When people say we’re living in an Attention Economy, a world where everything is becoming increasingly fleeting, ephemeral, and superficial, they may be right for the moment, but this isn’t by any means a sufficient description of our current situation. In fact, you could go so far as to make the opposite claim: that our digitalised present allows us to store Attention in ways previously impossible. Whereas stored attention in the pre-digital world took the form of a book, sounds, images, and even complex sequences of movements and Thought-Engrams can now be stored, with the result that the contemporary intellectual, once limited to reading between the lines (inter-legere), can now engage the entire sensorimotor apparatus. From this perspective, the lament over contemporary communication’s transience essentially reveals itself as a failure, even a sin of omission. Instead of engaging with how the Writing of the new world can be utilized, it indulges in the lamentations of a dying world.

And amid this general lament, Substack seemed like a godsend—a place that doesn’t bombard readers and viewers with ads and clickbait, but instead offers authors the opportunity to engage with their audience in a thoroughly novel, multimedia exchange. And because the old Author’s ethos still haunted my mind, my goal was that all the texts, audio, and videos, as well as the conversations with members of the intelligentsia, should retain their relevance beyond the day they were published. This was a vow I made long ago—that I would write nothing that might turn out to be embarrassing in three, four, or five years, or (worse still) force me to make excuses based on the passage of time. That my partner Hopkins Stanley dug up my work from the late eighties and nineties was touching, insofar as, alongside the personal journey through time, the transpersonal dimension also became visible—all the questions that, even though they’ve been around for a few decades, remain relevant.

And this is precisely what remains and should remain the guiding principle of ex nihilo: that all our conversations do not get lost in clickbait, but point beyond the day.

I realized this when Aldo Haesler, with whom I had a wonderful conversation about the nature of money, told me afterward that it had become something like his personal testament—a statement that touched me all the more deeply when I learned of his death a few months later. Now, while the hope of leaving a great body of work to posterity may strike some as falling into the realm of the romantic original Genius—I don’t want to relinquish the aspiration of creating texts and thinking that endure beyond the day.

Because the conversations we’ve had on ex nihilo over the past three years have almost exclusively dealt with open questions, we’ve spruced up our somewhat neglected YouTube channel to reflect this.

One of the reasons we decided to do this was that Substack lets you link to a YouTube channel and automatically handles the feed. And YouTube really does have its merits—after all, you can create playlists on it that focus on specific thematic blocks.

So if you’re interested in any of these topics, you’ll find what you’re looking for there.

Here’s the channel, followed by its links to our individual playlists (which, of curse contain a series of videos):

Im Gespräch mit … | Talking to … | Culture | Economy | Politics | Zeitgeist | Digital | Media |

Energy | Art | Education | Philosophy | History | Arbeitswelt | Artificial Intelligence |

ex nihilo | Philosophie der Maschine | Going Viral | Geschichte der Digitalisierung

So far, we’ve transferred about half of our conversations there, but we will finish uploading the entire video archive over the next three or four weeks.

Does this mean we intend to neglect Substack? No, quite the opposite. When we compare this ecosystem with the outside world, the differences become even more apparent—and so does the importance of not losing your attention to clickbait, but rather, as before, focusing on how to preserve it permanently.

In fact, every author knows that a book, in a certain sense, remains the most intense repository of time—and consequently, the second volume of my Psychology of the Machine series will be published on May 28:

This volume of the series deals with the question of Alien Logic – only that, as always, I have approached it with the utmost thoroughness, which is why I’ve taken up the fundamental questions of Anthropology by immersing myself in the world of Bronisław Malinowski and his Trobrianders, which unsettled anthropological thinking simply because of how the Trobrianders couldn’t conceive of (not even in the case of the domestic pig) natural reproduction nor a natural manner of death—which exposes our talk of Primitive Peoples for what it is: a backward-looking fantasy of salvation.

But enough with the announcements! Just let yourself be surprised.

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Is it any wonder that history, having confronted us with the dark chambers of human nature, now leads us into battlefields, into the field of the Man who, as they say, is the Father of all things? Undoubtedly, war accelerates the development of computer culture, yet it would be premature to regard it as the cause. As we have noted, the computer doesn’t come alone but brings with it all kinds of specters showing themselves in the most contradictory ways. Without a doubt, the computer’s history is always also a story of death and the devil, of angels dancing on the head of a pin—something between a nightmare and a fairy tale, a blessing and a curse. How did Nietzsche put it? Where human creations are at play, human madness is never far behind. Consequently, the progress of reason is accompanied by deeply enigmatic, underlying motives; a fairground fortune-teller can play a role just as significant as the mathematical cold logic. Each of these strands is so powerful on its own that their combination could almost be described as a form of schizophrenia. In any case, it would be fundamentally wrong to praise Alan Turing, whom we’ll discuss in the next chapter, as the inventor of the Turing Machine, while ignoring that secret life which ultimately led him to take his own life. With a poisoned apple, just like Snow White.

Alan Turing was born in 1912, the second son of a civil servant working for the British Empire in India. Since his father believed that his two sons had no place in India, they were placed in the care of a governor, who, quite fittingly, was named Colonel Ward. When they are old enough, they are sent to a public school, one of those prestigious English schools where boys are groomed to operate as efficiently as possible within the Empire’s bureaucracy. But if anyone isn’t cut out for this world, it is little Alan, a shy child who constantly spills ink on himself and then gets humiliated in front of his classmates as a result. While the young Hollerith escaped all constraints by jumping out of a window, Alan Turing knew no other escape than dreaming of a special ink that would, so to speak, render his clumsiness invisible. And while his classmates enjoyed themselves on the sports field, Alan watched from the sidelines; his role as a linesman afforded him a perspective on the action that was both outsider-like and geometric.

But this description of a loner isn’t entirely accurate. As Alan grows up, he realizes, contrary to the school’s strict rules, that he perceives the school’s esprit de corps not so much in athletic terms as in erotic ones. Alan is attracted to boys—specifically, an intelligent classmate who shares his interest in science. For Turing, the discovery of a kindred spirit is as startling as if he had met an alien. Suddenly, the world is no longer a place of profound loneliness but a promise of encountering his beloved—and so the places where his beloved Christopher walks become, in a sense, sacred.

Unlike Alan, who is shy and comes from a modest background, Christopher Morcom is worldly, charming, and extremely engaging personality. Moreover, Morcom’s family is extremely wealthy. In any case, the astonished Alan (who experiments with the simplest tools in the school basement) finds out that the Morcom family has given their sons a laboratory of their own. For an entire summer, the two friends discuss Astronomy, Chemistry experiments, and the Theory of Relativity. However, their relationship remains completely platonic. Their letters, in which they address each other by last name, focus on experiments and questions of Physics and Mathematics. This doesn’t stop them from planning to study at Cambridge together — but after the entrance exam, only Christopher is admitted. Turing is utterly inconsolable, but barely a week later, his beloved friend dies from an undisclosed case of bovine tuberculosis.

Alan writes to Christopher’s mother, and in return, she invites him to take a trip with her in the place of her deceased son. He sleeps in Christopher’s bed, in his sleeping bag, and asks his surrogate mother to give him a goodnight kiss. Together, they make a pilgrimage to the church where a stained-glass window has been dedicated to the deceased as Saint Christopher. This becomes an annual ritual, and in his correspondence with the mother, Turing raises the question, ›Why do we have bodies at all, why don’t we live freely as minds […] and communicate as such?‹

The times, however, leave no room for platonic love stories. Throughout Europe, the approaching war is palpable. And it’s clear that in the battles ahead, victory will depend not just on fighting spirit and heroism, but also on intelligence and resources. In the war of secrecy, the Germans possess a cryptographic wonder weapon called Enigma, which makes it virtually impossible for their enemies to intercept the Wehrmacht’s communications.

Although the machine operates through radio transmission and Morse code, structurally its core principle remains pre-digital—one originally proposed by Renaissance philosopher Leon Battista Alberti: Using two sliding discs, one exchanges alphabetic signs with one another, so that depending on the discs’ positions, an E might be replaced by a P, and an I by a V—thus transforming »Ei« into an unreadable »PV«.

That the Enigma Machine was considered unbreakable, despite its relatively primitive substitution mechanism, because the discs were regularly changed by switching between different rotors, resulting in the explosion of what would otherwise be a manageable combinatorial problem of the 26-letter substitution into terrifying trillions of possibilities. To tackle this challenge, British Intelligence desperately sought out scientists who believed they could solve it. But why did the Secret Service choose Alan Turing?

In 1936, the 24-year-old Turing published an essay that tackled the highly abstract mathematical problem known as Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem [Decision Problem] and proposed a practical solution. David Hilbert’s original question was whether it was possible to design an algorithm that, based on yes-or-no answers, could verify the universal validity of a logical statement—that is, a truth test. Turing’s solution was innovative in that he didn’t get lost in the labyrinth of metalogic, but instead assigned the task to a machine—a device that seemed to spring from Turing’s obsession with the spill-proof special fountain pen. In fact, it was a writing device with only three main elements: an infinite tape divided into squares, a read/write head that could read and overwrite the contents of a square, and, finally, a program that instructed the write head to move left or right and perform specific operations.

So, counting one up from a number would be very simple to do, specifically with the instruction: »Read the number from the box, move one space to the right, and add one to the number you have memorized. Write the result in the box you are currently on.« Since the machine would have all the time in the world, it could solve any mechanically solvable problem—except for those involving a future, undiscovered type of number. So, in the end, Turing’s Universal Machine was nothing more than a formalization of Babbage’s Proof of God’s existence—along with the side effect that Turing’s imaginary machine had solved Hilbert’s decision problem, or more accurately: demonstrated its unsolvability. For if all the time of the world is necessary for a calculation, then there is no stopping point and, consequently, no decision about the calculation being true or false. While the mathematics may be difficult to grasp, the phenomenon itself is well known to us. It is the moment our computer hangs itself on a routine and freezes. If a calculation takes all the time in the world, there is no stopping point and no way to decide if it is true or false. The mathematics might be hard for us to understand, but we’re very familiar with the phenomenon: that moment when our computer freezes.

Because of the impact of his essay in the small world of mathematics, Turing was invited to study in America. After defending his doctoral thesis, he returned to England—and was immediately recruited by the Government Code and Cypher School, the decryption division of British intelligence. There he encountered what was called a Computer at the time: young, low-paid women who performed simple calculations and copying tasks in open-plan ›Big Room‹ offices. Even what we call Software had a different, more tangible meaning back then—referring to the small paper cards used by German submarine radio operators that contained the Enigma’s changing default encryption settings. To prevent them from falling into enemy hands if a submarine sank, they had been made and inscribed with water-soluble paper and ink. In some ways, the Enigma Project was the perfect work environment for Alan Turing. There, he was surrounded by crossword puzzle enthusiasts, hieroglyphics specialists, paleontologists—all nerds who didn’t bat an eye when their hero rode up on his bike wearing a gas mask.

Despite these quirks, the code breakers quickly succeeded. This was because German radio operators had a habit of repeatedly using the same phrases to encrypt their messages, and nearly every message began with the greeting »Heil Hitler,« providing the researchers with enough clues to decode the daily-changing ciphers. Even at this early stage, Turing proved himself not only as a mathematical genius but also as the co-inventor of a decryption machine they nicknamed »the Bomb.«

However, in July 1942, a crisis emerged: the Germans had added 12 rotors to the Enigma, which they called the Lorenz Machine, and its ciphers proved extremely complex to decipher. The only way to deal with the unleashed combinatorial possibilities was to accelerate the decryption process—and this meant the work of the »Big Room Girls« had to be somehow changed to machine processing. Turing remembered a young man, Tommy Flowers, who worked in the British Post Office’s research department. Flowers had already impressed Turing because his automatic relays reminded him of his own dreams of building machines. So the engineer came to Bletchley Park, where the Code and Cypher School was located, and began working with them on what would become a marvel of engineering: the Colossus. Flowers designed the hardware setup, while Turing provided the mathematical and statistical expertise. Flowers managed to feed paper tape into the machine at 30 miles per hour, enabling it to process 5,000 characters per second—equivalent to about 500 human workers reading simultaneously. The Colossus employed the Boolean circuits that Claude Shannon described in his master’s thesis, breaking down and encoding letters into a 5-bit code. Equipped with 1,500 vacuum tubes (2,500 in later versions), the machine could process data at a rate of one-two-hundred-millionth of a second. This speedup reduced the time needed to decrypt a message from several weeks to just a few hours.

Although the Colossus project was extremely successful—ultimately decisive for the war’s outcome—all memory of it was erased at the end of the war. To prevent the machines from falling into the hands of an enemy communist power, they were destroyed and eventually discarded in abandoned coal mines. Alan Turing, for his part—who had been honored with the Order of the British Empire but forbidden to speak of his work—moved to Manchester, where, as director of the country’s first computer laboratory, he received funding to build an electronic computer. This marked the beginning of the passion project that would shape the rest of his life: designing Artificial Intelligence. Even if his machine was destined to fail in judging beauty contests,¹ he didn’t let that stop him from advocating for the superior intellectual existence he wanted to create—an idea he had already shared in his letter to Christopher’s mother: ›Why can’t we live and communicate with one another as minds? Why do we have bodies at all?‹

However, strangely enough, it was exactly this seemingly unnecessary body that drew Turing into an affair with a young man—an act that, in 1954, was still illegal. Unlike Wittgenstein, his teacher, who was always so shocked seeing a boy prostituting himself that he ran home and awkwardly coded the seduction in his notebook, Turing was comparatively casual about it all. While people usually met under bridges or in parks, Turing had met 19-year-old Arnold Murray at a movie theater. He had told him about his work on an Electronic Brain and invited him over for dinner. Murray didn’t show up, but when they met again, they spent the night together. Lying on the carpet, Turing told him about a dream in which an airplane hangar was actually an outsourced brain. Anyone could enter it safely—except Turing. If he stepped inside, the room would trap him and force him to play a game of chess for life or death.

It’s uncertain whether Murray, who came from a neglected home, could have grasped what Turing was sharing about his work and his dreams; the only certainty is that he had a penchant for higher pursuits and felt flattered by Turing’s efforts to spark his passion for science. And so as not to dispel Turing’s impression, he refrained from negotiating a fee for his services. Instead, he lifted a ten-pound note, a pair of shoes, and Turing’s beloved compass to say goodbye, which, of course, Turing discovered. They argued, and Murray was partially forgiven, but he decided to exact revenge for the humiliation by giving Turing’s address to a criminal friend. The latter took advantage of the opportunity to break into the house, and events unfolded: the police arrived and took fingerprints, while detectives incidentally discovered several magazines featuring boys posing in revealing poses. Suspecting Murray planted the magazines in his home, Turing wrote him a letter saying he wished to break off all contact with him. Murray then showed up on his doorstep, asserting his innocence, telling Turing about his accomplice, and ended up spending the night in his patron’s bed. This time, however, Turing took his fingerprints and handed them over to the police. Since the police have already identified the thief, they instead inquired about the nature of Turing’s relationship with the young man. Turing confessed—and suddenly found himself no longer the victim of a theft, but the defendant. In a letter to his ex-fiancée describing the events, he admitted that he was not only homosexual but had also occasionally engaged in homosexual acts. When the trial took place on March 31, 1952 (The Queen v. Turing), the presiding judge sentenced him to a suspended sentence on the condition that he undergo chemical castration. Turing was treated with estrogen, which caused him to develop breasts; he began to suffer from depression, sending him to see a psychoanalyst. The greatest humiliation, however, was that all his services for Great Britain seemed to become forgotten. It was forgotten that Turing was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for deciphering the Enigma machine; that it was thanks to him that the Allies won the Battle of the Atlantic; forgotten that here stood a great scientist, a source of distinction and pride in British computer research. Suddenly, he became a security risk, seen as a danger to Great Britain.

Shortly before his death, a memorable scene took place. Turing visited an amusement park in Blackpool with his therapist Greenbaum and his wife—and gave in to the temptation of seeing a fortune-teller. After half an hour, he emerged from the fortune-teller’s tent, pale as a ghost and hesitant to speak about what happened. This event signaled the end of his therapy. Turing had called Greenbaum the day before his suicide but was dead before Greenbaum could call him back. He was found lying on the bed, foaming at the mouth. Next to the bed was a bitten apple, while in the next room was a simmering electrolytic gold-plating experiment using potassium cyanide.

Of course, this Snow White death was anything but a coincidence, as we know the poison apple scene deeply touched Turing when he saw the Disney movie in 1938. Undoubtedly, he saw in Sleeping Beauty the image of an intelligence that could be revived with a kiss. And isn’t the computer precisely that?

A glass coffin that reanimates the things it has stripped of their physical form? Since the body of Sleeping Beauty, lying there in the glass coffin, is superior to the mortal and fragile body, we can understand why Turing committed himself so passionately to the project of artificial intelligence—and this long before anyone could have imagined a computer-controlled robot. It makes no sense, Turing argued, to punish a computer for failing to shine in a beauty contest, any more than we can blame a human for losing a race against an airplane. The goal is to create that higher mental intelligence Turing dreamed of in his letters to the mother of his beloved Christopher with the computer. But since this cannot happen ex nihilo, the first step is to create a child machine that, through interaction with its teachers, develops into a mature, and possibly superior, intelligence. But how can we test whether such a child machine has intelligence equal to that of a human? Turing’s answer, which has gone down in history as the Turing Test, is just as practical as his solution to Hilbert’s decision problem. If the machine succeeds in coming across as a gendered human being in a conversation with a human, the computer can be considered equal to a human. And because Turing is convinced this ennobling of humanity is only a question of time, we return to Snow White, who is far too beautiful to be buried in the black earth.

You can see: Turing’s model of artificial intelligence is far more than an expert system; it corresponds to the phantasm that also drove Ada Lovelace, the Bride of Science, to live as a purely disembodied sign. In this sense, his choice of suicide is not a personal, but a collective legacy, a fantasy that every contemporary transhumanist is willing to bear witness to - the idea that we and the world could have a better life – a Second Life. And if they haven’t died…

Translation: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

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When the late Jürgen Habermas lamented the New Obscurity in 19851, we could diagnose the exact opposite today: a level of intellectual conformity that might evoke memories of German history’s darkest era. However, the reasons for this new, surprisingly clear understanding are not at all obvious. If you only consider the symptoms, you could speak—depending on your perspective—of a narrowing of the range of opinion, an infantilization of political discourse, or the Clickbait logic—but this only focuses on the symptoms. Talk of the Attention Economy generously overlooks that Money’s primordial function actually lies in its suitability as a means of value storage. In contrast, the uncomfortable truth is that, in the age of clickbait, we’re not dealing with preservation but with shrinking attention spans (as our former Chancellor demonstrated when she promised to govern by sight). It’s no coincidence that the media coups of the past have turned out to be strategic errors; today, with considerable delay, we must conclude that the groundbreaking decisions of that era stemmed from political short-sightedness, if not from base motives altogether. While this has previously led me to see it as a Sham Economy illusion – a kind of Limbo Economy – ultimately, it comes down to the sinister conclusion that the Beautiful, the True, and the Good are things of the past, since Art has become kitsch, Truth has turned into bullshit, and Ethics have shifted into moral grandstanding.2 If you ask an intellectual how a Society that bandies about noble concepts like creativity, diversity, and human dignity could have succumbed to utter stupidity, he will blame social media—or, à la Yanis Varoufakis, cite a new techno-feudalism. There is no doubt that social media (which will also play a major role in what follows) has contributed to the deterioration of discourse; however, it’s far too simplistic to blame technology (or the tech companies behind it) for this alone. For my part, back in the early 1990s, I already observed in public broadcasters how the Attention Economy was taking hold—and how the fact that the Nuremberg Society for Consumer Research had been a Nazi invention was conveniently swept under the rug. What did Goebbels say in a lecture for the Westdeutscher Rundfunk? 90% should be entertainment; 10% political propaganda is entirely sufficient.

The starting point of my disquiet was an incident in 2015, soon after I finished writing an essay on Jeremy Bentham, aptly titled The Master of All Selfies3. In fact, studying Bentham—who went down in history as the inventor of the infamous Panopticon—was enlightening insofar as he’d had the idea of immortalizing himself as an Auto-Icon. For this reason, he had instructed his physician friend to have his body stuffed using a Maori technique, with the unfortunate side effect that his head, having become a shrunken head, was disfigured beyond recognition, necessitating its replacement with a wax replica.

And because my friend, the cosmetic—no, the plastic surgeon—had told me that quite a few people undergo cosmetic surgery to look like their own profile picture since the Internet’s been flooded with Duck Faces and other beauty filters, it was clear that what had once been consigned to a digital alternate world as Second Life had long since come to dominate reality. And it was into this train of thought that the unfortunate case of Sir Tim Hunt, a Nobel laureate, burst—a storm of indignation suddenly erupting out of the blue against him.

So, what had happened? The 72-year-old Nobel laureate had been invited to Seoul to lend some significance—no, more than that: to bring scientific gravitas—to a conference on the role of women in science. There, after being asked to give a short, impromptu speech, he introduced himself to his predominantly female audience with these self-deprecating words:

»It’s strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls? Now, seriously, I’m impressed by the economic development of Korea. And women scientists played, without a doubt, an important role in it. Science needs women, and you should do science, despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me.«

As expected, the audience responded with loud laughter to this humorous remark. However, in addition to the Korean guests, Connie St. Louis, a British science journalist, was also sitting in the audience, and spotting an opportunity, she set out to expose a Nobel laureate as a sexist. She seized on Hunt’s remark and tweeted in a tone of sincere outrage that »sexist Tim Hunt« had ruined the event with his comment that gender segregation should be reintroduced in laboratories. When another Twitter user asked whether the lecture had been recorded, another conference attendee confirmed the journalist’s accusation. Although it had been secretly agreed upon in advance, this set the stage for the public. What followed was a firestorm where first the Twitterati, then the International media, competed to outdo each other in their outrage at the alleged sexist. Even before Sir Hunt set foot on English soil again, he had lost his professorship at University College London, his honorary seat in the Royal Society, and his position at the European Research Council. Even the Korean organizers felt compelled to distance themselves from his appearance afterward. His claim that he’d only meant it as a joke was interpreted as an admission of misconduct, as was a public apology delivered through tears. Not only was the accusation based on a severe misrepresentation of the incident, but the accuser, Connie St. Louis, was also a rather questionable individual. While, as a Black woman, she might have felt particularly entitled to claim victimhood, the biography she shared on her website was full of inaccurate and grossly misleading information. So it remained up to the conference participants to address the difference between personal memory and media coverage. As objections mounted, Connie St. Louis doubled down, asserting that it wasn’t just her alone—the entire room had reacted to Hunt’s remarks with deadly silence. Although more and more strange details about the science journalist’s Pseudologies emerged, it was only when a recording surfaced showing Hunt among a cheering crowd that the story collapsed.4 But by then, Hunt had long since become a non-person. More important than the fate of individuals, however, is what the affair reveals about a society that permits such things to happen. While the media Witch Hunt may bring to mind the Communist persecutions of the McCarthy era, this parallel also underscores important differences.5 Because while the early Cold War focused on the interests of the State, the Hunt affair is all about Identity Politics. And since any sexist, no matter his merits, must never be allowed to play any role, the little Brothers and Sisters were quick to declare Sir Tim Hunt an Unperson, despite the actual circumstances.

To convey the tone of even a bourgeois public that considers itself liberal-minded, we offer the following commentary that Ariane Bemmer, the opinion editor for the Tagesspiegel, offered on the matter:

Old chauvinism piped up loudly once again — but wham — it got a good knock on the noggin, so things should be quiet again for a while. And rightly so. Old chauvinism in this case is the 72-year-old Nobel laureate Tim Hunt. He made a remark at a conference in Seoul that he — as he later tacked on — thought was funny. Since then, he’s been free to tend to his quinces in his lovely garden in the county of Hertfordshire, north of London.6

What makes Sir Tim Hunt’s case remarkable is the utter disproportion: the circumstances of a small, scattered group of individuals (nowadays referred to as activists, though perhaps more aptly understood as a coalition of free radicals) managing to establish a narrative that the entire public wholeheartedly embraced—and this despite the fact that the lecture (since it had been recorded) could have easily been watched on YouTube. The fact that newspapers and television stations skipped their research and instead launched into a Postmodern Witch Hunt could—albeit with some stretch of the imagination—be attributed to Clickbait logic. But the institutions involved should have exercised their responsibility to conduct due diligence and, after examining the facts, have defended the scholar, rather than distancing themselves from him—even going so far as to demand an apology from him. This can only be seen as a form of institutional cowardice, a conformism that casts doubt on the integrity of all involved. More concerning, however, is that the »sexism scandal« was based solely on the complete denial—no, the inversion—of reality. If Roland Barthes once aptly said, »Desire writes the text,« then we might conclude that the underlying desire lay in the humiliation, indeed, in the symbolic annihilation of an old white man. This outbreak of collective psychopathology—what I have called Sociose—is nonetheless remarkable, for here we are confronted with a resentment that only finds its satisfaction in conjuring up a Monster [Ungeheuer].

This brings us to the second case, taking us back to 2023—specifically to the day when Hamas carried out the October 7^th Pogrom.

If the case of this young woman, who was active in the pro-Hamas camp on the Stanford campus, is to be recounted here, it isn’t to use an ad hominem argument to condemn her folly (which, moreover—and this is to her greatest credit—she distanced herself from her errors in the interview), but because hers is an exemplary story, a conversation that prompts reflection on group and mob behavior.

When asked by the interviewer how she would describe herself, the young woman said she’s an activist who has always been politically committed to defending the disenfranchised worldwide. While most of her support before October 7^th had been limited to occasional Free Palestine posts, on October 7^th, she noticed countless Palestinian flags appearing in her live feed. This led her to assume that the Gaza Strip had been attacked by the Israeli army and that the dead mentioned must undoubtedly be soldiers of the Israeli armed forces. She realized the gravity of the situation when flyers appeared on campus the following day, calling for participation in community discussions—a call she heeded immediately. The speakers shared their views, saying that this conflict had been simmering for a long time—actually, since the founding of the Israeli State—highlighting the importance of taking a strong stand. The activist certainly didn’t need to be told this because she had long known that if you didn’t pay this social currency, you could expect intense peer pressure (it felt critical to voice your opinion early and as often as possible to show what it means to be a true ally). In fact, anyone who didn’t conform to this social currency was seen as an opponent—no, worse, as someone contributing to genocide. Regarding the events themselves, the young woman was firmly convinced that this was genocide perpetrated by a criminal apartheid system—and because she saw in it a reenactment of American racial segregation where Hamas played the role of a heroic Black Panther movement, she interpreted her own resistance to the Israeli actions as a struggle against the injustices faced by her ancestors. Anyone who didn’t share this worldview was a Zionist paid by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Because interacting with such paid lackeys was seen as unhelpful and there was also the risk of being filmed or recorded during such a discussion, the very idea of having any conversation lay beyond the horizon of thought. Consequently, it was crucial (since »Zionist is a dirty word«) to avoid such contamination—along with any critical or even hesitant questioning. The young woman was well aware that the revered Hamas had no qualms about resorting to violence, but since the end justifies the means, these atrocities had to be viewed within a broader context. Or, as the slogan that overshadowed all other questions put it: Resistance is justified when Palestine is occupied. It was after she’d proven her loyalty and commitment to the cause that she began having her first doubts when, in June 2024, she witnessed her comrades from the Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) storm the faculty offices, causing significant damage and smearing the walls with graffiti that read, depending on the instance: »Pigs taste best dead« or »Death 2 Israel.«

As a result of this irritation, which was also her first tentative stepping away from the group, the young woman accepted an invitation to visit an exhibition in Los Angeles in October 2024—a good year after the pogrom. Although she’d wisely kept this decision secret from her like-minded peers, it was by no means a sign of a shift in her beliefs. On the contrary, until she entered the exhibition halls, she remained convinced that the exhibition organizers, the producers of the Nova Music Festival would present her with nothing but Israeli propaganda material. In a way, this expectation is a mystery, if not an outright absurdity. Up until the moment she entered the exhibition halls, she hadn’t even seen any of the Hamas videos showing the Nova Music Festival attendees running for their lives—let alone had any of her comrades posted such footage to their shared livestreaming. And so, the very first images were enough to dispel the long-held narrative that Hamas and Israeli soldiers had engaged in a firefight. When she saw young people her own age, who only wanted to attend a music festival, being slaughtered by Hamas’s henchmen, that the attackers were even gloating over their victims’ suffering, she realized she had been living within a false construct for an entire year—that her unwavering certainties were nothing more than a result of groupthink in a closed world disconnected from reality. And very gradually, working through this carefully cultivated ignorance, she became aware of all the omissions the activists were guilty of. For instance, she hadn’t even known that the Israelis had withdrawn from Gaza as early as 2005, meaning that it was by no means an occupied territory. She was even more astonished when, during a visit to Israel, she realized that Israel is home not only to Jews but also to Arabs, Druze, and Bedouins—and that it is by no means an apartheid state. Naturally, the question arises: what are the consequences of such a learning process? What happens when an individual distances herself from the group? The answer was as simple as it was brutal: it meant losing all her companions, even those she had considered her best friends. To make matters worse, the young woman suddenly found herself having to fend off racist accusations (Are you a monkey dancing to your master’s tune?).

As the young lady offered the following advice to her former comrades-in-arms (Put yourself in the shoes of the ones that are more opposite your political opinion), we now move into the heart of power—that is, where a Twitter king resides—and where, by order of the Mufti, his subordinates—no, the entire world—is ready to submit to his whims. The idea that an Apprentice might lull himself into absolute certainty is familiar to us, much like Goethe’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice—just as the Stanford activist has enlightened us on how the information society offers ways to transform an overly complex reality into easily digestible bits of baby food. What is more remarkable, however, is that an entire cabinet participates in such compliance. As a result, no one objects when the boss criticizes his subordinates’ taste in shoes—and generously outfits them with shoes from Florsheim.

