Following our presentation of the »Labyrinth of Signs,« parts I and II, we now provide a deeply reflective yet light-hearted post-mortem discussion between us to help you understand what it means to be literate. Martin’s concept of Psychotope becomes more understandable as our conversation progresses; it becomes clear how essential the Alphabet is in enabling us to be literate in our thinking, writing, and discourses, revealing that we are essentially working with an outsourced, historical unconscious in how it shapes us through its use. This is evident from the fact that the origin of Symbolic Logic remains a gaping blank space in Philosophy—even more so: it’s hidden within the conspicuousness of its absence. Something I’ve come to know as the Burckhardtian leitmotif of »The Philosopher’s Shame.«

It’s also no coincidence that »Geist der Maschine« features a chapter on how Sigmund Freud developed his concept of the unconscious, which we’ve also translated into English and will be posting soon. For now, it suffices to say that this chapter explains how and why Freud excluded the 19th century’s material culture (meaning its Logic of an Electrified/Telegraphic Society), which fulfilled his metaphysical needs, while simultaneously introducing something like a black box unconscious of the Unconscious into the World as its Psychotope.

Hopkins Stanley

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The title’s rhetorical question is a tautology. After all, it's evident that when we dream, our bedroom transforms into a space that’s magically filled with all kinds of creatures. In this sense, the engaging little experiment showcased in our short video simply translates our dreamwork into daylight. If we must insist that artificial intelligence is not the creation of some alien, hostile force, it’s because this misconception has long become endemic. When commentators go so far as to view AI as a singularity, a trans-humanist super-intelligence—or worse, a new biological species—they are operating under a profound misunderstanding. This misunderstanding mainly arises because the History of Digitization has remained a blank page thus far. This is why we will present our readers with chapters detailing the events that have shaped the style and spirit of this history over the next few weeks. Our failure to confront this history and its implications for so long may explain the discomfort many of us feel as we contemplate the consequences of this revolution in our lives. Reflecting on the progress made in recent years, driven by projects like OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, and Ollama, it's clear that our working world—indeed, the capitalist value system itself—is facing the crisis Nietzsche described as the devaluation of values. However, in our case, we are dealing with an economic rather than a moral logic of devaluation. Instead of seeking comfort in doomsday rhetoric, it makes much more sense to dare to look in the mirror. While you may encounter your own nightmares, on the other hand, you’re also confronting a dream machine—one that can produce the most wondrous results.

Eigentlich läuft die rhetorische Frage des Titels auf eine Tautologie hinaus. Denn es ist evident, dass, wenn wir träumen, unser Schlafzimmer der Ort ist, der, ganz von selbst, von allen erdenklichen Wesen animiert ist. In diesem Sinn ist auch das kleine, höchst unterhaltsame Experiment, dass sich in diesem kleinen Video niedergeschlagen hat, nichts anderes als eine in die Tageshelle übersetzte Traumarbeit. Wenn man gleichwohl darauf beharren muss, dass die Gebilde der Künstlichen Intelligenz nicht auf eine fremde, feindliche Macht zurückgehen, so weil dieses Missverständnis längst endemisch geworden ist. Wenn sich Kommentatoren dazu versteigen, in der KI eine Singularity, eine transhumanistische Superintelligenz – oder ärger noch: eine neuartige biologische Spezies zu erblicken, hat man es mit einem tiefen Missverständnis zu tun. Dieses Missverständnis rührt nicht zuletzt daher, dass die Geschichte der Digitalisierung bis heute eine Leerstelle geblieben ist – weswegen wir in den nächsten Wochen unseren Lesern die Kapitel präsentieren werden, die in dieser Geschichte stil- und geistprägend sind. Dass man sich dieser Geschichte – und ihren Implikationen - so lange nicht gestellt hat, mag das Unbehagen erklären, das die meisten Zeitgenossen heimsucht, wenn sie darüber nachdenken, welche Folgen diese Revolution für ihr eigenes Leben haben mag. Schaut man sich die Fortschritte an, die sich in den letzten Jahren (forciert durch Projekte wie OpenAI, Claude oder Gemini oder Ollama) Bahn gebrochen haben, ist evident, dass unsere Arbeitswelt, ja, das kapitalistische Wertesystem hier vor jener Bewährungskrise steht, die Nietzsche als Entwertung der Werte gefasst hat, nur dass man es in diesem Falle nicht mit einer moralischen, sondern einer durchaus ökonomischen Entwertungslogik zu tun hat. Anstatt hier Trost in einem Weltuntergangsvokabular zu suchen, ist es sehr viel sinnvoller, den Blick in den Spiegel zu wagen. Mag sein, dass man hier den eigenen Alpträumen begegnen, anderseits hat man es mit einer Traummaschine zu tun – die ganz wunderbare Ergebnisse zeitigen kann.

