Podcast | Volya’s Nest and Counter Disinformation System Development in Ukraine

Principles of Infolklore, Ep 2: Volya’s Nest

The Most Valuable Position in the Room

Two hours and forty minutes into my own show, this past February. Decoding Disinfolklore on Volya Radio, the Wednesday slot this station gives me. Ioana, who co-hosts the news shows with Will, had been put to work. She had been asked for her articles, and she delivered:

“I posted the links to, I believe, seven of my articles in the commentaries.”

The commentaries. The comments. Not the nest. And then she said why:

“Let’s keep the nest on Ukraine. So I’m quite okay if people look in the comments, they will see that.”

For anyone new here, the nest is the pinned stack at the top of a live room on X, where the receipts go. A host reads a story out, finishes with it, and posts the source above the room, so anyone can retrace the segment, item by item. And what Ioana did that night is the nest’s constitution, spoken in one breath. Her seven articles went into the comments. The nest is kept for Ukraine’s evidence. The most valuable position in the Volya room is reserved, and not for the people who run the room.

I have now counted the nest through every broadcast this station has ever made. It is spoken of 8,558 times, across 1,060 of the 1,121 episodes in the archive. That is nineteen broadcasts in every twenty. Not a feature. A constitution.

The Name Came First

This series flies under a banner, and you have seen it, because it rides at the foot of every post this series ships in. Let me define Infolklore for you. Infolklore is the active, conscious, Code-observant deployment of folklore-like archetypes. When I say Code-observant, I mean it observes the Code of Positive Trolls, which, as many of you know, I created in February 2020 and trademarked at the European Union Intellectual Property Office. The Code of Positive Trolls is six criteria: generosity, ethical discipline (or Right), patience, joyous perseverance (or Mana), focus and insight. Any meme, any lexical unit which I categorise as Infolklore, or which can be categorised as Infolklore by a large language model or automatically, must observe all or most of those elements in the Code. Infolklore is a first-order practice.

I have now gone through the Volya Radio archive. Three thousand one hundred and ninety-five hours of it. Twenty-six million words. And in it I found the most amazing reservoir of Infolklore that exists on this earth. This series, which I began last week, is looking at how I parsed that data set for Infolk