When I returned to Budapest (where I lived from 2004 to 2009) for a few days at the end of last year, it wasn’t just the lost independence of the judiciary, media, culture, and education that my conversation partners complained about, but the increasingly deteriorated infrastructure caused by Orbán’s nepotism and the growing impossibility of leading a normal life that comes with it. Last week, the gap between state propaganda and the economic reality of the people finally brought down the Fidesz government, which had appeared unbeatable.

A number of analyses have underscored the role of day-to-day life in the election results. Discontent with the mundane aspects of life served as a unifying force for an otherwise deeply divided voting bloc. Gabor Gyori, a political analyst with the Policy Solutions research organization in Budapest, told the New York Times that voters longed „for normalcy, meaning moving away from constant hysteria and toward a governmental focus on everyday issues.“ Charles Lane emphasized that „even a deeply entrenched right-wing populist leader can overplay his hand, and alienate the public, by failing to deliver on issues that most affect daily life.“ And Ross Douthat concluded, „that the best political response to populism is usually to deal with its concrete policy demands, rather than insisting that a democratic emergency requires people to back the establishment no matter what.“

To be sure, engaging with political ideas is exciting, and political movements need motivating rhetoric, but at the end of the day, the litmus test for any policy remains whether it improves people’s lives—or rather, whether it allows for a ‘normal’ life. There is comfort and hope here against right-wing agitation and left-wing overreach alike. However much digital echo chambers have caused political discourse to drift away from reality, most people in today’s fragmented society still seem to find political contentment in the functional, the regulated, and the ordinary.

Interestingly, this insight is increasingly gaining traction in communication. David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, recently shared interesting thoughts for winning elections in a climate of populist polarization:

„No data. No stats. Instead, focus on personal stories from local voices (...) The voters who decide this election should be the lead storytellers (...) Don’t script anyone. Turn on the phone and camera and let people tell their story. As a former political ad maker, I can humbly say the best lines never come from professionals. They come from people in a language that is raw, real and accessible. Regular, nonpolitical Americans are the most effective influencers. That’s especially true on TikTok, which prohibits political advertising. Anything that smells paid and prepackaged will backfire.“

Lulu Cheng Meservey, who pioneered the go-direct approach, framed the shift in communication more broadly, not just limited to political communication:

„the real has never been more precious, refreshing, special, and rare. We need real people, building real things that actually matter, through real discipline and effort, with real outcomes in the real world.“

More specifically:

• „Designing real world events and artifacts, leaving people with memories that far outlast the cheap ‚impressions‘ generated by brainrot content troughs

• Showing up as real humans, with real flaws and foibles, instead of ultra-polished personas following AI scripts

• Forming real relationships that will weather time and tide“

When it comes to communication and campaigns, however, things are tricky, as the fabrication of ‘realness’ undermines the very thing it’s trying to create. Goethe, 1807: „One feels design and so is out of humour.“ This paradox, however, does not alter—in fact, it only confirms—a profound yearning for a pre-political being-in-the-world within a society saturated by signs and feverish debates.

Back in the summer of 2023, Andrew Sullivan—hardly the calmest of commentators—put out an unusual article titled “A Normal Summer And A Normal President,” in which he states:

“For the first time in years, this feels like a normal summer (...) we’re traveling again; taking holidays; seeing old friends and family, catching up after that strange, lost interlude of plague, when years of our lives suddenly seemed to evaporate into a time warp. In this little resort town I live in each summer, the old rituals are back with some punch: the crowds at the daily tea-dance, the daily trek to the beaches, the late-night drunken shenanigans.“

Sullivan argued for savoring the fleeting moment he described as „an interlude, a throwback, a pause.“ It is precisely what the Hungarian people yearned for when they voted the corrupt autocrat out of power. A moment whose lightness is reminiscent of what Hungary—next to intellectual seriousness—stood for for a long time: a lighthearted, joyful life, „the kind of thing that only really exists in a free society, where politics is kept at a distance, and private life can have its moment in the sun.“

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

Once again, the small country of Hungary impressed the global stage through its unique brand of freedom-loving obstinacy. The weekend’s election results moved me not only because the unthinkable occurred, but also because I lived and worked in Budapest between 2004 and 2009 and have stayed connected ever since. To be sure, the real test will come in the day-to-day grind, showing just how much of Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian populism will actually be rolled back in the coming years, but for now, there is every reason for relief and celebration. Is there a blueprint within Péter Magyar’s election success for regaining liberal territory around the world? This week’s POSTCARD presents quotes from reports, commentaries, and analyses that together provide a roadmap for countering authoritarianism.

• Don’t be afraid

  Michelle Goldberg, reporting from Budapest for the New York Times: „Over and over, Magyar beseeched the crowd, ‚Do not be afraid!‘ The crowd, in turn, broke into a chant: ‚We are not afraid!‘ I asked a woman I met in the crowd, Mariann Szabo, to explain Magyar’s words: What had people been afraid of? An elementary schoolteacher and mother of two, Szabo said that people like her, who worked in the public sector, feared that if they were seen to oppose Fidesz, they could lose their jobs and thus their ability to survive. That fear kept many people quiet about their politics. Before Magyar’s campaign, Szabo knew there were others in her town who didn’t like Orban, but not how many. Suddenly, it seemed as if everything was about to change.“

• Tell an optimistic story that looks to the future

  „After many years in office,“ Yascha Mounk rightly emphasizes, „leaders tend to be judged on their record rather than their rhetoric. And Orbán’s record increasingly looked abysmal.“ His promises sounded accordingly tired. András Bíró-Nagy, a political analyst: “The message was, ‘We could live even worse’.”

• Don’t pivot to the other extreme; offer common ground instead

  The Editorial Board of the New York Times: „Mr. Magyar, who identifies as center right, won partly by avoiding the social progressivism that dominates elite left-leaning circles and alienates many voters. He ran as an economic progressive and a cultural moderate if not conservative. (...) anyone who opposes Orbanism should examine the full Hungarian campaign, not only the convenient parts.“ Idrees Kahloon, reporting for The Atlantic: „Magyar succeeded because his party achieved ‚transformative repolarization‘ rather than ‚reciprocal polarization.‘“

• Take infrastructure and lived experience seriously

  It's still the economy, stupid! Gabor Gyori, a political analyst from Budapest: Tisza’s supporters are “very diverse and probably divided on many issues, but they all long for normalcy, meaning moving away from constant hysteria and toward a governmental focus on everyday issues”. Charles Lane over at Persuasion: „The outcome in Hungary shows that even a deeply entrenched right-wing populist leader can overplay his hand, and alienate the public, by failing to deliver on issues that most affect daily life.“

• Go where no one else goes

  „Magyar directly campaigned all throughout Hungary, including in rural constituencies that tended to go unvisited because they were considered Fidesz’s heartland, “ Idrees Kahloon writes in The Atlantic.

Noteworthy

“How do you pull this off without inciting a thirst for revenge? You also have to convince the two and a half million Hungarians who voted for Orbán on Sunday to embrace democracy again.“

—Wilhelm Droste, cultural practitioner in Budapest, interviewed by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on April 14, 2026

A mystery link leading into the unknown

„The people have the power / The power ...

• ... to dream, to rule / to wrestle the world from fools“

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.

The Alphütte Wasserfall is one of seven huts in the Bernese Oberland that Beat “Yeti” Hutmacher has carefully renovated, rents out to travelers, and offers as a retreat for creatives. It’s located near the Swiss village of Grindelwald and is accessible only on foot. I spent a week there before Easter.

The very first time I walked in, I ended up with a nasty bump on my head. Even though I tried my best to watch out for the low ceilings and doorways, not a day went by that I didn’t hit my head. At that point, I knew: I couldn’t afford to be confrontational. The cabin, seasoned by 350 years of existence, would only shelter me on its own terms. My efforts were rewarded.

Read more

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

Digitalization, the peak of quantification, is embracing the qualitative par excellence: taste. For real?

• Taste I

  „Is it discernment? Sensibility? Cultivation? Is it inborn or learned? A marker of distinction or a marker of class?“ the New York Times asks.

