Podcast | Færy Tale Beginnings - the Training Data Set

I am keeping a grip on where we are. This is episode three of a series I started four weeks ago. As some of us might remember, there were technical issues in the second week. So, this is episode three, where I am going through the paper I delivered at the Pirate Party Security Conference at the time of the Munich Conference last February.

The words from the United States Vice President at that conference are continuing to resonate, with new policies being released all the time. Most recently, the attempt to sanction the European Union—specifically several former senior European Union officials—for so-called free speech crimes.

So, this is the Disinfolklore universe that I had an intimation we were moving towards. It is provoked into being by such actions as we have seen today. I am also aware of my promise to Iona about six weeks ago that we would deal with truth, and I am moving towards that as well. It will be a few more episodes where I move towards that point.

Last week, we saw the continued reference to the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Some of us might remember in the prehistoric past—which, when I looked back on my writing over the past few months, was actually only a month ago, believe it or not—that five weeks ago I got the first intimation that this new round of so-called capitulation, or peace talks, was beginning and the pressure was on.

My first intimation of it—some of us will remember picking this data point up on our timelines—was when the United States had attempted to take the term “territorial integrity” out of the annual United Nations resolution in support of Ukraine’s war of independence and against Russia’s aggression. At the time, that stood out to me like a sore thumb.

The reference to sovereignty without the reference to territorial integrity is significant.

The sound “right” or “writ” is in both those terms: territorial and integrity. It is also in sovereignty, but it is disguised as the “reign” element—reine in French—originating from this idea of straightness, truth, and the rod. For instance, President Zelenskyy held a rod in his right hand when he was inaugurated as president in the Verkhovna Rada. The current English King, who is sovereign—there is only one sovereign on the island of Britain, and that is the King—also held a straight rod in his right hand when he was inaugurated as monarch.

These are very, very old Indo-European rites, and they are integrated into our language and the way we, as Indo-European communities, govern ourselves. This goes right back to Mykhailivka village in Zaporizhzhia, where the Yamnaya community lived between four thousand one hundred BCE and three thousand five hundred BCE. They spread Indo-European languages, religions, and forms of governance into the area between Ireland and India.

When I see today the President of the European Commission, the President of France, and Indo-European civilization’s greatest leaders—particularly in Europe—referencing the term sovereignty and digital sovereignty in almost identical terms, it pleases me enormously. We are moving towards the relationship between these concepts and trying to define what is rightful and what is truthful, which is what we try to do every day in real-time on our timelines.

I am a great admirer of postmodern philosophy—I studied as a postgraduate at Georgetown—but I am also a little old-fashioned insofar as I do believe there is truth. Truth is not merely a mobile army of metaphors; it can be, but it is not merely that. There is truth: when we sit on a chair, we are sitting on the chair. As we previously discussed with Wendy regarding the idea of emptiness, ultimately nothing does matter. However, in conventional reality, we have elaborated and established certain rules, certain regulations, and certain rights.

In that conventional reality that we are living in, for me, the preeminent rights are those established after World War Two and the international legal order for which eight million Ukrainians died, including one million Ukrainian Jews. Eight million European Jews died, and tens of millions of others died. We established this set of rules and regulations after World War Two, and for me, that is the truth—the standard against which we measure any speech trying to incite hatred or division.

Sadly, we see the lack of respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty which China, for instance, practiced when it invaded and occupied Tibet, and which Russia has denigrated a billion times. Sadly, we are seeing now the threats—the serious military threats against Greenland, part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and also against the European Union’s digital sovereignty.

These concepts and ideas are more important than ever. I see all of this as part of the Disinfolklore universe, which the MAGA administration, as well as Russia and the Chinese Communist Party, are attempting to wrap us up inside. Thankfully, for the time being—and I see no clouds on the horizon on this front—the European Union is holding up what is right, as indeed are Australia and Japan.

One of the main means we can use to determine who is upholding what is right—meaning the post-World War Two legal and social order in today’s world—is how they are supporting Ukraine. Some of us might well have friends who do not necessarily support Ukraine or who have had their minds contaminated by Russian Disinfolklore, so that they think they can challenge for the sake of debate or argument, arguing Russian information warfare tropes either knowingly or unknowingly.

It is not enough to defend sovereignty alone because the three archetypes which are central to Indo-European communities since the time of the Yamnaya are: Sovereignty, Security, and Prosperity (or Fertility).

These three elements are represented today, for instance, in our memory of the Hindi caste system, where you have priests, soldiers, and farmers. The priests are one aspect of sovereignty, the soldiers are an aspect of security, and the farmers are an aspect of prosperity. Again, the “writ” sound is in security, fertility, prosperity, and sovereignty. We have these archetypes very deeply embedded into our language, into the way we think, and into how we govern ourselves. It tickles me to have come across the literature of the French philosopher Georges Dumézil, who discovered these three archetypes imminent in all Indo-European traditions in the nineteen thirties.

For many of you, you will know I spent the time from twenty-fifteen to twenty-eighteen in a particular part of eastern Ukraine, in Stanytsia Luhanska. This is the only official crossing point from Russia-occupied Ukraine into government-controlled Ukraine. I worked for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). It was founded after the Berlin Wall fell, but it stems from the Helsinki Final Act of nineteen seventy-six.

I had cause to read the Helsinki Final Act this week, and territorial integrity is in every clause. Russia signed up to it and has violated sovereignty and territorial integrity. When you think about it, you can be a sovereign individual yourself, but you need an “area.” The word “area” eventually finds its way into “Aryan” or “Iranian.” You need an area in which to exercise your sovereignty. Unless this area is secure and defined, your sovereignty is compromised.

