It is a long-standing archetype in Indo-European culture and governance. And Putler played it to a T. The honest assessor, weighing up, like St Peter at the gates of heaven weighing your good karma with white stones and black. The honest assessor is my own name for it. He presents his judgements as weighed and fair, and he regrets his own forecasts. “I would like to be mistaken in this assessment.” A forecast of war, as a regret. The forecaster stands outside the wars he forecasts, and indeed causes. He is the innocent bystander at his own war. Those of us who study what Donald does, and his rhetorical tics, will see this in him too. The repeater cites himself. Donald also cites himself the whole time. He says so-and-so said this. They are saying this, when they are not. He is the one saying it, but he projects his own saying through others, as a literary narrative device. “I have spoken on this many times. I will say it once more all the same, in such a gathering.” About forty times in the evening Putler says “I repeat”, or “as I have said”, or “I have said this many times”. Perfect passive aggression. The position feels old and settled because it is said to be. In August 2022 I called this hypnotise through repetition. It is old, and it works on the hall every time. Then the smaller parts. The one who will not say. “I will not name it all now.” The hall fills in the name, so the hall authors the charge. The lawyer, “as lawyers say”. The man who reads the documents, “based only on the archive documents I have read”. The one who was there, “I remember well my discussions”. The plain speaker, “let us say it plainly”. The reader of other people’s minds. He tells the hall what the West thinks, what the Europeans thought, what the Secretary-General of the United Nations thought, in his own voice, as Dostoevsky does in his novels. So the enemy testifies against itself, in his report. None of these is a person. Each is a posture, and the postures are the costume’s. They are worth noticing, noting and learning, so that we begin to look for them. The formulas to carry in the margin These are the tells. Each can be heard in the moment. I give the Russian word so that you can hear it next time. Not we. In Russian, ne my. Nine times in six paragraphs, and three times in one answer. The rule is laid down in the speech itself: “Where is the truth? The truth is that it was not we who wanted war or began it. War was begun against us.” When you hear “not we”, the next clause names the other side as the one who began. Began. The verb comes 26 times in the evening, 24 of them in his own turns, and five of them in one paragraph about tankers. “The Kyiv authorities began to strike our tankers.” So the cycle of history begins. “We began to answer.” “And they started it.” Then the tell of tells, two sentences, one after the other: “We began striking.” “We did not start this.” When you hear “we began”, “we did not begin” is close by. We threaten no one. Six paragraphs. Each time it stands within a few sentences of a threat. All the weapons at our country’s disposal. A mirror answer in every ocean. Europe’s arms plants. The firms taken under external management. “This is not intimidation, it is an answer to an attempt to intimidate us.” Answer. In Russian, otvet. Nine times in eight paragraphs, as the word for Russia’s own act. In the speech the answers are mutual, “mutual harsh responses”, one side provoking and the other answering. By the questions the word has moved to one side. Whatever Russia does is a reply. Mirror. Zerkal’no, mirror-fashion. Three times, and a fourth in other words. And where is the mirror placed? “Where it is more advantageous for us.” A mirror that chooses its target is not a mirror. Inevitable. Neizbezhno. Nine times in seven paragraphs. The new world order is inevitable. The use of all weapons is inevitable. The loss of the rest of Donetsk region is inevitable. The failure of the West’s curtain to protect people is inevitable. In March 2022 I called this inevitability-farming. Whatever is inevitable is what is being announced. Finish breaking up. Dorazvalit’. Three times. The West wants “to finish breaking up the Russian Federation itself”. The little prefix do- means finish. It presupposes that something was broken up already. That something is the Soviet Union. Who broke it up? Early in the speech the cause is “internal imbalances”. That concession is never repeated. By the first question it has become “Then the Soviet Union was broken up”. By somebody. The somebody has no name. So-called. Three times, laid on the civilised. “So-called Western civilisation.” “The so-called system of civilised countries.” “The so-called civilised world.” The title is withdrawn from the West. The civilised act, “we negotiate”, is claimed for Russia. I will not. Six paragraphs. “I will not go into details.” What follows is the main thing, given without its particulars. Everyone knows. Five paragraphs. It comes where the claim is largest and the source is thinnest. “Ukraine, I know and everyone knows it well, cannot exist on its own.” A neighbour’s statehood is denied by a voice with no source. Regime. Four times in his own voice, for Ukraine’s government. It starts as the outcome of a coup, “an essentially unlawful regime”. It ends as a title, “the head of the regime”, used where a president’s would be. As you said. Four times the hall hands his words back to him. The moderator does it twice. Two guests do it. The last of them is an American journalist who now works in Russia: “As you said, two and a half times more territory.” His own figure, returned to him, on how much territory Russia has captured in 2026. Putler had said it was two and a half, two and a half thousand square kilometres, I think. With “most military experts” attached. A note. I’m not rebutting. I’m only outlining. I’m outflanking, not rebutting, and not getting lost in the weeds. So we can carry all of these in the margin as we listen to the rest of the evening. Everything else in it hangs on them. The threat delivered as its own denial I said on the fourth of October that the entire speech is a threat. The cast is how the threat