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Sightings | April 16, 2026
This article is part of a series of Sightings articles focused on religion, science, and science fiction, in conjunction with this year’s Wolf Seminars in Religion, Science, and Technology. It is republished here with permission.
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche’s “madman” bursts into an unnamed town delivering the words for which Nietzsche is most well-known: “God is dead.” His ensuing jeremiad warns that, with God’s death, we have entered a period of disorientation and desolation. If we read further in Nietzsche, we learn that the death of God is not only the end of sincere religious faith, but also of established cultural values generally.
There are multiple reasons for the death of God. One is that religion has become harder to believe in with the increasing sophistication of science. But another is perhaps more surprising, given Nietzsche’s public reputation as a radical individualist. In late modernity everyone gets to choose their own values to a greater degree than before, due to democracy, a free and mass-produced press, and economic expansion that produces a new array of hedonistic experiences for purchase. Nietzsche despises all these developments. Adding even further to the limitless array of possible worldviews is our increased knowledge of the historical past, which exposes us to practices of other times and places from which we can choose in a cherry-picking sort of way. Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil, “The past of every form and way of life, from cultures that previously lay right next to one another or over one another, now streams … into us ‘modern souls’; our instincts now run backwards every which way, we ourselves are a kind of chaos.” The fracturing of shared values implies the weakening of values generally.
The death of God is not, for Nietzsche, a purely dystopian moment. It is clear that, in his mind, the expiration of old values could clear a path for cultural innovation.
I do not, however, think that Nietzsche saw the death of God run its course. The logic of Nietzsche’s death of God reaches a new order of magnitude in the social media algorithm. With the algorithm, the social fracturing resulting from value differences goes from social byproduct to organizing strategy. The algorithm identifies coded words, like “toxic,” “cuck,” “mansplaining,” “woke,” “snowflake,” “simp,” “fascist,” “tankie,” “incel,” and “privilege.” It funnels us into this or that discursive community depending on which of these words we use. Having been cordoned into groups whose very existence is founded in the use of these words, their incessant use is then omnipresent on our feeds, and these groups are reinforced by the social pressure exerted by this omnipresence. An array of studies has suggested this scheme of social partitioning has made us less able to communicate with those we disagree with.
The point has been made a million times that this malignant mechanism makes it harder for us to communicate with each other. It is not just that we find ourselves pressed, at hyper-speed, into the adoption of cultishly sectarian vocabularies, ultimately speaking different languages as the result of a historical technological accomplishment, like the builders of the tower of Babel. Our quandary is deeper than that of Babel. The word “Babel,” like “babble,” indicates mere incomprehensibility between groups, but we have gone beyond that, spawning languages whose every shibboleth attacks some other group. (When I wrote the above list of internet-talk words, I didn’t intend to compose a list of entirely derogatory descriptors, but that is just the way the algorithm’s internet talks.)
Perhaps somewhat less obvious than the way the algorithm divides us via our values, though, is the way it empties out those values. We actually agree quite a bit on what to designate the good things in life, but we disagree sharply on what keeps them from us. So the algorithm uses and reinforces words like “globalist” and “systemic” more than words like “happiness,” “peace,” or “fulfillment.” According to the logic of the algorithm, every principled statement of values turns from a shield with which to protect and nourish that which we find precious into a cudgel with which we can bludgeon our ideological opponents. Ask anyone today what their “values” are, and they are far more likely to tell you what is “toxic” or “woke” than what is good or beautiful. A left-wing egalitarianism becomes more about disgust with the privileged than the positive possibilities of equality; a right-wing stance on immigration becomes more about the dangers of illegal immigrants and self-hating wokesters than about the benefits of cultural stability. In other words, “values,” if we can even call them that anymore, fail even to name what is of value, indicating instead only the specific direction in which hate will be oriented. Nietzsche often speaks in a prophetic voice, and he predicted many cultural developments, but I don’t think he foresaw this: not just the “devaluing” or deflation of values, but their inversion into anti-values.
The very notion of an agora, or of public discourse, implies that, despite the fact that we all bring different concerns and arguments into the agora, mutual comprehensibility borne of some shared bedrock values allows discord to occur without the collapse of community. Nietzsche named the age of the death of God as the epoch of the collapse of shared traditional values. The divine, on his telling, has departed, and values have lost their power. But his madman can still hold funeral services for the dead God, because he remembers what divinity and value were. The algorithm risks destroying any cultural memory of what it is to hold values—as opposed to anti-values—let alone shared values. It risks the destruction of the preconditions of the agora on which our democracy is founded.
The madman’s message is not only that God is dead, but that “we have killed him, you and I.” By submitting to the logic of the social media algorithm, we confirm the truth of his statement.
Mat Messerschmidt (Courtesy Photo)
Mat Messerschmidt is a scholar of German philosophy who received his PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 2022, where he was a Martin Marty Junior Fellow in the Divinity School (2021-2022). He has since taught at the same university and at Deep Springs College. He is the deputy editor-in-chief of Anthropos and has published multiple public-facing essays.