The Glass Labyrinth – The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The Glass Labyrinth

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The invisible architecture of choice and control.

You’ve scrolled the feed a hundred times, each tap an echo of your own reflection—and yet, the path was not yours to begin with. This episode explores the quiet disappearance of autonomy in a world where freedom is not taken, but shaped. Not by coercion, but by invisible design. The labyrinth is not a maze with an exit; it is a transparent system that feels like freedom while guiding you softly toward a predetermined goal.

We engage thinkers like Michel Foucault, Shoshana Zuboff, and Hannah Arendt to trace how contemporary power is embedded not in the state or law, but in the interfaces we mistake for mirrors. Algorithms do not restrain—they predict, shape, and learn. Arendt reminds us how normalization erodes judgment, until action becomes indistinguishable from obedience.

This is not a warning about surveillance. It is an inquiry into how desire itself is conditioned—how our preferences are pre-empted, our values inferred, and our resistance quietly rerouted. In the age of ambient control, the labyrinth is not where we are lost, but where we believe we’ve found ourselves. Every step feels chosen. That is the design.

What This Offers

This episode offers not an alarm, but an attunement—a way to begin seeing what’s been shaping us all along.

• A philosophical reflection on predictive design and autonomy
• Exploration of invisible systems shaping behavioral choice
• Engagement with Foucault, Zuboff, and Arendt on power, freedom, and perception
• A meditation on how control persists through familiarity and frictionlessness

Listen On:

• YouTube
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

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Bibliography

• Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
• Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
• Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
• Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.
• Stiegler, Bernard. Automatic Society: The Future of Work. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016.

The walls are clear. The guidance is gentle. The question was never how to escape. It was whether we ever truly chose the path at all.

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