Will you describe the origins of the Cyber Elves?

Giselle: Well, I can only tell you how I encountered them. During the rise of the global pandemic, I started seeing these sort of cryptic and strange symbols popping up into the vernacular of the internet. They started popping up into my feeds on Instagram and Facebook groups and Discord channels to different NFT marketplaces even, after people started to realize actually the level of algorithmically-enforced restrictions on the freedom of information on web2. They started to appear and me and my network were sort of adopting a nod in unison, because more and more of us experienced the frustration and the absurdity of not being able to safely share ideas or science or information about the conditions & diseases we were trying to cope with.

Gradually we started to use these symbols started to be used to kind of communicate with one another, and they were being used as sort of a joke to ridicule authority - algorithmic and human - and to kind of pick apart propaganda, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and false flag operations.

Troy: Bit by bit, it became more and more stylized and the group was forming in very recognizable way. The contrast between the Bitter King's 'Hulk' rage face and the joyfulness of the 'elf' side became the mechanic that allowed it to grow organically. People were adding and making their own little tweaks to it customizing it for their own personal needs. At the start, it was just a simple meme copy paste shit you see all the time and you would have these blurry images come through with memes overlaid on them and it quickly became recognized that it was actually began with this cyber elf persona on twitter of @kingofbitters and nobody really knows who did it, but it was suddenly popping up as if from nowhere and everywhere.

Giselle: Yeah, it took me a while to figure it out. One day I got an email from an account called "Aethelves" from the Cyber Elves, saying my name had surfaced in relation to an AI prediction model for social movements. It was like an invitation to participate in some sort of adventure on the internet. Then, I started digging into the original cyber elves in Eastern Europe. It was difficult to discern who was behind it beyond a handle - the original Aethelves. I still don’t know the Aethelves, except by handles. We take a ‘privacy by default’ approach. Cyber elves was born from pure frustration on the internet. Nobody could do what they wanted to do; everybody felt powerless in the face of total control. It was a wide grievance but it was manifested with these really evocative glyphs and symbols.

In the manual, you write that the Cyber Elf "is another hero born out of digital protest." Why choose to frame the archetype as a "hero" at all?

Troy: Well, the origin story that’s in "Cyber Elf Training Manual" and the way it’s presented aesthetically, is that I could see it animating itself on the internet in a way that could voice frustrations in a way that was very supportive of people's beliefs. It wasn't a veil for a certain kind of darker state or corporate agenda and I think that's really important.

As the book started to grow in circulate amongst our network, the Aethelves, began sending me more and more glyphs and weird emojis gifs, and it was starting to really change and morph.

The Cyber Elves is a almost like a 21st century play on pataphysics, which is the movement of the same name that essentially influenced the founders of the Dada Movement, and the Situationists, the Oilipo, many others. Actually some recent computational analyses of art movements of the 20th century show ‘Pataphysics as pretty central in the development of art over the last century. Anyways this goes further back than ‘Pataphysics really, to the emergence of our current associations with “obscene” at the end of the 17th century. Obscene originally meant “off-stage” and was used by playwrights to describe the space between scenes - sometimes implying sex - you know…curtains and lights go down, all that.

In the 18th century, the societal reaction to the obscene also became the act of provocation, street theatre and going undercover to throw back against the system. If you look at groups like the Parisian salons in 18th-century Europe, they were emerging at the same time as the Enlightenment and brought a lot of the same ideas in terms of rationality, Enlightenment and pushing back against the religious establishment. I think the original Cyber Elves was pulling on those kind of roots, a predecessor if you will.

Giselle: If you took a look into the roots of the Consciousness Hacking movement, you'd find that the Cyber Elf meme was something that was explored quite a long time ago, definitely on the 90s and early 00s internet. I noticed them also being used as a character type of an anime, the Megan Man Zero series, and many of the people who had used the meme or concept were people who were very much aligned with those ideas and movements already.

One of the many things I like about the Cyber Elf meme symbols is that it's a bit of a joke addressing system change through masking and this bringing attention to it, through that it's so easy to mask one's identity. It is a form of protest, this bringing attention to something that we all participated in, that we all participated in unknowingly. One organizing idea being the fact that we think we're not living in a simulation while we're online based on this belief that everybody is real, they're a person behind the avatar. To that extent, the Cyber Elves speaks to the power of the avatar and what it can create when it builds up communities, of collective intelligence, when it builds up a sense of belonging.

