Alienation, Synchronization, Imitation: Kafka, Then and Now

In this article, I have tried to measure the distance that separates us from Kafka by trying to register both the things that we still have in common with him and his time, and the many things that have changed in between. The first section is an analysis of the story “A Visit to a Mine” in terms of the new accident prevention techniques instituted by the welfare state at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. The second section deals with the new concepts of time and space that emerged in the age of electric and electro-magnetic media. And the third section is an attempt to write a short history of imitation from Descartes to Darwin, Kafka, Turing, and, finally, to the Large Language Models that we now call Artificial Intelligence.