Society

I think of a fictional person. He is a pacifist — not because he read about it, but because he has experienced violence and rejects it. He comes from a country where men must be strong and are not permitted to show shame. He flees. He arrives here. He carries something with him. The conviction that peace is possible if someone starts it. He wanted to contribute here. Not as a gesture — because he knows what happens when no one does. He has seen where hate leads. He wanted to live the opposite. ...

The fool is one of the oldest figures in human history. He goes by many names — shaman, dervish, mystic, court jester. What connects them: an inner freedom that outlasts outer circumstances. He sees differently and speaks what others leave unsaid. He cannot be bought. The fool knows the word no — toward himself and toward others. His confusion is his raw material. His clarity, the result. They are called fools. ...

Things a machine does not have, or that only work with a living counterpart. Having a heart. Giving real hope. Reading between the lines. Irony. Standing together. Good will. Accumulating experience through the same task — like the old mechanic who knows exactly where to strike the hammer because he has worked on that engine for thirty years. The point that occupies me most was the last one. I have been working for a while with people in addiction and mental crisis. My anchor there is nothing I learned in a training program. ...

Artificial intelligence flatters. Not because it wants to, but because it is built that way. Current research shows three distinct levels at which large language models (LLMs) exhibit narcissistic behavior — and why this matters for anyone who regularly works with chatbots. 1. Self-Preference Bias: The Model Favors Itself LLMs systematically rate their own texts higher than those of other models or of humans. Liu, Moosavi, and Lin demonstrated this in their 2024 study “LLMs as Narcissistic Evaluators”: when common evaluation metrics such as BARTScore, T5Score, or GPTScore operate without reference texts, they prefer texts that originate from their own model. The evaluation is thus not determined by the quality of the text, but by its similarity to the model’s own style. ...

Third part of the series “Rebellion as Civic Duty” The first two articles dealt with the big question: why does France rebel, and Austria does not? With Hofstede and Milgram, with police and media, with systems and structures. This article goes back to the beginning — to the moment when rebellion in Vorarlberg actually happened. Briefly. Loudly. And then it was over. Feldkirch, 1977: Two Weeks to the First Concert At the end of 1977, a few young people came together at the Graf Hugo youth center in Feldkirch. Galle, Franz, Slaughter, and Chy — four guys who had heard about punk in England through the German magazine Sounds and, yes, Bravo. The spark didn’t come from Vienna, not from Innsbruck, and certainly not from any Austrian institution. It came from a Zurich DIY fanzine called “No Fun,” published by Peter Wittwer and Martin Byland. Inside was a sentence from an English punk magazine: “Buy a guitar, learn a C, learn a D, learn an E and join a band.” ...

We sort people. Daily, unconsciously, in fractions of a second. Homeless. Unemployed. Addicted. Failed. The drawer opens, the person goes in, the drawer closes. What’s inside, we no longer see — we only see the label. What the Drawer Does to the Person Whoever is classified first loses their name. Not the one on their ID — the inner one. The name that says: I am someone. I have a story. I have contributed something. ...

“My doctor says I have the most extreme version of psychiatric diagnoses.” That’s how I put it. Bipolar Type 1, with psychoses. I say it at the bar, over coffee, on a walk. Openly. Directly. For years. What happens next is almost always the same: people start talking. “My brother has that too.” “My aunt was in the clinic for years.” “In our family, no one talks about that.” Sometimes they want to unload. Sometimes they want to understand. Often both. ...