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

Counter Vlad Surkov techniques and methods

Introduction to the Kremlin media techniques of year 2014

1. Peter Pomerantsev September 9, 2014: Russia and the Menace of Unreality. How Vladimir Putin is revolutionizing information warfare

2. 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.”

3. Book reading from December 5, 2014 on the subject by Peter Pomerantsev

It is notable that Campbell is a non-believer, beyond atheist, as he says in the same interview. Campbell is a believer in teachers, writers, authors, poets, songwriters, etc. He does not believe in supernatural.

Campbell: “The umbilical point, the humanity, the thing that makes you human and not supernatural and immortal—that’s what’s lovable.” … “The idea of the supernatural as being something over and above the natural is a killing idea. In the Middle Ages this was the idea that finally turned that world into something like a wasteland, a land where people were living inauthentic lives, never doing a thing they truly wanted to because the supernatural laws required them to live as directed by their clergy. In a wasteland, people are fulfilling purposes that are not properly theirs but have been put upon them as inescapable laws. This is a killer. The twelfth-century troubadour poetry of courtly love was a protest against this supernaturally justified violation of life’s joy in truth. So too the Tristan legend”

As for Marshall McLuhan, in perhaps his most famous work from 1967:

“Joyce is, in the Wake, making his own Altamira cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind, in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all the phases of human culture and technology. As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let’s make it a wake or awake or both. Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious.” — the book “The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects” by media analyst Marshall McLuhan and graphic designer Quentin Fiore, and coordinated by Jerome Agel. It was published in March 1967

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.

London, USA Embassy

source for image: https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1j4f286/in_front_of_us_ambassy_london/