Infinity and a Quiet Resistance

When I wrote this essay, it was rooted in two feelings of helplessness. One was the feeling that honing my skills might no longer make any sense. The other was the feeling that, with knowledge flooding in from all sides, I had completely lost sight of what was correct.Technology is updated daily, becoming obsolete the moment it is mastered. Knowledge is available at the click of a search button, but as a result, the criteria for determining truth and falsehood grow increasingly uncertain. The former eventually transformed into a question about “biased technology,” while the latter evolved into a question about “a new reality.”

Lying at the bottom of this sense of helplessness is not the optimism touted by “fully automated luxury communism,” but a far uglier reality—one that has become a money game. Shuffling capital from one place to another generates wealth far more efficiently than honing one’s skills.Both mastering a craft and engaging sincerely with knowledge are becoming activities that no longer pay off in the face of the rapid pace of financialization and AI adoption. The space for sincerely engaging with anything is quietly being eroded. Perhaps we no longer have the stamina to write novels like those of Kenzaburo Oe, nor the stamina to read them through to the end.The “extension of human capabilities through technology” that McLuhan spoke of is, ironically, coming to fruition in the form of a “shrinking of humanity.”

All of this may stem from a single condition: infinity.Feeds that can be scrolled through forever, endlessly generated text and images, and the ever-expanding knowledge and capabilities of AI. Choices that amount to infinity are presented as a form of abundance, yet in reality, they rob people of time and the leeway to make decisions. We, with our finite bodies, are simply not built to endure being constantly exposed to that infinity.

Escaping into the finite may be both a reaction against infinity and an act of reclaiming the breathing room needed to sincerely engage with something. Compressing time and retreating into fleeting satisfaction.Closing off space and trusting what is near rather than what is far, and the tangible feel of reality over fiction. And traveling back to the past, immersing oneself in nostalgia for an era when infinity did not yet exist. All of these are desperate reflexes to protect ourselves from the overwhelming burden of infinity.

However, this reflex often slips into exclusivity. Believing only in what is close at hand leads to distrust of what is distant and to conspiracy theories, while nostalgia for the past is often co-opted into a closed sphere called nationalism. The yearning for finitude does not, in and of itself, signify soundness.The very desperation to escape infinity sometimes creates the most exclusive enclaves.

Yet we are not in a position to simply stand by and watch this drift occur. Architecture is the act of shaping the landscape. The landscape—and architecture itself—is finite. Once created, it cannot be moved.Just as a mountain cannot be moved, architecture, too, continues to exert an inescapable influence on those who view and use it. We, who have sought to imbue technology with color and to reclaim the tactile quality of the real, are simultaneously dealing with the power to impose that color and texture upon others.The act of creating finite things is always accompanied by the weight of this power. That is precisely why ASIBA has charted a course of investing in the philosophy of creators rather than capital, remaining open to the general public and other fields, and holding fast to the accumulated body of historical scholarship. Even regarding the authority gained through this approach, we do not close our eyes to criticism of power.

“Political” here does not carry a grand or lofty meaning. Simply maintaining an unyielding passion for creation is, in itself, already a form of politics . And taking the time to gradually involve a diverse range of people will eventually become the nourishment that brings about change on a broader scale. I believe this is a modest form of resistance that we can still maintain in this age of infinity.