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
Not sure what your point is and I’m not interested.
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.
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.
When you ask countries you just threatened to invade for help with your inflation.
What’s happening is that people under the influence of Russian mental manipulation are doing what I call “Surkov Information Warfare”, “Surkov Governing”. NO DEFENSE HAS BEEN FOUND, POPULATIONS COMPULSIVELY MOCK-BACK AND YIELD POWER TO THESE TECHNIQUES, IT IS HORRIFIC HOW MANY HAVE LOST THEIR HEARTS AND MINDS TO THESE METHODS.
“In the twenty-first century the techniques of the political technologists have become centralized and systematized, coordinated out of the office of the presidential administration, where Surkov would sit behind a desk on which were phones bearing the names of all the “independent” party leaders, calling and directing them at any moment, day or night. The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with twentieth-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd. One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern art exhibitions. The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime.” ― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, 2014
When you ask countries you just threatened to invade for help with your inflation.
"What this film is going to suggest is that that defeatist response has become a central part of a new system of political control. And to understand how this is happening, you have to look to Russia, to a man called Vladislav Surkov, who is a hero of our time.
Surkov is one of President Putin’s advisers, and has helped him maintain his power for 15 years, but he has done it in a very new way.
He came originally from the avant-garde art world, and those who have studied his career, say that what Surkov has done, is to import ideas from conceptual art into the very heart of politics.
His aim is to undermine peoples’ perceptions of the world, so they never know what is really happening.
Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater. He sponsored all kinds of groups, from neo-Nazi skinheads to liberal human rights groups. He even backed parties that were opposed to President Putin." - 2014
I encourage you to watch the whole video: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/12/31/bbcs_adam_curtis_on_the_contradictory_vaudeville_of_post-modern_politics.html
People under the influence of these LOL patterns of governing often show characteristics of being unwilling to discuss and name the techniques, their years of origin, which nation they originated in, etc. Often they will praise egoism and self-centeredness in how they react to information on the subject of being bamboozled in information warfare.
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 ;)
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.
They are voting up the memes. We have Meme Kings of Trump and Musk to meme about every few seconds on every single media platform. I see people pressing UpVote on Reddit, Bluesky.
People sold out to Apple iPhone, who in February 2025 is promoting products on Elon Musk’s X (Apple is paying money to Elon Musk), a long time ago for the ability to mock a 78 year old man on the Toilet tweeting.
“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
It’s deliberate, all documented over a decade ago:
“In the twenty-first century the techniques of the political technologists have become centralized and systematized, coordinated out of the office of the presidential administration, where Surkov would sit behind a desk on which were phones bearing the names of all the “independent” party leaders, calling and directing them at any moment, day or night. The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with twentieth-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd. One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox Christian fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying Jesus crosses, who in turn attacked the modern art exhibitions. The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime.” ― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, year 2014
Introduction to the Kremlin media techniques of year 2014
Peter Pomerantsev September 9, 2014: Russia and the Menace of Unreality. How Vladimir Putin is revolutionizing information warfare
Adam Curtis, BBC, December 31, 2014: On The “Contradictory Vaudeville” Of Post-Modern Politics - “What this film is going to suggest is that that defeatist response has become a central part of a new system of political control. And to understand how this is happening, you have to look to Russia, to a man called Vladislav Surkov, who is a hero of our time. Surkov is one of President Putin’s advisers, and has helped him maintain his power for 15 years, but he has done it in a very new way.”
Book reading from December 5, 2014 on the subject by Peter Pomerantsev