• Taste II

  Taste „has become as much of a tech-world cliché as ‘disruption’ was in the twenty-tens,“ Kyle Chayka argues in the New Yorker, and senses „taste-washing.“

• Taste III

  Will Manidis is „against“ taste, because he thinks it turns human beings into „a critic of creation rather than a co-creator. A consumer (...) the activity is acquisition. And the acquisition leads nowhere.“

• Taste IV

  Analog interfaces with their „innate intuitiveness“ continue to be the benchmark of good design, John Gruber believes: „Light switches were easy and obvious. Flip the switch. Thermostats were easy and obvious. Turn the dial until the indicator points to the temperature you want. Light switches and Honeywell thermostats were so simple they seemed like they weren’t ‚interfaces‘ at all, which is why they were such great interfaces. The best interfaces almost literally disappear.“

• Taste V

  Taste, of course, requires immersion, time, and openness. It needs to be cultivated, as Ted Gioia points out: „I think Wynton Marsalis was right. He said — and this is controversial — but he said, if you take somebody who spent their whole life just eating McDonald’s hamburgers, you could take them to the best Michelin-starred restaurant in the world — they wouldn’t enjoy it because they would not have cultivated their taste to understand that.“

Noteworthy

„It’s the review that took three months but no one will read. It’s the investigation that required patience. It’s the work of understanding something before declaring judgment. All of it still exists, still gets made. It just doesn’t travel. And in a system where only what travels matters, we’ve made expertise indistinguishable from noise.“

– Om Malik

A mystery link leading into the unknown

„And I don’t mean that in a small way...“

• “... I mean that in a big way.“

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.

Whatever your take on it, the technology we call AI is fundamentally shifting how we process information and interact with computers in our day-to-day lives. Om Malik:

“Artificial intelligence doesn’t just search; it synthesizes, contextualizes, and presents information in a user’s preferred format.“

This shift is having a profound impact, particularly where work is text-based: in education and the humanities. At the same time, it’s becoming evident that the current LLM-based AI is running into constraints. Along with many other experts, Yann LeCun has strongly emphasized this. David William Silva summarizes LeCun’s position as follows:

„Large Language Models are a dead end on the path to human-level intelligence. They are, at their core, text-prediction engines, extraordinarily good at retrieving, recombining, and generating language, but fundamentally incapable of understanding the world they talk about. They lack common sense, causal reasoning, and any model of physical reality (...) no amount of scaling, that is, bigger models, more data, more compute, will ever bridge that gap. To get anywhere near genuine intelligence, AI must go far beyond text and learn from high-bandwidth sensory experience: video, spatial data, interaction with the physical world.“

LeCun is now pursuing the ‘World Model’ approach instead, an alternative that has gained the support of Tim Berners-Lee as well. „Real intelligence“, Le Cun writes, „does not start in language. It starts in the world.“ The goal is to capture and handle “real-world sensor data” that is “unpredictable” and “noisy.” A similar statement can be found on the website of the AI company general intuition: „human intelligence far exceeds language (...) Truly intelligent machines must move from words to worlds“. General intuition’s Pim de Witte and Packy McCormick recently published an extensive guide to World Models. These, the two explain, are “action-conditioned,” because actions compress “how humans respond to the countless variables in their environments.” World models can therefore be defined as “systems that learn from watching the world and the actions taken in it.”

The material turn comes to AI

The transition from words to the world comes as no surprise to cultural theorists, as the ‘world-as-text’ approach established by the ‘semiotic turn’ has already been criticized for its one-sidedness. Context isn’t just text. Culture comprises not only symbols but also material objects and social practices. AI solutions won’t achieve greater accuracy until things and practices can be digitized as well.1

The world-as-bottleneck also serves as the focal point for yet another excellent text from Chris Walker this week. He recalls the extent to which scientific discoveries in the industrial modern era were grounded in “contact with reality” and physical practice—specifically in “hands-on experimental work through which scientists build intuitions and encounter surprises that force deeper reflection.” These avoided the “exploitation trap,” where—as is the case with LLMs—only “low-hanging cross-domain connections in published literature” are established: impressively fast, to be sure, and insightful to a certain extent, but ultimately remaining within “well-explored territory.” Irritating insights from the field that prompt new conceptual frameworks are inevitably ignored.

The world is not enough

In contrast to language models, are world models better suited to navigate messy and dynamic contexts? Beyond romantic assurances and ethical concerns, there are compelling reasons to believe that we are ultimately facing a basic impossibility, notwithstanding several probable advances. Why? Because world or contextual knowledge is frequently ‘implicit’ expertise, which brings with it a series of difficulties for digitalization. First, as far as LLMs are concerned:

• Tacit knowledge is not reflected upon by actors and therefore isn’t put into words, which is why it cannot be fed into LLMs.

• Even with reflection, it is questionable whether every relevant aspect can be articulated and thereby digitized.

• Assuming that were possible, we still would encounter a changed situation with every new ‚application‘ as the field evolves, necessitating the constant input of the latest local expertise.

But also when it comes to world models. Chris Walker asks: „Could you build a surveillance apparatus comprehensive enough to capture all of this? Maybe. Brain-computer interfaces might someday access knowledge that even the knower can’t articulate.“ However, he suggests that „total capture can be worse than incomplete capture,“ because taste and judgment matter: „The challenge here is not codification but curation: selecting and assembling the right bundle of already-codified information at inference time.“

That means we have to address two further issues:

• If we assume that dynamic knowledge can be captured in real time via action-based world models, we are still left with the challenge of identifying which knowledge is necessary for a specific task.

• Finally, Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem presented itself, meaning that

  an ‘abductive’ moment of judicial capacity would endure.2

Watching the AI conversation unfold, I’m increasingly curious about who is actually benefiting from whom. The humanities and social sciences, by handing over administrative tasks as well as the evaluation of enormous amounts of quantitative data to AI? Or developers and engineers who need to upskill in qualitative aspects? Mētis, taste, judgment, context, tacit knowledge, the move from language to practices—and more recently, Peirce’s abduction: So many terms from philosophy, science studies, and humanistic inquiry are gaining sharpness and relevance in the wake of AI debates that well-conceived humanities might even have a bright future.

That said, the current craze for words such as „taste“ will pass more quickly than the skill itself can be mastered. For the cultivation of the irreducibly human demands immersion, tenacity, patience, and consequently, time.

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

Academia has long been challenged by independent writers, open-minded think tanks, and countercultural ventures. Meanwhile, more and more para-academic initiatives are emerging that leverage digital technologies and platforms such as Substack to revitalize and redefine intellectual life from outside the ivory tower. In his recent piece on the state of the humanities, Justin Smith-Ruiu listed some of these endeavours and argued that in order to reform themselves, universities need „external pressure from independent para-academic initiatives capable of modeling how the humanities are actually done.“ His article inspired me to dig a little deeper into „alt-ac.“ The result is this totally biased and incomplete map of the academia-adjacent.

• Micro-colleges

  Inspired by Deep Springs College, an institution of higher learning founded in 1917, a series of “micro-colleges” seek to integrate academic rigor, manual labor, and community life – often in low-tech environments – instead of „taking online courses, or abandoning the humanities in favor of classes in business or STEM, or paying high tuition to fund the salaries of more Assistant Vice Provosts for Student Life.“ The New York Times describes them as „communitarian pragmatists, with liberal arts for the mind, labor for the body and an ethos of secular monasticism for the spirit. They are the descendants of philosophers like John Dewey.“

• Great books programs

  Many institutions and initiatives, both traditional and new, concentrate on great books, among them St. John’s College, the Catherine Project, or The Invisible College, a series of courses on literature for paid subscribers of John Pistelli’s newsletter Grand Hotel Abyss.

• The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

  Founded in 2012 and named after the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, the BISR offers „community-based education“ and aims to „integrate rigorous but accessible scholarly study with the everyday lives of working adults and re-imagine scholarship for the 21st century.“ Among other programs, it offers one called „Praxis.“

• The Program for Public Thinking

  An initiative promoting „a more thoughtful, humane, and pluralistic public conversation“ that is co-sponsored by The Point magazine and the Parrhesia Program for Public Discourse at the University of Chicago. Founded in 2023, it offers a two-week summer workshop as its flagship program. Similar to the mission of the highly recommended magazine, it seeks „to cultivate habits of thought traditionally associated with liberal arts education but largely absent from our broader cultural discourse: analytic rigor, interpretive generosity, and the ability to test and question one’s own convictions.“

• Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life

  A non-profit providing deep reading programs on a farm in the Catskills: „no grades, no credentials, no distractions — only the joyful, demanding work of thinking carefully, reflecting creatively, speaking honestly, and rediscovering what it means to live a good life.“ It was founded in 2023 by Berta Willisch, the widow of Matthew Strother, who died of cancer at the age of 35.

