Episodes

  • One might call Benedict Evans an anthropologist of our digital age, as he’s been observing and analyzing its technological changes for over two decades. Before deciding to become an independent observer, he started his career at various venture capital and equity firms, such as Andreessen Horowitz, Entrepreneur First, and Mosaic Ventures. Now, he provides over 175,000 readers with his observations of the technosphere’s pulse as he interprets which of its often disruptive changes actually matter in his weekly newsletter. As a graduate of the University of Cambridge, where he studied history, Evans' perspective is imbued with observations that aren’t limited to technological innovations but also include all the fantastical hopes from which they spring – and their more practical meanings in our everyday world – giving his view of reality that human touch which is often far more potent than the code itself. In any case, a conversation with him can take many marvelous, surprising turns: From one moment to the next, you jump from an industrial-ecological look at a Billy Wilder film (The Apartment with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon) to the question of why saying hello in English lifts and American elevators is experienced as inappropriate, whereas in Germany it is good manners – and this in turn is only the prelude to the question of how accounting is changing under the influence of digitalisation, among many others in our conversation with him.

    Benedict Evans lives in New York. In addition to his newsletter and regular essays on his blog, he also presents his insights to major corporations such as Alphabet, Amazon, AT&T, Axa, Bertelsmann, Deutsche Telekom, Hitachi, L'Oréal, LVMH, Nasdaq, Swiss Re, Visa, Warner Media, Verizon and Vodafone.

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  • While the harbingers were already visible long before, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has made it clear that the days of the comparatively peaceful post-war order are numbered. Nevertheless, the calculations leading to all of this remain largely mysterious. How could a society such as the Russian one embark on such an adventure in which it reveals itself to the world as a terrorist state? The historian Sergei Medvedev, who saw the approaching catastrophe coming with his The Return of the Russian Leviathan, goes back deep into Russia's history to explain Putin's motivation - to figures such as Ivan the Terrible, the Golden Horde and the Chekists, who personify the legal State of Emergency. Medvedev's diagnosis, which sees Russia as the unconscious of a spiritually eroding postmodern age, is extremely dark. According to him, the invasion of Ukraine marked the beginning of World War III, which began with the invasion of Ukraine.

    Sergei Medvedev is an Affiliate Professor at Charles University in Prague. Born in Moscow, he studied at Moscow University and Columbia University in New York City. He specializes in political history, international affairs, and Russian studies. After over 15 years as a Professor and Associate Dean at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, he left Russia in March 2022. For many years, Sergei Medvedev was a contributing columnist to Russian Forbes, Vedomosti, and The Republic and filmed programs on history and culture for the Russian Kultura TV and TV Rain. Since 2015, he has been working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, where he hosts the intellectual talk show Arkheologiya.

    Recent Books

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  • There is no doubt that the margins of society can reveal something about what shifts within. And this is precisely what’s drawn our attention to a young anthropologist whose work with young, primarily indigenous drug addicts in Vancouver reveals a picture that’s as paradoxical as it is surprising: namely a driving force behind addiction is an irrepressible longing for normality, that suburban life with a wife, family and steady job that’s been vaulted by the media in such role models as the vanilla girl, the tradwife, and the family guy. This indicates that the ‘normalcy of the everyday’ which the boomer generation fled has become an unredeemable dream of life for even large sections of the working class, raising the question if this normalcy has become an unredeemable life dream even for large sections of the working class. If that’s the case, it indicates yet another major upheaval in our current Social Drive. In a way, this also mirrors Danya Fast’s anthropological career. After examining the life dreams of young men in Africa as part of her early collaborative work, her gaze shifted to her native Vancouver: to the living conditions of young people who, as the title of her book says, The Best Place: Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver. Indeed, the drug crisis, having been exacerbated by the advent of fentanyl, shapes the image of this highly affluent city. As in San Francisco, luxury and misery go hand in hand. In the tradition of participant observation, which has characterized anthropology since Malinowski, Danya Fast immersed herself in the underground life of this city - and that’s what our conversation is all about.

    Danya Fast received her MA from the University of Amsterdam and her PhD in Medical Anthropology from the University of British Columbia, where she’s an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine. Her research papers and interests can be found at Academia, ResearchGate, and Google Scholar.

