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The Plague
Camus's 1947 novel — an allegory of the Nazi occupation and a study of slow-moving emergencies recognized too late — whose structure maps with disquieting precision onto the plague of algorithmic optimization.
La Peste (The Plague) is Camus's 1947 novel, set in the Algerian port city of Oran during an outbreak of bubonic plague. It is many things at once — an allegory of the Nazi occupation, a study of collective suffering, a meditation on the varieties of human response to catastrophe — but at its structural core, it is a novel about a slow-moving emergency whose early manifestations are too easily confused with normalcy. The rats die in the streets; the citizens step over them. The fever arrives; it is attributed to other causes. By the time the city recognizes what it faces, the gates have closed and the plague is inside with them. The novel's protagonist, Dr. Rieux, becomes Camus's model for the stance of disciplined attention under conditions that exceed any individual capacity to cure.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book was written during the war and published in 1947. Its most immediate allegorical target