Our author Paul Stephan has finally had enough. The internet is being flooded with cheap A"I" content, often called "AI slop," which is just plain annoying—and is even being rewarded with countless likes and followers. Often, this content is about philosophy, too—specifically Nietzsche. How much damage is being done when this artificial Nietzsche increasingly displaces the real one, as A"I" outputs that repeat the same half-truths and falsehoods replace nuanced human interpretations? When machine-generated caricatures literally push out genuine photographs and artistic portraits? Paul Stephan embarked on an often frustrating search for answers and presents you with a few "highlights." Although he still believes that A"I" opens up positive possibilities—and occasionally makes use of them himself—in his third piece on the subject (feel free to read the first and second commentaries here and there), he feels it is time to take off the kid gloves and bring out the hammer. Stop the slop!

This essay, which we awarded first place in this year's Kingfisher Award for Radical Essay Writing (link), examines Nietzsche's question of the “barbarians” in a contemporary context and analyses how his philosophy is being politically exploited today. Against this background, the text shows how hustle culture, platform capitalism and neo-reactionary ideologies have been economizing the ”will to power“  and have become a new form of subtle barbarism: an internal decomposition of cultural depth through market logic, technocratic myths, and performative nihilism. Nietzsche's thinking, however, can be used precisely to describe these tendencies in their genealogy, to unmask their immanent nihilism, and to present an (over-)humane alternative to them.

In addition to hiking, dancing is one of the most prominent soldiers in Nietzsche's “moving [m] army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms.” Based on Nietzsche's reflections on the art of movement, Jonas Pohler explores the paramount importance that it plays in our present day. Is the effect of dance primarily sexual? What does dance have to do with technology? What symbolism is the dancing gesture able to convey?