is carried. Because the bear cub only answers, every threat arrives as an answer. Because the forest has no name, the threat has no addressee, and nobody is placed to answer it. Because the history has already made Russia the one who never began, the threat is spoken in the grammar of the inevitable, never in the grammar of a choice. So “We threaten no one” stands in neighbouring answers to “all the weapons at our country’s disposal”. The land comes as “must and will”. The loss of Donetsk comes as “inevitable”. The West’s curtain comes as a failure announced before the curtain is hung. The purest form comes in an answer about Europe’s arms industry. “I am not saying that we tomorrow are going to strike.” And then: “But this is a threat.” Not tomorrow. But. That is the formula of the whole evening in four words. But this is a threat. He also knows how the threat will be reported, just as they know how a plague story will be reported. So he labels the report before it is written. “Now they will pull this out and abuse it, exploit this thesis, the thesis that Russia threatens us with nuclear weapons.” That is the pre-emptive alibi. The threat stays on the record. Its reporting is discredited in advance. Then Europe’s citizens are addressed over the heads of their governments. “The citizens of European countries must understand this clearly and distinguish our position from the position of certain current political leaders of their countries.” I named that in March 2023. A attacks B. C is standing by. C is told that this is not about C, so long as C stays exactly where it is. It’s about neutralising the bystander. The moderator hears it, and jokes that he now feels like an accomplice of the domestic political manipulations of European governments. The house plays along with its own casting. Under all of this is one rule, laid down in the speech and drawn on by every later answer. The truth is who began, and it was never Russia. The innocent bear cub and the forest come next week. Last week: Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe (https://www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   1 Oct 2026

   Podcast | Disinfolklore Detector - Live Demo

   A listener asked: “I’m definitely interested to hear more in detail about how you use AI.” This week’s work was precipitated by a new model, which Anthropic dropped last week. Opus 5.5 has, for reasons that will become clear, become a bit of a revolutionary model. By model I mean a neural network algorithm. I am describing the architecture and the algorithm behind what many of us see as a chatbot. But there is a different way to use the model behind the chatbot. You reach it through a part of the computer that those of us old enough will remember from the 1980s and MS-DOS. It involves all of these little instructions. On a Mac it’s called Terminal. It is a part of our computer which is there, and which most of us never go to. It lets us reach these models in a way you cannot easily reach them through a chatbot. Some of you will also remember that I have been going through the principles of Infolklore. I use many words from the transcripts of Volya, and I am trying to derive the principles of Infolklore (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-what-is-infolklore) from the way many of us present on Volya. Last week’s episode (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-grass-whispering-infolklore) carried the latest of them. The Meta Main Game The aim of all of my work is what I call the Meta Main Game. Within about ten years, the assisted cognition we already experience is likely to be mainstreamed directly inside our minds. We experience it now by interfacing with the internet, through chatbots, through web browsers, through this very app. Whether that is done through connectors implanted in us or through light, I don’t know. Obviously Facebook and Elmo are working on implants. I am agnostic about whatever technology is used. I hope it isn’t done through implants, because I think that’s pretty gross. My goal is to prepare for that moment. I want to prepare a module that an interpreter of sensory data will use, through assisted cognition, to determine quickly whether the data she is encountering is Disinfolklore (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/disinfolklore), Infolklore or Neutral. It should work for humans or for computers. So it is an intermediary through which data streams. It lets us make decisions very quickly in the face of what I expect to be ever-accelerating vectors of information and sensory data. By sensory data I mean not just text, and not just music. I mean everything we encounter in our reality, including conversations, what people are telling us, and what we are feeling. Disinfolklore, as we know, is folklore-like story weaponised to inject lies, exploitative mental models and coercive control (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/coercive-control-techniques-being) into minds. Infolklore is its positive twin. Its divine twin, if you like. The same archetypal forms, used to protect communities and rebuild shared understanding. Neutral is neither. It is a menu. It is an account of something that has no archetypal content. There is nothing good about it and nothing bad about it. It is just sensory data. So the detector I am working towards must be able to tell these three types apart. The Disinfolklore Detector is the Meta Main Game’s first working form, and I am building it now. This case records one week of that building. In this week a cheaper, much more efficient model let me run many different operations at once, as simultaneous conversations with the machine. Each of these operations has its own window on one state-of-the-art Mac. One window, the operator, keeps the others and the long-running jobs in order. Visualise a big screen, or several screens. Each has one of these MS-DOS-like windows open in it. The one in the top left-hand corner is the operator, which helps organise all the others. Two latent dreams Two latent dreams lie behind all of my work, and behind my work this week. One is a question I asked in the London law firms