RoundSparrow @ .ee
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
- 300 Posts
- 136 Comments
https://www.advocate.com/politics/jasmine-crockett-trump-or-trans
“Gutted medical research?” “Trump,” answered National Women’s Law Center President Fatima Goss Graves.
“Driving us into a recession?” “Trump.”
“Increasing the cost of everything?” “Trump.”
“Encouraging an environment of hate and divisiveness?” “Trump.”
The list went on.
What to Understand
-
Donald Trump is the most obvious liar and egomaniac since year 2013. It is blatant, it is obvious, it is clear as day, it is documented.
-
Understanding the Problem Assertion 1: The problem is not Donald Trump. One liar “Big Shot” who plays golf and spends time with his family retired in Florida on the golf course and goes and hangs out with his buddies is nothing special for a man age 70 and older.
-
Understanding the Problem Assertion 2: The problem is We The People, the population of society. “MASS PSYCHOSIS - How an Entire Population Becomes MENTALLY ILL”
-
How did this happen? Assertion 3: A 1985 book by Neil Postman, Manhattan / New York University Professor (Donald Trump’s Home Town) predicted all this for America’s future. On February 2, 2017 his son Andrew Postman confirmed that Donald Trump was what his father’s book was ultimately about.
-
Understanding the Problem Assertion 4: The Theory of SOCIETAL STUPIDITY by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nazi Germany mass conformity / collective blindness
-
Ignorance of Surkov / Surkovian
“I encounter forms of this attitude every day. The producers who work at the Ostankino channels might all be liberals in their private lives, holiday in Tuscany, and be completely European in their tastes. When I ask how they marry their professional and personal lives, they look at me as if I were a fool and answer: “Over the last twenty years we’ve lived through a communism we never believed in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and oligarchy, and we’ve realized they are illusions, that everything is PR.” “Everything is PR” has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened. When I ask them about Soviet-era dissidents, like my parents, who fought against communism, they dismiss them as naïve dreamers and my own Western attachment to such vague notions as “human rights” and “freedom” as a blunder. “Can’t you see your own governments are just as bad as ours?” they ask me. I try to protest—but they just smile and pity me. To believe in something and stand by it in this world is derided, the ability to be a shape-shifter celebrated. Vladimir Nabokov once described a species of butterfly that at an early stage in its development had to learn how to change colors to hide from predators. The butterfly’s predators had long died off, but still it changed its colors from the sheer pleasure of transformation. Something similar has happened to the Russian elites: during the Soviet period they learned to dissimulate in order to survive; now there is no need to constantly change their colors, but they continue to do so out of a sort of dark joy, conformism raised to the level of aesthetic act.
Surkov himself is the ultimate expression of this psychology. As I watch him give his speech to the students and journalists, he seems to change and transform like mercury, from cherubic smile to demonic stare, from a woolly liberal preaching “modernization” to a finger-wagging nationalist, spitting out willfully contradictory ideas: “managed democracy,” “conservative modernization.” Then he steps back, smiling, and says: “We need a new political party, and we should help it happen, no need to wait and make it form by itself.” And when you look closely at the party men in the political reality show Surkov directs, the spitting nationalists and beetroot-faced communists, you notice how they all seem to perform their roles with a little ironic twinkle.” ― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, 2014
Published in 2014
Ignorance in USA abounds
Denial abounds in USA. There is so much hate messaging, so many ideas of hate and dehumanization. No person can function. It causes brain damage. The USA in May 2025 in total is a toxic culture, toxic society, and hate itself is the cause. All hate is bad.
Further, you have a very simplified, childish view of how intellectualism works as if there is a simple continuum from bad, kneejerk thoughts to sophisticated good intellectual thoughts devoid of emotion.
Nobody here is saying “devoid of emotion”. I love you. I think the crisis is people flocking to hate and machine dehumanization, leaving compassion and love in the dust.
I’m going to have to lock this posting, nobody here is replying in understanding of the March 2013 Russian Information warfare crisis and it’s all been reactionary mocking. I can’t keep spoon feeding you about every one of your hate-filled reactions.
IF YOU DO NOT FIGHT NOW with EMOTION
The only “emotion” you prize is hate and dehumanization, just like Donald Trump is very emotional. hate-filled emotions. Russia mind-fucked you and you are programmed not to discuss Cambridge Analtyica and Russia.
