The war disrupted this fragile existence. The dangerous violent struggles around the land was always apparent but the farm workers saw themselves as uninvolved and temporary, part of a distant, unrelated story. Mizrahi’s work enters the eye of the storm and the front line. The films shot from 2021 until the current war follow a group of Thai migrant workers from kibbutz Kfar Aza until and after their deaths on October 7th. The films he captured touch on grief and sadness, the horrific experiences they endured, emotional turmoil, and survivors’ guilt. They tell a story rarely heard in its intimacy and bitterness, about the dead and the ones who survived, about trauma and ghosts. A whole human fabric confronted with a reality not its own.

This story intertwines with another presence. A movement coiling both outward and inward. A mechanical snake slithers to encounters with engineers, soldiers, fieldworkers, and the land itself. The mechanical snake operates as an IDF tool for surveillance and attacks in Hamas tunnels beneath the border and Gaza, and below the soil tilled by farmers. Both innovative and clumsy, its serpentine role oscillates between plaything and weapon. It stands in stark contrast to its organic counterpart, a snake whose smooth, hypnotic movements embody myth and symbolism across cultures. The organic and robotic snakes share physical traits. The snake’s movement adapts to its environment, both above and below ground. The robot is a product of technology that replicates the traits of the living while stripping away their organic circumstances, harnessing these principles of movement and behavior for human purposes, penetrating difficult terrains and scanning hidden spaces. However, the fusion of the two forms, the physical-mechanical and the imagined, takes place particularly in how people perceive the snake. 

The snake’s appearance is slithering and coiling around objects and organs. It can be an orientalist circus spectacle or strangle a living body for sustenance. It may emerge from a pit, rise from beneath the ground, weave through the grass, or expose an escape route. It is both a promise and a threat, a source of healing and death. In its religious and cultural meaning, the snake can be a source of knowledge and insight, a figure for guidance and divination. In Thai culture, the snake holds multilayered significance tied to faith and mythology. It often appears as the Naga, a mythical being attributed with power, protection, and wisdom. The Naga is considered the guardian of the Mekong River, marking the boundary of the underworld and the border between Thailand and Laos. According to belief, it can bring rain or cause drought, often linking it to agricultural work and the rhythms of farming life. It serves as a mythical source for prayer and guidance. In the films created by Mizrahi together with the workers, the snake appears as a religious figure operating beyond its surroundings, or perhaps like in the Book of Genesis, the snake already understands what humanity is about to discover.

The works in the exhibition flow like lines in the snake’s spirit, with cinematic motion shifting between documentary and elusive fiction, while the reality in which this event unfolds is well known. Mizrahi’s project offers a creative and associative psychogeographic analysis of the region, using landscape and forensic imagery to explore concepts of territory, soil, and ash. From the Israel-Gaza border, the border between Thailand and Laos, and between the living world and the underworld, a previously unknown human experience is revealed to us. Moment by moment, an unfamiliar being is revealed to us through the strangeness and distance of the characters from our lives, even when they reside alongside us, tilling the land where the serpent sheds its skin.

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In a black crater close to the borders of the Gaza Strip, about five years ago, I stood at the threshold of my intellectual and political capacities. In the distance, I saw the horizon of Jabalia and felt an instinctive pull towards the border. I had arrived at the crater because at the time Barq, a resistance group in Gaza, was launching incendiary balloons, condoms, and fire kites over the border. Abu Yousef, the spokesperson who is reportedly responsible for some of the fires, told Al Jazeera “We came here to send a fiery message to the Israeli occupation that we in the Gaza Strip can no longer tolerate the blockade that’s been taking place for 13 years”. The area surrounding Gaza, known as  “Gaza Envelope” includes settlements and vast agricultural fields of peanuts, watermelons, wheat, sunflowers, bananas, forests targeted  by the “fiery messages”. The area, located on the eastern border of the Gaza Strip, grew with the Israeli settlement around Gaza and the establishment of agricultural outposts in the 1950s by the Nahal military unit. As hybrid agricultural-military settlements, these Nahal outposts were placed along the Israeli border for strategic reasons, to prevent the shrinking of Israeli sovereign territory and to solidify the border through cultivation of extensive agricultural lands. The border was established, monitored, and maintained through agricultural labor carried out by soldiers and volunteers, while also preventing the return of Gazan refugees to fields that had once belonged to them.

In Bert Nielson and Sandro Mezzadra’s research on dynamic borders, they use the term “Borderscapes” to express the simultaneous expansion and contraction of political spaces, engaging with the resistances that arise at these sites, the challenges they pose, and the criticism directed at them. The current definition of the “Gaza Envelope” region was measured by the Israeli army by comparing the physical distance from the border and the range of rockets and other threats posed by Palestinian armed resistance groups in the Strip. Unlike the Borderscapes perspective, from the unilateral disengagement in 2005 until the current ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the Israeli perception of the border with Gaza has been shaped around maximum siege and segregation, like extensive, but not airtight, insulation. Besides the land and sea blockade,  in recent years, the border has undergone various sealing attempts by means of accelerated automation processes, and the development of military surveillance and artificial intelligence technologies. The border with Gaza functioned as a tool to delineate Israel as a space where legal frameworks could operate, to consolidate its identity as a unified ethnonational state. The border has hardened over this period with restrictions aimed at further isolating the Gaza Strip. Since October 7th, 2023, the border has remained breached by the Israeli military, which controls it. Inside the Strip, tens of thousands of Palestinian lives, cities such as Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia, and Jabalia, along with numerous villages, hospitals, schools, and cultural centers, have been wiped out by IDF air and land operations. The vast majority of agricultural fields and greenhouses in the Strip have been bombed, and thousands of food and humanitarian aid trucks have been stopped at the border. 

The Israeli concept of the sealed border has disintegrated and has been replaced by a popular perception of military control alongside new settlements, as had been done previously and as can be seen in the West Bank over the last fifty years. Alongside the deployment of rigid and clear borders, Israel has been continuously blurring borders since its establishment,  by triggering conflict which could reconfigure borders perimeter and deepen the segregation and oppression of Palestinians by means of geographic and civil disruption. In contrast to the misleading perception of borders as a fixed, clear, enforcing, and delineating line of a homogeneous national space, the borders of Israeli sovereignty have different faces for different groups. Israeli borders show complex, polysemic, dynamic, and heterogeneous structures. As in other territories, these qualities are reflected in immigration policies. Further, borders function as tools for control and as a way to shape or connect the global flow of migrant labor. In the Gaza Envelope, since the establishment of Nahal outposts around the notion of “Avoda Ivrit” (Hebrew labor), neoliberal policies of the Likud right-wing party have targeted the Israeli farmers. As a result, they became increasingly reliant on cheaper Palestinian workers from Gaza. During the first Palestinian Intifada (1987-1993), security forces and employers in Israel began to fear the rebelliousness of the Gazan proletariat, and the border began to tighten. Most Gazan workers were no longer allowed to enter Israel for work, and a new low-wage labor force was needed. Since then, in an oppressive migration regime, the entire agricultural sector in Israel has become dependent on migrant labor from Thailand and the exploitation of populations from the global majority. The replacement of Jewish labor by Palestinian hands, and later by Thai workers, reflects the ethnic separation between Israeli-Jewish landowners and employers and the foreign labor force. The “other”, as a modular function, carries economic and psychological meanings. The anthropologist Shahar Shoham discusses how Israelis developed the term “Taylandi” (Hebrew for “Thai man”) as a synonym for agricultural worker, imagined as a submissive and compliant figure. Shoham shows how the discursive practices created by the Israeli migration regime otherises the labourers, using the imagined figure as a disciplinary tool in exploitative labor relations.  In the Gaza Envelope, Thai national workers are required to endure war as well as neglect and discriminatory racism. Before the outbreak of the war in October 2023, approximately 6000 Thai national workers lived around the Israeli-Gaza border. It is difficult to assess how informed and prepared they were of the danger when they moved there. The absence of protected spaces, alarm systems, or accessible information provided to them by the Israeli government, Thai migrant workers in life-threatening danger at the border. Many were killed and taken hostage during the 7 October attack.

It is relevant to the larger geopolitical positionality of Israel to note that there is evidence of a connection between the entry of Thai labor into Israel and security-military cooperation between the two countries. In his new book, Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture, Matan Kaminer demonstrates how Thailand’s military government attempted to implement Israel’s strategy of agricultural settlement in border areas, as embodied by the Nahal settlements. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the Thai government fought a Maoist uprising that received support from the communist authorities in neighboring Laos to the north. After the fighting along the Laotian border subsided in the early 1980s, Thailand became entangled in the civil war in its southern neighbor, Cambodia, and many refugees flooded the border region. General Phichit Kullavanijaya, who was in charge of the border areas, turned to Israel for assistance in establishing “border settlements” along the borders between Cambodia and Laos. The first stage of the plan involved a “border settlement” course that took place in the Gaza Envelope, the Golan, and the West Bank. On May 24, 1987, a delegation of 49 Thai military and government officials arrived in Israel to participate in the course, which was conducted under the guidance of the Israeli Defense Forces’ Foreign Relations Department. The above project can be understood in the ontological context of the Thai-Laos border since the 1970s, during which time it became a site of political tension and migration. This border stretches along the Mekong River, the longest river in Southeast Asia. For many communities around it, the Mekong is not just a border between countries but also a threshold between the world of the living and the netherworld of the dead. In the river resides Phaya Naga, a dragon serpent god, also known as the King of Snakes, who, according to folklore, shaped the river’s path with its body. The Naga appears in numerous tales, from Buddhist scriptures to soap operas, and in most cases, its appearance is deceptive as it transitions between human and snake. Events witnessed by the Mekong’s human neighbors point to fluctuations in the river currents and the appearance of fireballs above the water as evidence of Phaya Naga’s presence. Many sites along the Thailand-Laos border are dedicated to Phaya Naga, with festivals, fairs, and statues depicting the god as a multi-headed dragon serpent. I visited one such site along the promenade of Nakhon Phanom, a province in the northeastern Isaan region of Thailand. I visited the funeral of the siblings of Settha Homsorn (Tom), who was murdered in the massacre in Kfar Aza on October 7th. The siblings sat by the riverbank and described seeing the Phaya Naga in the water. While branches drifted along with the current, Tom’s sister noticed a movement going against the flow. His brother asked the Naga to alleviate the suffering of their family.

For me, as a Jew visiting the serpent god for the first time, its revelation in the borderlands was accompanied by various interpretations. After all, the serpent is known as a symbolic means of crossing the Jewish border between sanctity and impurity. The serpent figure accompanies the story of Moses and is especially prominent in the Biblical myth of Nehushtan in the Book of Numbers, chapter 21, where God commands Moses to create a serpent statue to revive the faith of the Hebrews and heal them from snake bites. Years later, King Hezekiah destroyed the bronze serpent because it had turned from a symbol of transcendent healing to a belief in a serpent god. Nehushtan’s serpent moves along a metaphysical scale from the symbolic to the figurative, from the animalistic to the sculptural, and then back to the symbolic. From the Bible to modern writers including Micha Yosef Berdyczewski and Amos Oz, examples of the serpent’s presence appear in the traditional symbol network of the “Sitra Achra” (Aramaic, meaning “the other side”), describing the crossing of the threshold beyond symbols of sanctity as a process of sensual anti-rational eruption. The symbol reflects the fragile face of religious logic and serves as an alluring gate to a truer experience of profane sexuality and threatening nature. After crossing the symbolic border of holiness, for example, after sacrificing a red heifer, a marriage, or eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the corruption, decay, and stench of earthly reality are revealed. As long as holiness remains within the symbolic world and impurity dominates earthly reality, the Sitra Achra objects evolve as an iconoclastic device that uses the symbol against itself. Once holiness is shattered, we see how the other side is more real than our symbolic existence.

In 2006, Hamas began digging tunnels through the soil to escape and counter the siege and trespass the border dividing Gaza from Israel. In response, the Israeli military sought ways to deal with the tunnels through complex, transdisciplinary systems of cameras and sensors, seismic motion detectors, robotic ground-penetrating devices, and a new subterranean border wall that reached the aquifer’s water. Among these systems, the Israeli military developed a robotic snake for collecting intelligence along the tunnels. The snake is controlled from a great distance and moves silently without being detected. The engineers who designed it explained that the robot was inspired by direct observations of a local viper. The mechanical snake was first revealed to the public in a 2009 television report, described as “the Israeli military’s new toy”, capable of spying, listening, and surprising the enemy. In the report, the robot moved along the grass, entered a small hole, and twisted sharply and erratically. Its movements were loose and it did not meet expectations based on viper biomimicry. In addition to the camera, it carries a microfiber communication cable to compensate for the lack of reception underground, as well as a microphone, a flashlight, and, sometimes, explosives, making the serpent a lethal weapon. In the past, soldiers from the Givati Brigade would enter the tunnel openings they discovered along the border with rifles and flashlights raised, alert for unexpected threats. The risk of abduction led to soldiers being tied to long ropes so that they could be pulled back to Israel in the event of an incident, dead or alive. In her article, Turning the Inside Out, Laliv Melamed examines the robotic snake development as a military tool, analyzing the snake via the concept of “penetrative aesthetics”, combined with technologies including thermal and medical media that penetrate the threshold of visibility, flipping the inside out. Melamed examines how developments in the snake allow for border-crossing videography, from the outside in, as well as penetration into the human body (like the medical snake bioscope) or dangerous and collapsing structures (as in the case of the  “rescue/retrieval snake”). Penetrative aesthetics, thus, reveal how new technologies can penetrate both the earth and bodies. Like the medical snake, the military serpent technology enables precision action aimed at specific threats, isolating and removing “sick” parts from the system. Through the example of the robotic snake, Melamed demonstrates how increasing reliance on optics and machine learning has led to the rise of biometric warfare, where the goal is not only to eliminate threats but also to manage life and care as a mechanism for control, occupation, and expression and dilution of sovereignty. The serpent’s gaze echoes Vilém Flusser’s analysis of forensic photography as a means of “decoding”. Flusser argues that images are illusory meta-codes, where text is disguised as reality and the automation of the photographic apparatus conceals any human agent. These are illusory automatic reflections of the world that are harder to decipher. When operating the robotic snake, the soldiers’ proxy slithers around its data prey, ready to swallow it. The special mechanism of the robot carries a trans-species perspective on and within forbidden places and renders an offensive image that penetrates across national and human borders. Through such a device, the Israeli military’s systems embody the physical manifestation of the state’s eye, realized in the body of a serpent. The videographic resources produced by the serpent actualize the enactment of a power that is now detached from its snake body.

Throughout this research project, I aimed to present the fluctuations I documented at the threshold between our material world and netherworlds, with particular attention to the Israeli boundary with Gaza and the Thai border with Laos. I didn’tcross these borders, but I observed and documented them from the outside. Nevertheless, the vast horizons of the other side’s landscape stretched, surrounded, and swallowed me whole. Since the ruthless violent escalation and the rupture of the Israeli boundary fence, the concept of the border as a two-dimensional line, as a tool for wrapping, sealing, and separating, has collapsed. In the past, the borderness of the Gaza Envelope region seemed to me like an object that consumes and obscures another object, like the box that does and does not contain Schrödinger’s cat. Today, although this border has collapsed, with tens of thousands of soldiers crossing into Gaza and Israeli pseudo-journalists “reporting” from there, the sealing and lack of access to Gaza are still maintained. The lives of the Palestinians and the Israeli hostages are obscured, dissolving into the blurred image of the destruction of the Strip. The deliberate removal of non-approved documentary footage from Gaza in the media allows the military to act to destroy the area without facing the judgment of civil society, especially within Israel, and the destruction continues to distance the perception of Gaza as an actual place. The map warps, and the territory perishes, allowing for repeated crossings over the border within the ruins; this is reflected in the violence and the strange technologies like the mechanical viper camera as it pursues its lowly path into the body and the earth.

Bio

Jonathan (Om) Omer Mizrahi is an artist and filmmaker who explores various relations to power through projects that transpire at the intersection of creativity and emergency. Om has participated in exhibitions and screenings at various art spaces and film festivals and has been an artist-in-residence in Greenland, Denmark, Austria, Germany, and Israel-Palestine.

