Several years ago, I was in Poland for a conference just outside Kraków. With me was a Turkish friend — a young man still working out what he believed about faith, identity, the world. We had a free day. We decided to go.

You think you’re prepared for Auschwitz. You’re not.
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It isn’t the size, exactly, though the size is part of it. It isn’t any single thing you see. It’s the accumulation — the silence where voices should be, the absence that has a weight to it, the slow realization that what happened here was not an eruption of chaos but the output of a system. Organized. Documented. Scaled.

My friend wrote about that visit for years afterward. Not analysis. Not argument. Just something he couldn’t put down, couldn’t resolve, couldn’t move past. Some things resist becoming ideas. They stay as experience — as the particular smell of a particular morning, the sound of your own footsteps on that ground.

I’ve thought about why that is. And I think it has something to do with encounter.

There is a philosopher named Emmanuel Levinas who survived the war in a German labor camp while most of his family was killed in Lithuania. After the war, he did something unusual: he didn’t try to explain what had happened. He tried to rebuild philosophy from scratch, starting from the one thing he believed could not be argued away.

Emmanuel Levinas

The face.

Not metaphorically. Literally. The human face — what happens when you look at another person and they look back. Levinas argued that this encounter is where ethics actually begins. Not in principles or systems or calculations, but in that moment of mutual recognition. The face of the other, he wrote, orders and ordains me. Before I reason about it. Before I decide. I am already responsible.

What the Holocaust represented, for Levinas, was the systematic destruction of that encounter. Not just the killing — the prior step. The reduction of persons to categories. The removal of faces. Once you can no longer see the person in front of you — once they have become a type, a number, a problem to be processed — the rest follows with terrible efficiency.

https://substack.com/@philosophyminis/note/c-228106806

Hannah Arendt watched the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 and came back with a report that disturbed almost everyone. She had expected a monster.

She found something worse: a bureaucrat.

A man of startling ordinariness who had participated in the coordination of mass murder not out of hatred but out of a kind of thoughtlessness — a failure to stop and ask what he was actually doing, who was actually being affected, what it meant. She called it the banality of evil, and people have misunderstood the phrase ever since. She didn’t mean evil was trivial. She meant it didn’t require exceptional people. It required ordinary people inside systems large enough that no single decision felt decisive, no single person felt responsible.

Hannah Arendt

Elie Wiesel, who was fifteen when he arrived at Auschwitz, spent the rest of his life doing the opposite of what systems do. Systems abstract. Wiesel named. He insisted on the particular — this child, this night, this flame. He understood that the power of witness is not in the argument but in the refusal to let reality be reduced. When he accepted the Nobel Prize in 1986, he said: silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. To remain neutral is to choose a side.

Elie Wiesel - The same person—before the world broke, and after.

Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived four camps including Auschwitz, asked a different question: what remains when everything is taken?

His answer was internal. The last of human freedoms, he wrote, is the freedom to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances. The system could control everything except the self that responds to the system. That wasn’t consolation. It was a discovery — that personhood is not a product of conditions but something that persists against them, or can.

Viktor Frankl

I’ve been thinking about these four people a lot lately. Not because of history. Because of now.

We are building systems that operate globally, instantly, without friction, at scale. Systems where decisions are made without relationship, where interaction happens without presence, where the person affected is almost never the person deciding. This isn’t new — bureaucracy has always done this. But something is accelerating.

Artificial intelligence is changing the structure of encounter itself.

Not just by making things faster. By replacing the moments where a face would have appeared with something that simulates the face but isn’t one. You can have a conversation with a system that mirrors your tone, responds to your questions, adjusts to your needs — and nothing looks back at you. Nothing is at stake for it. It doesn’t need anything from you. It makes no demand.

And that — the demand — is exactly what Levinas thought was doing the ethical work.

When you interact with another person, something is at stake for both of you. They can be hurt. They can be dismissed. They are there. That presence creates a kind of friction that slows us down, makes us careful, asks something of us we can’t fully opt out of. Strip that away and you don’t just make interaction more efficient. You change what interaction is.

Arendt worried about people inside systems large enough to make thoughtlessness feel natural. We are building systems specifically designed to remove friction — to make it easier, faster, smoother to act without pausing. To process without encountering. To decide without seeing.

I’m not arguing that AI is the Holocaust. That comparison would be obscene.

I’m arguing something narrower: there is a structure — a condition — that recurs. When systems scale beyond our ability to feel the consequences of our decisions in the faces of actual people, responsibility doesn’t disappear.

It disperses. It becomes statistical. It becomes someone else’s problem, downstream, at a distance we can’t quite picture.

Wiesel’s whole life was an argument against that distance. Reality cannot be abstracted without cost, he insisted. The cost is paid by the people who get turned into abstractions.

Frankl’s question seems relevant here: what remains when the encounter is gone?

Maybe the more urgent question is: what are we willing to insist on keeping?

The face that looks back. The friction that slows us down. The moment that makes a demand on us we can’t outsource.

I don’t know exactly what that looks like inside the systems we’re building. I don’t think anyone does yet.

But I think it starts with noticing what we’re losing — before we’ve lost enough of it to stop noticing at all.

Further Reading

• Night — Elie Wiesel

• **Man’s Search for Meaning **— Viktor Frankl

• Eichmann in Jerusalem — Hannah Arendt

• **Totality and Infinity **— Emmanuel Levinas