Compassion and love are emotions, You think the answer to hate is more hate. Reactionary.
you have a very simplified, childish view
More mockery and insults. I see why you flock to JD Vance topics, because he too uses insults and mocking. You think compassion and literacy promotion, promoting Carl Sagan, is “childish”. In fact, you are here to message that Carl Sagan is childish. This posting was responded to by viewing it through the lens of Carl Sagan’s 1995 book, which is not childish view. But you can only seem to react, react in mocking and insults, like Donald Trump on Truth Social.
I think you don’t understand media ecology of Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan, how Lemmy shapes your reactionary behaviors. Nor do you understand information warfare and Cambridge Analytica influence on the population and mindsets in the nation. These take patience and effort to comprehend and understand, not reactionary insult messages.
::: _______________
“Most people can’t stand up for their convictions, because the majority of people might not be doing it. See, everybody’s not doing it, so it must be wrong. And since everybody is doing it, it must be right. So a sort of numerical interpretation of what’s right. But I’m here to say to you this morning that some things are right and some things are wrong. Eternally so, absolutely so. It’s wrong to hate. It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong. It’s wrong in America, it’s wrong in Germany, it’s wrong in Russia, it’s wrong in China. It was wrong in 2000 B.C., and it’s wrong in 1954 A.D. It always has been wrong, and it always will be wrong. It’s wrong to throw our lives away in riotous living. No matter if everybody in Detroit is doing it, it’s wrong. It always will be wrong, and it always has been wrong. It’s wrong in every age and it’s wrong in every nation. Some things are right and some things are wrong, no matter if everybody is doing the contrary. Some things in this universe are absolute.” - February 28, 1954
I am going to have to lock comments soon if the pro-hate pro-reaction comments don’t stop.
I AM VERY angry, and when other people see that they also feel like their anger
Anger is the very basis of the Russian information warfare. Mass dehumanization via Lemmy social media, Twitter social media, Facebook social media, Reddit social media, Instagram social media, TikTok social media, etc. Hate-filled and angry.
We have a crisis of “media ecology”, the topics of Neil Postman at New York University, Marshall McLuhan of University of Toronto, among other extremely serious crisis situations.
I AM VERY angry, and when other people see that they also feel like their anger
Again, that’s the basis and outcome of the Russian information warfare that was launched on the World Wide Web Internet in March 2013.
Professional psychologists and psychiatrists worked with Russia to create 5,000 alternate reality screen games for media consumers to be constantly hate-filled, shallow, reactionary, anti-goodness, dehumanizing, and angry.
“In one experiment, CA would show people on online panels pictures of simple bar graphs about uncontroversial things (e.g., the usage rates of mobile phones or sales of a car type) and the majority would be able to read the graph correctly. However, unbeknownst to the respondents, the data behind these graphs had actually been derived from politically controversial topics, such as income inequality, climate change, or deaths from gun violence. When the labels of the same graphs were later switched to their actual controversial topic, respondents who were made angry by identity threats were more likely to misread the relabeled graphs that they had previously understood. What CA observed was that when respondents were angry, their need for complete and rational explanations was also significantly reduced. In particular, anger put people in a frame of mind in which they were more indiscriminately punitive, particularly to out-groups. They would also underestimate the risk of negative outcomes. This led CA to discover that even if a hypothetical trade war with China or Mexico meant the loss of American jobs and profits, people primed with anger would tolerate that domestic economic damage if it meant they could use a trade war to punish immigrant groups and urban liberals.” ― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America, 2019
If you knew ANYTHING about political organization you would know agitation is the first step to opening up the door to change
Yes, I knew this, but you are in such a state of reactionary mocking you haven’t read my last 100 posts on Lemmy, all you can do is engage reactionary thinking and reactionary mocking. Like JD Vance. Twitter-thinking. Nor have you seem to studied / understood / comprehended what Peter Pomerantsev has been publishing on the Internet since year 2011.
If you knew ANYTHING about political organization you would know agitation is the first step to opening up the door to change
Of course I know this, I teach it over on:
“Hybrid War Lost” to Russia, Russia is the Political Organization
[email protected]
Hey, newsflash, sometimes hate and mockery being used to tear down evil people is EXISTENTIALLY necessary to regain a peaceful, kind status quo.
More mocking, more insult
My message at the very top said: “The crisis of understanding in the United States of America 2025 is that thinking systems are important. Reactionary thinking, mockery thinking, one-upmanship thinking is not the same as the science way of thinking. Twitter-thinking, meme thinking, isn’t the same as science thinking”
Your “newsflash” electric message, mocking of me fits:
- one-upmanship thinking
- Reactionary thinking (attacking the messenger)
- mockery thinking, it is more mocking in a Total Mockery of the United States of America, you are the source of the mocking.
