Ex nihilo - Podcast English

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 rulin...

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 Enze...

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...

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 his...

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...

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 technologi...

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...

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 t...

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 attent...

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 Stanley Sound-Design: Martin Burckhar...

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,...

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 Be...

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 pro...

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 ch...

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 C...

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 ours...

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 whi...

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; oft...

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...

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 St...

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 t...

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,...

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 boo...

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 wor...

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 wh...