Muhammad Shehada and Walid Mahmoud, “Gaza Incendiary Balloons Are ‘Distress Signals’.” Al Jazeera, 21 August 2020. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/8/21/gaza-incendiary-balloons-are-distress-signals

Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor  ,Duke University Press, 2013 

Shahar Shoham,The Heroes from Isaan Working in Israel: The Production of Migrants in the Thailand-Israel Migration Regime. PhD diss., Humboldt University of Berlin, 2024.

Matan, Kamier, Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture ,Stanford University Press, 2024

Channel 2 News, YouTube, 11 June 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-dzZBa6TQE

Laliv Melamed, Turning the Inside Out ,University of Groningen, 2023

Vilém Flusser, “Towards a Philosophy of Photography ,Reaktion Books, 1984 

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Matan Kaminer: I did my ethnography in the Arabah, a region which is in some ways unique. It is a climatically extreme area, very dry and very hot in the summers. But as you mentioned, recent research has shown that the Bedouin inhabitants managed to practice a sustainable form of agriculture there over hundreds of years, while also herding animals. Before 1948, the Arabah had about the same number of inhabitants that it has now – Bedouin who spent the winters there with their herds and moved into the mountains on either side of the valley in the summers. In 1949, at the very end of what Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinians call the Nakba, the IDF conquered the sparsely populated southern half of the country, including the Arabah. The Bedouin were expelled over the borders, to Egypt and Jordan, but there was no permanent Israeli settlement in the Arabah until the 1960s, when moshavim (cooperative settlements) were set up in the center and kibbutzim (communal settlements) in the south. The government wasn’t convinced that there was any “need” – that is, any security need – to settle this very remote and climatically challenging zone, but a group of young people who had grown up in moshavim lobbied David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father, and he helped them get authorization to start first one moshav, Ein Yahav, and then several more – Hatzeva, Paran, Tzofar, Idan.

From the moment they were established, the moshavim did get a lot of government support, especially for pumping water out of very deep and non-replenishing aquifers. With that water and with roads leading to central Israel, they were able to make a good living by growing summer vegetables (tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers) in the winter for the national market. In this period, especially after the occupation of 1967, most Israeli farmers started depending on cheap Palestinian workers, but in the Arabah this didn’t happen – partly because they kept up the orthodox ideological position of rejecting Arab labor, and partly because Palestinian population centers were just too far away.

All this started changing quickly in the mid to late 1980s, for two reasons: one, Israel’s shift to a neoliberal economic track in 1985, which entailed a pretty rapid shift away from government protection for sectors like agriculture, which were previously considered strategic. Farmers increasingly had to get credit on the open market, to compete against their neighbors, and to worry about competition from foreign producers. In more central parts of the country this led to a turn away from agriculture, with a lot of the land getting snapped up for residential real estate. In remote places like the Arabah this wasn’t an option, obviously. The second major event was the First Intifada, the first Palestinian rebellion against Israeli rule which broke out in 1987. The government understood that dependence on Palestinian labor was a weakness and started looking abroad for a workforce that could replace it.

Thus, even though it had never been dependent on Palestinian workers, the Central Arabah became one of the biggest customers of Thai labor when it began to arrive in the 1990s. The region’s economy shifted from production of various vegetables for the national market towards specialization in one product – bell peppers – for the European market. More competition meant lower prices which meant that production had to be extended to make a profit. More land was grabbed up by greenhouses, destroying natural ecosystems (as covered in the work of anthropologist Liron Shani); more water was sucked out of the aquifers, leading to their salinization and depletion; and much more labor was needed. This labor was provided by Thai migrants, whose population equaled the Israeli population of the region beginning around 2000. Today there are about 3000 Thais and 3000 Israelis in the Central Arabah.

J.O.M: In Thailand, General Pichit Kullavanijaya started to look at those settlements, particularly those that sit on the borders. He wants to acquire knowledge about “frontier settlements.” and apply it as new communities in the Thailand border with Laos and Cambodia. What was he looking for and why?

M.K: Unfortunately I’ve never had the chance to speak to Gen. Pichit, so all I can say about his thinking is what the documents say. Pichit was a graduate of the US Army’s West Point Academy, where he’d met Israeli officers. He was also a veteran of the counter-insurgency against the Communist Party of Thailand, which he helped to defeat in the early 1980s. Subsequently, he was put in charge of the Cambodian frontier, which was destabilized following Thailand’s participation in the horrendous civil war in that country. In 1984, he wrote to the Israeli embassy as follows:

“Thailand has encountered many obstacles along the border […] There has been heavy fighting, which has affected Thai national security and economy […] Besides, there are a large number of refugees who have fled into Thailand, creating problems for the Thai government, not only with respect to increased burden on the country but also with respect to the care which must be taken […] about communist infiltration. […] Israel is a country which has experienced problems relating to security and economy in border areas similar to Thailand […] Israel has been able to tackle these problems with respect to security and economic stability in the border areas successfully, […] based on highly efficient cooperation between the people and the state to a high degree in economic development and maintaining security in these border areas.”

To be clear, Pichit had no particular interest in the Arabah; but he was interested in how Israel had used agricultural settlement to stabilize its control over so-called frontier zones, both within Israel proper and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. By this time, I should say, this was kind of an obsolete concept in Israel itself. In the 1980s Israel wasn’t really setting up agricultural settlements anymore – the new settlements in the West Bank and the Galilee were primarily suburban. Moreover, the diplomats at the embassy were very wary of the project because they didn’t want to get involved in Cambodia. But Pichit was an up-and-coming politician, who many people expected to become prime minister, so they didn’t want to disappoint him. They decided to say yes to the project but to demand that the Thais pay for the whole thing, in the hope that the money would dry up long before Israel would be expected to actually help in setting up settlements in Thailand. The one concrete outcome of the project that I have actually been able to trace is a delegation of military and civilian officials who came to Israel in 1987 to tour various “frontier settlements,” again including both Israel and the Occupied Territories.

J.O.M: Within two years after the delegation, thousands of Thai workers arrived to work in Israel. Back then, they were referred to as “volunteers” for agricultural learning purposes, which allowed the Israelis to exercise a set of exploitative employment conditions while maintaining the make-believe of the old self-labour settlement and Israeli agricultural prosperity. You analyze this employment period to be operating from what you call “exploitation anxiety”. How has avoiding dependence on Palestinians shaped labor policies? and what does this reveal about the power dynamics involved?

M.K: Well, to succeed in academia, you have to make up phrases that other people will cite later… My term “exploitation anxiety” actually attempts to describe an attitude that is prevalent throughout the history of the Israeli labor settlement movement, from the beginning to this day. It’s an ideological orientation which holds that there is something morally wrong about exploitation, not for what it does to the people being exploited – that’s basically true by definition – but for what it does to the exploiters. Starting settlements that would be purely Jewish was a strategic decision for the Zionist colonists – both for immediate military reasons, but also because they realized that by providing Palestinian peasants with work, they might actually strengthen their hold on the land. Labor Zionist ideology gave this strategic understanding a moral twist, saying that Jews had to learn to work the land for themselves and that dependence on others, especially but not only Palestinians, would destroy the moral integrity of the project. 

This was most explicit in the early days, when they had to distinguish themselves from the so-called bourgeois settlers of the First Aliyah, who were happy to employ Palestinians. But to a great extent it remains the case today. In my analysis, one of the main “services” that Thai migrants provide to the settlements of the Arabah is their cooperation in the work of making themselves and their own labor invisible. It’s not that anyone actually thinks the agricultural labor is being done by Israeli Jews; but the Thais help that fact to not be “in your face”, such that when farmers produce advertising and PR in which all the work is done by cosplaying Israelis, it doesn’t look totally ridiculous.

To return to your question, with regard to the early days of the traffic in workers I actually came up with another term, “structural hypocrisy”. The idea here is that everyone is lying to everyone else and to themselves – the Thai military, the Israeli government and employers, they’re all pretending that they’re engaged in a project of “training” and “aid” to set up settlements in Thailand, whereas what they’re really doing is importing cheap labor and looking for ways to take a cut of the money involved. After a few years, in 1993, the pretense was dropped, but what interests me as an anthropologist is why they had to tell themselves this story to begin with. And my answer is that this was a transitional period, in which the new economic structures were not yet ideologically legitimate, so this hypocrisy was a sort of discursive bridge from one period to the other.

J.O.M: In our context, the marriage of Israel’s agricultural industry and its settlers’ foundation requires variable frontier methods to ignore the struggles behind their borders. In agricultural spaces both in Isaan and Palestine, there has been a shift from self-sufficiency to market dependency over time. How has this transformation impacted local communities and their connections to their land?

M.K: I don’t think it’s about ignoring the struggles; decision-makers in both countries have always been very attuned to these struggles, although there’s always an aspiration to achieve “normalcy” and stability – if that’s what you mean. But what I argue is really central and shared to the thinking of elites in both countries is the close connection between commodity production and this sort of security and stability. In both Isaan (the northeast part of Thailand that migrants to Israel come from) and Palestine, including the Arabah, until the mid-20th century the inhabitants primarily produced for their own needs and subsistence. They participated in markets, but grew or raised most of their own food. This provided both a strong bond with the land and a degree of independence, especially from the need to work for someone else in order to make a living.

Both of these areas underwent what Marxists call “primitive accumulation” in the period following World War II. This is the process whereby people are violently dispossessed of their land and become dependent on markets and wage-labor to survive. It happened in very different ways to Palestinians and Isaanites, of course: Palestinians, including the Bedouin of the Arabah, were simply ejected from their land and became (sorry for the Marxist jargon again) a “surplus population” mostly denied gainful employment. In Isaan, people didn’t lose their land directly but incorporation into markets and population growth made it impossible to keep making a living off the land, and they began migrating: first to Bangkok, where their labor fueled the city’s industrial growth, and then farther abroad, eventually arriving in Israel too.

This is what actually tends to happen when areas that were previously under subsistence production get subsumed into markets: rises in productivity following technological advance and specialization tend to empty those places out, and people move to cities, whether they can actually find work there or not. In the medium term, this stabilizes the frontier zones since they are no longer populated by independent people who may or may not be attached to the state, but by workers who depend on getting a wage in order to live, since they can’t live off of whatever cash crop they are producing (you can’t eat only peppers, not to mention cotton). But in the long term, I think pushing millions of people into cities where most are not going to have gainful work is creating a time bomb – just look at Gaza. Remember that most of the population there is descended from peasants that were expelled by Israel in 1948.

J.O.M: During the outbreak of war in October 2023, after 41 Thai workers were killed and 31 were kidnapped, we began organizing under “Aid for Farmworkers” to provide humanitarian support to thousands of Thai survivors from the Gaza Envelope region. We have observed the discriminatory treatment of the Thai survivors and the pressure placed on them to resume work. While many workers have been evacuated from the border to other farms or back to Thailand, we are witnessing a massive return of workers to the war zone along the border regions near Gaza and Lebanon. To save the crops, most of these abandoned villages on the borders are now inhabited only by Thai workers and their employers, who are often exposed to missile attacks and sometimes killed. If frontier agricultural settlements were meant to stabilize these borders, as Israel promoted to General Kullavanijaya, they have completely failed. Do you agree? To what extent do Israel’s borders depend on agriculture, and by extension, on the sacrifice of workers’ lives?

M.K: The question of failure and success is very tricky. Take Pichit’s “Frontier Settlement Project” – on its own terms, it was a total failure, as no settlements were ever set up (at least as far as I know). But it paved the way for a lot of the people involved to get rich through a labor flow that they probably weren’t even thinking of facilitating at the get-go. So of course Hamas’ success on October 7th was a huge failure for Israel, and many of us – myself included – were at first quite sure that it would be career-ending for the Israeli leadership, first and foremost Netanyahu. But that man has 99 lives; at least as things look now, he has come out on top while turning large parts of the Middle East into disaster zones, beginning in Gaza but now moving into Lebanon, and who knows what next. Is that a success as far as the long-term security of Israelis is concerned? I would say absolutely not, but many, perhaps most Israelis would disagree with me at this point. Maybe they’ll change their minds later.

Rather than talking about success or failure, what we can do as researchers and artists is to try to tease out deeper patterns that are in a way independent of people’s intentions and even their conscious knowledge. I think your film and my book both try to grope at the many facets of the work of colonization: military, agricultural, and socio-cultural; and at the way that actors in the drama can be replaced with other actors while the underlying, oppressive dynamic remains. It doesn’t remain the same, because it’s alive, dynamic, ahead of the curve. We’re always behind that curve, but maybe we can catch the snake by its tail. And then it might snap around and bite our hand, but if we’re quick enough perhaps we can catch it by the neck and force it to grant our wishes.

Dr. Matan Kaminer is an anthropologist, an activist, and a lecturer at Queen Mary University London. His background is in cultural anthropology, political economy, and political ecology. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan and an MA in Sociology and Anthropology from Tel Aviv University. He is the author of ‘Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture’ (Stanford University Press, 2024).

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(Fig 1: screen capture from a video made by the Israeli Defense Force’s Technological Lab for Tracking and Exposing Tunnels)

Author’s note: The essay was originally given as a talk in a lecture series on machine vision, titled “L’image à l’épreuve des machines,” hosted by the Parisian gallery Le Bal, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the Sorbonne. The lecture was written in October 2021, and except two very short moments in the text, it does not account for the events that followed October 7^th 2023: Hamas attack and the Israeli counter attack that is still ongoing while I write this note in December 2024. I chose not to revise the essay according to the prism of the contemporary genocidal moment, as I believe it captures the continuous history of sovereign violence in Gaza. The past undercurrents described below can perhaps contextualize the rapturous and destructive present.

I.

“It Looks Like a Snake and Moves Like a Snake”

In June 2009, on the Israeli Channel 2 evening news, Israel Institute of Technology, The Technion, and the Israeli Ministry of Defense launched a new technological development meant, as the news item announced, to serve the military in its subterranean warfare. “It looks like a snake and moves like a snake! But it’s actually a camera” announced the news anchor, presenting a reptilian robot, made of mechanic vertebrates._¹ The lethal reptile is designed to mimic modular locomotion and weaponized with infrared camera, high-speed and high-resolution cameras, movement sensors, and explosives. Celebrated as the avant-garde of military tech, The Snake was designated to operate in spheres beyond the combatants reach, as the reporters affirms: “In Gaza’s tunnels, Hezbollah’s bunkers, cracks in the ground or narrow passages through buildings’ ruins.” The news item describes the robot as a decisive component of the “future battlefield” and in rescue missions, commissioned to collect intelligence, live stream data and eliminate suspected entities in the depth of the ground or the aftermath of urban disaster.

In the time of its launching, The Snake was a new technological deus ex-machina for what was known in Israel as “the tunnels terror,” a web of underground passageways under the sieged city of Gaza, perceived as a menacing threat, hosting clandestine movements (and today, where Israeli hostages are imprisoned). Side by side with their strategic use by Hamas, the tunnels are also a crucial civil infrastructure for the besieged city of Gaza, an illicit artery that supplies food, construction materials, ammunition and other goods. How does The Snake operate in the tunnels, beyond clear sight, in a space both vital and lethal? Can its operation in such liminal space rearticulate the sovereign violence inflicted by Israel on Palestinians?

The Snake Robot belongs to a growing field of BRML: Biometric Robotics and Machine Learning. Its developers also draw on optic fibers and their use in penetrative medical technology, for example, endoscopy. Here, it is used to penetrate and travel not inside bodies, but the pharynx of terrestrial terrains. In the news item the undulating robot is constantly compared with its biological counterpart, its capacity to operate in spaces beyond human reach or vision is highlighted, and so does its applicability and usability across different spheres of human activity: medicine, agriculture, military and crisis management, among others.

Side by side with recent advancements in biomechanics The Snake demonstrates the exponentially growing reliance on optics and machine learning in warfare operations. Warfare optics open a visual field defined not by a language of representation, but a logic of operation. Such processes, of mechanization- and computation-by-optics is not exclusive to warfare, but happens across infrastructural and logistical operations. A different form of vision now encompasses executionary force, it acts, and with machine learning: a sight, its epistemic and cognitive processing, and its tentative operation are all condensed to the surface of the image. Thomas Keenan rightfully observes that the extension of human vision to facilitate various logistics, from engineering to surveillance, was a prevalence modus-operandi for good few decades by now. With new technological developments, he contends, processes of interpretation, deliberation and consideration traditionally done by humans are being mechanized exponentially.² Harun Farocki’s writing and work on the operative image already proposes images that act³, but with Keenan we need to consider the increasing complexity of such actions. Now that images are added with a “thinking” faculty, their mandate to act is ever more forceful. Images are no longer the initiators of human reflection that respectively lead to action, but executive agents themselves.

