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 ...
Jul 19, 2025•1 hr 10 min
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 unc...
Jun 29, 2025•47 min
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 a...
Jun 15, 2025•5 min
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 ...
Jun 03, 2025•4 min
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 rings, into a glaring brightness mixed with blackness, shimmering red, the feeling of growing tensio...
May 28, 2025•16 min
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...
May 23, 2025•1 hr 7 min
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 wit...
Apr 25, 2025•49 min
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 phenomeno...
Apr 17, 2025•37 min
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 Phil...
Mar 15, 2025•1 hr 10 min
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 ca...
Mar 10, 2025•6 min
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 hi...
Feb 09, 2025•57 min
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 unde...
Jan 16, 2025•52 min
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...
Dec 13, 2024•58 min
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 . T...
Dec 06, 2024•52 min
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...
Nov 23, 2024•38 min
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 h...
Oct 31, 2024•1 hr 3 min
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 min...
Sep 25, 2024•55 min
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 ...
Sep 04, 2024•59 min
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 Russia...
Jul 20, 2024•1 hr 4 min
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 vani...
May 20, 2024•1 hr 6 min
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 facili...
May 13, 2024•24 min
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 chang...
May 09, 2024•1 hr 29 min
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...
May 02, 2024•51 min
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 t...
Mar 30, 2024•52 min
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 Burckhardt Music: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt From: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by...
Mar 03, 2024•55 min
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 h...
Feb 29, 2024•1 hr 8 min
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 teenage...
Jan 31, 2024•1 hr 8 min
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 Taiich...
Jan 20, 2024•1 hr 11 min
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 mat...
Dec 23, 2023•33 min
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 h...
Aug 13, 2023•51 min
