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Decoding Trolls: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Decoding Trolls
Decoding Trolls decodes the meanings inside memes. Decoding Trolls sees any emotion-moving activity of body, speech, or mind as trolling. Trolling others' emotions is what we do as sentient beings. The point is to control it, through getting how it works. www.decodingtrolls.net
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- 1 weeks ago44 min
The Lulaverse: Munich put into practice
Two years ago this month a man came from nowhere to win the first round of a presidential election in a NATO state. I worked out how it was done before the intelligence services published the proof, thanks to Ioana. On Sunday night a man in Brazil won a fourth term by doing the same thing the other way round. Tonight is about the method, the Disinfolklore analytical method, which is the one I set out in Munich in February 2025. It is about who is running it against us, as they did in Romania, and who has now run it back in Brazil. And it is about what the machine has found this month inside Volya Radio. A community of volunteers there has run the method for the war every night for two years. They have no name for what they do.One sentence first, so nobody mistakes the subject. Lula’s view of russia’s war on Ukraine is not mine, and it is not ours. Many of us have said so since 2023. Tonight is about method. The method works whoever holds it. That is the point.Munich, February 2025Here is what I said in Munich, to a Pirate Party audience at the Security Conference. The speech has since been viewed over a hundred thousand times. I repeat my own words because the case tonight rests on the dates.I declared that we live in a Disinfolklore Universe. Disinfolklore is my word, coined on 13 February 2023, for disinformation that works the way folklore works. It carries archetypes, the old characters and story shapes we all learned before we could read. It uses them to move our moods, our motivations, our attitudes and our intentions. The energy a meme carries from those archetypes into your mind is what I call Mana. Look for the Mana in the meme. That was the mantra.I said this was not a metaphor. The war for our attention is not like a war. It is the main battlespace of a war, and the kinetic battles in Kursk and Kherson feed it.I said that the power to archetype belongs to all of us, and then I gave the catch. If you own the means of cultural production, the platforms through which memes are made, exchanged and distributed, then you can archetype at scale. You can re-encode minds at scale.I said that community identity is wholly formed through story-telling. Herder asked the German tribes in 1777 to unite behind their folksongs. The Grimms, Wagner and Goethe answered. Ninety years later there was the first unified German state. russia knows this. MAGA knows this. They build community out of grievance, fear and memes.And I said what was to be done. First, know that this is what is going on. Second, create your own archetypes and counter theirs with yours, in your own mind and in your own sphere of influence, however small, modest or humble. Engage in conscious memetic warfare according to rules of engagement, which I called the Code of Positive Trolls. Six tests. Generosity, Right, Patience, Mana, Focus, Insight. If your memes conform to those six tests, that is positive trolling. It is Infolklore. And then make a call. Don’t just stand there assaying, like everyone on Volya does a thousand times a day. We make a call. We adjudicate. We listen, we read the meme, we decide, and we respond accordingly.That was the theory. Now the two elections.One guy worked out the box: Romania, November 2024On 24 November 2024 Romania voted in the first round of its presidential election. A man called Călin Georgescu came first with nearly 23 per cent. Three weeks earlier the polls had him under one per cent. He had no party, no structures in the country, and had declared zero campaign spending. He had been expelled from the far-right AUR in 2022 for calling the Iron Guard’s founder and the author of Romania’s Holocaust heroes. His content was a lost true Romania, before NATO and before the European Union. His biggest theme in the last two months was peace. Peace meant that Romania should stop supporting Ukraine so as not to be dragged into a war. Beside it ran the line that ninety per cent of Romania’s food is imported, which, he said, is a crime against the Romanian people.On 26 November, two days after the vote and eight days before any document was declassified, I published how it was done. My sources were two Romanian newsrooms, a think tank, and the commentator Ioana, of this parish. Here is the mechanism, and I want you to hold it in your mind beside what happened in Brazil.Georgescu did not rise through his own videos. He rose through other people’s. G4Media and Info Sud-Est found that his name had been planted, as a tag, in the comments under everything to do with the election. “Călin
- Oct 3, 202637 min
Podcast | When History Becomes War: Transcending the History Provocation troll (Ep 2)
