As professed in Evan Selinger’s conversation with author Nate Anderson (“Friedrich Nietzsche’s guide to better online living,” Ideas, March 27), Nietzsche might indeed have been mildly “concerned that our lives are inundated with information.” But not exceedingly concerned.
How Nietzsche may have dealt with informational inundation in the 19th century was unimaginably different than how one might speculate he may have contended with it in the digital environment of the 21st century. For a prolific reader, an original thinker, and an abundant writer like Nietzsche, the opportunity to tame and curate the metaphorical heap of information by employing the Internet’s blink-of-an-eye search tools would possibly have led to his amazed approval.
No, the towering Nietzsche obviously would not have endured the silliness of the “fear of missing out,” as Anderson notes, nor would he have been seduced by the strictly social aspects of online platforms, with their superficially seductive baubles. Instead, predictably, he would have optimized the formidable utility of the Internet, tapering the sources of content to nourish his philosophical genius.
A digital life might not have persuaded Nietzsche to move beyond the “nihilism” Selinger rightly calls out, but we may nonetheless venture that an online presence would indeed have abetted Nietzsche’s philosophy.
Keith Tidman
Bethesda, Md.