• The Strother School of Radical Attention

  SoRA is a Brooklyn-based non-profit founded by D. Graham Burnett. It is dedicated to „to push back against the fracking of human attention by coercive digital technologies“ and advance „Attention Activism“ through community programs in the study and practice of human attention.

• The Hinternet Foundation

  Founded in 2025 by Justin Smith-Ruiu, this venture is dedicated to ensuring the humanities „remain vital and relevant as technology reshapes the horizon of human experience.“ Its programs include an essay prize, a fellowship, a summer school, a conference, working groups, and ed tech initiatives.

Noteworthy

“I believed in doing things the right way—reading the right way (to learn from books, not lecture them), thinking the right way (with both feet on the ground), writing the right way (like an actual human being), teaching the right way (helping students to be better versions of themselves, not little versions of me)—and I wasn’t going to yield the field without a fight. I wasn’t going to let the bastards grind me down.“

—William Deresiewicz in his moving account „Why I Left Academia (Since You’re Wondering)“

A mystery link leading into the unknown

Get something para-academic...

… for free!

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.

If there is one mode of thought that defines human inquiry like no other, it is reflexivity. Self-reference is the supreme test for determining if a statement is free of contradictions. Anyone who denies the existence of truth is at least claiming that very statement to be true. Those advocating for ethical standards ought to lead by example. And if someone praises the humanities, shouldn’t this person be willing, in principle, to pursue them personally?

In a powerful declaration on the state of the humanities, Justin Smith-Ruiu last week laid out the circumstances under which a decision for or against “universitarian humanism” has to be made today: falling enrollment numbers, declining standards, AI, and a moment that he aptly describes as „the conjoint triumph of hyper-financialization at the level of institutional organization, and the hermeneutics of suspicion at the level of ideology.“ It is this mix of “hyper-quantification” and a “now-institutionalized, half-educated spirit of contempt” that leads academics, both inside and outside the university, to conclude that they should discourage their own children from following the path they themselves once pursued with such great enthusiasm.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not talking about people losing interest in their initial passions or finding they’re better suited for other fields as they get older. Instead, the point of my thought experiment is whether I, as a young person, would still opt for a humanities degree under today’s conditions. When I compare these conditions to when I was a student in the 1990s, the hiatus is impossible to miss: The politically imposed Europe-wide streamlining of degree programs into fully modularized bachelor’s and master’s programs, known as the Bologna Reform, had not yet taken place. It was a period marked by great scholarly autonomy. I recall advanced philosophy seminars where, week in and week out, we scrutinized the fairly obscure ‘minor Kantians’ and later produced a term paper that could easily qualify as a master’s thesis by today’s standards.

Even back then, however, it wasn’t exactly smart to assume that a life mostly marked by frugality and even precariousness would somehow end with a tenured, full professorship in a city where you actually wanted to live. And the few who (like me) managed to do so mostly found themselves in institutions that had little to do with their fond memories of student life, feeling more like underfunded, over-administered factories for grant acquisition and degree production.

In short, anyone opting for a degree in the humanities these days, especially with academic aspirations in mind, appears to be walking onto a sinking ship with their eyes wide open. On the other hand, not a day goes by without tech and business circles emphasizing that in the AI era, nothing is as important as that very last-mile-knowledge based on handling tacit knowledge and developing taste—‚skills‘ traditionally honed in a liberal arts education.

The humanities—capitalized or not

Throughout Smith-Ruiu’s latest essay, there is a distinction that could be rephrased as the Humanities, with a capital H, versus the humanities, with a lowercase h. What JSR intends to revitalize is Human Inquiry with a capital H—rigorous, erudite investigation of „universe-in-a-grain-of-sand topics“.1 In contrast, humanities with a lowercase h would refer to the liberal arts integrated into hybrid, ‚business-schooly‘ degree programs. Always geared toward economic „whitewashing“ or „self-indulgent me-search“, JSR finds them lacking a mode of thought that locates the liberal essence of the humanities in the awe-struck exploration of the ambiguous and the transgressive in human existence.

It may be a secondary rationalization of my intellectual biography and academic CV to argue that, while this dichotomy captures something accurate, it shouldn’t lead to playing off traditional forms of human inquiry against transdisciplinary ones. I earned my master’s in philosophy and German language and literature, and my PhD in Kulturwissenschaft, but I took extra classes in rhetoric, art history, biology, and law out of sheer curiosity. Some of my most talented fellow students pursued history or philosophy with genuine dedication while majoring in fields like economics, law, and psychology. My frustration with the hermeneutics of suspicion prompted me to turn away from the repetitive, incredibly boring ‘critique of power’ in favor of economists studying cultural phenomena or computer scientists tackling philosophical questions. All this has convinced me to believe that degree programs that integrate career-oriented disciplines with philosophy (especially the philosophy of science and ethics) and the arts are worthwhile, ideally giving each a one-third share of the curriculum. The obvious objection that this inevitably leads to superficial, half-baked knowledge—as in the examples mentioned and dismissed by JSR—only holds water if teaching were to consist of nothing more than poorly executed, ahistorical service-provider science and if those aspiring to academia could no longer fully commit to humanities research, spending years in the archives to produce detailed monographs on highly specific topics.

Call me naive, but beyond a certain diagnostic power, there’s no reason to maintain this binary. Just as ‘pure’ versions of the humanities can indirectly provide ‘utility’—whether in the form of being able to handle the unknown, in the form of character building, or even just as a credential for entry into any kind of career—conversely, a sense of intellectual friction can be injected into transdisciplinary programs by cultivating the challenge of engaging with sources that do not confirm one’s own views and engaging in fearless debate.

What I’m getting at—and here I am aligning myself with JSR again—is that the question of whether I would choose to study the humanities again under today’s circumstances needs to be put another way: Where do the qualities of what once made a humanities education so precious thrive in today’s world? Is this kind of experience still achievable at universities today? If it is, at which institutions, in which departments, with which faculty members? If not, where and how does it happen instead? Any path—sometimes in niches within traditional institutions, sometimes even within ‚business-schooly‘ programs—is valid, provided it doesn’t compromise the essence of humanities research.

What do the humanities cultivate? And where?

When I ask myself what the real value of my studies was and what I’m still drawing from today, it is this: a conversational setting that enabled reflective, revision-ready, and fearless thinking, alongside an exploration of the world through reading, writing, and open-minded observation. By engaging with texts that exceed one’s grasp, talking with those who were already more advanced or a bit smarter than oneself, and through the transformative effect of aesthetic experiences. The university, with its seminars and libraries, created the opening, but it was eventually a circle of friends that defined the experience, as we talked through the night about books and lectures, movies, plays, and exhibitions.

To finally answer the original question: if I were to find such a place again today, I wouldn’t hesitate to take the risk of pursuing a degree in the humanities. If it were more of a transdisciplinary program that offered those kinds of opportunities, I’d prefer it.

And what about the post-university, para-academic communities that are technically viable today on a global scale and for which JSR advocates? To me, they represent a great learning opportunity for individuals whose life situations keep them out of the ivory tower. Moreover, I view them as a supportive community for those struggling with the diminishing freedoms within established institutions.

At the end of the day, what someone studies—if anything—is secondary to the daily decision of what one chooses to cultivate. „The humanities,“ JSR writes, „are democratic precisely because they do not come down to us through blood-ties, but must be cultivated anew over the course of an individual life.“ He’s right.

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

AI is a great opportunity to more precisely define what makes humans unique, in other words, to reflect on „the element of distance between what metrics give you and what you need to make a decision,“ as Hollis Robbins phrased it in her essay on „the last mile.“ So, instead of yet another lexicon of AI lingo, here’s a small glossary of terms that attempt to capture human singularity.

• mētis

  Many concepts and intellectual frameworks in today’s AI debate can be traced back to the history of ideas. These include judgment (Kant), the rule-following paradox (Wittgenstein), and the concept of mētis – a knowledge that enables humans to navigate the intricacies of specific situations and adapt to ever-changing circumstances, resisting standardization and therefore digitalization.