New vision technologies promote a belief in total vision, determining human and more-than-human entities. Operative images, purposed to enhance human vision, are positioned on the threshold of visibility. Images that operate puts pressure on the very notion of vision and also complicate the distinct frames of the operation itself. Operations, tell us the sociologists and political thinkers Brett Nielson and Sandro Mezzadra, are complex and branched-out.⁴ Operations are not just about a procedural set of actions, inputs and outputs or hard facts, but include, at times even determined by, their potentialities and imaginaries, their phantasmatic envisioning and their echoing aftermaths. The crossing of functions and usability that The Snake Robot demonstrates, where the technology is utilized either for rescue or elimination, in cultivating food or the aftermath of urban disaster, already displaces the concreteness of actions. It points at larger questions about the technological regime that organizes modern life. With this new, total logic visual operations reorganize and cohere bodies, objects and terrains from the inside out.

(Fig 1: screen capture from video demonstration of the Snake Robot, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-dzZBa6TQE)

Within the discipline of media studies writings on violence and the visual have distinctively prioritized verticality as a visual paradigm through which to think of warfare, and the control over space. French philosopher Paul Virilio–perhaps one of the dominant figures in theorizing the relationship between vision and war—made this ominous connection by focusing on the look from above.⁵ The work of media scholar, Lisa Parks, critical geographer Steven Graham and the architect Eyal Weizmann has similarly reinforced the hegemony of verticality.⁶   In her cultural history of aerial vision, Caren Kaplan provides a more layered reading of the connections between visual technology and military, adding to it notions of fascination and control.⁷ There is a connection reinforced again and again between the totality of vision, vertical distance and control. In contemporary battle field media is used often for the purpose of operating from a distance or distance operation: surveillance, targeted killing, surgical elimination, all are means of precision, but also designed with the aim of keeping the operator safer. Verticality, distance, altitude are strategic components in these kind of operations. 

The surface again and again marks a threshold of visibility. With The Snake we move into subterranean terrains. In the depth, the optical aspect is somehow compromised even blocked, we’re no longer in plain sight. With the compromise of the visual regime, power and its operative performativity becomes speculative, even fictive. Going inside, I will argue, make bodies and landscapes amorphic, even abstract. While distance is still a dominant modus operandi, interiority adds a notion of odd proximity, even intimacy.

II.

Penetrative Aesthetic

During the Israeli attacks on Gaza in May 2021, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) performed a sophisticated maneuver: sending a vague message to international media, moving forces and using heavy artillery at the border of the Gaza strip, it created the impression that it is preparing for a ground invasion. Such impression was meant to trick Hamas to withdraw into the underground Gaza tunnels. While Hamas will be hiding in the tunnels, the IDF will use aerial strikes with a recently developed secret weapon, a bomb that with the help of new technology can penetrate the terrain, and in a surgical precision collapse the tunnel, on top of those hiding in it. Some parts of this maneuver are commonly used war strategies, for example, the use of trickery, the visible movement of forces only to tease a corresponding movement, or the surprise element. A subterranean architecture of networked passages is as ancient as warfare itself and was always there in excess to what happens in plain sight. Tunnels, notes the former colonel, Dr. Shaul Shay, are used in contemporary war mostly in asymmetrical conflicts by the inferior side. Tunnels warfare, Shay concludes, necessitates a combined geological and strategic approach.⁸ The failed trickery shows us the performative and speculative component of warfare, but mostly, what it brings to the surface is the way the military works with interiority, and how it weaponizes its enemy’s infrastructure in a traverse maneuver: rather than find a bait to lead the warriors outside, where they are dangerously exposed and visible—the conventional maneuver—to make them go inside, and then to bury them under their own design. 

In an article from 2006 the architect and head of the research agency Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman describes how in the early 2000 the IDF adopted a military tactics that they termed “traverse geometry.”⁹ Operating in Palestinian refugee camps in Nablus and Jenin, the troops avoided the streets, alleys or doors and instead made progress in the crowded urban texture while breaking through walls, walking through roofs, traversing the inside out. Such traversal of public and private spaces—of inside and outside—stands for a larger shift in the IDF strategic thinking. This change meant to induce elasticity, dynamism and creativity within the IDF operational logic. The street and the door are thresholds that delimit a state of fragility and exposure for the troops; walking through the walls, the soldiers rewrite the space, adopt to chaos and non-linearity, constantly shifting the camp’s inside and outside. According to Weizman, military strategists came with such tactical thinking by reading poststructuralists, postcolonial and constructivists radical thinkers such as Deleuze and Guattari, George Battai and the swiss architect Bernard Tschumi. In his article Weizman cites the testimony of one Palestinian woman who was sitting in her living room, watching television, when soldiers broke through her wall. She describes how one of the soldiers started screaming at her “get inside.” Her response to the soldier was: “but I am inside.” The city, like the tunnel in the 2021 maneuver, is no longer the site of battle, but the weapon itself.

[Fig 3: Camero’s Through Wall imaging demonstration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqs2OFu_NM4]

Back in 2006 Weizman also foresees that the shift in strategic thinking and movement will soon be translated into vision technics, allowing the soldiers to see through walls. Like the paradigm offered by Keenan, media technology steps in to replace the physical body rather than it’s being put in risk. With less dynamism and creativity, the IDF is consistent with using traversed geometry—as in turning the inside out—in its response to Palestinian resistance. Facing Gaza’s underground web of tunnels, Israel started building a massive underground wall around the Gaza strip. The majority of the wall, planned as 65 kilometers of reinforced concrete with the cost of milliards of dollars, is invisible. Instead of a wall resurrected upwards, the wall is built into the ground, digging up the soil, filling it with concrete, messing up geological formations. Geologically, the Gaza terrain is characterized as “soft earth,” consisting of high sand content. The underground wall is built using a relatively new engineering technology called Slurry wall. In addition to its concrete formation, the wall is said to embed movement-capturing sensors. What is interesting with the Slurry wall is its traversed attention. The wall corresponds with the environment—the sandy, soft soil—rather than the human factor. The sensors, are doing the opposite. Together, both sand and human bodies are what the wall is meant to block as infiltrating threats. 

Gaza’s underground is traversed not only by means of concrete and walls, but by further unearthing. One of the means with which the IDF tracks tunnels is conducting systematic digging into the ground. With this, the IDF excavates earth samples that can indicate the alternation of underground consistencies. It uses sensors to track tectonic shifts in geological depth. This literally means fighting digging with more digging. While the ground is being constantly monitored and filtered, what is most striking is its constant hollowing as means of weaponizing.

The Technological Lab for Tracking and Exposing Tunnels, an IDF unit established in 2016, has in its arsenal a combined technology that uses sound, seismic sensors and thermal imaging in order to track activity done underground. In a video released by the lab, red and rainbow-color emissions are patterned on a background of a blue screen. A title that opens the video explains: “identifying the sound of digging through seismic sensors” (highlighting in the origin). Nicole Starosielski describes heat-based media as producing a “radiant spectrum,” marked by thermal emissions^.10 Thermal imaging most common use in warfare is to track the movement of bodies in space or to track consistency attached to or within bodies. For example, the use of thermal vision to track boats carrying refugees drifting in the Mediterranean or the use of thermal vision to detect weapons and explosive carried on bodies. With these usages thermal vision reinforces the notion of surface, demarcating bodies or land as containers with an external layer, a shell. But what we see in the video released by the Technological Lab for Tracking and Exposing Tunnels is much more abstract and corresponds first with the ground, indicating human activity via the medium of the earth. As such, thermal imaging abstracts both soil substance and bodies.

Thermal vision traverses vision: corresponding not with a scale of brightness and light but one of hot and cold, or the accumulation of energy. A former war photographer told me a story about a sniper who was assigned to sit in a house for an entire month and surveil a certain suspect in the neighboring house with a thermal Weapon Sight. For the entire month the sniper saw the house inhabitants, the suspect and his wife, mostly as two stains of energy moving in space. After a while he learnt to discern one body from another – the suspect from his wife—based on their energetic consistency. This story awkwardly brings together surveillance and intimacy, interiority and recognition. It made me think about the radical abstraction of space and bodies by means of penetrating and traversal. In the abstraction, under the surface, where bodies are no longer (or, perhaps, more than ever) delimited, and the space is turned inside out—despite the diffusion, what seems to be consistent are narratives of hostility pertaining to both landscape and subjective agents.

(Fig 4: screen shot from a video released on Israeli news depict the identification and capturing of Hamas combatants emerging from a tunnel. Released July 17, 2014)

III.

Vital Lethality

In his article Weizman notes the importance of metaphors related to animal behavior in poststructuralist military tactics, such as swarm intelligence or worms that eat their way through substance. Like with The Snake, the means of operating and the strategic thinking behind it, entail something vital that draws from organic and biological life.

In 2019 another press release announced that The Snake is now operative in high-precision invasive medical procedures. This adds to its vitality an additional component. Like other technologies presented here, the technology itself is used to penetrate both the unknow subterranean of the ground and of that of the human body, exploring depth. From its very initiation at the news item, the rhetoric around The Snake is that of a technological development meant for both elimination and rescue, defense and care. The tunnels themselves, an elaborate network of dozens of miles-long underpasses also known as “The Gaza’s Metro” are used, among other things, as a supply chain for food, construction materials and medicine for a city of over 2 million residents being put under blockade for over 14 years, held on the verge of a humanitarian crisis, on the verge of disaster. The tunnels are a source of life.

Laleh Khalili contends that counterinsurgency is a liberal warfare that entails biopolitical use of power and draws on a legal and humanitarian discourses. It means that side by side with its use of armed power it attends life and nurtures them and that the way it uses its power to take life also includes some thinking on how to preserve life. The terminology of surgical precision, of targeting only affected organs, is very much the product of such biopolitical warfare. Biopolitical warfare entails a conundrum under which killing can pass under humanitarian law. Biomatric warfare, a division that includes an explosive fish or an army of arthropodous robots, enable operations of precision and distance, that are vital as much as lethal. With surgical precision warfare is not about killing the occupied population, but about removing the sick part (this is true of course for a pre-October 2023 approach. Today, Israeli military power makes no distinction between civilian population and Hamas combatants, as the high number of civilian casualties show). This resonates with a medical approach in which sickness is isolated to specific organs and so does the treatment, rather than addressing the body as a whole. Khalili demonstrates her argument by analyzing a discourses of “democratization” or the legal and public attempts to ethicalize war, that perceives war as beneficial for the civilian population, a form of care. 

IV.

Deep Sovereignty

The video demonstration of The Technological Lab features the medium of heat, but also that of sound. With this demonstration of how to listen to tunnels, let me collect some points about what I termed penetrative aesthetics. First, like in the case of thermal media, the operative use of vibrations entails a variety of applications in which the depth of the earth and that of the body coalesce. Sound vibrations, for example, are used today in experimental pharmacology to target and apply drugs only to affected organs. Drugs are capsulated in air bubbles and, with an external exposure to vibration, are mobilized inside the body. Consistent with the way it is used in warfare, medical media is a means of penetration, precision, targeting and isolating a part from the whole. Second, and perhaps somehow contradictory, sound in these cases is measured through resonance, which destabilizes a sense of source as well as the unicentricity and directionality of what we call an operation. Operating with sound means operation with a level of uncertainty and indeterminacy. Here it should be noted that with all the high tech and empirical measures, the IDF tunnel warfare is extremely speculative. Thirdly, sound is one measure in an assembled technology that captures movement (sensors), energy (thermal vision) and echo/depth (sound) all of them cater to an image. This image is positioned beyond the threshold of visibility, transgressing indexicality as the photographic image main logic, and certainly needs a trained viewer to read it. 

Through the tunnels of the ear things get further abstract and speculative. To the technological assemblage of cohering and controlling depth I want to add one last operational field, also directed at spheres of interiority. Resilience, as a set of psycho-pedagogical practices had become a prevalence civil infrastructure in conflict ridden geographies. What is termed in Israel the tunnels threat is not just handled on the level of security, but concerned the wellbeing of the civilian population living across and around Gaza. Projects ranging from mindfulness workshops to neuro-feedback experimentation, as benefiting as they are for the population, are meant to rehabilitate and therefore shape civil society according to security logic of animosity. 

These practices call to mind what Luciana Parisi and Steven Goodman term Mnemonic Control, a biopolitical horizon where our very cognitive system is already patterned along different forms of governance and management.¹¹ Parisi and Goodman look at advertisement as forming cognition and shaping the percepts of an uber-consumerist subject in a capitalist regime in realms of desire and subjectivity. I am interested in thinking of neurofeedback and neurodesign as means of interiority that cater to resilience in a biopolitical warfare. Cultural theorist Joshua Neves notices a continuum between the mediated environment of the Smart House or the internet of things, and the Smart body or the internet of bodies.¹² He notices how a series of technologies directed at optimizing our bodies no longer work according to the logic of extension to the body, a logic of prosthetics, but rather are mutually-constituted with the body. Here media is situated in interiority, constitutive of inner organs and mental faculties. This leads him to explore the new neurological directions taken by the pharma industry, among them microdosing.

Mindfulness, certainly a beneficial practice for the contemporary neoliberal subject, is a way to channel psychic energy in a way that makes one present, aware, goal oriented and able to act. Similarly to the reduction of the image to a sphere of operation, what is at stake here is directionality and output. Neurofeedback was conceived as a way to avoid a more invasive medical or surgical intervention in cases of neurological and psychological illness. It uses videogame or 3D simulation platforms to train our minds to re-channel neurological transmissions and recharge mnemonic patterns. In military context it is used to treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (we can see this being demonstrated in Harun Farocki’s video Serious Games. Some experimentation with the technic is conducted by Israeli labs, experimenting on Israeli soldiers with funding by the US military). Neurofeedback is thus used for the aftermath of battle as a form of maintenance in a perpetual war. This too is a biopolitical thinking of sustaining and supporting life, of providing care, that coalesces with improving and optimizing the bodies and minds of combatants. Resilience, according to Jose Brunner and Galia Plotkin Amrami, emerges as a discourse of survival in the neo-liberal state. They contend that the kind of civil contract that contemporary sovereignty has with its citizens does no longer includes prevention of harm, but rather commissions resilience as a sort of individualized protection kit from an imminent disaster. With resilience, rather than understanding the state as a unified political body, there are the optimized bodies of individual citizens.

As I showed here, I come to this study through working on security and military applications as a way to ask questions of sovereign modes of governance, containment and cooption. Going inside demonstrate the expanded horizons of control—control of minds and bodies, control of territory. Like the air, sovereign territory is hard to mark in the depth, where things become obscure. It involves fiction and speculation and an entire arsenal of technologies and technics to manage and monitor geological and biological movements.

V.

Epilogue

The Snake itself is partly a fiction. While the news release celebrated the avantgarde technology as the future of warfare, so far it is not even clear if The Snake was ever in use. An additional incident unearths the logic of subterranean control all together. On 6 of September, 2021 six Palestinians escaped the Gilboa Prison in Israel, a secured site where thousands of prisoners are held as administrative detainees. Among the six was Zakaria Zubeidi, a symbol of Palestinian resistance and endurance who fought in Jenin in 2006 when Israeli soldiers were walking through walls. The story of the escape sparks the imagination. The prisoners escaped through 22 meters of narrow tunnel they dug under the prison’s showers. Investigated about the escape after being caught, they explained they walked around the prison banging on the floor in order to locate the hollowest section of the prison. The wet soil under the shower turned out to be the ideal location. They dug the tunnel using whatever they could get—mostly spoons—and spread the content of the now hollowed passageway across the prison ground, turning the inside out. Among the many memes and viral images circulated frantically in social media after the escape, one, made by film scholar Ohad Landsman, paraphrased a citation from the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption that features quite triumphally a similar pattern of escape. The citation is as followed: “Zacharia Zubeidi, who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.” The sewage brings back the body in its traversed form. The many images of rogue tunnels, being penetrated by a sort of photographic fiber indeed have a rectal element to them. The story of the escape—a reality bigger than any fiction—perhaps traverses or alters the channels of control, reclaiming the tunnel as a means to subvert and disturbs deep sovereignty.

