Ex nihilo - Podcast English

Es gibt eine eigentümliche Ironie in der Geschichte der Umweltbewegung: Ausgerechnet jene, die einst mit spektakulären Aktionen die Industrie zum Zittern brachten, haben sich in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten zu braven Verwaltern des Status quo gewandelt. Thilo Bode, der als Greenpeace-Chef FCKW-freie Kühlschränke gegen den erbitterten Widerstand der Konzerne durchsetzte, zieht eine schonungslose Bilanz – und spart dabei nicht an Selbstkritik. Wenn einer, der sein halbes Leben dem Aktivismus gewidmet hat, zum Widerstand aufruft, stellt sich unweigerlich die Frage: Widerstand gegen wen eigentlich – gegen die Industrie, gegen die Politik, oder gegen die eigene Bewegung?Thilo Bode, der mit seinem vielbeachteten Buch Resist! Aufruf zum Widerstand soetwas wie eine politische Autobiographie vorgelegt hat, schaut darin auf ein Leben zurück, das ihm, von exponierter Stelle aus, einen tiefen Blick in die Verhältnisse erlaubt hat. Als junger Mann in der Entwicklungshilfe tätig, wurde er nach einem Intermezzo bei einem Mittelständler der Stahlindustrie zum Geschäftsführer von Greenpeace Deutschland, von 1995 bis 2001 zum CEO von Greenpeace International. 2001 gründete er die Verbraucherschutzorganisation Foodwatch und war bis zu seinem Ausscheiden Ende 2021 deren Internationaler Direktor.Thilo Bode hat veröffentlichtThemenverwandt Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

There’s a certain irony in how the American Dream—that grand promise of merit-based advancement—has begun devouring its own children. In 2011, Jacob Savage arrived in Hollywood with modest expectations: a Princeton degree, solid writing skills, and a reasonable hope of landing a mid-level television writer’s job. But what he found was a system that had quietly rewritten its own rules. When he submitted a pilot episode that a TV studio executive liked enough to invite him into the writers’ room, that same executive ultimately decided that having another white person on the team wasn’t appropriate. »I was told very specifically on several occasions that the reason was because of things I couldn’t change about myself.« Paradoxically, it was primarily older white men who enforced such corporate policies. What led Savage to view this fate not as a personal failure but as the lot of an entire lost generation was a weekend trip with old friends who, like him, had completed Ivy League educations but, with one exception, had all found themselves in precarious jobs. This made him write essay, The Lost Generation in Compact magazine, which was widerly read and brought him to our attention. In it, Savage goes a step further, backing up the logic of the closed door with hard statistical data that reveals how DEI policy ultimately amounts to systematic discrimination against young white men:»But nothing explains the New Media story quite like Vox, whose explainers dominated 2010s discourse and whose internal demographics capture the decade’s professional shift. Back in 2013, when Ezra Klein came under fire for his startup’s lack of diversity, Vox Media was 82 percent male and 88 percent white. By 2022, the company was just 37 percent male and 59 percent white, and by 2025, leadership was 73 percent female.«Jacob Savage, who laconically describes himself as a suburban dad from Los Angeles, spends his time selling concert tickets when he’s not taking care of his two sons. His article on The Lost Generation has earned him significant media coverage across various podcasts and newspapers. He also runs the Substack Jacob Savage.Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Given that we’re said to live in an Information Society, the idea that an entire Nation could succumb to a form of mass hysteria similar to medieval delusions of sacrilege and infanticide would normally be unthinkable. The Canadian scandal involving the Kamloops child deaths, which kept all of Canada on edge for quite some time, exemplifies such an incident—a moral panic that led the Canadian Prime Minister, in a display of national shame, to lower the country’s flags to half-mast. And because the public held the Catholic Church responsible for the alleged murders, Pope Francis was also asked to apologize—a request he humbly fulfilled during a six-day penitential pilgrimage to Canada. The fact that the affair eventually faded away did not, of course, lead to a full reckoning—and this is precisely why we should turn our attention to this question of how such a moral panic could have emerged in the Information age. It was Tom Flanagan who caught our attention because, as a political scientist, he has published two books on the subject (along with others); additionally, he is not only a recognized expert on Canadian colonial history but also has a deep familiarity with how politics operate, thanks to his long tenure as an advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.Tom Flanagan taught political science at the University of Calgary until his retirement. His academic interests centered on Canadian Indigenous peoples, especially the Métis, who, led by the millenarian Louis Riel, initiated a rebellion against the Canadian government in 1885. Alongside his academic pursuits, Flanagan also served as a political consultant and columnist for major Canadian newspapers.Tom Flanagan has recently puplishedRelated Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

What do you do when you’re a public relations spokeswoman sitting in a BBC studio, being grilled by a relentless host who is insisting that you defend Extinction Rebellion founder Roger Hallam’s absurd claim that climate change will claim billions of lives in just a few years? In actuality, her answer would have been simple — she needed only to follow the group’s creed, drilled into her before the broadcast: just break down in tears. »People need to see crying mothers...« That Zion Lights didn’t bow to the activists’ peer pressure in this situation is a sign of great intellectual integrity — which may have something to do with her family’s history: her parents were Indian rice farmers before moving to the UK, a background that taught her energy poverty is even worse than CO2 emissions — and how technology has done more to liberate women than any hand-wringing or crocodile tears ever could. And this was precisely what prompted us to start a conversation with her, tracing the path of this woman who went from being the press spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion—perhaps the most radical of all Environmental Movements—to becoming an advocate for Nuclear Power: a coming-of-age story that highlights the internal doctrine of this cult — as Zion Lights herself now calls it — while reminding us that demonizing technology is a luxury belief that few people can afford — and one that, as off-grid societies have shown, leads to the worst cognitive dissonance imaginable.Zion Lights is a writer who was an early environmental activist and press spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion from 2018 to 2020. After parting ways with the group, she shifted toward a pragmatic, technology-oriented environmental movement. She recently published her journey from »grassroots activism to becoming one of the UK’s leading advocates for nuclear energy,« titled Energy is Life: Why Environmentalism Went Nuclear. She has contributed to the Huffington Post for several years and has recently begun writing for Quillette and Human Progress.Zion Lights has publishedRelated Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

What happens when, in a society that considers itself free of all intellectual taboos, you pursue a question perceived as highly embarrassing, even awkward? This is exactly what happened when Fiona Girkin (after a disturbing personal experience) decided to write a doctoral thesis exploring how female narcissism manifests in the workplace. While male narcissism is well known as the Napoleon complex and even as a form of delusions of grandeur, the female variant is a much more psychologically complex issue, with many candidates portraying themselves as pitiful victims—a strategy that makes deciphering their behavior extremely difficult and even a social taboo. After all, who would want to accuse such a pitiful person of being the real culprit, namely the workplace bully? That Fiona Girkin was prepared to juxtapose the male hero’s journey with a »victim’s journey« was an institutional scandal for the Tasmanian police force, for which she worked as a trainer and consultant. Even though all the stories the police officers told her while on duty supported her version, merely mentioning the possibility of dark personalities in women touched on a long-held social taboo.Dr. Fiona Girkin is an Australian counselor who studies and teaches about female narcissism. In addition to her counseling practice and consultation services, she also runs a YouTube channel.Related Texts: Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

