On the mythmakers, slaves and shipwrecked migrants who built the Mediterranean again, every time it ended.

Michele Fossi in conversation with Federico Campagna

There is a familiar modern reflex, when the ground begins to shake, to demand a return to truth. Back to facts. Back to the real. Back to what is verifiable, solid, non-negotiable. Federico Campagna thinks this reflex is a trap. “Dig too deep for the real,” he says, “and you fall out of the world. Like in Minecraft.” He should know. Campagna—forty-something, Sicilian by blood, Milanese by upbringing, Londoner by exile, metaphysician by trade, anarchist by confession, and almost improbably a teacher of fashion students at the Royal College of Art—has just published Otherworlds, a long, vivid walk across five thousand years of Mediterranean catastrophes. A tour, more precisely, through the rebels and mythmakers who answered each collapsing world by inventing a better one. Bronze Age poets who escaped the absurd by making up gods. Gnostic heretics who turned an evil universe into a war film. Calabrian slave-boys who rose to become Ottoman admirals. Stateless Austro-Hungarian writers who, unable to go backwards or forward in time, reshaped a vanished empire in their own memory. The end of the book arrives on an unnamed beach in southern Europe, alongside a shipwreck of migrants—the figures, Campagna argues, that historians a century from now will look back on as the true protagonists of this moment.

Michele Fossi — Let’s begin where it begins. There are three motivations behind this book, you write—what are they?

Federico Campagna — There are three motivations behind it—and they are also the ideas inside it. The first is personal. I come from a Sicilian family transplanted to Northern Italy. I spent half my life in Milan, then twenty years ago, I came to London. I’ve grown used to being constantly dislocated. I wanted, in some way, to redeem that experience—to see what might be rich, what might be positive, in dislocation. The second is philosophical. I work on metaphysics, and I make a distinction between reality and world: things as they are in themselves—what Kant called the noumenon—and things as they appear to us. To a bat, to a fungus, to you and me, they appear in four different ways. Imagination is one of the engines that can create different worlds. And creating worlds means creating fates: forms of life, social institutions, civilisations—every shape we cut out of reality drags a destiny behind it. Male and female, for example, are not things of reality; they are things of imagination—legitimate ways of cutting the world, but each with its own assigned fates. If you don’t want those fates, protesting isn’t enough. You have to go back and ask whether that’s the only way to cut reality. Queer theory has done exactly this: different fates emerge, different societies, different civilisations.

M.F. — And the third motivation is geographical—Mediterranean.

F.C. — I focus on the Mediterranean as a catastrophe zone—a place where people have been learning to die and be reborn for five thousand years. Catastrophes aren’t equally distributed: in the same situation, some gain a lot, and some lose a lot. I look at it from the perspective of those who lose a lot. 

How does one survive a catastrophe—when the world rejects you, when it’s rebuilt so you no longer fit, when you’re handed a terrible fate? You don’t always have to fight. Sometimes it’s much more useful to run. And how do you run? Physically—like the migrants, of whom there are plenty in this book; you, living in Berlin, and I, in London, are two more examples. But also at the level of imagination, migrating into a different world without necessarily physically moving in public.

M.F. — The book takes us through narratives that humanity—Mediterranean humanity especially—had to build to make sense of the real. And it shows how these narratives exhaust themselves cyclically, while someone always manages to invent something new. In this analysis, you go very far back.

F.C. — I start from the beginning of History with a capital H—roughly the fourth millennium BC. That Bronze Age passage may seem the least contemporary, but it’s the most important because it presents a paradigmatic situation. Human beings have a gigantic problem: they find themselves catapulted into a reality they know nothing about, except for one thing—they will suffer and die. The makers of mythology tried to escape this—to escape absurdity, the sense that things make no sense, that you make no sense, that nothing has value. These intuitions are correct. Nothing makes sense, and nothing has value in itself. It acquires value the moment you invent a story. Philosophy is made that way, politics is made that way—in fact, everything is. Money is a live-action roleplay that all of us play together.

M.F. — But in moments of great disorientation, isn’t it tempting to go the other way—to look for something real, something true?

