Dr. Joe Ondrak, CEO of Peryton Intelligence, joins us in an episode of From the Source, the Blackdot podcast. He discusses semiotics, extremism, epistemic security, cultural intelligence in OSINT and understanding narratives. The conversation also touches on the implications of AI in intelligence work and the emerging phenomenon of meme coins as a new source of insight into online communities. You can read his insights below or listen to the full episode here.
Language, stories and a journey into OSINT
As a self-professed ‘language nerd’, Joe studied literature and linguistics at university. He completed a Master's by Research in literature, stylistics and formalism, exploring how the form of a story shapes readers’ perception of it. Then, did his PhD in online narratology, focusing on how stories told on social media shape participation and behaviour.
‘I was looking at things like Creepypasta,’ he begins. ‘One of the cases that I looked at was the 2014 Waukesha Slender Man stabbing. So you had two young girls who read stories about the Slenderman online and believed them because the form of the story is to be believable, they were written from a first-person account.’
He explains that older people participating in it knew it was a story, but the young girls believed that they had to stab their friend to be a proxy of the Slender Man. Thankfully, their friend survived.
‘It was a really good example of how stories told in a certain way online shape human behaviour in a really concrete and serious way at times,’ he explains.
Jo adds that strategic narratology is about more than identifying prevalent narratives. It’s breaking down how that narrative is deployed and how audience reception differs based on how it’s being spread across the internet. This, he explains, is where OSINT meets humanities, which informs his practice to this day.
‘It doesn't necessarily all have to be computer science, AI and coding,’ explains Joe. ‘For instance, [I was recently] looking at how various practices in folk study behaviour and telling of folk stories can then be used to identify early warning signals in extremism in school shooters. So there are plenty of ways we can pluck from other sources.’
After completing his PhD, Joe became disillusioned with the UK’s postdoctoral academic job market and found a role as an open source intelligence analyst at Logically. Today, he is CEO at Peryton Intelligence.
The semiotics of extremism
Joe is passionate about semiotics, particularly the semiotics of extremism. He references an article by Marc Andre Argentino, who works in counter extremism, about new, transgressive online groups adopting the symbols of extreme right terrorist groups without believing in the ideologies.
‘At what point does that stop mattering? Are they still doing a terrorist thing, or are they just participating in the semiotics and the culture?’ Asks Joe, who wrote about this new, difficult world of online extremism for GNET.
‘It's no different from when Sex Pistols walked out wearing swastikas. It's transgression, except now it's a lot more serious and hardcore than it once was,’ he adds.
Risks include the dangers associated with normalising niche symbology and can escalate to section 52 offences (such as sharing manuals and manifestos). Because it is largely younger generations participating in these subcultures and engaging in transgression, they may not know or care about the dangers.
OSINT and epistemic security
Joe explains that societies should have ‘epistemic commons’, which he describes as coming together around different viewpoints, whether divisive or not. Whether it’s football or polarising political issues, society should be able to debate with a shared epistemology or establishment of what we know as true.
‘We are all agreeing on what truth is, so therefore we can have that discussion,’ Joe begins. ‘However, the internet, disinformation and influence operations leverage the fragmentation of epistemic commons.’
Epistemic security is the practice of countering influence operations and disinformation to ensure society produces, shares and accesses reliable information. To ensure an epistemically secure society, Joe believes spending time with people face-to-face matters.
‘The thing that COVID did in shattering a lot of in-person meetups, the fact that we had a society that was centred around actually being in person rather than being digital, that scar remains. And we need to make more efforts to reconnect in person,’ he says.
He adds that pragmatism comes through in face-to-face communication because people don't want to be confrontational.
‘People will often try to find common ground, whereas if you are in mediated communication, be that video calls, or worse, just typing messages across the screen, that's not another person that you're engaging with there. That is your imagination of another person, conjured up by what you're reading or looking at on the screen. And you can be as mean to them as you like and as disingenuous as you like,’ he adds.
For Joe, OSINT informs epistemic security. Ensuring local authorities and governments recognise the wider shift in epistemology is crucial.
OSINT and cultural intelligence
For OSINT professionals, it can be easy to get lost in data and patterns during large-scale data scraping activities. But for Joe, remembering the human element of OSINT is important. It’s about being aware of how culture shapes behaviour, technology, and online microcultures, and, in turn, how people share information with others.
‘The online surface that we all play our trade in wouldn't exist without people on there producing that data,’ begins Joe. ‘It's building out that layer, not thinking about things in terms of nodes and data points, but as potential human producers of that data and how that data is then interpreted and shared elsewhere.’
He adds that this human element is what keeps him wary of artificial intelligence (AI) for analysis.
‘When it comes to the adversarial side of things, the production of AI content, I think we're in a much more difficult place because it's very, very easy and very, very cheap to do that at scale,’ he begins. ‘Especially when we're talking about influence operations, they can just overwhelm.’
Joe explains that there is a sense of panic that we can't tell fiction from reality. But instead, he believes the real risk is that people won't care and will accept fiction anyway.
Keeping up with rapid shifts in meme coins
Meme coins are a type of cryptocurrency inspired by popular internet memes. Typically more of a novelty than an investment, they can create communities and subcultures of their own, while also creating opportunities for monetisation and marketability. Joe believes that meme coins are often overlooked in discussions of online threats.
‘You will see, with various crypto exchanges, when a meme hits a certain critical mass, someone will produce a meme coin of it. And then you can look at engagement with it at that market level, as well as social listening and traditional engagement with that meme,’ he explains.
Joe provides an example in ‘Amelia’, a character from an educational tool produced by the Home Office to warn people of the dangers of extremist rhetoric. Amelia was a purple-haired goth girl wearing a choker who just happened to espouse views against immigration and English heritage.
‘Immediately, the online right took her and said, "We're having this one”,’ Joe says. ‘Very quickly, you also had the Amelia coin minted, pegged to, the Solana blockchain. And what that tells you is who's engaging with that, who's behind that account in terms of promotion. It can give you a really interesting picture of social discourse, specifically of these sorts of micro-communities and subcultures.'
Listen to Semiotics, online culture, and OSINT with Joe Ondrak, and stay tuned for even more OSINT insight on Blackdot’s next podcast episode.