where I worked in the early 2000s. The other is what I conceived at a conference on artificial neural networks in Long Beach, California, in December 2017. That is where the Meta Main Game began. Both needed people and resources, compute and money, ideas and technical capacities which I did not have. The first needed a firm’s worth of them. The second needed someone who could help build and train a neural network. Now the machine I have available to me can be directed in plain spoken and written English. All it takes from me is a clear mind, one that can keep hold of all of these different vectors, all of these different aspects of the project. So this week’s lesson is really about that mind. Multiplying the conversations drew me back into the loop (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/p/podcast-older-than-writing), the place of the person who checks and steers what an automated system does. There the work was plain. I was keeping thirteen windows in step, 24/7. Fifty-eight of my messages to those windows that week were the same instruction: just carry on. The operator window took that work over, a step at a time, as I taught it to report in terms I can see. Window titles, and a list of what to type where. What stayed mine were the rulings on meaning, the permissions and the signatures. The case closes where the Meta Main Game began, in Luhansk and Long Beach in December 2017. It closes on the open question of whether I can, in fact, build this. What I am building The Meta Main Game is a means of assisted cognition. On 14 July I put it like this: “In the vision I have for the Meta Main Game, in, say, ten years, humans will have the capacity to add on cognitive modules, which will immediately enable them to see” in different ways. They will filter data in ways not available to us today. Those ways may not even be necessary for us today, but may well be necessary in ten years’ time. Seeing through these modules is not just about reading. The module is meant to work on all sensory data: what we read, hear and see. At this point it is a hypothesis. It is an idea to work towards. Three kinds of work feed it. The main one is Automating Disinfolklore. The second is what I call Cryptotypic Engineering. The third I deal with mainly in my Power of Mana work, at PowerofMana.net: the Reversion to the M-N- sound (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/sacred-m-n-sound). That is the linguistics and the meaning work. I draw on it whenever I talk about Mana (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/look-for-the-mana-in-the-meme). The engine of Automating Disinfolklore is a large language model that runs on a state-of-the-art Mac. The model I am running at the moment is a Meta model, Glimmer, released a few weeks ago. The work I do will be adaptable to whichever locally hosted large language models come along. Glimmer reads a text under one codebook, the written rules for every verdict, and one brief, the instructions it is given for each reading. It judges what it reads with the Code of Positive Trolls (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/code-of-positive-trolls): Generosity, Ethical Discipline, Patience, Perseverance, Focus and Insight. Those are the criteria. If a text conforms to those six, it is Infolklore. If it violates any of them, it is Disinfolklore. If it triggers none of them, there is no archetypal content. It is just talking about the weather. Not the weather in a Jane Austen novel. Just the weather. There might be symbolic content there, but generally speaking there isn’t. My rulings on real texts are the standard Glimmer is measured against. So I am teaching it to perceive reality like me. Mine is the only ruling. Two bodies of Infolklore The engine learns first on two bodies of Infolklore, about 47 million words in all. One is a spoken reservoir, which we know about. It is an archive of broadcasts in natural spoken English by native English speakers. This show is among them. The other is an archive of two Ukrainian newsrooms writing in Russian, in the form of the structured article. Later it will meet Disinfolklore at scale, in an archive of about 290 million texts from state influence operations around the globe, from war bloggers and from fringe platforms. Dravidian, Hindi, Chinese, Russian, MAGA. The engine reaches people first through the Disinfolklore Detector. It is planned in five stages, from a page on my Mac, for me alone, to a tool that other people’s AI agents and AI assistants can consult. The Muse in your postbox Some of you might have seen that Meta made a big play in the last week by releasing Muse. Basically, you allow Muse to run free in your computer. Say you mention to your husband or your daughter, “Oh, it’s Peter’s birthday next week. God, I must order that ice cream cake.” The next morning an ice cream cake arrives through your postbox. Muse has done that, because you gave it the right to all of your credit cards and access to all of your devices. It is making your life less complicated. In return, Meta gets access not just to your posts on Facebook but to every single aspect of your life. That is the reality we are already embroiled in. This case is one week of preparing for the moment when billions of people have these agents running around their lives and their computers, to one degree or another. What was happening that week In this week the engine’s verdict rule was about to be tested against my judgement. The verdict rule is the way it weighs the six elements of the Code into one verdict. A library of very old texts, which the project reads for archetypes (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/archetypal-disinfolklore-literacy), recurring patterns of story and figure, was being read again. The codebook was being revised. So were the principles of Infolklore, which describe how the two bodies honour the Code and which I draw on in my writing. The detector’s first stage was built during the week. Much of it was running at once for the first time. The law firm and Long Beach In the early 2000s I worked in various law firms in central London. I sometimes wondered what would happen if