For me, the second organizing idea being very much about power and privilege and how these two things are intrinsically connected and linked. The Manual manifests and embodies a lot of these core ideas that we wanted to build on. Ultimately, the people who were using the Cyber Elf symbols were doing that very well, and we wanted to bring that entire ethos to the book.

The Situationists portray themselves as ignorant rebels without a cause but, I would argue, they are driven by a strong moral and ethical opposition to the way that the society operates. Why do you think it's so difficult to articulate this motivation for resisting the status quo?

Giselle: I think it's tough to answer that question because maybe some people would say that we're driven by our own moral and ethical responsibility as a form of resistance. I guess for me, it's kind of cool to think that all of these things begin from a place of complete innocence. They're born from the sort of frustration of being on the internet and not being allowed to openly discuss things.

The power of anonymity on the internet is something that we're very aware of, and I think that while there is this inherent power in anonymity on the internet, there are somethings that are difficult when trying to balance freedom of expression and some kind of moral and ethical responsibility. I think that so many unknown unknowns come out where we are just focused on knowing what you think is right or what you think is working for your community or for your people.

Troy: The parallel for me is unfortunately the ways that social media giants have commercially exploited people's desire to seek a sense of friendship, intimacy or belonging. This has been translated into a business model where they commodify people. I don't think it's because people are under any particular misapprehension about that, but I do think once the decentralized web, web3, whatever you want to call it, matures as a social infrastructure, it's a snap social dynamics change. Its already happening.

The cover of the Cyber Elf Training Manual includes the quote: "Just because it isn't there doesn't mean it doesn't exist." Would you mind elaborating on this concept?

Troy: It's a very succinct way of conveying the concept that we've all been engaging with quite a lot these days. The whole post-truth or alternative facts narrative. It's notoriously difficult to discern bad information, trace it to the source and shut it down when somebody decides to purposefully confuse you or to muddy the waters with some false context by bringing in innuendo, or contradictory theories, or in some cases, deliberately mistranslated news. I think in looking back there have been a range of methods that people have adapted to try to track these sort of false narratives and scattered claims, but I think this one simple method, if it can't be found, it can't necessarily be presumed as not existing.

Giselle: For me personally, it has to do with our access to the internet. It's 24/7, it's global, everybody has access, and everybody is potentially connected to each other and everybody has access to the same information. It kind of works for and against us in a lot of ways, especially because a lot of this information is no longer being curated by humans. On the internet, it can be curated by algorithms and all sort of different factors – a lot of this is brand new and it's being created on the fly.

We basically want future cyber elves to understand that just because this information does not exist, it does not mean that it can't be found, found and researched. By challenging the concept of "non-existence," what that really means. Just typing things into a search engine, "nothing is there," that is not necessarily true. It just means you have to look harder.

Ariel: In terms of the “non-existence” concept, this is actually something that we found when we were doing research for our research, which is something that the pataphysicians put into practice themselves - the science of imaginary solutions. The whole idea is that when something is unfindable or it doesn’t exist on Google, that it doesn’t mean that it does not exist. This is something that we have also put to practice within the Cyber Elf network and we are very, very much of the mind that just because something can’t be found or can’t be found on a Google or because you have not have heard of something, you don’t know about it. Especially when algorithms are showing each of us a different lens on reality.

In the book, it’s written "while the Cyber Elf is a hero who operates in the shadows, the Cyber Elf Training Manual provides an invitation and roadmap for like-minded individuals to take up their mantle." What advice would you give to individuals that want to begin their own information freedom missions? Do you think the handbook is sufficient for such efforts or are there other skills, tools, and resources that are needed?

Troy: In the book launch (which we are helping to organize here on Mirror) we will distribute beta versions of this training manual for inspiration, fun, and activities and also to seed the Cyber Elf memetic ecosystem. It was also to help the more creative elves to have off-the-shelf material that they could remix, repurpose and reconstruct in a way that suited them best. We are really keen not to put any kind of stranglehold on creativity.

Not that it matters, but just to set the record straight, we’re not directly involved in the creation of the Cyber Elf Training Manual, nor the Eastern European Cyber Elves movement. We were contacted in 2021 by the Aethelves. They gathered input from a lot of OG citizens of the internet for best practices in dealing with the trolls.

We are, however, doing our bit to help them distribute it, prototyping the Cyber Elves DAO, and doing our part to make more people aware of the Cyber Elves and spreading the word and building the network.

Ariel: The Cyber Elf Training Manual provides a roadmap, not only how to become a cyber elf in your own right, but also in an ever-growing, evolving way to break down the tactics of internet trolls and become a part of the community that challenges them but also to set ways of creating new, creative forms of self-expression, play and learning online.