My new Historical versus Real russia lens has been tested before.In October 1925, at Locarno, Weimar Germany guaranteed its borders with France and Belgium. But Weimar Germany left its border with Poland open. The Weimar state spent years campaigning about the past. The history it told claimed the land, claimed Poland. Fourteen years later, its army crossed the open border.“…The limb is gone, but the feeling of the Historical Russia remains. AfD, MAGA, Brexit, Poland’s PiS, France’s National Front and a heap of other backward-looking, oligarch-run democracy-hacking projects engage in History Provocation tactics - nostalgia concealing a will-to-power whose goal is to destroy the post-WWII architecture…”The Federal Republic, the same core after a far greater defeat, kept a legal claim on the lost east for two further decades. But the Federal Republic renounced force. It acknowledged its crimes from 1951. In 1970, it signed treaties with Moscow and with Warsaw, accepting the post-war borders. After signing the first, that August, Willy Brandt told West Germans on television: “There’s nothing lost with this treaty which has not been squandered away a long time ago.”That is what the Real Germany sounds like in a core that has lost its empire. That is what we must hear in the Real russia of the future.If we want to hear the leaders of the future Real russia, then we must hear it from them now. We must be looking for that meaning in what we hear around us today. So, by the time the russian state collapses and becomes Moscow and St Petersburg and a couple of counties around those areas, we will be equipped to help steer it, and to ensure that it remains inside the boundaries of the Real russia. Whenever it lapses into the Historical russia discourse, we can help correct it.The question to put to every voice in Future russia is Locarno’s. Which borders do you call final? And do you call all of them final?For their own good, and within the lawIf russia had the power to conquer Ukraine, it would. But it doesn’t. Ukraine will enforce its borders for the decades to come.So unless Future russia learns what the Real russia is, and how to evacuate its brain, its consciousness and its national consciousness of this Historical russia fallacy, the Ukrainians will enforce it. They will be fully within their rights under the law. They will enforce it using tens of thousands of drones every time russia strays over its borders, in search of revenge, or some historical russian troll.What I’m prescribing today is a change in mind and understanding. It is metanoia, in Yakubova’s speech. It is for their own good. It is for the good of humanity, and the good of European peace and security. And it is all within the law.Respect your borders. Don’t invade other countries. Don’t fill your population with nonsense about the past. Especially when that nonsense will, in due course, end up persuading them to participate in unlawful invasions of other countries, and the deaths of millions of people, since February 2022.Why we need to start nowThe reason to learn the difference now, before Future russia arrives, is that many Westerners are already hypnotised by the Data-Resistant Archetypes.The archetype of russia as a great power is a phantom limb. It’s like when you lose a leg or an arm. For months afterwards, you try to move it. You try to pick something off the shelf, or you try to walk, and you can’t. It’s gone. That is the Historical russia.The Historical russia is still in our information space. As the Syrian regime began to collapse in the winter of 2024, the same IR (International Relations) experts who had not seen the end of Syria coming were urging Ukraine to concede territory to an unbeatable russia. They still are.The limb is gone. The Historical russia is dead. It’s in the grave. All that is left is an idea
- Sep 28, 202639 min
Podcast | Future Russia: The Pattern Ukraine Must End
This is about Future Russia. Now is the time to think about Future Russia.Current Russia has one choice left that does not end in losing everything. It can accept that the world will settle for nothing less than its withdrawal from all of Ukraine, every village of Ukraine, Crimea included. Russia has shown no sign of making this choice. I contend it will not make this choice in time.“We need to understand the distinction between Historical Russia and Real Russia today. Historical Russia is often disguised. It comes through the words and the writings of journalists, or of Western so-called experts. It comes through Russians themselves, and propagandists, and Disinfolklorists.So in the future, as soon as it raises its head, we must have the analytical capacity to see the Mana, to see the energy, of either Historical Russia or Real Russia.”Ukraine’s war aimsUkraine’s plan does not depend on Russia choosing well from its perspective.In February 2024, Kyrylo Budanov, then head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, set out Ukraine’s conditions for ending the war. Ukraine should destroy Russia’s rear: its oil and fuel bases, the plants producing its weapons and ammunition, and its other strategic targets. Ukraine should take back all its territory before peace talks begin. In his words, Ukraine “will be able to feel secure only after all Russian war criminals are prosecuted, [Russia’s] nuclear weapons are destroyed, and [Russia’s] nuclear power plants are controlled by international organisations.”I called those Ukraine’s war aims: destroy Russia’s capacity to wage war, permanently.I wrote then that Budanov gets it. I wrote that this is a once-in-a-millennium