What technology, story and language reveal about us.
By Mirel Bran, for 27 years a correspondent for Le Monde, France’s newspaper of record.
Every machine we build reflects the inner world we carry.
Every world we build begins as a tale. Every word we find changes the thing it names. These books follow one question through technology, story and language: what do our inventions reveal about the human spirit?
Three books, one inquiry. Each can be read alone.
Technology is not a tool but a mirror. From the first hand-axe to the language model that speaks back, every machine we build reflects the inner world we carry. Technosophy is the discipline of seeing what we project when we make.
“To understand the world you live in, you need a mental framework connected to the future.”
We are not the rational animal but the storytelling one and every world we build begins as a tale. Drawing on Campbell and Jung, Eliade and Tolkien, Mythosophy asks the question beneath all the others: who writes the story we live in?
“Change the story and you change the world, not metaphorically, but where perception meets possibility.”
Language is not a tool we use to name a world already there, but the medium in which that world becomes real. Drawing on Genesis and Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Rumi, the final volume asks what we do when we speak truly, and what we lose when we stop.
“Find the right word and the thing itself changes, not as description, but as creation.”
Short and a natural door into the whole project. What if the self is not a thing you possess but a loop that turns to try to know itself, and never quite manages to close the circle? Drawing on Genesis and Gödel, Kabbalah and Hofstadter, this companion to the Sophy Trilogy follows one figure: the mind that turns to see itself and never quite closes.
“You are not your file. You are the one it is for.”
More books are coming.
Three essays, free to read, that show how these books think.
There is a cup on your table. What it teaches about God, about you, and about the machine may be the strangest true thing you read this year.
We think we build tools to solve problems. Look closer. We have been building our way, for ten thousand years, toward something we no longer know how to name.
Long before you chose anything, a myth chose you. Most people serve it their whole lives without once learning its name.
Every week, one conversation with the people building what comes next. In English, hosted by Mirel Bran.
A journalist and philosopher working at the crossroads of technology, story and meaning.
For 27 years Mirel Bran was a correspondent for Le Monde, France’s newspaper of record. He also reported for France 24, Le Point and RFI, in French, from the changing east of Europe.
He left Le Monde to give his time to Noi venim din viitor, the interview show he founded in Romania, where he has held more than 500 conversations with founders, researchers and innovators.
His books are the distilled form of that inquiry: not commentary on the technological moment, but an attempt to see what it reveals about the human spirit.
He writes in French, Romanian and English. He holds a doctorate in information sciences from Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas, alongside a background in philosophy, the history of religions and the visual arts. The French Republic named him Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.