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Who comes up with something like that? (Carmela Soprano)

It's been a good two years since we entered the world of AI-generated images, and during this time, tools like DALL-E and Leonardo.ai have become familiar companions in image production. And during this period, we’ve been exploring the artistic capabilities of our own Company Machine, the in-house metaphor machine we developed, which can translate texts and conversations into truly surprising images from scratch. This is why we were very curious to test the much-hyped Google VEO software, using images from our Company Machine that are pretty unusual themselves. Here is a little demonstration of what you can count on in the future. Count on? No, that's the wrong word. It might be more appropriate to speak of the anticipation of a magic mirror that translates what it receives into gestures—amounting to nothing less than the complete unleashing of the Imagination’s power. The following is the result of a compilation of a fun day Hopkins, Martin, and I spent together trying to teach this ex nihilo Image World to walk.

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At a time when productivity theater, task masking, and sham production have become commonplace, it is clear that we’re facing a profound crisis of work, indeed, of everything considered valuable in our society. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that the principle of performance itself has come under criticism. This crisis has drawn our attention to Daniel Markovits, whose work explores whether the widely revered meritocracy is actually a trap. Consider that the term meritocracy was coined just over sixty years ago, suggesting that this could mark the beginning of the gradual erosion of its meaning. Because the Ivy League university system, whose tuition fees increase each year—so much so that it's questionable whether many students could ever repay them with their ›hands,‹ or more accurately, with their minds—favors only those who have access to the necessary financial resources, while excluding those born into less comfortable circumstances. As a result, it is becoming increasingly clear that we’re currently dealing with an incestuous ruling class in which our elite universities exhibit the characteristics of a closed society primarily focused on self-reproduction. Nevertheless, it seems that this pale cast of thought is affecting the students and graduates of these elite institutions. Why else would it be seen as good form to portray oneself as demonstratively overworked compared to those in lower castes? This brings us back to where we began: the question of whether all this might be a significant productivity charade against our discontent with Modernity.

Daniel Markovits (born August 4, 1969) is the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the founding director of the Yale Center for the Study of Private Law. His book The Meritocracy Trap was named one of the best books of 2019 by The Times.

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It may be that the world around us is transforming into a vast puzzle, even a Mystery Play. This situation also extends to our professional environment, prompting organizational sociologists to observe a particularly unsettling phenomenon: the silent exodus of the workforce, characterized by a state of inner resignation where employees merely do the minimum while their minds have long since disengaged from producing quality work. Now, Generation Z, a cohort that can no longer imagine a World without the Internet, has surprised organizational sociologists with a behavior that exhibits highly performative traits and has spawned influencers such as the Anti Work Girlboss and a reigning TikTok hype. What is it all about? The underlying question is relatively straightforward. It asks how one can perform a kind of productivity theater for one's employer or coworkers, in which everyone pretends to engage in highly difficult and complicated tasks. The answer is simple: you stare intently at the screen, make audible grunting noises, wander through the company corridors with your laptop open, or engage in loud conversations at the water cooler or coffee machine. In reality, however, it's all about masking your own inactivity – and using quick shortcuts to hide the fact that you're using your working hours to update your dating profile or live feed.