• Tacit knowledge

  The notion of tacit knowledge, put forward by the philosopher of science Michael Polanyi, points in a similar direction. Polanyi famously claimed, “that we can know more than we can tell,“ for instance, when an apprentice learns practical, implicit, even inarticulable knowledge by observing the master. Chris Walker concludes: „If we take Polanyi seriously, and I think we should, then we can make a precise claim about AI’s limits: if we cannot write down everything we know, then AI cannot learn everything we know.“

• Process knowledge

  Similarly, Dan Wang makes the case for experience and expertise that algorithms can’t capture, „all the things that come with learning-by-doing“ and calls it process knowledge: „Process knowledge is the kind of knowledge that’s hard to write down as an instruction. You can give someone a well-equipped kitchen and an extraordinarily detailed recipe, but unless he already has some cooking experience, we shouldn’t expect him to prepare a great dish.“

• Local knowledge/context

  In his latest article, Chris Walker revitalized Hayek’s classic argument against central planning, which claims that crucial knowledge is local and embedded in people’s practices. Walker argues that even if AI will someday be capable of digitizing contextual knowledge, „investing in codification quality upfront, maintaining it as domains evolve, and curating the right codified knowledge for each task“ will require „context engineering,“ which he defines as „experienced judgment about what matters, applied to an environment where AI does the processing.“ The whole piece is eye-opening: „The AI did the processing. The context engineering is what made the processing valuable.“

• Taste

  Another concept from the history of ideas gaining new prominence in the context of AI is „taste.“ E.g., last week Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark told Ezra Klein that „the thing that is increasingly limited, or the thing that’s going to be the slowest part is having good taste and intuitions about what to do next. Developing and maintaining that taste is going to be the hard thing. Because as you’ve said, taste comes from experience, it comes from reading the primary source material, doing some of this work yourself.“ To dig deeper, here’s a collection of classic quotes on the topic, and here’s a practical guide featuring literature as an example.

Noteworthy

“I wonder how many of the people making predictions about the future of truck drivers have ever ridden with one to see what they do? (...) These people have local knowledge that is not easily transferable. They know the quirks of the routes, they have relationships with customers, they learn how best to navigate through certain areas, they understand how to optimize by splitting loads or arranging for return loads at their destination, etc. They also learn which customers pay promptly, which ones provide their loads in a way that’s easy to get on the truck, which ones generally have their paperwork in order, etc. Loading docks are not all equal. Some are very ad-hoc and require serious judgement to be able to manoever large trucks around them. Never underestimate the importance of local knowledge.“

—Dan Hanson

A mystery link leading into the unknown

Fuel To...

• …Fire

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.

It is always illuminating when experts from different fields or professions share their perspectives on the humanities, such as natural scientists exploring aesthetics or economists analyzing culture. Maybe there’s something to be learned there?

Lately, a peculiar gap has opened: many talented minds are steering clear of the humanities, believing that fields like computer science offer greater intellectual stimulation, influence, and professional growth. On the other hand, especially in the context of AI, humanities-based skills are gaining significant traction and praise across the business, tech, and security worlds. For example, Jeff Bussgang, a venture capitalist and Harvard Business School professor, recently noted:

„(...) being good at discernment and taste and judgment, I think, is going to be really important. And for young people, how to develop that? I think it’s a moment where it’s like the Revenge of the Liberal Arts, meaning, like, go read Shakespeare and go read Homer and see the best movies in the world and, you know, watch the best TV shows and be strong at interpersonal skills and leadership skills and communication skills and really understand human motivation and understand what excellence looks like, and understand taste and study design and study art, because the technical skills are all going to just be there at our fingertips (...)“

What should we make of this? Are the traditional humanities more appealing than they realize? Or does the STEM environment offer a better climate for open minds than humanities departments constrained by orthodoxies and an unspoken pressure to ideological conformity? Is Big Tech absorbing the last bits of critical thought? Or should the humanities embrace this new interest coming from unexpected places?

Silicon Valley and the humanities

As far as I can tell, three distinct approaches are emerging in how the humanities engage with the cultural side of Silicon Valley:

• Intellectual histories of the Bay Area, such as those proposed by Fred Turner, Adrian Daub, or Moira Weigel

• Critiques of the so-called Silicon Valley canon and its one-sided focus on social engineering

• Ethical critique of surveillance and security technologies

All three perspectives are insightful and important. They share the premise that the humanities can offer a ‘contextual’ or ‘critical’ lens on the intellectual framework of the tech industry. But they also share a remarkable bias—namely, the assumption that the humanities have something to say about and to the tech world, without having anything to learn from it in return. There is a quick tendency toward condescension. For instance, Jürgen Kaube characterizes Peter Thiel’s comments on René Girard as “embellishments,” “private quirks,“ and “lingering memories of his own youth on campus and a teacher who impressed him.” That might as well be the case.1 But has anyone ever actually bothered to sift through the Silicon Valley canon—which is indeed unbalanced and oddly heterogeneous—to find legitimate starting points for a critique of intellectual life?

Palantir and the study of philosophy

Palantir Technologies, the data integration software firm specializing in defense and security applications, was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, who remains the company’s CEO. Although their political views differ, Karp’s biography, much like Thiel’s, reveals a surprising interest in philosophy. He holds a doctorate in social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt, where, for a time, his thesis adviser was Jürgen Habermas. In Klaus Stern’s 2024 documentary Watching You, Karp is seen at psychoanalyst Margarete Mitscherlich’s 80th birthday party; his advisor confirms that he also attended Habermas’s birthday celebration. A photo taken years later shows him surrounded by Palantir employees in front of a portrait of Michel Foucault, the French thinker who characterized the panopticon as a model of disciplinary power.

So, does Karp deserve to be taken seriously as a philosopher who applied his theories to the real world? I suggest a reverse approach: instead of following the CEO’s explicit statements, look at his company’s day-to-day practices. Palantir’s appeal to top talent and the company’s success aren’t so much rooted in its founders’ deep thinking, but rather in specific practices, as reports from former employees show. It is the way Palantir handles ’unknown knowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns‘ that makes it a compelling case for the humanities.

Forward-deployed engineers

In general terms, both the sciences and computer-based data analysis are about sorting and synthesizing vast amounts of information that would otherwise be impossible to navigate. Palantir apparently succeeds better than its competitors at processing datasets that are „often formatted differently from the others and siloed in separate databases.” But how do they do it?

The company is considered mysterious and notoriously secretive. Recently, however, several insightful accounts from former employees have emerged. For this post, I’m skipping the company’s own blog as well as CTO Shyam Sankar’s and Global Head of Commercial Ted Mabrey’s Substack to focus instead on firsthand reports from Palantir alumni.2 Can these practical accounts serve as a resource to help the humanities better define their specific appeal, potential, and relevance in the digital age?

The most comprehensive and thoughtful report I could find was written by Nabeel S. Qureshi, who worked at Palantir from 2015 to 2023.3 Also worth reading is a recent post by Chris Walker, who was with Palantir from 2010 to 2016, as well as pieces by Adam Judelson and Barry McCardel, both Palantir alums.

Qureshi mentions three points that may offer insights for the humanities:

1. During the interviews, it’s made clear that beyond technical expertise and soft skills, a certain kind of philosophical broad-mindedness is expected: “one of my interviews we just spent an hour talking about Wittgenstein.“

2. The approach only works with highly motivated individuals eager to have an impact. Consequently, the workplace culture rewards feedback: “criticism was highly tolerated and welcomed.“

3. While wide-ranging curiosity and openness toward criticism are—or at least should be—taken for granted in the humanities, the third point involves something less common: tackling specific problems on the ground rather than just applying pre-packaged frameworks and toolkits.

