Principles of Infolklore (Ep 6)
Let’s go back to the principles of Infolklore.
Some of you will remember how I am deducing The principles of Infolklore.
Previous episodes:
Ep 1 - Aug 20
Ep 2 - Aug 27
Ep 3 - 3 Sept
Ep 4 - 10 Sept
Ep 5 - 17 Sept
I use a combination of my own written work, what scholars would call a vocabulary. I use that as a lens to look at the transcripts of Volya Radio, of RIA Melitopol and of RIA Pivden. I had noticed that they are particularly interesting artefacts. They appear to practise what I call the Code of Positive Trolls. I have theorised it since February 2020.
I am using a neural network algorithm, a frontier model, in a kind of recursive loop, which I think is the technical term. It goes through the archive again and again and again. We start with some principles in mind and look for them in the words spoken on Volya Radio. Then we find out whether they are general principles of Infolklore that turn up elsewhere in the text. Then, with those in mind, we go back through the whole data set again, and again.
So every week I speak to you, new and interesting aspects of the data set are emerging. So are new understandings, on my part, of what constitutes Infolklore.
Many of you know I have been writing about Disinfolklore for three to four years. I was writing about it without that moniker for almost a decade. That began when I was posted to eastern Ukraine, at the end of January and early February 2015. I spent that time, as I am always banging on about, in russia-occupied Luhansk and on that bridge.
What the Law Is For
I want to continue where I left off, under the heading of what the law is for.
Ukrainian Arts and Culture, the 15th of June 2025. Some of us might remember that show. Two guests, Tatiana and Alexey, and a host asking them about a grandmother’s house. The talk is of rushnyky, the embroidered towels.
“Ukrainian embroidered Rusniki”
Given at weddings, the guest says. They symbolise prosperity.
“And they hang them around the icons.”
Then the old house at grandma’s.
“and it’s made out of clay, the walls out of clay,”
Flowers painted on the walls, as a charm.
I remember well visiting Petrykivka, about fifty kilometres from Dnipro. That form of flower painting is protected by UNESCO. Some russian nesting dolls adopt it as if it were russian. In fact it is Ukrainian. Perhaps all of us remember that amazing painted house in Kherson region, flooded and destroyed when the russians blew the dam.
So, flowers painted on the walls as a charm. It was never winter there, one of them says. It was always spring. And the wind in the grass.
“and the grass, shepochka, whispered.”
“how can you not be a poet when you hear the grass whispering?”
And then, without any change of tone, the year of the independence vote. Alexey was a student, he remembered, going door to door.
“and giving the pamphlets or leaflets”
“for like going to vote for independence”
He knocked on the door where Tatiana lived, and nobody opened. He went further down the street. Then he came back and knocked again.
“I was persistent.”
That is what he told Ukrainian Arts and Culture, on Volya, on the 15th of June 2025.
They met leafleting for independence.
Nothing in that whole hour looks like law, or like Right as the post-World War II legal order defines it. No European human rights convention is named. No crime is charged against the Ruschists. Nothing is argued. It is a lawful hour from end to end. A lawless hour, you might say.
And yet it is a morally lawful and pleasant hour, from end to end.
The right to take part in the cultural life of your own community is in the Covenant of 1966, in article fifteen. The right of a people to determine its own future is the first article of both Covenants: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and its twin.
A clay house. Icons under embroidered towels. A boy with leaflets who would not go away.
That is not the law being honoured in the way Will or Mockers honour it when they speak about the law of the sea. That is the thing the law exists to protect. Said out loud on a Sunday, with no enemy in the sentence.
The swans
The war is in the hour all the same. Tatiana’s brother is at the front as they talk.
The painted walls took Mockers straight to another house, in Oleshky. The artist Polina Raiko painted her whole house. It was partly destroyed.
Near the war, flowers painted on a clay wall take on a beauty that the same flowers far from it do not have to that extent.
At the time, I posted pictures of Polina’s house, showing the swans on its walls. I also posted the photos of the swans going by the town hall after the russians blew the dam. The fake governor of the day was speaking to camera, saying everything is fine, as the swans went by.
Apollo flew on swans to the Azov Sea in Greek myth. Back, as the Greeks did not know then, to where the Greeks came from. A thousand years before the Greek language was formed, out of a daughter language, from Ukraine.
Right, over the longue durée
And so, Right. Right is the second of the elements in the Code of Positive Trolls. The Code of Positive Trolls is the mental algorithm I use to help me discern Disinfolklore, Infolklore and neutral Mana, neutral energy, in memes. The second element is Ethical Discipline.
Right often means the post-World War II legal order. But Right is not only the honouring or the breach of the law of war. A story that carries the thing the whole order was written to keep safe supports that order.
In this hour, that thing is a clay house. The boy with the leaflets was asking a people to choose its own future. A house like that is only safe in a country free to make that choice.
Over the longue durée, the vote and the front are one act of independence, decades apart. The story moves the listener towards the law without ever naming it.
Where no law is invoked, we judge a story by the whole Code of Positive Trolls. It is a moral judgement. That is the deepest sense the word Right carries. Deeper than the article in the Covenant. Right, in the end, is whether a thing passes the whole Code of Positive Trolls.
The Energy in this one moves towards what is Right. Not away from it. Towards it.
One book counts. One book remembers. And the book that says why either of them is worth keeping is a grandmother’s house, with flowers painted on the clay.
The grass whispered. And he knocked on the door, and he was persistent.
I Won’t Say Winning
Good Morning Kyiv, the 14th of September 2025, an hour and thirty-five minutes in. A host is running through what the autumn holds for russia, and it is good. Then he reaches for the obvious word and stops.
“I won’t say winning.”
He says it once more, longer, with the reason and a replacement in the same breath.
“I’m not going to say winning until we’re won, until the full territories would be taken back, but on the ascendancy, you’d have to say, wouldn’t you?”
That was Good Morning Kyiv, on the 14th of September 2025.
And the co-host takes the replacement without a pause. Yeah, absolutely. On the ascendancy. Not winning.
That is the whole practice of Infolklore on Volya, in real time, in ten seconds.
Here is the claim in one sentence. The discipline we can hear best on this station, on Volya Radio, runs on our own first choice of word, spoken aloud, cancelled, and replaced in the same breath. And it runs one way. The refusal falls on Ukraine’s winning and never on russia’s losing.
Two sorts of folk-shaped story travel this war. One is told to work on you, for somebody who will not give his name. The other, the kind I call Infolklore, is told in the open by people who give their own time and energy to defending the law the world wrote down after 1945. What they tell has to pass every practice of the Code of Positive Trolls.
This hour is about how they choose their word…
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