The Politics of Warnings—On the Collapse of Meaning, the Terror of Thinking, and the Civilisation That Automated Its Own Despair

Michele Fossi in conversation with Santiago Zabala

In his new book Signs from the Future, philosopher Santiago Zabala argues that philosophy’s role today is not to offer answers or salvation, but rather to act as a warning—a fragile gesture of care that asks us to pay attention to what we usually ignore. He believes our biggest crisis is not climate change or technology itself, but our growing inability to feel these crises at all. We live surrounded by predictions, statistics, and algorithms that tell us what will happen next, but what really counts are those warnings that require us to think, to change, to get involved.

Zabala, who was raised in Rome, Vienna, and Geneva, is now an ICREA Research Professor at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He writes with urgency and clarity. He connects philosophy to everyday life—from Greta Thunberg’s protests to artificial intelligence, from Heidegger’s questions about technology, to the silence around Gaza. His goal is simple but radical: to make us listen again to warnings. For him, philosophy is not a theory but a form of attention—a way of staying awake when everything around us encourages sleep.

Michele Fossi – Your title, Signs from the Future, sounds almost prophetic—but you insist it’s not about prediction. In the book, you write that philosophy itself should deliver warnings. What does that mean?

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.