Greetings! I have been working hard on mastering a new (to me!) area of Cultural Psychology. The research (mainly in the area of Consumer Behaviour) into the laws governing “Sympathetic Magic” have electrified my understanding of the Mana manifestation of the M-N- sound. More soon on all of that!
Meanwhile, in connected work - Mana is key to the analytical method - Disinfolklore - that I invented for parsing Russian, MAGA and other forms of disinformation… In November 2024 I was commissioned to speak at the Pirate Party Security Conference in Munich. I worked up an original piece - Disinfolklore Universe for that speech:
[Disinfolklore ]
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Our Disinfolklore Universe
1 Introduction: Declaration of ‘Our Disinfolklore Universe…
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[Listen now]
embedded-post-meta 10 months ago · 14 likes · Decoding Trolls
Since then, I have been converting that speech into a narrative form suitable for a book. I have also been preparing a detailed non-fiction proposal and query letter to pitch the project to literary agents. Now, I have completed the book proposal, and the query letter. I am about to start sending them out to literary agents.
I wanted to share both documents with you, as an exclusive for my paid subscribers. Your support - financial and moral - is immanent in everything I do all day every day. I am really grateful to you for it. Please feel free to subscribe for free to my other two substacks: Decoding Trolls and Power of Mana. I’ll post my book proposal over the next few days. Thank you so much.
My book *Disinfolklore: Twelve Tools to Deploy, Detect, Decrypt, and Defeat the Disinfolklore Universe Before it Destroys Civilization (*hereafter: Disinfolklore) helps us navigate our information space, awash as it is with, well, Disinfolklore! I forged the portmanteau ‘Disinfolklore’ after working for three years inside Russia’s occupation of eastern Ukraine. Disinfolklore signifies, among other things, a narrative form which is immanent in the most effective forms of today’s disinformation, misinformation and propaganda, whether emanating from Make America Great Again (MAGA), the Russian State or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Because it’s invisible to most of us, before we get our eye in, Disinfolklore transforms our cultures in unseen ways. I am offering us a means of forestalling the rolling out, globally, of what I call a “Disinfolklore Universe” wrought of multiple coalescing Disinfolklore galaxies, promoted by MAGA, the Russian State and the CCP.
I was one of the few westerners ever to work inside the Disinfolklore Galaxy which between 2015-2018 Russia unfurled in the areas of Ukraine it militarily occupied. I witnessed how over a short period of time Russia used Disinfolklore to transform the identities of Ukrainians stuck inside the occupation. They achieved this diabolical feat by subjecting them to unrelenting Disinfolklore from every channel, all the time. Similarly, MAGA Disinfolklore changed the identities of a subset of ordinary and frequently highly educated patriotic Americans into the insurrectionists of Jan 6, 2021.
The Disinfolklore Propagation Apparatus includes X, Telegram, TikTok, Fox News, Facebook, Instagram, and the people whom you most trust. Often, unknowingly, we, our closest family members and those who judgements we admire spread Disinfolklore. My book Disinfolklore offers a means of identifying, interpreting and countering such innocently spread disinformation. It’s aimed at the general reader who senses something odd is going on in our culture yet can’t quite put their finger on how we’ve ended up with, for example, the current US president, Russian interference in our democracies and free people selling autocracy as a viable mode of governance. Those who liked Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power will love Disinfolklore. I am targeting active citizens who want to integrate the easily learned mental algorithms that I use myself in my work as a professional anti-disinformation practitioner.
I developed the Disinfolklore Analytical Method after spending a decade as a diplomat analysing cutting edge Russian state and MAGA information warfare techniques, tactics and tropes. The Disinfolklore Analytical Method works on most forms of disinformation, misinformation, and mind-hacking propaganda, including AI generated and propagated textual, visual and audible memes.
Disinfolklore, as a method of subtly communicating trolls into our inner minds, is a step-change advance over previous epochs’ propaganda techniques. This is partly because of the new means of propagating memes and getting them inside our heads — the Internet and the fluidity of our communities. Disinfolklore is also innovative because of the global-scale ambition of Russian, CCP and MAGA Disinfolklorists — they want to occupy all of humanity’s minds.
Furthermore, the use of cutting-edge insights from psychology to design, create and target Russian State and MAGA Disinfolklore at specific personality inventories is both scientifically grounded, and dizzyingly effective. Previous eras’ propagandists did not have Skinner’s Behaviourist research or Myers-Brigg/OCEAN psychological inventorying to help manipulate our minds and identities using expertly designed and targeted trolls.
Disinfolklore is also different from previous forms of disinformation and misinformation, because immanent in Disinfolklore is the purposeful use of the folklore-borne archetypes of which our main mode of making sense of the world is composed. Once inside our Inner Minds, Disinfolklore manipulates us (literally: ‘pulates’ (shakes) our ‘mana’) which is the well from which, according to Disinfolklore’s analytical framework, all our moods, motivations, attitudes and intentions flow.
Disinfolklore is spread in the form of folksy stories, visual memes, songs, vignettes and trolls of all kinds online and In Real Life. Disinfolklore, like the folklore collected in the 18 and 19 centuries, helps create community. Russian State and MAGA Disinfolklorists use the same techniques German, Greek and Irish folklorists used to create the sense of national identity which motivated the foundation of the first modern Greek, unified German and Irish States.
My existing platform includes the people who have read my many thousands of online posts illustrating the Disinfolklore Analytical Method on X (since February 2022: 100+ million impressions, 500,000+ “Likes,” and 150,000+ “Shares” @DecodingTrolls) and Substack (2,000 Subscribers to @DecodingTrolls / my three publications, including some Paid). Disinfolklore was described by Byline Times as “a brilliant new analytical method for parsing Russian disinformation and ‘War Magic.‘”^[1]^ My first online post on Disinfolklore in February 2023 on Twitter garnered 800,000+ views^[2]^. My YouTube/Podcast appearances on the Silicon Curtain channel have collectively garnered almost 100,000 views and thousands of positive engagements from viewers — see, for example,
I presented the already-written first draft of Disinfolklore at the Pirate Party Security Conference in Munich in February 2025 (see
Disinfolklore is a product of my unique professional experience acting in concert with my unusually wide education at the universities of Montpellier (linguistics), Dublin (BA in History and Political Science), Georgetown (post-graduate courses in 18, 19 and 20 century, as well as post-modern Intellectual History), Cambridge (BA and MA in International Law), and Oxford (MBA).
I am attaching my proposal, including the first fifty pages. Please let me know if this is the kind of project you think you could get behind.
[Byline Supplement]
Disinfolklore
Færytale Beginning…
[Read more]
embedded-post-meta 3 years ago · 21 likes · 1 comment · Byline Supplement
^[2]^ https://x.com/decodingtrolls/status/1626875001461784577?s=46