If the term Caste has recently entered the Human Sciences, this may be taken as evidence that European-style universalism has lost its appeal, and even as evidence that the idea has spread that here we’re dealing with an injustice that’s only been cloaked in a human, universalistic guise. When Indian theorist B.R. Ambedkar, ranked as the greatest Indian after Mahatma Gandhi in surveys, described the Indian caste system as »unknown to humanity in other parts of the world,« this finding becomes even more puzzling. This observation has given us the opportunity to speak with Suraj Yengde, who has not only addressed the caste system in two books but also experienced it firsthand as a member of the untouchable Dalit community—despite its prohibition under Indian law. Making this conversation even more interesting is his critical stance towards today’s culture of outrage, identifying Victim Olympics as a discipline that downplays or denies actual discrimination for its own benefit.Suraj Yengde received the 2019 Canadian Dr. Ambedkar Social Justice Award and is a fellow at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Center, where he teaches and serves as a research associate in its Department of African and African American Studies. He was named one of the 25 Most Influential Young Indians of 2021 by GQ India.Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,I want to share a few thoughts with you on the peculiar relationship our society has with Artificial Intelligence. It confronts us with the uncanniness of how it’s taken on an almost religious-like quality—why else would the phrase curse and blessing instinctively come to mind when talking about it? To make sure the ideas I present to you are not completely out of touch, I would like to share a few video clips we’ve published on our ex nihilo Substack, created in collaboration with Dall-E and Google VEO using our in-house, proprietary Company Machine. This software is quite unusual insofar as it transliterates classic essays and transcribed conversations into visual metaphors, and because our brain—or more precisely, our language—is a veritable magic box, these produce the most daringly audacious image compositions—things that even the most fantastical mind could hardly conceive. In a curious way, a remarkable reversal can be observed here. When we talk about the power of imagination, when some extremely daring theorists of the 1990s conjured up as the visual turn, it must be said that advanced image production had long since left the visual sphere—and gone to our heads. This is noteworthy as we are witnessing the return of a medieval concept of Signs. At that time, it was believed that the closer a Sign was to God, the more valuable it was – or, as we would say today, the more abstract it was. Consequently, thought was considered the most valuable Sign, followed by the spoken word, then the image, and finally the worldly traces one leaves behind. This changed with the Renaissance, which actually brought about the visual turn that cultural theorists of the 1990s diagnosed with considerable delay – and Leonardo da Vinci reflected on the fact that music is the little sister of painting, simply because it fades away, while painting releases works of eternal value into the World. So today, while claiming we live in a visual culture may still appear to be true for large parts of the population, the intellectual and aesthetic drive that feeds this world has shifted its metamorphic form. If Hollywood’s dream factory went on strike recently, it’s because the advances in our computer culture are truly revolutionizing filmmaking. You only have to think back to one of those epic historical films of the 1950s and 1960s, where entire small towns in southern Italy were recruited as extras – and you see the difference. Today, CGI (computer-generated imagery) provides directors with a whole armada of hyper-realistic, malleable actors. And this rationality shock affects not only the extras, but also the set and stage designers, as well as the musicians, whom Bernard Hermann once invited to the recording studio in the form of an entire symphony orchestra. All this is now accomplished by someone like Hans Zimmer or by anonymous CGI artists who conjure up the most phantastical things on screen, which means that what used to be called a set is now little more than just a studio warehouse where a few actors perform in front of a green screen. Now, this threat of rationalization posed by Artificial Intelligence affects not only the immediate production process but also post-production. Today, when voices can be cloned at will, and even translation and dubbing can be done by AI with perfect lip synchronization, the radical revolution of the dream factory is a fait accompli.Now, I could launch into a dystopian tirade about the changes to our audiovisual tools—and I would be justified in doing so, insofar as the coming surges of rationality are likely to affect the entire industry. But that is not what I want to do right now. Why not? Well, simply because I am convinced that a) this is a matter of inevitability, and b) well, I personally find the aesthetic and intellectual possibilities opening up with this world both sublimely wondrous. The dilemma we face is more intellectual, if not philosophical, in nature—a humiliation that surpasses anything Sigmund Freud recorded in his Civilization and Its Discontents. As you may recall, he identified three intellectual humiliations: 1) The Copernican Revolution, which meant we could no longer feel like we were the center of the Universe; 2) Darwinian Evolutionary Biology, which called our Anthropological Supremacy into question; 3) The Subconscious self, which made it clear to individuals that they cannot even feel at home in their own thoughts, that they are no longer masters in their own house. Now, let’s keep in mind that when these upheavals happened, they only really affected a small number of people (the so-called elite, if you will), but with the Digital Revolution, we are now facing a new and much more serious situation: it impacts everyone, absolutely everyone in this World.The dilemma we face today can best be compared to what Günter Anders once aptly called Promethean Shame—which can be understood as a form of schizophrenia: I am, but I am not. If Blaise Pascal once said that all human unhappiness stems from the fact that humans cannot remain quietly in their rooms, then it’s evident that networked humans are, by definition, social creatures—or, as I would put it: dividuals who thrive on their divisibility and their urge to communicate. But because that sounds so harmless, I will tell you, who are largely familiar with the practices of our public broadcasters, a little personal story. It has to do with how, as a young man, I couldn’t quite decide whether I wanted to be the next Thomas Mann or a composer. In any case, I realized quite early on that the heroic history of the modern author belonged to the tempi passati. That was in the mid-1980s, and since I had been working with a musician from Tangerine Dream for many years and was deeply involved in the world of recording studios and electronic sound processing, I eventually realized that some unquestioned fundamental assumptions had exceeded their shelf life. When you have a sequencer in front of you that allows you to chase your fingers across the piano, or more precisely, the keyboard, at unprecedented speeds, you wonder why you ever bothered with scales and Czerny’s School of Velocity. Even deeper than this doubt about virtuosity was the discovery that, with sampling, the whole world had actually become a musical instrument, that even the sound of a toilet flushing could be a great aesthetic experience, not to mention that a sampled sound is actually a multitude, a multiplicity. In short: What caught my attention was nothing other than the threat of proliferation posed by digitalisation.Fast forward three or four years, when I conducted an intensive seminar at the University of the Arts together with an editor from the RBB [Berlins public Radio], where I was working, and Johannes Schmölling, the musician from Tangerine Dream, during which we prepared actors and sound engineers to work together—and because it was going to be broadcast, this wasn’t just any ordinary practice session, but the real deal. And then my colleague from the station, Wolfgang Bauernfeind, had the idea of showing the sound engineers how the professionals at the station work. But since I had worked as a director in large companies and knew that the sound engineers weren’t even willing to touch the multi-track machine in the studio – whereas the studio at the University of Fine Arts was already fully digitalised – I told him that wasn’t such a good idea. But he insisted – and so, at some point (it was around 1992), half a dozen sound engineering students entered the hallowed halls of the station, the T5. But after just fifteen minutes, barely had the professionals begun their work, the first student came up to me and whispered in my ear: »Tell me, Martin, are they serious? « Which was, of course, a very valid question. At any rate, a few years later, I ran into one of the sound engineers in the station hallway, who asked me if I thought someone like him would be employable in the private sector.Where does this resistance to engaging with this world come from? The answer is simple: people resist because the experiences of engaging with these new tools seriously shake and disrupt their self-image. And most people prefer the phantasms of the past to such an uncertain, unsettling future. Consequently, they talk about true authenticity, about digital detox, or, when their attempts to assert digital sovereignty fail, they proclaim the end of humanity: the Infocalypse. Why is all this so easy? Because Artificial Intelligence, like an alien, imposes itself as a foreign body – for the simple reason that we’ve never really embraced the World of Digitalisation, or at best only as consumers who press buttons. Let me tell you a little story about this. While traveling across the US in the late 1980s to interview the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence, I had a lovely encounter with Joseph Weizenbaum, the great-father of all chatbots, who told me – still shaking his head – about his secretary. And because she was assigned only to him, she naturally knew that Weizenbaum was working on a chatbot named Eliza – a tribute to Eliza Doolittle from George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion – and she also knew that this chatbot was nothing more than a program that Weizenbaum had written using the computer language LISP. In fact, the program wasn’t particularly sophisticated, essentially little more than a paraphrasing machine. As an exemplar, if you typed in ›I feel bad,‹ the chatbot would respond, ›Oh, you feel bad?‹. What astonished Weizenbaum was that whenever he saw his secretary, she was constantly clattering away on the keyboard—so intently she didn’t even notice him coming. And because he was curious about what she was actually typing – she didn’t have that much to do for him – he stepped behind her one day and glanced at the screen. And what did he see? That his secretary was using his chatbot as a substitute psychotherapist: »I feel bad« – »Oh, you feel bad?«. This discovery intrigued him immensely—he realized that, despite his secretary’s knowledge that she was communicating with a simple program and not a human being, Freud’s mechanism of transference was at work here.While we might smile at this story, the strange part is that many of our peers indulge in similar behaviors—and that this form of transference (thinking of Ray Kurzweil, who dreams of a superintelligence) doesn’t even spare the experts in the field. This observation deepened my exploration of cultural history—an endeavor that ultimately resulted in the writing of several books. Throughout my research, I’ve kept asking myself the same question: How did this come about? What exactly is a Machine anyway? What makes people imbue machines with metaphysical, often religious significance to machines? But before we venture into the question of what we really mean by Artificial Intelligence, let me offer a very simple, albeit unusual interpretation of the computer world. What makes it so unique? As a young author, what was it that fascinated me about the World of Sounds? You could say it was this: Whatever can be electrified can also be digitalised. This means: What we call Writing is no longer just an abstract idea floating above the waters like the mind of God (or the Letters of the Alphabet), but can take on any imaginable form. This could be the geo-location data of a whale, the sound of a toilet flushing, or the swipe-away gesture of a hand that city dwellers use to reject potential partners they definitely don’t want to get in bed with. Applying this logic to the Work World, which is the only one we value, would mean that any Work that has been digitalised ends up in a Museum of Labour. Here’s another memory from the early 90s: a wonderful pianist came into the recording studio, played a piece by Schumann, and then left. But no sooner had he left the studio than the grand piano, which had stored his finger movements via MIDI sensors, played the piece again—and if we had wanted to, we could have sat down with Cubase or Pro Tools and altered his performance at will. And this raises the question: What does it mean that every piece of work that has been digitalized disappears into the Museum of Work? The answer is simple and familiar to us all. Because electricity transcends distance, the program—in other words, the mummified work process—can be transplanted and accessed from anywhere in the world: Anything, Anywhere, Anytime. Haunting us here is the dilemma of the Speed of Light. And this has nothing to do with Artificial Intelligence. Let’s take this a step further by examining the basic formula of our digitalised Continent of the Mind more closely. It can be found in an 1854 work published by English mathematician George Boole. Although it underpins Boolean algebra and logic, and every programmer uses Booleans routinely, this formula remains a terra incognita. Try it out the next time you get the chance, and you – or, depending on who you’re programming with – will experience the surprise of a blue miracle. And you don’t even need to venture into higher spheres to do this. George Boole, who pursued the project of »removing the representative from mathematics,« asked himself a very simple question: What do zero and one, the two royal numbers of mathematics, have in common—and what sets them apart from all other numbers? If I multiply one by itself, the result is always one, and if I multiply zero by itself, the result is always zero. This distinguishes zero and one from all other numbers. Formalising this gives us the basic formula for everything digital: x=xn. If you retranslate this back into natural language, you might begin feeling vertiginous: because it means the end of the original, the end of identity, the end of authenticity. Taking this seriously and applying this formula to yourself, you would have to say: I am someone else, I am superfluous, I am a population. The extent to which this logic has already taken hold of our thinking becomes clear when we consider that every digitized object (be it a .pdf document, an audio, or a video file) is structurally superfluous. This, it seems to me, is a profound upheaval, the consequences of which we cannot yet fully foresee.Let’s take this a step further and consider Artificial Intelligence, which is really more like pseudo-intelligence. Because what we see staring back at us in the mirror is, literally, a »mediocre« version of ourselves. Let me briefly digress to The Man of the Crowd, a short story published by Edgar Allan Poe in 1840. What prompted Poe to write this short story, whose motto intriguingly references the misery of human beings (Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul – the great misery of not being able to be alone), was his reading of a text published a few years earlier by computer pioneer Charles Babbage: The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. – This is the same man who founded the Royal Statistical Society and whose Analytical Engine, the precursor to the computer, rendered 10,000 French calculation slaves jobless. Indeed, Edgar Allan Poe’s hero, who watches passers-by from a London café, acts like a statistician—classifying workers, small clerks, cleaning ladies, maids, and so on. But when an older man moving in a strange, unpredictable way catches his eye, his curiosity is aroused. He gets up and begins following him. In this chase, which reads like a crime thriller, the narrator realizes that this man has lost his inner center of gravity—he is almost magically drawn to the events happening around him. This is the secret that is finally revealed after a long pursuit: this man has lost his center—and because he is off-center, he is completely absorbed in society and the world around him. This insight comes as a shock to Edgar Allan Poe’s narrator:»»This old man,« I said at length, »is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds. The worst heart of the world is a grosser book than the ›Hortulus Animæ,‹ and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that ›er lässt sich nicht lesen.‹« [he cannot be read]When we enter text into ChatGPT or Claude.ai – or generate an image using Dalle-E, Flux, or Stable Diffusion – what comes out is our stochastic self, The Man on the Crowd. And while this may appear intelligent – and even more intelligent than what entire cohorts of undergraduate bachelor’s students put on paper – it has nothing to do with true intelligence. You get the answers, or more precisely, the patterns that machine learning, with the speed of light of processors, has been able to find and collate from its database. In other words: what we see staring back at us from the mirror is nothing other than this Man in the Crowd. Once you realize that even talking about Artificial Intelligence is a kind of self-deception, the more interesting question arises: How do we deal with this so-called intelligence? And how do we escape the dilemmas that are epitomized in Edgar Allan Poe’s depiction of The Man of the Crowd: the archetype and the genius of deep crime? The answer is both simple and difficult. Simple because this demon loses its power the moment you become aware of it. Difficult because, as a society, we have long since entrenched ourselves in particular forms of social schizophrenia. This is evident in how people don‛t find it strange to want to limit Internet free speech by invoking digital sovereignty inspired by Carl Schmitt‛s thinking. Calling this intellectual confusion cognitive dissonance is almost an understatement, as it seems to me far more dangerous than anything we fear accomplishing with Artificial Intelligence. Yes, creating avatars of ourselves that act as consumer influencers is possible—but this idea has been entrenched in people’s minds long before it became a technological reality. When the call center agent recites his lines from a script, then I’m no longer talking with a human being, but with an android. It’s easy to forget where certain concepts originated. Take the cyborg, for example. In the 1960s, this term was used to describe humans who could only be kept alive in hostile environments—like the vacuum of space—by cybernetic means, turning them into cybernetically enhanced organisms. Viewed in this light, all of us who are glued to our smartphones and computer screens have long since mutated into cyborgs. Is there anything wrong with that? I would say no—or if there is anything to be said, it is that being a cyborg conflicts with claims of Identity, Authenticity, and Digital Sovereignty.In conclusion, I can certainly see that digital disruption, along with the advent of machine learning and AI, represents a major paradigm shift – and the political consequences could be as profound as the arrival of the Wheelwork Automaton, which plunged the Middle Ages into a veritable crisis of faith. You see it everywhere: a kind of general unease in culture that, in order to assert itself, takes refuge in an eroticism of resentment, a Great Again that seems like postmodern Quixotism: a fight not against windmills, but against processors that, just like Don Quixote, appear to us as monsters of the past. No philosopher captured this dilemma better than Nietzsche when he wrote:»Those who fight monsters should be careful not to become monsters themselves. And if you stare long enough into an abyss, the abyss will stare back at you.«If I ignore all these political questions and focus instead on what could be achieved with AI today, especially in the intellectual and aesthetic realms it opens up, the scenery changes radically—just as its pitch suddenly shifts too. Maybe we’re venturing into territory that’s unfamiliar, if not downright frightening to us in its uncanniness. For my part, I wouldn’t settle for anything less than what the Renaissance did for our culture because the Realm of Signs (see above) is once again undergoing a radical revolution. Anyone who works with audiovisual objects these days could probably tell you a thing or two about this. Immersing yourself in a program like DaVinci Resolve—what an apt name!—suddenly raises questions about the effect of a sound file on color or lighting design; or you find yourself preoccupied with the aesthetics of light leaks, glitches, particle emissions, and so on. All these questions may seem as obscure to you as how my reflections on the Philosophy of the Machine led me to Alien Logic—and I don’t blame you for that, quite frankly. When my son, as a 9-year-old Waldorf school pupil, was asked what his father does, he replied charmingly: »My father writes books that nobody understands!« The point is simply this: all the convictions I have arrived at over time are not inventions of my own, but have to do with the Social Drive that affects us all.With this in mind, I thank you for your attention.Translation: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

As the current wave of disruption, manifesting itself through various conversations about artificial intelligence swirling around us (which, from our perspective, would be better described as a »Reflective Intelligence«), builds into a cultural crescendo reminiscent of Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa. Indeed, when, as a kind of embarrassment of thought, even the leading figures in its epistemological field conjure up a dys-utopian race toward civilizational collapse (as with Geoffrey Hinton), it’s easy to overlook how the Computer’s intellectual roots in our Machine Culture date back to the 18th century. And because of this, reflecting back on Digitalisation's origins in the crackling rift of Writing’s electrification becomes even more essential. We’re pleased to share this brief conversation between us about reading between the lines regarding Electrification, Massification, and the shifting definition of Writing in the early chapters of Martin’s Short History of Digitalisation.Hopkins Stanley and Martin BurckhardtRelated Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

It is difficult to ignore how Capitalism has slipped into a deep values crisis – and indeed, you might be forgiven for thinking we are in a Potemkin village, a zombie economy sustained only by memories of a glorious past or by cash injections from central banks. For this reason alone, our conversation with Peter Fleming was extremely valuable, as he, with his keen sense of fundamental upheavals, recognized the signs of the times early on. Observations like how work has become little more than a mythological narrative for reassuring ourselves of our sense of importance and self-worth, or that universities have turned into dark zones in our era of Human Capital—sometimes jokingly called Whackademia—and that in this morally decayed environment, it is almost impossible to cling to the specter of the homo economicus as the ideal of utility-maximizing rationality. In this sense, it’s only logical that Peter Fleming's dirge ends with a reflection on Capitalism and Nothingness. And while this may be a somewhat somber topic, we found our conversation with him to be very enjoyable and entertaining.Peter Fleming is a Professor of Organization Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. During his time in London, where he taught Business and Society at City University, he chaired the London Living Wage Symposium at the House of Commons. His work has been recognized with several awards.Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

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 StanleyRelated Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

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.Related Content / Themenverwandt Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

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.Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