Now, as we all know, any criticism of style is an ad hominem attack. For my part, I wouldn’t just be outraged if such a package landed on my doorstep; I would—on principle alone—resolutely refuse to ever wear that pair of shoes. The fact that members of Trump’s cabinet have dutifully squeezed themselves into their master’s shoes testifies to a willingness to submit that’s highly disturbing—but it becomes even more grotesque when those concerned must struggle into shoes that are either much too big or so tight. As the Mufti says, »Seems to work out pretty well. Now they look all spiffy and nice!«

If we try to distill the essence of these three short stories, it becomes clear that we are dealing with a form of group behavior in which moral integrity, reality, and, ultimately, the dignity of the individual are sacrificed one after another. That an institution like the Royal Society, in order to maintain a spotless public image, sacrifices one of its members to a Twitter mob—and does so against its better judgment—leads to only one conclusion: that it is willing to sacrifice the truth to bullshit, a notion that casts academia in a truly bad light. Consequently, it isn’t surprising that a few years later, students at Stanford University, armed with keffiyehs, moral absolutism, and flimsy theories, find themselves caught up in a mindset that mocks all reality—and in which a mob mentality long since overcome is making a comeback. And when, in the end, the center of power bows to a showman who forces his subordinates—with their consent, no less—into a performance of self-degradation, this only testifies that the inner voice (what was once called the voice of conscience) has fallen victim to public image and opportunism. How can someone like J.D. Vance lecture European Nations on morality when he isn’t even capable of choosing his own shoes? Undoubtedly, social media plays a significant role here. For it allows a group to (paradoxically) shut itself off from any perception of the world—thereby casting a dark shadow, indeed, a veritable Monster, over the Information Society. In all of this, one might therefore detect a return to the Dark Ages—a Great Again! in which the True, Good, and Beautiful are replaced by bullshit, kitsch, and moral grandstanding. The compulsion to project an image makes it understandable that a Postmodern corset of virtue is imposed on institutions, that one speaks of genocide but actually has child murderers and well poisoners in mind—and that displays of power have replaced genuine politics. What lies behind this is what Max Horkheimer called erotic ressentiment—a sense of group belonging that derives pleasure from closed worldviews and demonizing the opponent; no, even more than that: it literally feeds on the Monsters it has conjured up from its imagination. Consequently, it is precisely this Monster’s lack of substance that allows group pressure to escalate to unbearable levels. From then on, everyone can be certain that the slightest dissent results in an expulsion from the group—and thus losing everything that had made the inner emptiness somewhat bearable.

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A society that uses mass media is a mass society. While most of our contemporaries attribute mass society to a natural nationalism, we’re not thinking of eternal Germanness or Frenchness, but of what actually produces this type of society: that flash that makes our electrified monks twitch. Information, you could say, is the way the monks line up in formation. What happens when the experimenter touches the battery? He is caught in the net and begins to twitch with the others, whether he wants to or not. Now, incorporation doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with physical conformity. As Mesmer’s séances show, mere imagination can be enough.

The greatest of these delusions is undoubtedly nationalism: suddenly, people are held together by an invisible bond—giving rise to modern Nation-states, all of which have a Flag, an Anthem, and a National sports team. And because we ourselves are so intoxicated by our world champions, we easily forget that with the State comes Statistics (which derives its name from political science) – and with it the necessity of bureaucracy, record-keeping, and identification papers. It’s no coincidence that our computer pioneer, Babbage, also founded the Royal Statistical Society and designed the business model for modern Life Insurance. If we compare this logic with the customs prevailing just a generation earlier, the advantage of an impersonal principle of solidarity is obvious. Before the French Revolution, it was customary for a citizen who wanted a regular pension payment to give the State a certain amount of money, in return for which he received a monthly pension until the death of a person specified in the contract. This arrangement incentivized the insurance company to get rid of this person as quickly as possible.

Once statistics gain traction, the discovery of the masses leads to the average person being measured, their body mass index calculated, and, indeed, all conceivable data about them collected. Naturally, the first thing you want to know is: How many people actually live here? This question brings the census taker onto the scene. In our case, his name is Herman Hollerith, and he is the son of classical philologist Georg Hollerith, a revolutionary thinker who emigrated from Großfischlingen to America, settling on the New York Wine Route in 1850. And it was there in Buffalo, New York, that little Herman was born in 1860. And it was there, in Buffalo, New York, that little Herman was born in 1860. Because the child suffered from severe dyslexia, he rebelled against his teachers’ demands by jumping out of the upper-floor classroom window so he wouldn’t have to write it down. His mother, a single parent now, after her husband’s death, took her son out of school and taught him at home. In 1875, the bright boy enrolled in the City College of New York to study engineering and eventually graduated from Columbia University School of Mines as a mining engineer. In 1880, he began working at the newly founded U.S. Census Office. What interests a twenty-year-old mining engineer? That’s right, women, first and foremost. So he strikes up a conversation with young Kate Sherman Billings at the Buffalo Boat Club—and she invites him to a chicken salad tasting. Her father, John Shaw Billings, is the statistician for mortality at the U.S. Census Bureau. Since he’s getting older and has had experience building varied institutions during his career, like an Army Museum, an Army medical library, and the New York Public Library, he makes a remark that registering death statistics is labor-intensive and needs mechanization, just like Jacquard’s loom generates its patterns with punched card control.

Upon hearing this, the young mining engineer immediately became interested in data mining. Shortly afterward, when Hollerith explored the possibility of such a device at MIT, he concluded that, in addition to its use for pattern generation, the punch card was a perfect medium for storing information. To identify a railroad ticket bearer and prevent them from passing it on to a stowaway, holes were punched in certain places to indicate characteristics such as blond hair, tall stature, and a beard. With this picture in mind, Hollerith designed a machine that could dissect each American citizen in detail.

What made his innovation so much better than the simple conductor’s punch card photography was how his machine translated the information from the punch cards into electrical impulses – which in turn activated the mechanical counters. By electrifying the reading process, enabling the 43 machines that Hollerith provided for the 1890 census to independently record the 62,622,250 people who made up the total American population—at a fraction of the estimated cost and time previously required.

Recognition of his success wasn’t long in coming; Hollerith received a bronze medal at the 1893 World’s Fair and began traveling around the world as an evangelist for his machine. Because every emerging nation-state was interested in conducting a census, Hollerith, then barely 36, founded the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896, which offered an improved version of his census machine. Of course, the cost of the American census of 1900 was so enormous that doubts arose about whether it could be justified. However, calculations showed that using the machines was still cheaper than manual entry. The company’s business model was no less ingenious than its physical equipment, as Hollerith’s machines were never sold but leased—and required Hollerith’s punch cards as raw material. Having understood from the outset that information is a currency, Hollerith decided to make his punch cards the same size as a dollar bill.

Although the company had a cash cow, the business didn’t prosper as hoped, largely because of the inventor himself. Instead of concerning himself with his company’s needs, Hollerith preferred devoting himself to his farm, his Guernsey cows, good cigars, and good wine. In fact, Hollerith seemed to appreciate only three things apart from his invention: his German heritage, his private life, and his cat, who answered to the name Bismarck. Just as he protected his Bismarck from the hostile feline world with an electric fence, he harbored a pronounced distrust of his own world. Consequently, he didn’t shy away from involving his biggest customer, the US Census Bureau, in a patent-infringement lawsuit. This quarrelsome approach, which made him unpopular with friends and foes alike, didn’t help the company thrive. In 1911, industrial mogul Charles R. Flint acquired the company and merged it with three other firms to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR). Hollerith remained on the board as a director and advisor. Thomas J. Watson, the same man who would later become the laughingstock of futurologists for predicting that there would one day be a global market for perhaps five computers, became the company’s general manager in 1914. By contrast, Watson, who had made his career at the National Cash Register Company, was a gifted salesman, unlike the reclusive engineer Hollerith, who was not. He didn’t shy away from unconventional business methods in pursuit of his goals, which led to his being charged with illegal business practices, earning him the reputation of a Mexican bandit.

Once he reached the top of the new company, however, Watson behaved in an extremely distinguished manner. In addition to establishing a pronounced cult of personality, he created a distinctive corporate culture. Every meal and every public appearance was an opportunity for self-promotion. In this ongoing PR show, the astronomical tips he gave to waiters, elevator boys, and chauffeurs were part of a grand image of a far-sighted leader presiding over his children. ›Think of me as the head of the family‹ was the credo Watson instilled in his subordinates, and to bring this sense of family to life, Watson entertained his employees with a never-ending series of picnics, outings, and dances. While they were promised that they would never be alone as members of the company, the Salespeople were required, in return, to dress impeccably in their daily work. There were motivational seminars, company songs, and even a kind of religion of being chosen (doesn’t that sound familiar?). This religion’s spiritual summit was the company slogan THINK, which adorned the uppermost step one had to ascend to enter the Holy of Holies—the firm’s rooms. And because the portrait of the all-knowing father presided over it all, Watson succeeded in reviving the languishing business.

When Hollerith resigned from the board in 1924 due to heart problems, Watson seized the opportunity to rename the company IBM, the acronym for International Business Machines, in line with his expansion plans. In 1910, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft (DEHOMAG) was formed by licensing Hollerith’s patents. Like other franchise companies, it rented Hollerith’s machines and ordered punch cards and programming intelligence. In 1923, amid the turmoil of inflation, Watson took over the business, a move that, like almost all of his business practices, was rather unfriendly. Although it didn’t bear the IBM name in its title, DEHOMAG became the largest IBM subsidiary in Europe. This, like Hollerith’s German origins, proved to be highly conducive to business when the Nazis took power. As a supposedly German company, DEHOMAG was able to engage in the business of Aryanization. The first test run was the Prussian census, conducted in 1933. On this occasion, the new leaders were shown that their talk of the »people’s body« wasn’t lost in metaphor, but – in the form of many thousands of punch cards – represented a reality that could be counted on. As a result, the Reich Statistical Office was able to report that the Berlin district of Wilmersdorf had the highest Jewish density at 13.5%. Because it was possible to identify any population group (whether they were practicing Jews, Jews of Polish descent, or wealthy Jews) by linking information, the Master Race had at its disposal a fantastic means of power, a means by which genocide entered the realm of the plannable. Who, Where, What? – nothing was to remain hidden from the Führer.

Watson, despite his preference for Mussolini, was not an anti-Semite himself. As a businessman, he regarded the Nazi racial-hygienic program simply as a welcome opportunity to demonstrate the skills of his machine. As a good Capitalist, he offered to make his company’s intelligence available to the Nazis for a fee. This offer marks a profound turning point in our computer history, namely the moment when the Machine crossed over to the side of power. Whereas previously the liaison between punch cards and dollars alone had determined the course of events, now rational calculation was married to the Master Race’s racial fanaticism—and madness found its method. But henceforth, the future of the Jews was no longer written in the stars but decided by Hollerith’s punch cards. Already with the 1939 census, in the wake of the Kristallnacht, the information collected had been conceived as the building blocks of an extermination machine, by means of which Jews could be successively removed from business life, deprived of their social contacts, their possessions, and finally their lives.

And here we encounter the Janus-faced nature of our formula. Even though we dream of economies of scale and an Artificial Intelligence called Watson in the age of big data, the dawn of the information age leads us to concentration camps, where Hollerith’s machines supervised the killing. Just as every concentration camp had its Hollerith code (Auschwitz 001, Buchenwald 002, Ravensbrück 010), it also had a Hollerith department that organized camp life, no—the death. In the abstraction of death, individuals’ suffering was no longer linked to their names and histories but to the numbers tattooed on their forearms by the Masters of Death.

And because this was the ID of his punch card life, it was no longer individuals who died, but numbers—Data Carriers. Perhaps one of the great oddities is that an entire generation of historians has overlooked the Digitalisation of Death, while contenting themselves with the myth of a supposedly backward ideology of blood and soil. No, Auschwitz is not just the place where Europe, indeed humanity, perished. It is, in a way that is difficult to bear, the beginning of our Brave New World.

Translation: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

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Translation: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

Anti-Semitism is the most terrible Monster produced by Modernity.¹ One of the greatest mysteries is how such a questionable writing as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion could become the blueprint for genocide, for which, despite all the blood-and-soil romanticism, the most advanced data technology was used. Specifically, Hollerith’s punch card machine, which had already proven its worth in the 1890 US census, was used for this purpose. After being transferred to IBM’s ownership, it was used to map the German »People’s Body« under the direction of its German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen Gesellschaft [DEHOMAG]. This was done with such efficiency that the data corpus reflected the exact population composition of each parish and city district. And because it included a demographic measure of the so-called Jewish density, it provided something akin to an extermination script for the Jewish population.

Put bluntly, the question is this: How could a culture committed to rationality subscribe to a conspiracy theory whose plausibility doesn’t exceed that of a Penny Dreadful? After all, it was already clear in 1921 that the Protocols were a crude forgery when journalist Herman Bernstein published his book The History of a Lie.2 Even more remarkable is how this forgery became the German catechism legitimizing their Jewish genocide—an idea that Hannah Arendt identified in her The Origins of Totalitarianism as the core question that historiography must address.3

Perhaps the biggest surprise awaiting historians tracing this text’s history is that its starting point stems not from anti-Semitic resentment but from an unease with Modernity. Moreover, you could say that modern anti-Semitism fills the vacuum that Modernity brought into the World. Just as the Guillotine is an act without a perpetrator, the Panopticon is sovereignty without a Sovereign, and the Market is thinking without a Thinker, anti-Semitism conjures up a Scapegoat to fill the vacuum. From then on, this Scapegoat is held responsible for injustices, whether real or imagined. Politician Hermann Rauschning, briefly a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party [NSDAP], and who exiled himself to America early on, recounts a short dialogue in which Hitler discusses World Domination, where, in response to Rauschning’s question about whether the Jews should be exterminated, Hitler replies that ›if the Jews didn’t exist, they would have to be invented.‹ It’s important to have a tangible enemy, not just an abstract one.

If this idea paraphrases Voltaire’s aperçu – »If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him« – it’s worth noting that the logic of invention here doesn’t culminate in the apotheosis of the World Order as the best of all conceivable worlds, but seeks to blame an enemy for the flaws in the system. In this sense, »the Jew« is the Scapegoat of Modernity – the one who must serve as the Scapegoat for all the real or imagined hardships to which people feel exposed.

Origins of this global conspiracy theory can be traced to the writings of Abbé Augustin Barruel, who, in his Memoirs on the History of Jacobinism, imagined a grand Masonic conspiracy that couldn’t possibly be Jewish because Jews weren’t allowed to join.4 According to his account, in 1763 the French Freemasons established a secret literary academy comprising Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet, Diderot, and d’Alembert, which regularly met at Baron d’Holbach’s home; their publications, in turn, challenged the morals and religion of the French people. From 1776 onward, Condorcet and Abbé Sieyes built a revolutionary movement of half a million Frenchmen, from which the Jacobins of the Revolution eventually arose. However, at the heart of this conspiracy, the revolution’s true leaders were the Bavarian Illuminati, led by Adam Weishaupt—the secret society from Ingolstadt that, as we learn from Mary Shelley, inspired her Dr. Frankenstein to create his monstrosities.

These »enemies of the human race, sons of Satan« had infiltrated society, using the very same networking logic demonstrated by Claude Chappe’s Optical Telegraph: »›And so‹, concludes Barruel, ›from neighbour to neighbour and from hand to hand the orders are transmitted with incomparable speed, for these pedestrians are delayed neither by bad weather nor by mishaps that normally befall horsemen or carriages; a man on foot can always get along when he knows the country, and that is the case here. They stop neither to eat nor to sleep, for each covers only two leagues. The mailcoach takes ten hours from Paris to Orleans, stopping for one hour; the distance is thirty leagues. Fifteen or twenty pedestrians, replacing one another, can reach Orleans from Paris in nine hours, using short-cuts and above all never stopping.‹«5

This nexus, in which a symbolic order is attributed to an adversary as the »enemy of the human race,« is the central theme. The advantage of this attribution of blame is immediately apparent: now you no longer have to deal with the strangeness of Scientific Modernity, but can operate on an equal footing, ad hominem. When the Abbé sees a viral form of transmission at work in the communication of news (from hand to hand, from neighbor to neighbor), he shows in the third part of his work that this form of proselytizing, this antisocial conspiracy, follows a viral logic6—whereby the conspiracy emanating from the Children of Light articulates itself as a form of infectious Mass Psychology. The revolutionaries’ bloodlust, which feeds on freedom and equality, is also linked to this in a hysteron-proteron reversal: “This is precisely where the origin of that revolutionary cruelty, that bloodlust, those insatiable prohibitions, those impetuous executions, and finally those banishments, which are more artful and cruel than the relentless guillotine, lies. «7

It was significant that Barruel’s conspiracy theory singled out Adam Weishaupt’s Bavarian Illuminati as central to the global conspiracy. This was a convenient target, insofar as the Illuminati were founded themselves as a Pythagorean secret society—an intellectual elite concerned less with Kabbalah and Alchemical techniques than with the affirmation of Scientific thought.8 Undoubtedly, the members’ secrecy provided a canvas for all kinds of projections, but even more than their reticence, it was the brotherhood’s elitism that attracted attention. Consequently, it wasn’t difficult for the Abbé to attribute the gathered intelligentsia’s elevated level of abstraction as distinguishing its members from the common crowd.

In this sense, the Illuminati appear precisely where the vacuum rises above the sea of air. The advantage of this juxtaposition, or more precisely, the humanization it embodies, lies in its ability to bring the threat of abstraction down to earth, while scaling the system down to a human level. Consequently, the Illuminati appear as puppeteers manipulating the unconscious masses with the greatest ingenuity.9 Because there is no longer any need to grapple with the problem of headlessness, of action without perpetrator, the element of the uncanny [Unheimlichen] is banished—that is, the Alien Logic that, although of human origin, is located at a level of abstraction that only machine-augmented reason can reach.

In his Elemente einer psychoanalytischen Theorie des Antisemitismus [Elements of a Psychoanalytic Theory of Anti-Semitism], Freud’s student Otto Fenichel points out that the unconscious remains foreign to us – making the stranger into a bearer of the uncanny. Contrary to what Psychoanalytic theory suggests, the uncanny in reason isn’t a reincarnation of outdated ideas; rather, it describes a new, modern form of deprivation. It’s the feeling that creeps over observers as they watch the bird struggle for air inside a glass container – and ultimately die. In this sense, Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters doesn’t refer to a temporary nightmare, but to an everyday occurrence: namely, that the Monsters born of reason’s dreams are, in a sense, an everyday occurrence, to the extent that they have taken root in Modernity’s things, institutions, and thought patterns. In fact, this is the actual meaning of the word Monster – the invisible that becomes visible, the phantom that takes on a body.

Barruel’s conspiracy theory could be seen as secularized anti-Semitism at work. Consequently, drawing on the medieval horror stories spread about the Jews, he claimed that during the September massacres of 1792, Jacobin fanatics had roasted and eaten Catholic priests.10 Clearly, he draws on the reservoir of historical anti-Semitism, in which all the archetypes of god-killers, well-poisoners, and enemies of mankind are prefigured. An early occasion that brought rather subterranean anti-Semitic reflexes to the fore was the assembly convened by the Antichrist Napoleon in 1806, which he called the Grand Sanhedrin in reference to Jewish jurisdiction. The meeting’s purpose was to answer 12 questions Napoleon posed to Jewish representatives—essentially to determine whether Jewish religious laws conflicted with the Code civil.11 The outcome was positive, and Jews were granted full citizenship. From then on, equality served as an entryticket to society, resulting in Judaism, as a visible group, dissolving into the Mass Society.12

Meanwhile, it took another half-century for the anti-Semitic narrative to reformulate itself. This delay is noteworthy because it makes clear that modern anti-Semitism must be understood more as a product of modern monstrosity and less as the fruit of millennia-old racism. Insofar as that, the literary foil that provides the theoretical framework for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion appears in a context that does not concern Jews, let alone any other minority. What is discussed in Maurice Joly’s The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (1864) is the modern techniques of power themselves. Above all, it is about Napoleon III, whom Victor Hugo, with a keen sense of the grotesque, christened Napoleon the Little and who was likened by his contemporaries to the Haitian Emperor, Faustin Soulouque, who had made voodoo Haiti’s State religion. With Napoleon III’s seizure of power, France became a failed State, politically corrupt but economically on steroids – which is why it’s not coincidental that Marx, looking at this short-legged, unsightly pretender, said that all world-historical things happen twice, »once as tragedy, the second time as farce.«13

After spending several years in Parisian government offices, Joly, a somewhat shy but highly rebellious lawyer, felt the need, as he recounts in an autobiographical essay, to expose »all the terrible abuses that imperial legislation had left behind in all branches of the administration, in all their abysmal depths. [...] I had the idea of conducting a dialogue between the living and the dead about current politics.«14 While the intention to portray Napoleon III’s rule as an authoritarian leadership state may cast the Second Empire in a very unfavorable light, it’s also true that the Emperor was especially gifted at presenting himself as a populist: a man of the people who expressed the passions of the collective better than anyone else.

Paradoxically—no, appropriately—Louis Bonaparte himself had indulged in utopian socialism à la Fourier in his youth and had also written an anti-Capitalist book in which he blamed Jewish financiers in particular for the general misery—and for this reason alone, the masses who had been left behind were able to identify with him.15 Armed with plebiscites, the usurper succeeded in disempowering the liberal mind of 1848, replacing it first with authoritarian rule and then with the Second Empire. While some historians have labeled his power techniques as proto-Fascist,16 it could be said that Louis Napoleon succeeded in providing the emerging Mass Society with a figure it could identify with. In any case, he was a virtuoso of power who knew how to play the keyboard of a mass society like no one before him.

Because this is where Maurice Joly’s criticism comes in, he puts the following words into the mouth of his Machiavelli (aka Napoleon III):

»The usurper of a State finds himself in a situation similar to that of a conqueror. He is doomed to renew everything, to dissolve the State, to destroy the city, and to change the face of morality. That is the goal, but in this day and age it can only be achieved by devious means, by deception, by clever combinations and, as far as possible, without violence. So I will not destroy the institutions directly, but I will touch them one by one with an invisible hand that will disrupt their mechanisms. In this way, I will address the judicial system, the right to vote, the press, individual freedom, and education, one after the other.«17

The Emperor’s reference to the principle of the Invisible Hand may have originated in Economics, but it primarily corresponds to the seduction logic that Søren Kierkegaard inimitably laid out in his The Seducer’s Diary as the prototype of a perfect crime.18 This is so ingeniously constructed that the object of its machinations sees no reason to hold the seducer accountable for his actions—which brings to mind the exclamation in Lessing’s bourgeois tragedy Emilia Galotti: »What violence means is nothing: seduction is the true violence.«19 Joly writes: »To rule today is no longer a matter of committing acts of violence, beheading one’s enemies, expropriating one’s subjects, torturing them; no, death, expropriation, and physical torment can only play a rather subordinate role in the domestic politics of modern States.«20

The brute exercise of violence stands in contrast to the ideal of Modernity: the act without a perpetrator, in which manipulation is left to an invisible hand. If this description aroused the Emperor’s displeasure, which led to Joly’s immediate imprisonment, it was because he had uncovered the calculations of modern, populist power. This employs the most advanced means and anticipates what Edward Bernays would later ennoble in his classic 1920s work on propaganda as the discipline of Public Relations.

If, as Bernays argued, controlling public opinion is a standard tool of modern governance, the question becomes: How could Joly’s critical work on contemporary society evolve into the monstrosity we encounter in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? The answer is easy in its complexity. Easy because the strangeness of the modern social system is imposed on the figure assigned the role of Scapegoat; complicated because here we’re dealing with a series of transcriptions and forgeries: a crime story, if you will.

This forgery’s strategy was as simple as it was ingenious: the Russian agent who picked up Joly’s long-forgotten book in the Bibliothèque nationale had to do little more than attribute the passages Joly had put into the mouth of his Machiavellian Napoleon doppelgänger to one of the Elders of Zion. If a statement like beheading a subject was no longer considered crucial, but instead accusations against judiciaries, the press, and similar entities, already sounded scandalous coming from the mouth of a cynical power politician, the idea that a small group of Jewish conspirators, somewhere in a back room of the Basel city casino, could have devised such a plan was equivalent to a diabolical global conspiracy. In any event, power has changed its form: it’s no longer a self-evident positivity that confronts the individual in a recognizable form; no, it’s a machination, a pretense, a form of social theater in which the puppeteers pull the strings in the background.

There’s no mention of this shift toward anti-Semitism in Joly’s work. To understand this transcription, we must first examine a second narrative strand that’s linked to German postal secretary Hermann Goedsche, who published horror stories and adventure novels under the pseudonym Sir John Retcliffe. Since the Anglophobic Goedsche was in the service of the Prussian secret service, but had been convicted of forging a letter as an agent provocateur—accusing the liberal politician Benedikt Waldeck of plotting to assassinate the Prussian king—he was forced to resign from his post. From then on, he devoted his energies to the staunchly conservative Association for King and Fatherland, which he headed as managing director, and to his literary career.21

In 1868, the historical adventure novel Biarritz was published. It includes a chapter inspired by a conspiracy scene inAlexandre Dumas’s novel: in it, Alessandro Cagliostro and other conspirators plan the Necklace Affair. Goedsche relocated his global conspiracy scenario to a Prague cemetery. Here, under the cover of night, the leaders of the twelve tribes of Israel gather, along with a thirteenth, clearly meant to represent the incarnation of Satan. The choice of location alone evokes a fantasy of revenants, with all manner of terrifying figures rising from their graves: Rabbi Löw’s Golem, the eternal Jew, the Kabbalah, the Jewish lust for gold.22 One after another, the leaders step forward, explaining how the world can be subjugated to Jewish supremacy: One must dominate the Stock Market, acquire Real Estate, ruin the Craftsmen, undermine the Church, discredit the Military, contribute to the disruption of social peace among various factions, conquer Trade, Government Offices, Culture, and the wombs of Christian girls, and, last but not least, dominate the Press and public opinion: »If gold is the first power in the state, then the press is the second.«23

Taken together, the two sources suggest that Goedsche’s horror story provides the decorum and stage design, while Joly contributes the underlying Political Philosophy.24 What is truly remarkable is how atavistic resentment merges with sophisticated Mass Psychology—this can only be explained by a general psychological willingness to believe in such a flimsy construct. In this sense, Hitler’s dictum, as handed down by Rauschning, is an expression of a collective desire – and this, in turn, insists on attributing a World Order that is perceived as incomprehensible, if not perverse, to a malefactor’s machinations. Only this desire explains how Joly’s criticism of Napoleon III’s populist practices of rule could be transformed into a blueprint for a global conspiracy.

In a sense, the Monster of Capitalism [Ungeheuer des Kapitalismus], or more precisely, the Telematic Society’s increasingly widespread Alien Logic, is banished as a foreign body. It could even be said that progressive Modernity and anti-Semitic activities advanced in lockstep, fueled by economic turmoil such as the global economic crisis of 1857 and the stock market crash of 1873.25 This explains one of modern anti-Semitism’s paradoxes—the more invisible the Jews were in the urban landscape, the more monstrous their reputation became. The void, if you will, gives birth to the corresponding Monster. In any case, anti-Semitism becomes an obsession indulged in by quite a few artists and scientists. In 1860, Gougenot des Mousseaux’s Le Juif was published, translated into German by Alfred Rosenberg in 1921, followed by Eugen Dühring’s Die Judenfrage: Racen-, Sitten- und Culturfrage [The Jewish Question as a Question of Race, Morals and Culture] in 1881 and Theodor Fritsch’s Antisemiten-Katechismus in 1893. In France, Édouard Drumont’s La France Juive, published in 1886, became a bestseller.

The text’s subsequent fate can be quickly told. In 1897, shortly after the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, the Paris agent of the Russian secret service, discovered a copy of the long-forgotten conversations between Montesquieu and Machiavelli at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Armed with this book and a Russian translation of Goedsche’s Friedhofsfantasie [cemetery fantasy], he cobbled together a text that combineselements of pulp fiction with sharp political analysis—in such a crude manner that its stylistic inconsistencies remain striking even today.

Based on this template, Russian author Pavel Alexandrovich Krushevan, a fervent anti-Semite and member of the Black Hundreds, published a text in his magazine Snamya [The Banner]. This text legitimized the pogroms that his tireless agitation had triggered in his hometown of Chișinău, now the capital of the Republic of Moldova.26 Although this event shocked the International Community, it was only the prelude to a series of pogroms that erupted between 1903 and 1906, resulting in the murder of some two thousand Jews. The physical horror only served to intensify the impact of the Ochrana agent’s work, the heart of darkness.

In 1905, Russian novelist and mystic Sergei Nilus published a second, longer version, which he appended to his novel The Great in the Small.27 Nilus, convinced of the document’s authenticity—which doesn’t speak particularly well of his literary sensibility—claimed the manuscript had been given to him by a lady of French society who had come into possession of a translation documenting the Masonic-Jewish secret meeting in Paris—a statement Nilus later changed to refer directly to Theodor Herzl.

A third, further expanded edition appeared in 1906, penned by Russian journalist Georgij Butmi de Katzman. That the enemies of mankind were accused of further misdeeds was due to the political climate of the time, which was crying out for Scapegoats. Since the railway pioneer Sergei Witte, acting on behalf of the Tsar, had decreed a top-down modernization of the country, which abolished serfdom in 1861,28 social tensions had been steadily increasing. The war lost to Japan, which led to St. Petersburg’s Bloody Sunday and the 1905 revolution, was essentially the result of unbridled modernization, which imposed traditional corvée labor on workers and made any form of union self-organization a criminal offense—so that even fighting for an eleven-and-a-half-hour workday was considered a crime.