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  • The rise and fall of the Dread Pirate Roberts is a complex story that delves into the creation and dismantling of the Silk Road, an online marketplace for drugs. The narrative explores the dual identities of Ross William Ulbricht, the mastermind behind the Dread Pirate Roberts persona, who presented a respectable outward appearance while running a criminal empire. The text discusses the technological advancements, such as encrypted communication and anonymous currencies like Bitcoin, that facilitated the operation of Silk Road. The story culminates in Ulbricht's arrest in a public library, revealing the intricate planning and execution by law enforcement agencies to capture him. Despite conflicting portrayals of Ulbricht as both a villain and a hero, the narrative refrains from taking sides and instead seeks to uncover the underlying logic that led to his descent into the criminal underworld. The case of Silk Road serves as a study of the intersection between technology, politics, and morality, prompting readers to ponder the broader implications of digital anonymity and online crime.



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  • When does it ever happen that an intelligent contemporary describes himself as a neo-Luddite with conviction and a certain sense of status? This alone would be reason enough to talk with Baron Robert Jacob Alexander Skidelsky, co-founder of the British Social Democratic Party and a man who can look back on a long career in the English House of Lords. Skidelsky came into the public’s consciousness primarily through his multi-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, a work that sharpened and changed the Baron’s perspective on the machine age. While Keynes was an optimist, in Skidelsky’s writings, a distinctive, dystopian view gained the upper hand, not the least through his experiences of the Great Financial Crisis. And there’s no doubt that the seismic shock of the Digital Revolution has pushed Capitalism into a deep crisis of legitimacy, which can be seen primarily as our diffuse unease with modernity. And because it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, many of our contemporaries seek salvation in apocalyptic thinking. Skidelsky, on the other hand, in addition to his economic grammatology, views the broader historical context as he focuses on the Machine as the Social Engine influencing our living conditions far more than any political ideology. Consequently, our discussion explores precisely what the upheaval accompanying the digital revolution is and to what extent we are dealing with a controllable event.

    Robert Skidelsky, who taught Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in 1970 and has been an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College in Oxford since 1997, can look back on a varied career in politics while, above all, publishing several books.

    Recent publications

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  • That society loses its way in phantasmata and ideological labyrinths may be attributable to the human-all-too-human – but it’s strange in a culture that declares science and objectivity its highest values. In this context, Wilfred Reilly’s work is enlightening in an old-fashioned sense: a political scientist undertakes the task of comparing and contrasting morality trends with the data and finds the results deeply troubling. As in the case of the Black Lives Matter movement, where the data found that incidents of brutal police violence were in the low double-digit range, while the general public was convinced it was an almost endemic behavior that’s been documented thousands of times. Doesn’t this raise several difficult-to-explain questions of cognitive dissonance? How are such contradictions even possible in a society that considers itself enlightened? What does this have to do with our present Attention Economy? How is it possible that a culture of victimization develops in the shadow of the moral economy? All of these questions are touched upon in conversation with Wilfred Reilly.

    Wilfred Reilly teaches political science at Kentucky State University, and his books Hoax and Taboo are widely discussed in the American public.

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  • Since Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the country has been at war, with the rest of the world having registered this state of exception in horror, as one of the post-war foundations of order has started to slip. Wherever events come rushing in, it's not uncommon for the soberly detached, skeptical view of the social analyst to fall by the wayside. But this is precisely what drew our attention to Volodymyr Ishchenko, who, in his book Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War, links the events in Ukraine with the post-Soviet phenomenon of disintegration and decomposition. A point of reference he makes is Antonio Gramsci's conception of an Interregnum as that never-ending in-between spatiality in which ‘the old will not die and the new will not be born’ - an interim period in which those in power lack legitimacy, representing precisely an ideal breeding ground for Authoritarianism, Caesarism and even acts of aggression and violence of all kinds. What's so striking about his interpretation is that, gifted with this perspective, events in Ukraine are no longer seen as a special case but as a magnifying glass through which the crisis of representation that also afflicts the West is given a surprisingly new interpretation.

    Volodymyr Ishchenko is a sociologist and research associate at the Institute for East European Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. He writes for The Guardian, Al Jazeera, New Left Review, and Jacobin, among others. Verso Books published his book Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War in 2024.

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  • Examining the question of how the Universal Machine represents an epistemic force - this chapter explores how a Machine Culture’s socioplastic nature inevitably subjects its societies to a certain order.

    Long before Columbus sets off to cross the Atlantic, the European Middle Ages is already the New World that it will seek and find in America.