F.C. — If you start digging for real things, you can dig as much as you like—you just end up in an infinite hole. You shouldn’t respond to disorientation by stiffening up, trying to make truth great again. You have to embrace, instead, the fact that it is through stories that we remake destinies.

It doesn’t matter whether they’re true or not: the quality of a story isn’t judged by its truth, it’s judged by its consequences. If you have a partner and you say they’re the most beautiful person in the world—it isn’t true, but it doesn’t matter. The fact that it’s false is entirely irrelevant, because it creates something: a fate, a possibility. Mythmakers are the most important people in this whole story. Sense is an invention.

M.F. — And who were the early mythmakers? Who do you talk about in the Bronze Age?

F.C. — I weave together two great mythological traditions—the Mesopotamian and the Egyptian. Gilgamesh and Enkidu on one side; Osiris, Isis and the rest on the other. The story moments are very similar—creation, war within the cosmos, the birth of humanity, catastrophe, attempts to escape—but the two traditions lead in completely opposite directions.

The Mesopotamians lead towards a state of absent hope: there’s an immutable destiny weighing on us, and the only thing we can do is learn to fall better. This passes to the Greeks and the Romans. The Egyptian solution is the opposite: we have God inside us; we are, fundamentally, gods. This passes onto Christianity, in which we are all saved.

I don’t take a position between the two. But together they show how it’s possible to truly change everything—and create different destinies.

M.F. — Religions of hope come with a price, though.

F.C. — Religions of hope come with a price. They help people live by offering a kind of support, but they defer everything to the hereafter, sometimes draining the energy we need to rebel against those in power. They lead to a passivity that serves no one.

Inside every system of narration there are those who take it at face value, and those who keep imagining variations.

There are those who think joy is a natural human right—given alongside intelligence and expression—and those who think it must be earned through merit.

M.F. — A few thousand years later, the systems built on those two traditions start to collapse—and your favourite moment of history arrives.

F.C. — Late Antiquity. My favourite, because it’s a moment of enormous confusion. The Western Roman Empire is falling, Christianity sweeps paganism away, many other cults emerge, Islam expands, the barbarians come. Everything is reshuffled very fast.

Some—the Hermeticists—say: yes, everything is precarious, but we are gods, we are immortal. We just have to realise what we really are. Others, like the Gnostics, respond by saying that this world is awful, and that it’s awful for a specific reason: because God is evil. The Bible is true; it’s the black book of God’s crimes—look at the Old Testament; look at how God kills Jesus in the New Testament. There’s an evil, alien God, from whom we come, trying to save us from this other evil God who has imprisoned us. It’s a life-or-death struggle between us and them.

M.F. — It’s basically The Matrix.

F.C. — Exactly The Matrix. In fact, The Matrix precisely represents the Gnostic myth—just with the machines in it.

M.F. — And then there are the last pagans.

F.C. — Romantic, marvellous figures—like the Tsarist cavalry in Mongolia in 1917. Julian the Apostate, Rutilius Namatianus, who truly try—like Hector in the Iliad—to fight the wave that is going to sweep them away. They remind me of certain figures from Japanese heroic epic: doomed to defeat, but a splendid defeat. The beauty of defeat—unredeemable. A wonderful epoch. Strikingly similar to our own.

M.F. — I’m thinking of Petronius, who accepts defeat by throwing a party—if it has to be a defeat, let it at least be cool and fun.

F.C. — Exactly—though this is another path, very Fellinian. Not the Hectorian heroism of going down with the sword, but turning the defeat into a triumph through aesthetics.

M.F. — Your book celebrates outcasts and losers as heroes of the imagination—people with an extra gear, capable of inventing a new world while the rest suffered through the collapse of the old one. A favourite?

F.C. — The Jewish writers of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire: Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig.

M.F. — You open one of the central chapters with a scene: Joseph Roth, seated in a Parisian café in the 1930s—a terminal alcoholic, still loyal to a vanished empire, while outside France slides toward fascism. Why Roth, and why that scene in particular?