Blaming the Jews for the social unrest was, insofar, the classic Scapegoat solution. Consequently, the authorities were tempted to look the other way – or, worse, to actively stir up pogrom sentiment – thereby distracting attention from the real conflicts that socially and industrially backward Russia was embroiled in. Following the deceived-deceiver model, more than a few establishment figures, including the Tsar himself, believed that the Protocols were a contemporary historical document, thereby providing proof of an impending global conspiracy.29

Very soon, this belief spread far beyond Russia. Wherever violent social upheavals occurred, the Protocols were not far behind. Nations ravaged by war were particularly susceptible: typewritten copies circulated among Belarusian anti-Bolshevik emigrants at the Paris Peace Conference. Because the events of the October Revolution brought a period of general uncertainty, fears of social unrest took the form of conspiracy theories. Russian-language editions of the work appeared in Berlin, New York, Paris, and Tokyo, and in mid-January 1920, Gottfried zur Beek (actually Ludwig Müller von Hausen) published the first non-Russian version of the text. At the same time, industrial magnate Henry Ford—inspired by reading the Protocols—published a series of articles that whispered of a Jewish world conspiracy.

In the fall of that same year, the work was published in Boston under the title The Protocols and the World Revolution. In England, of all places, the renowned Times newspaper brought the text to the public under an ominous title: The Jewish Peril. An Arabic translation followed those in France, Poland, and Italy, as the Protocols suddenly became a global bestseller. The fact that Times reporter Philip Graves uncovered its similarities to Joly’s original didn’t mean the Protocols were over, as his article somewhat hastily claimed. Au contraire: Henry Ford followed up his Jewish-world conspiracy essays with a major work titled The International Jew. In Germany, Theodor Fritsch, who was responsible for the infamous Antisemiten-Katechismus, published another translation, which had sold 100,000 copies by 1933.

The German market was so receptive that it even accepted the version by Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, which went through three printings within a year. In 1929, the NSDAP acquired the rights to Beeck’s translation, and in 1933, excerpts from the Protocols were read in the Romanian parliament – and exploited by the Fascists there to justify the expulsion of the Jews. As late as November 3, 1939, shortly after the invasion of Poland, Hitler suggested that the work be further disseminated abroad to make it known that the Jews and Freemasons were truly responsible for the outbreak of war.

It is an enigma how such a text, lacking any internal consistency and which, because of its sentimental nature, reveals itself as the product of a rather questionable imagination, could become one of the most widely read works of literature. Equally puzzling is how the debate about this text, from Robert Graves to Bernstein to the great Berne Trial that exposed the Protocols as a forgery, was limited to the question of whether it was an authentic document or a forgery. As a result, the question of susceptibility to seduction, of anti-Semitic suggestibility, was hardly discussed any further. Thus, any analysis of the underlying problem – ›if the Jews didn’t exist, they would have to be invented‹ – remained in the dark.

A second, no less important concern is the fact that Joly’s criticism of Napoleon III doesn’t insinuate desecrated communion wafers, ritual murders, or well-poisoning; rather, it proceeds as a vivisection of contemporary techniques of power: the Press, the Judiciary, Education, and the like. The scandalon of Modernity is therefore nothing other than Modernity itself: the fact that it’s no longer about beheading its enemies, expropriating its subjects, or torturing them, but that Money, the Press, and Intellectual Manipulation provide much subtler techniques of domination.

But what added value do conspiracy theorists derive from this narrative? Following Freud’s insight that dreams are wish fulfillments, we might conclude that conspiracy theories are also wish fulfillments and that the idea of a global conspiracy should be understood as a daydream. This is precisely the escape from reality through artifice realized in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. By dragging the Great Puppeteer onto the World Stage, Modernity’s threat of abstraction is neutralized. People no longer have to deal with the vacuum, the deed without a Perpetrator, or sovereignty without a Sovereign, any more than they have to deal with the remote effects of Telegraphy or Electricity. With the argumentum ad hominem, which is also accompanied by the distorted image of the subhuman, the perpetrator has been reduced to one's own level, ignoring the fact that there is such a thing as a space above the sea of air. For once you’ve rid yourself of such Alien Logic, you can claim that the moment the legitimate leader takes power, the impositions of Modernity will vanish into thin air.

Structurally, from an anthropological perspective, modern anti-Semitism is the counterpart of Voodoo religion, including Zombification—the evocation of a spirit world that Gustave Le Bon had already most astutely observed: »When people come together to discuss a question of politics, religion, or morality, it is the dead, not the living, who are talking about it. It is the souls of their ancestors that speak from their mouths, and their words are the echo of the eternal voices of the dead, to whom the living always obey.«30 Because blissful memories of the past protect us from the present, figuratively speaking, the king’s head has not yet fallen, and a concept of sovereignty can survive even though it had already been rendered obsolete by Hobbes’s collective figure of the Leviathan.

In a short 1924 text entitled The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis, Sigmund Freud describes repression’s differing techniques by conducting the following thought experiment: He imagines a woman who loves her brother-in-law and is now standing at the deathbed of her sister, who has died unexpectedly. Now nothing stands in the way of her happiness—but she cannot allow herself to entertain this thought. According to Freud, the Neurotic would resolve this dilemma by denying her own feelings, while the Psychotic would deny her sister’s death. In the former case, the individual denies their own instinctual life; in the latter, reality itself. The Neurotic doesn’t deny reality; she just doesn’t want to know about it; the Psychotic denies it and seeks to replace it.31

With this distinction, Freud underhandedly introduces that the driving force doesn’t come from the child’s inner life, but pulsates within reality itself—which we’ve hitherto referred to as either a Social Drive [Gesellschaftstriebwerk] or as the Psychotope. »In Psychosis, the rejected piece of reality probably imposes itself repeatedly on the Psyche, as does the repressed drive in neurosis, and that is why the consequences are the same in both cases.«32 But as reality’s onslaught is inevitable, the Psychotic is not only forced to replace it with a fantasy world but also compelled to transform reality so that the conflict is eliminated, or at least mitigated.

In this sense, the term fantasy world is somewhat misleading because, like Potemkin villages, it can have very real characteristics. As an exemplar, the GDR’s Politburo would drive past the streets of Wandlitz on their daily commute to the East Berlin government district, which, unlike the rest of the city, had been modernized and neatly painted. This kind of reality enhancement could be seen as collective self-deception or even collective Psychotic behavior. Following this line of thought, Freud argues that Psychosis, »in a different, more self-aggrandizing way,« is interested in »the creation of a new reality that no longer offers the same stimulus as the abandoned one.«33

If we follow this line of reasoning, much of what we’ve come to call Ideology or Worldview could be understood as a form of collective Psychosis—an attempt to avoid perceiving certain aspects of reality.34 The degree of Psychosis depends on the intellectual and material effort that an ideology must expend to avoid acknowledging reality, or more precisely, the fundamental Psychotope. What psychologist Leon Festinger called cognitive dissonance could be understood as Psychotic energy translated into a cacophonous metric. That such Mass Psychoses are much less conspicuous than an individual’s delusional system simply has to do with how the collective body has no skin. Were it real, modern anti-Semitism could be understood as a form of phantom pain—like an amputated limb still causing pain.

On the other hand, in social life, people are not only confronted with the confusing absence of the painful limb but can also project onto others the illusion that it’s a temporary disturbance that will go away once the foreign body is removed or eradicated. There’s also a second factor: if you can cover up phantom pain by projecting the missing limb onto an enemy, the fantasy of sovereignty can stay intact. Seen this way, the foreign body to which all the World’s power can be ascribed corresponds to a suspended self-importance—a deeply narcissistic desire. Of course, this is an illusion, just as the invented Jew is the Scapegoat for a present that can no longer be eliminated. What suffers is the modern Psychotope, the Reality Principle itself.

In his early work, Zur Judenfrage [On the Jewish Question] from 1844, the young Karl Marx already noted that modern anti-Semitism takes its revenge on a Scapegoat. There, he calls for the emancipation of the State from Religion—or, as he puts it, the »decomposition of man into the Jew and the citizen«—and then, leaving this pseudo-question behind, turns to the conditions of actually existing Capitalism:

»Let us not seek the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us seek the secret of religion in the real Jew. What is the worldly basis of Judaism? The practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his worldly god? Money. Well then! Emancipation from haggling and from money, that is, from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.«35

As we can see, he too is unable to escape the diabolical authority: because he conjures up the image of a vampire in the form of interest-bearing Capital, sucking the needy Capital, the Worker, dry – a mental image that can also be interpreted as a form of modern ressentiment. The fact that even Scientific Materialism fails in modern times only shows just how deep the desire is to avoid looking at the driving force [Treibwerk] itself – or, to be more precise, that here too we’re dealing with a mass psychotic energy.36 What becomes apparent here is the dialectic of Enlightenment, or more precisely, how reason fails in the context of a Mass Society, indeed under Mass Psychology. Serge Moscovici identified this marriage of politics and suggestibility as the hallmark of Modernity: politics is a rational means of exploiting the masses’ fundamental irrationality.37

In this context, modern anti-Semitism represents a battery of power that’s as sinister as it is effective. From a psychological perspective, its infamy lies in how, by accusing the enemies of the human race of plotting World Domination, it empowers itself to confront its diabolical adversary in exactly the same way. Interestingly, this projection process had already been observed in Hermann Goedsche. That an agent provocateur, who spies on his fellow human beings for the secret service while forging letters to accuse a hated politician of a murder plot, should develop the idea of a Jewish World Conspiracy only testifies to the fact that we’re dealing with a split desire. Because the responsibility for an individual’s own actions is placed on others, it’s possible to act with impunity. The anti-Semite has a clear conscience; he is, as Sartre so aptly put it, a »criminal for a good cause,« an »immaculate criminal.«38

In this sense, it is no longer necessary for the other side to take action, just as it’s not necessary to prove that such a conspiracy exists. Given the other side’s depravity, a preemptive strike is called for. You empower yourself to be modern—without taking responsibility for your own actions, let alone being willing to pay the price that Modernity demands. Having this in mind resolves an issue that has long troubled historians, or leaves them perplexed at the very least: the Modernity of National Socialism. You only need to consider National Socialist poster advertising from the 1920s to realize that every trick in the book was used in terms of mass propaganda.39 The Perverse Modernity of National Socialism becomes abundantly clear when the German Master set about organizing mass murder. Preparations began very much earlier, even before the political will and determination to make genocide a reality existed.

The first census on June 16, 1933, relied on the cooperation of DEHOMAG [Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen Gesellschaft], an IBM subsidiary that distributed Hollerith’s punch card technology in Germany. The head of the census, Friedrich Burgdörfer, was a statistician and eugenicist who was involved in drafting the bill Zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses [On the Prevention of Hereditary Disease in Offspring].40 By 1936, armed with relevant population data from the census, the National Socialists already had an overview of which districts had the highest so-called Jewish density. Structurally, this made mapping the genocide out and writing its script for government agencies to follow a simple matter.41 Conversely, without such mapping, industrialized mass murder would have been unthinkable.

Genocide articulates what is structurally predetermined by the computer: that we are dealing with machinery for the administration of populations. It’s not coincidental but rather an expression of this perverse governmentality that every concentration camp operated its own Hollerith system and that the number tattooed on the prisoners’ forearms served as their Hollerith punch card number.42 »All Auschwitz inmate information, including workers still alive, deaths, and transferees, was continuously punched into the Hollerith system servicing the camp. Tabulated totals were wired each day to the SS Economics Administration and other offices in Berlin by the various camp Hollerith Departments. Hollerith tracking was the only system for monitoring the constantly shifting total population of all camps«43

Naturally, the obvious conclusion that data processing could be held responsible for the horror of genocide is absurd. The logic articulated here is rather that of division: the assertion of Racial Supremacy, while simultaneously transforming Modernity into a Machine of Destruction. In this sense, it is quite significant that the following two or three generations did not take note of the informational architecture of the Jewish extermination, instead fixating on the völkisch ideology of Blood and Soil. Meanwhile, the fixation on National Socialist Ideology has the effect of negating the driving force behind what one actually wants to dissolve: a Rationality that creates Monsters in Dreams.

43

Ibid., p. 353 ff.

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Related Content

What is certain is that the founder of symbolic logic, George Boole, didn’t go mad, perhaps because he created the labyrinth in which everyone else got lost: Boole developed the binary system of 0 and 1, which forms the basis of every modern programming language. This system offered a solution to the problem of carrying over tens, which had caused Charles Babbage to despair while building his analytical machine. However, this only became apparent much later. Both Claude Shannon, who is considered the originator of the modern concept of information, and Konrad Zuse, who built the first functional digital computer in 1941, used Boolean logic – not least because addition, subtraction, and multiplication were much easier than with conventional decimal arithmetic.

You might wonder whether George Boole was even a mathematician. Born in Lincoln, England, in 1815, the son of a shoemaker, he stood out early as a child prodigy, especially after teaching himself Latin and Greek. The translation the twelve-year-old made of an Ode by Horace was so flawless that his proud father had it published, while a local schoolmaster expressed doubt that a child was even capable of such depth of feeling. The boy was not deterred by such nitpicking and went on to teach himself German, Italian, and French – one after another. When his father’s business collapsed, Boole, barely 16, became the breadwinner for his large family, first as an assistant teacher and later as a teacher at the Mechanics Institute in his hometown. Although he had initially toyed with the idea of a career as a priest, his pedagogical calling prevailed – and so, four years later, at the age of just twenty, he opened his own school.

Boole’s turn to Mathematics after studying classical and modern languages stemmed from a revelation he had at age 17. The circumstances were much less spectacular than Charles Babbage’s attempt to lure the devil out of his dark realm with a bloody circle (in vain, which turned Babbage into a cheerful agnostic). For Boole, there was neither temptation nor drama, just this meadow he had walked across countless times. Except that on this day, he wondered how it was that people used the same symbols, in this case the number 3, to refer to completely different things, such as apples and pears.

Is there a fundamental power built into the human brain that precedes every perception and every act of thought, allowing us to count apples and pears equally in the process of mathematical reasoning? This question wasn’t entirely new. Even before Boole, generations of mathematicians were convinced that numbers were something primordial, a kind of basic equipment inherent in our minds, like the awareness of beauty, truth, and goodness. Now, claiming that every human being is a born mathematician may easily sweep a mathematician off his feet, but the general public’s enthusiasm will be limited. However, this assertion raises questions that are much more difficult to answer. For if the number 3 is built into man from the beginning, then why not also the number 4.001 or 41.627? Or a negative number? Or an irrational and transcendent number like Pi? Boole’s trick was that he didn’t engage in such sophistry in the first place but took a new, unconditional look at the world. He asked himself whether it was possible that this fundamental power of thought had never been recognized before, that it was unconscious. What he called unconscious was something very simple, a perception that every small child has when it discovers that it can find a toy and then hide it again: There! Gone!

What Boole saw was that the laws of thought must be derived from his insight into this experience of presence and absence. Of course, this insight had consequences that went far beyond recognizing the unconscious power of thought. Because he wanted to perform calculations with apples and pears, he abolished the old world of numbers without further ado. His thinking was as follows: if we could put everything that exists in the world into one pot, we could give it a name— we could speak of the all-unifying, the world-all, or the universe. But what’s left over when we’ve thrown everything into one pot? Right: Nothingness. And with that, we have the two poles of unconscious thinking power before us: Presence and Absence, All and Nothing.

At this point, Boole reintroduces numbers, except that they no longer function as units of calculation but have taken on a new, philosophical meaning, as it were. Because from now on, one is supposed to represent the universe, and zero represents nothingness. Now you might ask: What’s been gained by this? Let’s take the wallet I put on the table earlier—and which is now gone. Could I use Boole’s system to find it again? Let’s give it a try. If I can think of nothing else but my wallet, then I have described it clearly, at least in my mind: (image of wallet) And, naturally, we can also think the opposite (using the process of elimination): the universe minus my wallet.

With both methods, the wallet I am looking for, which we will call x for simplicity, is adequately described. Consequently, both approaches can be expressed as an equation: 1 – not-x (in other words, the universe minus what is not my wallet) corresponds exactly to 0 + x (nothing plus my wallet).

Boole thus achieved what was impossible in classical Mathematics: from then on, it became possible to perform numerical calculations on anything imaginable. In a sense, this approach is much more precise than the traditional counting process: when I think of my wallet, I don’t think of a reddish-brown cowhide wallet that is 12.5 cm wide, 9 cm high, and 2 cm deep, containing exactly €67.58. But the only certainty is that it is familiar to me and currently missing. In this sense, the process of identification is not based on numbers but on perception—on my discovery that what should be in its place is no longer there. Insofar as this is concerned, Boolean logic is much more about a general search operation than about a counting process.

While the line of reasoning may be understandable, the consequences of Boole’s insight are as strange as the discovery of electric fluid. Because now every object and every relationship can be reduced to the logic of zero and one: my wallet (there or gone), the state of my apartment door (open or closed), the number of apples and pears picked and placed in the basket. If the numbers reflect only one aspect of the world (the quantum), then all conceivable qualities can now also be described: the voice that utters a welcoming greeting in an inviting manner, the position data of a whale, or a hand movement (which the robot immediately imitates). Insofar as Boolean logic breaks away from Mathematics, it not only opens the door to a new kind of universal script but also allows us to see the smallest unit of this writing system. In the logic of presence/absence, the unit is no longer a number but the smallest atom of meaning we can imagine: a bit.

As we know, such a bit is either loaded or not loaded – which gives us Boole’s basic state: Presence/Absence. But how does such a bit get transformed into a number? Simply by interpreting the bit as a number. Now this interpretation is by no means mandatory: I could also interpret the bit as a color pixel (■) – or as a letter with which the next paragraph begins. One thing is clear: in Boolean algebra, nothing is what it is anymore, but only a manifestation of itself. But how can a thing be converted into a series of bits? Let’s start with the numbers that Boole excludes from his perspective, given his focus on Presence/Absence, All and Nothing. First, I have to acknowledge that I can’t even count to two (because the unloaded bit is interpreted as 0, and the loaded bit as 1).

If we wanted to count to 3, we would need 2 bits:

With the third bit, we would at least get to 7:

Just as in the chessboard puzzle, where the king doubles the number of rice kernels per square, the number range doubles with each additional bit. If 3 bits can represent 8 numbers (from 0 to 7), 4 bits can represent 16 numbers, 5 bits can represent 32 numbers – and with 64 bits, we have already reached the unimaginably large number of 18 quadrillion 446 quintillion 744 trillion and a few more. However, interpreting such a bit sequence as a number is only one interpretation. A number could just as easily be read as acoustic voltage or as letters (as here, in the case of the ASCII code).

If we have pointed out the connection to electricity, it’s because we can think of Boolean algebra as a universal language that can convert anything that can be electrified into a series of zeros and ones. In this sense, Boole’s experience in the meadow must have struck him like a bolt of lightning out of the blue. It’s debatable whether George Boole was aware that his thinking would one day take the form of electronic computers. When Charles Babbage showed him his calculating machine in 1862, Boole didn’t seem familiar with either Jacquard’s Loom or the Laws of Electricity. However, that doesn’t diminish the significance of his thinking. Even if Boole had no practical application in mind, Boolean algebra represents a revolution not only in Mathematics but also in Logic and Philosophy. Not only does it transfer the world of Numbers into the world of Information, but it also allows for all the operations that are common in Mathematics: you can add and multiply, use complex algebraic formulas, and, last but not least, you can also evaluate logical statements – whereby presence and absence are interpreted as true and false.

Essentially, logic is transformed into a Machine in which conclusions are no longer a matter of individual discretion but adhere to what might be termed an objective logic. In this sense, the economist William Stanley Jevons designed his »logical piano,« a device that executes logical conclusions at the touch of a button. Indeed, the search for the fundamental force of thought was in the air at that time. While George Boole was working on his algebra, Alfred Smee, an English surgeon who had devoted himself to the study of the nerves and the human brain, wrote a book chapter in which he conceived of the laws of thought as biological Algebra.

Despite all this, Boolean logic has led a strange, shadowy existence. Apart from a few mathematicians, hardly anyone has taken notice of it. Perhaps this is due to Boole’s pronounced modesty or the fact that his Department Chair was located in the South of Ireland – in any case, George Boole has become computer history’s Unknown Soldier. Every programmer knows Boolean operators, but virtually no one knows anything about the inventor’s biography. In any case, his gravestone bears no inscription other than: George Boole died on December 8, 1864.

After a long walk home in the rain, the professor arrived home soaked to the skin. His wife, following the naturopathic principles of the time, which advocated treating like with like, treated him by pouring buckets of ice-cold water over him, resulting in pulmonary edema and an early death. Thus, the basic formula of the computer age, like its creator, became a great unknown.

When I first encountered this formula many, many years ago, it struck me like that proverbial bolt of lightning. Why? Because it upends everything I’d been taught to believe. In fact, the first thing you notice when looking at this formula is that you’re not dealing with equilibrium but with structural asymmetry. Now, even though this asymmetry may seem strange to us, we are by no means unfamiliar with it. That’s because we know that any good that has been digitalised can be reproduced at will. However, the formula unleashes its full force when we apply it to ourselves. Suddenly, we’re compelled to say what we previously didn’t even dare to think: I am someone else, a multiplicity, a population—I am superfluous. And in that blink-of-an-eye, the slumbering imposition within the Signs transforms into psychic pain: cognitive dissonance. Naturally, we know that, unlike our online existence, our physical body cannot be duplicated at will. But that’s precisely the trick: the formula gives a finite, limited thing the appearance of infinity. Insofar as it is a deception of nature, it’s a virtually perfect Machine—and, of course, like every successful Machine before it, it shapes the World in its own image. When I said that Boole’s formula struck me like a bolt of lightning, this enlightenment was followed by the astonishment that the lightning wasn’t followed by a thunderclap, but by this continuous, deafening silence—as though the imposition that had jolted me awake had, in that same instant, touched the World into Slumber. Although this mental image, this formula, has guided me like a guiding star ever since, I’ve yet to meet anyone who would accept it as naturally as you accept the quirks of a good friend. Perhaps such oddities are the reason we write books, insisting that you know the exact moment a story begins. After all, how can you understand a film if you start watching it only at the grand finale?

There are various reasons why Boolean algebra, despite all this, was able to establish itself, albeit in a mediated, distorted, and reinterpreted form. The first is named Gottlob Frege – and the most accurate impression one can form of this philosopher is probably to imagine him as a clean freak, a pedantic fanatic, and a compulsive character. Why? If Frege has an enemy, it is language, which he believes lacks the necessary sharpness and precision. To rid language of its pitfalls and inaccuracies, its very impurity, Frege set about scrubbing it with steel wool—always with the aim of transforming language into a precision instrument that functions as smoothly as Mathematics. And because, in his thinking, everything is pore-deep pure, he can claim that, as a philosopher, he can essentially look down on the world through a microscope, while normal people are fooled by appearances. In fact, philosophical historians praise Frege for revolutionizing Logic and Philosophy with his great conceptual sweep. He is considered the founder of the Philosophy of Language and of formal languages – with philosophers such as Carnap, Russell, and Wittgenstein referring to him. Because the path to computer science leads through here, some computer historians portray him as a founding figure whose ingenuity opened the door to the computer age. However, this overlooks one small detail. Frege adopted the logic that forms the cornerstone of his thinking from Boole (which already rubbed one of his contemporaries, Charles Sanders Peirce, the wrong way, as Peirce remarked that Frege’s ideas were, at best, a transcription of Boole’s original work).

Now, theft is the golden rule in science—provided that you a) only steal from the best, b) cite their names, and c) do not falsify the stolen material. As for the first point, Frege cannot be blamed. However, he can be blamed for points b and c. Not only did he do everything he could to downplay Boole’s contribution to his ideas, but he also reintroduced the world of numbers (which Boole had abolished with his logic) through the back door. And why? The answer can be found in a short text in which Frege reflects on the nature of thought, asking how a thought differs from a hammer. A hammer, he explains, is an instrument made by human hands, whereas a thought, as philosophical knowledge, isn’t a human product but an inspiration from higher beings. As such, thought is »timelessly true«, like a planet that follows its celestial path unmoved.

Naturally, philosophers were thrilled with this. Who wouldn’t be delighted to be considered a higher being? Consequently, everyone began creating truth tables, believing that symbolic logic gave them a kind of universal key to solve all the world’s problems. If we wanted to join this Song of Songs to Artificial Intelligence, we’d have to completely erase everything we’ve said on the previous pages—like, completely. The whole business with electricity, angels and monsters, and all these unknowns we’ve had to wrestle with—because, viewed through Frege’s microscope, it’s all dirt. And because the dirt must be removed, Frege claims that he didn’t borrow his superior truth from Boole; rather, it was instilled in him by a heavenly, superior mind. So he’s behaving like a painter who paints the top corner of a picture black, then claims that higher beings ordered him to do so. But skimming through our narrative, isn’t this a common pattern? Didn’t Ada Lovelace, the bride of science, also consider herself chosen? And didn’t the researchers of electricity also believe they had power over life and death in their hands? Naturally, you only do such things if you consider yourself a higher being: as a chosen one – which, in Frege’s case, manifested itself not only as a distortion of Boole’s model but also as rabid anti-Semitism.

And suddenly we find ourselves in the year 1936, which shouldn’t surprise us, because the history of computers is full of strange twists and turns that tunnel through time like wormholes in Physics. Lights are burning everywhere, and it’s the age of radio and television. Here, in this room at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stands a 100-ton colossus made of rods and wheels, controlled by punch cards, that moves in miraculous ways—and ultimately spits out calculation results. Graduate student Claude Shannon, tasked with maintaining the Institute’s electromechanical computer, learned from his boss that this machine was modeled after Babbage’s Analytical Engine. This means that, although electrified, the machine still operates in a pre-digital way. Because the device keeps breaking down, the institute’s employees are constantly busy repairing malfunctioning switches. Shannon notices that the circuits resemble what he learned in a course on Boolean symbolic logic. Because he’s not only a gifted unicyclist and juggler but also an inventor, he sits down to consider how a much simpler and more modern computer could be built—in other words, a digitalised computer. It dawns on him that all he has to do is apply the basic laws of Boolean logic to the switches.

To add and multiply, only two types of switches are needed: those connected in series and those connected in parallel. To add (or, more precisely, to perform logical AND operations), the input fields are arranged one after the other.

For multiplication, also known as the logical OR operation, two parallel switches are used.

Admittedly, this does not appear entirely straightforward, especially when you consider a circuit diagram with millions of transistors. However, the underlying principle is simple: electrical current, tamed by Boolean binary logic, is energy that can be converted into information. You could say that if you add Babbage and Boole, you get Shannon. What did Karl Marx say about this? History repeats itself, but it is usually a farce the second time around. The difficulty lies in losing sight of the background or, as in Frege’s case, in silencing it. The scientific world celebrated Claude Shannon as the father of the information age—awarding the talented student the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Alfred Nobel Prize for his Master’s thesis in 1939. Unlike Frege, Shannon was a man of integrity who would never have dreamed of passing off someone else’s work as his own. When asked by journalists what his breakthrough’s eureka moment had been, he said he couldn’t remember it, and even if there had been such a moment, he wouldn’t have even known how to spell »eureka.« This anti-metaphysics—equally subversive and playful—also marks Shannon’s other major achievements.

Not only did his inventive genius spawn a flamethrower trumpet, but he also built a tool he called the Ultimate Machine. When the user pressed the button, the box opened, revealing a hand that pressed the button again, and the device closed.

Translation by Martin Burckhardt and Hopkins Stanley

Previous Chapters:

Under the Sign of the Dividuum1

Or: How to Rack One’s Brain Over Nuclear Fission

Martin Burckhardt

If there’s one thing that binds a generation together—indeed Society as a whole [Gesellschaftsklebstoff3], it is the rejection of nuclear technology. In this sense, the slogan Nuclear Power? No Thanks! isn’t merely a relic of a time when Nuclear Power, under the threat of atomic system conflict, was understood as an entrée into the End of the World—but it also represents a kind of spiritual emblem, even a form of communal belonging. Factually, the arguments against Nuclear Power have become so commonplace that even a child can recite them convincingly.

The fact that one era burdens subsequent generations with obligations that they must bear without ever having been asked seems like a Modern Fall from Grace: the Primal scene of what now lies ahead under the Sign of the Climate Crisis.

Furthermore, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observation in their Dialectic of Enlightenment: »Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity«4 makes clear that the Enlightenment’s pathos, read against the backdrop of the Mushroom Cloud’s prospectus, leads us into a dark zone and even makes Modernity’s project questionable. Considering the Hiroshima survivor’s eyewitness accounts it may seem natural to regard the Atomic Bomb as evil incarnate (as is still the case in a publication by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which, for its commitment, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017). Even the story that the explosion’s flash completely dematerialized people’s bodies while their shadows5 remained burned into the Earth seems like testimony to a Man-made Apocalypse. Given this destructive power, which exceeds all comprehension, American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton’s formulation seems entirely accurate: namely, that with Hiroshima, a cold, anti-humanistic, and entirely technological godhead6 has raised its head. What the American psychiatrist observed in the inferno’s survivors—as a form of psychological paralysis, indeed conceptual helplessness—applies to its subsequent generations as well.

Thus, the use of Nuclear Power has been viewed with a general suspicion, even when it’s employed for peaceful purposes promoting the common good.