    Speaker: Hopkins Stanley

    Sound-Design: Martin Burckhardt

    Music: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

    From: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)

    To listen to previous chapters:

    Philosophy of the Machine 11

    Philosophy of the Machine 10

    Philosophy of the Machine 9

    Philosophy of the Machine 8

    Philosophy of the Machine 7

    Philosophy of the Machine 6

    Philosophy of the Machine 5

    Philosophy of the Machine 4

    Philosophy of the Machine 3

    Philosophy of the Machine 2

    Philosophy of the Machine 1

    Here is the Link to the German Publication by Matthes & Seitz



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  • If one were to describe Scott Tinker's work, perhaps the most apt description would be to describe him as an anthropologist of human energy use. In any case, as a trained geologist who, after a few years in the Texas oil industry, went back to university and, in 2000, became Director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas in Austin and State Geologist for the State of Texas, has spent a lifetime studying the relationship between energy use and society - a concern that, as he says, stems from a childhood memory of the former Soviet Union, where he inhaled the smell of poverty. And, to address the world's misery, he founded the Switch Energy Alliance, an organization whose mission is educating the public on the energy issue and how best to use it. To this end, he teamed up with the American filmmaker Harry Lynch, with whom he made two documentaries dealing with global energy consumption and energy poverty in the global South. In this context, Tinker has traveled to more than 65 countries worldwide and initiated a series of collaborations with various communities and tribes - an activity that’s also been reflected in his various TED Talks, Student lectures, newspaper articles and television appearances.

    Films

    Switch On (2019) - a film on global energy poverty directed by Harry Lynch.

    Switch (2012) - a film on global energy directed by Harry Lynch

    Scott Tinker at the ARC conference in London, 2023

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  • Undoubtedly, the question of oikophobia is a most puzzling social phenomenon. If the 19th-century psychiatrists understood it as the fear of being inside one’s home, the English philosopher Roger Scruton understood it to mean becoming a stranger, no, even more than that: an idiosyncrasy towards one's own culture that can take on ‘a chronic form…in the guise of political correctness.’ Benedict Beckeld – who grew up in Uppsala and Stockholm, and emigrated with his family to New York as a teenager – has taken up this concept as a comparative lens to examine history for recurring patterns. As a classical philologist and philosopher who studied and earned his doctorate in Heidelberg, and who also performed research as a visiting scholar at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and in Bologna, he is highly predisposed to do so (he had also spent a year as a student at the Sorbonne and was later a professor of philosophy and classics at the American University of Paris). After all, he has that fundamentally alien view distinguishing the historian, enabling him to identify recurring patterns and structures.

    Conversations with Dr. Beckeld are extremely stimulating as you move effortlessly with him through world history. If Beckeld follows the personality ideal of antiquity, he is also a child of postmodernism - just as familiar with its twists and turns as with various languages and philosophical systems of thought. Consequently, he’s by no means unfamiliar with the world of social media – in addition to his philosophical work, he also runs a video blog where he regularly comments on the issues of the day. He currently lives in New York and is working on a book about aesthetics and a narrative about his experiences as a young teacher in Namibia (which is why the young student in the photo below not only declared him her favorite teacher but one whose vast knowledge has changed her life).

    Link to Benedict Beckelds website

    Benedict Beckeld has recently published

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  • Looking at many contemporary institutions, we can't help thinking Modernity's secret goal lies in its organizational irresponsibility. In the shadows, however, a revolution has occurred where the individual doesn’t have to function as a cog in the Wheelwork of a Machine. Instead, they’re given the freedom to work in small, highly agile groups responsible for the efficiency and quality of their product. Inspired by the novel Toyota Production System of Teamwork (TPS) that Japanese engineer Taiichi Ohno developed on the car manufacturer's factory floors, this movement found its spirtitus rector in Jeff Sutherland - a thinker whose Agile Manifesto (co-authored with Ken Schwaber in 2001) has promulgated this project management’s style in all areas of life. And if you consider Sutherland is advocating a method without methodology that’s essentially a staged form of chaos, you immediately sense a highly unconventional spirit at work here.

    As a West Point graduate, Jeff Sutherland was deployed flying reconnaissance over enemy territory in the Vietnam War – missions that often cost his fellow pilots their lives. Then, as a young statistician in Radiology, he was asked to apply his knowledge in cancer cell research, where his expertise unexpectedly catapulted the Stanford assistant professor into the financial industry. Here he experienced the problems of a strictly top-down, hierarchical management style and developed his idea of Scrum. That is small groups of people who, like a deeply attuned Rugby team, work out their interactions with each another - and in the form of blind agreement – develop a step-by-step efficiency that puts to shame everything designed to date. In this respect, it’s no coincidence this idea has found its way into the modern working world after becoming the startup world's undisputed paradigm. And that’s precisely what an energetic 82-year-old Jeff Sutherland tells us in his interview with Ex nihilo - the story of a revolution set on a permanent course.

