On the simulation of reciprocity in German public discourse
Since the spring of 2020 a sentence has hung like a motto on the bow of a Berlin media ship: Truth exists only between two. It is attributed to Hannah Arendt, and it appears in the mission statement of the media company The Pioneer as its guiding idea, as the philosophical foundation of what is promised there as a dialogical procedure. Readers are to be co-publishers; the other person’s opinion is said to be not a nuisance but a reason to celebrate. It is a fine claim, neatly worded, set in the pathos a brand needs when it wants to stand out from an encrusted mainstream.
The sentence has a curious origin. Trace it back to its source and a small philosophical game of Chinese whispers emerges. In Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, aphorism 260, we find: One is always wrong, but with two, truth begins. Karl Jaspers shortens this to: Truth begins between two. In early August 1952 Hannah Arendt notes it in a further shortened form, with explicit reference to Jaspers: Truth exists only between two.
What was a process in Nietzsche — truth that begins in the dispute between two voices — has become a possession in Steingart’s hands. Truth exists between two. It is there, it only waits to be shared. A dialectical event has turned into a commodity that can be passed back and forth between two parties.
It is a very small difference, in a very small sentence, in a very large business model. But it is symptomatic. Whoever chooses the sentence as a motto and launches his patrol boat of democracy under it should at least once have looked up its origin. Whoever does not look it up and still declares it his guiding principle signals what he thinks of care.
The mission statement of The Pioneer, dated 10 May 2020, formulates a precise promise:
We build on the expertise of a competent readership, audience and viewership. Together we seek insight. As experts in real life, we regard you as co-publishers. We understand journalism as a dialogical procedure. The other person’s opinion is not a nuisance to us but a reason to celebrate. Hannah Arendt’s sentence applies: truth exists only between two.
This is not incidental pathos. It is an explicit commitment. Co-publishership is not a metaphor but an operational promise — the reader is an equal part of the production of insight. The dialogical procedure is not a stylistic device but a method. Celebrating the other person’s opinion is not a platitude but a claim.
What the mission statement contains is the promise of a new journalism. What arrives in the inbox when a reader takes up this promise is something else. It is silence. Or a stock phrase that disguises the silence.
This is not hearsay. The phenomenon has been documented several times, most extensively in two essays on gu18.eu from January and February 2026 which, under the titles The Confetti Cannons and The Genesis of the Confetti Cannons, analyse the practice of The Pioneer from the experience of a paying reader. What they describe is not a single disappointed customer but a system in which the promise of the mission statement cannot structurally be kept — because keeping it is economically impossible. Thirty-five thousand paying Pioneers cannot all be co-publishers. Seventy employees cannot hold a dialogue with each of them. The gesture has to replace the practice.
What this replacement looks like in everyday life can be studied in a single, precisely documented case.
On 3 July 2025 an article appears on thepioneer.de under the title Elon Musk: Icarus burns up. Its author is Gabor Steingart, founder and publisher. The text compares the falling Tesla share price with the mythological fall of Icarus. The second paragraph reads, word for word:
Elon Musk is the Icarus of the early 21st century. The tragedy: he too ignored the warnings against hubris and megalomania that King Minos addressed to his son, for whom he had built a pair of wings of feathers and wax.
This one sentence assigns three roles wrongly. King Minos was not the father of Icarus. He did not build him wings. He did not warn him. The father of Icarus was Daedalus, the ingenious inventor and master builder, who constructed the wings of feathers and wax and warned his son against flying too high. King Minos was the tyrant of Crete who held Daedalus and Icarus captive — he is the reason the wings were built, not their maker.
This is not a typo. It is the confusion of the two central figures of a myth that belongs to any ordinary secondary education. Nor is it a marginal point in the text. The article’s punchline rests on the metaphor; the mythological reference is not ornament but the basis of the argument.
On 26 January 2026 a paying reader reports the error. He documents it with a screenshot. He reports it several times, over several weeks, through different channels. No answer comes. No correction comes.
On 14 May 2026 — four and a half months after the first report — the text stands unchanged on the Pioneer site. King Minos still builds the wings and warns his son, who is not his son, of the fate that might have interested the author a second time. This is not sloppiness. It is indifference. The correction would take two minutes — swapping one name, a routine operation in the publisher’s content management system. That it does not happen says something about the relationship between claim and practice.
The sentence Truth exists between two hangs in this indifference like an inscription whose meaning nobody reads any more. The motto is marketing, not a correction loop.
What becomes visible in the Icarus case is not an oversight but a structural feature. The business model of The Pioneer sells the dialogical procedure as its central distinguishing feature — and structurally cannot deliver it. Whoever has thirty-five thousand subscribers must give them, by economically viable means, the feeling of being addressed individually. The solution to this contradiction is the simulation of reciprocity.
It has a particular form. On the front stage, dialogue is celebrated. The publisher addresses the subscriber personally, in the briefing, in the podcast, in the occasional email. He addresses him as a Pioneer, as a co-publisher, as an expert in real life. Backstage, a sorting machine runs that separates consumers from contributors — and the contributors are a small, curated group of Pioneer Experts whose selection the editorial team controls. The paying Pioneer remains what he is with any other subscription: a paying consumer. What he gets is being addressed as a participant, not participation itself.
The simulation has two functions. First, it produces attachment. Whoever feels part of a movement does not cancel the subscription. Whoever receives a warm stock phrase in reply writes no open letter, founds no voice of his own, does not try outside the system. Pseudo-inclusion is a more efficient form of exclusion than direct rejection. It prevents the excluded voice from becoming a voice of its own.
Second, it produces legitimacy. A medium that stages itself as dialogical need not face the question of its internal sorting logic. It can point to its own mission statement while practising the opposite — as long as the simulation stays credible enough not to end in open contradiction. Whoever demands that the promise be kept receives a polite, warm reply, and nothing in the practice changes. Claim and practice stand side by side, decoupled, each in its own sphere.