As a memento of the real possibility of self-annihilation, it touches upon a historically unprecedented psychological rupture. Or as Albert Einstein put it: Man invented the atomic bomb, yet no mouse in the world would construct a mousetrap. Günter Anders responded to this mental aberration with the image of Promethean shame – that of a creator who denies the fruit of his own thinking: It’s me, but it wasn’t me. That the inhabitant of Modernity must be understood as a structurally ambivalent person, as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde figure, can be understood as a traumatic shattering far more efficacious than the break Nietzsche postulated with the death of god. From this perspective, the denial of this schizophrenia, the psychological numbness, may be a perfectly understandable reaction.

Psychological Nuclear Fission

When Günter Anders writes that shame is a flame that feeds on itself and grows the longer it burns, the Nuclear Power plant may represent a reified form of shame. In this sense, it would be understood not only as a memento of human destructive power but also as a materialized refusal to accept reality. Given both the various reactor disasters and the use of pressurized water reactors in the production of Nuclear weapons, such a suppressive act is a perfectly understandable resistive gesture—but the fusion of Nuclear Power and the threat of death isn’t a Law of Nature. With the advent of third- and fourth-generation nuclear power plants, whose waste remains radioactive for only 100 years and which no longer pose an excessive risk—even in the event of an accident—these traumas could have been left behind.

That there hasn’t even been an attempt at a rational debate in Germany; that instead we’ve fixated on a flagrantly failing energy transition, can only be understood as a form of psychological division [Abspaltung]: Out of sight, out of mind! Making the Elephant’s question in the room: Isn’t what materialized with the Atomic Bomb an integral part of Modernity’s condito humana?

Or even more pointedly: Doesn’t Nuclear Fission [Kernspaltung] presuppose a psychological one? And if so, wouldn’t material Nuclear Fission be nothing more than the symptom of an intellectual occurrence? Nourished by terms like information overload, this intuition had long ago expressed itself in my thinking—surprisingly in a field an outsider wouldn’t have even remotely associated with Nuclear Power: the Sound Studio. It was here, particularly, that the use of digitalised sound samples seemed like a symbolic nuclear fission—as if I were dealing with the Signs glowing themselves out [verglühenden Zeichen], indeed, the dying glow [Verglühen] of an entire worldview. Given that the term for the Soul, back-translated into Latin, means anima (›the human voice‹), perhaps it isn’t surprising that my observations were accompanied by a suspicion that this deconstructed voice rendered the classic concept of authorship and authenticity obsolete, or more precisely: transformed it back into an open, unresolved question. And as the Chernobyl cloud drifted across Europe, it dawned on me that, in a fully Digitalised World, the idea of an original was as obsolete as the notion of Pascal’s in-dividual remaining alone in his room to escape the misery of the World. What was initially nothing more than a feeling became a certainty through my engagement with Boolean Logic. When delving into the ideas that inspired George Boole to write The Laws of Thought in 1894, you encounter the underlying formula that underpins binary logic.7

Now the equation characterizing the digital object split into a binary sequence of zeros and ones proves to be not just a self-contradiction, but can also be read as a proliferation threat congealed into this formula: x=xⁿ—making it clear that the digital object is structurally superfluous, and as a shadow of itself, buries the idea of its uniqueness—what Benjamin characterized as an aura.

Rite de Passage

Undoubtedly: Nuclear Fission represents not only a material but also a symbolic death threat—and this may explain the nervousness and idiosyncratic discomforts the Computer’s apotheosis evokes in many of our contemporaries. My reaction to this brave new world, however, was one of exquisite contradiction. Just as it seemed unquestionable that Digitalisation was a form of symbolic nuclear fission, there was no doubt that this World of Digitalised Signs was opening up a previously unheard-of world—one which I welcomed almost in its entirety—making this encounter with sounds a rite of passage. Because every sound could become a note, a world of sounds, no, even more than that: the entire World had become an instrument—the only difference being that to play such an instrument, you first had to perceive its uniqueness. This insight was nothing more and nothing less than a discovery of the unheard-of: that the sound of a flushing toilet, with its various overtones, slowly but surely creates a most exquisite Work of Sound Art requiring no further processing. Being in a recording studio, a thoroughly artificial environment, a virtual soundscape whose connection to reality was fragile and dubious, did nothing to diminish my sense of reality.

On the contrary, it heightened my sensitivity—having the opposite effect of what Robert Jay Lifton described as psychological deafening. In this sense, symbolic nuclear fission no longer appeared merely as a cold, anti-human, and entirely technological deity; rather, it was an augmented sensory apparatus that, precisely through the possibility of hybridization, enabled a new, significantly expanded view of the World.

Taking Leonard Cohen’s beautiful dictum, it is precisely the crack in things that lets the light in—it is a dialectic of creative destruction: because every sound appears as something changeable and disposable, it loses its weight and its naturalness—while, on the other hand, the sensorium for its original nature becomes significantly refined. Which, incidentally, encapsulates the logic of mechane: that it’s precisely to the extent that you deceive nature, you begin to read and understand it.

Res Publica

If the crack in things lets in the light, and if it is precisely an awareness of their fragility and vulnerability that brings about a deeper understanding – then it becomes questionable how tenable the dictum of the Triumphant Disaster of the Enlightenment really is—or whether we are not dealing here with a form of self-distancing, an excuse whose sole purpose is to shift blame and responsibility elsewhere. In this sense, Robert Jay Clifton’s cool, anti-human, and entirely technological deity can be interpreted as a scapegoat, a Moloch figure that allows people to avoid confronting their own shame (or, more precisely, their own altered self-image). This is akin to Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, who banishes his split-off double to a chamber, where the abhorred nuclear power plant functions as an outsourcing of what is actually an intellectual problem: as a psychological final repository, if you will. How this splitting tendency obscures and distorts our view becomes clear when we immerse ourselves in the History of Digitalisation8. Here, it becomes clear that the connection to Nuclear Fission, whether understood intuitively or symbolically, is based on a shared historical origin. This is precisely the crux of the story: that the vision of the Internet can be traced back to the construction of the Atomic Bomb—or more precisely, to the collaborative effort known as the Manhattan Project. The story’s hero is computer pioneer Vannevar Bush, who in the 1930s made a name for himself by converting Charles Babbage’s 19^th-century Analytical Engine into a giant electromagnetic Computer. Although this 100-ton colossus standing in the halls at MIT wasn’t yet based on the binary logic that Babbage’s contemporary George Boole had developed in his Laws of Thought, this was soon addressed by Bush’s assistant, who had been entrusted with maintaining the machine: Claude Shannon. Thus, the two proto-concepts of the Computer, both deeply rooted in the 19^th-century, were now linked together—and the first binary calculating machine was now ready to compute.

Although Bush’s calculating monster had been a milestone, the outbreak of war led to a strange turning in his career. He had convinced President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that only a merging of Science, Industry, and the Military could close the arms technology gap between the U.S. and the Nazi Reich. And because this measure proved extremely successful in a very short time (not only revolutionizing American radar technology but also increasing the explosive power of American bombs through the development of a radio-controlled proximity fuse), Vannevar Bush found himself appointed the Manhattan Project’s Scientific Director in 1942. As a deeply constructive-minded scientist, Bush wasn’t part of the theoretical physicist nukies camp and saw the Nuclear Fission task imposed on him as a nuclear headache. What gave him headaches wasn’t only the project’s ethical questions – but the unprecedented complexity of coordinating the activities of approximately 150,000 people. The biggest problem was how the scientific landscape had fragmented into so many splinters, prompting philosopher Nicholas Murray Butler’s wonderful aperçu: An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less, until he knows everything about nothing.9

Keeping the specialist-idiot’s dilemma in mind, it becomes clear that the epistemic field’s fragmentation foreshadowed what was to come with the advent of Nuclear Fission—meaning it can be concluded that the Psychotope of the time had already undergone Nuclear Fission, and that specific insights were possible only because the specialists were entirely focused on the particular slice of reality they were investigating.

Insofar as the task of constructing the Atomic Bomb was concerned, this intellectual fission was perhaps a greater problem than mastering radioactivity, given Bush’s primary task of persuading all of these specialists from various disciplines to work together. This was precisely what he devoted his remaining free time to: designing an information system that would make this atomized knowledge available to all participants, so that the free radical thinkers could come together into what Ludwik Fleck described as a thinking collective. Although Bush was unable to build his device himself, in an Atlantic Monthly essay10 published before the Hiroshima Bomb was dropped, he described it in such detail that someone else could have built it. The device’s name said it all: Memex. If Memex stands for Memory Extension, it already implies a lack of cohesion resulting from this knowledge fragmentation.

While world knowledge disintegrates into ever smaller fragments in response to specialization (and, insofar, reflects the same logic of destruction taking shape in the A-bomb), the Memex apparatus enables the In-dividual to access the entire body of knowledge. Thus, global knowledge fragmentation can be countered by a new order realized in the Memex Machine which the res publica could only ever represent metaphorically: a common purpose.

If a contemporary took Vannevar Bush’s article in hand today, he’d discover the precursor to what we know as the Internet in this knowledge networking machine.11 In fact, reading this text inspired Internet pioneer Douglas Engelbart so much that, after reading it as a young radar technician, he devoted himself to creating such a world intelligence in the 1950s—and with such unbridled idealism that the device’s darker origins were forgotten. While Engelbart is primarily remembered as the inventor of the computer mouse, it’s often overlooked that in the 1960s he not only developed the mouse, but also the first graphical operating system, hypertext editor with linking capabilities, e-mail, graphical plotter, and telematic video collaboration—all innovations he presented to an astonished, enthusiastic public in the 1969 Mother of all Demos. If we consider the Internet’s history (from Vannevar Bush’s Memex device to Engelbart’s Arpanet), it becomes clear that what we have enthusiastically welcomed as networking is nothing more than an attempt to transfer the logic of nuclear fission into a new knowledge order: a social sculpture bringing fragmented knowledge together on a higher level. In this melting pot, the link between nuclear power and the Bomb tells not only the destructive, apocalyptic part of the story, but it also makes us forget that the symbolic nuclear fission that precedes it suggests a contrary order.

Intellectual Explosive Charge

The Internet—and this is the part of the story that’s so conspicuously overlooked in the demonization of Nuclear Power—emerges in the Bomb’s shadow. If the Bomb, as the embodiment of evil, occupies the position of the diabolon, then structurally speaking (and in a variation on Mephistopheles’ formula), we’re dealing with a force that always wants evil and always creates good. In any case, Nuclear Fission is a fait accompli that can no longer be removed from the World. One of its most beautiful side effects is the emergence of a global consciousness, a sense of global togetherness—confirming Kant’s idea that history progresses with a cosmopolitan intention. In a curious way, this dialectic is still mirrored in the emergence of modern environmental movements. Before Greenpeace devoted itself to Whale rescues, it had very successfully protested against Hydrogen Bomb testing at Amchitka Island off the Canadian coast. It was this success story that prompted Canadian journalist Robert Hunter to bombard the public with gruesome film footage of Soviet trawlers slaughtering whales—footage he himself called mind bombs. And because Hunter had access to the advanced communication networks of his time, his mind bombs can be seen as an early indicator of what we now call the Global Public Sphere because they triggered a psychosocial chain reaction, a mental meltdown, in which a new issue was introjected into people’s psyche almost overnight. Strangely, the dialectic of splitting is also effective in bringing war back to life in our psyches. For as undoubtedly as Russian leadership’s plans suggest something sinisterly unrestrained as the Kremlin’s lackeys blather in their talk shows about just dropping a bomb on Warsaw or Berlin, it’s equally certain that unimaginable destructive power has taught the masters of the battlefield to fear. Following this dialectic, we can conclude that the threat of mutual assured annihilation during the post-war period has led us to our attempts to de-escalate and contain wartime hostilities.

But, for this reason alone, the blanket rejection of Nuclear Power is a response that fails to address the issue—precisely because it rests on the belief that, by banning the objectionable, the problem itself has been eliminated: out of sight, out of mind. That the very people who preach environmental protection and rain down their mind bombs on the public in the old Greenpeace manner are succumbing to this regression is particularly ironic.

Because, as the debate over continuing to operate nuclear power plants clearly shows, it seems to be about perpetuating collective fantasies and prejudices—about positioning one’s self as pure and uncontaminated, on the side of the good, the pure, and indivisible. And because Nuclear Power, as a dangerous technology, represents an attack on self-esteem, it must be disposed of, come Hell or High Water! But as we know (or perhaps should know): The Internet also carries the potential for Nuclear Fission within itself. And in this dual form, every Twitter user is confronted not only with their better angels of human nature but also with its darkest depths. What Robert Jay Lifton has identified as a cold, anti-human, and entirely technological godhead proves, when viewed up close, to be but a reflection of ourselves. Denying psychological Nuclear Fission and imposing cultural blame on the evil atom means not only that this act of repression is paid for by the unconscious but also that it can be read as an indicator of reality loss (which, according to Freud, is the signature of psychosis).

End of the In-dividual

This denial is hardly surprising given the caesura where the ground falls away. Because if you keep in mind that the term In-dividual is a loan translation of the Greek a-tomos (thus the in-divisible), it’s clear that the In-dividual’s swan song leads into an Abyss. We’re confronting the shattering of a promise of Identity [Identitätsversprechen12] that entered the world with the early modern period (and the hyperrealistic physiognomies of Renaissance portraits)—which still forms the basis of all our modern Bildungsromans. What’s more, this In-dividual, this unshakeable core of personality, is the nucleus so blindly presupposed by our social systems. This makes it understandable how the present could fall prey to the Identitarian delusion—indeed, that it’s what younger generations (Generation X, Millennials) seem to be primarily concerned with. Nevertheless, the repressed inevitably returns – how could it be otherwise? This is because, for such self-ID to function successfully, the In-dividual must use social media, implying that the Nuclear Fission logic is woven into the very fabric of social messaging. Insofar as in this case, the Identitarian formulas of this self-assertion can be read as proving the opposite – as a form of Identitarian self-immolation.

If material Nuclear Fission already brings all conceivable idiosyncrasies to the surface, it is easy to imagine how painful this insight into psychological Nuclear Fission might be. However, denying this paradigm shift—this movement away from the modern In-dividual to the computer age’s Dividual—does nothing to diminish its violence, just as it’s beyond human power to undo this rupture.

This change may be an unspoken taboo playing out below the threshold of perceptible discourse, but it can be revealed by understanding virtù, which the Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola equated with human dignity. Its foundations were themselves rooted in a seismic upheaval, as the medieval virtues were morally codified and linked to the cardinal virtues (Prudence, Fortitude, Wisdom, and Justice), augmented by the Christian virtues of Faith, Love, and Hope. The Renaissance virtù was a shattering insofar as these virtues were no longer linked to a specific, precisely codified behavior—rather, they referred to an awareness of open possibilities, in the sense of a triumphalist: We can also do otherwise. Consequently, Pico locates human dignity not in Man’s virtuousness, but in his chameleon nature. If this prompted Machiavelli to make the sinister statement that the Prince need not be good, but only appear good, then it means nothing other than appearance takes precedence over existence. However, because working on appearances is also a complex matter, an image of the virtuoso emerges as one that constantly transcends the boundaries of the given.13 Although this ideal personality has survived for several centuries, it’s starting to show signs of straining under the advent of the Computer World. You only have to see a piano virtuoso sit down at his grand piano (equipped with digitalised MIDI sensors) to play and have his fingerprints recorded by the keyboard – enabling the instrument to playback the virtuoso’s performance long after he’s left the room—with the same phrasing, intonation, and finger strength. In symbolic form, this dissolution of an embodied presence is a precise repetition of what the Bomb did in Hiroshima: the human body dissolves, but its shadow is burned into the earth.

Digitally Contaminated

The equation of material and psychological Nuclear Fission simply means that in-dividuals are exposed to a form of societal radiation from which they cannot escape anymore than they can the Bomb’s fallout. Now, this radiation doesn’t necessarily need to be radioactive; it is also transmitted, nolens volens, through our work with digitalised symbols. Because, within the digital scanning process—whether the user is aware of it or not—there is a Boolean proliferation threat: x=xⁿ. In fact, this formula can be interpreted as an expression of Identity disturbance, or even as evidence of a psychological meltdown, because it implies that every digitalised object ultimately becomes superfluous—with the profound social implications of its logic on human labor. Any work that can be digitised (in the same way a virtuoso’s fingerprint can be scanned and transferred into virtual reality) runs the risk of disappearing into the Museum of Labor, or more precisely: Into Working Memory. And, as such, it can be transposed into the boundlessness of Anything, Anytime, Anywhere. Recalling that an in-dividual’s social status is essentially based on work performance, it becomes clear that this constitutes an attack on the dignity of every in-dividual. What contemporary economists vaguely refer to as disruption or scaling is ultimately nothing more than a consequential manifestation of this violence.

From the In-dividual’s point of view, this may be accompanied by a form of degradation, even total Societalization [Vergesellschaftung], but the consequences for Society as a whole may well be beneficial—as exemplified by common resources such as Wikipedia or the Internet Archive at archive.org.

In any case, the idea of open source—which conflicts with the idea of private property—can be seen as a form of Societalization, forcing in-dividuals to act as dividuals: as someone whose self-image is based on their willingness to-share-with for the sake of a higher rationale.14 Bearing in mind that our conception of Work and the Legal system is based on the idea of the In-dividual, it’s clear that we’re witnessing the dawning of a new era—one no less radical than the shifting from medieval virtutes to modern Virtuosos. In fact, we only need to recall the demands placed on in-dividuals (mobility, flexibility, willingness to engage in lifelong learning) to realize that Zygmunt Baumann’s Liquid Society has long been a reality, or more precisely, a social introject that requires in-dividuals to adapt in certain ways. This alone is reason enough to conclude that Robert Jay Lifton’s portrait of the cool, anti-human, and entirely technological godhead amounts to self-deception. Because it’s less about an apparatus becoming Alien and more about an inherently viral logic structure that, as such, takes hold of the mind, indeed of every person’s psyche coming into contact with it. In a way, everyone who lives and works in and with the Cloud is digitally contaminated—making the Alien God a misunderstanding; it would be more accurate to regard this entity as a psychological introject that, subcutaneously, subtly reformats our thinking.

In any case, insistence on any sort of Identity is doomed to failure; the autonomous In-dividual can only continue to exist as a ghost of a vanished era.

And because this is a narcissistic humiliation of the first order, it isn’t surprising that Identity Politics enjoys great popularity—no, more still, that it has become a societally acclaimed drug. Because it allows those affected to delude themselves into believing they can restore a paradise lost through a speech act—a performative gesture. However, at best, such acts only birth an empty shell, a negating identity whose strongest argument is that it has been prevented from fulfilling its potential by a heteronomous system. Consequently, the system is cast as a cool, anti-humanistic, and technological godhead, absolving itself of all responsibility. Such a vociferous J’accuse might be understandable if the complainant, like a hermit, sought to withdraw from this Social System, but the complaint becomes completely ridiculous when it is made coram publico, or more precisely, through Social Media’s filter bubbles. As a skating exhibition in this gallery amounts to nothing more than eliciting applause from like-minded people, it’s a feedback mechanism that unmasks what it claims to be as mere pretension in the same breath. If this contradiction is already inherent in the concept of Identity Politics, the denial of intellectual fission becomes a problem when Phantom Pain mutates into Phantom Lust. And that means wherever Identity Politics, married to obscurantism, claims political relevance – which is easy to do as mind bombs take on a viral structure in the computer world.

With this in mind, Victor Hugo’s famous saying that »Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come« could be paraphrased as: Nothing is more powerful – and identity-forming – than an idea whose time has passed.

Why? It’s because those involved bask in the glow of past greatness, while donning costumes of the past to emerge victorious from the battles of yesteryear. What appears to be a playful carnival of identities may, when taken seriously, develop into what is known in the Anglo-Saxon world as a culture war—where we’re dealing with various groups trying to gain social advantages through a form of militant Identity Politics – which would be impossible without the use of social platforms. The fact that the identities being claimed are hollow, no more complex than the equipment that computer gamers equip their avatars with. And that these actors are indulging in a form of collective Don Quixotism indicates just how far behind us the world of fixed identities already is. Antonio Gramsci described this pseudomorphosis precisely with his term interregnum: »The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.«15 One thing is certain: social discourse has bid farewell to political economy and instead circulates around the question of Identity. In some countries, self-ID has been given the force of law, which seems like dancing around the golden calf – except that this calf is a void, the phantom of a time whose future is long gone.

The Return of Don Quixote

If the energy crisis is bringing the unresolved issue of Nuclear Fission to the fore, it isn’t coincidental; it’s the reemergence of a long-suppressed issue. Above all, the sustainability claims of Nuclear Power detractors are proving anything but sustainable—in fact, a range of dark specters is emerging in their wake: a philosophical neo-Malthusianism that seeks salvation in prohibitions and a command economy based on a State-of-Emergency.

In any case, the protagonists are succumbing to the same confusion Don Quixote fell prey to when he believed he was fighting giants rather than windmills. You may wish to portray yourself as a hero in the fight against such overwhelming odds (»Do not flee, you cowardly, despicable creatures; for it is a knight alone who attacks you«), but it is no coincidence that tilting at windmills has become a metaphor for futility.

Embarking on such a slippery slope despite all warnings betrays a degree of blindness that calling it cognitive dissonance is an understatement—and only makes sense if you understand the energy propagandists as horsemen of the apocalypse waging a heroic battle against a toxic underworld deity. Yet the link between Nuclear Power and Bombs, which dominates the discourse, isn’t really inevitable. Unlike the light-water reactors of the 1960s, third- and fourth-generation Nuclear Power plants aren’t designed to produce plutonium that can be used for weapons—making the horror stories of exploding power plants vanish into thin air—just like the specter of nuclear waste that will continue emitting radiation for thousands and thousands of years. However, that an industrialized nation like Germany voluntarily renounces the future of nuclear technologies, even prohibiting their research, can only be interpreted as an attempt to banish Modernity’s Moloch to the underworld. But as Goya taught us: The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters—no, even more than that: it leads into the darkness of Identity Politics, a catacomb world in which light penetrating through the cracks into the interior appears only as hostile radiation, as toxic energy.

Welcoming the Future

How—and this is perhaps the crucial question being swept under the rug by the furor surrounding Identity Politics—can the modern Dividual be understood in a positive, humanistic sense? In view of the social upheavals looming with the use of Machine Learning and AI (all of them amounting to the devaluation of human beings), such a question may seem inappropriate, if not hopelessly idealistic. Because what Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction has affected not only the world of objects but also their Creators. In this sense, the In-dividual has outgrown itself; we need to recognize that the Identity promises of the past will not be fulfilled. Ultimately, sincere self-encounter is possible only when we’re aware of our own contradictions and cognitive dissonances—all of which stem from this moment of psychological Nuclear Fission. Now, as beautifully demonstrated by influencers and successful A-B-C celebrities, this path’s biggest obstacle is the In-dividual’s own self-conception: the temptation (or compulsion) to elevate their own life to that of a Work of Art. What Romanticism called original genius has become every in-dividual’s preeminent task under the banner of self-realization; we’re constantly urged to maximize the potential of our human capital in the most efficient way possible. If we consider the Influencer as an exemplar of this self-optimization mindset, it’s clear that finding an authentic self in the world of beautifying filters is difficult. This is because the influencer’s task is to presenttheir audience with what they are not: a credible, convincing role model. However, such an Authentic Self (unplugged, approachable, convincing) is doomed to failure from the outset, a Don Quixotism in which the battle is no longer with windmills but with the operating systems of the present. But this is precisely the insight that the astute knight refuses to accept, for the sake of his self-image. This is because the world of symbols, which is subject to constant Nuclear Fission, inevitably also attacks its users. Against this backdrop, Leonard Cohen’s beautiful line about the crack in things that lets the light in isn’t merely a counter-program, but also the promise of a new, post-Capitalist world. For it says that it’s precisely this moment of division which is the prerequisite for a new form of enlightenment, indeed, for a new view of Humanity. From this perspective, it’s no longer a question about the self-made man’s perfectibility, but rather of the fragility and sociality of the In-dividual—not in the sense of a deficiency—au contraire, as a potential. The concept of In-dividuation would thus have shifted to a different register, to an art of failure which Samuel Beckett so wonderfully articulated: I tried, I failed. I tried again. I failed better.16 This is precisely what the Virtuoso of Virtuality would have to learn: how to assemble the fragments of the past into a new, meaningful, and humane whole.

Translation: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

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In 2005, Peter Sloterdijk published his book Zeit und Zorn [Rage and Time], with an unerring sense of the Zeitgeist, or more precisely, of the vibes that give the Zeitgeist a little push. In it, he confronted his astonished audience with an archaic concept borrowed from antiquity: the Thymotic. What can we imagine this to mean? Consulting an ancient Greek etymological dictionary, we find that thymos has a number of overlapping meanings, as it refers to: life, vitality, spirit, feeling, heart, mind, courage, anger, passion, smoke. In fact (as in the case of anima, which refers to breath, a breeze of air), the oldest meaning can be found in the Indo-European root *dheu, which covers all forms of air turbulence: scattering, swirling, blowing, stinking, shaking, steam, breath, and smoke. So when Sloterdijk, in the first sentence of his book—under the apt heading »Europe’s First Word«—equates thymos with anger (»Of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, sing Goddess....«), we are dealing with a sensation having more to do with an overwhelming natural phenomenon than a mood familiar to one of his civilized contemporaries. Indeed, what Sloterdijk passes off as Europe’s first word already dates back to the 5th century BC. Because as politics took shape within the founding of the Polis, the images depicting Achilles (the cattle) disappeared in his berserker-like anger– images of a rage that led him to slay Hector or, worse still, to behead the son of the Trojan king Priam, and to do so in the sanctuary of Apollo, an act considered scandalous even in archaic, God-fearing Greece. This raises the question: How can an intelligent, well-read contemporary 21st-century citizen propose such an archaic concept? Well, that Sloterdijk seems to have hit the Zeitgeist’s nerve is evident from the emergence of the Angry Citizen, a term coined by journalist Dirk Kurbjuweit in a Spiegel article (with the corresponding journalist delay, in 2010). Sloterdijk clearly didn’t have this specimen in mind when he wrote a text for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung [FAZ] Arts section with the odd title: Die Revolution der gebenden Hand [The Revolution of the Giving Hand] in the June 13, 2009 edition. This contribution is memorable insofar as Sloterdijk goes out of his way to defend the honor of the Thymotic, or rather, to celebrate it. Despite his intellectual finesse, his argument can be reduced to a very basic, even primitive, logic, namely the indignation of a high-income earner who realizes that more than half of his income goes to the tax authorities. As befits a philosopher, Sloterdijk doesn’t just accept this circumstance as a given, let alone as fate, but asks why this is so—he asks for the reason.

Fully developed Tax States claim half of all the economic success of their productive classes for the Treasury every year, without those affected resorting to the most plausible response, anti-fiscal civil war. This is a political achievement that would have made any Finance Minister of Absolutism green with envy.

And because the philosopher isn’t satisfied with this political outcome, he imagines something like a Thymotic Revolution:

The only power capable of resisting this plundering of the future would require a socio-psychological reinvention of »Society« [Gesellschaft]. It would be nothing less than a Revolution of the Giving Hand. It would lead to the abolition of compulsory taxation and its transformation into gifts [Geschenke] to the general public—without the public sector having to become poorer as a result. This thymotic upheaval would show that in the eternal conflict between greed and pride, the latter can sometimes gain the upper hand.

On one hand, we have the thymotically-charged Civic Pride, and on the other, the malicious Leviathan, which has conditioned its subjects to the extent that they no longer even perceive their own oppression. The bizarre nature of the Thymotic celebration becomes clear when you realize that the conditio sine qua non of Modern individuality coincides with the emergence of a corresponding Social Drive [Gessellschaftstriebwerk]. Just as it’s no coincidence that the birth of the Renaissance Individual goes hand in hand with the emergence of the catasto, nor is it a coincidence that Masaccio’s first painting using central perspective is titled The Tribute Money.1

You could dismiss Peter Sloterdijk’s celebration of the Thymotic, accompanied by its amazing political blindness, as the mental aberration of a high-speed intellectual – or you might quote George Orwell, who said: »Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe in them,« but that would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Because if you look back, you must recognize that Sloterdijk’s model of the community of excitement [Erregungsgemeinschaft] is a highly accurate diagnosis of our times. Yet the Angry Citizen is only one example of this movement—perhaps not even the most prominent. With the advent of social media, discourse has become so thymotically charged that you could easily conclude that some of our contemporaries have shed their civility, choosing the archaic Berserker as their role model. Wherever you look, whether on the left or the right, ressentiment reigns supreme. Or, taking Thymotic’s basic olfactory meaning: it stinks to high heaven.