all of these resources were dedicated to pushing the bounds of human knowledge rather than protecting the legal order. Hundreds of lawyers. Over a thousand employees. In December 2017 I travelled to the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, NIPS, in Long Beach, California. I was working then as a diplomat in Russia-occupied Luhansk (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-the-bridge-at-stanytsia-and). At the same time I was trying to build an automatic means of interpreting satellite data into actionable intelligence. It was my entrepreneurship project for the executive MBA I was doing at Oxford University. At NIPS I saw how the future was being created on artificial neural networks. There I conceived the idea of automating the interpretation and detection of Disinfolklore. I was watching it brainwash Ukrainians in Luhansk and change their identities in my day job. I thought that somehow we could automate the interpretation and detection, and protect our minds and our sense of reality from this Disinfolklore, using neural networks. On the Wednesday morning of that conference, Lise Getoor, whose work is machine learning over networks, gave one of the invited talks: “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Structure”. I photographed a slide. Of everything I photographed that week, that slide comes closest to the Disinfolklore Detector. On the slide, a machine reads what people post, and the network of people they post among. From that it judges where they stand. The detector asks a different question of the same material. It reads what is posted, and judges whether it is Disinfolklore, Infolklore or Neutral, measured against the Code. To build anything of the kind in 2017 I would have needed a massive team, millions of dollars in compute and seed capital, and a business partner who understood how to create, mobilise and control artificial neural networks. I didn’t have any of that. The rules on that slide in 2017 were written in English. In the box at its foot, one of them is written again as a formula the machine could run. In 2017 that second step, converting English into a formula a computer could interpret, needed people who could build a system to do it. A video over lunch In January 2026, having lunch one Saturday in my favourite restaurant, I watched a video of Claude Code working inside the terminal. Ming is going to post that video. It did not just answer questions like a chatbot. It carried out instructions on the computer. Immediately I realised that these two latent dreams could be actualised. They were formed in different worlds, one in a law firm in central London and the other in Long Beach, California. The main computer language now is naturally spoken and written English. If you can speak or write English, you can now control the computer and get it to do anything you want. That was completely unforeseeable before 2023. It only really became actionable because of Boris Cherny, from Chornomorsk, just east of Odesa. That is where all the Germanic languages, English among them, grew out of the fusion of the Yamna (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/yamnaya-and-ancient-ukraine) and the Usatovo culture. They met there. Out of that encounter, over five hundred years, emanate the Italic, the Germanic and the Celtic languages, their religions, everything. The seed of everything we know. Boris Cherny invented Claude Code quite by accident, at Anthropic. It lets us control anything a computer can control, just with naturally spoken and written English. So my rules go to the machine as I write them, in the same words I use to think. All one needs now is a clear mind. No longer a business partner who understands how to work artificial neural networks. I can do all of this work on my own. Opus 5.5 On Tuesday 22 September Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5. I caught the launch within minutes, in the tweets of Anthropic’s own staff. Anthropic said it performed at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 on most work and cost 40 per cent less to run than Opus 5. I run two Anthropic Max accounts. With them I could do better than the equivalent of two weekly allotments of Claude Fable 5.1. Suddenly, from that moment, I could do over ten times that much work. It was clear to me within minutes that this was what I would now be able to do. So I could keep many windows working around the clock. I couldn’t do that before. Claude Fable, brilliant as it is, used the credits so quickly on any job that you ended up waiting for your usage allowance to reset. Every five hours you get a set allotment of usage credits. Claude Fable, brilliant as it was, would use them up within an hour. Then you had to sit around, or switch to your other account. Many people would have ten accounts and switch between them. Keeping an eye on what is going on is a skill in itself. Trained by Twitter So I go back to what I forecast for the future, where we have all of these different vectors. We are all used to it through Twitter. We deal with so many narratives and so much information each day. Most of us probably have the self-awareness to notice it sometimes, by comparison with friends or family who don’t live in the Ukraine information space, or on Twitter. We are being trained in this way to deal with vast amounts of data. That is partly what feeds my prediction that in ten years’ time we will be dealing with even more. That is when we will need assisted cognition. We will need a means of determining what we let into our minds and how we deal with certain information quickly. We will need to manage our own psychological wellbeing and mental hygiene in that world. Our happiness, our communities’ happiness and the world’s happiness will depend on how we manage this. This is why I think what I am trying to build should be quite helpful. The operator The long-running jobs on my Mac already had a keeper, a window opened on 21 September. Glimmer was in the middle of a long reading run, 7,582 passages read for the second time. There was a bench, a small web page. It shows me passages one at a time, as cards, for me to rule on from