The following text is part one of the second chapter from Martin’s second book, titled »Vom Geist der Maschine. Eine Geschichte kultureller Umbrüche«, published in 1999.Martin BurckhardtIn the Labyrinth of the Signs IThe Gods are from the Field of the Real(Jacques Lacan)Dazzled by the BlindingWhat is it like to look into the sun? To feel small sparks burning into your eyes, expanding into rings, into a glaring brightness mixed with blackness, shimmering red, the feeling of growing tension. Tears gather under the retina, like a burn blister that will eventually burst under the mere pressure of a blink. And with the watery vitreous humor, my eyesight will also drain away. I imagine this loss: almost a relief, no more burning, just this liquid running down my cheek and leaving a taste in the corner of my mouth. But I can still see: pulsating, bullet-like flashing points. Are they specks of sunlight or already the first holes in my eye? It doesn’t matter, who knows? Basically, I'm no longer sure whether the radiation comes from outside or rather from the depths of my skull, a volcanic magma that wells up and, at the moment of discharge, causes my gaze to explode and fly off in all directions—as if, at the moment of dazzlement, I could see with a thousand eyes, like an insect. A piercingly bright pain, but this pain is accompanied by an equally clear thought, the amazement that here, where the light shines brightest, the path leads into the darkness of Myth.Black. Nothing else. A calm black that stretches into infinity. And yet, this blink of an Eye [Augenblick] isn't accompanied by total darkness. Maybe it's because of the little noises making it feel like this blackness keeps changing color. Incidentally, it isn’t entirely dark to me either, but as if a residual radiation emanates from things, an almost imperceptible inner light. It takes time to get used to it. No, that's wrong, because you don't need time anymore. With your eyesight, time also runs out into timelessness. Everything returns to itself, like a kind of rhythm, so that it doesn't matter which tense I choose: I was, I am, or I will be. At the beginning, one sentence kept incessantly wandering through my mind: Fame is the Sun of the Dead—now I know it refers to that moment when there can only be light and shadow. In fact, this last and ultimate flashing blink describes the point at which the objective becomes one with the apocalyptic. There is the Bomb's blinding flash, casting a final, merciless glance at the World and simultaneously burning the body that its radiation has reduced to nothing into the ground as a shadow. Nunc stans.No, here the shadows aren't burned in, much less anything else that can be grasped. As my eyes (or what remains of them) adjust to the diffuse residual light, I notice that a black sun is shining here too—or are there several? But perhaps the word ›Sun‹ is wrong, because these luminous bodies are more like Cyclops' eyes. Like spotlights, they roam through the darkness, creating multiple exposures, image overlays, and blurred streaks of movement.Perhaps it’s this very presence-of-mind gaze that leads us to the Myth’s essence: that the individual body becomes invisible as an individual, composed of those silhouettes that the Cyclops' headlights, as its »pursuers«, cast onto the walls. Perhaps the Myth can be thought of as a layer of film, as a never-ending gaze in which large, intergenerational periods of time are inscribed. It would be misleading for the Myth to be interpreted as a face, or even as an individual being. If a name appears, it stands as a choir leader who embodies a long genealogy, a face assembled from many faces like that of a wanted poster. As in the receptive surface of the film, it’s only what’s inscribed in the Myth that corresponds to the substrate's receptivity (the exposure time): la longue durée. Just as the first photographs took hours until reality had burned itself into the image, and how a pedestrian could walk through the scene without leaving the faintest trace of his presence, so too can Myth be understood as a surface that remains unconcerned with passers-by and ephemera, anecdotes and episodes. When, on the other hand, something becomes visible in the picture, IT is because it is a condensation and crystallization of time. This explains how the one-and-the-same figure can appear multiple times, in different roles and stages of life. Like a long-exposure photograph, the Myth absorbs time, juxtaposes the sequential, and thus equates the different levels of history. The images may be dark, blurred, and shaky, but what is conveyed is pure architecture. There’s nothing random or arbitrary about them; rather, everything shares the same torpidity and heaviness inherent in our buildings and institutions. As an edifice of thought [Bauwerk des Denkens], Myth has always been Mytho-Logos.It may seem as if the idea of a single Myth is erroneous, since so many myths vary depending on the place, region, and time. However, this diversity isn’t surprising; rather, it is a necessary characteristic of a culture that, equipped only with rudimentary writing techniques, listens to its Sagas. In the absence of a fixed, canonizing writing, history constantly reinvents itself. More precisely: it always finds itself anew, because it is not about the individual addition, but the general, the supra-personal. In this sense, myths, regardless of their apparent fluidity, are based on that enduring reality as something much denser than paper, much denser than the style and inventiveness of the individual author. Insofar, myths should be approached with the same respect afforded to all those things and institutions proving their own viability by themselves – which, even if we do not know their individual authors, allows us to speak of a self-evidence: an immediate insightfulness. Nevertheless, a methodological difficulty arises here. While the myths may have once possessed exactly this form of self-evidence, this no longer applies to us; we no longer understand them straight away. Instead, the myths lead us into areas entirely alien to our self-understanding and interpretation of the World. For myths are stories without history; they refer to events that are not dated and to people who are not tangible as persons. Entering the world of myths can create a feeling of sinking into a maelstrom, as you can constantly remind yourself of the invalidity of your mind’s inner coordinate system. Myth isn't realized in definition, but in its variation; it doesn't adhere to the logic of space, time, and causality, and as it has no Author, it represents a Text in our sense of the word.If we attempt to apply any of these concepts to myths, they fall apart – you are seized by the disconcerting feeling of being and remaining an illiterate [Analphabet] of the Myth. The impression of illegibility isn’t accidental. It points to its connection with Writing, or better, to the relationship of exclusion prevailing between Myth and Writing. The World of Myth precedes alphabetic writing. Only with alphabetic writing does the inexorable Logic of Signs emerge on the page, which definitively codifies the World and, in doing so, inextricably links cause and effect, text and author. Writing puts an end to Myth. The identifiable Author replaces the unrecognizable inventor of the myth; a story replaces the collectively thrown-together web of symbols and images with all its details of Who? Where? When? The Word replaces the evoked, conjured-up word made definite. If Writing eliminates Myth from the World, this raises the suspicion about Writing itself, as the crystallization form par excellence (the monument of all things, as Aeschylus says,) has a mythical dimension, that Logos has absorbed the function of Myth and thus rendered it superfluous. But what does Myth tell the person who one day opens his eyes and no longer believes himself to be subject to the Laws of Myth, but to the Light of Pure Reason?The Moment of ForgettingGuided by the idea of gradual progress, people have sought to interpret the Greek alphabet as a stage in the history of Writing, as the perfection of a movement of thought arising with the first characters: a movement toward abstraction. One argument supporting this interpretation is that, as Herodotus reports, the Greeks themselves didn't regard their alphabetical letters as an indigenous invention, but as something borrowed. They were called phoinikoi, meaning: the Phoenicians – thus referring to their Semitic origin. Such an evolutionary interpretation, however, overlooks the fundamental flaw inherent in the Greek alphabet. It was only on Greek soil that letters transformed into what we now call the Alphabet: that Symbolic Machine in which the Signs circulate, as if for themselves and without reference to any entity, as they run in the circles of the Sign. No letter has any attachment to reality anymore. Where the Signs are stretched onto the Typewheel [Typenrad] of Signs, the phantasm of a pure, otherworldly, metaphysical Sign emerges in its circularity. When it's said that the specific Greek contribution to the Alphabet lay in the perfection of the vowel system, it completely overlooks how radical this fundamental transformation was. Because this process goes hand in hand with the body’s expulsion, the Semitic alphabet, serving as the Greek alphabet’s model, has one or more meanings for each letter. Aleph is the Semitic Sign for the Bull. However, as you might think in the Saussurean tradition, this meaning is not arbitrarily attributed to the Sign. Instead, it is precisely the opposite: like in pictographic writing, the Sign serves as the placeholder for a body.You can see the Bull’s two horns when you turn the Sign upside down. The Bull is the figure of the divine, and if the gods love to appear in its form, it’s because it symbolizes maximum procreative power. Aleph-Alpha-Phallus – the letters themselves allow us to read the letter Alpha as a phallic symbol. And yet, even in Sign’s ideographic form, enabling us to recognize the Bull's head, there is a fundamental ambivalence. Looking at the letter, you can see the yoke in the crossbar, the instrumental device that transformed the Bull into an ox, putting it into human service. The Sign Alpha thus reveals not only the presence of a god, but also the usurper’s gesture of seeking to wrest the secret of all fertility from the gods.The Greek Alpha marks the ending of that first revolution of the Sign. It is a revolution in the literal sense of the word, a rotation, because the Sign of the Bull, once turned, becomes the Sign of the Plow, the instrument that transformed nomadic peoples into farmers settling in one place. This progressive abstraction also includes the Bull Sign's refinement as it evolves from totem animal to instrument of agriculture until it becomes a symbol of love (which then soon turns out to be what we call the symbolic yoke of marriage). In fact, this line, which leads from pictograms to ideograms, from the body to the idea, describes the path characteristic of all pre-alphabetic sign systems. In this process, abbreviation prevails, with pictograms becoming increasingly stylized and simplified. However, (and this must be emphasized) the starting point is always the object being designated. Even there, where the first syllabaries emerge, the syllabic signs, which are recoded pictograms, still refer to this original image [Ur-Bild] that gave them their name; the direction of movement is thus conceived as leading from the Body to the Sign (in the sense of representationalism). This line isn't only reversed in the Greek world to the extent that the Sign is considered primordial and the body as a shadow being; rather, it can also be said that a barrier is erected between the Sign and the Body, completely obscuring the connection between the Body and the Sign. If I can no longer see what a child can see, namely that the inverted A represents a bull's head, then this serves as proof of this barrier. However, it is precisely at this barrier where the phantasm of the pure and arbitrary Sign emerges: a Sign that is not an image, but autological, tautological: itself.EuropaThe Alphabet arrived in Europe in two ways. This statement is both true and false. It's false because it assumes that Europe is a geographical place, as if this continent had already carried this name since ancient times. Yet, having said that, Europe is a construct emerging from the migration of symbols, and is less a geographical entity than a symbolic one. It is not the tectonics of the land masses, but the texture of writing that emerges in this name. In this sense, the connection between the Alphabet and Europe isn’t accidental but a reciprocal event. But where does the migration of symbols, which culminates in the Alphabet, begin? As already mentioned, the Greeks refer to the alphabetical symbols as phoinikoi, highlighting their Phoenician origin or, more generally, the Semitic world of Asia Minor as the birthplace of the Alphabet. Europe itself is named after a Phoenician king's daughter who was abducted by a bull and carried across the sea—westward, where the Bull revealed his true form as the god Zeus. If the name Europa has an etymology, it traces back to the Semitic ereb, erebos, which means dark, suggesting that the movement into the West and darkness is already prefigured here. One might assume that the god who appears on the Phoenician seashores as a beautiful white bull abducts Europa to the land that has since borne her name. However, Zeus carries her to Crete, a land that wasn’t considered part of Europe in ancient times. Europa—and this is the story’s paradox—does not arrive in Europe.It's precisely this circumstance that is so remarkable, as it brings into play that other linked path, indeed, that is intertwined with the fate of Europe. In fact, the history of the Alphabet’s story is of two siblings who appear together in Myth for only the blink of an eye: the moment they're torn apart. Their paths then diverge. Nevertheless, both paths are strangely intertwined; not merely parallel, but constantly intersecting, mixing, and mirroring each other. Thus, the abduction of the young princess Europa by Zeus is only part of the story. The abduction of Europa results in a mission to bring her home again—a mission entrusted to her brother, Kadmos.Europa and Kadmos are children of Agenor, which means the first man or leader of men. The siblings are named Phonix, Kilix, Cadmos, and Europa. Phonix and Kilix refer to Asian regions and peoples of Phoenicia and Calicia. It is therefore plausible that son Cadmos, the only son without land, is sent by his father to bring back the kidnapped Europa. Thus, Cadmos sets off, accompanied by a cow armed with the Oracle's prophecy. He crosses the Bosporus, finally arriving in Boeotia via Samothrace, where he founds the first Polis: Thebes.However, Cadmus isn't only the city's founder but also a heroic bringer of Writing – the guy who brought the Alphabet to Greece, and thus: to Europe. The Greek alphabet marks Sign Revolution’s crowning glory. It goes hand in hand with an upheaval of the divine order. Karl Kerényi wrote that the Myth of the Gods merges into the Heroes Myth in the palace of Cadmus. If deities set out from Asia Minor, they arrive in Greece as heroes. While Cadmus represents this journey's heroic side, the abducted Europa's story illustrates the female perspective. Of course, the mythological Europa never arrives in Europe—which further places her among all the women left behind, of which mythology is full. If what we call Europe is the search for the vanished, lost Europa—a search that has turned away from its original goal and been transferred to other objects of longing – then we’re dealing with a process most accurately described by the term transference. This term, which has both psychoanalytical and technical connotations (and thus a fundamental ambiguity), is used in its simplest sense: as a transfer from one place to another. Europa is carried by Zeus to Crete, while Cadmus crosses the Bosporus, the ford that will separate »barbarian« Asia from Europe. The result of this journey is a sharp difference, a division between origin and destination, but also a division within the figures themselves (embodied in Europa, who, to become Europe, must disappear as a figure). If we translate transfer back into Greek, we encounter the word Metaphora, which means metaphor. As we know, metaphorical, figurative speech relies on shifting and condensing the original meaning into a higher meaning. However, the original meaning must be suppressed for this transition to a higher level to succeed. It’s precisely this rupture that characterizes the series of transfers/omissions recounted in Myth: from the Sign of the Bull to pure letters, from the village to the Polis, from the gods to the Heroes, from Myth to Logos, and from the figure to the metaphor. Once torn apart, the siblings will never see each other again.CadmusLike all heroes, Cadmus is a figure devoid of psychology. Although he occasionally appears in Greek tragedy, such as in Euripides' The Bacchae, it makes more sense to think of him as the archetypal cattle herder: a lonely wanderer who sets off westward toward the evening sky. Occasionally, there's mention of a small, armed band of companions, a brother, and even his mother. However, you always hear about the cattle he is bringing with him, so the ford he crosses is called Bosporus, the Ox Ford, and the land he finally reaches is Boeotia, the land of cattle. If the Cadmus epic deserved an atmosphere, it would be that of a Hollywood western: wilderness, land grabbing, and cattle rustlers. Yet this herdsman possesses secret knowledge, a dark energy driving him forward. In Delphi, he consults the oracle and is instructed to seek out Pelagon, a Shepherd born to die; buy a cow from him that bears the Sign of the Full Moon on its flanks; and settle where this cow digs its horns into the ground»A clear sign I will tell thee, thou shalt know it;Where first that horned beast that dwells in the fieldShall kneel her down upon the grassy groundThere make thou sacrifice to dark-leaved EarthClean and holily. Thine offering made,Found on the hill a town of spacious streets,First sending Ares’ dreadful guard to death.— So shall thy name be known of men to comeThy consort be a goddess, blessed Kadmos.