We’re truly fucked, aren’t we?
We, The United States of America, have been and we don’t even realize how we got fucked, who did the fucking, and how we have entirely failed to defend or study the problem. We are so lost in our own Total Mockery and Twitter-thinking values, we haven’t a clue about what was unleashed upon the World Wide Web Internet since March 2013.
“We Are here” / “You Are Here” Untied States of America:
We are here:
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
“you just like to hate JD Vance and feel good about it and not ACTUALLY do anything or pay attention to anything”
No, I’m not saying that.
it is just one of the more enjoyable things I do.
I’m saying you don’t understand Surkov / Surkovian information warfare, you enjoy that your nation lost to Putin and Russia since March 2013. If I’m not being blunt enough for you:
it is just one of the more enjoyable things I do.
It is clear as day you find pleasure and joy in the United States of America Total Mockery created by the Kremlin using Internet media systems since March 2013. that you find it enjoyable that there is so much hate and mockery, that you want to contribute more and more each day.
making easy high school level jokes
Exactly what Carl Sagan said in 1995: “The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media”
That means Lemmy.
Stephen Gutknecht: Of course everyone can see he is hateful. That’s why he is popular.
You don’t know what you are talking about, on many simultaneous levels.
JD Vance is the most unpopular Vice President since the U.S. has been polling Vice Presidents, you are a cynical fool who has lost the plot if you genuinely think JD Vance represents what even something approaching a majority of USians want…
You do not understand popularity, it shifts. And what has become popular since March 2013 is mass dehumanization and hate. Mockery and insults. Surkov / Surkovian information warfare an governing methods.
Rick Roderick in 1993 gave a lecture, he was a professor at Duke University, and he explains what you do not understand about media ecology of media systems. Why JD Vance’s popularity is popular.
You can see this every day on every social media network in May 2025. What is popular is mass dehumanization, mockery, hate, anti-science, anti-goodness. What is popular is Surkov / Surkovian governing methods.
Rick Roderick 1993
"And we get for the first time a phenomenon never known in polling which is the phenomenon of not liking a person, but of liking liking a person. This is a sign you are dealing with the hyperreal.
Let me go over that again: Reagan’s popularity was popular. When you went through the various traits of Reagan and what Reagan stood for and his policies and so on, ah, vast numbers of people disliked nearly all of them. What was popular was his popularity. And I don’t think that Reagan’s alone in this.
Show business figures had this same thing go on for years. I can’t remember the last Michael Jackson song that I even listened to. Or my kids, who also don’t like Michael Jackson. But he’s popular, but not in the old sense. It is a hyper popularity, if you follow me. It is popular that he is popular.
Madonna has learned to live and create herself on the curve of the postmodern by making it her goal to be more popular than popular; by having her popularity the topic of popularity. I mean, we have found out that she can’t particularly act or sing. She is not built well enough to be a true cybernetic sex symbol for this period, and yet she manages – because of her understanding of this situation that Baudrillard calls the hyperreal – to stay on this curve of popularity."
https://rickroderick.org/308-baudrillard-fatal-strategies-1993/
Hate of JD Vance is popular
Hate of Donald Trump is popular
Mocking and Total Mockery United States of America on the World Stage is Popular
You don’t understand what Rick Roderick is teaching. You can study and learn.
ok I am imagining, sounds great honestly!
I already got that sense from you, that you think JD Vance is great content to keep you entertained with hate mockery.
JD Vance and Carl Sagan debate would be like watching a grizzly bear dismantle an entire childrens party in a park, but in a fun way.
That’s what it all comes down to, you having fun enjoying JD Vance. That’s the very basis of his power, playing the wrestling heel (on media systems) for social media users to mock and insult - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heel_(professional_wrestling) - the Surkov / Surkovian governing methods. Twitter thinking, entertainment thinking, mockery thinking. JD Vance knows exactly how power works in United States of America 2025 social media society. JD Vance knows how to keep the notifications flowing over TCP/IP.
“An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth – scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, the comics and many books – might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. What kind of society would it be if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?” - Carl Sagan, January 8, 1994
Imagine being such a pathetic incel you can’t even leverage the position of Vice President Of The United States to gain any sense of respect from… well really anyone.
Imagine having all the information in the world, and flocking to react-comment to JD Vance in 2025 without seeing the forest for the trees, 340 million people who are ignorant of Carl Sagan’s concepts and ideas, and even if they can repeat the words, they don’t comprehend or understand because they are so reactionary in their thinking values.
everyone else too) can see right to the rotten, hateful heart at the core of his identity.
