“A moment of happiness,
you and I sitting on the verandah,
apparently two, but one in soul, you and I.”

…

“You, Soul, free of ‘we’ and ‘I,’
subtle spirit within man and (wo)man.
When man and (wo)man become one,
that one is You.
And when that one is obliterated, there You are.
Where is this ‘we’ and this ‘I’?
By the side of the Beloved.
You made this ‘we’ and ‘I’
th…

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It was 1920 when Angelus Novus, Paul Klee’s enigmatic monoprint, was created in Berlin, and the last year it remained there, quietly awaiting the role it would come to play in the history of ideas. Today marks its final day on view at the Bode Museum before it returns to Jerusalem.

It was not Klee, but Walter Benjamin who would make the work iconic through his writing. When Benjamin fled Nazi Germany, he took Angelus Novus with him into exile. In 1940, shortly before his tragic death at the Franco-Spanish border, he entrusted the drawing to his brilliant friend Gershom Scholem, the founder of modern Kabbalah studies. Initially safeguarded by Georges Bataille, who had helped Benjamin conceal his manuscripts in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Angelus Novus eventually came into Scholem’s care. He later ensured its preservation by donating it to the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, where it remains today.

Benjamin transformed the image into an enduring allegory of historical consciousness. His Angel of History, forever blown backward into the future, eyes fixed on the accumulating wreckage of the past, offers a searing critique of historicism: the belief that history unfolds in a rational, linear progression.

As Benjamin famously wrote:
“Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet.”
The Angel’s terrible insight is that progress and catastrophe are just co-conspirators, locked in a dialectic that too often goes unrecognized.

Even within the Bauhaus, the radical cradle of modernist design, many succumbed to the illusion of unbroken progress. Some claimed that the illiterate of the future would not be those unable to read or write, but those unable to take a photograph. While Benjamin partly agreed, he posed a deeper, more unsettling question:

“But must not a photographer who cannot read his own pictures be no less accounted an illiterate?” (One-Way Street, 256)

Here, Benjamin reframes literacy as the capacity to read critically, to interpret what those tools produce, and to perceive the unseen. Knowledge without reflection, he warns, risks becoming an instrument of catastrophe.

To move forward with awareness, we must learn to read not only what is visible, but also what is hidden, especially when it is cloaked in the language of progress.

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Meanwhile, this week, the cultural sphere churns: As cultural institutions striking themselves—or striking predetermined poses in the Transatlantic landscape, Berlin included, with its much anticipated Nan Goldin speech on Friday—while remaining utterly and forever unprepared in the face of looming algorithmic violences including a freshly elected A.I. president, and the collapsed coalition here. The future is certainly not a horizon but a fault line, and again, nothing is new.

Whether through the variety dialects of Liberalese or the unoxygenated vocabularies of today’s art world, politicians, and journalists, we’re increasingly getting sedated to the erosion of public debate as well as the anti-news stances of platforms such Meta and X. The internet inverted long ago, since the utopian days of Jaron Lanier, X (née Twitter, née also in the 1960s) has followed suit under Musk, all these platforms continue their quiet destruction of the potential for planetary togetherness—all while consuming immense water and more to fuel their infrastructure, including our daily email we generate in ChatGPT for the sake of cultural “efficiency.” I find myself contesting for a flower image I posted to meet community standards; you fighting for your nipple—a pretty universal source of motherful ingredients—or a critique of an ill-fated dictator. To AI, these acts are indistinguishable: propaganda, diary entries, porn, critiques—it’s all the same noise to its third eye. (No purple healing revelations.)

Do you use TikTok? I dont’. Yet nearly half its users under 30 follow politics there, whether in Germany or the USA, and about the same number believe the platform is “mostly good” for democracy. I’m not a Swiftie or a TikTok aficionado; my brief foray was for dance videos and performance clips. My quantum GF gives me a weekly digest on demand. By these metrics, I’m already a curatorial relic. And when formal news networks take cues from TikTok, I can’t help but feel Alicia-Silverstone Clueless. Do we all need to become short-form video specialists now? Should we all hoopla to navigate algorithms, overlay debates with captions, and package commentary in 60-second clips? The New York Magazine touched on this with its cover story recently. The media establishment faces ongoing disruption on all sides, while pranksters, and algorithm-savvy social media influencer are meteoric rise, and know how to surf or shark through the algorithmic lines.

The global political landscape is flooded with AI-driven tools like Campaign Nucleus, churning out algorithmic strategies, with waves of AI-generated content. Conspiracy , rumors, and automated messaging contour our menopausal age. Meanwhile, we—the worker bees—are expected to donate further our so-free labor to train these systems so that they don’t block or erase our humble attempts at beauty, eroticism and critical speech.

Automated politics have existed since Cold War, relying on predictive algorithms to “manage” political tasks, including rallies, campaigns etc. But now, governance has reached new lows. Electorates - alienated forever, and officials lacking courage and curiosity, acting on short-term calculations, dominate our reality, so then what happens? In Germany for instance, over-the-beyond-the-party-data-gathering-structures are being set up sniffing for voter data, migrant data, Burger data, data, data, but for the grander Prussian state that is resistant to disruptions yet. When demands for transparency from even civic and media entities that withhold data about their operations fail, we come to the potential conclusion that that even these publicly funded entities – not unlike Meta- are not democratic institutions, yet we continue building their empires brick by digital brick. (Speculation? A bit.)

I dared to explore the AI terrain four years ago in South Korea with Natasha Ginwala, my sister-brightness, through the lens of the brain's plasticity and communal potentials, long before the advent of ChatGPT. Thanks to the inspiration we drew from philosopher Catherine Malabou, many here have followed that journey, contributed to it, or reminded me of their respective explorations in collective potentials of humanity. In sharp and stark contrast to our efforts towards collective intelligence today, we get the following presentation How AI Eats the World and this brilliant article by Jill Lapore in New Yorker:

“The artificial state is a digital-communications infrastructure used by political strategists and private corporations to organize and automate political discourse. It is the reduction of politics to the digital manipulation of attention-mining algorithms, the trussing of government by corporate-owned digital architecture, the diminishment of citizenship to minutely message-tested online engagement….. Within the artificial state, nearly every element of democratic life—civil society, representative government, a free press, free expression, and faith in elections—is vulnerable to subversion.”

In the same article, The Artificial State, Scott Timcke, argues that "Muskism” and “datafication"—the conversion of human practices into computational artifacts—not only advances neoliberalism but automates inequality and curtails freedom, with Matthias Risse aptly quoted: “Democracy and technology, specifically AI, are by no means natural allies.”

Yes, all media platforms profit from political extremism even as they feign allegiance to democracy. The bitter irony? I must express all this here, in the algorithmic confines of this space. No? You tell me. You also tell me if I should stay or where I should migrate next?

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