Ex nihilo - Podcast English

If, precisely to the extent that the field of education has championed lofty principles, a decline in education has set in, the question arises: Where did this come from? Psychologist Peter Gray, for whom the question of learning has become his life’s work (and who, for many years, wrote his widely read Freedom to Learn column in Psychology Today ), recalls his school days in the 1950s, especially...

Because the second volume of The Psychology of the Machine series is set to be released in a few days, we sat down for a brief workshop to discuss why such an undertaking is necessary and the potential gap that must be bridged along the way. In a curious way, the story leads back to the suppressed childhood questions of our history, which we encounter today in ghostly form as social puzzles that a...

As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a seemingly endless summer of globalization began—thirty golden years in which the only question worth asking was how to stimulate demand. But what happens when the world turns on its own axis and the problem is no longer finding consumers, but actually producing anything at all? David Baverez, a financial strategist who has spent the past decade observing China fr...

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 subm...

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 Prim...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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 epistemol...

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, r...

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, w...

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,...

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 tr...

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 Burckhardt In the Labyrinth of the Signs I The Gods are from the Field of the Real ( Jacques Lacan ) Dazzled by the Blinding What is it like to look into the sun? To feel small sparks burning into your eyes, expanding into...

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 wi...

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 diseng...

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 wit...

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 th...

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...

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 interesti...

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 E...

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...

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 th...

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 n...