Visual Meme Analysis

The Twelve Tools apply to visual, audible, and textual memes alike. The book manuscript includes around 50 visual memes illustrating archetypal Disinfolklore in action. This page demonstrates how Tool 1: Archetypal Literacy and Tool 3: Mana in the Meme work when applied to images, staged photography, symbols, and visual spectacles.

Key Themes

• A meme is any informational unit — a photograph, a Telegram sticker, a staged image, a flash of colour. The Twelve Tools work across all media. What matters is the Mana the image carries and the archetype it activates in the viewer’s Inner Realm.
• Staged photography as War Magic — Putin’s carefully staged photographs (bare-chested on a horse, posing with an anaesthetised tiger) install the “strong man” archetype. We mistake the image for the substance. Tool 1 teaches us to see the staging.
• Verbal images as visual memes — Putin’s reference to “Sleeping Beauty in a coffin” creates a visual archetype in the listener’s mind. International lawyers correctly interpreted it as genocidal intent. The words generate the image; the image does the damage.
• Photographs as sympathetic magic — the Immortal Regiment: mass-produced placards of dead relatives function as ritual objects, physically connecting the living to the dead and the dead to the state’s war narrative. See Tool 3: Mana in the Meme.
• Visual Counter-Disinfolklore — Ukraine’s intelligence chief places an owl behind him (ancient Sumerian goddess imagery). Fashion designers create costumes riffing off archetypal superhero imagery. Counter-Disinfolklore imagery passes the Code of Positive Trolls.
• The Code applied to images — when you scroll through a timeline, you make thousands of unconscious adjudications. The six criteria (Generosity, Right, Energy, Patience, Mindfulness, Wisdom) can be applied consciously to any image.
• Screen Spectacle — the political rally as visual Disinfolklore: curated images on giant screens transform the audience into passive recipients of an archetypal narrative. The imagery is not decorative — it is the mechanism.
• Real-time video — a swan filmed escaping the Kakhovka Dam explosion activated thousands of years of archetypal meaning (Apollo’s swan-powered chariot linking Olympia to Hyperborea).
• Tools demonstrated — Tool 1 (archetype behind the image), Tool 3 (energy/intention in visual memes), Tool 4 (images target the Inner Realm directly), Tool 6 (six criteria applied to images).

Read the Passages

Where Next?

• Tool 3: Mana in the Meme — the primary instrument for visual meme analysis
• Ways of Seeing — the theoretical framework for visual Disinfolklore literacy
• Spectacle — what happens when we become passive consumers of visual Disinfolklore
• War Magic — staged photography as magical practice
• Little Green Men — folkloristic naming as a kind of visual costume
• Art — the intersection of aesthetics and Disinfolklore