In The Present Age (1846) Soren Kierkegaard condemns The Press for contributing to the nihilism of his age by cultivating risk-free anonymity and idle curiosity and thereby leveling all meaningful differences. He would surely have denounced the world wide web for the same reasons. I will spell out Kierkegaard's objections by considering how the web promotes the nihilism of Kierkegaard's two nihilistic spheres of existence and repels the third non-nihilistic sphere.

In the aesthetic sphere, the aesthete lives in the categories of the interesting and the boring and wants to see as many interesting sights (sites) as possible. The web promotes surfing which is surely a matter of being attracted by whatever is interesting and dropping whatever is boring, a paradigmatic form of nihilism. In the ethical sphere, the ethical person's whole life consists in making and keeping commitments. Ethical people might use the Internet to make up and keep track of their commitments but would be brought to the despair of meaninglessness by the ease of making and unmaking commitments in any domain. Only in the religious sphere is nihilism overcome by making a risky, unconditional commitment. But the net, which promises a risk-free simulated world, would tend to undermine rather than support such a commitment.

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