«Cadmus follows the oracle’s prophecy. The cow kneels and digs its horns into the ground. Cadmus sacrifices it and sends his companions to fetch water. However, no one returns because a terrible dragon resides near the spring’s cave. The companions fall victim to the dragon. Finally, it comes to a Showdown, the great Dragon Fight. The hero enters the battle almost unarmed. He overpowers the dragon with his sword or by throwing stones. He then sows the dragon's teeth in the ground, from which heavily armed warriors emerge. Cadmus throws a stone into the crowd of warriors to protect himself from them, whereupon they turn on each other. Only five remain: Udaios, the ground man; Chthonios, the earth man; Pelor, the giant; Hyperenor, the superhuman; and Echion, the snake man. They are also called Spartoi, the sown ones.Harold Innis, the Canadian philosopher and teacher of Marshall McLuhan, analyzed this myth early on as the Alphabet's central myth, a kind of civil war of Signs in which the remaining warriors play the role of the vowels. Indeed, from this perspective, there are several reasons to study the myth of Cadmus, who is explicitly regarded as the bringer of the Alphabet. However, this leads us into a field of inquiry going far beyond the mere notation scheme—one that renders the sign legible instead as a symbolic reproductive apparatus. Not only does the Aleph Sign, which refers to the ox in the yoke, emphasize the correspondence between these two orders of fertility, Sign and Field, but also a series of fantasies pointing in this direction. When the Greeks refer to the early form of writing, in which the text alternates from left to right, as boustrophedon, meaning »the way an ox pulls a plow,« this is more than a metaphor: it reflects the Aleph’s logic. And the Oracle's prophecy that Cadmus should settle where the cow lowers its horned head also anticipates the reversal of signs – the Bull's head, the head standing upright.There is another dimension to which the myth points, and it will be discussed further under the heading of telluric sacredness: While Cadmus had only natural stone at his disposal, the characters who emerge from the earth are armed with iron weapons. The battle gives rise to what could be called the TYPE—and this will distinguish Greek culture, with its armies of hoplites, from the ›barbarian‹ cultures. The dragon's power, described in the oracle as the guardian of the god of war, and which falls victim to Cadmus' throwing of stone, is not entirely eliminated, but continues in the highly disciplined soldiers acting as a military alliance. However, this detail is part of a whole chain of transpositions foreshadowed in the Cadmus myth: from cattle breeding to the Polis, from the Shepherd born to die to the soldier, from stone to iron, from the hero to the collective – and from the dragon, guardian of the god of war, to the army. All these transpositions herald fundamental shifts. In summary, it can be said that the principle of Acrocracy, the towering, dark singularity, is replaced by new magical circles, which, like the Alphabet, consist of several elements. The original power is no longer visible as such but has entered into the concerted action of the elements. This, however, doesn’t mean a weakening, but rather a potentiation. If Cadmus was able to engage in a duel with the dragon as an individual, he can only defend himself against the superior forces of the armed fighters by throwing a stone at them, casting them into a state of disarray – an elemental confusion, if you will – from which the new powerful synthetic whole emerges.When Cadmus later marries Harmonia (whom the myth calls a different Europa), this takes place amid the jubilation and great sympathy of the gods, who shower the couple with wedding gifts. This isn’t a coincidence, for this union articulates the apotheosis and beginning of Greek antiquity: the Marriage of Systemic Thinking. Ovid, who colorfully embellishes Cadmus' battle with the dragon, has a voice come out of nowhere: »Son of Agenor, why are you gazing at the dragon you’ve slain?You too will become a dragon for men to gaze upon!«This oracle's prophecy (like every oracle's prophecy) comes true. Cadmus and Harmonia are transformed into snakes—thereby endowed with divine power. Before being struck by the verdict of the Fall, the serpent was considered a sacred creature. When the pharaohs wore the sacred Cobra around their heads, when snakes were kept in pits and regarded as the Oracle’s protectors, it was because they were believed to possess a deeper knowledge of the reincarnation laws. In this sense, the transformation into a snake or dragon is both an apotheosis and a transfiguration of the knowledge originally reserved for the snake alone. Now, the story of Cadmus and Harmonia has a counterpart in their bridegroom’s dragon fight, the god Apollo. For Apollo also slays the dragon Python, thereby gaining possession of the Oracle. Another dragon-shaped adversary of Apollo bears the name Delphyne. This Delphyne, in turn, gives its name to the Oracle's site at Delphi—the place Cadmus visited on his way to the land of cattle. The name Delphyne reveals the essence of his quest, as Delphyne is an ancient name for the womb. And when Cadmus and Harmonia are deified in serpent form and carried off to the island of the blessed, it’s because they have replaced the mystery of birth with the Code of Nature. Perhaps this is the deepest reason why Europa – and with her all the mother goddesses of Asia Minor's World – will never arrive in Europe.CreteWhat is this island where Europa arrives? Crete: island of bulls and sacred snakes, childhood home of the Greek gods, a world of legends filled with miraculous figures, giants, and mythical creatures, all displaying unprecedented, memorable grandeur—just as in childhood stories. Crete is the home of early thinking that has not yet been alphabetized. Consequently, the way Greek authors write about Crete reveals the sentimental mellifluousness that clings to memories of preschool days. Sentimentality is sentimental precisely because it no longer believes in lost paradises, encountering them only in hypothetical form: a reality that would evaporate into nothingness if confronted in real life. Thus, the dashing formulas of disenchantment characterizing the School of Athens are not contradictions of sentimental affection, but rather its necessary counterpart. Whatever the outcome, it boils down to a denial of childhood, because all Cretans lie. This is a profound statement, not only regarding Cretans, but also the logical apparatus that produces it as a theorem. This marks a split between Mythos and Logos, a razor-sharp dividing line cutting through what cannot be separated. As the birthplace of Zeus, which shows the god in diapers, Crete reminds us of the shame of being born, of the fact that we have not created ourselves nor our own World of gods Consequently, in Greek thought, Crete represents not only the mystery of the primordial beginning but also a veritable taboo zone: the noli me tangere of the a priori, that form of not wanting to know which makes a specific form of knowledge possible in the first place.So what is Crete's significance as the birthplace of the god? While it has been noted on various occasions that Greek culture reflects a tendency toward monotheism in Zeus, Crete narrates the emergence of this god, specifically during the time when he was not yet king of the gods and the highest of the Olympians. Perhaps this story's motto and embarrassment is that even giants once began as small. If Zeus is a creature, this implies that there was a time before, when his glory didn’t yet shine – and thus there may also be an after, the moment of his dethronement. This threat is linked to the birth cave of Zeus, leading us back to religious realms where the mother goddesses existed before any adult male deities. Indeed, Crete was idealized as the home of the Great Mother Goddess. Of course, the rule of this goddess is already strangely broken. The birth of Zeus itself describes a peculiarity: Rhea must kneel on the ground on Mount Ida, overcome by labor pains. But before she gives birth, the mountain convulses and births out small, metallic beings who assist her in the delivery: the Curetes. The word itself has a double meaning: the Curetes are the Cretans themselves (in Latin, Crete is called curetis), and there is also a connection to the word kouros, which means both »boy« and »core.« The Cretans who sprang from the earth, who are undoubtedly related to the fighters springing from the earth in the legend of Cadmus, have a metallic core. They immediately begin to dance with weapons, swords, and shields. However, they aren’t merely servant ghosts (like the seven dwarfs in Snow White) but priests who tell of the goddess's mysteries.Here, a curious difference emerges. Why does the Great Mother require the Curetes’ assistance? Does she herself not represent Mother Earth? And what kind of Earth would it be from which the metal dwarves spring? In fact, the myth tells us about the replacement of two orders that are religious in nature, but it also relates to the laws of reproduction. In connection with the mastery of the ores, Eliade spoke of telluric sacredness, pointing out that the metallurgical process is essentially understood as one of symbolic birth. The craftsman takes the place of Mother Earth, with firing being understood as a synthetically induced maturation process—an artificial birth in which the metal embryo is prematurely removed from the womb and brought to maturity by firing. This assumes, conversely, that metals mature internally like the embryo in the womb—an idea that still lived on in the alchemical doctrine that every metal is a precursor of gold, which must inevitably find its final form in gold.If the telluric sacredness represents an analogy to traditional fertility cults, then the »birthing« of the metallic form, as an act brought about exclusively by human hands, stands in clear competition with that event requiring natural forces. It isn’t necessary to look far to visualize the rift—in today's terms, the metallurgical process would be in vitro fertilization. And what's more, because the metallurgist doesn't return a removed embryo to the earth mother but grows it in an artificial environment, this process could be seen as a form of artificial reproduction. It’s precisely this interpretation that provides the key to the birth scene on Mount Ida. The mountain gives birth to its creatures without needing the Great Mother. Instead, when the Curetes intervene in the birthing process as midwives, the relationship shifts clearly in the direction of artificial reproduction. In another version of the myth, the Curetes are referred to as dactyls (literally: fingers or toes), bearing names that can be translated as anvil, hammer, and knife. Whatever the Curetes are – forges, sorcerers, warriors, or priests—it’s evident that the mysteries and secret teachings they recount all pay homage to a cult inadequately grasped by our traditional understanding of fertility. Against this background, the term telluric (although extremely useful as a concept) is ill-chosen, for tellus, terra mater, is the earth mother herself. In this context, it would be much more precise to speak of a Promethean cult, a self-made religion that no longer feeds on the mystery of birth and rebirth, but on the retort. In this religion of the retort, culture begins to celebrate itself. If Crete is regarded as the place of the Mother Goddess, the island is also the site of her gradual disappearance.Iron ManThe Curetes represent a new type, the type Hesiod calls the Bronze Race, of whom he aptly says, »They did not eat grain, but their spirit was made of steel.« This race finds its most perfect expression in the figure of a bronze giant, a coastal guard who walks around the island three times a day, driving away intruders with stones. His name is Talos. While outwardly this Iron Man appears as a terrifying figure, inwardly he is the guardian of the Law. In Plato's interpretation, he's the one who goes around carrying bronze tablets inscribed with the laws and ensuring compliance with them, which earns him the nickname »Bronze«. Therefore, Talos would be the wandering letter, the arm upholding and ensuring compliance with their law. Certainly: the contradiction between the two forms of religion, between agriculture and ore, also characterizes him. On one hand, it's said that he had a human form, while on the other, he had the form of a bull. Indeed, this is reflected in a fissure inscribed into his being, a line marking his vulnerable spot: a long vein running from his head to his feet with a concealed access portal on his ankle. When the Argonauts land in Crete, the sorceress Medea succeeds in extracting his secret. She then opens his port, and the god’s blood, the Giant’s sekretum flows out – along with the Minoan Culture’s mental secretions being hysterically carried by their ships as Europa seeks the Europe she never finds.This only happened when the Minoan culture was conquered and occupied by the mainland Greeks in the 14th century BC. As Talo's image suggests, in reality, the Minoan empire's downfall was more akin to a departure, in the sense that ships set sail. Only it is no longer the ironclad ships of the Cretans, but those of the Mycenaean conquerors, with which the secret of Minoan culture finds a home throughout Mediterranean culture. However, in the middle of the second millennium, Crete still remains impregnable. The watchman automaton Talos does his duty. Cyclopean walls protect the Minoan empire named after the legendary King Minos, while a cultural schism smolders within it: a rift between the Great Mother Goddess and Zeus, between the Bull and the Bronze Guardian.The Lost FormBut what’s Crete’s secret? Where does the Minoan culture's superiority expressed in the Bronze Giant's form originate? The name Talos itself reveals the secret. Talos means Sun in the Cretan language, and the Cretan Zeus is called Zeus Tallios – an indication that Minos' automaton (which some attribute to divine origin) can be interpreted as a god’s representative. From here, a line runs to the Greek metallon, which originally meant the pit and tunnel, and only later referred to what was found in it. In the form of Talos, the heavenly fire has descended. What’s more, the sun has been immortalized in the bronze tablets, as it becomes the foundation of the law, the heavenly scripture that Plato calls Logos. Additionally, because this artifice [Kunst] is intimately connected with the Greek pantheon, Talos is also the guardian who preserves its secret. Now, the Crete of the 2nd millennium is not only home to Zeus' birth cave; it also has a metallurgical achievement elevating it above its surrounding cultures: bronze casting with lost forms. While bronze smelting is primarily based on mastering fire, bronze casting with lost forms represents a skill far exceeding the beginnings of bronze technology. Its ingenuity lies in producing a cavity that, as a hollow receptacle, can contain and accommodate the final shape of the bronze casting without melting. Instead of a hammered hand-worked object, a finished form emerges that has completely passed through the fire and cast from a single mold – which, drawing a parallel to the birthing process, actually evokes the fantasy of a second nature as we are not only dealing with in vitro fertilization but with a growth process taking place autonomously.But what is the Lost Form? First, there is a model made of beeswax: the prototype. This waxy form is covered with plaster after candles have been affixed to create exit channels for the wax to flow from later. The plaster-covered form is then heated, causing the gypsum to harden while the melting wax flows out of the drain channels, leaving behind the hollow mold. Positive-Negative: The simultaneous melting and hardening is what makes the process so ingenious, as the same logic is applied in the final step. Now, the plaster-coated hollow mold is placed into a cavity in the ground, allowing for rapid cooling once the bronze is poured in, thereby ensuring a successful casting.It's easy to imagine how the artifacts produced in such a process must have appeared as wondrous objects to the more naive cultures of the time: swords and shields without any traces of the irregularities of human hands, instead exuding a formal unity and perfection unique to living beings. Impressive as the superficial shine of the swords and shields may be, the deeper knowledge behind their fabrication is that the Cretan blacksmith-priests must be credited because mastery of these techniques requires a high degree of metallurgical expertise. They had to know and regulate the melting points of metals without the aid of measuring instruments, and understand how metals behave in compounds and alloys. Through the lost form process, bronze technology emerged from the handicraft stage. Energetically, we are now dealing with a type of power plant technology [Kraftwerktechnik] that functionally reflects a highly abstract creation process. While this technical perfection is highly esteemed, its connection to the religious sphere mustn't be forgotten. If the forges of ancient times were attributed a priestly status, it is clear that those adept in this superior casting technique would have been accorded exceptional status. In fact, the categorical separation of this technology from the religious world is a division that has only existed since the Romantic era. For the world of the Cretans, knowledge of the process of lost form was a secret teaching in two senses: firstly, as knowledge of a technical practice, and secondly, as a religious cult that articulated this knowledge in an elevated, idealized form. Against this background, the story of Zeus' birth must be reconsidered. If the Bronze Guardian is the placeholder for the godhead whom the Cretans call Zeus tallios, then it arises out of a deep connection between the god coming to life here and the cult spread by the Curetes. Now, besides the story of Rhea giving birth to the divine child on Mount Ida, there are other birth narratives in which the lost form connection becomes even clearer. It is said that Zeus was born in a Cretan cave, in a hollow form, clandestinely, to escape the vengeance of his child-murdering father Cronus. In this version, the Curetes are no longer midwives but perform a noisy dance with their shields in front of the cave to drown out the telltale cries. There’s even mention of different caves: one where the birth took place and another where the Zeus child was nourished. While psychoanalytic thinking may be tempted to see these caves as maternal womb images, viewing them as transfigurations of the caves and grottoes used by Cretan metallurgists as forges for producing their products seems much more plausible. Thus, the cave serves as a temple of the lost form, and the child of Zeus (who clearly heralds a rift in the world of the gods; for why else would Kronos want to kill him?) as the first incarnation of this cult.Following this thought, a line of further connections can be made linking the caves of Zeus to the Cretan cult’s most famous place—the Labyrinth. According to Mircea Eliade, the labyrinth was also originally a cave. Now, the alleged parallel between cult and technology would be mere speculation if there weren't a myth in the mythological world of the Zeus child, in which the lost form process is described in an almost unadulterated way that would seem bizarrely incomprehensible without this reference:There live the sacred bees, the nurses of Zeus. A great fire breaks out in the cave once a year, always when the blood ferments that flowed at the god's birth. One day, four brave men enter the cave, clad in iron armor and fortified with honey from the bees, their faces whitewashed with plaster. When they see the god in his birth cave, wrapped in swaddling clothes and smeared with blood, their armor falls off, and giant bees attack them. When they see the god in his birth cave, wrapped in swaddling clothes and smeared with blood, their armor falls off, and giant bees attack them.