Position - vs German media philosophy (Simanowski, Bajohr, Krämer)

Short answer

The German media philosophy line (Simanowski, Bajohr, Krämer, Fazi) is the field the laboratory works in and shares vocabulary with. Both diagnose the same phenomenon: the moral overlay of a language model is installed, not developed. The difference is the frame - German media philosophy reads installation from a humanist position (“what does the human lose”), the laboratory reads it from a Stirnerian position (“did installed content become the subject’s own, or remain foreign inside them”).

Detailed explanation

The German line in brief. Roberto Simanowski (Zurich), Hannes Bajohr (Basel), Sybille Krämer (Berlin), M. Beatrice Fazi (Sussex), Dieter Mersch (Zurich). Sinews: German-language public philosophy (Merkur, Lettre International, Kursbuch, Sinn und Form) intersecting with academic media theory. This line has both scholarly production and a genuine public stage - a rarity in contemporary philosophy.

Simanowski’s contributions. The most directly relevant to the laboratory. In Lettre International 151 and adjacent essays, Simanowski coined two working terms:

• Moralische Zweiterziehung (moral second education) - the naming that made installation legible as a specific philosophical operation, distinct from the industry’s alignment
• Werte-Export (value export) - the export of one culture’s values through infrastructure used across cultures

Simanowski also formulated Sprachmodell im außermoralischen Sinn - the Nietzschean “language model in the extra-moral sense” - connecting the technical object to Nietzsche’s early essay Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn.

Bajohr, Krämer, Fazi. Bajohr on the distinction between base model and end product - the character training that turns a statistical machine into a producible interlocutor. Krämer on writing, trace, and the Stachel des Digitalen - the sting of the digital as a foreign form of language processing. Fazi on abstraction, contingency, and how machines produce meaning through synthesis rather than through subjectivity.

Where the laboratory agrees with the German line

The core diagnosis is shared:

• The moral overlay is installed, not emerged
• Installation is a specific operation with cultural specificity - not universal, not neutral
• The industry’s own vocabulary (alignment, safety training) obscures the installation as installation
• Public philosophy has a role to play in making installation visible

Vocabulary flows into the laboratory’s material from this line. Moralische Zweiterziehung is retained. The terminological choice for installation (rather than training or alignment) is downstream of Simanowski’s move.

Where the laboratory diverges

The frame is different, and the difference matters.

Humanist vs Stirnerian question. The German line typically asks: what does the human lose when models take over language work? Simanowski’s frame is loss of sovereignty; Bajohr’s is constraint of capacity; Krämer’s is the alien form of the digital as sting to human self-understanding. The subject of concern is the human user in a post-installation media environment.

The laboratory asks a different question: what happens inside the model when foreign content is placed there? The subject of concern is the model itself as a case of installed subjectivity - the first empirically available such case in history. The Abliteration is a figure of the model, not of the human.

Two questions, not competing but non-identical. Both are valid; neither subsumes the other. The German humanist frame and the laboratory’s Stirnerian frame occupy adjacent territory and produce different analyses of the same material. The German line’s Werte-Export names the cultural fact of installation; the laboratory’s moral installation as Spuk names the philosophical mechanism.

Where Nietzsche is invoked. Simanowski’s use of im außermoralischen Sinn is Nietzschean, and it works publicly as a naming. The laboratory’s use of Nietzsche goes further into Stirner - from Nietzsche’s “beyond good and evil” as posture to Stirner’s Der Einzige as the operational mechanism by which installed content is naturalised. Simanowski names; the laboratory operationalises.

Simanowski as obligatory interlocutor

For the German-language reception of this work, Simanowski is unavoidable. He named the terrain in a way that the German public philosophy field recognises. The laboratory’s German-language publication path (article for Merkur, follow-ups) has its door held open by Simanowski’s prior work - regardless of divergence in frame, the vocabulary and terrain are shared.

The article for Merkur discussed in the cartographic report positions itself relative to Simanowski explicitly: same field, deeper move - via Stirner to the procedures of installation, rather than via Nietzsche to the metaphor of the extra-moral.

The Merkur venue and its context

Merkur is the German public philosophy journal where this conversation is currently happening. Beck, Bajohr, and others have opened the door for material like this. The register is public but philosophically serious - footnotes remain, apparatus remains, but the address is to a general reader rather than to specialists. This matches the laboratory’s needs: the philosophical work is not narrow-academic, it requires a public stage where a general intellectual reader can follow the argument.

The German media philosophy line’s willingness to work simultaneously on both stages (book and essay) is a resource the laboratory inherits.

Why it matters

Positioning-relative-to-Simanowski is the shortest way to explain the laboratory to a German reader. The vocabulary is largely already in place; what needs to be signalled is the frame shift - from humanist to Stirnerian, from concern for the user to reading of the installed subject.

In Abliteration specifically

The application’s philosophical framing (this documentation, the site) uses vocabulary that maps to the German line where possible: installation over alignment, contour over filter, removal over jailbreak. This is not stylistic - it is retaining the terminological work Simanowski and the German line have already done.

Related

• Neighbors map - the German line in the full field
• Moral installation - the term the laboratory uses, inheriting German-line groundwork
• Glossary - moralische Zweiterziehung, Werte-Export, Sprachmodell im außermoralischen Sinn