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  • From: Dina Hornreich <hornreichdina AT gmail.com>
  • To: Dina Hornreich <hornreichdina AT gmail.com>
  • Subject: [TypicalGirls] HumanifestX Update January 2025: Honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.: Where have all the visionaries, dreamers, oracles, resisters, and world-changers gone?
  • Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2025 11:30:17 -0500

Dear friends, family, and other pertinent constituencies:


Where have all the visionaries, dreamers, oracles, resisters, and world-changers gone? When Trump’s inauguration day coincides with Martin Luther King Day; I am reminded of Arthur Waskow’s Freedom Seders in 1968 which offered a radical Jewish perspective for confronting all the “modern pharaohs” confirming our continued failures for addressing ongoing systemic problems related to humankind’s historic abuses including (but not limited to) slavery and genocide.


As I am advocating for better consumer safeguards and sustainable economic reform in this age of surveillance capitalism, I refine my ideas as I continue to propose collectively "wising up" from rationality to morality in an emerging "Conceptual Age." It is clear that “fake content” generated by algorithmic robotic crawlers reinforces fears that technology can become “weapons of math destruction” (cf: Cathy O’Neil <https://cathyoneil.org/>). But since we know that the medium is the lesson, it is also obvious that we can and should find ways to keep “Artificial Intelligence” in an assistive role – socially and otherwise – so it can be just another technological tool (cf: Maja J Matarić <http://robotics.usc.edu/~maja>. (Like anything else, it’s how we use it that makes it either helpful or harmful!) Furthermore, our approaches should espouse a “health equity” lens to circumvent the “problem deficit” mindset (which is problematic in and of itself!) as we collectively strive for integrative recovery and holistic wellbeing. As Dr. King himself is frequently credited for saying, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman” <https://pnhp.org/news/dr-martin-luther-king-on-health-care-injustice/>


As such, I am further expanding my inclusive efforts for promoting awareness of the acquisition of lifelong literacies instead of reinforcing the perception that "natural vulnerabilities" are "permanent deficiencies" (or otherwise relying on stereotypic thinking to prevent overcoming our personal learning curves and other accepted “margins of error”) as we begin to see ourselves as a community of learners who are struggling to fight the onslaught of unhealthy messages generated by accepted practices condoning/promoting the exploitation of typical human fallibilities. In doing so, I am facing opposition from those accustomed to reinforcing the greedy, violent, and misogynistic approaches of plutocratic tyrants who resort to criminalizing, pathologizing, and otherwise blaming the victims of their wanton ludicrousness. 


Because I am 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"); these effort face suffocating adversity as it reveals complicity with systemic injustices perpetuated by ongoing inequitable power dynamics (i.e. colonialism) and other covert accessibility barriers to the basic resources that support our universal human needs, wants, & desires. Nonetheless, we should start agreeing to “wise up” by helping each other succeed at becoming informed, engaged, and wise global citizens and otherwise participating in a transnational democracy.


When trauma responses of “freeze, fight, or flight” continue to offer unnecessary barriers for resolving these ongoing conflicts, it means we’ve simply fallen back into those self-defeating old “habits” which ignore the importance of empathy and self-assessment. As this approach can transform the fundamental nature of our everyday lives, and possibly the very nature of reality, it offers tremendous potential should we become able to join together as a taskforce of nonviolent communicators who are:

  •     Promoting an informed, engaged, & wise global citizenry and participatory transnational Democracy

  •     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 disorder, & “techno-lust” from further disrupting our social, cultural, political, & economic ecosystems

  •     Advocating for 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: Examine power; challenge power; elevate emotion & embodiment; rethink binaries & hierarchies; embrace pluralism; consider context; and make labor visible


I understand it may seem radical to propose a cultural realignment that promotes spiritual fulfilment, connective labor (cf: Alison Pugh <https://www.allisonpugh.com/>), aesthetic pleasures, the pleasures of creativity, etc. I realize my challenges to “gender essentialism” and recognition of the “politics of emotional _expression_” (cf: Sarah Ahmed <https://www.saranahmed.com/>) may be unwelcome invitations for reframing emotional expressions as reflections of universal experiences; but I am indeed proposing a more “gestalt” oriented approach which is intuitive, contextual, and attuned to the cultural zeitgeist’s ongoing frustrations when supporting accessibility (not elitism), literacies (not deficiencies), and systemic causation (not victim blaming). 


Thank you for reading, and (as always) please be well.


-Dina




  • [TypicalGirls] HumanifestX Update January 2025: Honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.: Where have all the visionaries, dreamers, oracles, resisters, and world-changers gone?, Dina Hornreich, 01/16/2025

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