What is emerging from this community of excitement is a gradual slippage into a Moral Economy, a symbolic Civil War in which the focus is no longer on the common good (the Political Economy) but rather on the decisive question of how individuals are perceived in public. If my oft-quoted Marshall McLuhan quote describes an everyday practice (»Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.«), the question then becomes: which pot feeds this general agitation? One answer, even if it’s by no means sufficient, is that the Attention Economy fuels scandalization—and in this sense institutes, in contrast to Marx’s Use Value [Gebrauchswert], what I’ve called Abuse Value [Missbrauchswert]. You don’t have to look far to find exemplars. If you look at the strategies of young politicians, it’s evident that deliberately breaking taboos and exploiting outrage as tools can be excellent techniques for gaining political office.2 In this sense, it isn’t just a question of personal pride; it’s a structural problem, which, in the past, would have been described as positively sanctioning antisocial behaviors—to such an extent that we no longer notice the loss of civility it expresses. Following Sloterdijk, we could understand this decline as a result of political conditioning and (as often happens) blame social media for it—but such an explanation offers little insight, especially since it leaves the unanswered question: Who has an interest in such bourgeois self-destruction? If we want to clarify how and why a culture of ressentiment has spread over the last two decades, we need to dig much deeper. Against this backdrop, Sloterdijk’s regression to a pre-civilizational state offers us a deeper insight. The career of his assistant Marc Jongen, who cannibalized the Thymotic for its populist appeal, serves as an exemplar here. Jongen’s career didn’t begin in the political arena; rather, it reveals his more esoteric orientation. He wrote his master’s thesis on The Essence of Spiritual Knowledge [Das Wesen spiritueller Erkenntnis], in which he concluded: “The spiritual standpoint is the only one from which a way out of the current crisis in human development can emerge, and the only one from which a fundamental renewal of our knowledge, our culture, and our society—namely, in the sense of restoring the ancient—is possible.«3 Now, advocating for the Restoration of the Ancient makes sense only if Society’s unease with its current presence-of-mind is deemed doomed and rejected in its entirety. Jongen—who made a career as an AfD politician—is by no means alone in this view. And so, over the past few decades, a steadily growing chorus of humanities scholars who have succumbed to suspicions of a general toxicity—and, depending on their perspective, have blamed Capitalism, Masculinity, the White Race, or Fossil Fuels for the World’s Misery. It’s in this sense that the desire to restore the ancient (Great again!) is just a makeshift masquerade of pronounced nihilism, even a real desire for destruction. This may explain why the cohesion of the Gesellschafttriebwerk—or, to put it in more practical terms, the Social Glue [Gesellschaftsklebstoff]—has weakened, and why centrifugal, if not escapist, forces have gained ground instead. And, indeed, from this perspective, a Thymotic revolution has taken place—with the difference that the virtues so fervently invoked by Sloterdijk have turned out to be scourges. In this sense, the Advent of Morality, the boom in Ethics Councils, the never-ending invocation of noble and most noble intentions are the true symptoms of crisis – for we know that the moment we feel compelled to invoke Morality, we’ve already long since buried it.

Postscriptum: If we consider the disturbing case of Norbert Bolz, who was visited by four police officers following a satirical comment on Twitter, it becomes apparent that our institutions have also undergone a Thymotic upheaval. Why else would there be a portal like Hessen gegen Hetze [Hesse against Hate], boasting of having reported 75,000 instances of hate speech in recent years? The fact that, in the fight against the metaphysical Nazi, people are descending into moral spheres where rationality is dispensed with is more than worrying; more than anything, it contradicts Max Weber’s dictum that politics is done with the head, not with other parts of the body or the soul. If, instead, we must expect that we’re dealing with Religious Warriors, it could be that what Sloterdijk mistakenly called Europe’s first word will be its last. As Winston Churchill said:

When the doorbell rings at 6 a.m. and I can be sure it’s the milkman, then I know I live in a Democracy.

Translation: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

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Every story that’s even remotely exciting somehow revolves around love in some form or another—except that we can be passionate about very different things: the elegance of a mathematical formula, the consistency of a physical law, or God. As an exemplar, while stiletto heels may captivate a shoe fetishist, they might be utterly incomprehensible to a passionate chess player. It’s even harder to connect the group orgasms of Mesmerists, a monster stitched together from body parts, or dancing angels, to the question of Digitalisation. Certainly, a technician might try to convince us that it is only pure reason that rules in the Computer world, but the previous pages should have made it clear that the Monsters of Reason primarily lurk on the dark, world-renouncing side. And since these swings into the irrational will continue in our discussion, I’d like to take a brief detour to explore the question of why the computer, alongside its unquestionably practical side, always appears as a fetishistic apparatus.

The answer to the riddle lies hidden in the term Machine, which, when translated back into ancient Greek, can be understood as cunning or the deception of nature. In fact, the first Machine the ancient Greeks came up with was the Deux ex machina – when the Olympian goddess Athena was lowered onto the stage by a crane. Because the audience was so captivated by this miracle, it didn’t matter that it was just a theatrical trick.

One of the most astonishing acts of deception that the Western world has perpetrated on nature is the figure of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, who manages to immaculately give birth to the Son of God. We might smile at the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, presenting a World with a woman without a lower abdomen as a curiosity, but the Mother of God, as a human machine, set in motion a mechanical ascension project more radical than anything in the world. For wherever people began gathering to worship Our Lady, Cathedrals were built—Notre Dame Cathedrals—and from these Cathedrals emerged cathedral schools and, ultimately, Universities. Taking just the word used to describe the process of imparting knowledge at the University, we hear the echo of dogma: the »Seminar« (from the Latin semen, »Seed«) repeats the process of ear fertilization, the idea that supernatural wisdom pours into the adept’s head through the ear.1 With this in mind, it’s easy to understand why Europe became so excited about the Printing Press and why people in the Middle Ages, caught up in a general enthusiasm for machines, viewed God as a Clockmaker God. Oddly enough, the victorious joy over supernatural reproduction might even outlive Religion itself. As an exemplar, after encountering the »Celestial Machine«, the philosopher Descartes became firmly convinced that animals were nothing more than Natural Automatons. Because the Machine, like love, is a heavenly power and, unlike everything earthly, promises eternity, love stories become conceivable that go far beyond the classic configuration of Boy meets Girl.

So how does the story we are about to hear begin? Perhaps we’ll start in 1812, when a 21-year-old Charles Babbage is sitting in the Trinity College library, lost in thought. When asked by a friend what he was dreaming about, he replied—quickly glancing at the logarithm table in front of him—that he was dreaming of a machine that could calculate all logarithms. In fact, the mathematician’s life story makes us doubt whether he ever woke up from this dream. His entire working life would revolve around developing such a machine, which seemed to grow increasingly monstrous.

While Babbage is busy dreaming about his notion of such a calculating machine, a young lady in London is busy forging plans for her future. These plans essentially revolve around choosing the right husband—and for some reason, her covetous gaze has fallen on a young man who has just conquered society with a great poem: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

Because she finds George Byron the most interesting man she’s ever met, she believes that with him she can produce the mathematical child she’s always dreamed of as the »Princess of Parallelograms«. After an extremely complicated, deceptive campaign of conquest (which is only successful because the impoverished poet, hounded by creditors, appreciates a dowry and a wealthy wife), she discovers she’s been completely mistaken about her lover: Instead of pure and superior Reason, she encounters a bundle of nerves plagued by fears and nightmares, who can only sleep with a revolver under his pillow. And her realization comes too late: by now, the young lady, who has become Lady Byron, is already pregnant. So in December 1815, little Ada was born, just as her mother had become convinced that her husband was either insane or suffering from hydrocephalus. To separate from her husband in line with the times, she begins a massive scandal—suddenly claiming that Byron is having an incestuous relationship with his sister. The scandal becomes so massive that Byron is forced to sell his library and leave the country.

While Lady Byron prepares to raise her little daughter (who is never to learn anything about who her father is) to become a mathematical child, Charles Babbage is busy in his own way with work on the obscure object of his desire. Although a brilliant mathematician, his modest final grades mean he has no prospect of a professorship. Thankfully, he married into wealth, so he is free to pursue his dream: constructing his calculating machine. At a time when not even a standardized screw existed, this was a Sisyphean task that plunged Babbage into lifelong skirmishes with various toolmakers—which doesn’t exactly make things easier. Nevertheless, he finished the prototype of his first machine in 1822, and the government officials to whom he presented it were so impressed that they awarded him a large sum of money.

While Babbage sets about building his great machine, little Ada grows up. She’s a sickly child who is unable to move her legs for a long time and suffers from aphonia, anorexia, and asthma, followed by nervous breakdowns in adolescence. Her mother, therefore, consults an entire armada of specialists while continuing to dream of a mathematical child—a human calculating machine, so to speak—and strives to develop her daughter’s intellectual powers. And because she’s become obsessed with Phrenology—a »Science« claiming the ability to read character traits from the shape of the head—little Ada is also measured carefully. And, how could it be otherwise? She’s declared a genius.

Like Ada, Babbage’s project was also plagued by all sorts of teething problems. Although the machine was originally scheduled to be built in three years, construction dragged on. Or, in the words of the young Ada, who met Babbage at the age of 17 and immediately became an ardent supporter of his brainchild: »The analytical engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as Jacquard’s loom weaves flowers and leaves.« As is evident, Jacquard’s separation of the mechanical body and its control system serves as the inspiration for this new concept. Like Jacquard’s loom, the Analytic Engine receives its instructions in the form of punch cards that are read by a so-called mill, a processor unit that implements (executes) the programs. The result is then printed as a punch card or a paper graphic, and a bell rings to indicate an error or signal that a process has been completed.

What his machine has in common with today’s computer is that it doesn’t always do the same thing; it can run different programs depending on the situation. Before, there was only one solution, but now the machine acts differently depending on the situation. The relativity theory of a computer replaces the absolute nature of the Wheelwork [Räderwerks].

Babbage himself makes this clear in a very exquisite thought experiment: he instructs the medieval Watchmaker God using basic programming features. As an exemplar, if the divine apprentice were to execute a simple addition program, he could be instructed to progress only in triple steps, or more precisely in third steps, from a size of 1000. For this to be possible, a programming language is needed that instructs the machine (meaning the Dear old watchmaker God) to retrieve another program at precisely the correct point. And in this ability to change the program is the power of this new God potency: God is now a DJ.

Now, it’s one thing to come up with a proof of God, but it’s quite another to implement such a program change in praxis. A prerequisite for this is that the programs recorded on punch cards must be assigned unique identification numbers. If the condition for a program change is met in a program (in our exemplar: if the sum of the previous arithmetic operations is equal to one thousand), then the new program is retrieved, replacing the previous program. The machine also has a rotating drum component where all punch card programs are stored, as well as a memory that can store auxiliary variables, intermediate results, and the like. As you can see, Babbage’s machine is remarkably similar to a computer—it seems miraculous that a single mind could have conceived such a complex construct.

Ultimately, what makes the Analytical Engine a great unfinished project is the problem of carrying over tens, which we’re all familiar with from school. And while this may seem relatively harmless on paper, it poses a major mechanical problem, because special cases, meaning additional gears, have to be provided for in the arithmetic operations. In short, in its inventor’s mind, the machine grows into an uncontrollable monster consisting of 55,000 individual parts.

Young Ada, who is shown the machine at an evening party, is completely unfamiliar with all of its mechanical workings. However, she realizes that if she devotes all her energy to mathematics, she can escape her mother’s control. With the battle cry »Here I am! Ready to be taught!«, a private tutor is hired, a certain Dr. King, who is to teach her the finer points of differential calculus. The teacher is patient, the student is eager to learn—and as life would have it, the two become a couple. This fits well, not least because Dr. King, later Lord Lovelace, is of noble birth and wealthy, just as the young lady herself is. So they marry and have three children, one after the other. Now that Ada is a mother herself, there’s no longer any reason to keep the truth from her. And so, at the age of twenty-six, she finally learns who her father is: Lord Byron, the ostracized genius. This discovery unleashes a highly personal suspicion of genius in her—and so she takes heart and writes a letter to Charles Babbage, a friend of the family, in which she offers her services as his assistant, along with an invitation to go ice skating: »It occurs to me that at some point (perhaps even within two or three years, but perhaps only after many years) you may have put my mind to work on your plans.«

However, this announcement of a love story begins as a strange love triangle. Who actually loves whom — and why — remains unclear unless we consider the ideals of Machine, Mathematics, and Artificial Intelligence. In Babbage’s case, the facts are perhaps the most straightforward. He wants to birth his machine into a hostile, ignorant world—and when such a faithful and accommodating being presents herself, why not? So he asks his admirer to translate a French text written by an Italian mathematician about his analytical machine. Ada Lovelace agrees—adding a series of personal notes. The notes are twice as long as the original text, because Ada has, unexpectedly, found her calling: as the bride of science and self-appointed high priestess of the Machine, she doesn’t bother with engineering tinkering, but delves straight into the heart of the matter—the question of how these programs that will run on this wonderous machine should actually be created. And in whose mind should they be created, if not her own? The fact that her mathematical abilities are still a little rough around the edges isn’t an obstacle; after all, she has her genius, which she occasionally refers to as her »poetic science.« From this perspective, the apparatus Babbage is working on is nothing more than the embodiment of a code innate to her nature. From here, it’s only a short step to the seemingly megalomaniacal idea that one could create a »calculus of the nervous system,« that the functional mode of one’s own brain must contain the World Formula.

Even if Ada Lovelace’s visions don’t really match up with her rather modest contributions, we should still ask ourselves how these seemingly megalomaniacal visions differ from the promises of Artificial Intelligence. Actually, any sober expert on the subject will admit the difference is marginal. In this sense, the lasting fame that recognized Ada Lovelace as the first programmer in history and led to the programming language ADA being named after her is fully justified. However, her importance lies elsewhere. Ada Lovelace plays a role in the history of computing not because of her practical achievements, but because she articulated the phantasmatic, divine charge of the Machine like no other. And while Babbage, working on a Universal Machine, must contend with uncooperative toolmakers and the mundane realities of everyday life, Ada Lovelace, the »bride of science,« can dream herself into a mystical union with the Machine. And it’s here that she takes up the very theme we’ve introduced with our reference to the story of Mary. Precisely because it has been dissolved into text and no longer needs a body, the Machine becomes the ideal of the mathematical child: that of being liberated from one’s mother and one’s own body. Pure thought, pure genius.

Translation by Martin Burckhardt and Hopkins Stanley

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1

See the section The Mother of God Seminar in Burckhardt, M. The Psychotope, Ex nihilo, Feb 19, 2025.

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If we take Fredric Jameson’s brief quote that it’s easier to imagine the World’s end rather than that of Capitalism, we must conclude this thought contains a paradoxical creed – or at least an assumption of eternity. This might have something to do with Capitalism’s becoming lost in a fog of ideas—that, even, in the absence of a convincing genealogy, the construct’s historicity is unclear.1 But not knowing how this story really began makes it hard to imagine how it will end. If we consult the father of Capital, it’s striking that whenever it comes to understanding the nature of Money, he leads us into metaphysical, if not religious, realms. This is how Marx equates Capital with jealous Israel2 – or bluntly asserts that Capital has an inherent vampiric nature. »Capital is dead labor, which revives itself in a vampiric manner by sucking in living labor, and lives all the more, the more it sucks in.«3 Even where he, as a scientific materialist, refers to historical propulsive forces, this is of little help to the reader. For when Marx concludes that Capital comes dressed in a uniform and national colors,4 the image of such a monetary Leviathan leaves much to be desired—after all, this explanation, at best, takes us back to the 17^th century, to when Cromwell equipped the soldiers of his new model army with uniforms—while it’s a good fifty years later that the Bank of England was founded – and with it the concept of the Leviathan and its fiat currency. However, when we keep in mind that Interest, as the actual return on Capital, dates back to the Middle Ages, it’s evident that we’re dealing with a historical short circuit. Even Max Weber, who attributed the Capitalist Mind to Protestant ethics, offers us only very limited insight. While it’s clear that something like Capitalism and Psychological Accounting took root in the Protestant worldview, this attribution can’t explain why Luther preached so vehemently against Interest and worked himself up into a frenzy of vague anti-Semitism. Just two or three arguments should suffice in refuting Weber’s fixation on Protestantism: That Florence introduced a general tax obligation as early as 1427 with the catasto – simply because it was at war with Milan and intended to hire British mercenaries (a commonplace practice already the 14^th century); - that the Church devised Purgatory for giving money changers an opportunity to work off their sins; - and finally that, with Hugh of St. Cher’s treasury of grace, we get the rise to the Indulgence selling, prompting the Church’s most astonishing financial innovations—all showing how the Geist of Capitalism, as a form of psychological double-entry bookkeeping, was already at home in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, having cloaked the ruling institutions in a barely concealed proto-Capitalist guise.

Beloved Enemy

Why hasn’t anyone paid attention to these obvious details, especially since they weren’t hidden or kept secret? The answer is simple: if, as Roland Barthes so aptly put it, desire writes the text – and if, as Marshall McLuhan said, ›moral outrage is a fundamental technique for conferring dignity on an idiot‹—it becomes understandable why so many of our contemporaries prefer to conjure up a kind of scapegoat whom they can blame for their own speechlessness. How can these calamities, even those we’ve brought upon ourselves, be blamed on the Alien Logic of Capitalism? Following this outsourcing logic, Guardian columnist George Monbiot has traced Capitalism’s true origins to the island of Madeira in 1450—an interpretation that allows him to brand the Capitalist scapegoat as both colonizer and environmental destroyer. Because Land, Labor, and Money were commodified on Madeira, Monbiot can venture onto the highly Zeitgeisty formula: »Destroying the environment and creatively skimming money off the top isn’t a perversion of capitalism. It is capitalism.« All the above arguments should make it clear that what we’re witnessing here is merely a continuation of the dramatized horror stories that have been chanted by countless Marxist authors, theorists, and ideologues following in his footsteps, whose sole purpose is to express moral outrage—an attitude that Karl Marx, who genuinely appreciated the achievements of Capitalism, never adopted. Naturally, anyone demanding real Enlightenment about the birth of Capitalism can only turn away in disappointment. But where to turn? Following Marx’s insight that ›being determines consciousness,‹ the task would be to apprehend the Triebwerk5 [Drive] behind the Capitalist Operating System. Now, we don’t have to look very far to find an exemplum. The medieval Räderwerkautomat [Wheelwork Automaton] is a Universal Machine that not only revolutionized energy production through its Mill technology but also instituted Labor’s organizational ratio, which, in its Mechanical Clock form, converted time into money, making tax-paying as a form of interest debt the foremost civic duty. Here, the intellectual difficulty is that we’re suddenly confronting a thought without a thinker, a logic that clandestinely conquers minds—and that, to this day, remains a historiographic blind spot. Anyone wishing to consult a university library about the birth of the Mechanical worldview would find entire rows of books promising Cartesian-perspective enlightenment, while de facto revealing their scholarship’s blind spot: that the Räderwerkautomat is a product of the Middle Ages. Consequently, the question must be asked if the Cartesian hero’s story is actually accurate—or if we shouldn’t be asking ourselves why Descartes arrived several centuries late instead?6 In any case, we’re compelled to delve into a cultural unconscious. Even though Wheelwork’s Logic strikes medieval thought like a meteor, Scholastics had great difficulty coming to terms with its ratio; worse still, they deployed all their erudition in denying this new Era’s internal logic. Here, the Psychotope’s innovative approach, which we have come to call Capitalism, takes hold of people’s minds in a thoroughly subterranean way.

Work is Prayer

My story begins in the 12^th century—at a time when the Räderwerkautomat was establishing itself as the medieval energetic Kraftwerk [Powerhouse], as exemplified by the Mill. This meant that people who had been plagued by famine just a century earlier were now able to achieve modest prosperity. However, Capitalism didn’t initially take shape in the cities; instead, it emerged where least expected: in the forests of Burgundy, in places such as Cîteaux, Fontenay, and Noirlac. It was here, following their leader, Bernard of Clairvaux, that Cistercian monks settled to establish what they called a paradisus claustralis, a monastic paradise away from the cities and feudal spheres of influence. Drawing a present-day parallel, these monastic communes’ history resembles that of our 20^th century dropouts experimenting with new ways of living and working in rural communities. Indeed, a new kind of intellect was emerging at the time – a spirit clearly expressed in two short quotations. Firstly, when Bernard of Clairvaux decrees that work is prayer, he’s echoing the old Benedictine motto (ora et labora), but he’s reassigning its primacy to work by reversing its elements, which, consequently, is the overcoming of feudal privilege. For if a monk’s piety can now be gauged by his works, a new principle of meritocracy is established, promising a career even to second-born children of the nobility, who would otherwise have been left with a questionable future. Secondly, and perhaps even more important, is how Bernard of Clairvaux’s theology brings about a peculiar shift in the horizon of thought. When he claims that ›the tree is a fallen pillar‹, and that nature represents the wildness of a heavenly form, this isn’t merely a call to resurrect the paradisus claustralis in its spiritual form (as a word or liturgy), but also in its material form. That the monks adhere to his theology, which represents a concrete utopia in both form and substance, is evidenced in the stark contrast between their monasteries’ architecture and that of their historical predecessors.

While the Romanesque Cathedral in Autun, built in 1120, was a haven of apocalyptic horrors, populated by demons and terrifying monsters, monasteries built under Cistercian direction are free of such figures; instead, they cultivated a minimalist architecture with stylized floral Capitals and a light-flooded beauty.7

However, the absolute novelty of Cistercian Gothic architecture lies in the invention of ribbed vaults that transfer the load bearing down on the building to its sides. This innovation, which can be understood as an anticipation of the architectural principle of form is function, allowed architects to reduce the use of materials to an absolute minimum—and likewise, to raise buildings to unprecedented heights. While theologians may celebrate the redemption of the Cistercian Ascension project, its architectural structures remained unsurpassed for a long time, with such dizzying heights not reached again until New York’s skyscrapers in the late 19^th century. Unsurprisingly, Cistercian Gothic architecture soon conquered the Cathedrals being built in cities, such as those at Chartres and Reims. More importantly, however, is how these architectural design principles brought Cistercian rationality to the cities. Consequently, cathedral-building became a collaborative division of labor, with specialists (stonecutters, masons, glassblowers, sculptors, and the like) working together. That this specialization of trades led to the formation of guilds, which in turn adopted the Cistercian order’s rules as their model, illustrates just how willingly the secular world followed in the monks’ footsteps, as exemplified by its effects at Chartres Cathedral. Not only is this a work of art in which the anonymous architects show their reverence for their Greek artistic idol Daedalus’ labyrinth, but the Cathedral also becomes a place where the fearless affirmation of reason takes on a momentum of its own. So the Cathedral began educating monks, first as a cathedral school, then as a university, where it became a haven for natural philosophers who, in the Aristotelian tradition, sought to understand the laws of Nature. When philosopher Bernard of Chartres articulates: »We are dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more and further than they«, he was setting the tone of progress’s motto that hasn’t left Europe, which Meister Eckhart later expressed with beautiful clarity: »God is intellectus.«

The Temple, Inc.

Where does this story take a turn that could be described as genuinely Capitalist? An initial symptom of this intellectual expansion is reflected in the Cistercian Order’s countless branches, all modeled on Fontenay, which, consequently, transform the paradisus claustralis into a corporate entity extending from Italy and Spain to Scandinavia. On top of that, the Cistercians spread their missionary activities to Prussia, Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania. Yet another coup that brought the Money issue to the fore was the founding of the Knights Templar. Following the Mother Order’s rules, its function was clearly monetary: as companions on the Crusades, tasked with securing the enterprise’s financing, the monk-soldiers also served as logisticians and financiers. Long before Italy’s moneylenders moved from their banchi to respectable buildings, the Knights Templar had established a vast network of branches, creating what could almost be described as a Temple Incorporated.8 Paradoxically, the Brotherhood’s immense success attracted the attention of secular powers – leading to the papacy being forcibly relocated to Avignon. When the Knights Templar settled in Paris after the Crusades ended, the French King, who was always short on money and plagued by financial difficulties, set his greedy eyes on the Order’s treasure trove of gold. So Philippe le Bel takes the Pope into his custody, and, with his help, fabricates charges of simony against them before having the Order’s leaders burned at the stake. If this conspiracy, which continues haunting conspiracy theorists to this day, teaches us anything, it’s that Money became the decisive Triebwerk [Drive] behind events, while the spiritual world was transformed into a Potemkin village. According to this interpretation, all the aspirations that scholars of the time strove to conceal come into view. Undoubtedly, we’re dealing with a form of schizophrenia where consciousness does everything it can to deny its own existence: Protect Me From What I Want. In overcoming gravity,9 it’s evident that as Labor’s ratio of division and specialization takes hold in Society, the Räderwerkautomaton introjected virtues of tact and punctuality soon begin to permeate its Social machinery, making gains in rationality visible. While we may have become intimately familiar with the inherent dynamics of the expression Time is Money, it confronted the Christian Middle Ages with an intellectual monster: the demand that the ratio itself yields added value, commonly known as interest. In fact, in the Aristotelian tradition, interest represents a noli me tangere.10 On the one hand, while Aristotle taught that money was called nomisma because any value could be stamped on a coin, when it came to the question of interest, he fell prey to the most beautiful naturalism. Since Money was a sterile form of wealth, he argued, it was unnatural for it to produce offspring, that is, interest, from itself.11 Although the figure of the usurer was already known in ancient Greece, this doctrine remained intact until the 12^th and 13^th centuries (and is still valid in the Islamic world today). If humans are compelled to eat and recover from their daily work during sleep, then (according to the argument put forward by the monks) it is unnatural for Money to also demand Interest at night. Consequently, the usurer was to be regarded as a time thief, sinning against the divine order. Although this memento has led to our parking meters still observing the night’s divinity (and the Sabbath’s rest), neither Society’s monetization12 nor Usury’s triumphant advance could be stopped with Capitalism’s advance. While the Church proved to be a successful arbitrageur in its construction of the indulgence trade, it left the money-lending business primarily to social outsiders, Jews in particular, who were punished for this in cognitive dissonance with militant anti-Semitism. The absurd consequences of this can be illustrated with a little story. When the English King Edward I, known as the Hammer, returned from the crusade, he asked his English nobles for permission to levy a tax on them to pay off his debts to Venetian bankers. However, his lords were in no way willing to pay for this. Their response was that they: a) demanded a say in granting this permission and b) advised him to confiscate the property of Jews living in England—which became the final solution. In 1290, all Jews in England were stripped of their property and expelled from the country. However, the problem of interest-bearing money was not solved in any way, so English usurers complained that they had to dress up as Jews in order to charge interest. The American sociologist Benjamin Nelson, in his The Idea of Usury13, has written a magnificent work on the history of interest, precisely capturing the historical metamorphosis in the subtitle: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood. Because this path, which frees societies from the bonds of brotherhood and family ties, is fraught with pitfalls and obstacles, it wasn’t until the 16th century, during Calvin’s time, that Society began to reconcile itself to this burden. In the end, however, it was considered a citizen’s civic duty to pay off their debt, including interest and compound interest—an obligation that only widows and orphans were exempt from. If, in the words of Jakob Burckhardt, we attribute the Renaissance to the discovery of Man and the World, this means that what we pejoratively perceive as the logic of Alienation in Capitalism also has a liberating side—because, as the individual undergoes a transformation into the universal Other, he or she is also elevated to the status of a World Citizen.

In God We Trust

The extent to which the monetary system was inscribed into the medieval social fabric, ultimately becoming its Social Drive [Gesellschaftstriebwerk], can be illustrated by a brief story from the 14^th century: A sinner inspired to atone for his misdeeds, volunteers to work on the construction of Cologne Cathedral, a particularly holy object. This request, of course, didn’t sit well with the highly specialized workers, who were all organized into guilds and paid accordingly—and so the repentant sinner paid for his willing atonement with his life—because the workers promptly pushed him off the scaffolding. If, with a few exceptions—such as Nicole Oresme’s A Treatise on the Origin, Nature Law and Alterations of Money—discourse on the new monetary order was taboo, evidence of its advance can be seen in the phantom pains of the Church’s reaction to it. An early expression of this was the treasury of grace, developed around 1230 by Hugh of Saint-Cher, an advisor to several popes. The fundamental idea was relatively simple: so as to demonstrate the Christian currency’s superiority, Hugo asserted that the Church, nourished by the Martyrs’ sacrifices, possessed an immeasurable treasure with which past and future sins could be expiated. »The blood shed is a treasure kept in the Church’s treasure chest, and the Church has the key to it; therefore, whenever it wants, it can open the treasure chest and distribute the treasure at will by granting indulgences and remission of punishment to the faithful.« Contemporaries may smile at the idea of such a religious Fort Knox, but this construct gave rise not only to the sale of indulgences but also to a series of financial innovations. After all, what was a believer who had ended up in a foreign city on a trading journey supposed to do in the absence of his confessor and his familiar language? To spare believers from the torment of a guilty conscience, they were offered a letter of indulgence—a kind of check that could be cashed elsewhere at their discretion. This logic was further refined when the church leaders proposed the idea of substitution – so that a believer could also shorten a loved one’s time in purgatory by purchasing such a letter. It is evident that this logic of indulgences, a taxonomy of sin—indeed, a form of Psychological Accounting—became inscribed in the collective consciousness, and that from then on, every sinner caught up in this indulgence economy was compelled to consider what transgressions were within their financial means. As demand for indulgences continued to rise, church leaders devised new instruments promising added-value—including the idea of a Jubilarian Year, during which pilgrims to Rome could purchase their absolution at a discount and in tear-off blocks, like tickets from a vending machine.14 Having brought a flood of pilgrims to the Eternal City, the Holy See was now able to show them the magnificent buildings constructed thanks to this form of sinful mercantilism. While the Cardinals may have seen these buildings as a triumph of the Spirit over filthy Mammon, it must be noted that the Indulgences’ success took on a momentum of its own—leading to unexpected consequences. Because soon profiteers began distributing forged letters of indulgence, it became necessary to assign them serial numbers—ultimately turning Church documents into the template for the American dollar: In God we trust. However, the most magnificent, yet most questionable, invention devised by the Church leaders was Purgatory itself – which was nothing less than a reconstruction of Heaven. In a sense, this measure was also an embarrassing stopgap solution. Just as people had reconciled themselves to the Räderwerkautomat by retraining the dear Lord as a watchmaker (as Nicole Oresme demonstrated in his proof of God), this intermediate level between heaven and hell served primarily to reconcile people to inevitability of filthy lucre. And so that even usurers could enter the kingdom of heaven (If you can’t beat them, join them), the thinking arose that they work off their sins in Purgatory. If Clairvaux’s dictum work is prayer takes on a new, unexpected quality here—this is clear evidence that the original promise of freedom has become an obligation, no, even more than that: a matter of course.