F.C. — The 1930s. The Second World War is about to start, and a good part of France at that moment has strong sympathies for Nazism—it sounds as if we were talking about today. France today also has strong sympathies for far-right ideologies. Roth had escaped the disintegrated Austro-Hungarian Empire and taken refuge in Paris. He’s about forty—young biographically, but a terminal alcoholic: he’ll die soon afterwards. He’s a complex figure. He had turned self-invention into a trademark—came from a small, impoverished Jewish family in a village in the eastern reaches of the Empire, but had always tried to reinvent himself as a Catholic dandy (he never actually converted, and not for political reasons but aesthetic ones). Socialist and monarchist at once; the subject of a kingdom that no longer existed, still declaring himself a loyal citizen of that vanished empire.

In the scene I describe, he’s sitting there scribbling and drinking, when someone walks into the crowded café. Everyone turns; the waiters rush over. It turns out to be a minister—a French politician affiliated with the Nazis. Roth rises painfully to his feet, on swollen ankles, and shouts to the waiter: “Waiter, why are you going to him? He’s a bad politician—I, on the other hand, am a good writer. Come to me.” And everyone applauds. It’s Roth’s last bright moment. I wanted to place it at the opening of the chapter that runs through this period into the present. Partly because of the very strong parallels with now—the return of authoritarianism. But also because the signature of that generation is nostalgia—another very strong sentiment in our time.

M.F. — What kind of nostalgia was theirs? They weren’t trying to bring the empire back—that was impossible and they knew it. So what were they doing with that lost world?

F.C. — They had nostalgia for a lost world, but a completely different kind. They didn’t want to go back—one can’t go back. They didn’t want to seize power to make the Austrian Empire great again. They wanted to invent a better past for themselves. They had no room in the present—stateless Jewish refugees, in a very bad way. Stefan Zweig would end up killing himself; they all end badly.

In the future there was no space for them. The only time available was the past. So they reshaped the past

They made themselves believe that the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been a marvellous, beautiful moment. If you read Joseph Roth, you really want to move there—but it wasn’t really like that. The past becomes a land to explore, a refuge when the present creaks. One can take shelter even in a past that never existed. We know perfectly well, from both a philosophical and a scientific point of view, that time doesn’t exist. The distinction between past, present and future is too complicated to unpack here—but it belongs to our way of thinking, not to things in themselves. Projecting one’s desires and plans into the future is therefore equivalent to projecting them into the past. It is completely legitimate to want to build a new house there.

M.F. — So Roth built a house set in the past. The book closes, though, with a group of people who have no house at all—the migrants at Lampedusa. You frame them as the inheritors of this entire tradition.

F.C. — Until the end, every story I told was documented with footnotes and exact references. Towards the end that dissolves: I keep talking about true things, but I tell them in a more fable-like way. The book ends on a beach with a shipwreck of migrants—based on the Cutro massacre, though this doesn’t appear in the text—and the reader and the author walk together from that beach towards a temporary detention centre, feeling themselves entrusted with a mission: “to pass the torch to those people shut inside.”

M.F. — Why them?

F.C. — In the contemporary moment, they are really the ones in the existential position of all the other characters of this book. This isn’t sentimental—I’m not saying “migrants are all excellent people, saints.” It’s a technical point. Whoever continued writing this book a hundred years from now would be writing about them. They occupy that same position.

The question is: these foreigners, these people for whom there’s no place, who have to reinvent themselves a world—what is their creative imagination? The book doesn’t say, because I don’t know. A historian will be able to say a hundred years from now.

I just want to draw attention to the fact that the beating heart of an alternative Mediterranean isn’t developing in the galleries, in the museums, in the publishing houses, in the TV studios. Not even in the banks, in industry, in the parliaments. It’s developing in jails.

M.F. — Today’s foreigners ended up in jail. But the book is full of other foreigners—out of place, out of joint—who instead turned their dislocation into a kingdom. Pirates above all. You love them, it shows.

F.C. — Well, as a child I used to read Emilio Salgari—wonderful, but with one historical flaw: he placed pirates in faraway places, the Caribbean or Malaysia. True, there were pirates there, but historically the most successful pirates were in the Mediterranean. Not the little island of Tortuga with four rascals—real pirate states, huge geopolitical powers.

