Following our presentation of the »Labyrinth of Signs,« parts I and II, we now provide a deeply reflective yet light-hearted post-mortem discussion between us to help you understand what it means to be literate. Martin’s concept of Psychotope becomes more understandable as our conversation progresses; it becomes clear how essential the Alphabet is in enabling us to be literate in our thinking, writing, and discourses, revealing that we are essentially working with an outsourced, historical unconscious in how it shapes us through its use. This is evident from the fact that the origin of Symbolic Logic remains a gaping blank space in Philosophy—even more so: it’s hidden within the conspicuousness of its absence. Something I’ve come to know as the Burckhardtian leitmotif of »The Philosopher’s Shame.«

It’s also no coincidence that »Geist der Maschine« features a chapter on how Sigmund Freud developed his concept of the unconscious, which we’ve also translated into English and will be posting soon. For now, it suffices to say that this chapter explains how and why Freud excluded the 19th century’s material culture (meaning its Logic of an Electrified/Telegraphic Society), which fulfilled his metaphysical needs, while simultaneously introducing something like a black box unconscious of the Unconscious into the World as its Psychotope.

Hopkins Stanley

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The title’s rhetorical question is a tautology. After all, it's evident that when we dream, our bedroom transforms into a space that’s magically filled with all kinds of creatures. In this sense, the engaging little experiment showcased in our short video simply translates our dreamwork into daylight. If we must insist that artificial intelligence is not the creation of some alien, hostile force, it’s because this misconception has long become endemic. When commentators go so far as to view AI as a singularity, a trans-humanist super-intelligence—or worse, a new biological species—they are operating under a profound misunderstanding. This misunderstanding mainly arises because the History of Digitization has remained a blank page thus far. This is why we will present our readers with chapters detailing the events that have shaped the style and spirit of this history over the next few weeks. Our failure to confront this history and its implications for so long may explain the discomfort many of us feel as we contemplate the consequences of this revolution in our lives. Reflecting on the progress made in recent years, driven by projects like OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, and Ollama, it's clear that our working world—indeed, the capitalist value system itself—is facing the crisis Nietzsche described as the devaluation of values. However, in our case, we are dealing with an economic rather than a moral logic of devaluation. Instead of seeking comfort in doomsday rhetoric, it makes much more sense to dare to look in the mirror. While you may encounter your own nightmares, on the other hand, you’re also confronting a dream machine—one that can produce the most wondrous results.

Eigentlich läuft die rhetorische Frage des Titels auf eine Tautologie hinaus. Denn es ist evident, dass, wenn wir träumen, unser Schlafzimmer der Ort ist, der, ganz von selbst, von allen erdenklichen Wesen animiert ist. In diesem Sinn ist auch das kleine, höchst unterhaltsame Experiment, dass sich in diesem kleinen Video niedergeschlagen hat, nichts anderes als eine in die Tageshelle übersetzte Traumarbeit. Wenn man gleichwohl darauf beharren muss, dass die Gebilde der Künstlichen Intelligenz nicht auf eine fremde, feindliche Macht zurückgehen, so weil dieses Missverständnis längst endemisch geworden ist. Wenn sich Kommentatoren dazu versteigen, in der KI eine Singularity, eine transhumanistische Superintelligenz – oder ärger noch: eine neuartige biologische Spezies zu erblicken, hat man es mit einem tiefen Missverständnis zu tun. Dieses Missverständnis rührt nicht zuletzt daher, dass die Geschichte der Digitalisierung bis heute eine Leerstelle geblieben ist – weswegen wir in den nächsten Wochen unseren Lesern die Kapitel präsentieren werden, die in dieser Geschichte stil- und geistprägend sind. Dass man sich dieser Geschichte – und ihren Implikationen - so lange nicht gestellt hat, mag das Unbehagen erklären, das die meisten Zeitgenossen heimsucht, wenn sie darüber nachdenken, welche Folgen diese Revolution für ihr eigenes Leben haben mag. Schaut man sich die Fortschritte an, die sich in den letzten Jahren (forciert durch Projekte wie OpenAI, Claude oder Gemini oder Ollama) Bahn gebrochen haben, ist evident, dass unsere Arbeitswelt, ja, das kapitalistische Wertesystem hier vor jener Bewährungskrise steht, die Nietzsche als Entwertung der Werte gefasst hat, nur dass man es in diesem Falle nicht mit einer moralischen, sondern einer durchaus ökonomischen Entwertungslogik zu tun hat. Anstatt hier Trost in einem Weltuntergangsvokabular zu suchen, ist es sehr viel sinnvoller, den Blick in den Spiegel zu wagen. Mag sein, dass man hier den eigenen Alpträumen begegnen, anderseits hat man es mit einer Traummaschine zu tun – die ganz wunderbare Ergebnisse zeitigen kann.

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Who comes up with something like that? (Carmela Soprano)

It's been a good two years since we entered the world of AI-generated images, and during this time, tools like DALL-E and Leonardo.ai have become familiar companions in image production. And during this period, we’ve been exploring the artistic capabilities of our own Company Machine, the in-house metaphor machine we developed, which can translate texts and conversations into truly surprising images from scratch. This is why we were very curious to test the much-hyped Google VEO software, using images from our Company Machine that are pretty unusual themselves. Here is a little demonstration of what you can count on in the future. Count on? No, that's the wrong word. It might be more appropriate to speak of the anticipation of a magic mirror that translates what it receives into gestures—amounting to nothing less than the complete unleashing of the Imagination’s power. The following is the result of a compilation of a fun day Hopkins, Martin, and I spent together trying to teach this ex nihilo Image World to walk.

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