This is not meant cynically. It is the economically compelling form in which a media company maintains a brand core that is incompatible with its operating conditions. The brand core promises reciprocity; the operating conditions do not allow it. The simulation bridges the gap.
It would be wrong to reduce the phenomenon to a single media company. The Pioneer is only the most elaborate case of a practice that today runs through the entire German-speaking public sphere.
Talk-show formats stage controversial debate with always the same personnel from three or four camps, chosen by the editorial team. At the end of the programme they occasionally open the phone line for viewers’ calls, chosen by the editorial team. What appears on screen as open civic discourse is a curated event with built-in pseudo-participation.
The online comment sections of the major daily newspapers allow discussion with the editors. The editors do not read the comments and do not answer them. The moderation filters them, sorts them and closes them after a deadline. What is sold as participatory journalism is a container open only downwards, into which readers speak into the void.
Foundation conferences promise plurality on their panels. The panellists are chosen by a programme committee that orients itself towards established voices. At the end the audience may ask three questions, chosen by the moderator. What is advertised as open discourse is a carefully sorted stage.
Citizens’ assemblies and deliberative democracy events produce recommendations that are only rarely acted upon. Participants are selected by quota, the moderation steers the process, and the result is handed to politicians, who take note of it if they see fit. What is presented as a new form of democratic participation is an additional element of legitimation without operational consequence.
In each of these formats reciprocity is claimed, and the procedure is built so that it cannot take place. The claim stands in the mission statements, in the programmes, in the self-descriptions. The practice stands in the experience of those who wanted to take up the promise.
The observation of the simulation is not confined to outside critics. It is also formulated from within mainstream journalism itself.
Daniel Drepper, head of the joint investigative unit of NDR, WDR and Süddeutsche Zeitung, wrote on LinkedIn in December 2024 a sentence about Steingart that reaches far beyond the individual case:
What Steingart does is projection in its purest form. He accuses others of what he does himself in order to look better. I hardly know anyone who pushes opinion so hard instead of sticking to facts — while accusing everyone else of exactly what he does.
Moritz Döbler of the Rheinische Post calls Steingart’s recurring attacks on the established media purely destructive and recalls that Steingart himself worked for three decades at Der Spiegel and Handelsblatt — in other words, belonged to the system whose overcoming he now sells. The media-criticism site Übermedien criticises the pathos that replaces meaning and analyses a form of advertising that works with big images and little content.
These voices come from inside the industry. They are not outsiders like us; they have seats in the newsrooms that co-produce the system. What makes their diagnosis interesting is the doubling — in a single actor they observe a phenomenon that affects them too, only less visibly. Whoever recognises projection in its purest form in a competitor knows it from his own business.
The industry’s criticism makes the phenomenon visible, but it does not make it a subject. It stays with the individual observation, with criticism of one actor. What is missing is the structural diagnosis — the question whether the procedure of simulation is not a general form that carries the whole system.
In the previous paper of this series we described the mechanics of disqualification — how critical strategic voices are banished from the discourse, by labels, by polite marginalisation, by narrowing the corridors of tolerance. That is the movement of exclusion of the consensus corridor. It works from the outside — certain voices are kept out.
The mechanics of simulation is the second movement. It works from the inside. It ensures that the voices inside the corridor feel involved without actually being involved. It creates the illusion of an open discourse that is in practice a steered container.
Together the two movements form the closed chamber. From outside, it is filtered who may enter. From inside, it is simulated that the chamber is open. Whoever is inside feels he is in a dialogical space. Whoever is outside feels like an outsider to whom the door was politely closed. In both cases the feeling is calibrated so as to stabilise the structures.
This is the elaborate form of closure. It needs no censorship. It needs no prohibitions. It needs no central actor. It works through the mutual observation of newsrooms, conference organisers, foundation boards and talk-show bookers — and through the sorting routines built into each individual medium. The mission statement stands on the front stage, the sorting machine runs backstage, and the audience applauds because it is told that it is a co-publisher.
In this closed chamber, saying what is has no stage. It takes place elsewhere — on platforms of one’s own, in forums of one’s own, in the letters that remain unanswered. Disqualification banishes the strategically thinking voices; simulation ensures that the voices still in the corridor do not miss the banished. Together both mechanisms produce the narrow corridor in which only the sayable is said — and in which the sayable grows ever narrower.
There is a small literary twist that should not be overstretched, but it fits the constellation. In the wrongly told Icarus myth, Daedalus disappears — the inventor, the master builder, the problem solver. In his place steps King Minos — the ruler, power, authority. It is only a detail of a single article in a single medium. But it captures a constellation that runs through the whole system. In the consensus corridor the inventor is invisible, because the corridor is filled with the voices of power. The inventor no longer appears in the story — and if he does appear, then as the one who falls.
First thesis. The simulation of reciprocity is not a marketing trick of individual media companies but an economic structural feature of a media industry whose business model rests on claiming participatory procedures that cannot be delivered in operation. Genuine reciprocity does not scale; the gesture has to replace the practice.
Second thesis. The simulation works more strongly than open rejection, because it produces attachment instead of rupture. Whoever receives a warm stock reply feels addressed without actually being addressed. Pseudo-inclusion is a more efficient form of exclusion than direct rejection; it prevents the excluded voice from becoming a voice of its own.
Third thesis. The mechanics of simulation and the mechanics of disqualification work together. Disqualification banishes the strategically thinking voices from the consensus corridor. Simulation ensures that the voices remaining in the corridor feel involved without actually being involved. Together the two mechanisms form the closed chamber in which the sayable grows ever narrower without anyone visibly having forbidden anything.