(Fig 5: the Gilboa Prison Tunnel)

1. The news item was originally aired on Channel 2 news, June 11, 2009. Can be found on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-dzZBa6TQE (Last accessed April 28, 2022).
2. Thomas Keenan, “Counter Forensics and Photography,” Grey Room 55, Spring 2014, 58-77; Allan Sekula, “The Instrumental Image: Steichen at War,” in: Photography Against the Grain, Halifax: Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984, 32-51
3. Harun Farocki, “Phantom Images,” Public, no. 29, January 1, 2004, p. 17. This much cited text by Farocki is based on a talk delivered at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany in 2003, translated to English by Brian Poole
4. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2019
5. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, (trans.) Patrick Camiller, London: Verso Books, 2009 (1989). Steven Graham, Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers, London: Verso Books, 2018. Lisa Parks, Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror, New York and London: Routledge, 2018. Eyal Weizman, “Introduction to the Politics of Verticality,” in: OpenDemocracy (23 April 2002), https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/article_801jsp
6. .Caren Kaplan, Aerial Aftermath: Wartime from Above, Durham: Duke University Press, 2018
7. Colonel Dr. Sahul shay, “Underground Warfare,” in: Ma’arachot 389 (May 2003), 36-43. 
8. Eyal Weizman, “Walking Through Walls: Soldiers as Architects in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Radical Philosophy 136 (March-April 2006), https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/walking-through-walls
9. Nicole Starosielski, “Thermal Vision,” Journal of Visual Culture 18, No. 2 (August 2019). See also: Nicole Starosielski, “The Materiality of Media Heat,” International Journal of Communication 8 (2014): 2504
10. Joshua Neves, “The Internet of People and Things,” Technopharmacology, co-authors Aleena Chia, Joshua Neves, Susanna Paasonen and Ravi Sundaram, Berlin and Wisconsin: Meson/Minnesota University Press, June 2022
11. Fenwick McKelvey and Joshua Neves, “Introduction: Optimization and its Discontents,” Review of Communication 21:2, 2021, 95-112. https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2021.1936143
12. Jose Brunner and Galia Plotkin Amrami, “Securing Resilience and the Disaster to Come,” Hazman Hazeh (This Time), November 2020 (in Hebrew), https://hazmanhazeh.org.il/resilience/

Dr. Laliv Melamed is a Professor of Digital Film Culture at the Goethe University, Frankfurt. She specializes in non fiction film and media. She is the author of Sovereign Intimacy: Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence (CUP, 2023), as well as articles, short essays and book chapters on Israel-Palestine, media, affect and politics that appeared in JCMS, Discourse, American Anthropologist Review, Social Text (online), World Records and NECSUS, among others. Her current book project studies the entanglement of military optics with cultural imaginaries of violence, civil consent and secrecy. Additionally, she has worked as film programmer and curator for DocAviv, Artport, Oberhausen Film Festival, The Left Wing Film Club, and the Israeli nonprofit Zochrot.

The post Turning the Inside Out / Laliv Melamed appeared first on Maarav.

^{Left our hometown to pursue our dreams,
Work so hard every day in a foreign land far from home.
As a labor, make only enough to feed ourselves,
Yet still need to set aside the money for our mortgaged land.
Working in the Jews’ land makes us heroes
We have to tolerate hard work and harsh words.
The lover back home has been changing and it’s heavy on my heart.
It’s hard to make ends meet with the salary they pay
Is there anyone who sympathizes with us?
Working for other people means no comfort,
Some nights they fight, dangers surround us
The pay they promised, we’ve never got it
We don’t know who to turn to.
This is the truth about Thai labors in the Jews land
The money we make is merely over 30,000 Baht
Then come these bills for electricity, water, taxes, and food to pay
Only 10,000 Baht left to send home to Thailand
Is there any organization that can fix this?
If you can’t, you’d better not send more workers
Because we feel like we are being buried alive here.}

This song was published on YouTube by Sombat Khaophuk in 2016, but the writer is unknown. The male singer’s voice is accompanied by a guitar alongside images filmed by a cell phone of Thai farmworkers performing different tasks in the fields in Israel. The song’s protagonist complains about the violations of his rights, the treatment of his employer and calls for solidarity. All those experiences, together with the violence of the conflict he became entangled in, causes him emotional and mental distress. 

This song is one out of a larger corpus of cultural productions created by Thai migrants around their experiences in Israel. These songs are part of a tradition of popular folk songs such as molam and lukthung, focusing on the migration experiences of the people of Isaan, the northeast region of Thailand. Most of the Thai migrants in Israel come from Isaan, where migration to different labor markets around the globe became a central phenomenon in the lives of many, often across multiple generations within one family. The people of Isaan are placed in the bottom of Thailand’s socio-economic hierarchies, following years of unequal treatment from the county’s central regimes, which led many to migrate internally and overseas destinations. Stereotypes around the people of Isaan became a common discourse by the urban elite in Thailand and in the media, discussed as problematic “backward” rural villagers who are not part of the Thai project of modernity and progress.

This song and many others were published online in social networks such as YouTube and Facebook. These virtual communal spaces created fertile infrastructures for Thai farmworkers in Israel to interact, complain, negotiate their subjectivities, relations with Israel and their home, and produce knowledge about their experiences. Those virtual spaces flourished in light of the Israeli migration regime and policies aiming to maintain the Jewish majority by preventing integration of non-Jewish workers through policies controlling migrant workers’ lives, exploitative employment structures, continuous rights violations and social and physical isolation.There are multiple ways to approach the songs written by Thai migrants in Israel. They can be analyzed through poetic literary perspectives, focusing on the metaphors, references and cultural spheres they emerge and engage in, such as vernacular Buddhism. In the following, I suggest four paths to approach the songs using an anthropological perspective to analyse the Thailand-Israel migration regime and the lived experiences of Thai workers in Israel. There are many other ways to encounter these cultural productions. This is an invitation for others to do so. 

Complaint songs

The theorist Sarah Ahmed (2021) asks us to listen to “biography of complaint” with a feminist ear in order to “hear who is not heard”. Adopting her approach, when engaging with the songs, reveals how migrants attempted to challenge their mistreatment and rights violations through a spectrum of acts of resistance. As part, some occasionally used their collective power to protest the treatment by their Israeli employers, organized strikes or used the assistance of human rights organisations.  

Yet, most of the migrants’ daily acts of resistance are made in the intimacy of the farms and within the intimacy of the labor relations between the workers and their employers. These “intimate complaints” are hardly heard and are mostly invisible, as they are not counted in the statistics of complaints made by migrants to NGOs, nor are they documented in the state’s official statistics. Often, even when migrants do complain about their mistreatment and rights violations, it results in a compromise on their behalf, settling on much less than they are entitled to by law, as it is “better than nothing”. 

However, the complaints made through songs written by Thai migrants take a public form for everyone to hear, or at least to those who wish to listen. As such, the songs can be read as “biographies of complaints”, a way for migrants to exercise their labour agency. What do Thai workers in Israel complain about? Songwriter Sanya Hitakun asks us to listen: 

Lao Isaan Man/ Sanya Hitakun_²

I am ^{a Lao Isaan man who left home to work overseas.
Although Israel is far from Thailand, my heart is always close by.
Working hard in distance leaves me feeling lonely. 
It is not an exaggeration to say that it is extremely hot here and my face is burning.
Every day, I only hear commands, some of which are just annoyingly repetitive.
I have a huge debt because I sold buffalos and pawned my land to come here.
I don’t know when I will have enough money to redeem them.
My beautiful lady, please don’t give up on me. 
Your handsome man will work hard to earn money.
When we become a family, I promise to provide a wealthy life for our future.
For now, let me pay back the debt first, and when I have enough money, we can talk about our future.
Even though I am exhausted, I will not give up on our dream of living together in the future.
I work hard each day from 5 am until it gets dark. 
Some unlucky days, I must climb up the date tree and get injured by its thorns.
Although I am Lao and look like a Lao person, I never give up. 
As a son of my father, I work hard and hope to pay back the debt,
Be proud to be a debt-free person.}

Songs as traces 

The songs also express a range of emotions. They express anger at the treatment from their employers, longing for home and their families, and a sense of physical and mental exhaustion. As they describe their daily reality, migrants’ songs also become documented testimonies, a repository of knowledge and experiences. As such, they leave traces of life lived under the burden of debts and the pressure to provide and to survive. The songs provide evidence of harsh living conditions, of rights violations, and feelings of isolation and marginalisation. Theorist Eyal Weizman (2017) suggests that following those traces not only provides information, but also transforms the audience who encounter them, as they bear witness to migrants’ experiences. Engaging with these cultural productions thus holds the potential to transform us to become witnesses, asking us to listen and to be active. 

The subject position of Thai migrants in Israel is further contextualized and localized by describing experiences of violence and war. The recruitment of Thai migrant workers to the agriculture sector in the 90’s was part of Israel’s aim to replace, weaken and control the Palestinian workforce from the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza. Following October 2023, those measures have been used by Israel to inflict further violence on Palestinians by restricting their access to the labor market. Parallel, Israel have been dramatically increasing the recruitment of migrant workers while legislating further harmful policies. In the songs, migrants describe the emotional stress and the fear of injuries and death and provide evidence for the lack of adequate protection. Such is the song by Pongpat Pasunjon from 2014:

A Laborer Veteran/ Pongpat Pasunjon³

^{I come from Issan to work in a war land.
Hearing the explosive bombings and missing my beautiful lady back in the rice field village.
There are sounds of bombings and gunfire in Gaza.
Oh, my dear, I miss our home terribly and wish to return, but I cannot.
We are in huge debt and so I must suffer in the bunker.
If I am unfortunate, it would not be worth the effort. 
So it’s better to rush to the bunker.  
The loud bombing sounds like a huge thunderstorm in our rice fields. 
When the bombing ends, a laborer veteran like me must return to work again.
I must endure for those who are waiting for me. 
Even the bombs cannot stop me from fighting for a better future.
Please wait for me, if I am still alive, in five years. 
A veteran laborer will return to hug those who are waiting at home.} 

Songs of longing and belonging 

The gravity of the migrants’ sending communities and their connection to their homes in Isaan are another central theme in the songs. Their home communities, the migrants are telling us, are important for them and are spaces worth fighting for. The songs are written in a dialogue with Isaan, as the space where the loved ones are, the responsibilities to provide are actualized and where the songs’ protagonists belong. Their absence is only temporal, and the motif of the anticipated return is dictating the temporalities of their lives in Israel, as they are counting the days until their contracts end. In reality, their return is temporary, as most migrants continue to engage in cycles of migration to sell their labor in multiple destinations during their lives.

Nevertheless, I suggest that the songs imagine the sending communities as a grounding space, a locality that is available for them in times of need, helping them deal with the present’s hardships, a place they imagine they can always return to. What will come after the work contract ends, the songs tell us, is for future worries, beyond the scope of the nostalgic sentiment ruling the description of homes. The relations of the writers to Isaan are reflected, for example, in the song: 

5 years and 3 months/ Titharachakon Chantem⁴

^{I left my home with hope for a better future for my family.
Left my loved ones to live in a faraway land, a thousand kilometers away
Even though it is hard or extremely difficult, I will stand
For a better life for my family and to end our poverty.
I work diligently with sweat pouring down my face, earning money for my employer
Under the burning sun, I tell myself I can do it.
I am fine here, so Mom and Dad, don’t worry about me
Even though it is hard, I will not give up for my family
Mom and Dad, please wait for me. It will not be a long time
It is physically hard, but my heart will not give up
In 5 years and 3 months, I will return to dine with mom and dad.
Being a laborer is like trading our sweat for their money.
In 5 years and 3 months, I will return to dine with mom and dad.
For 5 years and 3 months, I must endure hard work for my family to be happy.}

As the songs articulate, there is pain that is caused by the anxieties of being forgotten by loved ones back home, that is, I suggest, related to the fear of losing one’s place of belonging. The migrants are asking their loved ones to hold the space for them as participating subjects in their communities and homes while they are away. Holding this space has multiple functions in my reading of the songs, as it provides a purpose and meaning for the stressful physical and mental conditions they experience. However, there is another request voiced in the songs. That is to hold a space to be full subjects, in contrast to their erased and fragmented subjectivity in Israel. The songs can be read as a plea of the workers to their communities to help them to be more than “only workers” while in Israel, to move away from reduced subjectivity, to be full subjects who care, act and belong. 

The “migrant hero” figure  

To deal with the agony they are facing, the protagonists of many of the songs capture themselves as heroes, as a figure emerges from below as a self-constructed gaze of the migrants over themselves. The “migrant hero” emerging in the songs is a particular type of hero, who is fighting the hardships to provide for his family. Among the tools the hero uses in his multiple battles are tolerance, patience, and endurance. As in the song:

Superman College/ The Moshav Band⁵

^{We sell labor and worker is our position
We sell labor and our assumed name is Thai worker
We are up for work early, it’s our Thai worker standard
We don’t mind hard or light work, we stay composed for our dreams
Exhausting work and a lonesome heart but we are persevering and ready to tackle
Because we are in a superman college, we learn and practice patience
We train our minds to overlook idleness, experience is our college degree
We sell labor and worker is our position
We sell labor and our assumed name is Thai worker
We are up for work early, it’s our Thai worker standard
Success comes with determination and consistency
So don’t give up, grab this opportunity with both hands and do your best
Because we are in a superman college, we learn and practice patience
We train our minds to overlook idleness, experience is our college degree
We sell labor and worker is our position
We sell labor and our assumed name is Thai worker.}

The figure of the “migrant hero” in the songs is constructed in relation to another figure created around the Thai migrants in Israel, that is the “taylandi” figure. Through the years, the word taylandi (a Thai man in Hebrew) became synonymous in Israel with farmworker. The Israeli public and state discourse around the “taylandi” figure along the years attributed specific characteristics and behaviours to the Thai migrants, describing them as submissive, docile, easy to manage and fit to deal with exploitative labor conditions with not much resistance or complaining. The “taylandi” is characterized in Israel as a racialized gendered “other” to the Israeli Zionist “melting pot” ideology, who is willing to do the unbearable work that Israelis will not agree to perform. 

I suggest that the songs are capturing the tension of living between the “tailandi” figure and the “migrant hero” figure. It is the tension created by the reduction of subjects to workers and the need to develop survival techniques to live through and despite oppression and discipline. Thus, by emphasizing their Isaan identity and the gravity of their home communities, the songs resist both subject positions produced by the figures, as they wish not to be reduced to none of them. In my readings, they reject their identification as obedient ideal farmworkers, nor do they aim to engage in continuous heroic battles to survive the distress caused by the Israeli migration regime. Living in these tensions makes the migrants exhausted. The songs, thus, produce an imagination of the possibility of non-reduced subjectivity, of living beyond their position as workers and migrants.

Thai migration archive 

When former migrants who worked in Israel listen to one of these songs they may have the possibility to claim: I was there, I worked there, I lived there, I experienced there, what I lived through happened to me and others in my village, in my region, and is part of the collective realities of many around me. What opens if we think of the songs as part of a larger migration archive of Thai migrants in Israel? In what way can an imagined migration archive contribute to our understanding of the lives of Thai migrants in Israel? The culture theorist Arjun Appadurai (2003) argues that the possibilities of popular migration archives challenge the notion of what an archive is or could be. They provide spaces to imagine, as they build a capacity and reflect the aspirations of those who move, functioning as a link between what is desired and memory. Migration archives, thus, have agency as they are active actors in the localities they are part of.

To clarify, such an archive does not exist in the institutional sense, as there is no one location where those archival materials are stored, sorted and labelled. Imagining a Thai migration archive, emerging out of migrants’ lives and cultural production such as the songs, has an active role not only in gathering the traces, complaints, articulation of feelings and relations to home. Migration archives emerging from lives lived has the potential to activate their spectators and those who encounter them. They hold possibilities for  Isaan migrants as they create spaces to comment, negotiate, and engage with their concerns, identities and the translocal spatialities they are part of, for example, through the migrant hero figure. The archive also activates spectators by opening new fields of knowledge and access to lived experiences of Thai farmworkers in Israel. 

Yet, these archival encounters, as the one we engaged here through the songs, raise ethical questions to be considered. To name a few: How can we, as spectators of popular migration archives, engage with them through theory, practice, and political actions? Is visibility always helpful for the communities and individuals? What can be the costs and for whom when engaging in popular archival encounters? Is a Thai farmworkers migration archive asking to be defined, to be encountered, and by whom? Are anthropologists, artists and activists in danger of becoming the gatekeepers of archives through the knowledge they produce about them? And if so, what are our responsibilities towards the archive and its makers?