chance for Ukraine, and for all of us. That includes Russians who understand what the Real Russia is, and how their future can be built only on the Real Russia, not the Historical Russia. Any chatter, I wrote then, about “peace” should be filtered through this prism.General Budanov had already said in October 2022: “As soon as the Russian regime collapses, it will all fall apart.”Future RussiaThis is what I expect. Current Russia goes on losing until it has lost almost everything. Future Russia is the state of Moscow and St Petersburg.The rest of today’s Ruschist Federation becomes a whole plethora of sovereign states. Their independence is watched over for a time by Europe, the United States, China, the powers of Asia. Each of these future states must adhere to a Real policy, not an Historical policy. That is a condition of receiving the aid they will need to sustain themselves as sovereign independent states.The map already holds the outline. Within its internationally recognised borders, the Ruschist Federation counts 83 federal subjects. These are the regions, republics and cities that make it up. Twenty-one of them are republics. Most are named for people who are not Russian.As I wrote in 2022, “Russia’s self-image as an eternal monolith masks its continuing colonial legacy.”Muscovy was a village when Kyiv was already a city. Muscovy has never had a decolonisation moment. There was no Frantz Fanon in Moscow, and no Sartre. Future Russia is what the decolonisation looks like when it finally comes.Two Russias inside Future RussiaThe current Ruschist state dissolves and splinters. It leaves a remnant based around St Petersburg and Moscow. Even then, however, the Russia problem will not have been solved. A state of Moscow and St Petersburg can still be the old empire in a smaller coat.Inside Future Russia, two Russias will argue over the country. The rest of us need to know, from the first day, which one is speaking.One is Historical Russia. The other is Real Russia.The purpose of this is to explain to you the difference. Understanding this difference can help us cut through debates today, rhetoric today, and what I call, in other projects, Disinfolklore today.One is Historical Russia. The other is Real Russia. They cannot share one country. For 30 years, plenty of Russians, plenty of Western experts thought the Russia of the doctrine of Russkiy Mir and the Russia of the map could get along. Indeed, they thought they could even help each other.They cannot. Sooner or later, one devours the other. The Real Russia devours the Historical Russia. Or, as is occurring today, the Historical Russia is devouring itself.The harde
- Sep 21, 202646 min
Podcast | Older than Writing
Today I want to talk about something older than writing. The writer today, and I do consider myself a writer, still holds that position and still keeps that practice. I want to add something to it as well. The human inside and outside the loop, in the age of mythos.EnheduannaEnheduanna is the answer to a question in the air just now.The oldest writer whose name we know was a woman. I have written about her before. I first met her as a cuneiform tablet in a dusty, forgotten corner of a Brussels museum. That tablet had been written six hundred years after Enheduanna died. She lived around 2400 BCE. So her songs went on being copied for six centuries, and were cut into clay, and that is why I could find one of them on a day when I was in Brussels to talk to people there about the Disinfolklore analytical method.Enheduanna lived in the city of Ur. In the marshland the Greeks would later call Mesopotamia, some four thousand three hundred years ago. That is the same Mesopotamia Peter Jukes, the writer and artist, refers to in his recent piece in Byline Times, “The Tyranny of Literacy: How Writing Only Scratches the Surface”.She was the daughter of Sargon, the first monarch to bind Sumer and Akkad into one dominion. She was high priestess of Nanna, the moon god.There is an alabaster disc of her in the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. Penn is where my grandfather went to university. It is also where Donald Trump went, but we will not hold that against it. I have not managed to visit the Penn Museum yet and I am desperate to. The disc was carved in her lifetime, and I will post a picture of it beside this piece. On it she stands larger than the men around her. That stone still catches the light after four millennia. The way a full moon does.What Enheduanna did, as the first named author in human culture, was not in the end to describe her world. It was to intervene in it. She used words to set her world right. A usurper defiled the temple she served, a ziggurat of the kind the Bible remembers as the Tower of Babel. She did not merely record the outrage. She wrote against it. Her writing outlived him.The averaging engineWe are told reading and writing are dying. In truth, as Peter Jukes recently put it in Byline Times, they are exploding. There is more of both than in any century before ours.The real worry his essay raises is subtler. These new machines, the large language models we hear so much about, produce fluent text at stunning speed. One thing they do is predict the likeliest next word from billions already written. They are, as his piece has it, “avatars of the average”. They “produce nothing new but predict the old”.There