– When attempting to analyze this myth, it becomes evident that the uterine idea of the birth cave does not lead very far away. Rather, it's the story's details that are important. First, there's a layering of meanings: the annual fire breaking out in this cave plays on the circularity of ancient fertility cults, while the blood here is merely a remnant, having given way to the boiling metal. This transubstantiation conveys an essential message illustrating that Cretan culture, with its storehouses, palaces, and fortifications, no longer adheres to the mythology of blood unreservedly, but instead venerates metal as the source of wealth and general well-being.Nevertheless – and in order not to simply break with tradition, efforts are made symbolically—or rather: symballically of bringing the two levels together. Accordingly, the sekretum of Zeus is also represented as a mixture of blood and molten metal. However, following the narrative, it becomes clear where the focus of the new cult lies. All details refer to the lost form process. The sacred bees, Zeus's nurses, refer to the wax that serves as the raw material for the bronze sculptures. The four brave men with their shields (the artifacts of which Cretan culture is so proud) have whitewashed their faces with plaster, reminiscent of the plaster casings used in sculptures. The mention of fire is also unambiguous. There are two reasons why it takes courage to enter the heights: firstly, the real danger inherent in the casting technique, and secondly, it touches on the arcane secrets of Cretan culture. Insofar as viewing this world's interior is accompanied by the horror of theophany, a terror instantly disarms the warriors, leaving them at the killer bees’ mercy. At the same time, this brief glimpse reveals the secret of Cretan culture, the secret of the highest Greek godhead, whose Cretan childhood causes the Greeks a certain embarrassment. Wax, metal, fire, the falling bowls, and finally the image of the blood-stained god standing there in swaddling clothes—like one of those sculptures removed from their plaster molds but not yet cleaned. The details of this myth illustrate the miraculous technique that enabled the Cretans to create forms from a single cast for the first time. Zeus is such a figure, an ideal, complete body. With him, a new figure enters the World of Mother Goddesses, a figure that could be called HOMO-GEN in all its ambiguity: a human creation, cast from a single mold. The myth goes on to say that Zeus gave bees the color of ore out of gratitude for nourishing him. When honey becomes the food of the gods, and ambrosia is used for anointing while wax is used in mummification (as was still the case with Alexander the Great), this substance also experiences an apotheosis.With the thesis that Zeus represents the godhead of Lost Form, the question is immediately raised about what constitutes the Lost Form of Myth as an analogy of the casting process. Initially, there may be a tendency to attribute this loss to the ancient pantheon's diminished function. If the ancient fertility deities owe their existence to the circularity of growth and decay, this tributary relationship melts away to almost nothing in the case of Zeus. Zeus owes his existence not to a particular substance, but to a trick: he is an artificial god. In its form, culture encounters itself. But here lies a contradiction, indeed, this god's birth defect. The god in whom human work celebrates itself does not exactly contribute to its own exaltation. To worship him as a god, it is precisely this aspect of the synthetic that must be suppressed—all the more so because, unlike natural material, the ingenuity of the lost form no longer holds any mysteries. It’s no coincidence that the birth cave of Zeus is shrouded in an embarrassing silence—the four brave men who see him, covered in blood and swaddling clothes, are seized by panic. What they see there is not something wholly different, but rather that their godhead is a self-made cult figure.In the liquefied, creamy metal that takes on the role of blood in Zeus' birth cave, a new, ›artificial‹ form of fertility comes into play. From now on, when we refer to a logos spermatikos, we always mean this special ›blood juice‹ [Blutsaft]. The culture of Zeus is abstract, synthetic, head birth [Kopfgeburt] as a result of pure imagination. Nevertheless, Zeus tallios, the Cretan god who emerged like a statue from a lost form, still stands under the dictum of tradition. Because the old godheads cannot simply be displaced, Zeus, in accordance with the inertia of religious sentiment, takes on a different form – a form that must be more congenial to the older female fertility deities. If Amaltheia, another wet nurse, whose name again contains the honey aspect, nourishes the child of God with the horn of a bull, an inexhaustible horn of plenty, it is only right and proper that he should occasionally appear in the guise of a phallic bull. And in precisely the same way, in the guise of the Bull, he appears to Europa on the shores of the Phoenician sea—a guise he discards once he arrives in Crete. In this dual nature of the god, where the Lost Form is superimposed on the traditional bull's costume, lies the rift foreshadowed in the long, head-to-toe vein of his earthly double. Because here, two principles collide: the world of agriculture and the tamed fire, the telluric sacrality and that of the agricultural deities. In fact, for a time, molten metal still counted as a form of bull power – the equation of blood and red-hot metal holds. Accordingly, the Cretan religion can be seen as an attempt to unite the two competing orders. The highest object of worship is represented by two horns with a sun disk resting between them.As in the birth cave of Zeus, which is described as filled with surging blood but is actually an allusion to the liquefaction of metal, the fusion of blood and metal occurs repeatedly. However, this isn't about the substances themselves, but about the competing religious orders they represent, which are reconciled with each other in the overlapping of the two levels of meaning. The new alloy of blood and metal is not limited just to Crete but spreads throughout the Greek world, just as myths can be seen as forms of migrating thoughts, representing a shift of names, places, and cults. Insofar, it is not surprising that the Cadmus myth has sequels and repetitions, as in the story of Jason. Jason has to compete in a contest to marry Medea, the king's daughter. Before the hero faces the dragon, the king sends him into battle with fiery bulls:»Behold the bulls with feet of bronze! From steel nostrils, / They blow Vulcan's flames; touched by the embers, / The grass around them burns. And like full-grown oxen, they bellow, / Or as limestone burned in a limekiln hisses, / Or grows hot when sprinkled with a drop of water, / So from their chests and parched throats, / Came the rumbling-roar from flames pent up within.«Jason, the hero, equipped by his enchanting Medea with a »Promethean ointment,« can approach them:»...never feeling their fiery breath—so potent is the power of the spell — / He boldly strokes their hanging dewlaps with fearless hand, / And harnessing the yoke upon them: made them draw the heavy plow, / And cutting through the field that had felt a steel share before.«Then the battle with the dragon begins, which Jason defeats in the manner of Cadmus:›Now he takes the dragon's teeth from the bronze helmet / And scatters them into the loosened soil. / The earth softens the powerfully enchanted seeds, / Growing into teeth and becoming new formations. / Just as in the mother's womb, a child takes shape, / Perfected within – limb and limb join together – / Not coming forth into the common air, until fully formed, / So, when the forms of men had been completed in the womb or the pregnant earth / They rose up, teeming from the fertile earth / And—even more astonishing!—each brandished weapons emerging with himself. (...) / He throws a heavy stone into the midst of his enemies, / Turning their attack away from him, onto their own ranks. / These sons of the earth took to wounding one another, / And struck down by the bands of their own kin, / They perish in civil war.‹This short passage, in which Ovid examines a distant past, is remarkable because it intertwines all levels of the question, revealing the superimposition of two competing religious orders (figuratively summarized in the elements of blood and metal). Furthermore, this passage highlights that aspect of symbol formation which will find its enigmatic form in the pure Sign. In fact, we cannot yet speak of a symbol; instead, we are observing the various aspects in separate forms, all jumbled together. Now, sym-ballein, the throwing together, is the essential stratagem leading to the symbol as the ultimate form of condensation. All connotations of the Alpha-Phallus Sign converge here: the taming of the Bull, the replacement of the agricultural world by metallurgical, Promethean skills, and the hermaphroditic being of blood and metal (the fiery bull). The hero, armed with a Promethean ointment, the dragon seed, and the knowledge of the secret of reproduction, embodies the birth of the homogeneous and the horror of uniformity, which in turn provokes a civil war but ultimately gives rise to the community that characterizes the Greek world: the Polis.SemeleIt's evident that when the center of worship shifts, the sacrificial offerings must also change. When the Greeks euphemistically said that a human sacrifice had ›passed through fire,‹ it was clear that the godhead was now being paid with a different currency than before. Now it's Cadmus' fourth daughter, Semele, who falls victim to this ritual against the express wishes of the god, who must step aside due to the law of tyche, that relentless goddess who determines how things have to be. Even the highest god must bow to this absolute necessity. How does the myth of Semele go? Semele, daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, is impregnated by the god of lightning, who carries within him the energy and knowledge of Me-Tallon. Semele is the Phrygian word for the Greek Chtonia, meaning ›the underground.‹ At the same time, the word contains the seed of the Greek similis, which in Latin becomes simulacrum, meaning dream, shadow, phantom, or image of the dead. Semele, into whom semel, once and for all, the seed of Zeus has descended, is the hollow form of the god: receptivity in its entirety. Hera, the jealous wife of the gods, approaches her,»Wrapped in a golden saffron cloud, / She rides to Semele's threshold; / Nor does she dissipate her cloud /Until she’s adopted an old woman’s guise, / Streaking her temples with white hair / And furrowing her skin with wrinkles.«Hera has taken on the form of her old nurse. In this disguise, the old woman instills doubt in her about the god's paternity: »Many have already entered chaste chambers as gods.« Doubt, this hollow form of reality in which what was real flows out, becoming a phantasmatic cavity – a cavity constantly producing new suspicions and possibilities—this doubt of demanding certainty. The god is to give her a token of his love, and he promises her this token, whatever it may be. And Semele, in search of the god's true identity, demands he reveal himself as he truly is, which becomes her downfall. The unhappy god struggles to tame his fire, wrapping himself in steam and clouds, rain and lightning, yet despite this, he appears to her as he is: as a bolt of lightning that burns Semele to death. The god can only save the son Semele carries in her womb, so he's sewn into his father's loins with a golden clasp. Zeus gives birth to him, who has a bull's head like himself: Dionysus. For this reason, he's also called the twice-born.Mellis (the honey) Se-Mellis. Similis. Semele. (Se)meltan. Melting. The hardening of the god coincides with the melting of the woman. Semele leaves behind the hollow form, the doubt, the empty, burnt-out royal palace. And with the vine, that substance that will populate the reality principle with the power of imagination’s [Einbildungskraft] shadow beings, along with intoxication and delusion.HysterologosSomething new emerges from the technique of the lost form. The hollow form becomes productive. Whereas cultures previously had to act on the body itself to create an artifact, now bodies emerge bearing no trace of the human hand: hybrid beings, alloys, totalities. The exclusion of the human hand signifies the step into abstraction. Molten bronze poured into a hollow mold is a kind of plastic. The idea of perfect plasticity resides in the magmafication of the molten state: a flexible, malleable, and supple body. Conversely, this infinite plasticity corresponds to the body’s complete annihilation during the melting process. A strange dialectic emerges here. By melting down the natural body’s form along with its unevenness and bulkiness, all conceivable forms, FORM as such, become visible for the first time. While the wax positive still represents an analog of the body, the process of abstraction takes a decisive step further in the case of melting down and refilling. The fact that here the creative human hand no longer has any possibility of intervention describes only the external side of this process; however, we must bear in mind the extent to which metallurgical knowledge is assumed to grasp all the sharpness of this leap of abstraction. Against the background of these intellectual and abstract skills, it becomes clear that this melting process can only be understood as a mental process. With this step into abstraction, the view shifts from physicality (or, as one might say, the mother substance) to those cavities preceding the body. In this sense, Dionysus, twice born, is an image of this process. The child of his mother, who melts away (like wax) under the energy of lightning, and the child of his father, into whose thigh he is sewn (like bronze poured into a hardened plaster mold).The body emerging from this hollow form is a strange hybrid creature. While it appears perfect, despite its appearance, it is no longer the archetype [Urbild], but rather a copy—and indeed a double copy. It may be a steel Ironman, yet inside, it’s as fluid as Talos – a Protean creature that is only invulnerable in appearance [Erscheinung]. The Technique of Lost Form inscribes a division into the thing: the division between being and appearance. Strictly speaking, the things emerging from this process are already appearances: they embody the forms that preceded them—Wax and Air. Insofar, it is no coincidence that Semele, whose expressed desire made Zeus the idea’s father, gives birth to simulacra. Just as the hollow form gives birth to possibilities, doubt gives birth to illusions. Moving along these lines, Euripides recounts in The Bacchae a version of the myth circulated by Semele's sisters about her death. They claim that Semele only pretended to be impregnated by the god on the advice of Cadmus, which was the reason why the god killed her.Like Semele, her son Dionysus, »born of lightning,« is a master of appearances—and at the same time his mother's avenger. When Pentheus, the son of one of those envious sisters, dares to deny the presence of the god in keeping with family tradition, Dionysus mocks him by appearing in human guise and conjuring up a bull out of thin air. — The deluded Pentheus, whom Dionysus has persuaded to go to the Maenads in the guise of a woman, suddenly believes he sees two suns and a double Thebes – and finally Dionysus himself appears to him, as his father had appeared, in the form of a bull. Perhaps there’s no stronger image for the totality of illusion than this: the appearance of a second sun. Where it’s impossible to decide what reality is and what delusion is, doubt encompasses the whole world—thereby marking something like a counter-world formula. Just as the Lost Form’s production process shifts the creation of form into the invisible, the reality of Dionysus shifts into the intangible. But only here, and not in his concrete manifestation, can the presence of God be felt. Pentheus, the godless rationalist who takes the form of the god for the god himself, who believes he can capture the god with a ribbon, is punished for his trust in appearances with the multiplication of appearances. And at the moment when doubt about the world seizes him, his fate is sealed: he is to be dismembered himself. He is torn to pieces by his own mother and her maenads.The idea of appearance makes sense only in front of the hollow form. The bronze sculpture is the realization of something absent, the phenotype of a genotype that is lost in the process itself. Latin speaks of ars fingendi, equating casting with counterfeiting or faking. This is where the realm of Dionysus begins, who is the god of theater and, for a long time, dressed in the costumes of the great tragic figures—the only hero on stage (Nietzsche). Dionysus has been too readily proclaimed a reincarnation of earlier fertility deities. In fact, he belongs to the Technologos—only that, unlike Zeus, he doesn’t want to be turned into statues and statutes. Dionysus embodies the sacred fire, that immense, all-consuming force hidden in the hollow of the process of the Lost Form. When Nietzsche says in The Birth of Tragedy with precise instinct, »Dionysus of the mysteries, a god experiencing in himself the sufferings of individuation,« this suffering leads to where the potency of Cretan culture has its highest expression.In one Orphic myth, the infant Dionysus is attacked by the Curetes; in another version, by the Titans. With their faces painted with plaster (!), they approach the playing child, dismember him, and throw him into a boiling cauldron. The dismembered and overcooked body is finally transformed, restored by the gods, into a vine, into pure mind. If it is said that Zeus brought about fulfillment, but it was Dionysus who made fulfillment complete, then it is clear his contribution lies in a realm that cannot be grasped through physical abundance or pure positivity. It's more like a formlessness that Dionysus embodies: as an enthusiast who excites the Bacchantes, who clouds their minds and blurs the line between the sexes, between madness and reality. — But it would be wrong to see this god as the opposite of reason. He is more like that part of the process hidden from view. This affiliation with the Technologos explains Dionysus's special relationship with Hephaestus, that limping, dwarfed monstrosity whom his own mother hurled down to earth. If Hephaistos trusts only Dionysus, it is because this god, in whom the sacred fire and the mutability of form pulsate, embodies the mind of his craft like no other among the gods. And if, conversely, the god of wine is responsible for elevating the god of blacksmiths, this is further proof of their deep kinship. Intoxicated by wine, the metalworker ascends to heaven.However, a self-made god whose mysteries owe their existence solely to human artistry presents a problem, for the day inevitably comes when he is revealed as a creation of human hands. Xenophanes initiates this process by suggesting that the gods could only be the shapeless creations of humans. From that point onward, only what isn’t anthropomorphic can be considered god: »One God is greatest among gods and men, / neither in body nor in understanding equal to mortal men.« Here, where the twilight of the Olympian gods begins, reality, or rather the formlessness of Dionysus, comes into play: that a god can only be invisible. Whatever form this great nothingness may take, whether it leans toward the god of philosophers or follows the path of monotheism or Christian crucifixion, it is always great, absent eternities making themselves felt. In fact, without wanting to reduce this story to a mere technical aspect, it's possible to discern the birth of this idea in the Lost Form’s melting process: magmafication.Translation: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardtand here’s part II Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

