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.
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.
Being open source won’t prevent this, sadly. 4 years is still young, but if a critical mass shifts back to Reddit then Lemmy will be considered a failure.
you express very limited understanding of open source and how competition works. Just because Microsoft kept selling Windows and “Linux on the Desktop” never came to displace Windows by 2005, it doesn’t mean Linux on end-user machines was a failure. Android Linux came along and is the biggest Linux distro ever, defeating Windows CE / Windows Mobile.
if a critical mass shifts back to Reddit then Lemmy will be considered a failure.
Again, that is like saying “people looked at Linux on desktop in 2003 and went back to Windows, so Linux was a failure”. Trying to displace entrenched players is often not how it works, it is when people leverage the source code and some parts of the system in different ways - like Android did with Linux - that things often change.
Regarding Reddit specifically, the Reddit code was open source for a very long time, nobody wanted to leave Reddit for different owner/operators… that changed in 2023 when every alternate to Reddit has seen a surge in developer interest (even non-federated apps like Tildes). That’s not really happened in the decades Reddit has been around before that specifically large groups of people and app developers have specifically expressed interest in moving away from Reddit in mass (Voat was the only prior big movement, but API apps were not really a focus in that movement).
By “MySpaced” I mean “become irrelevant”.
8-bit video games stopped selling in the 1990’s, but then in 2023 there is a huge “Retro gaming” and “retro computing” movement. Same with vinyl music records going out of style then coming back in as retro. Right now TikTok and video dominate Reddit front page - which Lemmy hasn’t even been taking on with video clips that reach Reddit’s technology level, let alone TikTok. There are trends of changes that are more than just one platform owners vs. another. Some of those may be in favor like federation/networked servers that Reddit does not have - that even drew the attention of Facebook.
These issues need to be addressed or Lemmy will be MySpaced within a year.
Lemmy is already well over 4 years on the Internet and open source.
How is the Fediverse privacy focused?
Not only have there been major bugs with delete of comments not working on other servers, the whole idea of federation is that it gets sent out to any instance that wants a copy - with not even a ‘terms of service’ that is standard on Lemmy.
For such a communist focus that the Lemmy developers have, I’ts so odd that they don’t emphasize that content is public and have it like Wikipedia content contributions. They use GPL license to force people to share their work of the code, but then they turn around and promise privacy that they fail to deliver on given that they don’t even warn newcomers how federation works.
Lemmy is well over 4 years old.
memes from many sources. And a lot of people created several logins on other instances given all the instability of Lemmy.
Imagine being in Taiwan and having full access to information about China and the west and still shilling for China. Those types of people should be looking for a dominatrix, not a political philosophy…
That’s kind of the history of humanity regarding religion. To some degree when the religious prophets were alive it make sense, but hundreds of years later it’s a story book (or oral tradition) and people still strive for the authority.
We haven’t really had that many teachers like Carl Sagan who describe the history and our favoring of authority - inability to question them. It’s pretty weird, as they often aren’t attractive or good speakers, but you see people just accept almost anything they say. I mean in the USA I witnessed so many people who would trust Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones kind of blindly, and there is some mechanism at play that humanity in total seems to keep engaging.
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.