is a counterweight worth putting beside that. One of the founders (@importai) of Anthropic wrote on X this weekend that the idea of these models as stochastic parrots has in many ways ruined our capacity to understand their real power. That landed with me. Until last November I thought I parroted the stochastic parrot line myself. They do predict the next word. But at the level of meaning they do not predict in that same stochastic way, and that is where the mystery sets in.Jukes’s warning still stands. If we lean on them too hard we may learn to average too. We may mistake the plausible for the true. His piece ends on a line that resonates. “The trouble with our moment is not that we grant our machines too much mind, but that we grant ourselves too little.”Every word of that is right.It is also one half of an alabaster disc. I have been holding the other half in my hands and in my mind all summer. The whole disc begins where writing itself begins, with a woman writing to the moon, to the moon god Nanna. It travels a road older than the machines. Older than the essay as a form. Older than cuneiform, which was used six hundred years after Enheduanna’s death to record what she had once sung as a prayer.It is older than writing.What a writer is forSomething subtle is buried in the word writer.A writer’s job, as I have come to understand my own, is to recouple two things that power, that mana, is forever trying to prise apart. What is legally right, and what is morally right.The tools for that work are hidden in the vocabulary of the work itself. We right the world by writing. We set down words that act in a reader’s mind like a writ, a summons, a binding instrument. Right, write, writ, word. Say them. Write them. You will hear one sound under all four. An R with a hard stop behind it. <a target="_blank" href="https://www.powerofmana.net/p/s
- Sep 16, 202640 min
Podcast | I am become meme.
When Elon Musk told a conservative conference in 2025 “I am become meme”, he was not joking. He was telling you what he does for a living.The Russian state’s own dramaturg has said the same thing in plainer words. Dramaturg carries the T-R-. Vladislav Surkov, once deputy prime minister of the Ruschist Federation, was picked in 1999 to design Vladimir Putin’s political system, like an architect, and directed it for years. He was the actor-director at the centre of managed democracy, that play-act of democracy. Part 1 of this two-parter is available here (though this is stand-alone and one of my best podcasts.In an essay in early 2025 he wrote that Russia had gone onto an information counter-offensive against the West by transferring the psychological concepts of the mental matrix and the archetypes of national consciousness into politics. Perhaps by sending two Brighton Beach oligarchs, mafia-adjacent oligarchs, to Kyiv the other day, supposedly representing the greatest country that ever was.So when I talk about archetypes, I am not trying to be arch or impressive. I am not telling you that I have read Jung. I am helping you understand the enemy of everything that is good about our lives. Surkov serves a regime whose only goal is to evaporate, eviscerate and turn to ashes every city and village it can get within drone or artillery range of. Google him and you will find them all saying he is a great genius. When he says that Russia has gone onto an information counter-offensive by transferring the archetypes of national consciousness into politics, we must listen. In every country where Russia operates, it dons the mask of patriotism. The AfD, Reform, the National Rally, all the so-called patriotic parties the Russians fund wear the costume of patriotism in the country they operate in. That is the mental matrix and the archetypes of national consciousness, in the reality of our lives. How un-American is MAGA? Yet it purports to define what is American. That is Surkov’s reveal.Continued from Part One:In March 2025 Surkov told the French magazine L’Express what the system he built was. He called it democracy with a monarchical archetype. We need a tsar, he said. Periods without a tsar always end in disaster for us. And he said that when Donald was first elected, a number of very serious American media had reported that Donald’s team used Surkov’s propaganda methods and some of his political ideas, and that Donald was ideologically closer to Putler than to Macron. The operator named the operation, in print, in the year the ballroom was begun, the folklore-like ballroom that installs an archetype where the East Wing stood.Democracy with a monarchical archetype. In Washington it is being architectured, by a ballroom bolted onto the White House. The phrase belongs on the roundabout at Arlington.The nurseryGold. There is no East Wing any longer. Imagine that. Imagine I had told you two years ago that he would demolish the East Wing, that he would take the architectural symbolism of destroying the First Republic by knocking it down and installing a folklore-like monarchical archetype in its place, a ballroom. The East Room has gold drapes. The Oval Office is gilded, with a cabinetmaker flown up from Florida to do the trimmings and the President adding bits himself with Krazy Glue, Krazy with a K. The two equestrian statues by the Lincoln Memorial have been coated in gold leaf. When I was a diplomat in Kosovo, everyone said that when