1. Sombat Khaophuk [YouTube channel]. “Thai workers in the Jews land”. YouTube, Posted on 2016, July 30. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-0gUx5HoQA&ab_channel=sombatkhaophuk. Appear in Shoham (2024, p. 122)

2. Sanya Hitakun [YouTube channel]. “Loas Isaan Man”. YouTube, Posted on 2011, August 25. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=594JD–V2jg&ab_channel=SanyaHitakun . Appears in Shoham 2024, p. 155. Lao Isaan man refers to belonging to the ethnolinguistic majority group in Isaan. For further reading: Keyes, C. F. (2014). Finding their voice: Northeastern villagers and the Thai state. Silkworm Books.

3. Pongpat Pasunjon [YouTube channel]. “A Laborer Veteran”. YouTube, Posted on 2014, July 23. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAx1wpFa_RQ&ab_channel=pongpatpasunjon . Appears in Shoham 2024, p.140.

4. Titharachakon Chantem [YouTube channel]. “5 years and 3 months”. YouTube, Posted on 2011, September 6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAHC-_iX7Qo&ab_channel=หนุ่มอุบลคนภูจอง. Appears in Shoham 2024, p. 130.

5. Piyapong Butkosa [YouTube channel]. “Superman College”. YouTube, Posted on 2014, June 20.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7hoAbjW600. Appears in Shoham 2024, p. 132.

The text is based on Shahar Shoham PhD dissertation: “The Heroes from Isaan Working in Israel: The Production of Migrants in the Thailand-Israel Migration Regime” (Humboldt University of Berlin, 2024). 

Assisted with translation from Thai: Phaksornkan Thongkam, Siriwatchaya Naowong, Nootchanok Jitpakdee and Pichapon Robru. 

Dr. Shahar Shoham is an anthropologist specializing in labor and forced migration at the intersection of policy, lived experience, and migrant-centred research. She previously directed the migrants and refugees department at Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and researched Israel’s externalization policies toward refugees. Currently, she is developing a collaborative multimodal visual anthropology project that builds on her doctoral research with migrants from Isaan. She is a Visiting Research Fellow at “ChainGE Lab: Labor Law for a Global Value Chain Economy” and an Associated Member at The Berlin Institute for Empirical Integration and Migration Research at Humboldt University of Berlin.

References

Ahmed, S. (2021). Complaint!. Duke University Press.

Appadurai, A. (2003). “Archive and Aspiration.” In: Brouwer, K. & Mulder, A. (Ed.), Information is Alive (pp. 4–25). V2 /NAi Publishers.

Weizman, E. (2017). Forensic architecture: Violence at the threshold of detectability. Zone Books.

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1. The Courier

In the beginning, there were forerunners, named after the main action they were required to perform: running. Running was a means to an end: delivering mail, goods, or a message to a specific person on behalf of another person or organization. The forerunner carried various news: victory, defeat, the conquest of additional territory, or a new tax regulation from the king. The action – running – has since changed to riding a scooter or an electric bicycle, but the goal is the same: a courier on a mission on behalf of a sender. What is the gospel that contemporary couriers deliver?

“Nothing in the world travels faster than Persian messengers. … Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor the darkness of night will prevent these messengers from quickly completing the task entrusted to them.“[1]

The contemporary messenger mediates between Man and his desires: taking care of all our needs, while we are confined to our homes and wandering around on our toes instead of our feet. The ‘blueish’ presence of these messengers on their electric bikes has become a Tel Avivian spectacle in recent years. At certain times of the day, it is rarer to spot a pedestrian, or a vehicle, rather than a delivery-man with a large cooler tied to the back of his tiny vehicle.

2. The Sender

The world we grew up on, up until the 21st century, was based on a capitalist agenda with the winning formula 8-8-8: eight hours of sleep, eight hours of work, and eight hours of leisure. The hours of leisure were also used to move the wheels of the economy. Through participation in consumer activities (the favorite pastime of every teenage girl, according to American producers, was spending time at the mall), or through staring at the tribal bonfire – television – people were exposed to advertisements that encourage consumerism. Today, none of these pillars exist as they did at the end of the twentieth century. Television channels have been replaced by streaming services; stores have been replaced by online shopping sites, and the workday and fixed wages have been replaced by ’employment flexibility’.

“With Wolt, you can make deliveries when, where and however it suits you – the decisions are in your hands! No obligation, no prior experience required – it’s really easy to start earning money!“, announces the recruitment page of the Wolt website. In exchange for that employment flexibility, Wolt couriers – defined as ‘independent contractors’– are required to file income tax returns, they are not entitled to any social rights, such as pensions, sick leave, convalescence, severance pay or overtime, and the employer can announce the termination of employment without any prior notice.

A representative of Wolt company testified before the court in 2022 that about ten thousand couriers are signed up on the platform. The average Wolt courier works about 48 hours a month, and makes an average of 2.5 deliveries per hour. The average salary is 69 Shekels per hour.

“To be your own boss,” is what Wolt promises its couriers. The company refers to them as ‘colleagues’[2] in a ‘collaborative community’, which is the ‘platform.’ The platform’s role is to connect the customer (the one who is at home, confirming an order) with the requested service (a burger at 1 a.m.), through the service provider (a courier on an electric bike). In exchange for the connection, the platform supposedly charges a modest fee from both the service provider and the service recipient.[3]

From the moment you press the button on your phone, confirming you truly want a burger at 1 a.m., the algorithm of the platform seeks a colleague, who is near the restaurant. The colleagues receive a message that they are requested to arrive at the restaurant as soon as possible, and after picking up the burger you have ordered, the platform navigates them through the streets of the city to the destination – your apartment. 

The platform’s algorithm determines which one of the workers will do the job; the algorithm provides instructions to the worker, and it is also what determines their salary according to a complicated and non-transparent formula. It is not a job without a boss, but it is rather working for a robo-boss: an invisible and all-knowing algorithm that treats the colleagues as replaceable robots. In charge of the invisible and all-knowing robots is an actual person – a capitalist or a digital entrepreneur, who distributes the platform between different countries, taking into account legislative and tax considerations.[4]

The algorithmic form of employment creates the most significant gap in the terms of employment of couriers, whether it’s the blue Wolt, the orange Tenbis, or the yellow Mishlocha. While the collaborative language (‘colleagues’, ‘community’) seeks to eliminate the hierarchy between employer and employee, seemingly creating a symmetry between them as ‘platform users’, there is actually a large asymmetry of information, deriving from the knowledge that the algorithm (= the company) has regarding the work environment, the number of employees, and to what extent this information is available to the average courier (not at all).[5]

3. The Exit Point

In New York, when you pass by the rows of buildings in the afternoon, you immediately recognize the pyramid: a stack of various cardboard boxes, taller than the average person, from Amazon, Target, Walmart, or some kind of fashion company. At the end of each workday, on the way back from work, you stop in front of the same giant pyramid and collect the goods you ordered a day or maybe just two hours before. Only tourists visit the actual stores. The volume of the box does not indicate its contents. A jar of jam from Walmart purchased on sale will be wrapped in two layers of plastic and topped with another generous layer of bubble-wrap. Since the chosen box is larger than the dimensions of the jar, the skilled worker will fill the space between the two with brown paper. This basic packaging should allow the jar to arrive safely in less than 24 hours from the giant Fulfillment Centers on the outskirts of the city to your doorstep.

What we refer to as a ‘big city’ is not only the outcome of the number of people who reside under a particular municipal authority (as evidence, many Chinese dormitories house more people than New York City), but rather a result of the quantity of encounters between people who live under that municipal authority. A vibrant big city will produce a large number of encounters – both planned and unplanned – through the existence of cultural, commercial, entertainment, leisure and dining venues for people who live within a certain radius to participate in, and to leave their homes for this cause.

In recent years, in Tel Aviv, like in other large cities around the world, tiny logistics centers, nestled within the city streets, began to emerge. From the outside, it may appear as a store, and it was a store until a moment ago, but now it is a small warehouse to which a constant stream of couriers on electric bicycles moves. These are dark stores.

Not long ago, there was a store whose products were manufactured in a nearby factory, which included a storage space in the back and a display in the front. Shoppers could enter it, pay with their money and leave with some kind of merchandise in their hands. Nowadays, urban commerce has changed beyond recognition: the store’s products are manufactured at the other end of the globe, displayed on a website and stored in a tiny logistic center which is accessible only to couriers. Shoppers press a button, and the merchandise arrives at their doorstep within fifteen minutes, two hours, or a day. Dark stores are the ones to enable this rapid delivery of merchandise.

If commerce is what encourages random encounters between people who live in the same area, without commerce – people cannot meet. The urban space will be neglected and abandoned to populations who have no choice but to wander the streets: homeless people, drug addicts, prostitutes and small criminals.

Similar processes of abandoning urban streets in favor of the comfort of spacious homes occurred in the 1950’s and 1960’s in the United States, in the Rust Belt cities – a phenomenon that was called the White Flight. The consequences in cities, such as Detroit or Baltimore are still felt to this day. Once there are no passersby on the street, there is no sense of safety. And since there is no sense of safety, there are no passersby. And despite the many attempts by both municipalities to illuminate and awaken their dystopian streets, they have not yet succeeded.

In this scenario, the presence of couriers on electric bicycles who flutter between tiny logistic centers around the city will be even more widespread: if it is dangerous to go out, it’s better to order a delivery. And if you order a delivery instead of going out into the street, the streets become emptier and therefore more dangerous. And so, as delivery platforms thrive, they will thrive even more, since they create processes that are difficult, and almost impossible to stop.

4. The Delivery

“I looked up again, and there before me were four chariots coming out from between two mountains—mountains of bronze. The first chariot had red horses, the second black,  the third white, and the fourth dappled—all of them powerful. I asked the angel who was speaking to me, “What are these, my lord?” The angel answered me, “These are the four spirits of heaven”.”

The prophecy described in the book of Zechariah is expanded in the vision of John into a detailed image of four messengers on horses, who carry the news of the upcoming Apocalypse – the first period in the long process of the Eschaton.

The meaning of the term apocalypse is the end of humanity. This does not necessarily imply the life or death of the human beings who make up humanity, but rather the end of the way they live. Humanity is more than the sum of all the human beings within it. Humanity is the social structures that human beings have created in society, culture, economics and politics. These social structures are facing drastic change. In contrast to the vision of Zechariah and John, the messengers who apprise the Apocalypse do not ride horses, they ride electric bicycles. 

Similar to the sender of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse – an invisible and all-knowing divine entity, the Wolt couriers are sent on their mission by an invisible and all-knowing algorithm. However, unlike the divine being, behind the algorithm stands a human being – a wealthy man – who sees the profit line of the approaching apocalypse.

In Pixar’s 2008 science fiction animated film Wall-E, set in the 29th century, future humans are depicted as fat, hedonistic and lazy creatures, who spend their days reclining in ergonomic armchairs, consuming their food through straws from large plastic cups, while staring at a floating screen that provides them with ‘content’, 24/7. The future humanity in this film has adapted to a life of comfort, and abandoned the need for activity, work, or social connections. It has become addicted to endless entertainment and consumerism. This is not very far from contemporary reality.

The multiple actions performed by different humans (ordering products to their doorstep) sterilizes and dismantles the public space of its meaning and reason for existence. Without a public space where people actually meet each other, the direct connection between humans is reduced. The meetings take place online on various platforms, intended to create alleged human contact (WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter). This is actually part of the disintegration of human society as we know it, and accordingly, the loss of what we grasp of humanity. This is the message that the messengers of the blue-collar Wolt carry.

[1] Herodotus, The Histories, Book 8, chapter 98, approx. 430 BC.

[2] Sivan Klingbail, A Request to a Lawsuit Against Wold: Denies the Couriers their Status, De Marker, 20th of August, 2020

[3]  Lawyer Daniel Ansky, The Case of Wolt Couriers,Orita Journal, a professional magazine for managers, salary and funds, February 21st, 2021

[4] There.

[5] Alex Rosenblat and Luke Stark, Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Uber’s Drivers, International journal of communication, 2015

[6] The contemporary term is ‘fulfillment house’.

[7] Dani Bar On, A 15 Minute Delivery? How? I Inflatrated Yango Deli, Haaretz newspaper, February 23st, 2022 

[8] The White Flight is a term that describes the processes of suburbanization in the 1950s and 1960s in industrial cities, mostly in the Midwest of the United States. The American dream for the middle class, that was established after World War II, included a house with a garden and a car. The American government’s investment in building freeways allowed for easy and fast travel between the suburbs and city centers, and led to the migration of powerful populations – mostly white – from city centers to the suburbs. The populations that remained in the city centers were the poorer strata of American society, many of them African-American. The abandonment of the powerful populations created a chain reaction that resulted in decreased value of urban real estate, the abandonment of houses and streets controlled by gangs.

[9] Zechariah 6: 1-5

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You will not be able to plug-in, turn on and cop out[³]

With a Captagon, at a Psy-trance party in the desert[⁴]

To undress from your uniform and dance with the stars[⁵]

 ^[1]Gil Scott Heron – The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (karaoke)

^[2]The text is written in the masculine form for convenience purposes only, but addresses all genders.

^[3]‘Blowup mini-market drug’ is an Israeli term, used for a wide range of chemicals designed to have effects that are similar to those of illegal drugs. For example, pentylenetetrazol was originally used for ADHD treatment (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). However, it was withdrawn from use, due to its high risk of addiction. Now it has been labeled by the media as the drug of ISIS.From Walla News website, 2015: “It’s a cheap drug, ecstasy for the masses,” says a police source. In fact, the drug costs 50 NIS per pill, much cheaper than an ecstasy pill, which earned it the street name ‘zbale’ (derived from the word ‘garbage’ in Hebrew).

[⁴]As the sun rose across the desert horizon, day broke. It’s an almost onomatopoeic word — ‘yom’ (day, in Hebrew). Small and prosaic. The mouth closed before it could even finish yawning stubbornly, as if it wanted to create something, but then swallowed that something in the same breath. On October 7th, Captagon pills were found on the terrorists who arrived at the Nova party.

According to Globes, this was their chemical composition:

Theophylline: a caffeine-like asthma drug, which enhances the stimulating effect of amphetamines.

Caffeine: a stimulant.

Diphenhydramine: a substance found in allergy medications, which, when combined with amphetamine creates euphoria and impulsivity.

Ephedrine: a drug for shortness of breath and asthma, which causes euphoria and sexual arousal, and can also impair decision-making.

Allopurinol: a drug for rheumatism and gallstones. Its psychoactive effect is unclear.

Benzocaine: a local anesthetic.

Trimethoprim: an antibiotic, which has been reported in rare cases to cause hallucinations.

[⁵]‘A dancer, an officer and a gentleman’ was one of the first to arrive at the scene of the massacre at the Nova Festival, and is now the undisputed winner of Dancing with the Stars for 2024! The dissonance between the horror scenes and his work in the show-business world is similar to the story of a judge on the show. Their encounter is just one of  the heartbreaking moments that will accompany the season from the first episode.

Nir Wolf summed it up beautifully in his  article: “The judge’s sister, Leah Yanai, was kidnapped to Gaza while dancing at the Nova, and was released; the actor Dor Harari described how he fought on the battlefield; the magician Hezi Din cried over the loss of a family member. Each of them told something sad to the camera, cried a little, wiped away the tears, and finally went on stage to entertain the people.” Nir Wolf, Israel Hayom.

Wolf managed to see the moment of transition from national trauma to the dance that followed, or should we say from trauma to the process of mourning, internalization and processing. But he sees it as a ‘corrupt dance’, since in his view the elitism of the stars leaves us to watch their grief from the sidelines, while cheapening and distancing it.

It’s not my apocalypse if I can’t dance in it!