my phone when I have a spare moment. That helps train the local model running on my computer, with the help of the frontier model, as one of those thirteen windows. A scheduler was posting for other things I am doing. At 05:55 on Wednesday I asked that window, “I want to start a new instance,” which means a new terminal window, “and transfer your oversight, controlling role over to it. And then I want to open the new instances to govern individual new tasks, as well as new tasks. Is this a good idea? Help me implement it.” Basically, you start off doing one thing in one window. Within two days you have thirteen threads running in the same window. If you remember what MS-DOS was like, it is a real head-melt, working out what is going on. So I suddenly realised I could open a new window for every thread. Every thread is like a garden of forking paths. With them all open, say thirteen windows, it is much easier to keep an eye on which of the forking paths we are on, what needs to be done and what needs to be decided. I just had that inspired idea that maybe I could do it this way. So the computer drafted four briefs, written instructions for four new windows. The first new window opened as the operator. That is the controller, and the only conversation allowed to stop or start the long jobs. The others took different jobs I was doing. One did the codebook. Another was rinsing the transcripts for the principles of Infolklore, going to the end and starting again. Each of those had a window. By about half past six that morning, thirty-five minutes later, six windows were at work. A root-and-branch review of the whole project, of the whole Meta Main Game and how I am getting there, was among them. Something went wrong within half an hour. I closed the old keeper’s window by accident, and Glimmer’s reading run had been started from it. Glimmer is Meta’s local large language model. Actually it is multimodal, so it deals with sound and video as well, but I am mainly using it for language at the moment. The run stopped with the window. Every check on the computer reported the run alive, but it wasn’t. The new operator found the stall, restarted the run at 06:39, and asked me whether this was the same run. So this is the human in control. I ruled that it was “still one run of one instrument, paused for twelve minutes.” Since then every long job on the Mac, except the operator’s own watch, has been launched free of any window. I have many of these terminal windows open. The week in numbers Fifteen windows did work between eight o’clock on the evening of 22 September and 07:40 on 28 September. The machine wrote around 27 million tokens. A token is the unit a model reads and writes in. It is a little under a word, so that is roughly 20 million words. The windows wrote 9.7 million of them. The rest came from agents, which are helper copies of the machine that a window sends off to do one piece of work and report back. 2,039 agents did work in the week. It is the equivalent of having a team of, say, 150 lawyers, and giving them different jobs, some of which could take a day. The windows launched 119 workflows, which are batches of agents run to a plan. They also sent each other 78 messages. So they are communicating with each other. The project’s research record gained 106 entries. Everything I do has a research ledger. It is all add, don’t delete. I use a method which has been peer-reviewed and established for using computers in foundational research. Whenever we make discoveries or new representations of data, they are all noted. I keep a running record of how we are working with Glimmer and the other large language models I have been experimenting with. I have whole security protocols, which also keep records and ledgers. And my shelf received 571 Word builds of 319 documents. I sent 362 messages to the computer, about 10,000 words, leaving out the briefs I pasted and the machine’s lines I quoted back to it. Those messages directed the week, in plain English, slips of the keyboard included. I typed twelve permission lines. I have to give the computer permission to do certain things, for security reasons. I signed five preregistrations and amendments. A preregistration fixes a test before any of its data is read. Keeping thirteen windows in step Eighty-three of my messages were one line typed into three windows or more within a quarter of an hour. Fifty-eight of them were the same instruction to carry on. “Limit reset, continue.” “Keep going.” “What’s next? I’d like you to keep going.” That kind of thing. The usage limit is the most work one account can ask of the machine in a few hours. It stopped windows five times between Friday and Sunday. Each time, every window stopped where it stood. None could start again by itself. At 19:39 on Saturday I typed “continue” eleven times in four minutes, into ten windows. On Friday I had also learned to move every window to the other account with another login. The windows could not see each other, and much of what went wrong lay between them. A batch of readings was cut off by the limit and resumed, and it wrote its second readings over its first. On Saturday afternoon I restated the rule: “I don’t understand how anything can be overwritten. We have a hard rule that nothing is deleted. It’s added to.” By that evening a guard kept a copy of any file before any window could write over it. On Sunday morning two windows set about building the same reading of the library of old texts at once. Inside each window the machine reasoned well. What it needed was a person to coordinate between the windows, and for most of the week that person was me. The person in the loop was needed between the conversations rather than inside any of them. What only I supplied What I supplied was the rulings on meaning. On Saturday, on my phone, I ruled on card U196. I commented on a particular interpretation by Glimmer. I said, “This is Infolklore. Danyliuk’s boomerang analogy, metaphor. It’s Right.” It conforms to the second element of the Code of Positive Trolls, “as it is a warning to Russia of what Ukraine is by now doing well in advance.” It’s a warning well in advance. Like grandma