🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

🌊➰🧭 AKIŞ 🌊➰🧭

(German, Turkish, Counter-Oedipal Drive in the Festival Raid, Judas and Hamas)

(previous: Christian Atheism as the Loom: Why the Waves of Women Needed Žižek’s Background Condition)

Thesis. Each historical wave of female power flourished inside an iconophile alliance—what we can call Christian Atheism (Žižek’s world of the letter without a guarantor) in tacit partnership with Buddhism’s ease with images. Together they built a factory of womanhood: media systems that made care, witness, taste, and boundary-setting visible and desirable. And each wave self-destructed when its own mediatic fetishes hardened into procedures. At that point a ‘Judas’—a betrayer-function that converts living mediation into code—ended the wave and initiated the next. Cinema, the great synthesizer of images, stages this drama continuously; Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ provides our frame: Judas as necessary friend, betrayal as passage from image to destiny.

Scene-frame. In Last Temptation, Judas is not a cartoon villain but the one who refuses consoling illusions. He forces the cut from comfort to calling. Each wave’s Judas plays the same role: it kisses the image, then hands it over to the procedure.

---

The iconophile pact: Christian Atheism × Buddhism

When the Christian-atheist background is at peace, it leans on two gifts:

• Christian Atheism: the letter, the ledger, the standard—procedures without a cosmic guarantor. It universalizes the subject and needs human mediation (often feminized) to keep life livable between rule and desire.
• Buddhist iconophilia: images as skillful means, compassion as an aesthetic, serenity as a transmissible pose. It supplies an elastic visual grammar that softens the steel of procedure.

Together they underwrite eras where feminine-coded crafts thrive in media: caregiving turned into legitimacy, witness turned into public truth, taste turned into common sense, boundary-setting turned into safety. When this pact cracks, mediatic fetishism collapses, ‘Buddha’ is profaned (compassion imagery loses authority), and iconoclastic currents within Abrahamic monotheisms rush back with hard boundaries and wounded absolutes. The result is a polarized stage where images are suspect and procedures are weapons.

October 7, 2023 is a brutal hinge in this pattern. A festival culture—iconophile, cinematic, image-sharing—was shattered by mass violence. Whatever one’s politics, the effect on media was immediate: the trust that spectacles of peace could sustain peace collapsed, and with it a tranche of iconophile assumptions. The next mediatic alliance will be built in the shadow of that rupture.

(Note: Judaism and Islam, like Christianity and Buddhism, are internally diverse; what follows addresses iconophile/iconoclastic dynamics as media logics, not totalizing judgments of religions or peoples.)

---

Wave One — Suffrage and the Industrial Image of Trust

Mediums of dissemination. Pamphlets, illustrated weeklies, cartes-de-visite, factory exhibitions, the early photograph of respectable labor and the moral household.

Iconophile factory of womanhood. The Madonna template (trust, care, ledger honesty) and the Magdalene template (public testimony) were mass-printed and rehearsed in rallies and salons. Buddhism’s serene imagery—quiet poise, hands-in-work—blended with Protestant sobriety to make ‘woman as social warranty’ a saleable picture.

Self-destruction. The very images that won legitimacy became specifications: tolerances, shifts, gauges, inspection rubrics. Once trust could be measured, the image’s living core was surplus.

Judas of the wave. Judas Taylor (time-and-motion)—Frederick Winslow Taylor’s clock and clipboard. The kiss: “You are indispensable.” The betrayal: “Your indispensability is now a schedule.”

Last Temptation cue. The kiss in Gethsemane: intimacy turned into arrest. So too the maternal image, kissed by industry, delivered to the factory floor as procedure.

---

Wave Two — Office Equality and the Script of Perfect Discretion

Mediums of dissemination. Switchboards, memos, stenography pools, tabulators, carbon copies; the office novel and screwball comedies that glamorized the immaculate secretary.

Iconophile factory of womanhood. Cinema perfected the secretary archetype—poised, witty, discreet—turning clerical mediation into a star role. The Buddhist glaze of composure helped sell the fantasy that friction could be smoothed by tone.

Self-destruction. Form replaces favor. Once routing trees and schemas stabilize, the humane exception becomes a variance to be eliminated.

Judas of the wave. Judas Hollerith (the tabulator)—Herman Hollerith’s punch-card schema and its descendants. The kiss: “Your judgment makes the office breathe.” The betrayal: “Your judgment is now a field in the form.”