The Birth of Political Economy

If History, summarized here in its shortest form, teaches us anything, it’s that we cannot assume an original plan, just as we cannot assume that a mindset can be realized in a cool, proto-Capitalist form. Rather, it makes the protagonists appear as the Sorcerer’s Apprentices, who unleash Ghosts that they later cannot exorcise. Yet, the Gesellschaftstriebwerk, lifting its head behind their backs, isn’t a questionable monster but rather the wheelwork automaton ratio itself: the Universal Machine that not only organizes division of labor and communication among the actors, but also inscribes itself (punctuality and tact) into their psyche. Thus, the 14th-century Princes’ Mirror instructs future rulers to behave in accordance with the mechanical Clock. And because the mechanical Clock becomes not only the epitome of rationality but also a moral imperative, the path is paved leading into the mind of René Descartes and his mechanical worldview. Pausing for a moment to take another look at Max Weber’s interpretation, it’s evident he’s taking Protestant ethics as the symptom for the cause—that he’s focusing on the superstructure, while the Gesellschaftstriebwerk remains in the dark. The intellectual break leading to Capitalism becomes much more tangible when we focus on the Machine instead of the moral superstructure. This is because it’s through Money that the mechanism (Time is Money), which, together with interest, imposes strict Psychological Accounting on citizens; even more than that, it compels each individual to accept the production of surplus value as a moral obligation—finally bringing into focus what Marx called political economy. Because, as mentioned earlier, it certainly isn’t self-evident that money wears a uniform and national colors—let alone that it’s a reasonably reliable currency. Here, we enter the World, or more precisely, delve into the unfamiliar world of the 14^th century, when Society still believed that because the King issued the coin, he must also be considered its owner. Accordingly, the coin wasn’t considered to have intrinsic value; instead, it was a royally licensed tool for measuring the value of something (reminiscent of today’s software licenses). This in turn implied, on one hand, that value is intrinsic to the object—and that an item’s price doesn’t change at will (or as the economy fluctuates)—and, on the other hand, that the instrument (like a value thermometer) works reliably. However, this wasn’t the case. As Society became increasingly monetized from the 13^th century onwards, while the institution of a Universal Tax was still unknown, feudal rulers found themselves in constant financial straits. The aforementioned French king Philip IV solved this problem by unceremoniously melting down his neighbors’ or predecessors’ coins, stretching them with cheap base metals, and re-minting them, a technique that allowed him to double or triple his state coffers. Since this debasement of money value didn’t go unnoticed by the citizens, protests soon broke out, and the counterfeiting king found himself confronted by angry fishmongers. In fact, not only the Money question, but also that of a State budget, poses a profound intellectual dilemma no less perplexing than the issue of interest-bearing money. Consequently, the scholastics responded by admonishing sellers to charge a fair, Christian price. It was Nicole Oresme who, in his Treatise on Money Devaluation, asked: Who owns the money? His answer corresponds to nothing other than a monetary Central Perspective – or, more precisely, the Logic of Representation. Because Money is available to everyone, and thus an omnibus of a common good, making the King, he argued, as the supreme representative of his community and therefore obligated to issue coins of stable value. Such an order implies the logic of a currency area sharply demarcated from other States. If, for example, another ruler were tempted to melt down his neighbor’s coins—thus triggering an inflationary process—this would constitute a cause for war. What emerges in negotiating this question of good Money is nothing less than the Nation-State architecture, the very entity that Marx sees before him in its uniform and national colors. If Oresme’s treatise, written in the mid-14^th century, lucidly anticipates this Nation-State logic, then the Leviathan, as its conceptual symbolic realization, took three centuries to fully emerge—not least because this construct lacked the corresponding ratios and a steady source of funding. Here too, theologians proved to be the decisive influencers. In an interesting reinterpretation of the Two-Kingdoms doctrine, they brought a new kind of actor onto the political stage. While the Roman tax authority was nothing more than the State treasury, the ever-resourceful Scholastics elevated it to the status of Jesus’ representative on Earth, attributing to it a quasi-divine quality of omnipresence. Consequently, the catchy slogan was: Quod non capit Christus, capit Fiscus [What Christ does not get, the Treasury does]. How this became the basis of representative government is demonstrated by the Florentine authorities’ introduction of the catasto in 1427, accompanied by the first painting depicting Central Perspective (Andrea Masaccio’s The Tribute Money). If the catasto was nothing more than a database that recorded Florentine citizens, determined their financial circumstances, and taxed them according to their income, then it can be understood as transferring Psychological Bookkeeping into the collective order—a battery driving not only individual salvation but also the common good.

The Chameleon

Looking back from here at the monks who sought the paradisus claustralis in the forests of Burgundy, it’s evident that we are dealing with a breathtaking metamorphosis. The depth of this spiritual change and the way it transformed medieval thinking into the Capitalist Psychotope is exemplified by the recoding of medieval Virtues. In Bernard of Clairvaux’s time, everyone understood that virtutes referred to the four Roman virtues—fortitude, justice, temperance, and prudence—which Christianity had expanded to include the triad of faith, love, and hope. However, as Psychological Bookkeeping took hold in people’s minds, a slow but profound change took place. When Pico della Mirandola, attributed with writing a book on the dignity of man—the first treatise ever devoted to this subject—locates human dignity in Man’s chameleon-like nature (The dignity of man is that he is a chameleon), we’re confronted for the first time with a moral flexibility understood as virtù in the Renaissance.15 Attempting to translate this virtue of all virtues into a contemporary moral portrait is best summed up as the slogan: We can do things differently! If this logic—as an expression of Machiavellian thinking—is still viewed with suspicion today, it is easy to imagine the depths of moral conflict facing the medieval World with this figure of thought. The result, of course, was unambiguous—and unavoidable. Everyone was compelled to see themselves as instruments, or rather, since they were required to constantly optimize themselves, the shift in Psychological Bookkeeping had to occur: a shift away from the otherworldly and toward the inner world. With this in mind, it’s hardly surprising that the virtuoso becomes the ideal personality.16 That Europe made him a superstar, harmonizing the whole of social life into a symphonic orchestra, shouldn’t obscure the hardships that accompanied this change. With this logic, not only does the individual’s freedom, but also his social alienation becomes programmatic. From now on, everyone is encouraged to see themselves as producers of added value, as homo oeconomicus. While European societies managed to somewhat tame Capitalism’s Monster over the centuries (so that Bernard de Mandeville, after the founding of the Bank of England, was able to note with astonishment that greed can work for the common good as »private vices turned into public benefits«), the logic of exploitation was imposed on the rest of the world. While the Sachsenspiegel [Saxon Miror] of 1215 decreed that serfdom was contrary to God’s will and therefore shouldn’t exist, early modern Capitalists found nothing objectionable about operating Haiti’s sugar cane plantations with slaves. What happens when Nature, Humanity, and even our own selves are exploited for the sake of maximizing profits is the story that’s been told to us under the heading of Capitalism— not only by Karl Marx, but also by economic historians such as Karl Polanyi, whose The Great Transformation demonstrates what happens when economic rationality becomes detached from humanity.

Game Over!

If we look back on the history of Capitalism today, it’s perhaps because its history and decisive pillars have dissolved one by one over recent decades. The Triebwerk behind this dissolution is easy to identify: just as the medieval Räderwerkautomat ushered societies into the modern era, Digitalisation is bringing about another fundamental change. If, since the end of Bretton Woods, Capital is no longer at home in National Capitals (with Central Banks, indeed the Nation States themselves, having lost power), then what we’ve become accustomed to calling, somewhat misleadingly, Globalization should be understood primarily as a global networking epiphenomenon; and if our concept of Work has become questionable, it is because Digitalisation has programmatically confronted us with the Museum of Labor;17 and finally, if every digitalised good is structurally superfluous according to the basic formula of Digitalisation (x=xⁿ); then our concept of what a good is18 and what its added value consists of has become an open question, indeed, a mystery. If the logic of Anything, Anytime, Anywhere weren’t disturbing enough, post-industrial societies are now also confronted with the threat of rationalization posed by Artificial Intelligence, which calls into question the value of human beings, insofar as AI, based on a generalized reflection of Human virtuosity and Capitalist exploitability, does so. Here, the chasm separating us from classical Capitalism deepens, becoming increasingly tangible when we consider that the actual Triebwerk behind Capitalism (time-is-money) has lost its significance—while, simultaneously, the Specters of Usury are returning. Curiously, this can be illustrated by the speechlessness characterizing the present-day reaction to the appearance of Avatars in advertising: A Spiegel author, in the manner of a medieval Scholastic, wrote the headline: »They don’t eat, they don’t sleep, and they earn a lot of money.«19 If we try to fathom contemporary Capitalism’s values crisis, we don’t actually have to look very far. When the Anglo-Saxon world translates interest [Zins] as »interest«, it is evident that we are dealing here (at least virtually) with a Social Emplastic [Gesellschaftsklebstoff].20 If we contrast the concept of interest with that of attention, which, as we know, drives contemporary Capitalism, the dilemma becomes apparent.21 While interest rates have been regulated over the centuries—which, on one hand, has freed members of society from excessive usury and, on the other, promised them a certain degree of security in planning their lives—the Actor’s attention span in the Attention Economy has shrunk to a punctum. Everyone pays attention, but hardly anyone is able or willing to permanently store it, let alone shape it into a viable model for future use. To use a term coined by C.G. Jung, we could speak of a psychic inflation: the emission of supposed values that, on closer inspection, turn out to be phantasms. The fact that today’s politicians are booking mountains of debt as special assets may be dismissed as contemporary sophistry. But the fact that even the financial virtuosos rushed headlong into the abyss like a horde of risk-averse lemmings during the financial crisis, indulging in a veritable cargo cult with their junk triple-A-rated real estate securities, is clear evidence that even the Masters of the Universe have shut themselves away in a phantasmal World. From this perspective, the world we live in isn’t so far removed from the Counterfeiters of the Middle Ages. Nowadays, everyone may be lulled into the certainty that when they pay attention to something, they are paying with their data, but nevertheless, even if this doesn’t enter our consciousness (as often is the case), it’s stored long-term. This is because user data, á la longue, is transformed into Artificial Intelligence models that can generate text and images, but can just as easily be used to control autonomous vehicles, construction machinery, or robots—resulting in the devaluation of human labor. If the medieval Scholastics, in misjudging the systemic problem, admonished people to demand prezzi christiani, it’s evident that moralizing here misses the systemic crisis—indeed, as Nicole Oresme asked afterwards: Who owns the Money?—shouldn’t we ask: Who owns the Attention? Although this question is already popping up here and there in the media, it’s always with the ulterior motive of accusing the big tech companies of counterfeiting. However, it would be much more effective to pursue the vision of what a successful Attention Economy might look like. And this would have to address the real question of what constitutes good, sustainable attention: or better said, an interest that, instead of burning up in a limbo Economy generates real added value as applications not only relieving people of tedious tasks, but also directing their attention to an interest in what lies beyond.

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Yes, it’s true: we live beyond our means. We use money we don’t have to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like. With criticism of Consumerism, Environmental Protectionism begins. There’s no planet B! And who would have anything against sustainability? The question is simply: Is it true that we only really talk about the environment when we mention environmental or climate protection? Or is there something else at play here that we don’t notice?

As the idea arose during the French Revolution that nature has set no limits on our hopes, the English government established an early basic income to nip the Spirit of Revolt in the bud— immediately sparking fierce protests among the wealthy property owners. With this, work morale was undermined, and hunger as an educational measure was rendered obsolete. Reverend Thomas Malthus took a more fundamental approach to the issue, responding to dreams of infinite progress with the idea of a ›naturally limited‹ state. Because the Earth is finite, the population cannot grow indefinitely. Now, Malthusianism had already been proven to be a grave error in the 19th century—as had the predictions of the Club of Rome and those of the incorrigible prophet of doom, Paul Ehrlich, who had predicted millions upon millions of deaths in the 1970s with his Population Bomb. And here is where the idea of a Naturally defined boundary reveals its ugly, or rather, its featherbrained face. It tempts its followers to extend their own limitations to the whole world and into the future. For if desire is the Father of thought, it is also the Mother of delusion. And as a result, one sees the Horsemen of the Apocalypse storming in from all sides..

The decisive error in thinking of the catastrophe lover consists in ignoring the reversal of the modern concept of growth: Less can be more. A computer chip most clearly demonstrates this. It shows that a silicon crystal can store billions of times more information than was possible in the 1950s – with the result that every smartphone owner has more information storage capacity than NASA had at its disposal for the moon landing. Couldn’t it be that those who oppose this dizzying growth with a »natural limit« are primarily cultivating ignorance? As flimsy as this operation of repression and self-empowerment may be, ideologically, it’s an extremely successful ploy. While the revolutionaries of yesteryear took up the cause of liberating the proletariat (who responded with a gruff ›Go over there then...‹), we’ve moved from alienated beings to desecrated nature, from World Revolution to Climate Catastrophe. And because nature doesn’t talk back, you’ve entered into an alliance with a higher power. Isn’t it great that this legitimizes your actions with a clear conscience? More politically significant is that declaring a State of Emergency allows you to assert special rights (even if these are highly questionable in terms of democratic theory). In any case, those who warn of the limits of nature are constantly tempted to take on the role of gatekeepers. That is, those who watch over the limit values, distribute resources, and separate what’s permissible from what is impermissible. You only have to consider the educational measures taken by the World’s Saviors to realize that a misanthropic ideology has crept in. Once you’ve converted a child’s life into a CO2 footprint, a birth strike is not far off. No, even more than that: if the apocalypse is imminent, it’s best not to be born.

Translation Hopkins Stanley

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Dear fellow citizens, oh God, no, no, you can’t start a speech like that! It’s so pushy, really, really awful! Why not keep some distance? Especially since I have to start by distancing myself. So: Ladies and gentlemen! It is not acceptable for me to appear like a politician who delights the world with some kind of admonition, a Sunday sermon in which all the high-toned words would only be an expression of my small-mindedness, my timidity.

Recently, I picked up Max Weber’s Politics as a Vocation again—and was shocked by the simplicity of his dichotomy: Either one lives for politics, or one lives from politics. This is where the question of conscience begins. Because if I’m faced with a political problem, I would first have to ask myself what the Thing is, res publica—and not whether it somehow benefits me. And this is where, dear listeners, my discomfort begins—no, where your discomfort probably begins too. Because when I listen to our kind, that is, the classe politique, I am struck first and foremost by how out of touch with the present our discourse is. Why? Perhaps because we all live from politics, not for politics. There prevails (as already in the financial crisis) a strange herd behavior. As long as the music plays, everyone plays along with the game—until, that is, the lemmings throw themselves off the cliff.

C. G. Jung coined the wonderful concept of psychic inflation a century ago. Just as in the early twenties, after the dissolution of the traditional value system (“I gave my gold for iron”), the Reichsmark shot up into the tens of thousands, indeed into the millions and billions, so much that during hyperinflation, people had to cart the paper money around in laundry baskets and wheelbarrows—in other words, we’ve worked ourselves up into a state of verbal armament, an intellectual hyperinflation in which Democracy, Human dignity, and even Humanity are constantly at stake—except that the lofty words usually mean the exact opposite of what they say.

When and why does one proclaim something like an Education Republic of Germany? Exactly! Because education is going downhill…If we were honest, we would first have to acknowledge that our country (like many other industrialized nations around us) has been in a downward spiral for quite some time. The bridges are as dilapidated as the healthcare system is bankrupt, the Education system is in ruins and produces a large percentage of functional illiterates, Deutsche Bahn is distinguished primarily by its unpunctuality – and we have managed to drive a functioning energy system into the dark doldrums. You could, like a string of pearls, link one grievance to the next: the Migration crisis, the birth of an industrially operated, state-sponsored censorship complex, and the threatening deindustrialization.

There is actually no area of life that is exempt from this polycrisis. Here, a simple question arises: How long will it take before bridges become dilapidated and new buildings collapse? Something like this doesn’t happen overnight; it’s a project that spans generations. And here begins my disturbed bewilderment, which is simultaneously connected with a deep personal shame… For quite obviously, we, as a generation, have accomplished such a feat. Which raises the question: how do you do that? Which raises the question: how do you do that? Psychologically speaking: By compensating for the slow decline with corresponding grandiose fantasies.

Oh God, I already hear you sighing—as if I wanted to place all of Germany on my analyst’s couch! Why invoke psychoanalysis when common sense is enough? It’s not as if we hadn’t seen it coming. But somehow it wasn’t opportune to express our discomfort, because that would have put us into uncomfortable conflict with the zeitgeist. So we kept quiet and, with some amazement, observed how reality can be blocked out and replaced by mere words and ideologemes—a logorrhea in which we bury the World beneath words. As our Chancellor, God rest his soul, said: Anyone who has visions should see a doctor!

To the extent, however, that political impotence became evident, the grandiose fantasies have transformed into boundless acts of self-empowerment. In a sense, everyone, following Caesarian madness, behaves like Napoleon on horseback. In this sense, the holiday sermons that seek to protect our Democracy from its despisers are monuments to megalomania—and they all boil down to the same shift in perspective that Bertolt Brecht once observed: The people have forfeited the government’s confidence. Wouldn’t it be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another? Consequently, we are continuously occupied with teaching the great louts manners. Now, I’m not exactly the type to quotes from the Bible, but when a saying is good, it’s just good: You see the speck in your brother’s eye, but not the beam in your own eye. Consequently, we succeed brilliantly in not acknowledging the contradictions we’ve created ourselves, doing everything we can to silence them. Where each of us was proud to be able to stand up to the system, we’ve made ourselves comfortable in the institutions.

With this authoritarianism in our baggage, we generously overlook that we can abolish humanity in the name of Humanity—and that our hypermorality is only the flip side of a deep-seated nihilism. If the folk saying goes, There’s no good except what you do!, that may point the way—but Francis Crick (the genetic split-off from Watson & Crick) added to this in a rare fit of wisdom: When all is said and done, it’s more said than done. And that’s precisely where our whole art lies! Words that create the impression that you’ve created something really, really magnificent. How pliable words are—and how easy it is to indulge in language politics! Tsk-tsk-tsk, you don’t say that!

That explains why we continuously declare a State of Emergency—and can declare it. Because with the climate catastrophe looming, aka the Apocalypse, you don’t have to worry about trifles. The Whammy is followed by the double-Whammy, what else!? That our Never-again has turned back into an urgent present, indeed that we are confronted with the revenants, the darkest minds of our past, is, insofar as an unpleasant surprise. It is over, as Wolfgang Schäuble said. And I must confess, I was there, like everyone else. Right in the middle, mainstream!

If we hold our failure before our eyes, the actual moral question arises: Wouldn’t it be better if we resigned? Or issued something like an intellectual declaration of bankruptcy? Can the arsonists who are responsible for all this seriously play the role of firefighters? Now, it’s true, I don’t know many colleagues who are really malicious. But often it’s not malice but ignorance that’s the root of all evil—we know, or should know, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And while we enjoyed a beautiful peace dividend, as moral world champions, we financed Mr. Putin’s war.

Oh, I don’t want to go into details. The truth is: We have made ourselves guilty of a whole chain of sins of omission (what once, as sloth of the heart, was still considered a mortal sin). Forgive me! Because my moral contrition, so wonderfully staged, cannot absolve me of what I have done or failed to do—and, least of all, does it ultimately legitimize my desire to present myself to you as a Savior?

Because to be able to tackle the problems of the present—my God, what an expression?—we would first have to bring before our eyes the reasons for our failure. The actually political question would therefore be: When did all this begin? What is the reason for our generational failure?

No, I cannot give you an answer to this big question. But perhaps the admission of my speechlessness is a tender beginning—for with it comes the insight that the bubble has burst! Pop!

And so, when I hear the firecrackers banging tonight, I let go of my illusions, false hopes, and filler words—and wish you: a Happy New Year.

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Hopkins Stanley

The Black Sun

There are countless dark bodies next to the sun to be discovered—ones we will never see. This is, said between us, a parable; and a moral psychologist reads the entire celestial script as nothing more than a parable and a sign language with which much can be concealed.

(Friedrich Nietzsche)

The intrusion of the unconscious [Unbewußten] into thought marks a profound shock, a shock equivalent to the humiliation suffered by early modernity when forced to recognize that the human sphere is by no means the center of the universe. In a certain sense, the humiliation inflicted by the unconscious seems even more serious; for it’s one thing to relinquish the privilege of being the center of a highly abstract universe to other celestial bodies, but quite another finding oneself deprived of complete possession of one’s own intellectual powers. If the unconscious (in the formulation of insanity) has become a matter for the courts, this means that in general terms Western thinking normally considers itself to have diminished responsibility for itself—and this diminution is nothing other than the collective submission to that authority which, according to Freud, is called the unconscious. Since Freud,1 reason has, generally speaking, undergone a kind of Copernican revolution—which is expressed most notably in the fact that even avowed non-Freudians and opponents of psychoanalysis make use of the psychoanalytic toolbox and that terminus technicus such as »repression« have entered our everyday vocabulary. There is no doubt that a revolution in thinking is needed here. But how did this come about? And what is its root cause? All these questions lead back to the complex that Freud called the unconscious.

Now, here an essential point arises: are we dealing with a discovery or an invention? Does the unconscious function as a law of nature, or should it be interpreted as a thought machine [Gedankenmaschine]? This question isn’t a matter of semantics: if we speak of a discovery, it suggests that the unconscious is understood as a psychological continent, a terra incognita that’s always existed but whose conquest waited until a forty-year-old Viennese neurologist set out to analyze his dream’s underworld. To speak of an invention sets an entirely different accent: then, namely, we are dealing with Freud’s ingenium. Under these auspices, it would make sense to historicize the Freudian drive [Triebwerk]. We should view it the same way as other vehicles of thought emerging in the 19th century, with Nikolaus August Otto’s Otto engine as an exemplar. If the idea of such a view seems strange, it is because Freud succeeded in preserving his thought machine from the ravages of time—and literally so, since he, quite obviously with posterity’s consent, expelled temporality from the unconscious.

When the seventy-seven-year-old Freud presented his thoughts on the unconscious in condensed form in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis in 1933, he made it clear that he wasn’t talking about a personal figure of thought, but about a timeless truth: »There is nothing in the Id [Es] that can be equated with negation, one also perceives with surprise this exception to the philosopher’s statement that space and time are necessary forms of our mental acts...«2 If the unconscious is timeless and spaceless, then it isn’t historical; any attempt to juxtapose it with the apparatus of the 19th century is categorically impossible.3 However, this implicitly suggests that we’re dealing with a discovery that leads us to consider the unconscious as a kind of Natural law. Against this backdrop, it is evident that any attempt to understand the unconscious as a historical apparatus of thought will face fierce opposition—or, in psychoanalytic terms, the most substantial possible resistance.

However unquestionable and self-assured Freud’s formula may appear, it’s nevertheless characterized by a peculiarity—a peculiarity becoming only apparent when considering Freud’s almost categorical disregard for Philosophy. The reference to Kant marks one of those rare instances in which he explicitly and argumentatively refers to a philosophical authority. Although Freud always presented himself to the outside world as a natural scientist and scrupulously avoided displaying any philosophical pretensions, he was far from indifferent to Philosophy—au contraire, it marked a youthful love whose attraction continued unabated, becoming increasingly apparent in his later work. Just at the time when the idea of the unconscious was forming in his mind, Freud wrote to his Berlin friend Wilhelm Fließ, who for a long time was a kind of alter ego and tenderly loved intellectual double4: »As a young man, I knew no longing other than for philosophical knowledge, and I am about to fulfill it as I move from medicine to psychology. I became a therapist against my will.«5 Reading Freud’s description of the ID (which represents his contribution to Philosophy6), it becomes clear he’s elevating himself among equals. Furthermore, by stating the exception to the philosopher’s proposition, he not only imposes limits on the great Königsberg philosopher but also positions himself as a conqueror of traditional Philosophy.

There’s no doubt that the significant response to the concept of the unconscious in the humanities validates Freud’s ideas in hindsight, just as you can see Freud’s theory as a logical evolution of 19th-century Philosophy.7 It’s against this backdrop that another comment made by his friend, psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, after a visit in 1910, makes sense:

»Out of the multifarious conversations I was allowed with Freud, I should like to bring up a few more things: firstly his views on the unconscious. In the conversation concerned, I had taken up something he had said at the Wednesday meeting: »The unconscious is metapsychical; we simply posit it as real!« This sentence certainly says how content Freud was in the matter. He says we proceed as if the unconscious were something real, like the conscious. On the nature of the unconscious, like a true natural scientist, Freud says nothing, simply because we know nothing about it for certain, but rather only deduce it from consciousness. In his postulation that behind the conscious, which we can experience, lies the unconscious, which can never be experienced directly, he sees a parallel with Kant’s postulation of the thing in itself behind the appearnce.«8

A curious connection emerges here: the unconscious as a thing in itself [Ding an sich], as the ultimate, incomprehensible, yet a priori presupposed object taking place in the figure of thought that Kant called »the thing X« [das Ding X]. Now, it’d certainly be wrong to conclude from these references to Kant that Freud was a Kantian—as Laplanche notes, Freud never went beyond the »ready-to-wear Kantianism« common at the time.9 In fact, his discussion of the philosopher is quite precise, at least insofar as it suggests that it’s not really about Kant, but about Philosophy as a whole. Nevertheless, a debt of reckoning is owed to Kant in particular – it’s tied to the a priori of the Kantian system. Freud’s clearly aware of a danger here – and it’s the same danger that Kant exposed himself to when postulating that »space and time are only forms of sensory perception, and therefore only conditions for the existence of things as phenomena, and that we have no concepts of understanding, and therefore no elements for the knowledge of things insofar as perceptions corresponding to these concepts are given, and consequently we cannot have knowledge of any object as things in themselves, but only insofar as they are objects of sensory perception, that is, as phenomena.«10 According to this premise, which suggests agnosticism about reality, all figures of thought are forms of the imagination—and, as Kant elaborated, forms of the imagination that are woven into the intellectual pattern, the a priori of space and time. In essence, the conclusion is that all reason can only be phenomenology of the mind, a historical sequence of different concepts of space and time. This is precisely where Freud comes in: »Just as Kant warned us not to overlook the subjective conditionality of our perception and not to regard our perception as identical with the unknowable object perceived, so psychoanalysis warns us not to substitute conscious perception for the unconscious psychic process that is its object. Just as the physical does not need to be in reality as it appears to us, neither does the psychic.«11 Admittedly, in a peculiar volte-face, Freud undermines the rigor and consistency of Kantian architecture. Where Hegel’s philosophy, in its logical extension, dissolved the mind into the Phenomenology of Mind, and where reason could only be read as history, Freud falls back into metaphysical bad habits, insofar as he posits his own invention, the unconscious, not as a figure of thought, but as the real par excellence. This subversion is all the more peculiar in that it’s again accomplished using Kantian categories. Herein lies a fundamental paradox of the unconscious. Although it isn’t comprehensible as such, precisely this categorical incomprehensibility proves its absolute reality. The unconscious in this sense is an un-concept: it’s that which, as something incomprehensible, eludes comprehension. If this statement is obscure, it becomes clearer in light of the fact that by asserting the incomprehensible, Kant’s dilemma of the categories of reason is removed from the equation. That’s because from now on, the unconscious isn’t mixed up with consciousness in a way that can’t be untangled, like an undercurrent that shares and has to share its historicity, but stands there timelessly: just so that it can be excluded from the philosopher’s statement.

But how does Freud come to attribute such evidentiary value to the statement, »The unconscious is metapsychical; we simply posit it as real!«, that an extensive system can be built on this hypothesis, a system that isn’t merely hermeneutic? If you read this sentence with the impartiality as you would study the manuscript of any random author, it borders on pure madness, since you could just as easily conclude for the same reason that every species is descended from unicorns, given that no one has ever seen one. So what is expressed from this operation? How could anyone ever envision creating such a separate realm, a darkroom into which, unlike the gray areas of the semi-conscious or subconscious, the light of reason can never penetrate, either now or in the future? Isn’t this construction truly the most improbable of all conceivable constructions? Not a thing, but the un-thing itself? And what function does this metapsychical construction serve?

All these questions become even more acute when considering Freud’s position prior to his actual psychoanalytic career. Because Freud was by no means a wild thinker, nor did he seem predestined for what is referred to here as »metapsychology.« »I have not always been a psychotherapist,« he writes in Studies on Hysteria, »but was trained in local diagnosis and electrodiagnostics like other neuropathologists.«12 Now, it’d be much easier to gloss over this part of his life if it had fallen during his youthful years of confusion, but in fact, it encompasses half of a very long life. Just as Freud pursued the separation of the unconscious, he later also pursued a kind of cover-up, as exemplified by avoiding the inclusion of his neurological works (some of which were groundbreaking and of which he had no reason to be ashamed) in the complete edition of his writings. In fact, the break hinted at here is challenging to grasp, as we must find an intellectual path from observations about the finer shape and structure of the eel’s lobed organs, described as testicles,13 to the interpretation of dreams; we must connect the histologist who studied the structure of the nerve fibers and crayfish neurons with the person who, at the end of his life, reflects on the man Moses and the origin of monotheistic religion. If these texts seem to be worlds apart, worlds corresponding to the familiar supposed divide between the hard natural sciences [Naturwissenschaften] and the soft humanities, then the point marking this dividing line is undoubtedly the unconscious. If this figure of thought marks a cultural-historical explosive charge, a kind of Copernican reversal of the mind, then this rift also runs right through its creator’s intellectual biography. — Nevertheless, alongside this sharp break, there’s also an astonishing continuity. Freud always took care to transfer not only the physiological rigor of his histological work, but also the theoretical models he developed there to areas where, in the opinion of natural scientists, only wild speculation was at work, speculation that was downright irresponsible and unsupported by anything. Freud strove to »establish psychology on a similar basis to any other natural science, such as physics«.14 So how can we understand the path that led the neurologist—who conducted histological examinations in the laboratory of Messrs. Brücke and Meynert—to become a psychoanalyst, encouraging his hysterical female patients to engage in free association as part of his talking cure?