While I was in eastern Ukraine, in Stanytsia Luhanska, I encountered what I call the first Disinfolklore universe. For those who were not there, it is akin to what you saw with MAGA affecting people you knew. It goes from being a joke to actually being an identity-forming element. I engineered the term Disinfolklore from my experience as a diplomat on this bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska.

The scene itself was a biosphere reserve, forested, with the Donets River running through it. The Donets is part of a series of “DN” sounded rivers. In my work, there are three sounds which are really important: the “MN” sound, the “RT” or “RIT” sound (associated with truth, Arta in ancient Iranian or Rita in Vedic), and the “DN” sound.

We have the Don River, which marked the border between the area protected by the Goddess Europa and Asia. We have a map from Isidore of Seville from about the sixth century defining this. Isidore was basically the Wikipedia of the pre-Middle Age world. Isidore of Seville defines the area protected by the Goddess Europa as being west of the Tanais—the Don River. East of the Don River is Asia.

Then you have the Donets River, which is the Little Don. Then you have the Dnipro, the “Don Upper” river. Then you have the Dniester, the “Don Lower” river. And then you have the Danube. You have these great rivers of Europe, all with the “DN” sound in their moniker.

I was on the Don. I did not know any of this while I was there, thankfully, or I would have bored my fellow diplomats to tears. But the setting made an impact on me: beautiful forests, willows hanging over the river, and this iron bridge. On one side, about a kilometer north, was the Ukrainian Armed Forces position. On the south side was the Russian occupier position.

I arrived there in February twenty-fifteen, just after the bridge itself had been blown up. You could still cross the river, but it was a difficult passage, like in a computer game. It was about fifteen kilometers to Luhansk City, which was and is under occupation by the Ruscists.

In this whole scene, it was a beautiful, halcyon, bucolic location with birdsong and trees, yet wild animals would often set off landmines in the forestry. Before twenty-fourteen, it was sleepy. Then, while I was there, each night there were massive amounts of artillery strikes from one side to the other.

Each morning I would go down to the bridge, speak to the Ukrainian commanding officer, and write down their stories. Then I would pass thousands of civilians waiting in queues on this borderline. A lot of folktales are about borders—between this world and another, a liminal world between truth and fiction.

Then I would cross the bridge and speak to the occupiers. Often, the stories they told me would be the mirror opposite of what the Ukrainian soldiers were telling me. At the same time, I was doing an MBA at Oxford, studying Silicon Valley and trolling in computer culture. I made the conceptual link between internet trolling and what the forces on either side of the bridge were doing to me. They were trolling my emotions with these stories.

This Disinfolklore universe, which I saw being created inside Russia-occupied Ukraine, is my training set. Just as you use masses of data to train an artificial intelligence neural network to identify cats, my training data set is these three years of hearing stories on the bridge and watching how they interacted with the information space.

One day, a Russian colleague and I went to the bridge, and several tons of sausages in white bags had been dumped exactly at the halfway point. The Ukrainian forces said they knew nothing about it. The Russian occupiers said they initially thought it was a weapon and trained their guns on it, but realized it was sausages—Kharkiv sausages, which have a mythological significance of luxury in the Soviet mindset.

We inspected the sausages while drones filmed us. For the next three weeks, my Russian colleague and I appeared in Disinfolklore stories in the Russian occupation media. The stories evolved from us smuggling sausages to us trying to poison the population. This was the “Luxury Sausage Troll Saga.” It was an archetypal experience where I personally featured in a system of trolls on one theme.

I had other instances where there would be an explosion. I would ask a Ukrainian soldier polishing his grenade launcher if he heard it, and he would deny it. Then I would go five hundred meters to the Russian occupiers, and a senior officer would take me on a whirlwind tour of damage, claiming Ukrainian diversionary groups had fired at them. They showed me blood on the ground, but it was blackberry season, and tons of blackberries were being transported across the bridge, so I was not sure if it was real blood.

Then stories would emerge saying the injured people were “crisis actors.” This was my training set. When I read about MAGA accusations of crisis actors or Pizzagate, or the bizarre stuff on Twitter since the full-scale invasion, I recognize the origins. That is where I came up with the idea of Disinfolklore. It is a narrative form akin to folklore, triggering the same emotional impacts, but with real-world consequences on how you perceive reality.

I associated the area with folklore immediately because of the forests. I have spoken before about the “Mother and the Maiden” tale, which was another archetypal moment. We perceive reality through folklore much more than we are consciously aware.

Victoria Amelina wrote about the “Executed Renaissance” of the nineteen twenties in Ukraine. The Russians initially pretended to support Ukrainian culture, leading to a flowering of culture, and then executed thousands of writers. Putin constantly talks about correcting “Lenin’s mistake,” by which he means this Ukrainization. Victoria Amelina was collecting stories about violence for war crimes tribunals before she was murdered. One of her short stories was titled “A Shell Hole in a Fairy Tale.”

The Wagner Group, whom I encountered in Stanytsia Luhanska in twenty-fifteen, fired a shell into the “Fairy Tale” kindergarten there on the twenty-fourth of February, twenty twenty-two. I have a photo of it. When I saw that, and when I saw them bombing the Shchastya power plant, I knew the whole war was imminent.

The kindergarten is a vital institution. Ukrainians had invested huge efforts after twenty-fourteen to bring their kindergartens up to European standards, using money from USAID and the EU. The desecration of these symbols of Ukraine’s emergence from the Soviet cloud was significant.

Everywhere I look, there are these folkloric references. You have this fusion of reality with fiction—Disinfolklore—which has a strong emotional connection. It is a method of changing how we perceive reality, brainwashing people whether they are in MAGA or Russia-occupied Ukraine.

Maybe now we are seeing the high point of MAGA. I hope the relentlessness of the Epstein documents, which explode the main foundation myth in MAGA, will have the power to wake everyone up from their spell. But we cannot be complacent.

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