Nietzsche describes five ways priests help us [counterproductively] to deal with nihilism. You can do it through self-hypnosis – drinking or medicating. You can do it through mechanical activity – just do what your boss tells you to do. You can do it through petty pleasures, like charity work. You can do it through herd mentality – just try to be with as many people as possible and do what they’re doing. And you can do it through orgies of feeling, whether positive or negative, like [watch] a football match.
“Technology offers us new versions of these five techniques. You can think of tech companies as modern day priests. So you have your Netflix for techno-hypnosis. You have ‘do whatever your Fitbit says’ for mechanical activity. You have Kickstarter, GoFundMe and Indiegogo for your petty pleasures.
“Obviously herd mentality language is what Facebook and Twitter use – you have your followers. And then you have orgies of feeling – I call it orgies of clicking, more recently called cancel culture – where you log into Twitter and find out who you get to attack that day.”
How does one break this cycle?
“Nietzsche says the possible cure for passive nihilism is active nihilism. He makes an important distinction between passive nihilism, when you stop caring – just a sort of defeatism, and active nihilism when you are actively destructive.”
You end the book on an optimistic note, saying the nihilism generated by technological progress may “force us to finally become creative”. Why do you think social media will ultimately be tamed?
“I think it’s exposing a certain emptiness. Holes in the armour keep appearing, so to speak. So if Google sells itself as the company that believes in ‘Don’t be evil’, and then you discover what they’re doing in China, you start raising questions – like maybe I’ve taken for granted what they think evil means – in the same way people start to question the Catholic Church.
“But the problem is – I think this is what Nietzsche meant with the ‘God is Dead’ claim – that you tear down a church and then just build a new one. So when people started the ‘Delete Facebook’ hashtag, articles started appearing, ‘What should be the new Facebook?’
“So we’re not aware enough. We are starting to question these megalithic companies but we’re not realising the problem is not Zuckerberg, the problem is much deeper.”
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