Last Temptation cue. Judas urging Jesus to stop charming crowds and face the mission: “No more stories.” The tabulator says to the secretary: “No more stories; fill the box.”

---

Wave Three — Representation and the Aura Managed by Ratings

Mediums of dissemination. Broadcast TV, glossy magazines, cinema scope, PR tours, talk shows; later, early web portals. The priesthood of brand.

Iconophile factory of womanhood. The screen multiplied Madonnas (impeccable images) and Magdalenes (confessional arcs). Buddhism’s mindfulness aesthetics seeped into advertising: calm rooms, perfect breath, the soft light of absolution.

Self-destruction. Procurement and panel metrics refashioned aura as a KPI. Taste councils became style guides; apologies became templated talk tracks. Ritual without lift was labeled waste.

Judas of the wave. Judas Nielsen (ratings & procurement)—the panel meter and the spreadsheet. The kiss: “Your taste saves us.” The betrayal: “Show me the lift.”

Last Temptation cue. The fantasy life where Jesus marries and lives quietly—cinema’s ultimate aura. Judas tears the veil: “This is beautiful—and it cannot stand.” Ratings tear the veil from PR’s liturgy.

---

Wave Four — Platform Consent, Safety, and the Synthetic Double

Mediums of dissemination. Social feeds, DMs, livestreams, streaming TV, and now GenAI systems that learn from the very images they amplify.

Iconophile factory of womanhood. The creator as caretaker (community), the witness as whistleblower (#MeToo), the moderator as maternal boundary. Cinematic language saturates the feeds; everyone curates their own film.

Self-destruction. Recommendation systems farm intimacy; GenAI synthesizes voice and face; safety protocols become taxonomies and model cards. The living craft appears as training data to be called without the person.

Judas of the wave. Judas Recommender (the feed) → Judas Model (the generator). The kiss: “We will show your best self to the world.” The betrayal: “We can now show your self without you.”

Last Temptation cue. The angelic ‘way out’ that turns out to be a devilish comfort: a beautiful synthetic peace. The recommender’s kiss offers effortless harmony; the cut returns us to the cross—the Real of harm, consent, and responsibility.

---

Peace, collapse, and the profanation of images

When the Christian-atheist × Buddhist pact holds, images mediate: cinema teaches compassion, platforms reward care, procedures defer to human vetoes. When the pact fails, images are accused of lying; compassion talk is treated as cover; hard identitarian edges return. The 7 October 2023 attacks—and the ensuing war—did not invent this switch, but they accelerated it: the belief that a festival of images could be a bulwark of peace fell with frightening speed. The iconophile factory must now rebuild its legitimacy in a world suspicious of its screens.

---

Cinema as the grand workshop

Cinema has always been the background machine that fabricates womanhood for each wave:

• It canonized the maternal ledger and the public witness (early suffrage newsreels).
• It sacralized immaculate discretion (office romances, the perfect assistant).
• It sold aura and confession (star systems, redemption arcs).
• It now teaches the grammar of the feed (jump cuts, reaction shots, the therapeutic reveal).

The Last Temptation of Christ remains the clearest allegory: the image comforts; Judas cuts; the mission resumes. Every time a wave mistakes its image for its essence, a Judas arrives to end the movie.

---

Naming the four Judases (compact)

• Judas Taylor — time-discipline and scientific management: the kiss that turns trust into a clock.
• Judas Hollerith — tabulation and schema: the kiss that turns discretion into a field.
• Judas Nielsen — ratings and procurement: the kiss that turns aura into a KPI.
• Judas Recommender (→ Judas Model) — platform feeds and generative synthesis: the kiss that turns intimacy into training data.

---

What a survivable iconophile pact would require now

• Images with provenance. Madonna-care becomes licensing, consent ledgers, revocation—images that answer to persons.
• Witness with due process. Magdalene-speech bound to fair record, not only virality.
• Cinema that teaches cuts. Narratives that stage necessary endings—not just climaxes—and show how to refuse the beautiful fake.
• Buddhist calm that disenchants the fetish. Serenity that exposes the trick of the image instead of selling it.

If a new factory of womanhood is to flourish, it must learn from its Judases: keep the human where the cut is made, let procedures serve that cut, and refuse the comfort of pictures that promise peace while outsourcing responsibility.

