The Death of Meaning

On the horrors of AI-generated imagery

In March, 404 Media blessed us with the following headline:

‘Brainrot’ AI on Instagram Is Monetizing the Most Fucked Up Things You Can Imagine (and Lots You Can’t)

The article, written by 404 Media cofounder Jason Koebler, began:

These are words I never thought I would type, and the people in my life who I have said them to have told me to immediately stop speaking. But here is how I would describe the type of AI generated reels that are popular on Instagram right now: Dora the Explorer feet mukbang; Peppa the Pig Skibidi toilet explosion; Steph Curry and LeBron James Ahegao Drakedom threesome; LeBron James and Diddy raping Steph Curry in prison; anthropomorphic fried egg strippers; iPhone case made of human skin; any number of sexualized Disney princesses doing anything you can imagine and lots of things you can’t; mermaids making out with fish; demon monster eating a woman’s head; face-swapped AI adult influencers with Down syndrome, and, unfortunately, this. Unfortunately, I swear to you that the screengrabs and videos I am including and linking to in this article are not the worst that I have seen on Instagram.

But it gets worse. Here’s the next paragraph:

Other “niches” that have become popular on Instagram and which have begun to regularly pop up on my feed are wildly racist AI videos of Black men whose faces are put on dogs or gorillas, Black men storming KFC restaurants and chasing after watermelon, George Floyd opening a “Fent-Donalds,” Martin Luther King Jr. in a tub of green sludge, Anne Frank as a zionist cyborg, etc.

What I realized while reading this and clicking through to several of the videos was that all these sexualized cartoon figures, racist caricatures, degraded historical icons, and surrealist horrors are not actually random artifacts of a broken algorithm but a penetrating reflection of our human psychology. I don’t mean the part that seems obviously human — the humor, the sexuality, the racism. I mean the part that seems obviously machine — the AI artifacts, the algorithmic noise, the creepy visual simulacra. It may be captivating, but so is a house fire. Yet within that noise, knee-deep in the vomit of pattern recognition engines trained on titanic data sets of the most clicked, watched, searched, and fetishized content on the internet, lies something all too familiar. A billion human impulses gnashed together insensibly, incoherently, inhumanly, yet it is precisely this that strikes me as most human.

Black mirrors of the soul

One of the amazing things about AI is that it gets better at creating coherent images the more data you train it on even if the data you give it is garbage such as racist memes or child drawings. It learns to mimic the shape of meaning even while losing any sense of ethical context. The underlying mathematical algorithm may seem like the metal endoskeleton that lies beneath the living flesh of the visual brainrot described above, blank and soulless as the blackness of a shark’s eyes, but as Nietzsche said, “If you look long into the abyss, the abyss also look into you.” Or rather, the abyss reflects you like the black mirror of a screen. And what does the mirror reveal? We created it to take the things we talk about most and feed it back to us, plucking the signal from the noise, the echo of humanity’s voice ringing through the dark forest of the uncanny valley. And the chaos of it all is just the visual tearing of the fabric of our being as we witness the death of meaning in the age of infinite content.

Dig beneath the fake AI-generated videos and what now counts are “real” is an actual video of an actual person, except this is not reality either. What appears on Instagram is pure performance. That young girl crying because her boyfriend left her? She had to set up her phone to record before she began to weep. But again, even when you train AI on videos that are themselves not real, something true emerges, the platonic ideal referenced even in the most performative display rises to the top. This is what Jean Baudrillard calls a simulacrum — a copy with no original, untethered from reality, morality, or even coherence. Nothing but a set of signifiers defined not by the referent, or actual thing in the world to which a word refers, but by our collective intuition of what a term probably means in the descriptive linguistics of postmodernist pragmatics where “woman” means whatever people think it means.

The grotesque, the sexual, the racialized, the absurd all exist when we conjure these artificial spells because they work. They generate clicks, watch time, shares. They’re not stories but functions in a system optimized for affect not understanding. And that copy of a copy devoid of human understanding, meaning, or referent is the more deeply human thing about this because it reflects the crisis of meaning that’s gnawing away at the soul of human society. Perhaps Nietzsche was correct when he said “God is dead,” predicting that without the moral guardrails of Christendom, the West would slide into nihilistic relativism, as indeed we have done. But do not despair, little lambs, for all is not lost. In my essay “Bitter to the Burned Mouth,” I explained:

If you gaze long enough into an abyss, observed Friedrich Nietzsche, the abyss also gazes into you. This is often misunderstood as a contemplation on death or the existential void. But this is not the nihilism of full metal Nietzsche. Quite the opposite. He was referring to the human psyche, and that if you probe its depths you find a deeper version of yourself looking back, for you are the abyss and the person gazing in is but your avatar to the world. Still, there is truth in the misreading. If you contemplate the demons of the deep, before long they will slowly turn their eyes to you. Human suffering is an emotional contagion and it extracts a heavy toll. …