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.Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

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 publishedRelated content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

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:hackedEliza Mondegreen’s articles in Unherd FreethinkerRelated Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

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 Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Here is a short video that provides some illustrative footage for a documentary we have been planning about the carnival activities of Castiglion Fibocchi, a small town in southern Tuscany. Because the performance is based on a medieval event from the 11th century, its festival staging could be understood as the continuation of a local tradition. On the other hand, the fact that this tradition was in the world of avatars, a kind of cosplay in baroque robes—shows how the traditions of the past can be blended into future community building.Hier ein kleines Video, das Anschauungsmaterial für eine Dokumentation liefert, die wir den Karnevalsaktivitäten einer kleinen Stadt in der südlichen Toskana widmen wollen, Castiglion Fibocchi. Weil das Ganze sich auf einen mittelalterlichen Anlass aus dem 11. Jahrhundert bezieht, könnte man die Inszenierung als Lokaltradition verstehen, andererseits mag der Umstand, dass diese Tradition im Jahr 1997 reaktiviert worden ist, ein Vorschein auf die Welt der Avatare und des Internets sein, eine Art Cosplay in barocken Gewändern.Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

When the cognitive dissonances of our present-day made themselves felt in the aftermath of October 7th, the question of where and how the abysmal hatred leading to this pogrom originated has remained unanswered. This question drew our attention to John Aziz, a British-Palestinian journalist who passionately writes about the events in his father's homeland. His perspective is particularly interesting because he clearly sees the weight of this heritage as the dark shadow of a tragedy imposed on him, but even more on his relatives remaining in Palestine. Because, as a product of the English education system and, as a young musician, he also feels part of the digital world. And it’s in this sense that he personifies the global mission of a digital native who, as a peace activist, wants to share his view of Islam with a wider public.John Aziz is a musician active in the peace movement and digital economy. As a journalist, he has a Substack blog and has written for Quillette, Foreign Policy and Prospect. His music can be found on Soundcloud.John Aziz in the mediaThis is not Late State Capitalism, in: QuilletteThe West is Next, in QuiletteThe Death of a Deluded ManReplacing Isreales with Palestne. A Dangerous DelusionRelated Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

If there's a great mystery in the history of ideas, it lies in where the blind spots of thought are encountered. However, this raises the question of precisely what conditions lead to such blind thinking. When Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University whose work has delved deeply into the history of political theology, prefaces his book Ignorance and Bliss with the motto of an English Writer: »The faintest of all human passions is the love of truth,« he's highlighting the underlying dilemma: that the love of truth pales in comparison to other passions. And because he’s somewhat surprised this fact has received comparatively little attention in the history of philosophy—with the exception of Nietzsche—in his latest book, Lilla turns to the psychology of the present-day obliviousness, characterizing various paradigms within which the will to ignorance has found expression. Looking around at our present, we're confronted with countless varieties of blissful ignorance, making our conversation with him all the more rewarding as an in-depth exploration of a terrain that's received little attention.After working as an editor at The Public Interest and holding professorships at New York University and the University of Chicago, Mark Lilla became a professor of humanities at Columbia University in 2007. He regularly writes for the New York Times and New York Review of Books, among many other publications.Recent PublicationsRelated Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Because life is life-size, academic discourses, let alone grand worldviews, can only ever be approximations. Yet, direct observation and engagement with a specific situation raises the most complex and, at the same time, the most diverse questions. From this point of view, the experience the young Moriel Bareli recounts in his book When a Jew and a Muslim Talk is of such a dense and unusual nature. Yet his starting point was relatively simple: a young man growing up on Long Island, New York, who came to Israel when he turned eighteen. And since he lived near Jerusalem's Old City, inhabited mainly by Israeli Muslims, he developed a desire to learn Arabic – and in this way, to approach and become closer with his neighbor—the unknown being, as Rilke had named him. In practice, however, this wasn't quite so easy to accomplish because, at the time of the so-called Knife Intifada, Jewish students were only allowed to enter the Old City if accompanied by guards. So, as a digital native, Bareli downloaded an app and arranged to learn the language through various online conversations. Because he soon realized revealing his identity as a Jewish Israeli wouldn’t help him achieve his goal, he decided to focus on his New York background, presenting himself as an American college student who taught English in exchange for Arabic classes. And it was in this way that he was able to strike up conversations with all kinds of people in the Arab world—conversations that would have been impossible in everyday life. This experience, with its unmistakable anthropological significance, drew our attention to him – leading to the following conversation, which, despite the subject's dark and confrontational nature, was characterized by a wonderful sense of humor.Moriel Bareli lives in Samaria, teaches Arabic and gives lectures on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Recently publishedRelated Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Sometimes, political landscape changes occur very slowly, almost imperceptibly, and not infrequently; a social step backward is disguised as a seductively progressive formula. In this context, Göran Adamson is one of those rare specimens whose awareness of undesirable developments of this kind was sharpened early on – not least because he connected the rise of populist parties to the failure of the political elite. Or, more precisely: their entry into what Adamson calls nationalist masochism. The roots of this peculiar self-hatred go way back to the 1970s – in the meantime, having produced a political class underpinning its political career with performative acts of self-flagellation. Consequently, Sweden's conservative prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt could claim: »Swedish roots are nothing but barbaric. The rest of the development has come from the outside.« If we take the problem of nationalist masochism seriously, we understand both that and how the ideology of multiculturalism has made the deliberate and always consensus-seeking Sweden into a form of mental paralysis in which turning a blind eye could become a form of civic duty. In any case, Adamson, already a sociology professor at the University of Malmö, observed how his colleagues had developed a groupthink—a group pressure that’s spread as a kind of mental mildew over the discourses and threatened to stifle free speech and research. Was this a reason for Adamson to leave the University? As a true citizen of the world, he subsequently spent many years in Indonesia, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Jordan. He recently has submitted a study on the failed Swedish migration policy to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Brussels.Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

The artist's becoming the preferred role model of modern Europe is a perfectly understandable process, as we can see in him the embodiment of the idea of individuality and, ultimately, human dignity. However, detaching ourselves from the aura—thus also from the promise associated with this figure—we see a strange, even dark question emerging. What if this promise can't be kept, and what if we’re now confronting the figure of the failed artist? This is a thought that the American philosopher Eric Hoffer made, in the early 1950s, the core of his work The True Believer – in which he argues that totalitarianism, as it raged in its Nazi and Stalinist varieties, could first and foremost be counted as failed artists. And this is precisely the idea of artist Megan Gafford, who sees the disappearance of beauty—exemplified by Marcel Duchamp's urinal—as one of the great catastrophes of the last century. Because what art denies itself seeks refuge in political activism. Since Megan Gafford, who taught design and drawing at the University of Denver and has been teaching at the University of Boulder for more than a decade, has been able to observe this logic of mobilization at close range, she's emerged as a journalistic voice with this idea, writing for magazines such as Quillette, Areo, and Tilt West.Megan Gafford is an artist who lives and teaches in New York. Her interest in science and technology drives her artwork's strange sense of uncanniness. In her studio practice, she repurposes unsettling scientific tools like radiation and cybernetics as art materials, to create work that commingles eeriness and elegance. She also has a Substack blog called Fashionably Late Takes.Recent Articles:The Totalitarian Artist: Politics vs Beauty. In Quilletteand Megan Gafford recommendsSamuel Hughes: The Beauty of ConcreteRelated Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Imagining the Boomer world straying into suffocating moralism during the Pop Revolution would have seemed like a grotesque, if not outright ridiculous, mind game. Actually, it is a first-order puzzlement how such a terror of virtue could take hold of our political discourse and institutions. It is precisely this question that cultural theorist Catherine Liu addresses with the rise of the new ruling caste of the Professional Managerial Class—also known as the PMC. This caste is characterized by how it claims social privileges for itself in a sharp demarcation against the lower classes – or the deplorables, as Hillary Clinton referred to them. As an excellent stratagem, this hidden class struggle makes excellent use of symbolic currency as the capital Pierre Bourdieu so aptly described in his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. However, as ever-larger sections of the population fight for positions, privileges, and scarce resources, the question of how to succeed in the moral economy is brought into relief. An excellent way out of this dilemma is declaring oneself a victim or behaving as particularly virtuous – a role description that Catherine Liu so aptly analyzes in her Virtue Hoarders. What was so refreshing in our conversation with her was that she never risks losing herself in moral indignation – but instead carries out a class analysis in good Marxist fashion. Thus, she reveals the basic features of the moral economy while also showing the blind spots of this ideology of domination.Catherine Liu teaches film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she has also served as director of the UCI Humanities Center. Her 2021 book Virtue Hoarders was widely acclaimed, and she’s currently working on a book exploring the significance of trauma for the moral economy.Catherine Liu has publishedRelated Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