Interestingly, the third point reflects exactly what Henry Farrell, in a nuanced critique, finds lacking in the Silicon Valley canon:

“The engineer’s focus on simplifying and solving problems can be of great value, so long as it is leavened by a deep appreciation of the richness and complexity of the systems that it looks to transform.“

To go beyond simply acting as a product provider or consultant and instead develop on-site solutions that feed back into product development, so-called forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) are sent to customers.4 Chris Walker explains:

“Forward deployment means leaving your office and embedding in the customer’s environment (...) Code is a key output, but it’s downstream of something that doesn’t exist in any database: an understanding of how work actually gets done.“

This approach, he says, allows software engineers to understand the “real map of influence and trust”:

“You observe the workarounds, the informal protocols, the tribal knowledge passed between colleagues. None of this is written down. Very little of it can be written down. Tyler Cowen likes to say ‘context is that which is scarce.‘ Forward-deployed engineers are hunters of scarce context.“

Nabeel S. Qureshi agrees with this assessment:

“the key idea is that you gain intricate knowledge of business processes in difficult industries (manufacturing, healthcare, intel, aerospace, etc.) and then use that knowledge to design software that actually solves the problem.“

Forward-deployed engineering means communicating within specific contexts, listening, translating languages (e.g., from CS to exec-speak), engaging stakeholders, recognizing trade-offs, navigating ambiguities, and immersing oneself in the messiness of day-to-day reality. It’s a genuinely praxeological method, as Adam Judelson points out:

“The golden nugget in this philosophy is that you don’t worry about how to ask users the right questions or obsess over ‚interviewing‘ them. Instead, you are literally there, in the shit with them, getting involved in what is happening.“

Even more pointed:

“You have to be the user to unlock this concept. I don’t mean that spiritually as in ‘think like the user‘; I mean literally do their same job with your product as an extended member of their team and see what you learn.“

Writers like Hollis Robbins and Jasmin Sun have begun advocating for a similar conception of the humanities in the age of AI. The latter writes:

“The job of the researcher, then, is to live in the world—to uncover the subtexts of small things (...) I want to do work grounded in place and culture, to put human faces on abstract secular trends. Translate between disciplines, fill trust gaps. Let the Hill staffers bring their memos and the economists their charts. Writers serve the public as historians of vibe: they tell us what it feels like to be here, now.“

To be sure, merely adopting the (temporarily) popular label FDE isn’t enough, as several critical voices have noted. FDE is a very radical concept. Barry McCardel points out that this approach to building and delivering software „needed more than technical skill – forward-deployed folks also needed creativity, judgement, and customer-facing charisma.“ He underlines:

“The core of ‘Forward Deployed‘ culture is a radical deference to teams in the field. They are empowered to do whatever they need to solve a problem, even if it bears only a thin – even begrudging – relationship to the base platform. This isn’t limited to just configuring or customizing; it’s inventing entirely new products and technologies, if that’s what it takes to win.“

And:

“But to reap the benefits of Forward Deployed Engineering, you have to not only accept the chaos, but embrace it. You have to look at overlapping efforts, and failed projects (and burnt-out husks of FDEs) with gratitude for the lessons learned. This is the core of the ‘forward deployed‘ model, and unless you’re willing to commit, you’re not really doing it.“

McCardel hits the mark by characterizing FDE as “R&D,“ as “primarily an opportunity to build and learn, rather than harvest short-term cash.“ This requires a “mindset that you don’t actually know the thing to build, and you’re going to discover it bottoms-up with users.“ James Pratama makes a similar argument, describing FDE as a first-principles-approach where the goal isn’t “product-market fit,” but rather “outcome-market fit.”

For the humanities, if they’re looking for a true understanding of the world and real change rather than just cheap virtue signaling, an ‘FDE-mindset‘ entails moving beyond convenient, one-size-fits-all theories. To avoid being sidelined by know-it-all attitudes and gestures of condescension, they should study the success of Palantir—hated as it may be. While the pace will certainly be slower than in tech deployment, what the humanities may learn is to get out there, ground their reflections, and subject themselves to the demanding intricacies of life.

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

If there is any consensus in the debates surrounding AI, it is the indispensability of the human element. For this assumption to be more than just a romantic way of reassuring ourselves, we need to clarify exactly what it means. This week’s POSTCARD brings together a collection of noteworthy contributions on the matter.

• Human touch

  Adam Ozimek makes a historical argument: people have always preferred the human touch, even when mechanical alternatives are available. Think live music, theater performances, and attentive service in a restaurant.

• Last mile

  Few authors match Hollis Robbins for her sharp and thought-provoking insights into AI and what she calls „the last mile“: local expertise and human judgment that exceeds AI capability. You can find the original „last-mile-articles“ here and here; more on the topic here (how universities approach strategic decision-making), here (learning velocity), and here (personalized education).

• Tacit knowledge

  Chris Walker worked as a „forward deployed engineer“ at Palantir from 2010 to 2016. He learned that eventually it’s not the code that makes the difference, it’s „an understanding of how work actually gets done“ – a knowledge that cannot be digitized.

• AI-native firms

  Jasmine Sun: „Increasingly, fewer jobs will look like doing tasks ourselves, and more will involve teaching AIs to do them for us. How can we transfer context to the machine? Can they adopt the values and instincts we’ve evolved over millennia to have? (...) Can you teach taste? Creativity? Learning to learn? This is the great pedagogical project of our time.“

• All our records will be lost

  M. E. Rothwell takes a long-term view: „As a civilisation we seem to think that anything ‘backed up’ digitally is safe forever. But the 1s and 0s of our online archives remain bound by the laws of the physical world, stored as they are in data farms and cloud servers. Bit-rot and data-decay will ensure that in a mere millennium from now all our records will be lost, if the hardware is not constantly maintained, new copies not continually forged. A thousand years is a long time — do we really think our descendants will seek to preserve all that we’ve produced? Energy constraints, future wars, or the simple act of forgetting will most likely render all our online activities to the abyss.“

Noteworthy

„- I will assume that anybody speaking might know something I don’t;

- All who are speaking from behind a screen are equal until proven otherwise;

- I will not suspend my own judgment just because whoever is speaking claims to have institutional authority behind them;

- I will not be impressed with what someone has said because I have heard of them before. The converse is true as well. I will endeavor to give someone I have heard of an equal hearing even if my envy and resentment may predispose me against them;

- I will endeavor within reason to give extra hearing to the powerless and voiceless.“

—Sam Kahn, outlining an ethos for the digital era

A mystery link leading into the unknown

An ode...

• ...to the places people go to.

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.

Two weeks ago, I laid out three arguments for reading the news. But newspapers, newsletters, newsfeeds – they’re a rabbit hole, aren’t they? And I’m not just talking about keeping up with the rapidly evolving political situation, but also about the abundance of insightful analyses. When the unread newsletters in my inbox recently exceeded 1,000, I realized I couldn’t keep up anymore and needed a new way to handle the influx of information. Here’s what I came up with.

1. Contexts

When newsletters primarily arrive in your inbox, new messages from other contexts (such as work emails that arrive on the weekend) grab your attention every time you open your email program to read the news. Conversely, incoming newsletters involuntarily catch your eye, even if you just intended to reply to personal emails. To avoid these built-in context switches, I recently changed a few settings. I didn’t expect these small changes to be so instantly calming.

Substack

Given that most of the newsletters I get are from Substack, I changed my delivery preference from email to app. To catch up on new newsletters, I either log in via my browser or open the app, usually once or twice a day. What can I say? The difference is huge.

Pro tips for Substack heavy users:

• Manage your content preferences in settings to control which topics you see in your feed.

• Actively manage notifications.

• Turn off autoplay.

Feedbin

For blogs, newsletters, and feeds not hosted on Substack, I use Feedbin to read them. It’s perfect for RSS, newsletters received using a custom-generated Feedbin email address, indieweb social, podcasts, and YouTube.

Smart mailboxes

For newsletters linked to a subscription and its associated email address, such as those from the New York Times, I set up my email program to redirect these messages to a smart mailbox, ensuring they are stored separately from other incoming mail.

An even better option would be to use a dedicated email address solely for news, but that would require updating every single source – a hassle I’ve avoided up to this point.

2. Timeframes

Even if you heroically resist endless scrolling and succeed in deliberately limiting the time you spend exposed to the news, there’s still a tricky question to answer: what’s the ideal time of day for reading the news?

To be honest, I don’t know

If you struggle with mornings as much as I do and have cherished that half-asleep morning news ritual since your youth, it will feel counterintuitive to ignore the headlines, avoid wasting energy and concentration in a constantly updated stream of bad events, and instead tackle the most important tasks first thing in the morning, as many well-meaning folks advise.

I’m afraid the never-ending cycle of digital news compromises Hegel’s idea of reading the morning paper as „a kind of realistic morning blessing.“ But how can one keep this effect when switching to another time? To be frank, so far I haven’t figured out a better hour that actually works.

Briefings

A workaround could be to get up to speed with a briefing and save the analyses for the evening. I recommend Kagi News, an app that „reads thousands of community curated RSS feeds from publications across different viewpoints and perspectives“ and then leverages AI „to distill this massive information into one comprehensive daily briefing, while clearly citing sources.“ There is only one update per day, and it takes less than five minutes to read.

