Your phone doesn’t buzz. It summons.
A small rectangle vibrates like a nervous oracle, and you—cultured mammal with a calendar, a conscience, and at least one unread copy of Beyond Good and Evil—perform the same tiny bow. Thumb rises. Eyes narrow. The liturgy begins: check, clear, respond, repeat. Not because you’re weak. Because you’re good. Or trying to be.
Nietzsche would recognize the smell immediately. Not the plastic-and-lithium smell. The other one: the sweet, antiseptic odor of morality. The feeling that you “should.” That you “owe.” That a delay is a defect.
In the old world, morality wore armor and thundered from pulpits. In ours, it arrives as a polite red dot.
The Red Dot as a Miniature God
Start with the simplest scene. You’re in a conversation, in a room, in a life. Then—buzz. A banner slides down like a curtain in a cheap theater. Someone wants you. Or an app wants you to want someone. It’s never just information. It’s interpellation with emojis.
Notice the moral texture of it. The notification doesn’t say, “Here is a message.” It says, “A message is waiting and your character will now be measured.” Respond quickly: you’re attentive, kind, competent. Respond slowly: you’re aloof, careless, possibly dead. Ignore it: you’re a monster. (Or, worse, a person with boundaries.)
This is Nietzsche’s territory: not morality as rules, but morality as tone. The invisible atmosphere that sorts actions into “good” and “bad” before you even think. A push notification is a small instrument for manufacturing guilt: a portable conscience with better marketing.
The genius is that it doesn’t force you. It frames you. It builds a world where responsiveness equals virtue and absence equals sin. And because the device sits in your pocket, close to your pulse, the command arrives as intimate as hunger. You don’t experience it as external power. You experience it as “me being me,” which is how the best powers operate.
You can almost watch the genealogy unfold. In Nietzsche’s story, the “good” once meant noble, strong, self-affirming—someone who gives values the way the sun gives light. Later, “good” becomes meek, obedient, safe. Our current variant: “good” means available. Always available. Available like a customer support agent for your own social life.
The red dot is a miniature god, and its main sacrament is immediacy.
The Ascetic Priest Gets a UI Job
Nietzsche’s most savage character is the ascetic priest: the one who takes raw suffering and gives it a meaning that keeps the herd manageable. The priest doesn’t eliminate pain; he interprets it. He turns anxiety into a moral engine: “You suffer because you’re guilty. Be obedient. Confess. Repeat.”
Swap the cassock for a hoodie and a product roadmap and the priest re-enters the room through your lock screen.
The modern priest doesn’t say, “Confess your sins.” He says, “Share your thoughts.” He doesn’t say, “Be humble.” He says, “Be authentic.” He doesn’t say, “Offer penance.” He says, “Streaks.” (Yes, streaks—the penitential calendar for the secular soul.)
And the confessional is frictionless. You tap. You type. You send. Relief hits like a small absolution. The social bond tightens. The system learns. It becomes harder, next time, to resist.
This is where your “discipline” starts to look like virtue and your exhaustion starts to look like failure. You can’t keep up with the stream, so you develop a new moral emotion: the faint shame of being behind. Behind on messages. Behind on news. Behind on the group chat where the real world allegedly happens. Nietzsche would call this a refined cruelty turned inward: you lash yourself with the thought that you are not sufficiently responsive, not sufficiently present, not sufficiently good.
And here’s the twist: the thing you call “control” is often just compliance with a schedule you didn’t design. You don’t choose your attention; you rent it out in small intervals. The phone trains you to crave the feeling of being needed, because being needed feels like meaning. The priest always knew that. He also knew the herd would thank him for the chains, as long as the chains came with a story.
The new story is: “You are connected.”
The old story was: “You are sinful.”
Same mechanism. Better typography.
Will to Power, Subcontracted
Nietzsche’s will to power isn’t cartoon villainy. It’s the basic impulse to expand, shape, intensify—to leave a mark on the world rather than be merely stamped by it. It’s creative force, appetite, style. The tragicomedy of our moment is that we still have it, but we keep spending it on micro-tasks designed by strangers.
Watch the day. You wake up and reach for the device before you reach for your own thoughts. You scroll through other people’s lives like a monk fingering beads. You “react,” “like,” “respond,” “acknowledge.” Each gesture tiny. Each gesture counted. You feel busy, therefore righteous. Your will to power gets chopped into confetti and sprinkled over the feed.
Then comes the deeper irony: the system sells you “agency” in the form of settings. You can toggle notifications, mute a chat, set Focus mode. This feels like sovereignty. But it’s the sovereignty of choosing which bell you’ll obey. (The prison allows you to repaint your cell.)
What would a Nietzschean counter-move look like? Not a detox with a smug glow. Not a purity ritual. Nietzsche hated that kind of moral cleanliness; it’s just another asceticism with better branding. The counter-move is harder and simpler: give values rather than receive them. Decide what deserves your attention before the red dot declares an emergency.
Put the phone down and notice the withdrawal—how the body reaches, how the mind invents reasons. That is the feeling of a trained animal discovering the fence. Then, do something that doesn’t beg for a reaction. Read a page slowly. Write a sentence that scares you. Say one honest thing out loud to a person in the room. Make something that cannot be “engaged with” in two taps.
Because the final insult of the notification-morality isn’t that it distracts you.
It’s that it replaces your taste with a timetable. It replaces your style with a reflex. It teaches you to confuse responsiveness with goodness.
And Nietzsche, with his cruel tenderness, would lean in and whisper: if your virtues arrive as vibrations, they aren’t virtues. They’re habits. They’re training. They’re the red dot wearing a halo.
The phone doesn’t buzz. It judges. And the most rebellious act, sometimes, is to let it judge in silence—while you go do something that belongs to you.
See also: The Genealogy of the Self: Foucault’s Radical History of Subjectivity