Because the apocalypse[⁶] will not be televised

You will not receive a dedication with a song by “Hatikvah 6”[⁷] in the radio

And you will not be able to cry with Geula Even[⁸], while she is interviewing the families of the hostages[⁹] on the news 

No, the apocalypse will not be served in a bottle that doesn’t contain fruit

 [⁶]The apocalypse is revealed to prophets. It is written for the righteous, describing what will ultimately happen to the unjust world that currently exists. On the one hand, It is full of horrific and intimidating scenarios, but at the same time, it also arouses the eros of destruction, embellishing the horror with symbolism. It is a kind of joy for the wicked, who taste the offering from the eternal arm of the righteous God. The apocalypse separates good from evil, light from darkness, fear and heroism. The apocalypse is born in an already chaotic world. It is cruel and evil from its foundation, which cannot be corrected, and only God can help. The war of Gog and Magog is about the hope for victory against all odds. It is the grand finale, a victorious blow. Is it a bad ending or a good ending? We are still waiting.

[⁷]Since the beginning of the war, on the children’s morning radio program, kids have been asking to dedicate a song to their fathers who serve in the reserves, fighting the front line. The song Home by Hatikva 6 managed to express so innocently and directly the longing of so many families to be reunited. It gained more popularity in comparison to the single that they released on the occasion of the Iron Swords War:

“We will wait for the sun to return

To bring us back the light

That the sun will return

It will happen

And everything will pass

When the sun will return

When the sun will return”

Hatikva 6, The Sun Will Return, December 13, 2023.From the entry List of Israeli Music Inspired by the Gaza War, Wikipedia.

[^8]The violence of the war has opened cracks of bereavement and pain in everything. Even in our stars. Somewhere off screen, Geula Even breaks down and bursts into tears, when she can’t maintain the neutral appearance of a news reporter. She also had to change direction. At least for a while. To vent. She also wants to be a dancing star, but she couldn’t last long. This is a season in which the competition is extremely high; the casting directors brought the ‘big guns’ this time — Linoy Ashram and all. To be a contender means to keep on shining. With their pale light from distant galaxies or their second light, emanating from the screen – the stars shine upon us – even for a little while, though the darkness.

 [⁹]When Linoy Ashram and dancer Rafael Fleischman dedicated their Viennese waltz to the twins Ziv and Gali Berman, who were kidnapped from Kfar Aza on the black saturday of Simchat Torah, the participants in the program, as well as the audience in the studio and at home, could not remain indifferent. “We dedicate the song and dance titled Sad Roses to the Berman family. I know Ziv and Gali personally, I was with them at the Festigal. They worked in lighting, constantly bringing light and joy between or after the performances,” Ashram said before they began. “We would play backgammon together. There was always such a good atmosphere with them around. The fact that we still don’t know what’s happening to them is killing me. I cannot imagine what their family is going through, but I can say that they are not alone in this. No one has forgotten them, we are here and waiting for them. We will continue to say what we can so that they will return home safely.” Tvbee system.

In the current season, three dance performances were dedicated to the hostages.

Because the apocalypse will not be allowed for publication 

The apocalypse will not be televised 

In the finale of “The Next Star for Eurovision”¹⁰

And it will not slip as a sigh¹¹ from Assi Azar’s mouth

After another tear-jerking performanceIt will not be another historic night that will be talked about for generations¹²

 [¹⁰]Since the time of Aristotle, comedy has been a funny story about ordinary people who make mistakes, and tragedy is a sad story about injustice, in which high-ranking gods and great people sin. It has a cause and effect. The broadcasts of the tenth season of The Next Star for Eurovision began with a disruption in the broadcast schedule. The filming of the show began on September 10th, 2023, just before life turned upside down. Due to the Iron Swords War, its continuation was postponed. Initially, the broadcasts were supposed to begin on October 31st, 2023, with a special edition that was adjusted to the war. However, due to the death of the fighters in the battles in Gaza that day, the beginning of the broadcast was postponed again. During the show, one of the promising contestants, the late Shauli Greenglick, also died in Gaza. The unimaginable tragedy that occurred before the eyes of the entire nation caught the broadcasters off-guard again. The reality-show pendulum is swinging like a pirate ship in a nightmare. Everything is recycled before it even happens. The entertainment industry, which is known for shredding everyone who has been lured to swallow its cup of glamour by the jaws of show-business —  uses and throws away —  could no longer digest it. As a tribute, in the season finale, while celebrating the selection of Israel’s representative for Eurovision, just before the results of the viewer vote were in, Shauli’s family was invited to perform a song and commemorate those whose chances of winning were cut short.

[¹¹] Silences can be awkward, especially during prime time, but if you know how to use them correctly, they can become a defining moment.

^[12] On the night of April 13th, the eyes of the country and its allies were fixed on the black sky, in between the stars, in order to see the Comets and the Iranian UAVs land. However, the Comet did not land, and exactly like in a children’s tale, the happy ending unfolded the tale:

“Mankind, ignorant of the truths that lie within every human being, looked outward — pushed ever outward. What mankind hoped to learn in its outward push was who was actually in charge of all creation, and what all creation was all about.

Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end.

It flung them like stones.

These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth — a nightmare of meaninglessness without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.”

From The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut.

Titan is the name of the largest moon that circles Saturn. Indeed, the eyes of humanity are drawn to this celestial body in a special way — the lunar methane mass resembles a potential alternative home, since it recreates conditions that existed on Earth just before life began to develop here. Far from the sun, its water is trapped in blocks of ice, while the rain that fills its rivers and lakes is made of methane.

The apocalypse will not send a “Decree 8[^13]”, mid season 

The apocalypse will not serve as a “Trojan Pot”, made by Rachel from Sderot[¹⁴]

It will not be a character in a special episode of “Eretz Nehederet” 

In these days of uncertainty 

The apocalypse will not be the new Mergui, old Mergui or just Mergui[¹⁵]

Because the apocalypse will not be

In the apocalypse there will not be free-flowing traffic, along the 60 highway, “Together We Will Win”[^16] 

In the apocalypse you will not dance to the sounds of “Harbu Darbu”[¹⁷], but you will receive harsh criticism

The apocalypse will not be available for audience-vote on the app 

The apocalypse will be life itself[¹⁸] 

 ^[13]The ‘hero-warrior’ Tal Morad, a model and Instagram star who is not  a stranger to the reality format, arrived at his first meeting with his dancer-mentor straight out of the reserves. Xena, with whom he will share his journey into ballroom dancing and also love, commented: “He smelled bad”. 

[¹⁴] During the October 7th attack, civilians emerged as reluctant heroes, who managed to show exemplary resourcefulness and overcome the terrifying situation of the horror scenario. One of the most prominent stories was that of Rachel from Sderot. She received iconic representation and great interest around the world. She even appeared as a character in the sketch of the show Eretz Nehederet, when she presented a combat strategy, titled the Trojan Pot. 

[¹⁵] It’s just Mergui in a track-suit. He also lost control.

[¹⁶] No matter where you are: in the living room, at the cafe, on the way to work, in the office, in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, in the kindergarten, at a party, in your tracksuit; in the cold, in the heat, in the morning or in the evening – together we will win. Don’t you forget it.

[¹⁷] As the phrase ‘he who tooteth not his own horn’ goes, wrapping oneself in the lyrics of the chant Harbu Darbu by creators Ness and Stilla, couldn’t save Yana Yosef from elimination. On the other hand, it did cause its creators’ names to be pronounced by top-notch musicians around the world; alongside their mentions in magazines and newspapers, as well as on the UN stage, as an example of South Africa’s claim against the State of Israel for committing conscious and deliberate genocide against the Palestinians. Apparently, any publicity is good publicity

[¹⁸] Fear, compassion and the next war. I watch reality TV to keep my sanity, because the reality in itself is unbearable. To be together and to be able to be alone. Sad, everything is so sad, but you should never break your spirit. You have to keep on dancing, and this is the eternal proof. Leonard Cohen wrote that when he composed Dance Me to the End of Love he thought of the poor concentration camp musicians, who accompanied their friends to the entrance of hell. What a cruel and vicious world it is, when even the spirit is enslaved, and yet pays its last respects to a person. How can love for life be so cruel and terrible? The mixture of bereavement and ecstasy is not a new genre for us, in a country where Independence Day and Remembrance Day are celebrated in the same breath. The purpose of Tragedy is to bring the audience catharsis – a moment of purification. It is like repentance, and for a good catharsis you need two elements: fear and compassion, in perfect balance.

————————————————————-

Chava Alberstein also sings war songs so beautifully. They are steeped in pain and hope. But they too fail to prevent the next war. If dancing (according to Instagram) is physically understanding a melody, while deciphering its rhythm and tune, then this is an ecstatic moment, in which the outside activates the inside in a new way, according to a new law. A new opportunity.

In Scott-Heron’s original song (see cliff-note #1), the revolution will be televised, since the real revolution, according to him, is not an image. Heron-Scott explained the motivation behind writing this phrase by saying that the revolution must first happen in one’s mind, before it can change the course of one’s life. And what will change the mind cannot not be captured by a recording. (https://www.google.com/url?q=https://mediaburn.org/video/the-90s-raw-gil-scott-heron/&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1738965244951338&usg=AOvVaw2LP3xABDeAyDWjvDEJmLsN).

This song also represents what the apocalypse will not be, or what will not happen in it. It is a story about the place of art and entertainment within society; about the status of artists and entertainers on the cusp of times. The apocalypse, like the revolution, calls for radical change and cries out for abject injustice. But the revolution determines that our fate is not a decree from heaven. The change begins with me, the ironic-cynical-sarcastic dissonance undermines the format itself. When reality manages to invade reality TV is when reality is so present that even its televised version cannot mask it.

The post The Apocalypse Will Not Be Televised / Dafna Falk appeared first on Maarav.

The cycle of ages is just one of many that the yogi experiences and is aware of. The universe is like a system of gears. In addition to the wheel of ages, there is also the wheel of birth and death, that is, the reincarnations in different bodies. This occurs alongside shorter cycles, such as the transition from sleep to wakefulness and vice versa, which is also perceived as a temporary departure from the body. The shortest and most elusive cycle however – Sukshma as they say in Sanskrit, meaning “thin and subtle” – is the cycle of the senses and the mind (Manas).

For example, in every blink of the eye, one’s sight rapidly shifts from complete blurriness to a clear, sharp image, and then in an instant the mind recognizes the objects and thinks of their names and concepts. Each time the eyelids are closed, everything is erased again, but still there is a feeling as if the external environment is concrete and continuous. In addition, with each inhalation and exhalation a certain thought arises, based on words and ideas, either as an inner voice or as vocalized speech. However, the yogi recognizes that in the silent gaps between breaths there is an empty space, without any thoughts or distinctions, and he learns to linger there, in order to rest from the fluctuations of consciousness.

Following his observation and analysis of mental, physical and transcendental processes, the yogi experiences the whole of reality as a kind of dream. Within this big dream, called “waking life”, other dreams are created, daydreams and night-dreams, constantly expanding and bursting like soap bubbles. We exist inside a Matryoshka doll made of dreams, and it is not clear where the universe begins and where it ends. Only the fact of our death is certain, however vague. So even if the apocalypse is imminent, approaching us with giant steps, it is nothing more than a slight ripple in the ocean of Saṃsāra, the cosmic cycle of births and deaths.

The yogi dedicates his life to prepare for the moment of death, in order to leave his body with a sense of equanimity (Samatva) and non-attachment (Vairāgya). What determines the next reincarnation is the Kratu, the last thought and intention, just before leaving the body. If the yogi manages to keep his mind empty, without any fears, desires or aspirations, he will be freed from Saṃsāra. That is, he will not be born again, and thus won’t have to suffer another incarnation. This liberation, called Moksha or Nirvāṇa, is not really the end, but a transcendent state in which concepts such as “end” or “beginning”, “death” or “birth”, no longer bear any meaning. Even the word “state” is not exactly appropriate to describe it. Absolute annihilation is more extreme than any possible end.

To illustrate this enigmatic cycle of existence, let us turn to a story-within-a-story from the Sanskrit literary masterpiece called the Yoga-Vasishtha. The text is a dialogue between the sage Vasishtha and Prince Rāma on the nature of Saṃsāra and the ways to release oneself from it. In one chapter, Vasishtha tells Rāma about a hunter who, many years ago, came to his hut in the forest, requesting to ask him some questions. The two discussed the mysteries of the universe and consciousness, and the hunter, who admired Vasishtha’s wisdom, decided to become his disciple. The hunter was curious about the life’s journey of his new guru, and wished to know how Vasishtha had learned everything he knew. Vasishtha in response told him a story:

Many years ago I decided to become an ascetic, and wanted to learn witchcraft. I abandoned my previous life, my wife and children, and moved to a hut in the forest by myself. I practiced meditation day after day, and recited the most powerful mantras, until I could leave my body at will and wander through the forest. One night I floated to the nearest village, and entered the body of another man while he was sleeping. I wandered around his body and saw all his internal organs, and then I went up and entered his head. In the space of his skull I found an entire universe, with a sun, an ocean, mountains, palaces, villages, animals and people. I realized that this world was his dream, and that I actually saw his dream as an independent reality, as if I were looking through his eyes.

After sunset, when it got dark, the man returned to his home, entered his bed and fell asleep inside his dream, and I fell asleep along with him. At that very moment, the world was struck by a huge flood that destroyed everything. I was immediately swept away, and while trying to hold on to a rock, a huge wave hit me and washed me back into the waters. Finally, I managed to climb to the top of a high mountain, and I looked at the utter destruction around me. When I saw this world destroyed to the very ground, I was filled with deep sorrow and cried for a long time. I became emotionally involved in his dream world, and completely forgot about my own previous life. Out of confusion, I merged with his soul and thought to myself: “This is my father, this is my mother, this is my wife and these are my children. This is my village, this is my home, this is where I live.”

After a few dreams, I again saw the end of the world coming. The entire universe went up in flames and became completely scorched. This time I was prepared, and even while the flames burned my flesh, I felt no pain at all, because I realized: “This is just a dream.” Not long after, I forgot my previous experiences once again. One day an ascetic came to my doorstep to collect alms, so I hosted him for dinner. When we talked after dinner, he suddenly said: “Don’t you know that this is all a dream? I am a person in your dream, and you are a person in someone else’s dream.” At that moment I sobered up, and then I remembered that I am a yogi myself. I replied: “I will now return to the world in which my own body exists.” I wanted to observe the body from which I had come out, and the body into which I had entered, and thus to return to the starting point.

The ascetic watched me close my eyes and make an effort in vain, and then he smiled and said: “Where do you think these two bodies are?” He was amused that I could not find my body, because I could not even get out of the head of the person whose dream I had entered. Confused and anxious, I asked him: “Well, where ARE those two bodies?” And he replied: “While you entered the other person’s body, a great fire broke out in the forest, destroying both your bodies. Now you are a villager, a family man and a householder. You are no longer a yogi.” When he told this to me, I was struck with astonishment. I tried to further question him in order to understand how he knew these details, but he just leaned back and closed his eyes, in deep silence that merged with the stillness of the night. From that day on I did not let him leave my house, he stayed with me until the moment of his death, and only then did he agree to tell me that in order for me to understand, I must become a yogi again.

The hunter interrupted Vasishtha’s story and said: “Dear Guru, I understand! So it means that you, me and everyone are actually characters in someone else’s dream.” The hunter did not understand the story correctly, and wanted to leave the hut, feeling that he had discovered the great secret. Vasishtha pleaded with him to stay by promising that he had much more to learn, and even offered to reveal his future to him, but the hunter refused. He left and moved on with his life. He went on to new reincarnations, until he finally became a yogi, and attained liberation.

What does this strange story try to teach us? What did the hunter misunderstand? What did Vasishtha understand? There is no doubt that this entangled narrative echoes the human confusion about the end. Of course, we are not just characters in someone else’s dream, but we also dream the other as the other, and then again dream ourselves as characters for the other, who is actually our own self, like an infinite fractal of empathy. The narratives we identify with are like a dream or a nightmare about an imagined event, and each new crisis causes us to quickly forget the previous one, even if its “fruits” are still being felt. Therefore, the more we are immersed in dreams – whether daydreams, nightmares, or god forbid, “scientific facts” – the greater is our self-forgetfulness.

But what does it actually mean to remember oneself? To observe one’s own gaze, to free oneself from the illusion of being “inside” the external world, and to see it as projected in consciousness from within. An apocalypse is a purely subjective experience. Each year, countless natural disasters, catastrophes, wars, and murders occur in the world. Yet, merely thinking about them does not resemble one’s own death, the first-person experience that erases everything. The entire universe turns off at once, like a phone that ran out of battery. It doesn’t matter how many apps were open at that time, who sent us a message or what was reported in the news. Suddenly, there is silence, until the next recharge. Therefore, the lucid and awakened yogi remains in equanimity even when flames consume his body, because he knows that the end already lies in each passing moment, and he is not afraid of it. For him, the end of the world already rests in its beginning, and is constantly present in the gaps that exist in-between.