If you prefer a summary by a single human being, a major newspaper’s briefing, like The Morning from the New York Times, can help keep morning news consumption at a healthy level. If you’re interested in newsletters curated by writers who read tons of material and recommend the best to their readers, this overview will help you get started.

3. What to read

It’s all in the mix.

Facts and filters

As I laid out in my first argument two weeks ago, an underrated way to read the news is to focus on fact-driven materials such as source documents, speeches, and in-depth investigative journalism.

To reduce filter bubbles, those without an e-paper subscription may try to avoid personalized home screens and clear their browser cache before visiting a newspaper’s website.

Viewpoint diversity

Because newspapers choose and interpret news differently, it’s smart to read two papers with contrasting political stances side by side. Alternatively, you could simply pick up a different paper every day.

As comforting and reassuring as it is to have one’s worldview, prejudices, and blind spots confirmed, it can actually be quite liberating to burst one’s information bubble.

Legacy and new

Legacy media and the new creator’s economy are not mutually exclusive. Both have strengths and weaknesses. „A newspaper,“ as Becca Rothfeld recently pointed out, „is—or ought to be—the opposite of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism in an era of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing.“ However, it’s best to mix original reporting, fact-checked and edited articles from traditional outlets with independent voices from gatekeeper-free platforms.

Print and screen

It’s not just romantic reasons that make reading a printed newspaper worthwhile from time to time, maybe on the weekend. The printed form inherently entails a certain slowing down, which isn’t just beneficial for your news intake. Plus, Sunday papers and magazines offer a broader perspective on daily events, using long-form articles to better contextualize current affairs.

Good and bad

To counterbalance the impression that the world is getting worse and worse and will soon come to an end, it’s imperative to acknowledge inspiring and optimistic news. It’s also wise to step back from the current moment and take note of long-term trends usually obscured by news hooks such as „the vast improvements in human living standards across long stretches of time.“

Global and local

Finally, if you read the news because you care about change, consider going local. That’s where you have the most agency and a strong chance to really make an impact in real life.

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

It was only a matter of time: this issue is all about politics.

• Lingua secundi mandati

  The weave and TYFYATTM.

• What do we mean when we say “racist”?

  Sherman J. Clark rejects a single definition: „The goal is to develop the practical wisdom to navigate its multiple meanings and purposes: to know when precision serves and when it stifles, to recognize which definition is operative and why it matters, to discern what the speaker is trying to accomplish.“

• Are we all racist?

  Paul Bloom offers a pleasantly nuanced perspective.

• On being a publicly engaged intellectual...

  … and a mensch.

• “The quantity is naturally indefinite“

  A prominent patient was medically prescribed alcohol during Prohibition. No surprise that a champagne was named after him.

Noteworthy

„Passion that is not disciplined by goals is self-indulgence. The core of real political passion is obsession with outcomes: what must change, how power actually moves, what tradeoffs are unavoidable, and which tactics advance the cause rather than merely advertise our virtue. (...) To insist otherwise is to treat politics as therapy and the oppressed as props in your emotional drama. (...) Anything less, anything that prioritizes our rage over results, is an abdication of everything we claim to stand for.“

—Freddie deBoer

A mystery link leading into the unknown

Let’s get real...

• ...about free speech!

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.

Nothing seems more imperative and self-evident these days than reading the news. And yet there is no shortage of well-meaning advice to avoid the news, go offline, read books, and concentrate more on what’s within one’s own control. It might seem that such advice would take care of itself, given that its very proponents write for newspapers themselves and rose to prominence there. However, it’s a fair question: why pay attention to news that, so say the least, doesn’t serve your well-being?

Let me be clear: My question isn’t why there should be a free press. That a fourth estate is needed to speak truth to power requires as little explanation these days as it did during the three days of the Condor. Given that original reporting, correspondents, and fact-checking are costly, it appears incumbent upon a concerned citizen to subscribe to quality newspapers. Furthermore, because independent newsletter writers highlight angles that legacy media neglects for whatever reasons, it’s prudent to support them financially. Remember: the truth is paywalled, but the lies are free.

Supporting quality journalism, however, doesn’t inherently require you to read it. Not everything that is fit to print may be worth my time. So, why read the news? I can think of three reasons.

1. Raw material

In a world of fake news and slop, trustworthy facts are more important than ever. However, even the most reputable news coverage we consume filters, contextualizes, and comments. What to do to be an informed citizen rather than just someone with an opinion? Focus on unprocessed facts such as original sources and in-depth investigative journalism. I remember that the newspapers I read in my school days contained considerably more source material than they do now: legislative texts, political speeches, all sorts of documents. Raw information like this makes a strong case for reading the news, because it serves as a grounding force in a world saturated with interpretation. It provides gravity to judgments.

2. Educational impulses

I confess I’ve always learned a lot from newspapers, magazines, and blogs, and continue to do so. It started with young me looking up foreign words while reading. Subsequently, newspapers became my source for books, exhibitions, travel destinations, design objects, and even evidence-based self-help. Currently, I’m finding inspiration in Substacks, whether it’s economists delving into culture, the digital literary sphere, or individual writers whose voices I no longer want to miss.

As long as references to ideas and aesthetic experiences are not confused with cultivation itself, as long as they don’t remain hearsay or half-education, and as long as stimulation doesn’t prevent thorough understanding, there’s nothing wrong with turning to press publications. Quite the opposite: even today, and particularly in an era where legacy and independent media coexist, journalistic texts can contribute to widespread education.

3. A place in the world

Among the posthumously published aphorisms in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s “Wastebook” (1803-1806) is an entry1 on reading newspapers:

“Das Zeitungslesen des Morgens früh ist eine Art von realistischem Morgensegen. Man orientiert seine Haltung gegen die Welt an Gott oder an dem, was die die Welt ist. Jenes gibt dieselbe Sicherheit wie hier, daß man wisse, wie man daran sei.“

“Reading the newspaper first thing in the morning is a kind of realistic morning blessing. One aligns one’s attitude towards the world either with God or with what the world is. The former offers the same assurance as the latter, that one understands one’s position.”

It appears that Hegel saw the newspaper’s comprehensive connection to current affairs as a means of grounding oneself in reality, of anchoring oneself in the world. Alexander Kluge has delved deeper2 into Hegel’s morning readings:

“Der Philosoph las außer den Berliner Blättern täglich die Edinburgh Review. Er war auf das Detail kapriziert. Das findet sich im Rohmaterial der Nachricht, nicht in der Meinung. Hegel brauchte mehrere Zeitungen, um unter der Tünche der Meinung die Einzelheiten wiederzuerkennen: Er las nicht, er produzierte. Stets neugierig auf die Wirklichkeit“

“In addition to the Berlin papers, the philosopher read the Edinburgh Review daily. He was fixated on the details. These reside in the raw material of the news, not in the commentary. Hegel needed several newspapers to identify the specifics beneath the gloss of opinion.“

In a world of disturbing news, disinformation, and disruption, it’s easy to see a grounding, but hard to see a blessing (albeit secular) in reading the news. Sure, being aware of events that might affect one’s life can instill a sense of control that can be interpreted as a blessing. But Hegel’s remark carries a deeper layer of meaning. What I mean is a sense of not being adrift, but rather, despite the profound concerns reading the news stirs up, feeling like a part of the world, with all the demands, duties, and delights that entails.

Why read the news? To hear the voice of the news anchor, saying:

“Good Night, and good luck.”

or

“Questo è Morning, cominciamo.“

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

This week’s POSTCARD is about thinking and writing under changing circumstances.

• Text is king

  Surprise, text is still king! Adam Mastroianni has more than romantic reasons for it.

• On not giving up

  A moving piece by the 74-year-old writer Gary Arms.

• The best philosophy lectures on YouTube

  Free, yet excellent educational content compiled by Jared Henderson.

• Substack and legacy media

  Cal Newport offered a nuanced perspective on Substack. I had a more specific question, and he replied [1:12:00]. Nevertheless, I still think that Newport, like so many IndieWeb advocates, underestimates the difficulty of building an audience.

• A tool to turn a YouTube link into a transcript

  Jasmine Sun Claude coded a tool that converts YouTube URLs into transcripts. She even added a font selector with options for Arial, Comic Sans, and Wingdings. 🙈

Noteworthy

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.“

—Edward O. Wilson, 2009

A mystery link leading into the unknown

„What if...

