Stephen Alfred Gutknecht
Professional in social media since 1985, created / sold social media server apps at age 15. Traveled the world to study media ecology.
“Finnegans Wake is the greatest guidebook to media study ever fashioned by man.” - Marshall McLuhan, Newsweek Magazine
It’s just a thought experiment to imagine MAGA heads exploding.
Fantasy. Simulacra. MAGA is death-wishing people that disagree with Elon Musk and Donald Trump values and leadership. Pretty much the entire nation is adopting death-wishing and social machine conventions of mass dehumanization. Trending towards more and more self-destruction as a nation.
Are we talking about the same person? Trumps ramblings are more incoherent than ever.
Yes, his chaos and nonsense has gotten more aggressive, even stronger in favor of Russia, etc.
Biden is too old” crowd are silent.
I haven’t witnessed the people who said that go silent. They changed topics that there were cats and dogs being eaten in Springfield Ohio, topics that JD Vance “couch couch couch”, topics that eggs are expensive, topics that Canada is bad, topics that Greenland needs to be taken over by the USA, topics that Ukraine started the war against Russia, they are anything but silent, they are commenting all over every media platform they can find free time to utilize.
Then have Obama run against him.
Every social media platform has these kind of answers. As of Obama would even desire a third term, he isn’t an egomania admirer like Donald Trump. Barack Obama is an intelligent, thoughtful, moral leader who values education and understanding. He isn’t a entertainer who values wrecking humanism and creating maximum content animation for news networks and social media consumers to react-comment to.
He has zero sense of humour: an inherent inability to recognize or invoke it.
There is a humor-like mocking of watching human beings suffer at the hands of government and business systems, “human tears”, “liberal tears”, “Ukraine tears”, values of winning and defeating humanism with systems of power. Donald Trump is very motivated and works many hours to socially arrange this domination and damage over human persons that don’t please his ego.
I rarely hear about apple at all.
It’s the influence on people’s behavior that’s far more my concern than the faith I have in people expressing self-awareness they have in terms of what they say (what you hear them say). Absolute addicts to technology can often not discuss their extreme addictions. You can witness the behavior all over in public since year 2010.
“One characteristic of those who live in a Technopoly is that they are largely unaware of both the origins and the effects of their technologies.” ― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 1992
The USA population and society has really lost all sense of what life was like before there was a constant notification stream of antics from billionaires. People are absolutely engrossed in the screen game of LOL at Donald Trump and Elon Musk so much they have no sense of life before 2008. There are huge numbers of people in March 2025 behaving as if Donald Trump is a new event and have lost every sense of him having been elected and in office in 2017.
By funding you mean resuming advertising on the platform, right?
yes.
I think the USA has taken a deep dive in international standing since January 2025, and Reddit is a USA-flavored USA-centered content publisher in terms of front page community. Things were pretty anti-USA with all the support of Israel in 2024, but now in 2025 with Elon Musk being the center of all USA society attention every minute of every day, sites like Reddit are being turned away from (or people only reading to mock the USA) - where the HiveMind is extremely USA technology consumerism / technology lifestyle worship.
For example, I never witness anyone on Reddit criticize Apple Computers for funding Twitter / X in 2025. It’s tech addiction as the primary religion on Reddit. And I think those outside the USA are sick of that machine lust / machine mind behavior of Elon Musk, Zuck, Amazon, etc.
“Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.” ― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 1992
The second it’s validated and becomes public knowledge, it’s no longer “privileged” knowledge and no longer makes them feel special for “knowing” a “secret truth”
Ahh, the (2 thousand year old) Bible verse Romans 11:33 theory of James Joyce’s work ;)
But democratized tech doesn’t guarantee democratic outcomes.
Far from it. We really need a major confrontation of the audience, information warfare needs to be educated to every single person of every age. Continuing education about science and mythology needs to continue, as people continue to flock to fiction and abandon non-fiction in every area of life.
People just can’t be serious about democracy and LOL and meme away their nation, the USA (where I live), it’s been absolute crisis since 2014.
“Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985
Conspiracy theorists: crickets
Agreed, FACTUAL EVIDENCE of a conspiracy theory is collected by reputable Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University and crickets. People flock to conspiracies with no evidence, but once one appears with authentic validation… nothing.
Troll accounts that had attempted to influence the US election had also been tweeting about vaccines, a study says. Many posted both pro- and anti-vaccination messages to create “false equivalency”, the study found. It examined thousands of tweets sent between 2014 and 2017. Vaccination was being used by trolls and sophisticated bots as a “wedge issue”, said Mark Dredze from Johns Hopkins University. “A significant portion of the online discourse about vaccines may be generated by malicious actors with a range of hidden agendas,” said David Broniatowski from George Washington University. The researchers reviewed more than 250 tweets about vaccination from accounts linked to the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA). In February the agency was named in a US indictment over alleged election meddling.
Important Reminder
All across the world every major news site covered this story in August 2018. Even Fox News covered it.
The clergy are failing all of humanity in not calling out the hate patterns in the middle east from all across the world. People need to stop grey-rocking Malala and promote her teachings.
“If one man can destroy everything, why can’t one girl change it?” ― Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, October 8, 2013
“In his pocket he kept a poem written by Martin Niemöller, who had lived in Nazi Germany. First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak out because I was not a Catholic. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.” ― Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, October 8, 2013
9.9xxx years before October 7, 2023.
Thank you and good work
Linux community arrogance is to deny the device driver issues and think Apple is fine, when the reason Apple thrives is because they don’t have open hardware like Linux, BSD, Windows…
Hardware companies are rarely held account for their absent support of Linux - some campaigns have come and gone, but in the end Linux users tend to arrogantly say it’s trivial to switch and embrace dishonesty. I guess they figure Microsoft is dishonest, so they normalize it.
Then why do people use them? And quit yelling.
People are attacking you, ganging up on you, one of the favorite things on Reddit like media platforms is to be hard core conformity enforcers and silence attempts at understanding mob mentality.
DOWNVOTES DONT MEAN SHIT! SO SHUT UP ABOUT DOWNVOTES AND GET OVER IT!
“MEDIA ECOLOGY DON’T MEAN SHIT I"M JUST HERE FOR AMUSING US ALL TO DEATH WITH DUMB MEMES”
Agreed. It is urgent that we teach Neil Postman’s “media ecology”. The junk noise garbage shit Internet sucks, and enough is enough!
Musk and Putin, two historic experts and achievers in trickle-down memes. Population control via meme machines. They seek power the Rupert Murdoch way.
Repeating: “MAGA is death-wishing people that disagree with Elon Musk and Donald Trump values and leadership.”
And you see value in using Lemmy social machine systems to announce that you are not interested. That in itself says a lot about the current state of affairs.