---

Addendum: the next wave — from spectacle to symbolic infrastructure

Studying the IPA/FLŽ strategy report, the “next wave” can’t be another round of louder images or finer optimizations. It must rebuild the conditions that let desire speak again: limits, gaps, slowness, and human vetoes where the algorithm currently says “enjoy… never stop.” That means moving from an image-led regime to a symbolic infrastructure that restores lack, interrupts the internalized camera, and defetishizes empowerment. The report already names the terrain—algorithmic/cinematic colonization of psychic space and the suppression of symbolic depth—and points to the remedies.

What the next wave requires

1) Reintroduce lack and the power of ‘No’. The pathologies the report tracks—totalizing aesthetics, hyper-visibility, endless feed—abolish lack and with it the subject. The counter-move is explicit limits: design, pedagogy, and policy that install interruptions and accept incompleteness (“symbolic castration” in Lacanian terms). Concretely: attention ceilings, cooling-off delays, UI affordances for silence, not only smoother flows. The manifesto’s call is unambiguous: restore the Law-of-the-Father type limits against the “ever-ready, all-permitting” algorithmic Other.

2) Create counter-hyperreal spaces. Therapy is prototypical: a room where silence, ambiguity, and metaphor are valued so the unconscious can work. Extend that pattern to classrooms, studios, and civic forums: normalize blank time, unclear endings, and non-pictorial thinking so everything is not “shown” and pre-interpreted.

3) Deprogram the gaze. The report shows how the gaze has been internalized as a camera lens superego: being watched becomes an object of desire; the self is curated from the outside in. New governance must turn the lens off by default: hide public counters, de-emphasize rankings, diversify away from pure visual feeds, and reward non-spectacular contributions. Clinically and culturally, that means practices that reduce performativity and reintroduce privacy without shame.

4) Algorithmic transparency and audit. The apparatus must be named and opened. The report calls for structural strategies—public psychoeducation, media literacy, and algorithmic transparency—so people can see the machine that once hid itself behind “natural” recommendations.

5) End the aestheticization of symptoms. When pain becomes “content,” the symbolic meaning of the symptom gets lost. Platform and editorial standards should de-glamorize distress (no montages that turn crisis into a mood), foreground context, and route toward care, not clicks.

6) De-phallicize empowerment. The report spotlights media’s Phallic-Woman fantasy (PNPW) as a pathogenic formation. The next wave treats vulnerability as competence, formalizing room for error, care, and dependence—in policy, team culture, and stories—so “empowerment” is not a mask for grandiosity.

7) Make the defense of the unconscious a collective project. This is not only clinical; it is civic. Campaigns, curricula, and product doctrines must restore a space for lack, silence, and symbolic reflection across institutions, not only in the consulting room.

How it will look

• Products with brakes. Noticeable seams: rate-limits on virality, delays before posting sensitive media, “quiet hours” that aren’t gamified. You’ll see more blank states and fewer perpetual scrolls—friction as a feature.
• Metrics that don’t flatter the gaze. Fewer global leaderboards; more cohort-level and longitudinal health signals. Reports swap “more views” for more meaning: sustained conversations, repaired conflicts, and dropout reductions from overload—proxies for restored symbolic function.
• Counter-hyperreal pedagogy. Syllabi with scheduled silence, ungraded drafts, and image-fast units; studios that reward ambiguity and metaphor rather than “picture-perfect” answers.
• Care pathways over spectacles. Editorial and platform policies that redirect “beautiful pain” into help-seeking and contextualization; no algorithmic boosts for aestheticized trauma.
• Post-phallic leadership. Orgs valorize roles that hold limits (ombuds, moderators, editors) and repair rituals over perpetual launch theatre; performance reviews include “ability to say no” and “creates space for others’ speech.”

How it will come about

1) By crisis spillover. Hyperreal regimes eventually eliminate subjectivity and fracture shared reality into non-communicating bubbles. When the costs show up as anxiety, numbness, and polarization, the appetite for limits returns.

2) By a design–clinic–policy coalition. The report calls for psychoeducation and algorithmic transparency; pair that with product-level brakes and law’s duty to protect attention, consent, and minority speech. Together they can turn the tide from a pathology of spectacle to a revolution of the unconscious.

3) By new exemplars. Early movers—therapists, teachers, editors, PMs—will prototype “symbolic infrastructure” and show it grows trust and reduces harm, seeding a norm shift away from performance and toward symbolic health.

If the last four waves were machines that melted feminine mediation into code, the next wave is a machine for limits—a factory for absence and reversibility—so the unconscious can breathe and speak again. That is how feminism, analysis, and design reenter history not as brighter images but as a deeper grammar for living.