Of course everyone can see he is hateful. That’s why he is popular. Don’t you see how hateful content on social media systems is what is popular and gets all the upvotes since March 2013?
It is as if nobody here on Lemmy has ever studied media ecology from Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan.
Hate is trending, the United States of America year 2025 flocks to shit and flocks to hate
Hate sells. Attacking women sells. It’s popular. Popularity and trending.
::: _______________
“What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” ― Joseph Weizenbaum, MIT computer science
How does he not know his a** from a h*** in the ground?
He doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground because he lives in the United States of America year 2025, where people shit-talk and insult and mock on social media systems like Twitter and Lemmy. Thinking that insults are a form of education, when all insults do is cause more and more favoring of ignorance.
He knows how to be popular. JD Vance knows how to get people to listen to him, how to get people to react to his choices and behaviors. By creating a total mockery like Lemmy and Reddit and Twitter and Bluesky social media systems are. JD Vance knows how to get attention.
Carl Sagan’s 1995 book gets no serious attention by crowds. Lemmy audiences and United States of America people flock to shit information, JD Vance as a source/ to Fox News for schooling, not to Carl Sagan as a source of information.
JD Vance doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground the same way all Americans do not, they avoid excellent teaching and lessons from educators like Carl Sagan. People are attracted to shit learning, in favor of junk memes. It has become a horrific situation since year 2013, that Twitter-thinking reactionary values have become so craved by people in the USA. How the United States of America lost an information war to Russia and people can’t even discuss thinking systems and information warfare education!
“a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, has been replaced by the idea of technological progress. The aim is not to reduce ignorance, superstition, and suffering but to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of new technologies. We tell ourselves, of course, that such accommodations will lead to a better life, but that is only the rhetorical residue of a vanishing technocracy. We are a culture consuming itself with information, and many of us do not even wonder how to control the process. We proceed under the assumption that information is our friend, believing that cultures may suffer grievously from a lack of information, which, of course, they do. It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from information glut, information without meaning, information without control mechanisms.” ― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 1992
There are now over 8 billion people all with their own information sovereignty. This is not a new 2019 experience, that’s the very meaning of the “Tower of Babel” metaphor itself.
my brain damage is around concern that pure liberty and freedom of 8 billion people needs common ground.
- poison food. Food that causes sickness, disease, illness.
- murder and war
- transportation accidents and mistakes
- fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods
- technology standards so we don’t end up with 800 mobile phones that all use a different power supply and we don’t have a USB connection standard
- Love and compassion I view as technology / learning / education / study / rituals passed down / poetry / art / experiences shared / dance / music. And I think we have to favor sharing this over say building military weapons and preserving killing techniques and killing machine construction knowledge. At some point, my brain damage seems caused by people finding killing more readily available than understanding of joy / compassion / love sharing. (Carl Sagan made this same point in 1994 open letter “WITH SCIENCE ON OUR SIDE”)
- medical knowledge. What dose of a medication for what body size. side-effects to look out for. drug interactions. first aid procedures.
etc. I think “Super Wikipedia” we have a common ground.
needs rewrite, editing, my brain damage is very extreme and bad.
“If all information is seen as part of a war, out go any dreams of a global information space where ideas flow freely, bolstering deliberative democracy. Instead, the best future one can hope for is an ‘information peace’, in which each side respects the other’s ‘information sovereignty’: a favoured concept of both Beijing and Moscow, and essentially a cover for enforcing censorship.” ― Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, 2019
It’s worse than that. One area Peter Pomerantsev falls short is not bringing in Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Joseph Campbell, Howard Bloom, and James Joyce into his work (Marshall McLuhan and Joseph Campbell were both professional teachers at university and both converge on teaching about James Joyce). Media ecology. Especially electric media ecology, the way people switch channels on television, the way people on Internet social media write one sentence at a time on Lemmy, Reddit, Twitter and don’t read an entire book by a single author - but hundreds of different authors in a Lemmy and Reddit comment section all contributing one sentence.
Don’t get me wrong, Peter Pomerantsev is a great educator / teacher / writer on these subjects. The problem is that I vew these conflicts not only in terms of government and politics, China / Russia - as in this quote from Peter Pomerantsev… but as Tower of Babel, all human communications and comprehension. The perspective of Carl Sagan in his poem Pale Blue Dot, and his 1995 book “Science as a Candle In the Dark”.