warning you not to go into the forest. Don’t eat the apple. This is a warning to you. So when Danyliuk says to the Russians, everything you do to us, we will boomerang back to you, it is Infolklore. Archetypal Infolklore. It is also Infolklore because of the double entendre of early birds, which he used as metaphor. Birds are a common euphemism for drones. They are a harbinger of spring, and indeed of doom. It is typed as I would say it. The engine will be measured against rulings like that one, and no window could have written it. What the week gave the work Before anyone looked, the operator fixed three conditions that an output had to meet. I won’t go through all the outputs. The detector’s first stage, Stage 0, was built on Sunday. It is a page on my Mac, for me alone, where I paste a text, any text, and Glimmer reads it. Glimmer is the large language model I am running locally. The verdict appears in words, with the tools named, which you can look at on Disinfolklore.eu (https://www.disinfolklore.eu/). A quotation is shown only if it is word for word in the text, so we have various guards against hallucination. The verdict rule is kept open, as a slot to be filled whenever the test settles. My rulings there, on full-length texts, will be the detector’s second measurement. The principles of Infolklore (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-demon-of-the-moon-ep-2-over) were tested. This one serves my writing rather than the detector. Principle 2.2 says the archive’s broadcasters celebrate strikes on lawful targets. Under a rule fixed before any reading, 406 of the 408 celebrated strikes on Volya met the standard of a lawful military target. Two could not be judged, and none failed. Principle 2.6 says the broadcasters refuse to target civilians. Its 21 failures in the archive were read again under a rule fixed beforehand, and 2 of the 754 passages of transcript still break it. It stays a candidate, not yet adopted as a principle. Then there is the library of old texts, which I am using to mine for archetypal content. It had lost about 635,000 words, 6.9 per cent of the whole text, to a fault in our own conversion program. Late on Saturday a window noticed that the questions it was about to put to me began from lines cut off mid-sentence. It traced them to the fault. At 19:48 I wrote, “Find the missing text and fix it.” By 20:11, 626,978 words were restored in a new folder beside the old one. The old one was left as it was, and the new one was checked line by line against it. Each of these rests on my rulings or on its source, never on a window’s say-so. Where a test was run, its rule was fixed before the reading. Some went against what the project expected, Principle 2.6 among them. And much of the best work was the machine finding faults in the project’s own foundations. Limits One Mac, one person, one week, in a project of years. The counts come from the transcripts, which record what the windows did and not what I did away from them. The token figures are output only, counted once per message. The best outputs were chosen by conditions the operator set, from records the windows wrote. Nothing here measures one model against another on this work. None of it could have run so easily without the months, and indeed years, of rules, guards and instructions built up into the system. They are part of the algorithm that controls and harnesses the frontier model, the local model and all the rest of the work. Years of work, and months of rules, guards and instructions, learned since I saw that video in January. Where it began, and where it goes The first dream asked what a firm’s worth of effort could do if it were turned to knowledge. For one week, one Mac ran thirteen windows and two thousand agents on my questions. Directing all of it took plain English and a clear mind, not a partner who could build neural networks. The second dream is the Meta Main Game, and the detector is its first form. The detector reads written text, and even the spoken reservoir reaches it as transcripts. The Meta Main Game is meant for everything that reaches the senses. So text is only where it starts. This week the detector reached the first of its five stages: a page on my Mac, for me alone. Its measurement comes next. First a brief for reading the Disinfolklore side, which has not yet been measured. Then one read, fixed in advance, of a sealed set of 1,549 passages. After that comes the online version, for people I invite, like you. Then a connector that other people’s AI assistants can consult, in due course, maybe by Christmas. Then the archive of other people’s operations. One week moved the first stage. The operator is a window whose subject is the other windows. In a small way it already does for my attention what the Meta Main Game is meant to do for perception. It tells me which windows can run on their own and which need me at any one time. In Russia-occupied eastern Ukraine I worked as a diplomat, amid dust, bombs, murder and torture. I watched the occupier brainwash the minds (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-combatting-russias-mental) and transform the identities of Ukrainians unfortunate enough to be stuck under the occupation. Russia’s use of Facebook, even in 2015 to 2018, as part of its brainwashing apparatus inside Russia-occupied Ukraine, was part of my daily work there. On Getoor’s slide in Long Beach in December 2017 were posts like those I was reading on Facebook. The Russian occupiers were reading them too, to troll me and my colleagues. They looked at the colleagues who had not taken our security advice, which I took at the time. The advice was to delete all your social media, if you had any. Some of my colleagues didn’t, and the Russians used those posts to run operations on them and cause havoc. So in Long Beach I was interested in how we could read posts automatically and counteract this kind of trolling. Long Beach in December 2017 was the unevenly distributed future. The conference venue was clean and blue-skied and driven by neural networks. I had travelled there directly from Russia-occupied Luhansk, and it blew my mind. Researchers at the