Mediterranean piracy is tied to another barely spoken-of epic: the epic of slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean. When people think of slavery they think of African Americans in the United States. But contemporaneously, in the Mediterranean, there was a different form: about ten million people as slaves. Livorno was the main slave-trading port in Europe.

M.F. — I was in Livorno two weeks ago—and saw the statue with the Four Moors in chains. Now I understand why it is there!

F.C. — 16th-17th centuries. The Medici gave Livorno its special status, tax breaks for slave traders. Algiers does the same; Istanbul is the third port. The Mediterranean is divided into two great blocs—the Christian one around the Papal State, the Islamic one with the Ottomans as hegemon—of more or less equivalent strength. Which means: I capture some of yours, you capture some of mine. I’m rather careful about how I treat them, because I know you’ll do the same to mine. Mediterranean slavery had its norms: it was temporary. You were captured for a period, not forever. You could ransom yourself—and often you were ransomed. More importantly: afterwards, you often stayed where you had been captured, because you had adapted, and because another opportunity opened up there.

M.F. — A character who stayed with you?

F.C. — A fantastic one. Many famous people were slaves—Miguel de Cervantes was a slave in Algiers for several years. But one truly extraordinary story: a Calabrian kid, the son of a fisherman, captured on the beach by a Turkish raid. They put him on the galleys to row. But he’s a clever guy. He makes a career: he frees himself, becomes a Muslim, then a pirate, then head of a pirate fleet. He gets noticed, becomes head of a legal fleet of the Ottoman Empire, is appointed governor of Tripoli, then of Algiers, then admiral of the entire Ottoman fleet. At the Battle of Lepanto he is the only one not defeated. At his death, in Istanbul, surrounded by unimaginable wealth, he leaves his slaves a village he’d had built in Turkey—called Nuova Calabria, New Calabria—and gives it to them, freeing them in his will. His name was Uluç Ali—Uccialì, in Italian.

M.F. — A destiny only possible if you can betray everything you know.

F.C. — There are tons of stories like this. People who reinvent a life from zero and have the insight to say: “I’ll betray my country, my religion, my family—who cares. These are fantasies. I’ll choose others. I’m loyal only to adventure—the possibility of a happy life.” Often slaves became pirates. The Barbary Coast is dotted with what Hakim Bey called the pirate utopias. Little groups of blond Dutchmen dressed in Turkish fashion, speaking the Mediterranean lingua franca—a mixture of all the dialects—smoking hashish, and raiding the coasts as far as Iceland. Astonishing lives.

M.F. — For every Uccialì, though, there are a thousand who simply went under—whose world collapsed and never reassembled. When a world really ends—an empire falling, a relationship breaking, a city waking up in another country overnight—is there a structure to it? Does it unfold in stages?

F.C. — I don’t think catastrophes follow similar courses—the Hittites’ one arrived through invasion, the ancient pagans’ through internal change. But there’s more similarity in how people experience them. One can resist taking stock of the fact that one’s world has ended, even for a good while; but then something happens—as when a painting falls from the wall and the nail snaps—and from then it’s extremely fast.

The immediate feeling is that of no longer having a world. Of having gone extinct before dying. You still exist, but you’re no longer there. It’s not that the world no longer exists: it’s you who have disappeared, because you existed as the meaning given to you by your world.

In a relationship, this is exactly how it works. What creates the trauma isn’t that the person has disappeared, but that you used to define yourself through that relationship. When you realise it’s really over—who are you? You’re nothing. That’s beautiful if you’re a mystic, but it takes enormous mental strength.

M.F. — I’m reminded of what the photographer Sven Marquardt—also known as Berghain’s legendary bouncer—told me during an interview years ago: the total identity loss East Berliners went through in the space of one night. The shock was so profound that he stopped taking pictures for years. The political system they’d grown up in was swept away; they were absorbed into West Germany. They found themselves strangers in their own country. The Berlin nightlife of those years emerged as a release valve for the mental chaos of a world that had suddenly vanished.

F.C. — Exactly. And then, from mere release, it became a parallel reality.