you went to Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, you would see their gauche equestrian statues dedicated to Alexander the Great. Now the two by the Lincoln Memorial are gold. “Wear sunglasses if you’re passing by them,” a Washington theatre director told Hitchens. The West Wing has its name in gold lettering. The ballroom will carry gold seals on its outside before the courts have finished with it. The arch is to be topped by a gold Liberty, the liberty of the eparchy, the enslavement of the people and the liberty of the oligarchy, and by gold eagles. The President addresses his donors from a lectern shaped like a golden eagle. And a 22-billion-dollar gilded redesign of Dulles Airport was presented in the Oval Office one afternoon.The ballroom. Ninety thousand square feet, which doubles the footprint of the White House. Two hundred and fifty workers, twenty hours a day, seven days a week. Three thousand cubic yards of concrete. A million pounds of rebar. The lead architect parted ways with him over how big was big enough. To make room for it the East Wing was demolished in three days in October 2025, and the rubble dumped on a historic golf course in East Potomac Park. “Sorry, darling, that’s progress,” he s
- Sep 9, 202649 min
Podcast | Arch Trolling: Installing the Monarch Archetype, Part One
One morning in April 2026 a US fighter pilot was supposedly pulled out from behind enemy lines in Iran. At night. That is the story we were told. We do not really know what happened. The likelier reading is that the United States military made an astonishingly unsuccessful attempt to steal nuclear material from Iran, then concocted a story about a fallen aircraft, the loss of many jets, and a heroic escape for an pilot nobody has yet seen. Some of us remember the cacophony of that week, which was then succeeded by all sorts of other stuff. On that very day Donald was circling the ceremonial axis of the Republic outside Arlington National Cemetery. He had his motorcade drive slowly round a traffic circle. He was focusing on a patch of grass in the middle of a roundabout, while the supposed airman, who may or may never have existed, struggled under unspecified injuries, rescued, it was reported, by hundreds of other heroic US military.Part 2 of this two-parter is available here (though this is stand-alone and one of my best podcasts.He wants to put an arch on that grass. A triumphal arch, like the one in Paris, 250 feet high, concrete wrapped in granite, with a 60-foot gold Liberty on top, wings on her back and golden eagles either side. Six months before, in the Oval Office, a reporter had pointed at the model and asked him who it was for. The Russian mafia Don answered: me.Continued:This week’s podcast is about an arch act of trolling: installing the monarch archetype at the ceremonial axis of the Republic, perhaps the greatest republic humanity has ever experienced, and probably now in its closing stages.A duty to retain the RepublicAll of us have a duty, and especially the Americans amongst us, to fight to retain the Republic in the jurisdiction of the United States. France has had five or six republics. There is no reason why there cannot be a second American republic, one that takes account of all the errors the Don and his enablers, the eparchy, have brought to the fore of so many minds.It must be said what it is like, at this point, to read the august commentators upon whom I and many others used to rely, in the Washington Post, the New York Times and the other great institutions of the Republic. They take the ballroom at face value. They write serious pieces about the arch. They write sniffy, snobby pieces about gold in the White House. They share the memes the White House releases, to express their disapproval, and in sharing them they keep them alive. That is one of the sadder aspects of all this.Last week a senior US Army officer in Canada pooh-poohed a very competent Canadian journalist who asked him the straight question. What would you do if the commander-in-chief ordered you to invade Canada? I do not impugn the integrity of ordinary soldiers. I do impugn the integrity of commanders who would rather keep their jobs than state clearly to Canada, a NATO ally and one of the United States’ strongest supporters, that under no circumstances would they obey an unlawful order to invade it. That lack of integrity, that lack of professionalism, is exactly what has led to the catastrophic war in Iran, in which America has expended most of its available munitions and all of its political capital in the Middle East, and has made a superpower of the mullah-led, undemocratic regime in Tehran. The US Army is engaged in the most heinous war crimes in an unlawful war. The Navy feeds its sailors starvation rations on ships without proper sanitation. Meanwhile the bombing goes on. Full kudos to the brave officers who resigned, or were fired by the Russian mafia-led administration, rather than follow unlawful orders. We can say that this is just Don and his Russian mafia enablers. It is on all of us that it is happening.My speciality is to look for the folkloric archetypes in the everyday stories that some people call news and I call Disinfolklore, or Infolklore. So while all that was going on in Iran, or not going on, and we may never know, Donald, the Don, the Russian mafia Don, was looking at a patch of grass.The straight lineThe spot where he stopped his motorcade is the western end of a straight line. Pierre L’Enfant, the French engineer George Washington hired to lay out the capital, drew it across a marsh in 1791. The McMillan Commission carried it west over reclaimed river flats in 1902. It runs from the Capitol down the Mall, past the Washington Monument, along the Reflecting Pool to the Lincoln Memorial, over Memorial Bridge, which I crossed many times as a postgrad at Georgetown, and up the hill to the old house at Arlington. Americans call it the ceremonial axis. It is the straightest line the Republic draws. Focus on that word. Straight. And everything the Republic does on that line is a turning. A powe