cutting edge were trying to build the tools to create a positive future for humanity. I had been transported from the nightmare of one potential future for humanity to that potential positive one. The nightmare was Russia-occupied Luhansk. It is Oleshky today. It could be our future, unless we all continue our good work to stop that future materialising. For me it was a game-changer. I realised that if we were to mobilise these artificial neural networks and unleash them inside our communities, we needed a means of ensuring their intelligence was positive trolling (https://www.decodingtrolls.net/p/whats-positivetrolling). It needed to be infused with a positive trolling module, the Code of Positive Trolls, built into the machine. That is the origin and the goal of the Meta Main Game. Glimmer, reading with the Code of Positive Trolls on my Mac, with the help of these frontier models, is the first place the module is being built. Whether I will be able to build it is still an open question. But now at least I am able to work towards that goal using natural language, almost unlimited numbers of electronic agents, and a crystal clear mind. So that is what I have to say about that. I don’t know whether that chimes with you, or interests you, Ming, or anyone else. Questions from the Nest Ming asked: “What I’m curious about, Decoding, is how do you have a sort of quality control assurance on the output you get from these…” Knowing the material In my context, one of the first things I did last February was go and get all of my public Substack posts (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-ai-and-disinfolklore-an-introduction). This thing allowed me to do it. That was about a million and a half words at that point. I trained it on them and interrogated them. Out of them it helped me create my Disinfolklore.eu website. And then that is training data for it. So the equivalent of your one plus one is, “Find everything I’ve ever said about what Disinfolklore means and summarise it for me.” It does that, and I quality control. I know what I’ve said and what I’ve done. This week, for instance, I checked what Google AI search is saying about Disinfolklore. It’s bang on. It captures everything in a positive way. That is the first time it has for a long time. So the main way I can check quality? It’s relatively easy if it’s something I know a lot about. I’ve invented Disinfolklore. I’m the one who’s written everything about it. I legislate what is correct and what isn’t. I can tell the nuance. So I can tell it, “I never said that.” I know my niche in a way that nobody else will know, or does know it currently. So that’s how I can quality control. A, by knowing the material much better than the computer. A system built from the ground up Second, by building a system (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-how-to-battle-archetyping) from the ground up. It mobilises what the computer is really good at doing, which is when you give it vast amounts of material. Even my Substack posts, five hundred or whatever, from the three different projects. It’s really good once you give it a solid data set. In your case, for instance, you might have a lot of files about aircraft leasing. Particular research, contracts, a whole plethora of stuff. That combination is kind of like an external hard drive of that particular part of your brain and your mind. You can train a computer on all of that data. You will know what you were doing around February 2004. You will know that it’s made up the name of this company, because you’ll say, “No, that’s just completely wrong.” And when you’re trying to get it to come up with new ideas, or business plans, or whatever. Ten thousand documents on a loop In creative work, intellectual labour, you can run it on all your literature, your entire library. One of the many things I have running is this Autoresearch stuff. It goes through my library of maybe ten thousand electronic documents, books, PDFs. I’ve read five thousand of them over the past few years, since I’ve been doing the trolling thing. I have that running on a loop when I have spare compute. It generates and bounces off different ideas. Some of them are really crap. But others I read and I think, “That is amazing. I would never have made that connection.” So that’s another way of quality control. Does that help you see? A post sent to test Grok Ming came back: “Apologies. I was just sending you a DM with a post which I’ve used to test Grok quite extensively. I’ve sent it to you to see if you can run it, perhaps even in real time, through your machine while you’re talking. If you can’t, don’t worry, just do it some other time when it’s more convenient. But to basically run it through the Disinfolklore test. “So just to give you some background, what the post is: it’s in Russian, from a pro-Russian person, showing a picture, so the picture’s flagged up as disturbing. It’s from early July, from a Russian strike on Kyiv. And this Russian person is claiming that, in fact, this isn’t from Kyiv in July at all, the Ukrainians are just lying about it. This is, in fact, from a Russian city where there was a gas explosion in an apartment block in, I think, 2008 or something, Volgodonsk. I forget where. And that the Ukrainians are just a bunch of liars. “Now, everything you need to debunk it in its entirety is in that original post, the one I’ve just DM’d you. And every time I’ve tested it on Grok, Grok has flunked. Claims that it is, in fact, Russia in the middle of winter, because the whole premise, the argument for this Russian person posting it, is that it’s not Kyiv in July, because, look, there’s snow. Well, if you look at the photo, there’s no snow in it. But Grok doesn’t see that. Grok just picks up the text and runs with that. “So Grok’s logic is reversed. So, if it’s in the middle of winter, therefore there must be snow in the picture, as opposed to: look at the picture, there’s no snow, therefore it’s not winter. Or at least it’s not a snowy winter.” The wrap and the wrapped The photograph, which I think you’ve posted. This is what we’ve come up with. The artefact you gave, Ming, was what I call a