M.F. — Speaking of parallel realities. DUST is a fashion magazine—and you, somewhat improbably, teach metaphysics to fashion students at the Royal College of Art.

F.C. — [laughs] I call the module World Beauty. The fundamental structures of reality, from a phenomenological perspective. On one side, I teach how world-building happens within society; on the other, what happens when worlds end. The philosophical thinking behind this book—I teach it to fashion students.

M.F. — And identity is central to fashion. What do you tell your students?

F.C. — Two things. First: identities are performative and flexible, not just in the usual way we mean it, but truly—they don’t exist. There’s a chapter in my book on Pico della Mirandola, in which even God says this to Adam. Pico, in the Oration on the Dignity of Man—unsurprisingly, the book was later banned by the Catholic Church—stages a dialogue in which God says to Adam: “Look, I’ve created everything; I’ve run out of things to give. To all other living beings, I have given gifts—but to you, I haven’t finished giving. So I’ll give you just one thing: you will have no identity. You will be able to be anything you want. A plant, a devil, an angel, whatever you please. It’s up to you. This is my gift to you.” In my view, this is the origin of what Judith Butler and others would develop in the Eighties and Nineties. But it’s already there.

Second: every identity, even though all are legitimate, brings with it a destiny. Be very careful which identity you give yourself—and which you give to others, because identities interface in specific ways. National identities, for example, always carry the battlefield within their destiny. It’s part of the destiny of a national identity to end up on a battlefield, massacring others with different national identities. The identity Italian, or German, necessarily implies a border from which someone is excluded, someone incarcerated, and a battlefield on which one dies for the mother country. The identity of a citizen of the world, on the other hand, contains no battlefield inside it.

The thing to keep in mind is that identities—like all the ways we have of inhabiting the world—are tools. One must be very careful not to allow the tool to start using you as the tool. When one stays in control of these tools, one can look around and see planetary culture as a fantastic arsenal. And one can build oneself, assemblage-style, a mix of all these things.

As Italian actor Massimo Troisi used to say: “Poetry doesn’t belong to whoever makes it—it belongs to whoever needs it.” Culture is exactly the same. It doesn’t matter where you come from: if that piece serves you, take it.

Then, when the next piece is somewhere else, also take that— and build cultural identity cyborgs that let you carry out the project of your life.

M.F. — One last piece from your own arsenal, to close on. Let’s talk about your native Sicily.

F.C. — Sicily is a land—something rarely noticed—with no natives. There are no Sicilian natives as there are Native Americans. The Sicilian natives were pushed out by the Carthaginians and the Greeks around 1,000 BC. Since then, Sicily has always been colonised by someone. It’s a land of syncretism precisely because it has no blood and soil. Everyone there has always been a foreigner, a child of tragedy. That, I believe, is where the strength and beauty of Sicily lie.

M.F. — Let’s close on that Sicily—which is also where the book begins, with you as a child.

F.C. — The genesis of the book is actually the last page of the book. I come from a family of Sicilian migrants in Northern Italy, in the Eighties and Nineties. Being Sicilian in Milan back then wasn’t the easiest thing—the South-hostile Lega Nord party was rising. In Sicily—just as in Mexico—we celebrate the Day of the Dead on November 2nd with brightly coloured sugar dolls and skeletons, sometimes shaped like a knight on horseback. The shared tradition comes from Sicily’s time under the Spanish colonial empire alongside Mexico, which also gave us similar architecture and Modica chocolate, the cousin of Aztec chocolate.

The book ends with this memory: me in Milan, in the ground-floor flat we had in Chinatown. On the morning of November 2nd, I wake up—and the dead have come to bring me a gift. On the bedside table, they’ve left a sugar doll this tall, all coloured. My relatives had told me that the dead put small pieces of their soul inside the sugar doll, and that they are happy if you eat it, because you bring them back to life.

So I eat this sugar doll, carefully—it’s terribly nauseating, but I finish it anyway. And I wait for something to happen. Nothing happens.

When I go to bed the next evening, I feel like I’ve failed—that I wasn’t able to bring the dead back to the living. The book ends by saying that, many years later, by writing this book, I’ve tried to live up to the mission they had given me then.