• ...they observe us the same way we observe them?“

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.

The entrepreneur Patrick Collison and the economist Tyler Cowen „are seeking to fund artists, architects, and designers who are consciously working to define New Aesthetics.“ Their call combines a descriptive formulation with a normative one: „what is the aesthetic of the twenty-first century?“ and „what should the future actually look like?“1 While the call may be read as an inventory, aesthetics that are already ubiquitous will not be funded. Instead, the initiators want to be surprised and inspired.

Barely two weeks after its publication and without any fellows yet appointed, the call has already made an impact: it sparked a discussion about the prerequisites for new aesthetics in the 21st century, to which, among others, Stephanie Wakefield and Paul Jun have contributed with engaging articles. What makes Wakefield’s and Jun’s contributions so interesting is that they avoid focusing on specific features of a contemporary aesthetic, but instead inquire into the very preconditions that make such an aesthetic possible in the first place. I’ll pick those threads up in a minute.

Presuppositions of the call for New Aesthetics

But first, let’s take a step back and reflect on the call’s underlying assumptions:

• The authors are impressed by the Bauhaus’s success as an era-defining aesthetic in the 20th century. However, they do not conceal its widespread unpopularity, and Tyler Cowen adds, „that beauty can be found in strange and unusual places.“ Doesn’t this not only suggest that aesthetics is not confined to beauty, but also that beauty is less likely to be produced by manifestos and planning than to emerge indirectly when circumstances are favorable?

• Can the idea of an aesthetic time signature remain plausible when the world is both deeply diverse and many countries no longer regard a Western-inspired ‘international style’ as an attractive goal?

• Can the aesthetics of an era be recognized within that very era, or only in retrospect, when the owl of Minerva begins its flight in the darkness?

• Conversely, the call’s initiators don’t want to be bored with already widespread aesthetics. But what if these very artefacts (like intentionally hidden, nondescript server farms or crappy interfaces of computerized homes) represent the defining aesthetics of our time?

• Finally, assume the pro-novelty streak implicit in the invitation is failing to recognize that the newness has become an obsolete criterion, and that—after exhausting every possibility—the genuinely new emerges from reworking what already exists? Would it then still make sense to search for new aesthetics?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m bringing up these questions not out of skepticism about the call, but to prepare a reframing of its original question.

Beyond styles

By making clear that a new aesthetic does not arise by creating a specific style, Stephanie Wakefield and Paul Jun have addressed a key issue. Styles are subjective. Styles become dated, styles turn formulaic. Styles are challenged by new circumstances, for example, when the poor energy performance of Classical Modernism becomes apparent or when the charm of the Meisterhäuser can no longer be felt amid the harshness of low-quality mass housing.

New aesthetics must be more than style — “neither message nor sign,” as Peter Zumthor puts it.2 What is mere assertion, what is mere expression, what is mere signaling, can be sorted out: “retrofuturistic aesthetics” (which Collison and Cowen themselves exclude), historicizing facades, deceitful decor, an artist’s vain particular obsessions, dreary corporate buildings, showy gestures, greenwashing, and so forth.

If style is no longer interesting, then what? Jun and Wakefield present two differing proposals: „story“ and „conditions“.

Story and form

Jun’s claim:

„The future does not arrive as an aesthetic. It arrives as a story strong enough that people start rebuilding their lives to match it.“

In his view, a new aesthetic derives from a “shared story” that envisions a positive future life:

„Maximum support for children, parents, education, and clean water. Objects that don’t just perform, but belong. Buildings that don’t just impress, but hold us. Interfaces that don’t just convert, but teach people to see again. A future that doesn’t look like a spaceship, but feels like a place worth embodying.“

By moving the emphasis from purely aesthetic concerns to clarity in diagnosing the present and to ethical guidance, Jun rightly avoids aestheticist shortcuts. The price for this, however, is that the form side remains largely untreated. What would, e.g., an ecological aesthetic look like? Apart from clarity about the right direction, what is necessary to design it?

Conducive circumstances

This is where Wakefield kicks in. She is less interested in the ‚what,‘ but rather the ‚how.‘ This ‘how,’ she argues, stems from a twofold movement: a distancing from the obsolete (she cites Italian Futurism) and the development of the new (illustrated by the early Bauhaus). According to Wakefield, the early Bauhaus „rebuilt the perceptual and conceptual conditions under which new forms could become thinkable again.“ These conditions included „pedagogy, shared conversations, parties, and overall experimentation.“ Exercises and „structured investigations“ such as „the Vorkurs, workshops, and performance“ served to explore and experiment. They „functioned as a laboratory organized around shared inquiry rather than stylistic or ideological coherence.“ In this spirit, she recommends real-world experimental zones that provide space and time for the emergence of a new aesthetics.

I agree, but I think she hasn’t taken her perspective far enough. Interestingly, Wakefield chooses two European examples rather than the Black Mountain College, where Bauhaus emigrants brought the early Bauhaus ethos to America. Jun also doesn’t mention the BMC, but merely refers to Walter Gropius’s influence on Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. This is unfortunate, as that particular school, which operated in North Carolina from 1933 to 1957, can teach us something when searching for a new aesthetic.

When art crosses over into life

At the BMC, Bauhaus masters such as Anni and Josef Albers, Lyonel Feininger, and Walter Gropius taught, alongside American avant-gardists like John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller. Notable students included Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. When I recently taught a seminar on the BMC at the Berlin University of the Arts together with a colleague from painting and students from fine arts, design, architecture, and communication, we were guided by the question of how this school might inspire our work. We took a deep dive into historical curricula, firsthand testimonies, and other primary sources. Our working hypothesis was that the BMC functioned as a self-correction of (parts of) the Bauhaus, which, as it grew more successful, increasingly abandoned the open-minded spirit Wakefield rightly points to as characteristic of its early years.

The Black Mountain College was the kind of place Wakefield pictures, though with a distinctive twist:

“The idea was not to produce artists per se (...) but thinking citizens who, honed by the discipline inherent to the arts, were capable of making complex choices — about their own work and, ultimately, in the larger world.“

Experimental practices, transdisciplinary research, and above all, communal living did not serve to develop a particular aesthetic, but rather to cultivate a specific way of life through the aesthetic:

“Black Mountain College was less an institution than a situation.“

This ‚situationality’ that Helen Moleswort3 highlights, included, among other things, Josef Albers’ perception exercises, a generous approach to time, and a certain purposelessness.

What does this mean for the re-framing of the search for a new aesthetic? It means the question should no longer be where the avant-garde is, but when4 What matters about an avant-garde is neither its rejection of tradition nor its will to form, but art crossing over into life.

Freespace

New aesthetics shouldn’t be concerned with mirroring the spirit of the times or creating a new stylistic community; instead, it should seek to contribute to lived experience in a particular way. In contrast to Jun, I believe this doesn’t require agreement on a grand narrative. In contrast to Wakefield, I take the experimental turn to be not only a method for producing outcomes but the outcome itself: an aesthetics of opening up.

Take architecture and design, for example. In his 1965 critique of functionalism, Theodor W. Adorno insisted that architecture „should produce something that comes out of the space, rather than place something arbitrary within it.“5 As early as his 1951 Minima Moralia, he had pointed out that things designed merely for function tend to take on a shape that „restricts interaction with them to mere handling, tolerating no excess, whether in freedom of behavior or in the independence of the thing.”6 It is remarkable that Adorno highlighted both the ‘ecological’ intrinsic worth of the material and the ‘liberal’ surplus of freedom attached to usage. What matters is how material is treated and which aspects of being human an artifact stimulates.

In 2017, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, founders of the Dublin firm Grafton Architects, published their Freespace Manifesto. It reads like an attempt to make Adorno’s thinking more concrete. It celebrates an architecture of generosity, in the very sense that Alexandre Lefebvre pointed out that the word liberal has a dual meaning: „to be free and to be generous.“

“FREESPACE describes a generosity of spirit and a sense of humanity at the core of architecture’s agenda, focusing on the quality of space itself.

(...)

FREESPACE celebrates architecture’s capacity to find additional and unexpected generosity in each project - even within the most private, defensive, exclusive or commercially restricted conditions.

(...)