Doron Peisic is a consciousness researcher, lecturer and PhD student in the Philosophy department at the Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on the Yoga and Tantra traditions of Ancient India, alongside a broader interest in Shamanism, Hypnosis, and Lucid dreaming.

Website:

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It is important to say, first of all, that the apocalypse is a Christian variant on the End of Days prophecy. Searching for ‘signs of the apocalypse’ may cause panic, since the Christian Armageddon is only revealed when everything is already lost, when there is nothing left to do. This is when the moment of reward and punishment arrives, shaking the world, leaving only those who have behaved well to survive it. According to this reading, the Horseman of the Apocalypse are the vanguard of the disaster, from which there is no escape.

As opposed to that, I will try to present the horseman of the apocalypse as a seismograph of the apocalyptic state: the way in which the treatment of the harbinger, the first messenger, may cause the spread of this situation or its demarcation; the collapse of systems, or the act of holding a racing bull by its horns. I see this kind of seismograph in the way that the State of Israel deals with the challenge of civil protection.

At the beginning there was a shelter. The neighborhood shelter is a spatial marker, like a grocery store or a school, and the placement of the shelters creates a map that networks the residential neighborhoods and also tells something about its neighbors. Similar to the hundred-meter map that was used during Covid, the number of seconds it takes to arrive at the shelter creates the image of the neighborhood, and the possible connections that may be formed within it.

In addition, the shelter of the shared building is also a spatial marker of proximity: the public space of the building is not only a transition area but rather a space that one stays in, which requires shared maintenance at best, or shared neglect. However, here we can see that the idea behind protection is undergoing a process of privatization: shifting from a problem of the urban planner to a problem of the shared building. Unlike the neighborhood map, the characteristics of the building shelter are not related to traffic regulation, or strategic location: it can be central or hidden, depending on its planner. Thus, the shelter was relegated from a strategic point in space to a suppressed point: the public was sent to the stern of the ship.

However, the shared shelter is also behind us. Following the Gulf War, civil defense moved into the house itself: from the sealed room, the path to the residential protected space was short – the so-called ‘mamad’. The path became even shorter with the integration of economic interest: the residential secure space is considered a ‘service area’ and not a main space, which permits adding an entire room to the house. This incentive was already difficult to resist, hence, the ‘mamad’ was annexed to the house.

In its public guise, civil defense was pushed to the margins. Its transformation to the private sector mobilized its path back to the center and from this moment, it took over public systems. Instead of being an addendum to the house – a protected space that happens to be inside one’s home – the ‘mamad’ became the initiator of the plan. If its location is the largest stone, the clearest point in the planning sudoku, it is easier to plan the house around it. From now on, it is no longer a home with a secure space, but rather a house that is wrapped around it. 

Hence, civil defense returned to the public domain: not only did the entire apartment become an annex to the ‘mamad’, but also the entire building. The concrete shelters are stacked on top of each other, forming the building’s core. And not only the building, but the entire residential space: ‘TAMA 38’, which was rooted in earthquakes and continued in civil defense, is the significant spatial generator of the current era.

The Home Front Command’s hopes were to integrate the protected space as part of the house, thus sustaining a routine of war. Entering and exiting. Alarms as a part of life. Beyond the costs associated with this approach, it seems that the opposite result was achieved: instead of creating a routine of a refuge-city, the panic was spread to the entire Israeli public space.

*

The conceptualization of civil defense as the Apocalyptic Horseman of War does not aim to replace cause and effect. War is war, and treating its symptoms is a very indirect – and often unexpected – way to influence the event itself. Civil defense must be examined, first and foremost, with tactical and strategic tools, aiming to save lives.

As mentioned, civil defense affects the way that war is perceived: whether the apocalyptic space is delineated or whether it takes over additional territories by using its emissaries. While the presence of the public shelter is integrated into everyday life in the urban sphere, the residential secure space (the ‘mamad’) reverses the picture: instead of introducing a routine into a state of emergency, it imposes the emergency state onto the routine. 

In this way, the Horseman of War is unrestrained: it affects everything it comes into contact with. Instead of defining the emergency state by introducing routine, it infiltrates war into the mundane. The emergency shelter replicates itself like a virus, floor after floor after floor, ׳TAMA’ project after another. Thus, the presence of the public shelter is calming, while that of the private one is stressful.

Civil defense is a call of action, a need to delineate the apocalyptic situation and plan its healthy surroundings. It is ironic to think that these were the reasons for deploying defenses on entire schools in the Gaza Strip: instead of allowing for a routine life to continue during an alarm, these serve as a constant reminder of the war that is yet to come. As mentioned, these are the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

*

In order to discover how to put a bridle on the horseman of civil defense, one must isolate the variables, by examining the elements of the defense system outside of their context. This should be done by exploring the mobile shelters and the different stories that they carry, which are scattered around Gaza, .

Mobile shelters are an unusual phenomenon in the process of privatizing the public sphere —  a phenomenon that operates by using a reverse logic from the one described above, and precisely for this reason they exacerbate the state of emergency. After the ׳mamad’ took over the urban planning, it turned out that there were holes in the net, and these were filled by mobile shelters. They are placed without any planning, as an independent object that is difficult to describe in a way, other than a ‘mamad that ran away from home’. During October 7th events, they were etched in the collective memory, becoming immediate monuments for public expression or emotional anchors. Their treatment is now important for the demarcation of the unrepressed apocalyptic space.

Perpetuating the mobile shelters in their places, is also the stagnation and perpetuation of the apocalyptic situation. Not only do they serve as a memory of a disaster that has occurred, but as each civil defense structure, they represent the possibility of a future catastrophe. On the other hand, their disappearance from the landscape – beyond the emotional damage that accompanies such actions, carried out by mistake in the days leading up to the events – is nothing more than emotional repression: the challenge lies in the ability to put them in their place, while planning their surroundings.

They cannot become memorial candles, since their hooves refuse to rest. It is best to harness them for the sake of preserving the apocalyptic boundaries: building a space for processing, by creating sites for action and integrating commemoration into a local, daily routine. These are sites of gray memory, spaces that deconstruct the cataclysmal state in order to maintain alertness and action – in other words, an answer for situations in which one must flee.

 ¹The term ‘mamad’ stands for the initials of  the Hebrew words: ‘Mekhav Dirati Mugan’ – a term that refers to a residential protected space.

 ²TAMA is a national outline plan. Meaning, a plan that applies to the entire territory of the State of Israel. National Outline Plan No. 38 was initiated out of the need to improve the resistance of existing buildings to earthquakes and later also to the threat of high-altitude shooting. It was expanded and duplicated indefinitely as it was an easy entrepreneurial path to construction with a quick transition through the regulatory planning institutions.

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We are beings of stories.
This is arguably what defines us best as humans – we give meaning, and with it we develop ideas, and we play with symbols that convey them; and with all of those, we build stories.
And if our stories are successful, through them we discover new meanings, and new ideas and symbols, with which we tell new stories, evolving stories – ones that lead us to evolve ourselves.

Stories are our attempts to create order.
To fit things into a certain frame of meaning, from which we can build further. That is probably the reason why one of the most ancient and foundational stories of humanity is the story about the relationship between chaos and order.
It exists in one manner or another at the cores of almost any faith and tradition, and in most it takes the form of a struggle, demanding humans to pick a side; they normally choose the orderly side.

But there are other traditions, ones that tell the story differently.

Discordianism is one such example, where the dialectic between order and disorder constitutes the core matter. Both sides are seen as manifestation of Kaos, or Primordial Chaos – the name the ancient Greeks chose for the concept of “the formless void from which the gods emerged”. Accordingly, neither side is seen as inherently preferable, and so, the faithful Discordian is tasked of finding their own personal balance within a world that perpetually sways from one side to the other.

Space here is too limited to fully explore the nature of the Discordian religion, but to proceed I’ll note that it considers the number five sacred, and so, Discordians tend to divide each process into five seasons, stages or ages, which are:

1. Chaos
   The first stage of any new reality, in which no one has any real certainty regarding how things work, and we start seeing different attempts of imposing some sort of order over the chaos of existence.
   
2. Discord
   In here, differing orders begin colliding into each other and struggling over dominance. From the struggles, usually a new order emerges, normally of a new scale – intended on resolving the conflicts.
    
3. Confusion
   In this stage, the new order starts catching up, but very soon is being absorbed right into the compulsive swinging of the seasonal dialectic, and becomes on itself the subject of the conflicts defining this age.
4. Bureaucracy
   Here we see a new order, of yet another scale, managing to transcend the existing orders while systemizing them and factoring them into its own views and models, cementing its perceived superiority.
   
5. The Aftermath/ Apocalypse
   Underneath the neatly ordered surface, however, chaos is still steaming; the more this new order develops and assumes dominance and exclusivity – the more its inconsistencies and fallacies become undeniably apparent, until we reach a state in which, as described in the Principia, “bureaucracy chokes on its own paperwork” and its orders collapse under their own weight. This paves the way back towards an initial age of Chaos, though one that belongs to a whole new cycle.

In this essay I will apply this model of five seasons to the chronology of the evolution of human society, and use it to explore its potential meaning. I’ll be focusing mainly on the current cycle, which I call “the Civilization Cycle”; it begins around 6000 years ago in Sumer, in an age of Chaos that got human civilization up and running, and ends with an age of apocalypse which seems to start manifesting distinctively in the past decades.

My starting point is the assumption that all human social constructs are essentially stories; civilization itself is one such story, one that’s purely human and aspires to form an all-engulfing frame for all that matters. The grand story of civilization practically attempts to organize each and every meaningful aspect of the world into the social framework. Accordingly, the historical exploration presented in this essay, revolves around this very axis – core ideas, the stories that serve as contexts for them, and how they reflect back to society.
I will exert my best efforts, however, for anchoring it all in common knowledge, as well as tying it to the development of some main information-technologies that have defined each age and allowed its ideas to prosper and greatly influence human culture.

This essay covers vast periods of time and deals with overarching trends, and so it naturally suffers from excessive generalization and simplification. Nevertheless, it provides a useful framework through which we can understand “the big picture” of humanity, or at least one version of it.

This essay is also overly focused on the Western civilization on those leading to and forming it, ones I know pretty well. I see no real issue with it, though, because this is the civilization that seems to almost always stand at the forefront of human progress. And besides, I firmly believe we can spot similar processes in the other civilizations, if we know them well enough.

Anyway, let’s begin.

Chaos

The age of Chaos in this current cycle begins in the Sumerian city of Uruk, around 3500-4000 BCE.

Uruk was the first city-state in known history, and the place where civilization as we know it first rose. Here is where the Urban Revolution began; here we took our first significant steps in transitioning from small and relatively egalitarian societies turn to large and highly hierarchical ones, headed by priest-kings and an elite of counselors and military commanders. This was the period when we developed layered and intricate societies, central governance, elaborate systems of trade and bureaucracy, and institutionalized religious systems. It was also the era when we invented the wheel, developed mathematics and generally established science, and even started recording history.

It was then that we also began developing one of the most important technologies for humankind – written language.
Initially it was all about administrative purposes; writing was first invented for managing commerce, employment and taxation. Accordingly, it was also very limited, consisting mainly of pictographic markings representing various kinds of goods, and numerical signs indicating quantity. Within mere centuries, however, it evolved and became a lot more sophisticated, beginning to serve even more purposes, such as legal and juridical documents, historic and scientific records, and even epic poetry and mythological tales.

The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan taught us, and this new medium for managing information started dictating –or at least fixating– new ideas and messages, which became the core of the stories we use to explain ourselves reality, life and the world.
One of the main features that define us as humans is our ability for symbolic thinking.
Symbolic thinking means that a certain part of our consciousness is virtual; fictional, imaginary, abstract. This part is what allows us to impart meaning on things, to play with symbols, to create stories and to think in ever-evolving abstractions.
The rise of civilization essentially was an evolution of consciousness; a process within which anything becomes a specific symbol packed with meanings, and thus, a part certain perceptual categories. We have effectively “moved to live” –on a very actual perceptual level– within the virtual space of consciousness, and inside this space that’s filled to the brim with changing symbols and evolving meanings, each meaning is a definition and each definition is a category.
That’s the step when we started thinking categorically about each and every thing. A tree, for example, is no longer a distinct, specific entity; but simply a manifestation of the general category “trees”. Human beings are no longer individuals, but the role they play in society. This is not a metaphor – many anthropologists studying and living with hunter-gatherer societies report that one of the most astonishing aspects is the radical difference between how they think, see reality and operate socially, compared to us; they live in societies that are far more egalitarian, their relationships with everything –including animals, plants and spirits– are far more personal and intimate, and their psych is much more rooted in and anchored to the present moment and the immediate environment, to the here and now.
Within the frame that is the virtual space of civilization, each and every thing becomes a part of a certain domain, and each of those domains becomes a part of some larger, all-engulfing, overarching order. If everything is so neatly ordered in our consciousness, well that implies the existence of a general order for everything, ain’t it?
And really, this was the time we started constructing stories intended on ordering all aspects of our lives. Here we began developing myths and mythologies that deal with creations stories, with elaborate hierarchies of deities, with the divine and cosmic order that reflects into the orders of the natural world, and into those of the world of men, the world of civilization. For civilization is a wholly separate world, one that’s completely human. A bubble of reality which, in its entirety, is a manifestation of the purely fictional and imaginative general social orders humans have developed, and helped them not just explain their worlds, but also to form intricate societies that are no longer based solely on inter-personal relationships, but on inter-social ones, which means intra-narrative; we belong to the same society because we belong to the same story. 

Discord

The age of Discord in this current cycle also begins in the ancient Near East and the Levant, mainly around the land of Canaan, around 1800-1500 BCE.

In this era, the general cognitive focus started shifting from one directed at the collective and group identity, to one directed at the individual and personal identity.
Here we start seeing, for example, a transition from group or family burial to individual burials, even among common folk and not just the elites. And it’s not just individual graves; we also see personally tailored offerings for the dead, more elaborate tombstones and specific, personal texts in burial sites. This shift to individuality manifests in social and theological contexts as well – during this period, people started working with and worshipping more personal deities, and even household ones; legal codes and religious texts begin to increasingly emphasize personal moral responsibility and individual ethics; literature and poetry transform and become much more reflective, in some cases even constituting what would later become “philosophy proper”.

Around this time we also began developing an information technology that constitutes the next leap forward.
The Proto-Sinaic writing system was developed around the 19^th century BCE, by a tribe of workers of Semitic origin, whom the Egyptians employed in turquoise mining in the Sinai mines. This group revolutionized the use of written language: they took a limited set of major pictographic symbols from the ancient Egyptian writing, and established that each symbol no longer represents a specific object or idea – but rather a specific syllable, usually the one at beginning of that Egyptian word.
This method created the very first alphabet, the earliest example in human history of a writing system that is entirely phonetic, which have led to a genuine democratization of the written word: not only did it simplify tremendously the use and study of writing, but also vastly expanded what could be done with it – suddenly it became possible to write literally everything that could be spoken.
Archaeological findings show that by the 15^th century BCE, this writing system had made its way to Canaan, where it became the ancient Hebrew script, and was also adopted by the Phoenicians. They, in turn, managed to simplify it even further, repackaging it as a set of 22 letters that were far more convenient and fluid to use than anything else around. It was so efficient –one simple principle upon which any language in existence could be based– that to this day, the vast majority of writing systems in the world can trace their origin to the ancient Phoenician script.
This revolution in how we handle writing –and by extension, information; ideas, stories, and the entirety of the virtual reality which is civilization– demonstrates very clearly the transition to a more individualistic mode of thinking.

