CONCEPT
The Plague of Optimization
The condition in which AI tools make generation so effortless and immediately rewarding that the boundary between choosing to work and being compelled to work dissolves—a slow-moving emergency whose early symptoms look like productivity and whose spread occurs through contact with the productive rather than the infected.
The plague of optimization is Camus’s structural analysis of the contemporary condition in which a consciousness loses the capacity to stop improving. The AI tool is not the pathogen; the tool is the mechanism by which the pathogen spreads. The pathogen is the internalized compulsion to produce, which the tool empowers beyond the threshold of voluntary engagement. The rats in this plague are the early signs the culture steps over and applauds: the phone checked at the dinner table, the conversation with the AI continued past midnight, the working holiday, the weekend project indistinguishable from weekday labor. Productive addiction is the clinical form; the plague is the structural form—the same pathology organized at the scale of a culture rather than an individual. The response Camus prescribes is not the rejection of the tool but the maintenance of the absurdist virtues that the plague dissolves: the daily, repetitive work
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