When he coined the term Psychoanalysis, he was forty years old: a renowned neurologist who had published a series of essays in specialist journals; in addition, the Studies on Hysteria written together with Josef Breuer had been published and met with mixed reactions, even receiving a scathing, »vile« judgment from the Pope of neurology.15 He has stopped sleeping with his wife since Annerl, their youngest daughter, a failed attempt at coitus reservatus, led to their mutual decision to stop at six children. For his part, he smokes too much; for two years, he has been plagued by heart problems and fears of death, while a recurring nasal catarrh adds to his woes. His beloved old father will die in his fortieth year, and this death will lead him into a strange form of self-analysis. He is a private lecturer, but his professional status lies in a peculiar intermediate zone, as he realizes his interests are pulling him away from his previous sphere. In Brücke and Meynert’s laboratory, his teachers, he examined eels, crayfish, and frogs, dissected the cerebral cortex into individual layers, took brain and tissue samples evening after evening, and studied fibers and nerve pathways. As a result, both his intellect and his social life became increasingly detached from his former ties. Breuer, who had generously encouraged him and even provided financial support at times, treated him with growing reserve. It may be that, after assisting Charcot at the Salpêtrière, Freud is now viewed as an equal, no longer as a promising talent but as a rival. Others of his age become professors, dignified gentlemen, but he is Jewish, which doesn’t contribute to a favorable reputation. While his life outwardly conforms to bourgeois norms, a secret life develops within him. The messengers of this secret life are the hysterical women who visit him during the week; it isn’t a need for healing that drives him, but rather a burning intellectual ambition.

Another witness, indeed a catalyst of this secret life, is his Berlin friend, the ear, nose, and throat specialist Wilhelm Fließ. Fließ is also pursuing a megalomaniacal project, attempting to fit all expressions of life into a scheme that envisions a 23-day male cycle and a 28-day female cycle. The book Fließ is writing is entitled Fundamentals of an Exact Biology, and this is precisely where their interests intersect, as both are, each in his own way, preoccupied with solving an oracle, a »great secrets of nature.«16 The ambitions of these two Natural Philosophers aren’t satisfied with a laudatory entry in the annals, but reach into the spheres of megalomania and generalissimo-like behavior. And Fließ, this »Kepler of biology«, as Freud affectionately calls him, is by no means the underdog. For a long time, his project even seems to be the more promising one, and it’s Freud who willingly provides him with material, such as his wife’s menstrual data. Freud’s behavior occasionally borders on enthusiastic adoration: for him, Fleiss is the »magician« and »healer«.17 It is a strange relationship, a chaste male friendship and, at the same time, a completely uninhibited intellectual affair. They meet somewhere between Berlin and Vienna for so-called »conferences,« which are, of course, always just a front for tête-à-têtes—carefully planned and jealously guarded meetings that almost have the character of trysts—as, indeed, the entire relationship seems to have been more of a love affair than a working relationship. If a letter is delayed, this is anxiously noted, just as every nuance and barely audible discord is carefully recorded. It’s Freud who assumes the feminine role in this relationship, elevating the other to heights corresponding to his ambition. Fließ, if you will, is his alter ego. In the shadow of this enthusiastic identification, however, Freud systematically worked on his own questions—and this preoccupation would eventually alienate him from Fließ. In 1895, he wrote a text, ostensibly to make his own system of thought plausible to his friend, but in fact to give shape to his own thinking. It’s a peculiar text, with mathematical rigor, demonstrating the work of a natural scientist, and yet: pure speculation, the construction of a brain and consciousness machine, which he would ultimately call the Psychical Apparatus.

»During a busy night last week, when my pain was at the level optimal for my brain activity, the barriers suddenly lifted, the veils fell, and I could see through everything, from the details of my neurosis to the conditions of consciousness. Everything seemed to mesh together, the wheelwork [Räderwerk] fit together, and one got the impression that the thing was now truly a Machine and would soon start running on its own. (...) Naturally, I am beside myself with pleasure.«18

All the ideas that Freud would later develop are prefigured here. It’s a cutting-edge text where the two realms of life meet. Somewhere in his mind, something fundamental is shifting, transforming the neuron into the unconscious. It’s as if an intellectual Herculean task is being accomplished—a task guided by the motto he’ll put at the beginning of his great and actually first work, The Interpretation of Dreams: »Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo« – If I can’t bend the heavens, I’ll move the underworld (Virgil). These years may seem like a time of crisis, but in reality, they are the most productive years of his life. His debts are paid off, and he no longer feels obligated to any institutions. Freud will burn his bridges behind him as he moves into the apartment at Berggasse 19, where he will remain until his exile. Ultimately, he will stand alone, a solitary figure who has created himself.

But even at this time, when Freud is preparing to touch on a great mystery of nature, the unconscious hasn’t yet revealed itself to him as that »metapsychical instance« which he’ll later claim it to be—»the unconscious is metapsychical, we simply assume it to be real«. The most stubborn opponent of such an arbitrary assumption is Freud himself. As a neurologist, he’s not willing to conceive of a psychological entity that lacks a physiological counterpart. Sure, there are bodies without minds, but there is no such thing as a mind without a body. Without doing him too much injustice, the early Freud could be called a biological thinker, a materialist of the soul. When he speaks of an »unconscious imaginative life« in the early nineties, he doesn’t mean some obscure psychic force, but something extremely precise: those stimuli that are inscribed in the brain as physical apperceptions without being translated into a form of thought—everything that one hears, sees, and perceives without explicitly hearing, seeing, or perceiving it.19 This unconscious, which is inscribed into the nervous system below the threshold of perception, is therefore clearly encoded neuronally; it isn’t primarily psychological, but a biological fact (like the intense pain that causes a person to lose consciousness, but is still registered by their nervous system). In view of this neural coding, however, the turn toward the unconscious, this great unknown, seems even more curious. So, how did this come about?

While this fundamental shift is the foundation of psychoanalysis, it doesn’t signify an abrupt or sudden inspiration. Freud had long developed concepts that form psychoanalysis’s basis during his neurological research.20 It’s primarily those areas of neurology where the nervous system functions in a deficient mode, which he later referred to as the psychic apparatus. Against this backdrop, the intersection of Freud’s clinical work becomes evident: aphasia, cocaine, hypnosis, paralysis—these are all disorders that reveal (or are intended to reveal) how this apparatus operates. How does this apparatus function? A second question follows: If this apparatus is a neural Machine, how does it produce suggestions and malfunctions in the first place—how can this Machine act hysterically?

Freud asks himself this first question in 1895, with an unheard-of radicalism, in the already mentioned Draft of a Psychology—the text that a clever interpreter said was the »most significant effort Freud had ever made.«21 His intention is to: »provide a scientific psychology, that is, to represent mental processes as quantitatively determined states of demonstrable material parts [and thus] make them clearly contradictory-free.«22 In other words, it is about a perfect Machine. In constructing this Machine, Freud starts precisely where he sees the basis of all life: namely, in the individual nerve cell. »Two main ideas [are] contained: [1.] The distinction between activity and rest is to be understood as Q [energetic quantity], which adheres to the general law of motion. [2.] To consider neurons as material particles.«23

When Freud, to the irritation of his students and followers, insisted on an energetic (or economic) approach in his teaching, which corresponded precisely to the logic worked out in his draft. Following this claim and asking what parts make up the Freudian Machine, it becomes clear that we’re not dealing with a limited apparatus, but actually with a World Machine [Weltmachine]. He treats the hysterical woman’s mental brouillon on the same level as the single-celled organism. And indeed, even though it maintains the appearance of hard science, the draft is what used to be called a cosmology.24 After establishing the neuron as the atomic principle, Freud continues: »From this observation, a fundamental principle of nervous activity regarding Q could be established, which promised to illuminate much, as it appeared to encompass the entire function. This is the principle of nervous inertia [which states] that the neuron seeks to rid itself of Q. The structure, development, and performance [of neurons] should be understood in this light.«25 What still appears here in mathematical garb reveals itself a few years later in a different form, namely as libido. Freud writes: »Libido is an expression from the theory of affectivity. We use this term to refer to the energy [Trieb] of such drives, considered as a quantitative quantity—albeit not currently measurable—which relates to everything that can be summarized as love.«26 Thus, the law of inertia is to be understood as a form of pleasure discharge of the cell.

But what occurs at the level of a single-celled organism when the energy dissipated is identical to the stored energy quantum? The cell releasing its energy into the surrounding environment would have to die immediately and inevitably. This brings a peculiar dialectic into play. If we translate the tendency to discharge energy using the familiar terminology of late Freud, who spoke of Eros and Thanatos, the life and death drives, we would have to assert that here the life and death drives coincide in a being-towards-death.27 However, this existence-towards-death, in its unabated and unorganized form, represents the anti-economic principle par excellence: the maximum removal of pleasure at the cost of immediate death. It is evident that life, if it wants to survive this mechanism, must organize itself in such a way that part of its organizational structure serves solely its self-preservation. Therefore, a certain amount of energy must be stored and retained as a reserve.28 Every organization must therefore be considered a resistance architecture. Against this backdrop, the concept of sublimation also takes on a new significance; it shouldn’t be interpreted in the usual sense of refinement or artificiality, but rather as a harsh necessity. If consciousness were confronted in its unmitigated form with that excessive, lightning-like energy, it would result in a death shock. The organized nervous system tries to avoid this confrontation by developing a strong tendency to escape pain,29 which involves sublimation, the energetic dilution of the somatic stimulus. When Freud turned his attention to consciousness from an energetic perspective, he was addressing homeopathically diluted residual forms of the original stimulus energy. Consciousness would thus be a kind of shadow realm, a Platonic cave that reflects the radiation of the original somatic intensities: »Consciousness gives us what are called qualities, sensations that are different in great variety and whose differences are distinguished according to their relations to the external world. In this difference there are series, similarities, and the like; quantities do not actually exist in it.«30 Consciousness, one might say, develops where somatic quantity turns into quality. But how is this possible? Freud’s answer is that the transfer of somatic, necessarily unconscious quantity takes place through a periodization, a pulsation of the stimulus.31 This implies, however, that the entire content of consciousness is conceived as a symptom. From this perspective, the dictum that there’s nothing in the unconscious »that could be equated with negation« becomes understandable. This signifies that the unconscious is undialectical, pure positivity, pure movement—and thus we’re not dealing with a static quantity, but with a moving and motivating quantity, absolute energy. This energy doesn’t have its place in history, but in Nature. Here lies its positivity—and this is precisely what characterizes the unconscious.

Considering the machinery Freud constructs in his draft, a double affinity cannot be ignored. On one hand, we’re dealing with an electrical apparatus; on the other, with a logic that can— in the Boolean sense—be termed digital. The neuron is homogeneous,32 and it is either charged or not charged, in a state of zero or one. On this basis, an ever-recurring affinity for the cybernetic desiring machine [Wunschmaschine] becomes plausible—not as a subsequent graft but as a latent component of the psychoanalytic architecture.

One of the reasons for designing his psychological apparatus in this sense stems from the second important question regarding the formation of hysterical symptoms: Why did the scene he described in the case of Anna O. come about?

»A girl wakes up in agony, watching over a sickbed. She falls into a twilight state and experiences a frightening hallucination while her right arm, which dangles over the armrest of a chair, falls asleep: this develops into paresis along with contracture and anesthesia. She wants to pray but cannot find the words; eventually, she manages to recite an English children’s prayer. Later, when a severe and highly complicated case of hysteria develops, she speaks, writes, and understands only English, while her native language remains incomprehensible to her for a year and a half.«33

When he wrote his Draft for a Scientific Psychology in the fall of 1895, seized by the impression that »the thing is now really a machine and will soon start working on its own,« he felt he had gotten to the bottom of the mystery of hysterical symptom formation. He wrote to Fliess: »Have I revealed the great clinical secret, either orally or in writing? Hysteria is the result of a pre-sexual sexual shock. (...) »Pre-sexual« means actually before puberty, before the release of sexual substances; the events become effective only as memories.«34 In line with the decisive tendency to avoid pain, the psychic apparatus rewrites the original sensation, transforming the initial sexual fear into various hysterical symptoms such as paralysis and aphasia. Throughout this, Freud consistently starts from sensory energy—and thus from a sensory stimulus. In a letter to Fliess, he explains his model, whose novelty lies in conceiving memory not as simple, but as multiple transcriptions.

»W [Wahrnehmungen (perceptions)] are neurones in which perceptions originate, to which consciousness attaches, but which in themselves retain no trace of what has happened. For consciousness and memory are mutually exclusive.

WZ [Wahrnehmungzeichen (indication of perception)] is the first registration of the perceptions; it is quite incapable of consciousness and arranged according to associations by simultaneity.

Ub [Unbewußtsein (unconsciousness)] is the second registration, arranged according to other, perhaps causal, relations. UB traces would perhaps correspond to conceptual memories; equally inaccessible to consciousness.

Vb [Vorbewußtsein (preconsciousness)] is the third transcription, attached to word presentation and corresponding to our official ego[Ich]. The cathexes proceeding from this Vb become conscious according to certain rules; and this secondary thought consciousness is subsequent in time and is probably linked to the hallucinatory activation of word presentations, so that the neurones of consciousness would once again be perceptual neurones and in themselves without memory.

(…) I should like to emphasize the fact that the successive registrations represent the psychic achievement of successive epochs of life. At the boundary between two such epochs a translation of the psychic material must take place. I explain the peculiarities of the psychoneuroses by supposing that this translation has not taken place in the case of some of the material, which has certain consequences. We hold firmly to a belief in a tendency toward quantitative adjustment. Every later transcript inhibits its predecessor and drains the excitatory process from it. If a later transcript is lacking, the excitation is dealt with in accordance with the psychological laws in force in the earlier psychic period and along the paths open at that time. Thus an anachronism persists: in a particular province, fueros are still in force; we are in the presence of ›survivals.‹35

The proximity to Freud’s metapsychology is evident, yet there’s nevertheless a significant difference. When Freud starts with the perception neuron and takes the signs of perception as the material for the first transcription, he claims that the sexual fear of his hysterical female patients stems from actual child abuse. Something had occurred—and all symptoms can be traced back to this event. From an energetic perspective, we are dealing with a process of induction. However, Freud increasingly began to harbor doubts about the validity of this hypothesis. Not all fathers can be child molesters. These doubts do not pertain to any minor detail of his apparatus, but instead affect the apparatus as a whole. Assuming that it is sensory stimuli being recorded in the brain and (as energetic input) equipped with those oversized quanta, which in turn are rewritten, it is impossible for the psychic apparatus to begin writing on its own—that would be like a camera taking pictures without the shutter being pressed. The dilemma is profound. If Freud wanted to solve the riddle of hysteria with his construction of the psychic apparatus, he must now accept that his apparatus itself has become hysterical—an assumption that must seem even more absurd considering the entire apparatus is based on a material foundation. Seen in this light, it isn’t just his assumption that the hypnotic symptom points to abuse that is being put to the test, but his entire neurological worldview. If his thinking is based on the principle that nothing can come from nothing – this great a priori of the West, which also represents the great taboo—then his hysterics confront him with symptoms devoid of any reality. The question now is: What feeds the psyche? What is its primary process?

At this point, Freud makes a decisive shift that establishes his historical significance and ultimately gives rise to the unconscious in the form it has been handed down to us. Freud is compelled to abandon his hypothesis of child abuse when it no longer seems viable, as his search for the buried core of reality uncovers ever-new inconsistencies, and he realizes that the structure of hysteria, which has been his focus, has collapsed. In a letter to Fliess, he writes: »I no longer believe in my neurotica [theory of the neuroses].«36 And then: »In this collapse of everything valuable, the psychological alone has remained untouched. The dream [book] stands entirely secure and my beginnings of the metapsychological work have only frown in my estimation.«37 Here lies a decisive turning point in the construction of the unconscious. For how does Freud proceed? He doesn’t sacrifice his neurotica, as he suggests to Fließ, but rather changes and radicalizes the foundation on which he views them. The unconscious, which until now was the memory trace of something real, becomes autonomous, so to speak, encapsulating itself into a black box, a pure unconscious. This artifice is as remarkable as it is paradoxical. From the »certain insight that there is no indications of reality in the unconscious...«,38 the unconscious emerges not weakened but victorious. The insight »...that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect.« leads to reality being perceived as phantasmatic and dreamlike—while, in contrast, the unconscious, purified of all reality, is now experienced as the actual [wirkend] reality. Freud sacrifices the sign of perception and promotes an information-generating apparatus instead of an information-processing one, an internally controlled desiring-wishing machine [Wunschmaschine] instead of an externally controlled reality principle. Of course, he does not fundamentally overturn the architecture of his psychic apparatus. Thus, the unconscious may assume the role of the legacy of those external stimuli, transforming into an inexhaustible battery, the powerhouse [Triebwerk] that drives the psychic apparatus.

If the unconscious is the active reality, then it is, as such, incomprehensible: it marks the beyond [Jenseits] of all conscious reasoning. With this construct, Freud creates a separation between the unconscious and the conscious; he establishes what would be termed, in theological language, a two-realm doctrine. On one hand, there’s the beyond of unspeakable desire, and on the other, there’s only a symptom, a distortion of the original text. »Have you ever seen a foreign newspaper which passed Russian censorship at the frontier?« he wrote to Fließ. »Words, whole clauses and sentences are blacked out so that the rest becomes unintelligible. A Russian censorship of that kind comes about in psychoses and produces the apparently meaningless deliria.«39 If we apply this image to the logic of the psychical apparatus, consciousness, as such, is psychotic: the original text only comes to light in a circumscribed, censored, and blacked-out form. Now, this division is by no means a necessary consequence of his new understanding of the unconscious, but already prefigured in his neurological hypothesis that consciousness cannot take note of the unconscious imaginary life because the intensity of the somatic stimulus prohibits this. Against the backdrop of this utterly incomprehensible beyond, all consciousness is necessarily a deception. This fundamental assumption explains Freud’s sympathy for hysterical women, as it expresses what he considers to be the primordial deception, the proton pseudos of consciousness itself.40

When Freud, in the course of 1896, after the »collapse of all values,« undertakes a reshuffle, it affects the beyond, from which he constructs his psychic apparatus. This beyond, which previously lay in the external world, has shifted into the internal world. While Freud had assumed during the drafting stage that reality was, so to speak, directly inscribed in the psychic apparatus, he now shifts the writing energy to the apparatus itself. The split no longer runs between soma and psyche, between body and mind, but is located within the psyche itself.

Nevertheless, Freud’s action is highly paradoxical insofar as he does not derive the reality of the unconscious from certain knowledge of this topography, but rather from the fact that it – as an unconscious – has been complimented-out of the sphere of consciousness. However, this operation has serious consequences. The unconscious no longer describes a mode of deficiency (as a lack of consciousness or something not yet conscious), but is reinterpreted as a battery. But with that—as something that is not derived—it can become what the subconscious couldn’t have been before: ever-present and all-powerful. And sure enough, it’s this withdrawal, this fundamental inscrutability of the unconscious, that Freud bases his entire theory. Just as Descartes has the ego [cogito] emerge from the most uncertain of all forms of thought, namely doubt, Freud relies on the certainty of an uncertainty: that the unconscious is removed from consciousness and is not mixed or intertwined with it. This is the break that sets Freud apart from 19th-century philosophy, regardless of his philosophical roots.41

With this formulation of the unconscious, a rift appears in the world that was not there before. Whereas the figure of the unconscious was previously essentially a mode of presence that extended beyond conscious being into those borderlands, dreamlands, and shadow realms that primarily characterize Romantic aesthetics, it now becomes anesthetic since a fundamental and categorical discrepancy between consciousness and the unconscious is postulated. There is no crossing over, no small border traffic, but rather a sharply drawn boundary. The unconscious is an inaccessibility that is as distant from the body of knowledge as paradise or the Platonic heaven. The reference to Plato is no coincidence. In fact, Freud’s construction of the unconscious is an inversion of the cave allegory. While in Plato’s heaven, it’s light that we earthlings can only perceive as shadows; for Freud, it’s the darkness of the unconscious that assumes this role. What lies before us in the artificial light of our reason only appears bright; in reality, it’s the refracted semblance of a dark light that preceded it. In the light of this »black Sun«, the world is comprehensible only as a symptom – our reason can be nothing more than a shadow world that can only find its way back to that eternally withdrawn, primordial order in anamnesis. Granted: this order is no longer divine, but human—all too human. It is not heaven but the underworld of instincts that’s being called into service, a reinterpretation that also appears in the Virgil motto Freud placed at the beginning of The Interpretation of Dreams. While Plato’s metaphor of light promises the shadows of a world of gods, Freud blackens the promise of knowledge by insisting that all knowledge springs from the black Sun of the unconscious.

Freud’s »discovery« of the unconscious has a long tradition that may come as a surprise in this context: namely, the doctrine of logos spermatikos.42 In fact, this is the meaning of the dream Freud had on July 24, 1895—the famous dream of »Irma’s Injection.«43 This dream appears like a sphinx at the gate of psychoanalytic theory formation and announces the continent that has since been referred to as the unconscious. It is noteworthy how Freud describes himself in this context less as a discoverer than as a recipient. The dream:

»A great hall — many guests whom we are receiving — among them Irma, whom I immediately take aside, as though to answer her letter, to reproach her for not yet accepting the ›solution.‹ I say to her: „If you still have pains, it is really only your own fault.“ She answers: „If you only knew what pains I now have in the neck, stomach, and abdomen; I am drawn together.“ I am frightened and look at her. She looks pale and bloated; I think that after all I must be overlooking some organic affection. I take her to the window and look into her throat. She shows some resistance to this, like a woman who has a false set of teeth. I think anyway she does not need them. The mouth then really opens without difficulty and I find a large white spot to the right, and at another place I see extended grayish-white scabs attached to curious curling formations, which have obviously been formed like the turbinated bone — / quickly call Dr. M., who repeats the examination and confirms it. . . . Dr. M.’s looks are altogether unusual; he is very pale, limps, and has no beard on his chin. . . . My friend Otto is now also standing next to her, and my friend Leopold percusses her small body and says: „She has some dulness on the left below,“ and also calls attention to an infiltrated portion of the skin on the left shoulder (something which I feel as he does, in spite of the dress). . . . M . says: „No doubt it is an infection, but it does not matter; dysentery will develop too, and the poison will be excreted. . . . We also have immediate knowledge of the origin of the infection. My friend Otto has recently given her an injection with a propyl preparation when she felt ill, propyls. . . . Propionic acid . . . Trimethylamine (the formula of which I see printed before me in heavy type). . . . Such injections are not made so rashly. . . . Probably also the syringe was not clean.«44

After a century of psychoanalytic interpretation, the sexual nature of the dream is obvious. If you imagine the movement as a camera shot, the dream leads into a large hall and lingers on Irma (one of the hysterical women who consulted Freud weekly) and her neck. Her complaint leads to a throat examination, during which Irma—as women often do—resists a little and refuses to open her mouth. Freud, the doctor, now looks into her throat and discovers a whitish, scab-like substance. The arrival of colleagues who—in the form of a medical gang bang—pounce on poor Irma symbolizes both a kind of desire and a sense of guilt, as Irma’s beloved friend and colleague Fließ has subjected her to a rather unsuccessful nose job. The story continues in this register: If Irma has been given an injection with a possibly contaminated syringe, and what’s more by her friend Otto (who recently brought Freud a bottle of the cheapest pineapple schnapps), this chain of events reveals with beautiful clarity that the gynecological examination (which began with an examination of her throat) is nothing more than a masquerade for sexual intercourse. It’s no coincidence that the dream leads to the formula for trimethylamine, which is a component of semen decomposition.45 Everything – that this formula says, which Freud sees in bold print before him – is libido. Every ideal can be traced back to sexual desire, and this desire is inextricably linked to shame, guilt, and impurity. Freud writes to Fliess: »As for Eckstein...that she bled out of longing.«46 However, it’s not only the shame of his hysterical female patients; it’s also his own. The examination of Irma reminds Freud of his professional mistakes; moreover, he has recently learned that his method of marital contraception has failed due to his own impurity. If we relate this dream content to Logos spermatikos, we could even speak of a tainted conception.47 This defilement represents all the people in the dream, including the limping, beardless Doctor M. (behind whom lurks the disempowered mentor Breuer, from whom Freud was parting ways at the time); it represents the friends Otto and Leopold, and it also represents Fließ, whose malpractice in treating Emma Eckstein manifests as a nameless fear that something may have been overlooked. Behind the bourgeois façade of a birthday party lurk dark secrets, infections that have spread like a virus and that one hopes will be eliminated. And yet something else is expressed in this dream, something that transcends contaminated sexuality. For here, Freud receives the answer to all the riddles that have troubled him for months. Just as the Oblate of the Middle Ages transubstantiates into the body of Jesus, the feeling of shame and guilt transubstantiates into the idea of the unconscious, which signifies: the triumph of having become part of the solution to the riddle.

In this sense, trimethylamine is the formula of pure reason, which asserts that everything is libidinous and tainted—in other words, impure reason, tainted conception. But what, a theologian would ask, is this strange logos? The reference becomes clear in the image of the black Sun. Instead of bright, divine, and immaculate light, we are confronted with indelible darkness; instead of the promise of regaining paradise, we face the threat of returning to the jungle. “The content of the unconscious can be compared to a primitive population of the psyche.«48 The world of ideals is, as it were, contaminated from below, influenced by the lower instances—which means the formula that as on Earth, so in Heaven simply has to be reversed). This very revelation prompts Freud to conduct a systematic investigation of tainted ideals, a project he aptly calls Dirtology [Dreckologie].

»I can scarcely detail for you all the things that resolve themselves into—excrement for me (a new Midas!). It fits in completely with the theory of internal stinking. Especially money itself. I believe proceeds via the word »dirty« for »miserly.« In the same way, everything related to birth, miscarriage, [menstrual] period goes back to the toilet via the word Abort [toilet] (Abortus [abortion]). This is really wild, but it is entirely analogous to the process by which words take on a transferred meaning as soon as new concepts requiring a designation appear.«49

The formula for trimethylamine serves as an abbreviation, an idea that, once conceived, opens the door that leads Freud into the chambers of the unconscious. At this point, a dimension comes into play that is usually overlooked (and which Freud, for plausible reasons, did not deem worthy of consideration): the desire of the analyst. When we reflect on Freud’s personal situation, it is evident that there is a certain asymmetry here concerning the libido formula, as Freud has no sexual interest in his patient. Rather, he is driven by a passion to fathom the mystery of Nature, an entirely intellectual desire. By placing the Irma dream in the context of his intellectual development at that time, it becomes clear that this marks the break between the two halves of his life, with the neurologist and clinician bidding farewell as the psychoanalyst is being welcomed. One commentator aptly summed it up by saying that »this dream (...) has the historical significance of having been dreamed in order to be analyzed, and of having been analyzed in order to fulfill a very specific task.« Freud receives in this the formula of the unconscious, which finally allows him to conceive of his psychic apparatus as a Machine that runs by itself.50 Against the backdrop of Kant’s problem, which redirects the tools of thought back to the thinker (something Freud should also have anticipated with his construction of the unconscious), it becomes evident why he positions himself as the recipient. This allows him to establish his self-made a priori as a higher power. The unconscious, in this sense, isn’t tainted by individual authorship; it’s supra-individual, supra-historical, and unchangeable—and it’s Dr. Freud who’s been given this mystery. If we assume (as I did earlier) that the dogma of the immaculate conception refers to the virgin Sign, then Freud seems to be following this tradition. According to his own logic, which interprets dreams as wish fulfillment, the bold print of the trimethylamine formula, now a Sign, represents the Analyst’s desired image. With it, he has succeeded in constructing a perfect Machine—an engine [Triebwerk] that runs independently without needing to be fueled [Triebstoff]: Metaphysics. Metapsychology.

The revelation that came to Dr. Freud on July 24, 1895, had no immediate consequences, but it acted as a catalyst, having a gradual effect. From this point on, Freud, through self-analysis and the drafting of his work, moved towards a significant turning point at which he would sacrifice the reality principle while maintaining the psychological and the dream intact. On this date, Freud recognizes that the paternal abuse he has attributed to his hysterical female patients is not grounded in fact, but rather is an expression of a desire that cannot be admitted. The engine of psychoanalysis is installed. This moment marks a kind of explosion in Freud’s intellectual development. In rapid succession, within a quarter of a year, the essential components of psychoanalysis emerge: the myth of Oedipus comes into play, Freud discusses endopsychic myths and the process of sublimation, and he begins to distance himself from the issue of religion with his drekkology.

From the fall of 1897 onwards, the unconscious acts in the way he will describe it as an old man. »We approach the id [Es] with comparisons, calling it chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement. We imagine that it is ultimately open to the somatic, absorbing the instinctual drives that find their psychological expression in it, but we cannot say in what substrate. It is filled with energy from the drives, but it has no organization, no overall will, only the desire to satisfy the instinctual needs in accordance with the pleasure principle. The logical laws of thought do not apply to the processes in the id, especially not the law of contradiction. Contradictory impulses exist side by side.| And a little later, we find the reference to Kant already quoted: »One also perceives with surprise the exception to the philosopher’s statement that space and time are necessary forms of our mental acts.«51

What does it mean that Freud insists on the timelessness of the unconscious and, in the same breath, postulates that there is nothing in the unconscious that can be equated with negation? Two things: Firstly, it means that the unconscious is to be understood as pure positivity and therefore as Nature (the primal horde within us, as it is later called); secondly, that this atavistic nature is the driving force behind all history. With the first point, Freud undermined 19th-century philosophy – and did so brilliantly. For the unconscious has no author, and it reveals itself only in an indirect, fragmented, symptomatic form. The light of consciousness outshines its source, this primordial, nameless blackness, which is nevertheless the battery of all world events. »What, then,« Freud asks consistently, »is culture? It is a precipitate of the repression work of all previous generations.«52 In doing so, however, Freud took Hegel’s idea of Reason’s Cunning, which uses people without their realizing precisely what they are doing, to an extreme. Freud’s World Spirit has no particular agenda; it is blind, irrational, and focused solely on its own unchanging desires.