    Life is What Happens To You While You’re Busy Making Other Plans (John Lennon)

    In German:

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  • If we remember that the machina mundi, like the Deus ex Machina, flies in from above, it's unsurprising that the scene of the Machine Discourse shifts to where the Politics of Heaven are fought over. It's the emerging Christianity that takes up the Machine question - albeit in a way that seems like a palimpsest, a parchment that has been scraped over and over again: constantly rewritten.

    This chapter deals with the paradox of the Christian world (which is trying to free itself from ancient materialism) becoming the catalyst of the Machine World - through the detour of Universal Scriptural Writing and the Assumption of the Immaculate Conception. It's a movement that inevitably led to the building of Cathedrals, the founding of Universities, and the book society of the Renaissance.

    Speaker: Hopkins Stanley

    Sound-Design: Martin Burckhardt

    Music: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

    From: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)

    To listen to previous chapters:

    Philosophy of the Machine 10

    Philosophy of the Machine 9

    Philosophy of the Machine 8

    Philosophy of the Machine 7

    Philosophy of the Machine 6

    Philosophy of the Machine 5

    Philosophy of the Machine 4

    Philosophy of the Machine 3

    Philosophy of the Machine 2

    Philosophy of the Machine 1

    Here is the Link for the German Publication at Matthes & Seitz



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit martinburckhardt.substack.com
  • You might call Roger Pielke Jr., the son of the highly respected Climatologist Roger Pielke Sr., an Environmental Political scientist who analyzes the atmospheric disruptions between Science and Politics. And because, with the looming apocalypse, this represents mined terrain, Dr. Pielke, who's been awarded international prizes and honorary doctorates for his work and served as director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has found himself at the center of a campaign that made him, as he puts it, the Voldemort of climate science. Paradoxically, this label has nothing to do with Pielke's measured observations, delivered with the beautiful clarity of a true scientist, but solely with the veritable religious furor that activists and world-savers have brought to the debate. This position of Pielke's is based on a timeless scientific ethos, which never allows itself to become aligned with any cause - knowing that the cost of such activism is sacrificing science's integrity. On the other hand, the liminal position between Science and Politics has made him highly sensitive - so when Mary Douglas' name comes up in the conversation, he's immediately familiar with her institutional theory and mentions Steve Rayner's work, appropriately titled The Social Construction of Ignorance, explaining that institutions are not necessarily formed to produce new knowledge, but often to keep uncomfortable or inconvenient learning out of sight. But because Pielke is stubborn enough to endure even the disruptive and inappropriate, he doesn't shy away from the adversity - he only points out at the end of the conversation; however, that contradiction is more manageable at an advanced age and that Academia might not be the ideal place for an up-and-coming Roger Pielke III’s career choices.

    Roger Pielke has published.

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  • The chapter deals with the birth of metaphysics and eternal damnation, the emergence of that peculiar attitude of mind called Gnosis in the science of religion. That the Earth becomes transformed into a vale of tears is, in this sense, a dialectical necessity. That culture becomes the angel maker.

    If the pure sign represents the appearance of eternity, the question arises why we still concern ourselves with the decrepitude of the earthly. Why not live eternally right away?

    Speaker: Hopkins Stanley

    Sound-Design: Martin Burckhardt

    Music: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

    From: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)

    To listen to previous chapters:

    Philosophy of the Machine 9

    Philosophy of the Machine 8

    Philosophy of the Machine 7

    Philosophy of the Machine 6

    Philosophy of the Machine 5

    Philosophy of the Machine 4

    Philosophy of the Machine 3

    Philosophy of the Machine 2

    Philosophy of the Machine 1

    hier der Link zur Publikation bei Matthes & Seitz



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit martinburckhardt.substack.com
  • The idea of another world arises with the pure, animate signs: Pure spirit, eternity, Platonic bodies. In contrast, the real world is a cave, an underworld realm of shadows, in which illusory existences see only reflections of their destiny: the reflection of the true, the good, and the beautiful.

    The chapter tells of philosophy's birth - and of how thinking thus begins to run in circles:

    That which philosophy considers as being or essence is the art of running in the circle of the universal machine. En kyklos paidein. But as we know, still every encyclopedia is alphabetical.

