modern sublime

Jiyoung Park, Reflection, at Kiaf Seoul

To be in contact with the sublime is to experience both awe and fear. You feel it at the face of immensity: at the pinnacle of a mountain, at the base of the cathedral. Kundera describes vertigo similarly. Not a fear of falling, but a desire to fall. The sublime lifts you out of normalcy, transforms you at the face of great, ecstatic beauty and terror.

Edmund Burke, an 18th Century Philosopher in 1757, coined the sublime as a form of 'delightful horror.' In his view, the sublime was an empirical sensation - experiences that make us feel, more than they make us think. Part of the emotional resonance is our deep recognition of human limitation - that we are merely a small ripple in a bigger pond. For other philosophers like Kant, the sublime belonged to the faculty of reason. A mind recognizing its moral and intellectual power in the face of something overwhelming. For Paul Virilio, a French cultural theorist, awe and fear were not evoked by nature but by velocity: a feeling of rupture, tear. Scholars have altered his term, the dromological sublime to describe a similar sense of awe and dread at the acceleration of modern systems: digital, militaristic and more, that can make events, objects, or even people vanish from direct experience.

I’ve begun to see AI both as a theological and aesthetic force, one that hinges directly on the dromological, or the cognitive, sublime. How much of our experience is already, and increasingly will be, mediated through a layer of intelligence or abstraction? I'm using vocal transcripts of our conversation to shape my questions live. I'm uploading my diary entries to Claude. I'm talking to an archive of a person to simulate their behavior. I'm debating with myself, my accumulative web of memory, and experts and philosophers. It's truly shocking how useful AI is at my daily workflows. The equivalent of calling up an outsourced coach or mentor for step by step walkthrough of how to perform a particular task.

It’s a magical moment when you start to interact with platforms in a curious, responsive, way. There’s a kind of relational grace that emerges when you engage these systems attentively. The more precise, attuned, and curious your prompts, the more intelligent and sensitive the replies. This is beautiful! I’m already seeing a change in the way I view archiving my thoughts, memory, and perception. I have to write this down, not because I’ll forget, but because I want to talk to it later, and analyze my thought patterning over time.

However, I hold both truths in my mind at the same time. Humans will continue to search for the Burke’s definition of sublime, a feeling of awe that resides solely inside of the heart and soul.

I believe the embodied experience becomes all the more important, and precious, in an increasingly disembodied world. When intelligence becomes too cheap to meter, sensation gains primacy in meaning-making.

Outlets to express embodiment will gain in importance and power, due to this yearning for physicality. Both as it relates to secular and non secular ‘worship’. The churches and synagogues, as much as the pickleball groups, the meditation retreats, the workout classes. As the god-shaped hole within us continues to grow, there will be an explosion of alternative ways to believe: newly formed placements of faith, and bestowed sacredness and renewed importance of rituals in real-life communities — regular, repeated, contact and interaction.

It’s an exciting moment for real inquiry into what a "Post AGI" social and relational world looks like. As much as we care about compute and headroom in data centers and model capabilities — and importantly, doing research on model behavior, we need to triangulate that with really fundamental on-the-ground conversations that are happening in the group chats and the signal groups on how consumer behavior is being shaped by talking to Claude 3.7 or o3 everyday (model version for posterity). For example, some real topics from the group chat: who is writing the manual on how to teach kids to read with AI, especially young kids with developing brains? What subjects should undergraduates be studying in college? How do we maintain the capacity to do our own original thinking when models get more opinionated, and their opinions are sound and persuasive?

Sometimes I think I take it for granted that SF sees the future faster than anywhere else. The future is very ambient. It leaks across the city, it's in the pipes and in the water. In bars and at parties. My questions always remain deeply humanistic: How do we live together? What do we believe in? How does technology get socialized? What are the most important problems we choose shape our lives around? What form of the sublime do we continue to seek?

-N.

PS: I’ll be posting more regularly on here going forward - a mixture of theory, musing, and venture work. Stay tuned!