Nietzsche was not a nihilist. He was a diagnostician of nihilism. He observed the growing sense of meaninglessness around him, but rather than embrace it, he looked down upon it like the green-cloaked man in that famous masterpiece of Romantic painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, which is itself a celebration of triumph over chaos. Like that painting, and like my friend Monita, Nietzsche offered not just hope, but a method for climbing out of the abyss. …

Nietzsche did not accept the erosion of moral values that came with the reassessment of God’s existence. Gott its tot, he famously said. God is dead. But people get this one wrong a lot too. He wasn’t declaring his atheism, but simply observing that as belief in the Judeo-Christian God fades, so will the authority of Judeo-Christian values, leading to a kind of moral nihilism. We see this now with the rise of relativistic postmodernism and woke progressivism. But in the face of this fact, Nietzsche felt the only thing to do was to assert value. Perhaps you cannot base your moral claims on the authority of divine will, he said, but that doesn’t mean you cannot arrive at the same conclusions. This assertion is why some think of him as the godfather of existentialism, because in the void of existence, the only meaning we have is that which we choose to create.

This argument was a product of the time in which he lived. One century before, in the 1781 work Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant had argued that the faculty of reason can be divided into the things that we perceive, or phenomena, and the reality that lies beyond the limits of our perception, meaning things as they truly are, or noumena.

The argument was revolutionary. If you were to name just four inflection points in the history of Western philosophy, they would be the Socratic turn from thinking about the natural world to thinking about the human world, the Aristotelian synthesis, from the human world to methodology itself and the birth of logic, the Enlightenment, taking us from logic to objective reasoning and applied science, and the existential turn from the objective world to subjective experience. Kant was the grand philosopher of the Enlightenment, above Voltaire or Locke, and the Critique was the basis of that stature. Kant took the famous allegory of the cave but, unlike the prisoners who are released at the end of Plato’s story in the Republic, he said we can never be released because our own senses are the chains that bind us. Plato’s point was that people live in what Friedrich Engels would later call “false consciousness,” that we are unaware of reality and the solution is education. But Kant said we cannot even take the first step. We can never get closer to the truth, but can only guess based on flickering shadows on a cave wall. The visible spectrum for humans goes from violet to red, or wavelengths of light between 380 and 750 nanometers. We can’t see ultraviolet light (below 380 nm) but bees can and it helps them find flowers. We can’t see infrared light (above 750 nm) but snakes such as boas, rattlesnakes, and copperheads can and it helps them find prey.

In his 1807 book Phenomenology of Spirit, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said reality is not permanently beyond our reach, and we can slowly get closer to it through a dialectic process of offering ideas, pushback, and resolution. But in the two decades before Hegel arrived, Kant had convinced many Europeans they could not trust their own senses. Add to this the social alienation and disillusionment of the Industrial Revolution, the erosion of religious belief and fraying of the order and sense of meaning it had granted. In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species about his voyage on the HMS Beagle, studying finches and barnacles on the Galápagos Islands, and his theory of evolution through natural selection, further upending our religious understanding of the world and our place in it. Then came the unification of Germany under Otto von Bismarck in 1871 and the rise of nationalism, which Nietzsche hated, and Bismarck’s defensive system of alliances that backfired in Germany’s face when the Bosnian Serb terrorist Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1914, and that defensive system of alliances pulled everyone into World War I.

This is the context in which Nietzsche wrote the line about the abyss in his 1886 work Beyond Good and Evil. The Enlightenment of the 18th century gave us a more rational understanding of the world, but the skepticism of the late 19th century turned away from truth and progress. Thanks to Kant, the Industrial Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, and German unification, objective truth had faded. In his book, Nietzsche tried to grapple with this loss and with the increasing uncertainty of the modern world. He rejected the simplistic binary of Judeo-Christian moral thinking and what he called slave morality, which prizes kindness and humility, as opposed to master morality, which prizes power and assertiveness. He wasn’t opposed to kindness, but to self-destructive kindness, arguing instead for the will to power, or as Jordan Peterson would put it, moving up the dominance hierarchy.

We find ourselves in a similar situation today. We are overwhelmed by information. We are drowning in misinformation and disinformation and copies of copies of copies. Here, the Marxist philosopher Guy Debord’s spectacle finds its apotheosis. In his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, he argues that the dominance of images and representations in modern capitalist society serves to alienate people from reality, from each other, and even from themselves. I always felt Marxists made better psychologists than economists, and this is no exception. It’s a valuable insight into human society, but a poor critique of capitalism, and never has Debord’s spectacle been more real (haha) than in a world where life is mediated by images and reduced to memetic sludge.

The real world is now but the acronymic raw material for endless remixing. IRL. Racial violence, sexual exploitation, historical trauma, the war in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, concentration camps in China — all are flattened into equal-opportunity entertainment in the attention economy. Two other Marxists, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, saw it coming. The culture industry, they warned, would eventually erase the boundary between atrocity and amusement. So it seems we feared the danger of AI would manifest in the form of T-800 killer robots and what we got instead was a sort of post-human fascism rendered in the pastel colors of Ghiblified nightmares and algorithmic racism.

