Episode Details

I would like to talk about character and characters in Disinfolklore. But maybe I will start quickly with just a brief précis of what I mean by Disinfolklore, because maybe not everyone here is aware of how I conceive of Disinfolklore.

So in 2016, I detected my first Disinfolklore Galaxy in Russia-occupied eastern Ukraine. Now I detect multiple Disinfolklore Galaxies. Make America Great Again, MAGA, Russian, Chinese Communist Party, and others are spreading through our biological and computational neural networks like translucent triffids rewilding the Garden of Eden. So here we have a perfect example of the narrative form that I try to capture with my moniker, Disinfolklore.

We have this idea of folkloric characters. In this case, triffids, which are a fictional plant — people of a certain generation who grew up on the island of Britain will remember *The Day of the Triffids*. I think it’s a book from the 1930s. The Garden of Eden itself is a folkloric reflex, obviously with a very deep and religious and important patina, but nevertheless it’s a folkloric story, the kind of story which if we read in folklore we would be quite accustomed to — but because any Christians who are listening here will be aware it’s inside the Bible, it has this very serious tinge to it.

And of course the idea of Disinfolklore Galaxies spreading through our biological neural networks is very important to the idea of Disinfolklore, which is also a theory of cognitive perception and how our emotions are used through stories to hack our rational thought systems. So there are biological neural networks. And the idea of the computational neural networks — of course, those of us here listening who are dealing with Twitter and X are constantly being trolled by computational neural networks. I have a great relationship with my For You feed — I hear a lot of people complaining about their For You feed, but I have no complaints about mine. It is a great algorithmically driven inspiration to me every day. It serves me up content that really inspires me and which doesn’t annoy me, and anything that does annoy me or people who annoy me, I just block and weed out. So I have quite a good relationship with my computational neural network. But of course many of the choices we make in today’s world are the product of computational neural networks — by that I mainly mean neural network algorithms which, as we encounter them, are offering us multiple different choices. But I’m quite Zen with them.

So this idea: the Disinfolklore Galaxies spreading through our biological and computational neural networks like translucent triffids rewilding the Garden of Eden. Triffids invaded the world in *The Day of the Triffids* — these massive plants basically take over the world. And this is what I fear and what I see.

I saw this word which is very common in American English but doesn’t exist in Irish or English or Scottish English, which is “trolling.” So I think probably “dragnet” is a play on this word, common in American English, where cops troll for criminals. When I was researching the moniker “trolling” and looking into its uses in contemporary culture, it comes up a lot in regional newspapers. I created a dragnet using the internet. At the beginning of my research in February 2020, I had access to the Factiva all-source, 33,000-source database for information. And I did a search for “trolls” and “trolling.” At that time, I got 65,000 results and I went through all of them, and a goodly portion of the results dealt with fishing or trolling in the context of looking for prey on the internet, but mainly it came from police. So I suspect “dragnet” is a play on “trolling,” which is not to be confused with trawling — as you describe it, trawling is using a net. So I think probably in American English, “dragnet” is the equivalent of “trawl,” as in T-R-A-W-L, which is different from “troll.”

Trolling, for those of us who don’t know — it comes i