North Atlantic Fellas Organization

Grassroots Asset Management

The North Atlantic Fellas Organization, an internet flashmob style cybermilitia that chose the Shiba Inu dog as its mascot, formed three months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is a bit different than the asset acquisition envisioned in The Online Operation Kill Chain, but it is absolutely worth inspecting, given how effective it was.

Attention Conservation Notice: here there be brain damaged cartoon dogs, with all of the attendant shenanigans. Only the brave (or foolhardy) dare advance beyond this marker …

Formation:

Any major event tied to the online conflict world will have disputed ownership and the origin story will over time evolve to be utterly unrecognizable to those who participated in the inception. A few years ago I spotted people talking about Project VIGILANT, invoking names I had never heard prior to that event. The dowager queen of disinformation, Louise Mensch, babbles about Andrew Breitbart’s death, but has a narrative that ignores the war of words he and I were having just before he dropped dead from a heart attack.

So these things happen. What does the Wikipedia entry say about the formation of NAFO?

The meme was created in May 2022, when Twitter artist Kamil Dyszewski (under the handle @Kama_Kamilia)^[7] started adding modified pictures of a Shiba Inu dog (the "Fella") to photographs from Ukraine.^[3] NAFO, such as it is, was founded on 24 May 2022 with a tweet.^[4] The Shiba Inu breed has had an unrelated significant presence in online culture since at least 2010 under the 'doge' meme.^[8]

While not untrue, this misses the influence operation that put some American veterans in a leadership role. KK was definitely update zero in the NAFO cascade, but there’s an interview in the Kyiv Post attributed to him. Whomever gave it knew a great deal about his background, but it was not him. The upshot of this is that his problematic past associations led to an American veteran claiming co-creator status. This person and the people around him have roughly handled many of the other grassroots groups, some of which were problematic infil efforts, but many of which were just newly minted activists. This keeps the overall NAFO meme safe in the moment, at the price of pissing off supporters and diffusing efforts.

Innovation:

The big, bold innovation in NAFO was the validation scheme. If you wanted to be anything more than a casual participant, you primary path was making a donation to the Georgian Legion, and then one of the NAFO forgers would make you your very own fella avatar. This created a trail for those who got involved, an immediate stumbling block for would-be infiltrators.

I took the social promotion route instead, hanging around doing stuff, sticking my nose into various things, and sticking with the ones that seemed well run. If you can find last spring’s “class pictures” of the Old Curmudgeons 1st Slow Response Brigade you might be able to spot my fella in the mix. There was a shadowy cabal behind some of the more notable events - the Canine Intelligence Agency. I feel safe sharing that as it was a multiple-use name right from the start.

There was a flood of internet style patriotic imagery, and I enjoyed the ones that evoked the World War II era.

Operation:

NAFO served as an amplifier for pro-Ukraine messaging and a source of endless torment for Kremlin toadies, at least prior to Musk’s purchase of Twitter. The bread and butter goal of the group was “bonking” any ‘vatniks” they could catch.

Here we see a very Francophone fella giving a slightly more battered looking than normal vatnik an etiquette lesson.

There was a never ending flood of this sort of thing.

Decline:

While the battle still rages, conflicted social movements, just like military units, can get battle fatigue. There’s a degree of social media addiction in those who are effective at the front line level, and novelty offers more dopamine than what was on the menu yesterday. Once the counteroffensive began in earnest, the online stuff seemed to dwindle pretty quickly. I don’t have a link, but I saw a recent report indicating that today NAFO is only 10% of what it was in the second half of 2022.

The extraordinarily unhelpful Hamas vs. Israel attack has clearly adjusted the landscape even further. While Putin’s hand is clearly seen in what happened there, the existing narratives, particularly in the United States, make that war a primo wedge issue. I see a cadre of newly minted NAFO field leaders just like the ones I recall from Occupy Wall Street, looking a bit lost. They’re still focused, but the crowd has moved on to other things. Many will fade, but some of them, having had a little taste of the action, are going to take service again and again, as needs arise.

Conclusion:

Like all social movements, NAFO sprang out of the moment. Nobody planned it, every day memes beyond counting drop all over the place. Some of them grow large enough to make the news. The enormous ones spill out of online spaces into the real world, like Anonymous did during Operation Chanology. Sometimes things that are purely notional, like the Hammerskins in Pink Floyd’s The Wall, become a frightful reality.

Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals #7 is somewhat apropos here:

"A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag."

NAFO formed, acted, and is now in the process of dissipating. There are no doubt similar efforts in support of Hamas and Israel; I’m not aware because the novelty wore off for me a long time ago. Some sort of Gaza implosion was inevitable, I’ve know this since I first wrote about their aquifer situation a decade ago.

What I expect to see next will be entities that form (or revitalize) over the Hamas/Israel throw down getting interested in the U.S. election. If this intrigues you, get out there, plant a persona, and get ready to ride the wave …