From Fichte to Meursault: LinkedIn “Intellectual Taxidermy” and the Reflection in the Executioner’s Blade

Scrolling through LinkedIn recently feels like a bad trip, and it sent me reaching for an old guilty pleasure from my philosophy undergrad days: Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s “Die Bestimmung des Gelehrten”, or The Vocation of the Scholar. What I still love about studying philosophy is how dead thinkers can guide you to the right questions. Never (for me at least) the answers, but they’d show you where to dig. Fichte is always good for that, especially when everything feels fraudulent.

He conceived the scholar’s destiny as humanity’s highest calling: to be the moral compass of society, to guide society’s ethical development through truth. Fichte conceived the scholar as what he called “the teacher of the human race”. And here’s the thing, almost nobody knows who the fuck Fichte is anymore, which makes dropping his name exactly the kind of performative erudition that is turning spaces such as LinkedIn into a wasteland of AI SLOP dressed as academic intellectualism. I’m doing it right now. Self-aware? Sure. But still complicit in this grotesque theater.

I migrated to LinkedIn after Musk’s takeover of Twitter, following genuinely brilliant thinkers, people who are still trying to fight in this swamp, still believing we could recreate something meaningful in a fresh agora. For a moment, it felt possible. But this platform has mutated into something monstrous, a chimeric nightmare where Fichte’s “teacher of the human race” has become a prompter of ChatGPT, where the sacred duty of knowledge has perverted into a carnival of intellectual cosplay.

Let me be clear: I’m not against AI as a tool for expanding reflection, for pushing thought into new territories. What we’re witnessing instead is the “gourmetization” of half-baked machine-generated content, algorithmically scraped refuse, plated on generative AI fine china and served as insight. This isn’t augmented intelligence; it’s intellectual taxidermy (quote me on that). A necrotic, festering wound, eroding authentic professional discourse but draped in silk smooth unnecessary verbosity (get the irony?).

Today, when scrolling through LinkedIn, I felt like Meursault from Camus’s “L’Étranger” on that blazing beach, the sun beating down, the glare unbearable, reality warping under the heat. Each post another glint of AI-polished academic jargon algorithmically produced and replicated by humans desperate for intellectual credibility. The platform’s algorithmic feed pressing down like that merciless sun until something snaps. But instead of pulling a trigger, we click “post”, firing our own AI-generated bullets, our fake diamonds of borrowed erudition into what is, in fact, in the grand scheme of things, a digital void. Fichte trembles.

Here’s the thing: technology isn’t our executioner: we are. We built the scaffold, sharpened the blade, and placed our own heads on the block every time we trade authentic thought for algorithmic approval. In this digital wasteland, facing our intellectual execution, perhaps the only authentic response is Meursault’s final clarity: embrace the beautiful indifference of a universe that doesn’t give a shit about our engagement metrics. This is not resignation.

The critical awareness in face of our absurd existential condition opens a path for what Camus called “lucid revolt”, not against technology itself, but against the reduction of human complexity to computational simplicity. Every time we choose difficult, unoptimized thought over algorithmic ease, every time we risk intellectual vulnerability over performative safety, we might defend whatever is left of our agency and authenticity.

REFERENCES

Breazeale, D. (2021). Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Summer 2021 ed.). Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/johann-fichte/

Camus, A. (1942). L’étranger [The stranger]. Gallimard.

Fichte, J. G. (1794). Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten [Some lectures concerning the scholar’s vocation]. C. E. Gabler.

Fichte, J. G. (1994). Some lectures concerning the scholar’s vocation (D. Breazeale, Trans.). In Early philosophical writings (pp. 144-184). Cornell University Press. (Original work published 1794)

Print