FREESPACE provides the opportunity to emphasise nature’s free gifts of light - sunlight and moonlight, air, gravity, materials - natural and man-made resources.“

The Town House at Kingston University London, designed by Farrell and McNamara, masterfully transforms the manifesto into a building:

Architecture like this doesn’t reserve the free space, pioneered by the early Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, for the development of prototypes. It infuses everyday life with aesthetic sensibility. Instead of waiting for the next big thing, it gets straight to work and makes the transformative energies of aesthetic practices available right here and right now. The New Aesthetic should be an aesthetic that weaves focused perception, sensory contact, and shifts in perspective into life. It brings the liberating power of the arts into the everyday.

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

This week’s POSTCARD is about sensual perception, beauty, and all things aesthetics.

• The artist is always on call

  Showering, folding laundry, running errands, waiting, falling asleep: „Every moment carries the potential for insight, connection, or discovery, even the most seemingly ordinary ones,“ Rick Rubin argues in one of his weekly meditations on creative practice.

• A call for new aesthetics

  What is the aesthetic of the twenty-first century? Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen are seeking to fund artists, architects, and designers who are consciously working to define New Aesthetics. Grant size: $5k – $250k. Deadline: Applications are open until March 31, 2026.

• Ten reasons to read great literature

  A reading manifesto by Henry Oliver. His preferred reasons are 3 and 4, whereas I’d vote for 2 and 6. How about you?

• Serializing novels online

  lettrss.com is a website that syndicates public-domain books via RSS; in other words, it serializes novels by publishing them in an RSS feed on a schedule. Find some historical background and contemporary ideas on the serialisation of literature in this post by Leon Paternoster.

• A notebook unlike any other

  I was given an unusually beautiful present, the iA Notebook for Writers. Believe me, I own many notebooks, but none are as well-thought-out, as carefully made, or as lovely as this one.

Noteworthy

“Ultimately, the product has to deliver, and it should be enjoyable to have diverse items in the glass that provide the same delight. Then it doesn’t matter. The world of wine is so diverse that there are always a thousand options you can drink. And sure, you could be so narrow-minded that you only drink Champagne, Pinot from Burgundy, and Riesling from the Pfalz. But that would be way too boring.”

—Steffen Christmann, winemaker

A mystery link leading into the unknown

Reasons To be Cheerful...

• ...Pt. 3

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.

Dear readers,

Happy New Year to you all! I’m using the first post of 2026 to take a brief inventory — and to warmly thank you for discovering this blog/newsletter, for following it (in some cases for a long time), and for supporting it through likes, article shares, or even paid subscriptions.

In 2025, 52 articles were published: 24 LETTERS = essays, 24 POSTCARDS with annotated recommendations, and four posts called REGISTERED MAIL for paying subscribers only. Additionally, a guest post appeared in The Republic of Letters.

After I was appointed Full Professor at the Berlin University of the Arts in April and have been leading the Institute for the Theory and Practice of Communication there since October, it hasn’t been easy to maintain my usual publishing pace despite the new commitments. Regrettably, I had to neglect the conversations on the platform that take place in the comments and in Notes.

With everything hopefully settling down in the new year, I intend to take a more active part in the debates again and, at least in the medium term, experiment with more idiosyncratic formats. As a scholar prone to systematic thinking, I all too often forget what a wonderful playground the web is—a place to renew form.

Broadly speaking, I think the rise of AI chatbots substituting for search engines and the spread of slop are amplifying the longing for real human encounters and distinct individual voices. It’s exciting to not just observe from the outside but explore as a participant the emergence of a new culture economy, which is to a considerable extent playing out on Substack – and to do so in three roles at once: as an author trying to gain a foothold in the digital creator’s market, as a contributor to refreshingly open international conversations, and as a reader uncovering exiting new voices on the platform. This moment might only last a short while before the next enshittification kicks in — all the more reason to make the most of it.

I appreciate your support. Considered feedback is welcome anytime. Just hit reply or dm me in the app.

All the best for 2026!

—Dirk

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

Here are my five favorite Substack posts from 2025. You can read the 2024 edition here.

• How Art Lost Its Way by William Deresiewicz

  If you read just one article from this list, read this piece about the heyday of New York dance criticism, its magazines, and the culture of seriousness that went with it. Whoever wants to understand the fracture that runs through our time, and whoever wants to understand what engaging with art might mean, should read this text.

• How to Confront Highbrow Misinformation by Dan Williams

  Yes, prestigious knowledge-producing institutions can be wrong. No, that doesn’t mean they need to be destroyed. For a convincing take on highbrow misinformation, read this piece.

• You should quit social media for good by G. Elliott Morris

  Research-backed, nuanced, and crystal clear: the last text you’ll ever need to read on social media, and the simplest path to a deeper life.

• talk is cheap by Jasmine Sun

  Jasmine’s analysis of the post-literate society and the oral culture revival convinced me so much that I quoted from it in an article for a scholarly journal.

• Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog by Henrik Karlsson

  There’s so much advice about writing on Substack... Yet you need to know little more than these brief 15 points.

Noteworthy

„For me, politics, identity politics, was only necessary to get past it. The point of politics was to be free of politics (...). After a point of some basic equal norms, we’re done. We have some compromises to make over practical questions that come up and the world changes, but we’re done. And in fact, the goal is to have a politics that doesn’t matter that much. In other words, the goal is, for me anyway, the expansion as much as possible of the spaces in which people can be fully themselves, flourish as themselves, which is not a political. Politics distorts everyone (...) You have to have it, but you have to keep it in its place. That’s, I guess, my liberal position (...) and it may not be the most inspiring common cause, because it isn’t. Liberalism is not as exciting as making a whole new world. It’s not as exciting as making everyone moral. It’s not as exciting as making everyone noble.“

—Andrew Sullivan in conversation with Johann Hari

A mystery link leading into the unknown

„Lets make...“

• “…movie history!”

As always – and here’s to a wonderful new year,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.

Basel

September It may be that nowhere else in the world does luxury come across as effortless and well‑put‑together as at Hotel Les Trois Rois in Basel and its three‑star restaurant, Cheval Blanc. Pretentious as it may sound, even chandeliers and culinary finesse here seem so subtle and unobtrusive that one almost loses sight of them, retaining only an impression of restful sleep and agreeable food. That this celebration of consistency is by no means guaranteed, but rather the result of well-considered and long-ingrained architecture as well as daily practiced, meticulous professionalism, hardly needs to be emphasized.

Berlin

June/October Am I still familiar with the city I live in? Walking around Berlin with guests from the UK and the US, I noticed how long it had been since I’d last strolled aimlessly through the streets, discovering new neighborhoods and bringing my knowledge up to date. Daily life and work have turned me from a flâneur into a creature of routine who could use a break in his own city. What if I booked a room and spent my next vacation in Berlin, as if I didn’t already live here anyway?

Bonn

August The former federal capital has the air of a sleepy small town stuck in the 1970s. The sluggish river; opening times still like in old West Germany; a railway crossing with barriers among low-rise residential houses where civil servants water their front gardens. Between them: the UN campus and outposts of political institutions. It wouldn’t take much to turn this place into the setting for a Cold War spy thriller.

Read more

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

This week’s POSTCARD is about, well, life.

• What if

  Absolutely marvellous meditation on unlived lives by Lei Wang: „But because things happened the way they did, I am not on an island off the coast of Portugal, enjoying the best temperate weather in the world. I am not writing overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and considering the travails of America from the vantage of Europe. I am not married. I am here, but also if I were there, I would still always be here, wherever I am.“ Remember: „you only have FOMO because YOLO.“

• Log off

  G. Elliott Morris, who was a Senior Data Journalist for The Economist and now runs his own data-driven news website, „Strength In Numbers“, has written the last post you’ll ever need to read about what used to be called social media. Seriously.

• Watch out

  An interactive map that reveals the intricate connections between surveillance companies, their funding sources, and affiliations.

• Persuade

  We should test, Dan Williams argues in defence of rational persuasion, „what happens when the liberal establishment is required to argue under the same rules as everyone else.“

• Enjoy

  Writer Manfred Klimek arrived too late for his keynote on the transformation of the wine world and posted it online instead (in German). His message: „We need a movement. Not a trade show, not a campaign. A fresh language, a new irony, a renewed desire.“

Noteworthy

“Scientific facts are considered boring. So being confronted with boring facts apparently works excellently as a provocation! On the other hand, we’ve gotten used to art as transgression; it’s accepted as normal.“

—Artist Hito Steyerl, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, December 7, 2025, p. 37

A mystery link leading into the unknown

Dream…

• … of Life

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.