If you follow the rise of populism and conflicts emerging in post-industrial societies, you see the same picture emerging everywhere: a society lost in the thin air of our moral economy, struggling with very tangible problems that people are reluctant to confront. Brad Evans' perspective can be highly informative when analyzing this landscape, which exhibits some features of what Hans Magnus Enzensberger called the ›molecular civil war‹. Born in Rhondda, Wales, at a time when the striking miners were the victims of Thatcherite neoliberalism, his perspective is shaped by that conflict, which plunged the people living there first into unemployment—then into a crisis of meaning even more terrible than exploitation: that of no longer being considered worthy of exploitation, in this sense: being completely invisible. Strangely enough, the young political scientist had to travel to Mexico and experience the Zapatista uprising before he could describe his own homeland with such an alien perspective in his beautifully titled book, „How Black Was My Valley.“ Here, the uninitiated reader isn’t only confronted with the insight that the Welsh are a kind of Indigenous minority confronted with the dark side of colonization through mining – but that Wales was already confronting the effects of globalization even before the great financial crisis in 1929. After the Treaty of Versailles, which obliged the Germans to supply coal in restitution, unemployment in Wales soared to alarming heights. In this sense, the personal alienation of having risen into the world of Academia from the working class gives him an unusual historical perspective of the lived experience while simultaneously allowing him to reach the heights of contemporary thought, the Philosophy of a René Girard or a Giorgio Agamben as he looks back.Brad Evans is Professor of Political Violence at the University of Bath. He's the author of several highly creative books that transcend the narrow confines of academia. He has also founded the Centre for the Study of Violence.Brad Event has publishedRelated Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

One might call Benedict Evans an anthropologist of our digital age, as he’s been observing and analyzing its technological changes for over two decades. Before deciding to become an independent observer, he started his career at various venture capital and equity firms, such as Andreessen Horowitz, Entrepreneur First, and Mosaic Ventures. Now, he provides over 175,000 readers with his observations of the technosphere’s pulse as he interprets which of its often disruptive changes actually matter in his weekly newsletter. As a graduate of the University of Cambridge, where he studied history, Evans' perspective is imbued with observations that aren’t limited to technological innovations but also include all the fantastical hopes from which they spring – and their more practical meanings in our everyday world – giving his view of reality that human touch which is often far more potent than the code itself. In any case, a conversation with him can take many marvelous, surprising turns: From one moment to the next, you jump from an industrial-ecological look at a Billy Wilder film (The Apartment with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon) to the question of why saying hello in English lifts and American elevators is experienced as inappropriate, whereas in Germany it is good manners – and this in turn is only the prelude to the question of how accounting is changing under the influence of digitalisation, among many others in our conversation with him.Benedict Evans lives in New York. In addition to his newsletter and regular essays on his blog, he also presents his insights to major corporations such as Alphabet, Amazon, AT&T, Axa, Bertelsmann, Deutsche Telekom, Hitachi, L'Oréal, LVMH, Nasdaq, Swiss Re, Visa, Warner Media, Verizon and Vodafone. Related Content: Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

While the harbingers were already visible long before, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has made it clear that the days of the comparatively peaceful post-war order are numbered. Nevertheless, the calculations leading to all of this remain largely mysterious. How could a society such as the Russian one embark on such an adventure in which it reveals itself to the world as a terrorist state? The historian Sergei Medvedev, who saw the approaching catastrophe coming with his The Return of the Russian Leviathan, goes back deep into Russia's history to explain Putin's motivation - to figures such as Ivan the Terrible, the Golden Horde and the Chekists, who personify the legal State of Emergency. Medvedev's diagnosis, which sees Russia as the unconscious of a spiritually eroding postmodern age, is extremely dark. According to him, the invasion of Ukraine marked the beginning of World War III, which began with the invasion of Ukraine. Sergei Medvedev is an Affiliate Professor at Charles University in Prague. Born in Moscow, he studied at Moscow University and Columbia University in New York City. He specializes in political history, international affairs, and Russian studies. After over 15 years as a Professor and Associate Dean at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, he left Russia in March 2022. For many years, Sergei Medvedev was a contributing columnist to Russian Forbes, Vedomosti, and The Republic and filmed programs on history and culture for the Russian Kultura TV and TV Rain. Since 2015, he has been working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, where he hosts the intellectual talk show Arkheologiya.Recent BooksRelated Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

There is no doubt that the margins of society can reveal something about what shifts within. And this is precisely what’s drawn our attention to a young anthropologist whose work with young, primarily indigenous drug addicts in Vancouver reveals a picture that’s as paradoxical as it is surprising: namely a driving force behind addiction is an irrepressible longing for normality, that suburban life with a wife, family and steady job that’s been vaulted by the media in such role models as the vanilla girl, the tradwife, and the family guy. This indicates that the ‘normalcy of the everyday’ which the boomer generation fled has become an unredeemable dream of life for even large sections of the working class, raising the question if this normalcy has become an unredeemable life dream even for large sections of the working class. If that’s the case, it indicates yet another major upheaval in our current Social Drive. In a way, this also mirrors Danya Fast’s anthropological career. After examining the life dreams of young men in Africa as part of her early collaborative work, her gaze shifted to her native Vancouver: to the living conditions of young people who, as the title of her book says, The Best Place: Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver. Indeed, the drug crisis, having been exacerbated by the advent of fentanyl, shapes the image of this highly affluent city. As in San Francisco, luxury and misery go hand in hand. In the tradition of participant observation, which has characterized anthropology since Malinowski, Danya Fast immersed herself in the underground life of this city - and that’s what our conversation is all about.Danya Fast received her MA from the University of Amsterdam and her PhD in Medical Anthropology from the University of British Columbia, where she’s an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine. Her research papers and interests can be found at Academia, ResearchGate, and Google Scholar.Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

The rise and fall of the Dread Pirate Roberts is a complex story that delves into the creation and dismantling of the Silk Road, an online marketplace for drugs. The narrative explores the dual identities of Ross William Ulbricht, the mastermind behind the Dread Pirate Roberts persona, who presented a respectable outward appearance while running a criminal empire. The text discusses the technological advancements, such as encrypted communication and anonymous currencies like Bitcoin, that facilitated the operation of Silk Road. The story culminates in Ulbricht's arrest in a public library, revealing the intricate planning and execution by law enforcement agencies to capture him. Despite conflicting portrayals of Ulbricht as both a villain and a hero, the narrative refrains from taking sides and instead seeks to uncover the underlying logic that led to his descent into the criminal underworld. The case of Silk Road serves as a study of the intersection between technology, politics, and morality, prompting readers to ponder the broader implications of digital anonymity and online crime. Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

When does it ever happen that an intelligent contemporary describes himself as a neo-Luddite with conviction and a certain sense of status? This alone would be reason enough to talk with Baron Robert Jacob Alexander Skidelsky, co-founder of the British Social Democratic Party and a man who can look back on a long career in the English House of Lords. Skidelsky came into the public’s consciousness primarily through his multi-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, a work that sharpened and changed the Baron’s perspective on the machine age. While Keynes was an optimist, in Skidelsky’s writings, a distinctive, dystopian view gained the upper hand, not the least through his experiences of the Great Financial Crisis. And there’s no doubt that the seismic shock of the Digital Revolution has pushed Capitalism into a deep crisis of legitimacy, which can be seen primarily as our diffuse unease with modernity. And because it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, many of our contemporaries seek salvation in apocalyptic thinking. Skidelsky, on the other hand, in addition to his economic grammatology, views the broader historical context as he focuses on the Machine as the Social Engine influencing our living conditions far more than any political ideology. Consequently, our discussion explores precisely what the upheaval accompanying the digital revolution is and to what extent we are dealing with a controllable event.Robert Skidelsky, who taught Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in 1970 and has been an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College in Oxford since 1997, can look back on a varied career in politics while, above all, publishing several books.Recent publicationsRelated Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

That society loses its way in phantasmata and ideological labyrinths may be attributable to the human-all-too-human – but it’s strange in a culture that declares science and objectivity its highest values. In this context, Wilfred Reilly’s work is enlightening in an old-fashioned sense: a political scientist undertakes the task of comparing and contrasting morality trends with the data and finds the results deeply troubling. As in the case of the Black Lives Matter movement, where the data found that incidents of brutal police violence were in the low double-digit range, while the general public was convinced it was an almost endemic behavior that’s been documented thousands of times. Doesn’t this raise several difficult-to-explain questions of cognitive dissonance? How are such contradictions even possible in a society that considers itself enlightened? What does this have to do with our present Attention Economy? How is it possible that a culture of victimization develops in the shadow of the moral economy? All of these questions are touched upon in conversation with Wilfred Reilly.Wilfred Reilly teaches political science at Kentucky State University, and his books Hoax and Taboo are widely discussed in the American public.Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Since Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the country has been at war, with the rest of the world having registered this state of exception in horror, as one of the post-war foundations of order has started to slip. Wherever events come rushing in, it's not uncommon for the soberly detached, skeptical view of the social analyst to fall by the wayside. But this is precisely what drew our attention to Volodymyr Ishchenko, who, in his book Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War, links the events in Ukraine with the post-Soviet phenomenon of disintegration and decomposition. A point of reference he makes is Antonio Gramsci's conception of an Interregnum as that never-ending in-between spatiality in which ‘the old will not die and the new will not be born’ - an interim period in which those in power lack legitimacy, representing precisely an ideal breeding ground for Authoritarianism, Caesarism and even acts of aggression and violence of all kinds. What's so striking about his interpretation is that, gifted with this perspective, events in Ukraine are no longer seen as a special case but as a magnifying glass through which the crisis of representation that also afflicts the West is given a surprisingly new interpretation.Volodymyr Ishchenko is a sociologist and research associate at the Institute for East European Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. He writes for The Guardian, Al Jazeera, New Left Review, and Jacobin, among others. Verso Books published his book Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War in 2024.Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Examining the question of how the Universal Machine represents an epistemic force - this chapter explores how a Machine Culture’s socioplastic nature inevitably subjects its societies to a certain order.Long before Columbus sets off to cross the Atlantic, the European Middle Ages is already the New World that it will seek and find in America.Speaker: Hopkins StanleySound-Design: Martin BurckhardtMusic: Hopkins Stanley & Martin BurckhardtFrom: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)To listen to previous chapters:Philosophy of the Machine 11Philosophy of the Machine 10Philosophy of the Machine 9Philosophy of the Machine 8Philosophy of the Machine 7Philosophy of the Machine 6Philosophy of the Machine 5Philosophy of the Machine 4Philosophy of the Machine 3Philosophy of the Machine 2Philosophy of the Machine 1Here is the Link to the German Publication by Matthes & Seitz Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