Santiago Zabala – For me, a warning is an emergency that hasn’t yet happened. It’s what presses towards us but hasn’t fully reached us—what the French call l’avenir. The future as futur is predictable: tomorrow it rains, tomorrow we go to work. But l’avenir is what’s coming, what we don’t know yet. A warning belongs to that register. It’s not a prediction, and it’s not necessarily based on truth; it’s a call to alter the present before it hardens into disaster.

That’s also what philosophy should do. When I say ‘philosophy is a warning’, I mean that thinking should no longer serve to describe reality but to disturb it—to change it here and now. The truth is absolutely useless if it doesn’t move us. Look at climate change: all the scientific truths in the world haven’t changed a thing.

M.F. – You often say, “The greatest emergency is the absence of emergency.”

S.Z. – Exactly. We live surrounded by alarms—environmental, political, humanitarian—and yet nothing truly unsettles us. Everything becomes normalised. Emergencies are managed, not lived. We scroll through catastrophes like weather forecasts. The real crisis is this anaesthesia, this inability to act and feel.

That’s why I prefer the word warning. It’s weaker than an alarm, but more demanding. To heed a warning means to interpret, to care, and to change. Emergencies can be managed by systems; warnings require people.

M.F. – Why do you think we’ve stopped listening?

S.Z. – Because we’re terrified of what listening demands: transformation in and of the present. Listening to a warning means admitting that what we call ‘normality’ is unsustainable. During the pandemic, for example, the universal obsession was to ‘return to normality.’ That was the one thing we should not have done. It was that very normality—economic, political, technological—that created the conditions for this crisis. Instead of learning from the pandemic’s warning, we returned to the same system that produced it.

Our civilisation is addicted to prediction, not reflection. Education today teaches us to calculate, not to think. Universities produce specialists in forecasting—not interpreters. We’ve built a society of experts incapable of imagination.

M.F. – Nietzsche plays a central role in your book. Why do you see him as the philosopher of warnings par excellence?

S.Z. – Because his claim “God is dead” was never a slogan of atheism—it was a warning. Nietzsche wasn’t denying God’s existence; he was warning us about what happens when we cling too literally to our founding ideas. God, nation, race—these become idols. An example? Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian neo-Nazi and far-right terrorist convicted of the 2011 Norway attacks, in which he killed 77 people. A man who believed too objectively. That’s the violence of belief.

Nietzsche’s warning was clear: when the highest values devalue themselves, nihilism begins. The choice then is between reactive nihilism—clinging desperately to dead values—or active nihilism, creating new ones. The Übermensch is not a fundamentalist; it’s the interpreter, the one who invents meaning where there is none. Real warnings are weak in form but strong in consequence. They don’t command; they ask to be interpreted.

M.F. – You devote much of the book to Heidegger and his unsettling claim that “science does not think.” What did he really mean by that?

S.Z. – It’s one of the most misunderstood lines in philosophy. Heidegger wasn’t attacking science; he was describing its condition. Science calculates; it doesn’t reflect on its own premises. That’s why we can have scientists who know everything about the cell, the genome, the atom—and yet no one asks what biology or physics or knowledge itself really is.

M.F. – As Isaac Asimov once put it, “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

S.Z. – I agree and would add: there is too much knowledge, but little understanding. Today, even philosophy has become technical. Research means projects with predetermined results—the opposite of thought. If I propose a five-year project on Hegel’s aesthetics and already know the outcome, that’s not research; it’s administration, verification, calculation. Thinking begins when you don’t know where you’ll end up. That’s why Heidegger opposed the calculative logic of the research project to the openness of the avenir.

M.F. – So his warning isn’t against science itself, but against what it becomes?

S.Z. – Exactly. “Science does not think” is not an attack on knowledge; it’s a warning against the power relations that define the essence of technology. Heidegger’s word for this is Ge-stell—‘enframing’—the form of technological thinking that compels humanity to order the real as Bestand, or standing-reserve, in order to enact the organised global conquest of the earth. As he explains in The Question Concerning Technology (1954), this process “tears [humans] loose from the earth and uproots them.” Science, as the basic expression of this technological mode of thought, precludes other ways of thinking and alienates us from nature.

