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Jeanyoon Choi (b.1999) is a Computational Artist researching in interconnectivity and complexity through Multi-Device Web Artworks.

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jeanyoon.ch@oi /oi % cat also-sprach-zarathustra

Also Sprach Zarathustra

2025-04-15

To say that we live in a world of confusion and chaos has become a cliché. Innovation continues in California, but it is becoming difficult to tell whether it serves humanity or simply serves further innovation. The technological treadmill accelerates without stopping. The growing number of people thrown off it hardly seems to matter: its supply and demand can be sustained by the products of another treadmill, such as automated agents. This is a dystopia of continuous acceleration. Yet every dystopia contains a trace of utopia.

Taylorism turned human beings into machines. Employment became a kind of feudal arrangement for the twentieth century, and people became components in a hierarchy of positions. Much blue- and white-collar work consisted of repeated operations performed with a restricted set of skills. We were servants of systems. Education, too, pursued the mass production of suitable components: solve as many problems as possible, as accurately as possible, within a fixed time. Housing, leisure, and fashion followed the same logic. Do we not take pride in living in a Corbusian prison—in Banpo Xi, for instance?

If artificial intelligence can be useful to humanity, one possibility lies in its capacity to replace the repetitive labour required to produce and sustain simulacra. Algorithms increasingly perform the operations through which these systems continue. This can be disastrous for employment and the present economy. But it might also release us from an industrial-engineering ideology that reduces a person's existential value to their function as a component. The servant of the system is liberated—or dismissed. At that moment, the value of the person as a being-for-itself must be reconsidered. We also possess technologies through which an individual's ideas can become tangible unusually quickly.

From servant to creator of systems; from being-in-itself to being-for-itself; from component to mechanism; from part to whole. Constraints of physical capital can give way to the creation of proliferating relationships of meaning. The modernist insistence on rationality, optimisation, and correct answers can yield to nonlinearity, unexpectedness, and an affirmation of uncertainty: a tongue stuck out at the Crystal Palace. Let machines calculate and repeat. A human lifetime is already too short for all the questions we might ask. Machines could bring these thought experiments into contact with practical experiments, perhaps helping us confront problems we have not yet learned to solve.

Nietzsche's Zarathustra speaks of the camel, the lion, and the child. The camel carries its burdens through the desert, accepting the command that it must obey. The lion seeks freedom and says that it wills, but cannot yet create what it desires. The child creates: innocence, forgetting, play, affirmation, a wheel that turns by itself. Rather than remaining inside the wheel, the child makes self-turning wheels—systems—as an act of play. If I can retain hope for the coming age, it is through this possibility of a humanity capable of creation, affirmation, and laughter. Zarathustra spoke a century and a half ago. It is our turn to respond.

The arrival of large language models makes the need for another approach urgent. Tools can already perform substantial portions of design, development, and administrative work. When constraints and objectives are fixed, solving the prescribed problem faster is an increasingly fragile basis for human value. Against regression toward the mean, I am interested in divergence from it: asking and defining questions where a relationship was not expected.

We need to transform ourselves before change is imposed on us. This accelerating hyper-Sisyphus shows how thoroughly we have enclosed ourselves in the treadmill of a hyperobject. The dystopian comedy retains a distinctly utopian colour.

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