    Speaker: Hopkins Stanley

    Sound-Design: Martin Burckhardt

    Music: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

    From: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)

    To listen to previous chapters:

    Philosophy of the Machine 8

    Philosophy of the Machine 7

    Philosophy of the Machine 6

    Philosophy of the Machine 5

    Philosophy of the Machine 4

    Philosophy of the Machine 3

    Philosophy of the Machine 2

    Philosophy of the Machine 1

    hier der Link zur Publikation bei Matthes & Seitz



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit martinburckhardt.substack.com
  • Occasionally, we must admit we belong to an older generation with worldviews shaped by our specific generational experiences. This, at least, was what crossed my mind while reading the text of a young Swedish writer considering the question of whether our present-day culture wars could be the result of an elite overproduction in the form of an educational glut from a flawed educational system; often leading its actors into the fiercest battles, not infrequently unfairly waged, for the remaining high-status jobs. The most interesting thing about this reflection is its tribute to the forgotten American political scientist James Burnham, who’d analyzed an emerging new ruling class in the forties with the publication of his Managerial Revolution – incidentally, which significantly influenced George Orwell’s writing of 1984. In his referencing of this thinker, who was a Trotskyist that metamorphosed into a staunch conservative, Malcom Kyeyune finds a diagnosis for the present as something quite comparable: an emerging new Woke elite class that distinguishes themselves morally rather than economically while teaching the world of its possibility. He notices that they are engaging in a moral economy that can be used for career advancement, social status, and economic advantage, often at the economic and career expense of the disadvantage they supposedly represent. And because Malcolm still considers himself a Marxist, our conversation (even if it lightly crosses different eras, cultures, and continents) revolves around questioning what drives this strange moral economy.

    Malcolm Kyeyune is a fearlessly provocative blogger and writer living in Uppsala, Sweden. He shouts for Aftonbladet but primarily for English-language venues like UnHerd, American Affair, and Compact Magazine.

    Correspondigs topics



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  • The chapter deals with the birth of Pythagorean mathematics - or, more precisely, the way with which mathematicians fall into the delirium of Infinity.

    Carnival. In that old-fashioned sense, every mathematical calculus has a strange carnivalesque side because you extract the flesh from life. Just as the tones of the music are abstracted from the body of sound, the formula dissolves an experience from reality, imposing on it a system of rules in which the highest is at the bottom, the lowest is at the top.

    Speaker: Hopkins Stanley

    Sound-Design: Martin Burckhardt

    Music: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

    From: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)

    To listen to previous chapters:

    Philosophy of the Machine 7

    Philosophy of the Machine 6

    Philosophy of the Machine 5

    Philosophy of the Machine 4

    Philosophy of the Machine 3

    Philosophy of the Machine 2

    Philosophy of the Machine 1

    Here’s the link to the original German edition.



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit martinburckhardt.substack.com
  • The chapter tells of how the Machine, as socioplasty, inscribes itself on antiquity - how it becomes an ideal of personality and, as imprinted freedom, ultimately determines social relations.

    From then on, sacrifices were no longer made to the gods but to the Polis. It is no coincidence that taxation is the only area in which we still talk about having to make sacrifices today.

    Speaker: Hopkins Stanley

    Sound-Design: Martin Burckhardt

    Music: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

    From: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)

    To listen to previous chapters:



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit martinburckhardt.substack.com
  • The sixth chapter tells how the phallic sign of the bull deity turns into an alphabetic type. But where does this story begin? There, where the god in bull form abducts Europa to Crete? Or in the labyrinth of Daedalus, where the Alpha-beast and mythical figure awaits its extinction?

    With the Alphabet, the twilight of the gods begins…we do not meet the riddle of creation here, but rather a nature that is spun into the type wheel of an already given understanding of the world.

    Speaker: Hopkins Stanley

    Sound-Design: Martin Burckhardt

    Music: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

    From: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)

    To listen to previous chapters:



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit martinburckhardt.substack.com
  • The fifth chapter deals with the paradox that the art of memory (ars memoria) is joined by the art of forgetting (ars oblivionis) - which may explain why the beginnings of Western culture are obscure or, as the case may be, declared as “the Greek miracle.”

    The realization that the alphabetic sign isn’t only what it notates but also what it makes us forget.

    From: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)

    To listen to previous chapters:

    Philosophy of the Machine 4

    Philosophy of the Machine 3

    Philosophy of the Machine 2

    Philosophy of the Machine 1



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit martinburckhardt.substack.com