M.F. – So in a way, his critique anticipates our ecological crisis?

S.Z. – Absolutely. The reduction, through scientific methodology, of all matter and energy to mere resources is making the continuation of life on Earth increasingly unviable. Against this reduction, it becomes urgent to think—to be underway, prepared, and available to respond to the call of Being. In this sense, thinking must be both receptive and active: listening to what things reveal to us and responding to their call. We’ve built a civilisation addicted to prediction, incapable of reflection, dependent on the very mechanisms that endanger it. That’s why I say philosophy must rescue us into emergencies, not from them.

M.F. – Artificial intelligence embodies that condition of highly-informed thoughtlessness perfectly.

S.Z. – Completely. AI is where thinking truly stops. It doesn’t think; it projects. It generates results from pre-existing data, endlessly reproducing the past. The more we automate, the less we can change. AI is not neutral—it’s an ideology: neoliberal, capitalist, profit-driven. And yet we treat it as a God. What’s frightening is that even its creators warn us—and we don’t listen. We’re building systems that know everything except how to think. 

M.F. – In your book, you open the AI chapter with Black Mirror’s Metalhead. For readers who haven’t seen it, the episode follows a lone woman hunted across a post-apocalyptic landscape by dog-like killer robots—emotionless machines programmed only to destroy. Why begin there?

S.Z. – Because it captures precisely what I mean by the absence of thought. The most unsettling aspect is not its violence, but the lack of explanation. You never learn why the world has ended or why these machines are killing. It’s pure automation without meaning—an apocalypse without narrative.

M.F. – And yet the warnings are everywhere. Why do we keep ignoring them?

S.Z. – Because the real problem isn’t AI itself but the corporations that control it—those shaping regulation to protect their dominance. Governments talk about safety, but what they really want is power. Everyone wants to write the rules for the next revolution.

M.F. – Prime Minister Sunak even said there was “no rush to regulate.”

S.Z. – Exactly—and that’s the warning. There’s never a rush to regulate when power is at stake. The same logic that drives AI—to predict and control—now defines our politics. We’ve built a civilisation that pretends to calculate consequences and refuses to interpret them.

M.F. – You write that AI is founded on ‘projecting.’

S.Z. – It derives predictions from the data it already has. It doesn’t create; it extrapolates. The difference between early neural networks and today’s systems is not intelligence but power. Big tech companies have spent decades harvesting data and building energy-hungry centres to process it—all to make the future look exactly like the past.

M.F. – You quote Noam Chomsky’s critique of ChatGPT.

S.Z. – Because he’s right: these systems “degrade our science and debase our ethics.” They confuse language with probability, intelligence with output. Their only real intelligence lies in maximising profit.

M.F. – So what is AI really teaching us?

S.Z. – That the absence of thought has become our new order. AI embodies the belief that reality is whatever can be calculated—transparency at the cost of depth, efficiency at the cost of meaning. While it repeats and degrades our knowledge, it deepens our dependence on technology and accelerates the desertification of thought.

M.F. – Which brings us back to Metalhead—that empty world without explanation.

S.Z. – Exactly. Its silence is the message. The absence of justification for that post-apocalyptic world finds its explanation here: in our inability—or refusal—to understand the consequences of what we’ve created.

M.F. – This epistemological confusion—the collapse of knowing into calculating—reaches another extreme in what you call the ‘metadata condition.’ You devote an entire chapter to it, opening with a quote from Michael Hayden, former NSA and CIA director: “We kill people based on metadata.”

S.Z. – It sounds like science fiction, but it’s not—algorithms now decide who lives and who dies.

M.F. – That’s so frightening… This makes me think of that shocking investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call about Israel’s use of AI in Gaza—how targeting systems rank people’s ‘risk level’ through metadata like phone activity and geolocation, giving human operators barely ten seconds to approve or override a strike, and accepting up to 15–20 civilian deaths as ‘collateral damage’ for each suspected militant.