wrap. I use the term technically. It’s a tweet, or a lexical unit, wrapped in another message. In this case, a lexical unit and an image. So those are the two artefacts. This is the five hundred words on it. The five hundred words The photograph is real. Efrem Lukatsky of the Associated Press took it in Kyiv on Monday 6 July 2026. The agency’s caption is inside the file Glavcom published the next day. The rescuer on the left wears a Ukrainian flag on his sleeve. A father, a mother and their son died in a nine-storey block in Podilskyi district, and nineteen people died in Kyiv that night. RIP. The picture is correct for the event the post describes. That is, the post which is wrapped. It is not recent on 30 September. It is twelve weeks old, and the wrap itself places the spreading in July. The post carries that record in Russian, with a demand. Its first sentence is true and stands as a scene. Its second asks the partners for the weapons that protect. Stephen ruled on 21 September that such urgency is in the service of Right. Stephen is me, Decoding’s other name. Right is the second element of the Code of Positive Trolls. The record supports the complaint. President Zelenskyy said in August that supplies of air defence missiles had fallen threefold. Five of the six hold. Generosity (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/applying-the-generosity-element-of) is the weak place: the quotation marks round «партнеры», which withdraw a name from the people being asked for help, and the dead shown without the photographer’s name or his apology. On the strict threshold, the post is a relay with a demand, and it grades Neutral. It is an Infolklore candidate, and that ruling is Stephen’s. The earned act in this chain is the photographer’s. He stood in front of that slab, signed the picture and asked forgiveness of those it would hurt. The wrap, however, is Disinfolklore. It says the picture is Magnitogorsk, 2018, the gas pipe. None of that is true. It offers one true sentence, that Kyiv has no snow in July, as the proof. There is no snow in the photograph. There is a white sheet, and a copy so small and so overprinted that a sheet reads as snow. That is, the wrap of the photograph and the Ukrainian’s message. The wrap then tells those who showed […] It fails all six elements in the Code of Positive Trolls. It removes the killer. A gas pipe has no sender. The address is not new. The same Magnitogorsk explosion was used against pictures from Chuhuiv on the first day of the full-scale invasion, and PolitiFact and Maldita recorded it in 2022. Two cases make a pattern to watch, not finding. One question the screenshots cannot answer. The wrap was posted by «Мария», and the profile in the attached screenshot is also named «Мария». If they are one account, the post is an exhibit on the wrapper’s own page, and this cut-off opening would say how it was framed. The lesson is about the copy. A true picture travelled until its details were gone, and the denial was built on that […] Stephen’s question, whether the photograph was real, settled more than any reading of the words could. So that’s what I taught the computer to do. The test, explained Ming told the room: “Just to give everybody the context of what Decoding was responding to there. Earlier in the conversation, Decoding was talking about his Disinfolklore AI project. And as a test, I gave him a post from a Russian account on X, which you can see in the Nest at the moment. So you can take a look at what Decoding’s actually run through his Disinfolklore AI. “That’s a really impressive result, Decoding, because I’ve tested that post against multiple other AIs, and they all fall into the trap that it is, in fact, Magnitogorsk, and need various degrees of additional prompting to change their minds on that. So, can I ask, what was your prompt when you fed this artefact into your AI?” Three prompts I gave it three prompts. The first: I didn’t understand that, so I just screenshotted it. I don’t open stuff in Twitter, ever. So I just had that photograph and the message from the Ukrainian. I gave it that, and I said to it (I’m just looking for it now), “Can you do a Disinfolklore analysis of the screenshot? Twelve tools (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-mana-stripping-through-monikoring) and five hundred words conclusion, please.” When I saw that, I saw what it was doing. Then I found the real photograph. So the second prompt was, “Is the photograph real? Don’t assume that is correct or recent,” because it was looking for stuff for today, on today. The third and final prompt I gave it was, “Now, see the post which wrapped that post.” That’s language I’ve taught the computer to understand. “See the post that wraps that post and the photo. So apply the method to the post itself and to the wrap. See screenshot.” The method is the Disinfolklore analytical method (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/counter-disinfolklore-b16). Then it produced that. Neutral prompts, and Grok Ming said: “So interesting. So your prompts were effectively pretty neutral, and they weren’t leading questions in any way. Because I always kept my prompts completely neutral on this particular test. It was just simply, ‘Hey Grok, assess this post.’ And then, in order to get Grok to tell the truth about it, I then had to start actually spoon-feeding it details. ‘Pay particular attention to,’ for instance, ‘the Ukrainian patch on the left-hand rescuer’s arm and the total absence of winter conditions,’ for example, just as pure examples. “And even when I did that, for instance, Grok wouldn’t admit that this was in fact not Magnitogorsk. And so I got Grok into situations where it was just claiming a completely absurd and contradictory position, in a couple of the tests that I ran on that. But it sounds like your AI has passed first run completely, which sounds really impressive.” Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe (https://www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

Podcast Authority Score: 7 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

15

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

0