- Aug 13, 202642 min
Podcast | The Economist Gets Trolled
As in all my work, I’m both working through these contemporaneous examples of writing and Ruschist Disinfolklore in order to apply and fine-tune the method, but I’m also hoping to then communicate some of the power of the method, which is the twelve-tool way, available at disinfolklore.eu.Midnight Tea at the KremlinSo the clock on the Kremlin tower had already struck midnight on the 28th of May 2025 when Andrey Melnichenko was finally summoned. Vladimir Putin greeted his guest, invited him to sit beside him, and offered him tea. Move closer, Andrey, Putler said kindly. A red folder lay in front of the president. Melnichenko guessed it was his own security service dossier. Is someone bothering you? Putler asked, with care.Melnichenko told the president that the mistake of Russia’s business elite had been to separate their fate from the fate of Russia. He thanked the Russian dictator for helping him see the light. Putler was pleased. For years he had warned the oligarchs that they were not truly welcome in the West. Now one of the foremost among them had admitted that Putler was right. The audience lasted over an hour.The scene is not mine. It is the opening scene of The Economist’s own profile of Melnichenko, published on the 9th of July 2026 in 1843, the paper’s long-read magazine, named for the year of its founding. The headline: a top Russian oligarch breaks the silence.Why 1843 Matters in My OeuvreSome of you who have been following my work since the beginning of the full-scale invasion might recognise the significance of 1843 in my oeuvre. One of my first posts on Twitter regarding Russia was on the 4th of March 2022, when I was still employed as a diplomat for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. And I had, several years before, gone through all the documents I could find relating to the first Crimean War, to try to understand if it would give any insights into the current, the second Crimean War. And I found this amazing Economist article, which I then wrote about, in which it describes the perennial problems of the Russian army. And you won’t be surprised to know they are exactly the same problems that we see today.Not only that, but even by the 4th of March 2022, it was clear, in the space of less than a week, that the perennial problems of the Russian army were still the ones that had afflicted it in 1853 — sorry, I’m muddling my dates; it was 1853 — and that afflict it today. So much so that the Washington Post saw my post, and Max Boot did an editorial based on it, basically saying the Russian army hasn’t changed at all since the first Crimean War.So, to see this puff piece for a Ruschist. So: a man takes tea with the Tsar at midnight. He recants his Western life to the Tsar’s face. He is shown the folder that owns him. Ten months later, he breaks the silence in the West’s most trusted liberal weekly, while living in Moscow, unarrested, his factories defended by the Russian army. The silence was not broken. It was commissioned.One Package, Two VesselsThe Economist didn’t publish one piece that week. It published two. The profile — 37 minutes of reading, built on 60 hours of granted conversation — tells us who the man is. And beside it, under the paper’s By Invitation rubric, the man’s own manifesto: why a broken Russia is bad for the world. The paper’s standfirst, the line under the headline that tells you what to think before you read, asserts his conclusion as if it were the weather: when the war in Ukraine ends, Moscow will need to be part of the new security architecture.The two vessels carry one payload. The profile manufactures the character — the physicist, the outsider, the chaos theorist, the man who avoids ideological and moral judgments. The manifesto then delivers the policy: stop pressuring Russia, accept its sovereignty over everyone, and let its elites design what comes next. Character first, payload second. This is how you serve a troll to readers who think themselves too clever to be trolled.I spent years inside Russia-occupied Ukraine from February 2015, watching how this machinery works on ordinary minds. I called what I found Disinfolklore: the narrative form in which meanness is communicated directly into people’s minds, working on their intentions, their attitudes and their moods, without their even knowing. The Melnichenko package is Disinfolklore of the highest grade. It is also 200 years old. That’s the point of this mission: the same families of Chekists and KGB men have been in charge of Russia for 200 years. Same genes, same memes — communism, empire, Russkiy Mir. Old wine, new bottles.The Manifesto: A War With No ActorsThe payload sit