S.Z. – We’ve normalised a new form of bureaucratic killing—automated, remote, morally vacant. In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt, another philosopher of warnings, had already cautioned us against this danger. She found Eichmann not a demonic figure, but a terrifyingly ordinary man—polite, unimaginative, obsessed with following rules. He did not act out of hatred or ideology, but out of thoughtlessness: the inability or refusal to think from another person’s perspective. The danger, as Arendt said, lies in not thinking.

Today, people are eliminated not for what they’ve done, but for how their data looks. Metadata is not information but the frame through which it’s interpreted. What’s executed is not a person but a pattern.

M.F. – What do you mean by that ‘executing a pattern’?

S.Z. – In the war on terror, algorithms replaced judgment. Drones don’t identify individuals; they identify ‘signatures,’ behavioural traces that statistically resemble previous threats. This means a person can be killed not for what they’ve done, but for how their data patterns look. It’s a technological form of preemption—punishment without action, guilt without intent.

M.F. – So this is not only a political issue, but an ontological one—meaning it changes our very idea of what it means to exist?

S.Z. – Exactly. When algorithms interpret existence, reality itself becomes filtered through the lens of probability. In this regime, being and appearing coincide: what you are is what your data suggests. Heidegger foresaw this when he said that in the technological age, “everything appears only insofar as it can be ordered.”

M.F. – But many would argue that data protects us—that it makes society more efficient, safer, even more rational.

S.Z. – Efficiency without interpretation is domination. What appears as rationality is often the automation of bias. We have learned to trust numbers because they seem neutral—but neutrality is the new ideology. As Jean Baudrillard warned, the danger of information is not ignorance, but saturation.

M.F. – You also connect this to capitalism and the attention economy.

S.Z. – Surveillance and capitalism have merged into what Shoshana Zuboff calls ‘surveillance capitalism.’ Every click, pause, and scroll is recorded to predict behaviour. The aim is not to inform us but to anticipate us—to eliminate unpredictability itself. The individual becomes redundant; only the pattern matters.

M.F. – What is the philosophical cost of living in such a world?

S.Z. – When measurement replaces meaning, the world loses its opacity. Everything becomes transparent, traceable, and therefore disposable. We stop asking why and only ask how often. This is the final stage of realism: the belief that the real is nothing more than what can be calculated. We live in the dictatorship of transparency. Too many numbers, too much data, too much control. We even mistake transparency for freedom. But when everything is predictable, even freedom becomes a simulation. I tell my students: Are we freer here, where four guys in California own all our data, or in China, where at least the state owns the network? It’s not a rhetorical question. Transparency promises light but delivers surveillance. 

M.F. – What kind of philosophy could oppose this?

S.Z. – Only one that reclaims interpretation as a form of resistance. We must learn again to listen rather than measure, to think rather than predict. As Foucault said, philosophy “calls into question domination at every level and in every form.” A philosophy of warnings reminds us that even in an empire of data, meaning remains fragile—and therefore human.

M.F. – The book ends with a call for a ‘politics of warnings.’ What would that look like?

S.Z. – It’s not a new ideology but a practice of attention. Politics today is obsessed with planning the next 12 months, but the global problems we have require longer periods, perhaps far into the horizon. The politics of warnings would measure success based on attentiveness, by how well it can listen to those warnings that concern our existence. Truth, by itself, doesn’t move anyone anymore. If it did, the world would have changed after Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. They revealed everything—and nothing happened. The problem is that truth doesn’t warn; it only describes. What moves people is intensity.

Greta Thunberg understood this perfectly. She didn’t bring new data; she brought pressure. She disturbed us. A real warning always disturbs. It’s emotional, even uncomfortable. That’s why art and activism matter so much: they press, unsettle, and force involvement. Far right populists have learned to weaponise this same energy—they go straight to the heart, to fear, to emotion. They’re wrong in content but right in method. It’s not a surprise that Mamdani won by practising a far-left populism. The real task is to reclaim that intensity for care, turning emotion into attention and noise into listening. Listening is the opposite of domination. It’s how philosophy, and perhaps politics itself, can start all over again.