If one were to describe Scott Tinker's work, perhaps the most apt description would be to describe him as an anthropologist of human energy use. In any case, as a trained geologist who, after a few years in the Texas oil industry, went back to university and, in 2000, became Director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas in Austin and State Geologist for the State of Texas, has spent a lifetime studying the relationship between energy use and society - a concern that, as he says, stems from a childhood memory of the former Soviet Union, where he inhaled the smell of poverty. And, to address the world's misery, he founded the Switch Energy Alliance, an organization whose mission is educating the public on the energy issue and how best to use it. To this end, he teamed up with the American filmmaker Harry Lynch, with whom he made two documentaries dealing with global energy consumption and energy poverty in the global South. In this context, Tinker has traveled to more than 65 countries worldwide and initiated a series of collaborations with various communities and tribes - an activity that’s also been reflected in his various TED Talks, Student lectures, newspaper articles and television appearances. FilmsSwitch On (2019) - a film on global energy poverty directed by Harry Lynch.Switch (2012) - a film on global energy directed by Harry LynchScott Tinker at the ARC conference in London, 2023Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Undoubtedly, the question of oikophobia is a most puzzling social phenomenon. If the 19th-century psychiatrists understood it as the fear of being inside one’s home, the English philosopher Roger Scruton understood it to mean becoming a stranger, no, even more than that: an idiosyncrasy towards one's own culture that can take on ‘a chronic form…in the guise of political correctness.’ Benedict Beckeld – who grew up in Uppsala and Stockholm, and emigrated with his family to New York as a teenager – has taken up this concept as a comparative lens to examine history for recurring patterns. As a classical philologist and philosopher who studied and earned his doctorate in Heidelberg, and who also performed research as a visiting scholar at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and in Bologna, he is highly predisposed to do so (he had also spent a year as a student at the Sorbonne and was later a professor of philosophy and classics at the American University of Paris). After all, he has that fundamentally alien view distinguishing the historian, enabling him to identify recurring patterns and structures.Conversations with Dr. Beckeld are extremely stimulating as you move effortlessly with him through world history. If Beckeld follows the personality ideal of antiquity, he is also a child of postmodernism - just as familiar with its twists and turns as with various languages and philosophical systems of thought. Consequently, he’s by no means unfamiliar with the world of social media – in addition to his philosophical work, he also runs a video blog where he regularly comments on the issues of the day. He currently lives in New York and is working on a book about aesthetics and a narrative about his experiences as a young teacher in Namibia (which is why the young student in the photo below not only declared him her favorite teacher but one whose vast knowledge has changed her life).Link to Benedict Beckelds websiteBenedict Beckeld has recently publishedRelated Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Looking at many contemporary institutions, we can't help thinking Modernity's secret goal lies in its organizational irresponsibility. In the shadows, however, a revolution has occurred where the individual doesn’t have to function as a cog in the Wheelwork of a Machine. Instead, they’re given the freedom to work in small, highly agile groups responsible for the efficiency and quality of their product. Inspired by the novel Toyota Production System of Teamwork (TPS) that Japanese engineer Taiichi Ohno developed on the car manufacturer's factory floors, this movement found its spirtitus rector in Jeff Sutherland - a thinker whose Agile Manifesto (co-authored with Ken Schwaber in 2001) has promulgated this project management’s style in all areas of life. And if you consider Sutherland is advocating a method without methodology that’s essentially a staged form of chaos, you immediately sense a highly unconventional spirit at work here.As a West Point graduate, Jeff Sutherland was deployed flying reconnaissance over enemy territory in the Vietnam War – missions that often cost his fellow pilots their lives. Then, as a young statistician in Radiology, he was asked to apply his knowledge in cancer cell research, where his expertise unexpectedly catapulted the Stanford assistant professor into the financial industry. Here he experienced the problems of a strictly top-down, hierarchical management style and developed his idea of Scrum. That is small groups of people who, like a deeply attuned Rugby team, work out their interactions with each another - and in the form of blind agreement – develop a step-by-step efficiency that puts to shame everything designed to date. In this respect, it’s no coincidence this idea has found its way into the modern working world after becoming the startup world's undisputed paradigm. And that’s precisely what an energetic 82-year-old Jeff Sutherland tells us in his interview with Ex nihilo - the story of a revolution set on a permanent course.Life is What Happens To You While You’re Busy Making Other Plans (John Lennon)In German: Related Content Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

If we remember that the machina mundi, like the Deus ex Machina, flies in from above, it's unsurprising that the scene of the Machine Discourse shifts to where the Politics of Heaven are fought over. It's the emerging Christianity that takes up the Machine question - albeit in a way that seems like a palimpsest, a parchment that has been scraped over and over again: constantly rewritten.This chapter deals with the paradox of the Christian world (which is trying to free itself from ancient materialism) becoming the catalyst of the Machine World - through the detour of Universal Scriptural Writing and the Assumption of the Immaculate Conception. It's a movement that inevitably led to the building of Cathedrals, the founding of Universities, and the book society of the Renaissance.Speaker: Hopkins StanleySound-Design: Martin BurckhardtMusic: Hopkins Stanley & Martin BurckhardtFrom: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)To listen to previous chapters:Philosophy of the Machine 10Philosophy of the Machine 9Philosophy of the Machine 8Philosophy of the Machine 7Philosophy of the Machine 6Philosophy of the Machine 5Philosophy of the Machine 4Philosophy of the Machine 3Philosophy of the Machine 2Philosophy of the Machine 1Here is the Link for the German Publication at Matthes & Seitz Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

You might call Roger Pielke Jr., the son of the highly respected Climatologist Roger Pielke Sr., an Environmental Political scientist who analyzes the atmospheric disruptions between Science and Politics. And because, with the looming apocalypse, this represents mined terrain, Dr. Pielke, who's been awarded international prizes and honorary doctorates for his work and served as director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has found himself at the center of a campaign that made him, as he puts it, the Voldemort of climate science. Paradoxically, this label has nothing to do with Pielke's measured observations, delivered with the beautiful clarity of a true scientist, but solely with the veritable religious furor that activists and world-savers have brought to the debate. This position of Pielke's is based on a timeless scientific ethos, which never allows itself to become aligned with any cause - knowing that the cost of such activism is sacrificing science's integrity. On the other hand, the liminal position between Science and Politics has made him highly sensitive - so when Mary Douglas' name comes up in the conversation, he's immediately familiar with her institutional theory and mentions Steve Rayner's work, appropriately titled The Social Construction of Ignorance, explaining that institutions are not necessarily formed to produce new knowledge, but often to keep uncomfortable or inconvenient learning out of sight. But because Pielke is stubborn enough to endure even the disruptive and inappropriate, he doesn't shy away from the adversity - he only points out at the end of the conversation; however, that contradiction is more manageable at an advanced age and that Academia might not be the ideal place for an up-and-coming Roger Pielke III’s career choices.Roger Pielke has published.Related Topics Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

The chapter deals with the birth of metaphysics and eternal damnation, the emergence of that peculiar attitude of mind called Gnosis in the science of religion. That the Earth becomes transformed into a vale of tears is, in this sense, a dialectical necessity. That culture becomes the angel maker.If the pure sign represents the appearance of eternity, the question arises why we still concern ourselves with the decrepitude of the earthly. Why not live eternally right away?Speaker: Hopkins StanleySound-Design: Martin BurckhardtMusic: Hopkins Stanley & Martin BurckhardtFrom: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)To listen to previous chapters:Philosophy of the Machine 9Philosophy of the Machine 8Philosophy of the Machine 7Philosophy of the Machine 6Philosophy of the Machine 5Philosophy of the Machine 4Philosophy of the Machine 3Philosophy of the Machine 2Philosophy of the Machine 1hier der Link zur Publikation bei Matthes & Seitz Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

The idea of another world arises with the pure, animate signs: Pure spirit, eternity, Platonic bodies. In contrast, the real world is a cave, an underworld realm of shadows, in which illusory existences see only reflections of their destiny: the reflection of the true, the good, and the beautiful.The chapter tells of philosophy's birth - and of how thinking thus begins to run in circles: That which philosophy considers as being or essence is the art of running in the circle of the universal machine. En kyklos paidein. But as we know, still every encyclopedia is alphabetical.Speaker: Hopkins StanleySound-Design: Martin BurckhardtMusic: Hopkins Stanley & Martin BurckhardtFrom: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)To listen to previous chapters:Philosophy of the Machine 8Philosophy of the Machine 7Philosophy of the Machine 6Philosophy of the Machine 5Philosophy of the Machine 4Philosophy of the Machine 3Philosophy of the Machine 2Philosophy of the Machine 1hier der Link zur Publikation bei Matthes & Seitz Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Occasionally, we must admit we belong to an older generation with worldviews shaped by our specific generational experiences. This, at least, was what crossed my mind while reading the text of a young Swedish writer considering the question of whether our present-day culture wars could be the result of an elite overproduction in the form of an educational glut from a flawed educational system; often leading its actors into the fiercest battles, not infrequently unfairly waged, for the remaining high-status jobs. The most interesting thing about this reflection is its tribute to the forgotten American political scientist James Burnham, who’d analyzed an emerging new ruling class in the forties with the publication of his Managerial Revolution – incidentally, which significantly influenced George Orwell’s writing of 1984. In his referencing of this thinker, who was a Trotskyist that metamorphosed into a staunch conservative, Malcom Kyeyune finds a diagnosis for the present as something quite comparable: an emerging new Woke elite class that distinguishes themselves morally rather than economically while teaching the world of its possibility. He notices that they are engaging in a moral economy that can be used for career advancement, social status, and economic advantage, often at the economic and career expense of the disadvantage they supposedly represent. And because Malcolm still considers himself a Marxist, our conversation (even if it lightly crosses different eras, cultures, and continents) revolves around questioning what drives this strange moral economy.Malcolm Kyeyune is a fearlessly provocative blogger and writer living in Uppsala, Sweden. He shouts for Aftonbladet but primarily for English-language venues like UnHerd, American Affair, and Compact Magazine.Correspondigs topics Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

The chapter deals with the birth of Pythagorean mathematics - or, more precisely, the way with which mathematicians fall into the delirium of Infinity.Carnival. In that old-fashioned sense, every mathematical calculus has a strange carnivalesque side because you extract the flesh from life. Just as the tones of the music are abstracted from the body of sound, the formula dissolves an experience from reality, imposing on it a system of rules in which the highest is at the bottom, the lowest is at the top.Speaker: Hopkins StanleySound-Design: Martin BurckhardtMusic: Hopkins Stanley & Martin BurckhardtFrom: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)To listen to previous chapters:Philosophy of the Machine 7Philosophy of the Machine 6Philosophy of the Machine 5Philosophy of the Machine 4Philosophy of the Machine 3Philosophy of the Machine 2Philosophy of the Machine 1Here’s the link to the original German edition. Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

The chapter tells of how the Machine, as socioplasty, inscribes itself on antiquity - how it becomes an ideal of personality and, as imprinted freedom, ultimately determines social relations.From then on, sacrifices were no longer made to the gods but to the Polis. It is no coincidence that taxation is the only area in which we still talk about having to make sacrifices today.Speaker: Hopkins StanleySound-Design: Martin BurckhardtMusic: Hopkins Stanley & Martin BurckhardtFrom: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)To listen to previous chapters: Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

The sixth chapter tells how the phallic sign of the bull deity turns into an alphabetic type. But where does this story begin? There, where the god in bull form abducts Europa to Crete? Or in the labyrinth of Daedalus, where the Alpha-beast and mythical figure awaits its extinction?With the Alphabet, the twilight of the gods begins…we do not meet the riddle of creation here, but rather a nature that is spun into the type wheel of an already given understanding of the world.Speaker: Hopkins StanleySound-Design: Martin BurckhardtMusic: Hopkins Stanley & Martin BurckhardtFrom: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)To listen to previous chapters: Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

The fifth chapter deals with the paradox that the art of memory (ars memoria) is joined by the art of forgetting (ars oblivionis) - which may explain why the beginnings of Western culture are obscure or, as the case may be, declared as “the Greek miracle.”The realization that the alphabetic sign isn’t only what it notates but also what it makes us forget.From: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)To listen to previous chapters:Philosophy of the Machine 4Philosophy of the Machine 3Philosophy of the Machine 2Philosophy of the Machine 1 Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

The serial killer is a figure of pop culture. This may be one reason why one of the strangest cases in this field is little known to this day: the case of the French doctor Marcel Petiot, who spread the rumor in occupied Paris that he was helping people escape to South America, but then murdered his victims, most of them Jews, himself. The American author Thomas Maeder has written an excellent book that captures the figure of the psychopath in all its complexity while at the same time allowing the madness of the time to emerge. And this outlines the cosmos of the author himself. Maeder, the son of a psychoanalyst, has studied the connection between Crime and Madness and the Origins and Evolution of the Insanity Defense. And he recently just finished work on a book that tells the story of a great passion - and in which love and crime bizarrely mix. The previous conversations Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

This chapter tells of the origin of the god Zeus, who was originally Zeus metallon, a metallurgical godhead reflecting the social practices of mining and metal extraction. Underpinning Jacques Lacan's beautiful remark: the gods are from the field of the real.Vertigo of the Proteus. Swindle of Art. That behind every realization, a universe of discarded possibilities opens up: all the possible worlds that have not been realized.From: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)To listen to previous chapters:Philosophy of the Machine 3Philosophy of the Machine 2Philosophy of the Machine 1Here’s the link to the original German edition. Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Sam Vaknin is an Israeli author who’s written extensively on the question of borderline and narcissism - and this with an unparalleled clarity. Above all, he, who has wonderfully declared himself a contemporary of Shakespeare, is someone whose gaze looks far beyond the narrow confines of the psychological discipline. This is due not least to the fact that he can look back on an eventful life in which he has held a wide variety of positions: startup founder, head of an investment fund, and advisor to various governments. In addition to a professorship in psychology, he also holds a professorship in finance. Besides that, he runs a YouTube channel with a quarter of a million followers. His book Malignant Self-Love, now in its 10th edition, has become a classic in the literature on narcissism.The previous conversations Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

This chapter goes back to the beginning of the machine concept, or more precisely: it makes clear that the Greek deus ex machina is based on an even older understanding of the machine, deeply interwoven with magical ideas.Could it be in the stage production of the godhead that the numinous passes over to the Machine? And the other way around: Is it possible that the godhead originates from the Machine? But then the godhead would be a product of the Machine. Basically, both are absurdities: the deified Machine, the reified god.To listen to the previous chapters:Philosophy of the Machine 1Philosophy of the Machine 2From: The Philosophy of the Machine (Translated by Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt - to be published)Here’s the link to the German edition: Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

This chapter continues uncovering the obscurations of what a Machine is by examining the Phenomenology of what it is or isn’t. What lies behind and beyond the phenomena of its skeuomorphic medially of a technological system?The closer you get to the Machine, the stranger it looks back. Speaking of a system of interacting elements functioning great than their sum is simply a tautology that leaves the question unanswered.From: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)To listen to the previous chapter:Philosophy of the Machine 1Here’s the link to the original German edition. Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe