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  • From: Dina Hornreich <hornreichdina AT gmail.com>
  • To: Dina Hornreich <hornreichdina AT gmail.com>
  • Subject: [TypicalGirls] April 2026 HumanifestX update: Are we not deplorables?! (Social Darwinism vs. De-Evolution)
  • Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:16:50 -0400

Dear friends (both new and old):


Did you know April is global volunteer month? (Moreover, April 21 is Americorps’ Volunteer Generation Fund Day!) Newer generational iterations continue to demonstrate traits demonstrating a desire for making meaningful contributions that extend beyond exclusively “profit driven” motivations; furthermore, they seem to easily lose patience with performing routine tasks that can be more efficiently completed by all these newfangled devices in varying shapes, sizes, and colors. 


As such, I am asking for your support through fundraising efforts as I continue to develop and refine my mission, vision, and purpose as an educator, researcher, content creator, and activist who is experiencing homelessness which is causing unprecedented medical challenges:


Please DONATE to my GoFundMe Campaign!


Have our daily lives finally been adequately transformed in the ways that the commonplace diffusion of these artefacts suggest so that we can return to our country’s founders’ ideas for becoming an American citizenry of informed, engaged, and wise democratic participants? What duties can machines perform that humans cannot; and what duties can humans accomplish that machines cannot complete? Do those functions overlap; and (if so) will they converge or diverge? 


While machine learning is very different from human learning (and vice versa); I continue to ponder an evolving interplay between the two. This seems to offer alternate ways to educate ourselves in order to navigate our lifelong pursuits with varying degrees of overall success and individual achievements; and this has suggested different kinds of economies (e.g. surveillance capitalism) which continue to transform our everyday marketplace.  It is obvious that there is substantial potential for reassembling socio-cultural rules, norms, protocols, policies, and procedures to better manage our limited resources according to different supply and demand distribution logic that reduces unethical marketing practices (e.g. payola) that reinforces unrealistic expectations — and otherwise skew this manufactured dystopia that favors the interests of greedy, violent, and misogynistic corporate tyrants (rather than promoting a citizenry of informed, engaged, and wise democratic participants). 


It’s not just about efficacy; it also suggests criteria involving ethics and appropriateness as well. I see opportunities for holding conversations with internal and external stakeholders for aggregating resources, realigning our communal priorities, and otherwise restoring a better sense of democracy. Obviously, I prefer to focus on the significance of “cultural capital” (cf: Pierre Bourdieu) because of its immediate impact (yet nebulous value) when transferred into the marketplace. Advertising and marketing strategies capitalize on our needs, wants, and desires by manipulating our attitudes, values, beliefs, and other “dispositional” traits which could eventually become consolidated into a more unifying demographic that creates needs, wants, and desires without exploiting our vulnerabilities through manufactured dependencies on goods, products, and services that cause more problems than they solve.


Even if we like to consider ourselves critical (and otherwise “immune” to those messages), there is always a strategy that will cater to that sort of “resistant” identity too (i.e. no one is exempt). And it is even more politically charged than we might initially expect because communal resource distribution is based around those illusory consumer identities (fka: demographics) because they were invented to hook us into brand loyalties in the marketplace; meanwhile “false hopes” from failed vanities, extravagance, and materialism increasingly continue to exacerbate the ongoing social overdifferentiation that manifest internally, externally, and everywhere in-between (or beyond). 


The “magical” connections we crave are a combination of scientific and artistic sensibilities; so if we use a “prosumerist approach,” then we can hopefully better safeguard ourselves from manipulation and exploitation into unhealthy dependencies. Furthermore, recognizing these ideas under a “prosumerist economy” perspective which uniquely validates those “slippery” (i.e. difficult to measure) interconnections that are readily invoked when engaging with organic, analog, and digital formats in ways that we were previously unable to demonstrate. Nonverbal persuasive tactics are very effective tools!


When pondering the contradictions between negotiating our individual consumption of mass produced messages that are ubiquitous with communally becoming an informed, engaged, and wise citizenry; it is apparent that this “prosumerist awareness” should offer us the potential for bringing us closer to restoring the democratic ideals that American culture had intended to endow. We tend to assign fascist connotations when invoking certain labels or brands; and I think that reflects the limitations of the nebulous meso/middle area between the micro and the macro (fka: gloCalization=localization + globalization?).


On that larger scale, the ideas of Benjamin Barber (cf: Jihad vs. McWorld) offer abundant evidence that these perceptions readily distort polarizing political relationships on all those levels. At its core, we can see that the religious origins in the foundations of human civilization recognize our needs, wants, and desires for better articulating the values and virtues that are being prioritized throughout these emerging socio-technology realities. I believe we have already demonstrated those things upon composing the US Constitution; as such, I am hopeful we can simply get back to those original principles as we renegotiate our overdifferentiated circumstances.


As a disorganized “reconservadox” kind of disorganized (yet observant) Jew, I can easily recognize those virtues which fell under the banner of “middot” (which I am personally moving towards restoring as Pesach and the custom of counting the Omer is rapidly approaching); obviously the COVID era has offered us opportunities to create new “midrash” narratives for these emerging socio-technical realities which makes eating the “bread of affliction” (and other traditional Seder customs) an effective template for ritual role play reenactments of ancient life and similar origins of civilization. I can easily find common ground with various other groups (the secular, the scholarly, and even the sometimes “stylish or fashionable”) whose tribal identities are intended to better support healthy relational dynamics - and many seem to involve the conspicuous consumption of hard boiled eggs this time of year! (Passover just offers us more of that “rhythm and Jews” vibe all over again & again each and every year - and it is always more than enough.)


The bottom line is: effective rules, norms, traditions, protocols, policies, and procedures should overtly support values and virtues that help us live, learn, love, work, create, play, lead, and grow individually, communally, and across the “meta-verse.” Moreover, it is clear that these ideas are not exclusive to the family, community, or socio-cultural background where I originally acquired them; as such, I remain eager to engage with anyone who responds civilly with my efforts to systemically move in this “experimental” direction. I am eager to create partnerships and forge new pathways in ways that make my skill sets uniquely vital throughout these uncertain times.


Furthermore, to be more universal/accessible with this context, I think it behooves me to explicitly ponder just how profoundly impactful these particular circumstances that surround me currently as a victim of homelessness remain. While I understand that everything has its utility, and everyone has something to teach me; I feel it is important to recognize that we recently lost a longtime staff member, Trevor Kyle Lynch, at the CSO shelter facility in Northampton, MA.


Coach Trevor regularly worked directly with our challenging population whom few seldom take the time to truly understand because we are so heterogeneous. Homelessness is a very difficult situation for people to reconcile for themselves. As a result, there is a heartbreakingly high “turnover” of staff and clients in this particular sector of public welfare services; and Trevor’s passing has left us with a vacancy that cannot readily be filled. (And those losses seem endless for our circumstances.)


Accordingly, in Trevor’s honor, I would like to submit to you this month’s “nugget” of scholarship for “wising up” as I enjoy adapting from research including Monica Ardelt who suggests the concept is a three dimensional personality characteristic (<https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26763810>):

  1. Cognitive: An understanding of life and a desire to know the truth, i.e., to comprehend the significance and deeper meaning of phenomena and events, particularly with regard to intrapersonal and interpersonal matters. Includes knowledge and acceptance of the positive and negative aspects of human nature, of the inherent limits of knowledge, and of life’s unpredictability and uncertainties. 

  2. Reflective: A perception of phenomena and events from multiple perspectives. Requires self-examination, self-awareness and self-insight. 

  3. Affective: Sympathetic and compassionate love for others. 


Finally, I would enthusiastically like to invite you to join me by participating in “Screen Free Week” which is May 4-10, 2026. 


As always, thank you for your time and consideration of my thoughts and ideas; and of course, please be well! 


And again, please consider making a donation to my fundraiser campaign in order to support my recovery from my journeys in homelessness: <https://gofund.me/42ba6d296>.


-Dina



Dina L. Hornreich, MS, MLIS 

Online donations: https://gofund.me/42ba6d296 

PayPal ID: hornreichdina AT gmail.com

https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/NAMP:_Not_Another_Marketing_Ploy

linkedin.com/in/dina-hornreich-113a79283
medium.com/@dina-hornreich

hornreichdina AT gmail.com

413-315-0485
c/o
FOH & CSO @29 Industrial Drive East, Northampton, MA 01060


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Advocating for better consumer safeguards and sustainable economic reform in the age of surveillance capitalism for "wising up" from rationality to morality in this emerging "Conceptual Age." 

Stopping the epidemics of misinformation, disinformation, & malinformation (propaganda) from disrupting our information, media, & technology (IMT) ecosystems by facilitating the effective, appropriate, & ethical comprehension/production of IMT artefacts on our journeys toward integrative recovery & holistic wellbeing.


Facilitating the acquisition of lifelong literacies, instead of reinforcing the perception that "natural vulnerabilities" are "permanent deficiencies," as a community of learners struggling to fight the onslaught of unhealthy messages generated by practices which condone/promote the exploitation of typical human fallibilities reinforcing the greedy, violent, and misogynistic approaches of a plutocratic tyranny who resorts to criminalizing, pathologizing, and otherwise blaming the victims of their wanton ludicrousness.


Alerting consumers to the impact of numerous illusions and other deceptive efforts that turn our individual differences into manufactured deviations (and other forms of "learned helplessness"); thereby revealing systemic injustices that are perpetuated by ongoing inequitable power dynamics (i.e. colonialism) and other accessibility barriers to the basic resources that support our universal human needs, wants, & desires.


Building a taskforce of nonviolent communicators who are:

  • Promoting an informed, engaged, & wise global citizenry and participatory transnational Democracy. (cf: listography)
  • Elevating “Conceptual Age” skills (design, story, symphony, empathy, play, & meaning) in order to remedy the shortcomings of residuals from the preceding "Information Age" and "Industrial Age."
  • Preventing media pollution, information poverty, & “techno-lust” from further disrupting our social, cultural, political, & economic ecosystems.
  • Championing mindful “meta-literacies” (i.e. becoming adept bullsh*t detectives) involving the creation, selection, organization, presentation, diffusion, consumption, & preservation stages for "processing" IMT artefactual innovations.
  • Adopting the principles of "Data Feminism": Examining power; challenging power; elevating emotion & embodiment; rethinking binaries & hierarchies; embracing pluralism; considering context; and making labor visible.


  • [TypicalGirls] April 2026 HumanifestX update: Are we not deplorables?! (Social Darwinism vs. De-Evolution), Dina Hornreich, 03/31/2026

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