- Aug 1, 202627 min
Podcast | Crossing at Ceuta
This week, the bridge troll went to Africa. I want to talk about Ceuta, and I want to use what happened there to show how a migration crisis hacks our minds. Everything I learned on a wooden bridge in eastern Ukraine between 2015 and 2018 played out this week on a breakwater at the edge of Africa, on a scale I’ve not seen in all my years watching such crossings.50,000 at the FenceCeuta is a Spanish city on the African shore of the Strait of Gibraltar. It has been Spanish for centuries — longer than the United States has existed. About 83,000 people live there. On the land side it is bordered by Morocco, an ally of Russia, and the border is a double fence that runs down into the sea at a breakwater called the Tarajal.On Thursday the 30th of July, the border effectively stopped existing. Spain’s government counted roughly 50,000 people entering in about a day. The president of the city said 60,000. Take the lower number: it is seven in ten of the city’s population arriving in 24 hours. At least 57 human beings died doing it — most drowned, some crushed in a stampede at the breakwater. They were mostly young Moroccan men, with Algerians among them, and a great many unaccompanied children. Footage from the Tarajal shows young men wading ashore chanting Viva España. Another chant was simpler: Bye Bye Morocco, Hello Spain.Ten days earlier there was a trickle. Between 1,500 and 2,000 people had come across since early July, after Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that people who arrive by sea cannot be summarily pushed back. The ruling itself is a humane one — a court applying the post-World War II Refugee Convention, under which the right to seek asylum is sacrosanct. What was done with it was not humane. The Prime Minister says a self-serving interpretation of the ruling spread like wildfire through the smuggling networks. The gangs sold desperate people a rumour about an open door and marched them to the water. And 57 of them died in it. Whatever else turns out to be true about this week, that part alone convicts the people who organised the march. But it’s not the whole story. A rumour does not cross a militarised border by itself. Someone has to hold the gate open.The Goats Are the Original MigrantsLongtime listeners know where I learned to read a crossing. Between 2015 and 2018 I was a peacekeeping diplomat on the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska, then the only legal crossing point between Russia-occupied Luhansk and the rest of Ukraine. In the counter-Disinfolklore manuscript, I called the armed men on the occupied bank what they were: armed Ruschist bridge trolls. My job was negotiating with them.The oldest troll story in our culture is Three Billy Goats Gruff. Three goats cross a bridge to reach new pasture, and under the bridge lives a troll who demands a toll. When I finally read that tale as an adult, standing where I stood, I saw what had been hiding in it all along. The goats are the original migrants — economic migrants. They just want a bit of extra food on the other side of the water. And the troll is the figure our stories have taught us to accept at every crossing since. He does not build the bridge. He does not own the river. He controls the one narrow place where you have to cross. And from that one place he controls the story of who you are when you cross it. Refugee or invader, returnee or criminal — you do not get to say; the one at the crossing says it.In the manuscript I put the whole engine of Disinfolklore in one sentence, and I’ll read it to you as I wrote it: stories that embed an inner- and outer-realm division in our minds, with invaders from the outer realm said to be threatening the sovereignty, security, and the prosperity — fertility — of our inner realm. That is the machine. Stories. That is the whole machine. Every migration panic you have ever been fed is that machine running. And I wrote one more sentence you should keep in your pocket this week: it is a story structure that becomes a cognitive structure. The border on the map gets built in your head, and then someone else decides who stands on which side of it.So when 50,000 people appear at a fence in a single day, the Disinfolklore analyst does not start by asking what the crossers wanted — 50,000 individual wants as old as our species: food, safety, a future. The analyst asks the bridge-troll questions. Who controls the crossing? Who opened it? And who profits from the queue?The Receipts from the GateStart with who opened it, because there the record is rich. Spanish officers who stood at the fence say the Moroccan gendarmes opposite them stayed passive while tens of thousands walked past. The Spanish police unions went further — and I quote them as unions, rather than as the government, because the government says the opposite. JUPOL called it a window of opportunity inside a strategy of hybrid war. J
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Decoding Trolls decodes the meanings inside memes. Decoding Trolls sees any emotion-moving activity of body, speech, or mind as trolling. Trolling others' emotions is what we do as sentient beings. The point is to control it, through getting how it works. www.decodingtrolls.net
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