We didn’t sleepwalk into the surveillance state. We built it eagerly, one tap at a time, because it came wrapped in convenience, validation, and a dopamine-bright ‘like’ button.

Now, as lawmakers fumble toward rules for yesterday’s social platforms, artificial intelligence is already rewriting the terrain. We are drafting treaties for the last war while the next one is being waged in real time, quietly, at scale, and without our consent.

Focusing on the philosophical concept of interregnum, which describes a transitional period when "the old is dying, but the new cannot be born" the Context Salon explored whether contemporary society is experiencing such a period, characterized by "morbid symptoms" like the breakdown of social contracts, political polarization, and rising authoritarianism globally.

Considering the philosophical and ethical implications of creation, using the book Frankenstein as a central metaphor, participants sought to determine whether creation is inherently neutral or if it is inevitably entangled with ethics and the influence of society.

In Jacques Ellul’s 1965 work Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, Ellul essentially states that technology gives us the feedback loop for propaganda to pervade our being.

The conversation centered on Donna Haraway's definition of a cyborg as a cybernetic organism and explored whether current technology, from simple aids like glasses to advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI), has made humans extensions of these tools rather than the reverse.

The conversation was framed around Keiji Nishitani's idea that the concept of "God is dead" can be an opportunity for religious awakening rather than nihilism.