I also find Peter Pomerantsev does not emphasize religion. Please let me revisit the quote:
“If all information is seen as part of a war, out go any dreams of a global information space where ideas flow freely, bolstering deliberative democracy. Instead, the best future one can hope for is an ‘information peace’, in which each side respects the other’s ‘information sovereignty’: a favoured concept of both Beijing and Moscow, and essentially a cover for enforcing censorship.” ― Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, 2019
Repeating again again: each side respects the other’s ‘information sovereignty’:
That’s exactly what Islam, Christianity, Jewish try to do with the Torah, Quran, Bible.
That’s the metaphor of the “Tower of Babel”. And I think with 8 billion people on Earth, James Joyce was pointing out in 1920’s that we can’t keep ignoring the elephant in the room. The “Tower of Babel” crisis.
I think we have failed to educate the behavior of people who don’t understand each other. Every person over age 12 should be focusing on the symptoms and understanding of information conflicts.
"each side respects the other’s ‘information sovereignty’: a favoured concept of both Beijing and Moscow, and essentially a cover for enforcing censorship.” ― Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, 2019
That goes on with marriages, that goes on with children to parents / age gaps in communications. That’s what goes on with Fox News viewers vs. magazine readers. These are the subjects of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman’s education. And Joseph Campbell in comparing all the religions of the world.
Malala from Swat Valley Pakistan, Carl Sagan, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr want us self-aware of the egoism / egomania / self-centered symptoms of failing to understand the behavior that comes out of these gaps in comprehension.
We are taking understanding, comprehension, experience beyond the words, for granted. We are smashing into each other, attacking each other, insulting each other, mocking each other… those are the symphony of what is being described:
“If all information is seen as part of a war, out go any dreams of a global information space where ideas flow freely, bolstering deliberative democracy. Instead, the best future one can hope for is an ‘information peace’, in which each side respects the other’s ‘information sovereignty’: a favoured concept of both Beijing and Moscow, and essentially a cover for enforcing censorship.” ― Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, 2019
There are now over 8 billion people all with their own information sovereignty. This is not a new 2019 experience, that’s the very meaning of the “Tower of Babel” metaphor itself.
“Face it, Donald Trump’s ‘cult’ is now an American majority”
By Paul Fanlund
November 6, 2024“The country today is on a strong economic footing, whatever the distortions. That a clear majority of Wisconsin voters did not understand or appreciate those facts represents the ultimate triumph of propaganda.”
Far-right propaganda found a huge national audience with the late Rush Limbaugh, who loved ridiculing anyone not white and male. It became deviously malignant when Fox News debuted in 1996. Fox, pretending to have traditional, slick network standards of fairness and balance, has — for nearly three decades — told those mostly in rural and small-town America two central “truths.”"
This has caused me so much brain damage. Constantly having to translate and communicate with people who have adopted Fox News and Rush Limbaugh as reality itself. All the people who never studied or understood media ecology of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, and do not get how “The Medium is the Message” works on their mind. The lacking self-awareness that they believe ignorant people on Fox News because of the style and fashion of communications. With the Kremlin information war since March 2013, there are now 5,000 more patterns of alternate-reality, it isn’t just Fox News anymore, it is the entire Internet seeded with anti-humanism anti-comprehension patterns even worse than Fox News.
Moderates
- Hybrid War Lost@lemm.ee
- Cringe Nation@lemm.ee
- PopBubble@lemm.ee
- Censored Content by Reddit Owners / Admins, not moderators@lemm.ee
- Understand USA@lemm.ee
- Diary of Anne Frank@lemm.ee
- Plead Out Loud@lemm.ee
- Media Cults@lemm.ee
- Attention USA@lemm.ee
- Assert Good@lemm.ee
- Malala Yousafzai@lemm.ee
- Media Ecology@lemm.ee
- Masturbatory Egoism@lemm.ee
- Third Rail@lemm.ee
source for video clip: https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxXPQC-bYFdEX7pYyaJNNrI5KFF8ElUqv-
…
But on a midnight watch I realized why twice you ran away [email protected]
Think about, Think about: how many times I have fallen!
Spirits are using me larger voices callin’ ( Earworms )
What Heaven brought you and me cannot be forgotten ( John 1:1 rewrites )
(Been around the world) I have been around the world
(Lookin’) Lookin’ for that woman girl ( ALP )
(Who knows she knows) Who knows love can endure
And you know it will
…
James Joyce Experience, Dublin Day, Dublin Night.
The metaphors exposed, the connections made, the merging, the joining, the medium waves, the nightmare of history of our Pale Blue Dot, from which we all try to awaken - and we all try to World Wide Wake.