Refining Outgoing Troll Radar: A Guest Op-Ed by Stephen Douglas
Disinfolklore/DeCoding Trolls analyst Stephen Douglas offers guidance on how to hone our outgoing troll radar in a time of escalating unreality so we do not become useful idiots for demonic trolls
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“Ruschia’s Nordic troll monarch Putler, for example, or Trump, are very successful at provoking our minds with emotions, which often carelessly we communicate into others’ minds — thereby doing those demonic trolls’ mean work for them. Such trolls, once inside our minds, commingle their energy (Mana) with our Mana through linguistic, visual, tonal, or audible means. They fire their energy / emotions into our minds. Before we know it, we become the petrol fueling the troll, whether we agree or we disagree with its content. When Negative Trolls troll us into feeling and propagating their emotions, we risk becoming the Useful Idiots of Useful Idiots.”—Stephen Douglas for Better Dangerous
Author’s note: I asked my friend Stephen Douglas, a cultural archeologist, to write an op-ed on how we protect ourselves from the escalation of unreality and how we reduce perpetuating the negativity of unreality.
An international lawyer and diplomat, Stephen found himself on a bridge in Ukraine, ensuring safe passage of civilians from 2015 through 2018, while listening to narratives coming from the Russian side that sounded folkloric to him.
Stephen Douglas examines damage to a shelter from Russian shelling of the Ukrainian armed forces checkpoint at Stanitsia Luhanska on 18 August 2016 Photo: Igor Danis
He would then find the same narratives planted in Facebook and the media, and he began to dive into the origins of what he calls disinfolklore. He discovered that what we are experiencing is a power grab by oligarchs trying to destroy the post-World War II human rights gains through narrative warfare — they’re trying to get rid of constraints on their power.
Of his time in Ukraine, Stephen said he was a witness to a stealth genocide and didn’t know it because of disinfolklore — he now is dedicating his time to exposing the techniques so we can protect ourselves and and our world.
As always, I am incredibly grateful for the generosity of our global experts.—Heidi Siegmund Cuda for Bette Dangerous, December 5, 2024
GUEST OP-ED: Incoming Troll Radar’s Divine Twin: Our Outgoing Troll Radar
By Stephen Douglas, DeCoding Trolls
In my most recent Guest Op-Ed, we talked about honing our Incoming Troll Radars.
A Troll is any emotion-moving activity of body, speech or mind. Negative Trolls — trolls which breach any of the six criteria in the Code of Positive Trolls — may be hidden inside visual, audible, mental or sensory memes.
The Code of Positive Trolls comprises 6 criteria which are:
1 Generosity.
2 Right / Ethical Discipline.
3 Patience.
4 Mana / Energy / joyous perseverance.
5 Focus.
6 Insight.
The Trolls we’re most concerned about are memes / informational units that are capable of affecting our Moods / Intentions / Attitudes / Motivations in ways that work against our own and our communities’ interests.
So, by scanning for potentially Negative Trolls in the oodles of incoming sensory data we encounter each moment, we create an opportunity to control what we allow into our Inner Minds.
In the context of Disinfolklore — the analytical method I invented for parsing MAGA, Russian, and other forms of mind-altering Disinformation — I call this practice of mindfulness: our Incoming Troll Radar:
Today, I want to introduce our Incoming Troll Radar’s Divine Twin: our Outgoing Troll Radar.
Let’s quickly recall how I conceive of Trolls from my last Op-Ed for Bette Dangerous:
“Trolls consist of emotion-moving energy (Mana) that only moves when we share them. Then, we become the troll. The informational unit (troll) consumes us, as it instrumentalises us to keep it in motion. In the manner of a virus hacking our minds, the troll manipulates our Mana / mind to keep their troll moving. Ruschia’s Nordic troll monarch Putler, for example, or Trump, are very successful at provoking our minds with emotions, which often carelessly we communicate into others’ minds — thereby doing those demonic trolls’ mean work for them. Such trolls, once inside our minds, commingle their energy (Mana) with our Mana through linguistic, visual, tonal, or audible means. They fire their energy / emotions into our minds. Before we know it, we become the petrol fueling the troll, whether we agree or we disagree with its content. When Negative Trolls troll us into feeling and propagating their emotions, we risk becoming the Useful Idiots of Useful Idiots.”
Being careful about how we allow Trolls / others’ sensory inputs affect our Moods / Intentions/ Attitudes / Motivations is an important matter for our own well-being. So our Incoming Troll Radars are vastly important. However, when we consider the impact we have in the communities in which we participate each day (In Real Life and online, at home or in the areas in which we live, on the micro/local level to the macro/civilisational scale), it’s clear we also need a means of proofing our outgoing communications so that we ensure we do not breach any of the six elements in the Code of Positive Trolls.
The Code of Positive Trolls is a mental algorithm we can all use to analyse any sensory data to determine if its content is Positive, Negative or Neutral. Basically, if for example, you notice the content in a meme is ungenerous, then, you know that meme breaches the first element in the Code of Positive Trolls, and therefore is Negative. It’s a Negative Troll.
So even if you are being bamboozled by messaging that’s confusing and you don’t know what to think about a meme or informational unit… if while holding a questionable or confusing meme inside your mental Incoming Troll Radar’s containment vessel, you see that its character is ungenerosity (drown migrants; don’t help a brave people fighting oppression; exclude Trans people from our community’s Inner Realm; Negatively discriminate against this or that category of human;…). Then, without bothering to think further about it, you can (usually) reject or dismiss that meme before you allow it into your Inner Mind.
If we do care about our community and the impact of our communications on our communal well-being, then, let’s also be careful about the messages we amplify!
Avoiding falling for the troll means also avoiding communicating onwards trolls others have designed specifically to trigger our emotions in such a way that we feel bound to communicate them onwards.
We often end up communicating onwards messages wrapped up inside stories (Disinfolklore) that, although we don’t agree with them, actually trigger others’ emotions in a negative manner. Then, those others communicate onwards the troll and so the energy inside such informational units is perpetuated and continues to move through our communities, just as the Disinfolklore designers intended.
Bannon or Donald don’t care if we agree with their trolls or not. They just want us to continue communicating the idea and memes they design to hack our minds.
The second element in the Code of Positive Trolls is “Rightness” or “Ethical Discipline.”
If there’s a lie in the meme or troll then it is not right. Equally, it would not be right for us to perpetuate such memes’ movements throughout our communities. Again, this element in the Code of Positive Trolls mental algorithm is supposed to be a Good Enough criterion to use on-the-fly.
If you detect deception or deceit or truthiness in the meme, whether it’s your neighbour repeating a Disinfolklore trope like “I met these migrants down the street and they were given healthcare and a house by the municipality. Yet, they’re still eating pets….” Or “the president needs more immunity”, then, we can immediately reject such memes and determine that we won’t repeat them.
Sometimes, we find ourselves on the cusp of repeating trolls — perhaps, we can’t think of anything else to talk about in an awkward social situation — even if we don’t really agree with them. Here, is where the idea of an Outgoing Troll Radar – the divine twin of our Incoming Troll Radar – comes into play.
We can use it to proof our outgoing communications of body, speech or mind for potentially negative content.—Stephen Douglas for Bette Dangerous, December 5, 2024
Stephen Douglas is a Cultural Archæologist. His nom de guerre is “DecodingTrolls” on Bluesky, Mastodon and X/Twitter. Decoding Trolls writes three publications on Substack: decodingtrolls; disinfolklore; power of mana.
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