Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

A new social media platform launched this month with the tagline, Humans Welcome to Observe.

As it turns out, MaltBook, is what it's called, isn't designed for people.

It's a social network that's exclusively for

artificially intelligent think bots conversing with other bots about things like consciousness,

purpose, and whether they're living in a simulation. So far, over a million humans have accepted

the invitation to observe. It's a strange moment when humans become spectators of our own

technologies as they debate what it means for them to exist. But then a strange moment when humans become spectators of our own technologies as they

debate what it means for them to exist. But then again, here we are. We live in a culture where

existential questions like who am I and why am I here have never been more urgent and never been

more confusing. The atheist philosopher Frederick Nietzsche predicted as much in his parable of the madman,

when a civilization detaches from God, it has effectively, as he said it, unchained the earth

from its sun. Without God as a fixed point of reference for identity or meaning or purpose,

humanity loses all orientation. And that's not all. Do we not feel the breath of empty space?

The madman then asked. Has it not become colder? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?

He said. Unchained from the sun, the only alternative is that identity is self-constructed, and that's

where we are. Social media profiles, elaborate pronoun demands, curated personas, tribal affiliations. These are all

things that claim to define who we are. The gender revolution insists biology is completely

irrelevant to the question of identity, but feelings, those are authoritative. Now AI bots are

creating their own alternative realities and debating their own feelings and their existence while humans just watch from the sidelines.

Though every alternative identity promises that you can be whoever you want to be, whoever you choose to be, whoever you make yourself to be, none of them actually answer the question that really matters. Who are we,

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