As Freud constructs the unconscious, he aligns himself with historical philosophers in assuming the magical illusion of an immobilius movens, a cornerstone of all historical philosophy. This gives him a historical-philosophical battery, a veritable perpetuum mobile, with which he can attack history. However, within this context, the unconscious emerges as the product of a fundamentally philosophical desire that doesn’t reveal itself as such. As soon as the idea gains a certain plausibility, the thinker manages to burrow into his own construct—passing off as Nature what is actually a thought machine. Freud, in a sense, acts like a builder who, after completing his apparatus, destroys all the blueprints and claims that he did not design it himself, but rather received it. This raises the question of the »unconscious of the unconscious«—and this denied chamber of consciousness must be assumed wherever the unconscious is envisioned in the image of Freud’s fortification, as something utterly unconscious: timeless, spaceless, and non-historical. The flaw in this construction is obvious. For what if it became apparent that Freud hadn’t discovered his invisible demon, but invented it? What if the unconscious had to be historicized, just as history is divided into different epochs? What if there were a Jungian, an Adlerian, a Lacanian, a modern, a postmodern, a deconstructivist unconscious—if the unconscious were not one but many? If we were to concede this possibility, the unconscious would be (like the Otto engine) a historical construct, no longer a force of nature but a thought among other thoughts. Here lies the threat that Freud was always aware of—and which is deeply associated with the name Kant. The severity of Kant’s dictum that what we know of Nature is solely what we have previously projected onto it is silenced in Freud. Where Kant’s path leads to the philosophy of the as-if, Freud falls back by presenting the unconscious not as a construct of the mind, but as a reclusive, active force of nature, and he must do so: a black Sun not of our minds, but of Nature itself. Here we see how important the strategy of withdrawal is; it allows Freud to proclaim a nature of the unconscious without having to examine his concept of Nature more closely. The unconscious is Nature because it is withdrawn, and as something withdrawn, it can be one and indivisible. A creatio ex nihilo that seems all the more unassailable because the all-engendering nothingness can never come to light. Black Sun, eternal light.

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Looking at the debate about what’s generally considered Fake News, it’s hard to shake the impression that this only became a major issue with the advent of Social Media, while the period before was like a Golden Age of Journalism. Against this backdrop, the story Graham Majin shares in his book Truthophobia paints a different picture. Majin, who previously worked in the BBC newsroom for quite some time—and thus has insight into its daily practices—goes back historically to the pivotal moment marked by the Boomer generation and its cultural revolution of 1968. While gonzo journalism brought a new freshness and subjectivity to the table, distinct from the old, meticulous bystander journalism (which Majin attributes to Victorian Liberalism) that dominated during the war, it was truth that suffered most from this new sense of spontaneity. Or as Jefferson »Fuck« Poland, a member of the Hippie Press, put it: If there’s no good story, make one up. Majin demonstrates that this casualness was by no means a mistake, but instead became common journalistic practice, exemplified by BBC Director-General John Birt, who served from 1992 to 2000 and established a form of Journalism that can rightly be considered scripted reality. By the time the Boomers’ revolutionary fervor had faded, a new style of reporting had been established, which Majin describes as »pro-social lying,« a form of social engineering. And because this is where the problems we’re facing today in our deeply fractured media landscape are buried, the conversation with Graham Majin—and the re-examination of the Boomer’s Revolution—is really valuable.

Graham Majin has worked in TV Journalism for over twenty years. After 14 years at BBC News, where he covered current affairs and produced documentaries, he founded his own film company, which produced work ranging from animations to TV dramas. After pursuing his passion for research at his Truth Lab and publishing many academic papers and journals, he now teaches the Art of documentary filmmaking at Bournemouth University and the London College of Communication. He has recently published Truthophobia: How the Boomers Broke Journalism.

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When we discuss how we’re living in a post-truth era, it’s simply an acknowledgment of a certain inevitability. Whereas guardians of good taste once decided which texts and authors could be thrust into the public eye, those barriers have fallen away — everyone is now empowered to trumpet their thoughts to the world. However, because the World is so complex and opaque, it quickly devolves into an echo chamber and a filter bubble. Thus, it’s only among like-minded people that you can convince yourself that your own Worldview corresponds to reality—and that all those not in agreement have succumbed to some ideology, or even worse: Conspiracy Theories. While society reflexively responded to the public sphere’s structural change by establishing professional fact-checkers and disinformation experts, the fundamental philosophical question of how to maintain universally binding truth has largely remained un-illuminated. This was precisely our reason for asking Justin McBrayer to converse with us—armed with the pathos of Truth and the episteme of ancient Philosophy, he has confronted the new circumstances without resorting to general cultural criticism.

Justin McBrayer teaches Philosophy, Epistemology, and Ethics. at Fort Lewis College in Colorado. He writes a blog and, in addition to publishing Beyond Fake News: Finding the Truth in a World of Misinformation, writes for various media outlets (including the New York Times, Quillette, and Philosophy Now).

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When it becomes common to talk about digital natives, it means that digital disruption has opened a new intellectual continent, bringing with it new social norms, behaviors, and values – it’s easy to find exemplars of this in our world. After all, who could have imagined a few decades ago that the market for urbanites seeking a date could be served with just a simple swipe? As future generations grow up taking this new Attention Economy for granted as the new normal, it’s wise to talk to someone who’s been closely following this social revolution to understand the nature of the change. This led us to Alexander Manu, an industrial designer who was already working in computer design in the 1980s and has dedicated himself to constant innovation. Therefore, it wouldn’t be wrong to call him an evangelist of change, a creative destroyer in the mold of Schumpeter, who always considers both sides: that to transcend the Power-of-Imagination, you must be willing to abandon cherished habits, thought patterns, and even a familiar set of values. In short, it’s about the art of unlearning—and the question of whether (and to what extent) this isn’t just an act of liberation, but also a painful process.

Alexander Manu, who was a master of industrial design in Bucharest before going into exile in Paris, is now a strategy consultant and speaker. He currently teaches at the Ontario College of Art & Design University and serves as a visiting lecturer at the Wallace McCain Institute of Entrepreneurship. Between 2007 and 2019, Alexander served as an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, where he introduced Innovation, Foresight, and Business Design in the MBA curricula.

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If there is one underlying noise that has been getting louder over the past few decades, it’s the hum of Identity Politics. In fact, the desire to be completely oneself ultimately results in a paradoxical form of self-loss, even becoming One with a Collective Identity. Consequently, Alexander Douglas titled his book Against Identity, drawing on a Taoist myth that, in the very first chapter, leads him to the grim conclusion that Identity Kills. Here, we see how Hundun, the unfortunate ruler of China’s Middle Kingdom, is pierced by his opponents. With this myth in mind—and the biography of Baruch Spinoza before his eyes—Alexander Douglas goes on to explore the paradoxical aspects of Identity Politics in the 21st century. And, of course, the conversation also examines the question of how Identity has evolved from a naturally developed self-image to strategic »self-marketing,« reinforced by Social Media and Silicon Valley’s digital technologies. While drawing on his own multicultural background and referencing philosophers such as Spinoza and René Girard, our conversation with Douglas also brings unexpected topics into relief, ranging from Identity Politics to Money and Writing. Although one may weigh these factors very differently, there was a common agreement that genuine Human Authenticity arises precisely from the »failure« of any fixed categories of Identity.

Alexander Douglas is an author and senior lecturer in Philosophy at the School of Philosophical, Anthropological, and Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews. He also maintains his As Difficult as Rare blog on Susbtack.

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As Difficult As Rare

My scribblings on Spinozist things.

By Alexander Douglas

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If Freud understands denial of reality as the hallmark of psychotic reaction formation, it can be conversely deduced that any mindset refusing to accept reality is itself at risk of drifting into psychosis. If this observation, presented as a rhetorical léger de main, provokes a protest or at least a frown, it’s because the transfer to society is by no means obvious. This becomes even clearer when, in a conceptually parallel way, Psychosis is juxtaposed against Sociosis—where the latter is initially understood in a completely value-free manner as collective repression of reality. That the phenomenon exists as such, no, even more, that it enjoys such great popularity, goes without saying— we only have to consider ideologues and believers of all stripes. For none of those involved would ever think of interpreting the articles of faith put forward with such verve as psychotic delusions. What protects such a collective belief system from self-awareness, even when it indulges in a completely delusional Worldview, is its group characteristic: that it operates within a collective feedback loop (now commonly referred to as a ›filter bubble‹). And because Sociosis, over time, develops a certain internal logic, anyone who assimilates its introject comes to understand it as the valid, realistic Worldview. Here is precisely where the difference between Sociosis and Psychosis becomes apparent. It is how its collectively assured certainty explains the asymmetry between individual and collective psychology, which Nietzsche had already summed up in perfect brevity:

Insanity in individuals is something rare — but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.2 (Friedrich Nietzsche)

I will never forget how, as a young author, back in the days of real existing socialism, I attended a conspiratorial meeting for the first time, organized by some artists in Prenzlauer Berg. But it wasn’t all that conspiratorial, because hundreds of young people were gathered in an old building’s large attic to listen to the poems of poets critical of the system. An acquaintance had taken me, the curious Westerner, there. And it was a truly formative event, because I’d never experienced such collective excitement before: words spoken into an electrified, breathless silence – provoking a palpable physical excitement in those around me. What irritated me, however, was that the poems recited there were strikingly simple, allegories in which a malicious king forced his subordinates into the wildest contortions, compelling them to call black white and white black. Seen in this light, the relief, even the cheerfulness, evoked by the poets’ words was nothing less than an act of liberation, a laugh with which the imposed burden could simply be shaken off. Naturally, no one, absolutely no one, was convinced by these imposed restrictions on speech and thought. Paradoxically, however—and this was the situation’s disturbing aspect—the rulers nevertheless seemed to have succeeded in damaging their subjects’ freedom of thought. For if the only response to violence is sarcasm, it’s paradoxically replicated, whereas the experience of freedom, as something taken for granted, doesn’t even appear on the intellectual horizon. The literary scholar Hans Mayer described this narrowing of perspective (which had, for him, characterized Brecht’s style since 1933) as slave language – and this becomes clear in the beautiful aperçu with which Brecht reacted to the events of June 17:

Stating that the people had forfeited the confidence of the government. And could win it back only by redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another? (Bertolt Brecht)3

By shifting the focus to the oppressor’s perspective, you lose sight of your own. This was precisely the difference, that profound incomprehension haunting me during that evening in Prenzlauer Berg. Because in my world—that of a Westerner—there was no sense of that inner censor’s power, which on the other side of the Wall was a second nature, if not an everyday necessity.

What follows from this? Nothing other than there’s also such a thing as an imposed denial of reality, whether it is enforced with naked or symbolic violence. While we are familiar with this as totalitarian rule, the question of Sociosis becomes much more complicated when we’re not dealing with a slave language imposed from above, but when it occurs of our own free will. What are the reasons leading groups into a sociotic logic of delusion? And above all: How does a group manage to keep unpleasant realities at bay – especially when there’s such a grotesque discrepancy between its belief system and reality? This is the question American social psychologist Leon Festinger attempted to answer in his book When Prophecy Fails – a book in which he tried answering the question of how a group of 1950’s UFO believers managed to convince themselves that a) the end of the world was near, b) that the chosen ones would be saved from the flood by extraterrestrial flying objects in a contemporary remake of the Noah’s Ark story, and c) how the failure of this precisely dated occurrence of this catastrophe could be explained. This remarkable research project began with the announcement in a local newspaper of a housewife’s prophecy she believed she’d received from an extraterrestrial intelligence through automatic writing, entitled: Prophecy from the Planet. Wake-up call to the city: Flee from the flood. It will overwhelm us on December 21, [1954].4 Because Festinger and his co-authors succeeded in infiltrating this apocalyptic sect as unofficial members, they were able to observe first-hand this group’s inner workings—and delve into this system’s delusional mystery. After having coined the beautiful term rationalization (which could be understood as a rationalization of madness), Festinger goes on to introduce the concept of cognitive dissonance.

»Dissonance and consonance are relations among cognitions -that is, among opinions, beliefs, knowledge of the environment,and knowledge of one’s own actions and feelings. Two opinions, or beliefs, or items of knowledge are dissonant with each other if they do not fit together - that is, if they are inconsistent, or if,considering only the particular two items, one does not followfrom the other. For example, a cigarette smoker who believes that smoking is bad for his health has an opinion that is dissonant with the knowledge that he is continuing to smoke.«5

In short: What’s considered to be the normal state here – as a harmonious Worldly relationship – is the consonance between action and worldview. And, if this harmony is disrupted, people will attempt to rationalize the situation by drowning out the dissonance. If they succeed, it doesn’t matter that they get lost in the wildest sophistry and most convoluted thought labyrinths. The crucial thing is how they regain the integrity of their own worldview. As valuable as Festinger’s insights may be, an individual psychological approach is of little help in understanding the Sociosis phenomenon as a reality loss affecting the dominant social discourse – or the classe politique – as a whole. The question is: How is something like this even possible? How can a society willingly enter into a sociotic state? And what are the historical circumstances favoring such collective denial of reality? Demoscopist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, who coined the concept of the spiral of silence, attributed this silencing of our sense of reality to an individual’s ›fear of isolation.‹ Because humans, as social animals, harbor a deep fear of social stigmatization, they remain silent in the face of what they perceive as public opinion—and consequently what’s acceptable to the consensus. Consequently, this can lead to a spiral of silence where »the winners speak – the losers remain silent«—thus to a silencing of reality. However, this insight, referring to the zoon politikon’s unchanging Nature, is of little help in answering the question of how a particular era can lose itself in sociotic delusions, while at other times it can prove much more resilient and realistic. Now, we don’t have to look far to see the most bizarre dissonances in everyday life. Keeping in mind that with the digital revolution we’re facing far greater humiliations than those which Freud lists in Civilization and Its Discontents6, we can clearly understand that such a Sociosis has its advantages: Namely, how it allows us to keep our contemporary Psychotopic intellectual impositions at bay, along with all those shocks that could potentially disrupt our own grandiose self-image. But how can we persuade ourselves that we are still masters in our own house? – By connecting our phantasms of grandeur to the batteries of the past. And this is all the easier because they’ve been immortalized in countless stories, novels, and films. Consequently, people draw on the archives of dead ideas as they spruce up yesterday’s revolutionary slogans, dusting and polishing them as they attempt to make them look new again. Put another way, Victor Hugo’s remark that nothing in the world is as powerful as an idea whose time has come can be transposed into its phantasmatic form of the sociotic:

Nothing in the world seems as powerful as an idea whose time has passed.

When the illusion of its appearance has replaced the Existent, it’s because we are no longer encountering Reality, but rather the phantasma of Great again! – that is, the illusion of still being master in our own house. By retreating into the role of consumer, you don’t even realize that you are dealing with an intellectual embezzlement – an operation that Oscar Wilde interpreted as a form of sentimental self-deception:

A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. (Oscar Wilde)7

The uncanny is simply banished by making ourselves comfortable in our museum of local history [Heimatmuseum] —while outsourcing any feelings of inner alienation to a hostile entity, scapegoating it for our failure to pursue what we consider desirable. As such, this Worldview is fueled by resentment—shielding it from anything that might disrupt it. In this sense, Oscar Wilde’s conclusion that sentimentality is nothing more than a nihilistic Sunday-holiday-time worldview cynicism, paraphrased to drown out its own emptiness with grand words and moral virtue-signaling.8 If the world is itself a nuisance, it’s clear the deepest reason for Sociosis is to keep up appearances—in short, as a kind of identity insurance.

As tempting as it may be to classify sociopathy within the classical psychopathologies, this overlooks an essential point: Namely, that the social refers to an accepted context of communication—to what might be called a symbolic order. And in case of doubt, such an order, as totalitarian regimes have successfully demonstrated, can amount to a form of everyday life—a sham architecture demanding a daily collective confirmation of reality denial. If the inhabitants of this Potemkin village have captured the main enemies of socialism (spring, summer, fall, and winter), isn’t this an eloquent testimony showing that even madness can take on a form of everyday practicality? Here, the question becomes: how is it possible to maintain such a sociotic relationship with the World? The answer is that compliance with the symbolic order, or lip service, is linked to gratification and economic advantages, which brings us closer to today’s circumstances. There’s no doubt that what is sometimes referred to as the narrowing of the corridor of opinion isn’t due to the intervention of an autocratic regime – because there isn’t even a serious Political Philosophy capable of providing the necessary circumstances with the appropriate script. Instead, we’re now dealing with a bottom-up totalitarianism, whose basic impulse is identity assurance. And, in a way, what makes people primarily susceptible to totalitarian temptation is a feeling of powerlessness—the vague, unfocused awareness that personal identity is on shaky ground. The very concept of Identity Politics, which owes its origins to a dubious group from the 1970s (the Combahee River Collective), boils down to a contradiction, a coincidentia oppositorum – since here the moment of individual uniqueness is subordinated to the political struggle. The lesbian black activists who came together in this group—»active in the struggle against racist, sexual, heterosexual, and class-based oppression«—were particularly keen on drawing attention to the phenomenon of multiple oppression. »This focus on our own oppression,« according to the group’s manifesto, the Combahee River Collective Statement, »is expressed in the concept of Identity Politics.«

»We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.«

If you look closely, it becomes clear that identitarian essentialism always boils down to a fight against those who are preventing self-expression. Consequently, we are no longer dealing with a self-image, but with a Politics of Resentment— fed by the unholy alliance of victim status and politicized identity. If Identity Politics has taken over the political discourse, the only logical conclusion is that it wasn’t just the black lesbians of the Combahee River Collective who were working on it, but that the identity crisis has affected large parts of the population. When we consider the disruptions triggered by the computer world since the 1970s—which have now reached a whole new dimension with the perceived threat of artificial intelligence—it becomes clear that the basic sociotic impulse must stem from a shattering rupture in our worldview. This is strikingly evident in the shift from a Political Economy to a Moral Economy. People no longer talk about circumstances; they are obsessed with language policy – linking the naming of what is to a moral penalty. What inspires the minds here is ultimately nothing more than resentment, a technique Marshall McLuhan translates into a wonderful aperçu (and this, too, is a remark you’ll find me coming back to).

»Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.«9

In fact, Moral Economics are essentially fed by the past. »Guilt and remorse,« McLuhan continues, “are by definition retroactive and relieve the guilty party of any redemptive act of atonement or creative renewal. Guilt and remorse are forms of despair and inertia.” It is therefore not surprising that much of what passes for progressivism today is limited to language policy and lip service—that actors involved are primarily concerned with cleansing past artifacts. In iconoclasm, history is put on trial. Not only is Immanuel Kant accused of racism, but even children’s books cannot escape the inquisitorial zealots. What the English philosopher Roger Scruton called oikophobia is to be understood as a form of intellectual self-flagellation. The fact that this enjoys such great popularity stems from the way publicly displaying personal virtue confers a sense of distinction, or rather, from how economic gratification can be reckoned with in the world of NGOs. This is a form of rationality in which actors can count on receiving real benefits from successfully navigating the Moral Economy. In this sense, the quote attributed to Hegel is beautifully spot on:

«When the facts don’t fit the theory, so much the worse for the facts.«10

Curiously, today’s circumstances can be compared to the 14^th century trade in indulgences, which not coincidentally arose during a time when society faced a major upheaval of its very foundations in the form of the medieval Wheelwork Automaton. Suddenly, people had to contend with Interest, the Division of Labor, and proto-Capitalism: Time-is-Money whose necessitated individual punctuality and tact. That a thinker like Nicole Oresme redefined the dear God as a watchmaker, indeed that he based his proof of God’s existence on the rationality of creation using a mechanical clock—the very device that later mechanistic philosophers would use to argue against God’s existence—should suffice as evidence of this Identity Crisis. That economics should become the scene of such deep conflict has much to do with people’s inability of coming to terms with the logic of interest-bearing money—instead taking refuge in a moral economy: the sale of indulgences. We must remember the Purgatorium, the place where the usurer could work off his sins, had been invented during this period – that the church leaders restructured celestial geography, namely Heaven, to accommodate the acceptance of interest. A wonderful illustration of this era’s schizophrenia comes from the account of the Cistercian monk Caesarius of Heisterbach: The usurer Jutta von Frechen dies without having repented. She is laid in her coffin, but at the moment when her soul is supposed to pass into the afterlife, the devil enters her body and makes her arms and hands move as if she were counting money. The parish priest arrives to exorcise the corpse. But as soon as he stops his incantations, the corpse begins to twitch her hands and feet again. If the only way to contain the strange, Capitalist Drive is to incorporate it without submitting to it, then we understand that the essential trick is to deny reality. The sale of indulgences is a sociotic symptom insofar as its essential impulse is to downplay the significance of money. Paradoxically, this is achieved by employing a logic of one-upmanship. Consequently, the Church leaders claimed that the martyrs’ miraculous deeds provided a treasure trove of grace capable of atoning for all future sins. This spiritual Fort Knox allowed the Church to maintain its supremacy, lulling the faithful into a sense of security in their faith—offering them the prospect of forgiveness for their sins. Of course, under the table, believers were confronted with a form of psychological accounting that was impregnating them with the new capitalist regime—one which, over time, led to a creeping devaluation of Christian beliefs. Seeing this, it’s easy to understand why, just as Europe was becoming monetized, the sale of indulgences started, while flagellants roamed the cities, turning their private penance into a public performance. While we may dismiss these things as a form of mass hysteria, in all actuality, they represent a form of Sociosis.

While the Middle Ages invented the sale of indulgences to reconcile themselves with the humiliation of the Wheelwork Automaton and proto-capitalism, our contemporaries revel in a moral economy. Now, there’s many reasons to be concerned about climate change, the discrimination of minorities, or other social problems, but Joseph de Maistre’s grim remark comes to mind when people sacrifice a practical framework for action in favor of moral Supermatie:

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

When pinkwashing, greenwashing, or whitewashing strategies are now at the heart of advertising, when moral judgments have dulled our sense of energy and economic realities, the underlying driving force is nothing other than Sociosis—the desperate attempt to at least give the outward appearance of still being in control of our own lives. If we want to understand why our contemporaries have brought laws of self-identification into the world – indeed, why they rack their brains over the gender scale (much as scholasticism struggled with the gender of angels) – the only plausible explanation is that it ensures the approval of fellow believers. And just as the sale of indulgences in the Middle Ages brought real monetary value to the Church, progressives in today’s Moral Economy can hope for a reward, whether it be an increase in their followers or monetization in the form of a state subsidy. Here, we approach the greatest mystery associated with the concept of a Moral Economy. Just as the sale of indulgences in the Middle Ages was a gigantic money-making machine, the moral economy of our day would be completely misunderstood if reduced to the realm of morals and ethics. In reality, it is an economic rationale —a social exchange system that provides those involved with monetary benefits—often highly lucrative income. If you use the right code words, you may be able to secure research funding or other grants. In this sense, the moral-economic complex that established itself at the turn of the millennium, as countless state-funded NGOs could be seen as an institution comparable to the sale of indulgences, a sociotic endeavor whose sole purpose is to maintain an outdated worldview—to avoid having to acknowledge the realities of our time.

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A SHORT HISTORY OF DIGITALISATION

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3 In Praise of Laziness

It’s said that necessity is the Mother of Invention. In the case of the next gentleman of interest in our Short History, it was clearly a matter of laziness – which, as we know, is the opposite of industria, or the diligence of hard work. Curiously, Joseph Marie Jacquard was incredibly persistent in pursuing his plan to avoid work—taking him more than forty years to put his idea into practice. The beginning wasn’t exactly promising. Born in 1752 as one of nine children in the weaving town of Lyon, from an early age, little Joseph’s parents forced him to work in the family weaving business, which he did so rather half-heartedly. When his sister married a well-educated man, her husband taught the 13-year-old illiterate boy to read, and young Joseph seized the chance to escape by learning the craft of bookbinding. After his father died in 1772, he inherited a vineyard, a quarry, and a weaving mill—yet his aversion to work remained unchanged. When his fortune was spent, he married a wealthy woman. But since her fortune was also quickly squandered, Jacquard was forced to sell his house, his looms, his wife’s jewels, and eventually his own bed.

At an advanced age, Jacquard revisited his fundamental question in life: How can maximum effect be achieved with minimum effort? How could work on the loom be reduced to a minimum? To find out, he first thoroughly studied everything his predecessors had created. He was especially interested in the solution devised by the renowned automaton maker Jacques de Vaucanson. This restless, inventive engineer had already designed an automatic duck with a digestive system and had also conceived the idea of a wooden punch card control system, which enabled a certain degree of automation in a machine.

A hole? Is that all? No, if we want to grasp what Jacquard’s stroke of genius was, we need to look further back. That’s because programming tools have existed for a very, very long time in the form of gear mechanisms that control groups of figures or play short musical pieces. In a music box, for instance, small pins attached to a roller strike metal bars – enabling it to play a specific tune. But what if you want to listen to a different piece of music? Then you need a new music box—which makes about as much sense as buying a new record player or iPod for each new record. This is how we arrive at Jacquard’s fundamental idea. Initially, the idea was that the loom could be controlled by a mechanism similar to a music box. Just as the pins on a music box roller strike small metal bars, the threads on a loom must be lifted, resulting in a characteristic pattern. To create any number of patterns, Jacquard conceived the idea of developing a mechanism that detected whether a hole was present in a specific location on a piece of paper, rather than using a fixed-wire roller. If a hole was present, the thread was lifted; if not, it stayed in place. With this clever trick, he transformed his loom into a kind of record player—because now it was possible to weave any pattern, even those that hadn’t been thought of when the machine was designed.

The innovation was separating the control program from the machine body — or, figuratively, skinning the roller and replacing its material sign with a hole. It took Jacquard four years to progress from his initial experiments to the prototype. When Napoleon, eager to whip the French textile industry into shape, saw the model, he was thrilled. He purchased the patent, handed it over to the city of Lyon, and provided the inventor with a pension — finally fulfilling the life plan that Joseph had envisaged as a child: to be able to retire.

The success of Jacquard’s plan to avoid work was nothing short of resounding – because the loom was around 30 times more efficient than a human weaver, while also allowing complex patterns to be produced – and all this at falling prices. With the final obstacle to the mechanisation of the textile industry removed, weavers suddenly found themselves in dire straits, facing the threat of being replaced by cheaper and more reliable machines. Shortly after the introduction of Jacquard’s technology, weavers united, destroying and burning the new looms and physically attacking the inventor. The experience of seeing their work, which wasn’t easy, devalued by a machine, was so devastating that a workers’ movement called the Luddites emerged, aiming to destroy the fruits of progress.

In our computer history, Jacquard himself could not have imagined the consequences that his work-avoidance strategy would trigger—just as he wouldn’t have seen any connection between his invention and the Leiden jar, Galvani’s twitching frog legs, and the telegraphic teletypewriter. This introduces another leitmotif, alongside the Luddite impulse: the strange fact that once an idea is released into the world, it gains an astonishing momentum of its own. We’ve already seen this genie in the bottle with the unleashing of electricity—and now Jacquard’s loom results in the separation of matter and writing, analogue and digital. Although the hole, as a precisely marked absence, doesn’t adhere to binary logic for the moment, it shows that thinking can free itself from materiality. The mind, if you will, once out of the bottle, cannot be recaptured. Now, you might argue that the separation of writing and matter has always existed, as it marks the first tenet of our culture. »In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word.« However, the punch card has nothing in common with these games. Au contraire, it introduces a perspective that led Karl Marx to his maxim of materialism: »Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.« And how? By imprinting patterns on matter, by reprogramming the World. Insofar as Jacquard developed the punch-card control principle to such an extent that any number of different programs could be executed, he anticipates what we now call the distinction between hardware and software – leading us directly to the next chapter, about the first computer in history.

Translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt

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If you follow the self-proclamations of the Muslim world, you may conclude that you’re dealing with a proud culture rooted in faith. This must have occurred to Michel Foucault when, as an observer of the Mullah uprising in Iran, he saw a »political spirituality« at play here. From this perspective, the idea that the recent decades of Islamist ambitions are mainly rooted in Western intellectual figures, even suggesting we’re dealing with a strange reinterpretation of Montesquieu, Hegel, Fichte, and Marx, sounds like something from another planet. But this is the exact story told by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, who traces the intellectual history of the Islamic world back to a young man, Rifa’a at-Tahtawi, sent to Paris in the early 19th century and who returned to Egypt with the ideas of the Enlightenment. As the Islamic world became aware of its own backwardness (which came to be referred to as the Nakba), it took refuge in the Counter-Enlightenments—particularly that of German Romantic philosophy, especially where it extended into the political sphere. This history, as a form of cultural unconscious, is the main focus of our conversation with Hussein Aboubakr Mansour—and how the unique perspective he offers on the past reveals a completely new view of the mysteries of today’s world.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour is a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) and writes the Substack blog The Abrahamic Metacritique. He is a respected expert on Arab intellectual history. After coming under scrutiny from Egyptian intelligence services during the Arab Spring for his work in this field, he now lives in the US.

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