Happy Friday, friends! After last week's adventure in radical honesty, I want to keep this post sober, professional, and analytical. So what better subject than a vibes-based analysis of the fundamental metaphysical energies of digital technology through the lens of Nietzschean aesthetics?

The topic happened to arise, as often happens, while I was walking with my friend to the post office to serve final divorce papers on my ex-spouse a month or two ago (yay divorce!). I explained Nietzsche's distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian forces, and gave some examples of things that might fall into each category.

"But what about AI?" my friend asked, perhaps a little mischievously. "That's a really good question," I replied, which — in case you’ve never met me in person — is my way of saying: "Oh shit."

But first: the headlines.

Haunted computers

If you're not familiar, 'Apollonian vs Dionysian' is a philosophical dialectic made popular by Friedrich Nietzsche's 1872 book The Birth of Tragedy. I'll just quote Wikipedia:

As a materialist (mostly), I don't think one should take this distinction too seriously. But it's fun to play with, just like the psycholinguistic duality of bouba and kiki. You can walk along the street pointing at random things and saying "kiki!" or "bouba!", or debate with your friends whether coffee or Javascript are Apollonian or Dionysian.

Clocks? Apollonian. Cats? Dionysian. Newsletters? Apollonian (despite my best efforts). Dreams? Dionysian, but Inception is Apollonian (which is why I hate it). Electronic music? The Dionysian coaxed to emerge out of the Apollonian. Tanks? Surprisingly, an edge case. You get the idea.

Coffee, actually, is an interesting example. Today it's Apollonian: a productivity drug that many of us depend upon to squeeze our brains and bodies into the rigid schedule of a technocapitalist society. Yet as historian Cemal Kafadar explains in Ep. 31 of the Empire podcast, coffee was originally a drug of midnight mysticism rather a dystopian productivity aid that we're all forced to mainline under today's transnational Anglo-Lutherian neo-Stakhanovite regime. I can imagine no better evidence for the thesis that modernity itself is the brutal conquest of the Dionysian by the Apollonian.

Similarly, cars lean Apollonian, what with all the wiring and crankshafts and so on. At the same time, they run on oil, an intoxicating and deeply cursed substance formed from the fossils of the ancient dead, which intoxicates men and lures them into war and is therefore very much Dionysian.

So what about computers? Obviously they’re Apollonian. Math, rules, if/then true/false bleep bloop bzzzt. Except... is that really correct? Anyone who's even dabbled with programming will have experienced how mysterious, how puzzling, how haunted computers can be.

Stories abound of cursed hardware, bugs that cannot be replicated, programmer comments attached to seemingly superfluous blocks of code that say "DO NOT remove this part UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, or the program will fail. No, we don't know why." Even if you're not a tech person, you've probably at least encountered the demo effect.

One possible synthesis is simply to say that Nietzsche's whole dichotomy is bunk, because deep down the universe is a bunch of particles and stuff whose usually-predictable behaviour emergently gives rise to unpredictable chaos, so obviously the Apollonian and Dionysian are always entangled, you fool, you absolute rube.

Another option is that computers are too Apollonian, and we just can't handle it. Humans are mixed-up and mystical and emotional and illogical, even when we're trying very hard to be otherwise. So of course we experience a perfectly logical mechanism as having the touch of madness. Computers show us how Apollonian we aren't.

Which brings us to AI. Specifically, artificial neural networks developed via machine learning (ie, most of what gets called ‘AI’ these days). In a very important sense these are grown, not made; we give them the data, and they draw their own conclusions, which we further shape by providing feedback. We know the inputs and outputs, but what happens in between is often unknown even to their creators (the now-infamous 'black box' problem). And if you've spent much time chatting to modern large language models, you’ve likely had moments where you experienced their unpredictable strangeness directly.

I am forced to conclude that AI is the realisation of something that once seemed a contradiction in terms: the Dionysian computer. Maybe that's why it's driving everyone so crazy.

Thanks for reading! As always, you can find me on Bluesky here, on X here, and read my recent stories for The Independent here.