The culture of narcissism

The three great thinkers on narcissism are Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm, and Christopher Lasch. In his 1914 book On Narcissism, Freud introduced the term “narcissism” in the context of psychoanalysis, distinguishing between primary narcissism as a natural self-focus in infancy and secondary narcissism as a pathological retreat of the libido from external objects back to the self. He saw narcissism as essential to ego development but potentially dangerous when excessive. In his 1964 book The Heart of the Man, Fromm argued that narcissism is a defense mechanism as well as a hallmark of an alienated society. He differentiated between the malignant narcissism of destructive, selfish behavior and the more benign form of self-regard.

Finally, in his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch argued that modern capitalist societies foster narcissistic personalities. He critiqued the therapeutic culture and consumerism for encouraging self-absorption and emotional shallowness. God only knows what he would say about the self-absorption of social media culture and people who spend hours scrolling through TikTok or uploading images of every meal they eat. Lasch was an American historian who used history as a lens through which to better understand the modern-day erosion of our institutions and, in turn, the impact this has on entire communities. The reason why he matters now as much as Nietzsche is because he strove to create a historically informed social criticism that could teach Americans how to deal with rampant consumerism, proletarianization, and what he famously labeled “the culture of narcissism.”

In The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch argues that since World War II, America has produced more people who fit the clinical definition of pathological narcissism. This would have been impressively prescient even if it had been published in 2019, but it came out 40 years before that. This pathology he describes is not exactly akin to everyday narcissism, which is a kind of hedonistic egoism, but with the clinical diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. For Lasch, “pathology represents a heightened version of normality.” He locates symptoms of this personality disorder in the radical political movements of the 1960s, such as the Weather Underground, as well as in the spiritual cults and movements of the 1970s.

His social criticism applies just as cleanly to the radical political movements of our time — BLM, fourth-wave feminism, the trans movement, woke ideology, QAnon, the cult wing of MAGA, and so forth. But what thinkers like Nietzsche, Freud, and Lasch probably never imagined was that when the abyss stared back into us, we’d actually enjoy it. The algorithm serves up a horrific bowl of social vomit and we immediately ask for seconds. Like a true culture of narcissists, we love what we see in the little black mirrors we carry in our pockets. And yet, despite the Debordian horror of modern life, I’m going to confess something. I am one of those happy fools smiling into my own black mirror, and let me tell you why.

What we are witnessing is not merely the degeneration of meaning but its algorithmic reconstitution, fractured and evacuated of reference. But whereas the spectacle was once a projection of mass media’s ideological control, it has now metastasized into an autonomous system of symbolic recombination. Debord’s insight that the spectacle mediates human relations through images has reached its terminal phase. Human relations are no longer merely mediated by images but replaced by the circulation of images without stable referents. This is not culture as communication but as compulsion, automated and affect-driven.

The grotesqueries spawned by AI are not aberrations of a broken system but the logical output of neural networks trained on our most compulsively clicked instincts, our deepest desires, our truest selves, warts and all. What appears as the surreal absurdity of Anne Frank as a Zionist cyborg, LeBron in a carceral rape fantasy, or Peppa Pig in toilet mashups is in fact a faithful rendering of our digital unconscious. These aren’t hallucinations of the machine. They’re dreams harvested from our collective id and fed back to our half-waking selves as entertainment. And I’m sorry, but I do find entertaining. I suppose my attitude about humanity has always been a bit more Falstaff than Hamlet, as that always seemed the wiser approach.

A better metaphor than the abyss gazing back or reflecting us like a black mirror is probably that it has become a feedback loop, refining our inputs and spitting them back in high resolution, iterating our desires and curates a reality in which meaning is less meaningful than engagement. This is Baudrillard’s simulacrum perfected. The copy with no origin, no truth, no ethical gravity — just sheer memetic momentum.

And yet, buried within this nihilistic recursion lies a darker revelation. The horror of AI-generated sludge is not that it is meaningless, but that it is precisely the meaning we’ve optimized for. The algorithm is not alien. It’s us, baby, scaled and rendered in code. Simulation theory is true, but instead of reality being the noumenal world out there, the simulation is layered overtop of it right here. The disintegration of coherent narrative, ethical constraint, and aesthetic integrity is not the fault of the machine. It’s the logical consequence of a civilization that long ago traded truth for spectacle, depth for virality, meaning for dopamine, and went all in on woke relativistic kindness over cold facts. If you ask me, that’s the real slave morality, and so while I enjoy the ride along the way, I also think we’re overdue for a course correction. A re-assertion of values, if you will. We may live in the infrastructure of the old temples now emptied of their idols, but we still have to keep the place the clean. Our task now is to restore meaning with full awareness of the tools we’ve built and the selves they expose. The machine reveals. The abyss reflects. But only we can decide what to become.