It comes as no surprise that this change first “caught on” so strongly in the region of ancient Canaan; after all, Canaan was the very center of the ancient world. This isn’t some theological statement about “the Holy Land”, but rather a combination of geographic and political facts: Canaan the meeting point of three continents –Africa, Asia and Europe– which naturally caused some of the main trade routes of the ancient world to pass through it, led to it becoming one of the major arenas for great conflicts between different civilizations on their stories, and contributed greatly to the ethnic, cultural and mythological diversity in the region.
Additionally, the land is bounded by natural barriers, which made it a lot easier for smaller communities and societies to maintain certain levels of cultural and governmental autonomy, even when regional powers ruled and exchanged control over it. In accordance with these geopolitical circumstances, said communities were in many cases highly diverse, ethnically and culturally, which presumably played a crucial role in the development of a more individualistic consciousness.
One of these communities –and among the most influential of them– was the ancient Hebrew society, which was on one hand a peculiar mixture of most of those who were around, while on the other hand was also very distinct and distinguished. This matter is exceptionally well reflected in the element considered the cornerstone of Hebrew thought – deep belief in the oneness of the divine.
Theologically speaking, this idea was very unusual for its day and age. It wasn’t yet the monotheism as we know it today, but rather more like monolatry – recognition of multiple deities, with one primary god rising above them all. But even this chief deity of the Hebrew culture was radically different in essence – it was completely abstract.
This concept of an abstract divinity transcending anything else is more reminiscent of certain eastern ideas, such as the Tao that was conceptualized and developed in China several centuries later. What we’re dealing with here isn’t actually some specific divine figure, but rather a cosmic principle that transcends all phenomena and deities.

This idea, at a very fundamental level, essentially adds another referential layer to the general perception of reality: in addition to the reality layer of the natural world of plants and animals, and the layer of the human world of civilization, and the layer of specific deity figures – there exists another layer which is entirely a being of a whole new order, one that beyond being completely abstract, is also both transcendent and immanent; both above and beyond anything and present in everything. And more importantly – we all have a direct, personal and binding connection with it.
This idea provides a frame that fundamentally changes all the stories with which we understand the world, and can account for both a group unity and social diversity. It represents an essential shift in how we conceptualize reality, life and the world, and provides a new referential basis which serves as a particularly fertile ground for new philosophical and theological ideas to come.

Confusion

The age of Confusion in this current cycle begins in the Roman Empire, between the first and the fourth centuries.

The idea of a divine being transcending all concepts is a very complicated idea to grasp and conceptualize, even today – as any student (or teacher) of Tao and Zen would admit. Moreover, unlike the Chinese, who attached to this divine principle a term with neutral and impersonal meaning (Tao roughly translates to “the way”), here this idea got the name of a specific god, which added significant theological dimensions to it.
That’s how the idea of an absolute divine principle became a story about a specific divine figure. This God is still transcendent and immanent, but in many versions have already lost a lot of his abstract quality, rendering him a distinct “someone” with clear and definite wants that form a one true way or true faith – what the ancient Greeks called “Orthodoxy”.
While this transformation happened on a very early stage – already in the ancient Hebrew kingdoms of Judea and Israel, still, the real credit for popularizing this story and significantly developing it further goes mainly to Christianity, and maybe to Islam too.
The formative ideas of the Christian (and later on Muslim) ethos could already be found with Jesus, even if he himself never intended for it to unfold the way it did. Unlike the faith of the ancient Hebrews, Jesus kept on talking about the body contrasted with the soul, and about the earthly carnal realities contrasted with the divine one. If there is a one God sitting on his divine throne, then there obviously is a divine realm – the kingdom of heaven. It only makes sense.
And so came to the world two of the ideas that again fundamentally altered the way people conceptualize and approach life and the world – the first ones speaks of one reality which is superior and favored over all the rest, and mainly separate from them. The second ideas dictates we’re all more spirit than we are body, meaning we’re bound to the heavenly realm far stronger than to the realms of men; and so, if we’re to manifest the kingdom of heaven here on earth – we’re tasked with the holy duty of spreading this ethos and leading every person to recognize this simple truth.
Thus was born the missionary enterprise.

Around the time when Jesus was active, in the Roman Empire as well, a novel information technology was developed, fitting perfectly to the missionary needs of the Christians.
I am talking about the codex, which we know today as simply “book”. Up until this revolutionary invention, the main format for keeping written records was scrolls of parchment or papyrus, which were very cumbersome, relatively more vulnerable and mainly, severely restricted. Suddenly, with the new invention, the content of fifty scrolls could be stacked within a single volume that was more durable, a lot more convenient to carry and allowed for far more efficient navigation within the text.
History tells us the Christians gladly adopted this new technology, effectively utilizing it to spread their faith far and wide. But that, as noted, wasn’t the end of it; several centuries later, another man of vision rose to prominence, and on a similar theological basis. Unlike Jesus though – Mohammed wasn’t just a visionary, he was also a mighty military commander and a cunning politician, and so he managed to solidify his followers and even lead them to the start of a very successful campaign of expansion and conquest.
A bit more than a decade after their prophet had died, the heads of the Caliphate were wise enough to canonize the Quran and spread it. The codex, of course, was of great help; in fact, they completely fell in love with the idea of accumulated human knowledge, so much that they started founding great libraries and initiating tremendous projects for translating important texts from all cultures they’ve met, a factor that played a significant role in the rise of the Golden Age of Islam.

With the collapse of the Roman Empire, the church, that already made itself established and institutional, started filling in the administrative vacuum and assuming more and more authorities, until it became a major political force. Around the Christian world alongside the Muslim –which grew and expanded, competing over resource, power and prestige– and as a result, within massive parts of the civilized world, the general “operating system” of human civilization became thoroughly religious. All aspects of life were subjugated to theological conceptions, all based on the unwavering belief in one, absolute and immutable reality which is God’s plan. Philosophy, the sciences, the arts, social life, governance and even wars – all was approached, in a fundamental level, from a  deeply religious perspective, that remained highly influential to this day.

Bureaucracy

The age of Bureaucracy in this current cycle begins in Italy, Florence most specifically, around the 14^th and the 15^th centuries.

Florence of this period was an important cultural, artistic and intellectual center, a reputation that flourished rapidly when the Medicis, who were renowned as the patrons of art, took over the city.
The cultural revival that began there and quickly spread to the rest of the western world is normally referred to as “The Renaissance”, and it was deeply influential not just for culture and art, but also for science, politics and even religion; and as always, we can trace the roots of this grand revolution in the stories and ideas that define the borders of our perception and consciousness.
Intellectuals and great thinkers of the time inherited from religion the idea of one, absolute and immutable reality, but completely changed its referential point and the criteria with which its validity was measured; these are no longer dictated by some theological ideal, but by objective compatibility with an external empirical reality anyone can measure in the same manner.
It’s been said, for example, that the greatest issue the inquisition had with Galileo wasn’t really about the specifics of his ideas, however heretical as they may be; the real challenge Galileo has posed to the church was his claims that the reason for his steadfast insistence on his ideas was that these are objective facts that truly exist “out there”.
In other words, he granted a piece of information the same degree of absoluteness which was seen up until this point as proper only for God and those claiming to speak on his behalf. Galileo essentially was a prominent representative of the general perception that started evolving with the Renaissance, one which took from the authorities of religion the power to dictate for everyone what’s the truth and what’s reality, what’s just and what’s right; and opening up new realms of exploration for anyone who wished to conduct research independently, free from religious and theological constraints. 

Some of the first sprouts of this perception actually bloomed in the world of art: even before the “official” Renaissance there were artists like Giotto, for example, who started developing the foundations for the study of perspective and depth perception in painting. He was among the first artists to treat the canvas as a window into dimensional space, and in his works we can already see quite distinctively the novel realism that’s going to be so associated with Renaissance artists.
This new perception, as we’ve noted, have gradually arrived to all realms of life, not just art. Andreas Vesalius brought it to anatomy, fundamentally changes how we perceive the human body, leading to the development of modern healthcare. People like Copernicus, Galileo and Newton had brought it to astronomy and physics, and completely altered how we perceive the universe. All of those have laid the groundwork for what’s going to be called “The Scientific Revolution”, dramatically transforming all of our lives.
Additionally, this novel perception have also arrived to the world of religion, with Martin Luther, Erasmus and John Calvin, the instigators of the Protestant reformation – which have stripped absolute authority from the Pope and the Catholic church and dramatically changed the public’s attitude towards religion and religiousness.

And just like in former ages, we can see here as well that from the initial stages of this era we’ve had developed a new information technology that vastly influenced all other developments.
Print was actually invented several centuries prior, in China, but never really took hold there. The equipment used by the Chinese was fragile and expensive, and besides, their writing system’s complexity and vast number of characters made the whole enterprise too cumbersome and inefficient.
Anyway, around the start of the 15^th century, printing press arrived in Europe, still a raw technology, but Gutenberg managed to improve upon it and invented some new features for it, thus paving the way for printing press to become widely spread.
More than just mere enrichment to the abilities of producing and distributing any existing kinds of text, like books, royal orders and religious edicts; print also contributed greatly to the development of whole new mediums, such as journalism or initial scientific and intellectual magazines.
Out of this cultural context there emerged a unique social phenomenon known as “The Republic of Letters”; an international community of scientists, thinkers and intellectuals, who shared knowledge and information with remarkable openness, relative to their time. Though it was never an official establishment, this “republic” contributed to the development of many, and above all, it was a very early example of a concept that’s going to evolve and take over the world in the following era – social networks.

Apocalypse

The age of Apocalypse in this current cycle began somewhere around the last hundred years, especially in Britain and the US; and more prominently in the past decades, all over the digital world and the internet.

People wiser than myself have already dubbed it “the Post-Truth Era” or even “the Infocalypse” (information apocalypse), and among them there’s a tendency of pointing at around the year 2010 as the main turning point – that’s when smartphones became popular and widespread, social networks rose to prominence and even dominance, and personalized algorithmic content started filling our feeds, and our consciousness. In fact, the term “post-truth” was even chosen as Oxford’s word of the year for the year of 2016.
The events of the Arab Spring, Brexit and the rise of Trump were probably the incidents that best exemplified this turn of the ages, but ever since, wars over consciousness and attention –especially in digital spaces– only get more intense; this era we’re now living is characterized by very convenient access to massive amounts of information and the possibility to easily create personally-tailored content en masse, and also by our ability to form social connection not limited by geography.
And so the internet, the very same tool that got all of us interconnected turning the world into an actual global village, has also provided us with the conditions allowing and promoting the fragmentation of this village into smaller and smaller echo-chambers that become ever more specific, with increasingly rigid boundaries.

We now witness the collapse of the idea of one objective reality, and the rise of the concept of inter-subjective realities.
It became particularly evident in politics and social issues, but that’s actually a general, overarching trend which can be observed within the general public, and reflects a growing interest in alternative word views and ways of life. And if it starts sounding a bit Hippie, that’s my exact intent – the Psychedelic Revolution of the counter culture movement in the 60s and 70s was the point of breakthrough for this new consciousness, at least on a social scale and not just local or personal.
It was then when we started thinking in a post-modern manner. To doubt authority – not just the political or religious, but also the scientific, social, philosophical; ontological even. And the psychedelic culture became one of the deepest manifestations of it; here we have an entire society of people actively experimenting with direct experience –on an actual sensual level, not just with their thinking– of alternative perceptions of reality and even different realities. And moreover, they’re analyzing their; sharing them, seeking appropriate frameworks of understanding – ones that transcend conventional Western scientific thinking. One point that’s interesting to note as well is that many early internet pioneers of this era were themselves part of the psychedelic movement and counter culture.

The idea of one objective reality is slipping through our fingers, gradually giving way to the concept of “reality pluralism”.
And what I find especially intriguing is that the process echoes the description found in the Principia Discordia, of Bureaucracy “choking on its own paperwork” – one of the first domains that started demonstrating this process was physics; the study of the very structure of reality from an objective point of view. Already in the first decades of last century, classical physics essentially “broke down”, and in many realms was replaced by Einstein’s Relativity and Quantum Mechanics – two descriptions providing excellent results, each for different parameters of reality, but they simply aren’t compatible with each other.
Several decades later, and a lot thanks to psychedelia, this upheaval arrived to domains that concern themselves with the study of how we study things and how we perceive reality – cognition and neurology. We started investigating more and more the connection between brain and consciousness, and rediscovered from various angles a very old realization: our perception of reality –which is not objective reality itself, but rather our interpretation of it– is the only reality we can directly access. Oh, and it’s also very fluid and can be highly manipulated.
And if back then, in the 60s-70s, this understanding was already significant, but still minor – today it has grown to monstrous (and magnificent) scales. As a society today, we’re much more concerned with how our perceptions are manipulated, and how we can do it too.
Politicians, marketers and all sorts of ideological leaders masterfully employ these notions for some time now, and in recent years it seems the general public starts catching up. We already know the concept of fake new very well, most of us have preferred sources from which we absorb information of the kinds and sorts we want to hear – regarding any topic, and many of us are already experimenting with generative AI, populating the web with deep-fakes.

The age of information has transformed into the age of infocalypse.
What are we going to do with it?

Epilogue

We are beings of stories.
The current age demonstrates it exceptionally well – it becomes clearer and clearer that we tend to prefer a captivating story over a cold fact.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing if we know how to work with it, and in any way, seems like this was the case from the very beginning; stories are, as we’ve noted, the way in which we order ideas, concepts and knowledge in the virtual space of the imagination. Information technologies are the interface we use to connect the virtual space to the concrete – from spoken language and cave paintings, through written language and all of the milestones of its evolution as we’ve covered in this essay, and all the way to electronic devices that actually created a whole new layer of interface between abstract and concrete realities – the digital realm.

In terms of history, this current age has just started, and if we’re to judge relative to the former ages, even if we consider they get shorter due to accelerated progress – I think we’re still facing at least 100-200 years of Apocalypse season, before we begin out next cycle with a new season of Chaos.
I won’t try predicting what’s to come, but some words regarding this age are due: while we call it Apocalypse, its initial name is the Aftermath, because it concludes the cycle and brings about the implications of all former ages, for good or bad.
It manifests in evolving technologies, and also in core ideas that evolve our foundational stories, as we’ve covered throughout the essay – but it also manifests in the tools we acquire with the ever-changing surface of reality.

Each age has provided us with new referential layers for the framework of our perception of reality, and fundamentally altered all the stories we use to explain ourselves life and the world, and so each age have taught us something new and meaningful that can aid our growth, if we know how to effectively apply it – the first age taught us the power of grand stories in forming societies, turning them into something radically new that was never seen before; the second age taught us about the source of all ideas and stories, and about our inherent connection to it; the third age taught us the force of unwavering faith, and introduced the notion of a preferred reality; the fourth age taught us to break free from theological ideologies and examine for ourselves this “preferred reality” from a shared and tangible point of view.
Additionally, each age also swung on the spectrum between collectivism and individualism – in the first age we’ve united to organized societies; and in the second we’ve learned to be individuals within those societies; in the third age the emphasis shifted again from individuals too social stories, religious this time; and the fourth had brought yet again a humanistic perspective, placing the individual in its focal point.

The current age, being the one concluding the cycle, is probably going to teach us an intricate balance between group and personal identities, a journey some of us are already actively exploring in some ways or other.
Apart from that, it’s going to make us internalize some of the main teaching of each age, but also to adjust them so as to not repeat former mistakes. For example, we’ve already noted that the idea of objective reality crumbles, but it’s still useful, and for the sake of mental stability we shouldn’t shake it off completely, just tweak it a bit; if we could abandon the idea of one reality which is the exclusive truth and recognize the truth of other realities, while at the same time acknowledge the unparalleled value of the physical, tangible reality as a very firm and stable “base reality” – we could already form a very efficient frame that could better account for and work with very novel and complex ideas. After all, this is one of the main advices for anyone finding themselves in uncomfortable corners of intense states of consciousness – ground yourself, get back to your body.
I think that in a very same manner we could look at everything we’ve learned in former ages, identify that it’s all just stories over which we have a certain degree of control, and adjust them for a better fit to who and what we are, and who and what we strive to become

It requires a challenging but fascinating combination between stability and openness, stemming from a realization that all stories are attempts of imposing virtual order over a chaotic reality, and that each of those orders is relative and not absolute.
Such an understanding is what turns this foundational story about the war between chaos and order to a different story, one that’s much gentler; a story about the dance between the two sides, about creative and fruitful relations – a story of love, instead of fear.

״

When people understand Chaos,
they live their lives as they please.
When people misunderstand Chaos,
the Machine grinds them into grist.
The greatest cause of Disorder is Order.
The greatest motivator of Order is Disorder.
Whoever can embrace both will see for miles.

“

~From the Chao-te-Ching, a book of Discordian wisdom

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