Cam Caldwell, with whom we discussed all these questions, has spent his entire professional career exploring the issue of effective leadership after honing his management skills in a managerial role. In this context, he has also examined the phenomenon of quiet quitting and its various manifestations.

Cam Caldwell earned his PhD in Human Resources and Organizational Behavior from Washington State University, where he was a Thomas S. Foley Graduate Fellow. Prior to earning his PhD, he accumulated over twenty years of experience as a Human Resource Director, City Manager, and Management Consultant. He has authored more than 20 books on management topics.

Cam Caldwell has published

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If identities in the Digital Utopia can be defined with the click of a mouse, it isn’t surprising when people want to make their lives as colorful as possible. After all: Who wants to be »a boring Normie?« as Eliza Mondegreen puts it in the simplest possible terms; consequently, those who wish to overcome their deep sense of emptiness proceed like computer gamers eager to endow their Avatars with superpowers. With this in mind, it’s easy to understand how the Trans debate (a marginal phenomenon only two decades ago) has seductively seized the public’s consciousness and taken on such political explosiveness. However, this raises the question of if the need for transcendence and the dissolution of selfhood boundaries can be met by administering hormone blockers to pubescent adolescents and promising them that a physical gender swap – or more precisely, a surgical modification of the body – can make all their problems disappear into thin air.

And, as someone intensively involved with gender issues for several years, this is precisely where the question Eliza Mondegreen poses begins. While initially studying the fundamental reality of Gender and Identity Dysphoria, she suspected there was a question of psychical countra-banding here that was strikingly similar to that found in cult-like phenomena. Just like the cultist, who feels newly reborn after a divine encounter, so do those adolescents embarking on a gender-changing journey. They adopt a new name, become active in their new fellowship of believers, oppose apostates while proselytizing, and proudly do everything they can to distinguish themselves from the rest of an unbelieving world.

Eliza Mondegreen is a researcher and freelance writer (for Unherd, Freethinker, among others) and photographer. She runs the widely read substack blog gender:hacked. She is currently working on a book about gender medicine, which will be published by Polity.

Link to gender:hacked

Eliza Mondegreen’s articles in Unherd

Freethinker

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It's common knowledge that capitalism has been in a deep crisis of values since the financial crisis of 2007/2008, while the question of where it comes from and how it affects our existing institutions is much more complicated. Talking to Philip Pilkington about this is worthwhile if only because it combines the perspective of a sober observer looking back on a career in investment banking with the acumen of a macroeconomist who can counter his profession's intellectual aberrations based on Philosophy. And because he's also familiar with contemporary thinkers, our conversation dealing with questions of energy, the political class's level of education, and the looming deindustrialization wander easily through entirely different areas. And while you are considering economic »bads,« it may happen that Jacques Lacan pops up, as does Kant’s definition of marriage (›...as a juridical consequence of the obligation that is formed by two persons entering into a sexual union solely on the basis of a reciprocal possession of each other’s private parts‹) and his tacit affinity to the Marquis de Sade. And so, despite the subject's darkness, the conversation is one of great hilarity—and the question can be resolved why the consultation with an OnlyFans model contributes to the GDP growth while, at the same time, conjugal coitus remains a quantité negligeable.

Philip Pilkington is a Senior Research Fellow at the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs where he focuses on macroeconomic and geoeconomic issues. Before joining the institute Philip worked in investment management as a macroeconomic strategist. Philip is the founder of the Multipolarity podcast. He regularly writes for the New York Post as well as other outlets, like The Telegraph, The Spectator, UnHerd, American Affairs, and First Things. He can be found on his Substack Philip Pilkington.

Philip Pilkinton has published

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