AI breaks old sources of meaning the same way Nietzsche said the death of God broke inherited morality.
When external structures collapse (roles, labels, certainty), meaning has to be generated from within.
Identity becomes what you return to repeatedly (actions, habits, resonance), not what you’re labeled as.
Morality becomes drift-resilience — maintaining coherence when everything shifts.
Nietzsche isn’t telling us how to worship; he’s telling us how to author value in a world where external meaning no longer holds, including one shaped by AI.
IMHO, this may all be leading towards greater authenticty, but it will unfold one person at a time, as it must.
Nietzsche says, without irony, all a basement dweller needs to pay attention to is doing world class shit!
(Medication, internet connection, etc may or may not be required-- from my reading, N's opinion is that getting used to virtuosity takes time and isolation-- drinking from the firehose wastes a lot of organs. I disagree, debate me! )
Anything of any value always takes one person at a time for things to really get better. Good article btw. I am working on a Science Fiction story about this kind of future. These concepts are a big help.
AI doesn't break any sources of meaning, it's value is in replacing journalists as middle man to access decades of silod research with more granularity.
I used to think the democratization of content creation and reach was an obvious virtue.
Now I think instead of massive corporations making shit up to sell stuff as some great way of life, we have every single Susan and Billy doing it constantly across every interaction.
it's worse. it doesn't make the former good. but we've somehow created a worse version.
When external structures collapse (roles, labels, certainty), meaning has to be generated from within.
Identity becomes what you return to repeatedly (actions, habits, resonance), not what you’re labeled as.
Morality becomes drift-resilience — maintaining coherence when everything shifts.
Nietzsche isn’t telling us how to worship; he’s telling us how to author value in a world where external meaning no longer holds, including one shaped by AI.
IMHO, this may all be leading towards greater authenticty, but it will unfold one person at a time, as it must.