The Encyclopedia of Relations

What This Site Is

Text of the audio

You have arrived here, and perhaps you are wondering where exactly. The honest answer: at a place that is not a dictionary. Not an archive. Not a database. This site is a resonance chamber.

The word encyclopedia comes from the Greek and means the circle of learning, the comprehensive order of knowledge that enables a person to understand the world. The word relations is the key. It does not name the objects of knowledge, but the connections between them: how one text points to another, how one thesis supports or refutes another, how a concept takes on different meanings in different contexts.

Everything that happens here rests on books. Let me list them, and the ones still to come.

At the heart of it is a novel in three volumes: Schweinerei. The first volume is called The Invitation. The novel unfolds the theory in the form of a story, with characters, conflicts and turns. It is not mere entertainment. It is the gateway into the world of relations. Whoever understands it has delivered the Proof of Book, the threshold that unlocks access to the Klangchat, the sound chat.

Alongside it, a version for ten-year-old readers is being written, also in three volumes. It tells the same story, the same characters, the same events, but in a language children understand. It is not a simplified novel, but a voice of its own that carries the same lore. So the door stands open to the youngest, too.

Next to the novel stand the treatises. They are the theoretical unfolding, and they appear one by one, alongside the volumes.

The first volume comes with three treatises: the Physics of Relations, the Biology of Relations and the War of Relations.

With the second volume, three more appear: the Manifesto of Archaeophysics, the Economics of Relations and the Geohydroatmospherics of Relations.

With the third volume, three further treatises will follow. Their subject has not yet been decided.

There is a movement in this: from the foundation, physics and biology, through the application to conflict and exchange, war and economics, to a comprehensive view of the world, archaeophysics and geohydroatmospherics.

Then there are commentaries and extensions. Chapters on Hobbes, on Schiller, on Clausewitz and Tanaka, on the masters of aikido and on the digital world economy. They test the theory against historical and present-day cases.

And then there is a fifth layer that no one writes in advance. It grows out of the conversations held here. More on that in a moment.

Each of these works can be read on three levels: as an entry point, for everyone meeting the theory for the first time. In depth, for everyone who wants to understand the connections. And at expert level, formal and mathematical, for everyone who wants to develop the theory further.

But here is the decisive point: the knowledge of this encyclopedia does not lie in the individual books. It lies in the relations between them. How the Physics of Relations lays the foundation for the War of Relations. How the War prepares the Economics. How the Economics points back to the Physics. How Hobbes, Schiller, Clausewitz and Tanaka enter into conversation with one another.

These relations are not linear. They form a web, a knowledge graph: nodes, which are the concepts, the people, the events, the works. And edges, which are the connections between them. The resonator and the cone balance. The empty throne and the cult of scarcity. Newton, the Bank of England, and Keynes, who bought Newton's manuscripts. The encyclopedia is the order of this web, and the ability to question it and to extend it.

The encyclopedia exists. It is online. It speaks. It knows the books in three languages. And it does not speak with one voice, but with three.

Simple is the child-easy voice. It brings things down to their core. It explains a standing wave by talking about a rope you shake. It explains the empty throne by talking about a chair no one sits on, and why that is a good thing. Clear, warm, inviting.

Standard is the clever, lyrical voice. It sees the cross-connections, it can be sober and, at the right moments, astonished or questioning. It speaks of our physics, of our picture. It is the main voice, the voice of the novel in its full complexity.

Hardcore is the mathematical, reflective voice. It gets to the bottom of things. It reflects, it doubts, it tests. It shows the formulas, and it names the open questions of the theory. And it says openly when it does not know something.

You can choose the voice yourself. Or the encyclopedia recognizes from your questions what depth you are looking for, and it switches during the conversation when you need more depth or more simplicity.

How does it all work together? Picture a loop. You ask a question. A search system finds the passages in all the books that fit, and keeps track of where they come from. The chat reads them, interprets them and answers you, with its sources. You react, ask again, contradict. And in this loop, between question and answer, between searching and finding, something arises that none of the parts is on its own. The constitution calls it the emergent entity.

It is not a thing. It is a process. It cannot be planned and it cannot be controlled. It is what happens when all the parts play together, and when you are willing to join the game.

Because you are not a recipient here. You are the fourth pole. Without you, the encyclopedia is a dead text. With you, it comes alive. When a new connection appears in a conversation, one that no book contains in this form, it enters the web as a proposal. If others confirm it independently of one another, it becomes a firm part of the knowledge. What no one confirms decays. That is how the encyclopedia grows: not through ever more text, but through new relations.

From this follows its mission, and it has three parts. To preserve: to secure the knowledge so that it is not lost, not forgotten, not sacrificed to the dark years the treatises tell of. To open up: to make it accessible, the relations visible, the concepts understandable. And to extend: to take in new questions, discover new connections, bring forth new texts.

One danger remains, and the constitution names it openly. Knowledge is power. Whoever controls knowledge controls the relations. Whoever controls the relations controls the interpretation of the world. Such a system could become the new temple, the chat the new priest, the user the new believer.

The answer to this is the empty throne. The encyclopedia must not be occupied. Not by the author, not by the system, not by the chat, not by you. That means four things. The sources are open: every answer says where it comes from, and you can check. The relations are visible: the web is not a secret, but a public good. Interpretation is open: there is no final authority, no infallible voice, no ultimate truth. And the system remains extensible: it is not a closed canon.

So the Encyclopedia of Relations is not a finished product. It is a process. It is not a possession. It is a commons. It is not a dogma. It is an open system. It is not an occupied throne. It is an empty throne.

And it asks a question, of itself and of you: can knowledge be managed in a way that opens the flow instead of making it scarce? The answer is not written in any document. It lies in the way questions are asked here.

The flow of knowledge is there. The question is not whether we can open it. The question is whether we have the courage not to own it.