Were Albert Camus alive today, he might have found in Nigeria’s internet culture a perfect theatre for his notion of the absurd, a boundless digital stage where suffering, humor, and distraction coexist, collapsing into one endless scroll of contradictions that mirror the human struggle to find meaning in chaos.
The French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus devoted his life to exploring what he called the absurd, the tension between humanity’s search for meaning and a world that offers none. In The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger, he depicted people trapped in repetitive, senseless cycles yet compelled to go on living. For Camus, this absurdity was not a call to despair but to awareness, to live lucidly even when life refuses to make sense.
Nigeria’s condition has long been absurd in the Camusian sense, a people yearning for purpose in a state that offers none, condemned to repeat cycles of hope and disappointment. It is a country where citizens must daily reconcile their hunger for order with institutions that thrive on disorder, where life itself feels like an endless rehearsal for change that never comes. Yet in the digital age, this absurdity has not merely persisted; it has metastasized. What was once an existential struggle for meaning has become a marketplace of distraction.
The internet, once celebrated as a tool of liberation, now functions as an engine of senselessness, producing noise faster than thought. Visibility has replaced virtue. Every post or hashtag becomes a fleeting substitute for substance, an illusion of participation masking deepening alienation. Nigerians now fight not only for physical survival but for the survival of meaning itself amid the onslaught of content.
Camus taught that the absurd begins when we confront life’s emptiness without illusion, a moment meant to sharpen consciousness. In Nigeria, that awakening is being dulled not by censorship but by entertainment disguised as engagement. The digital public sphere has become an economy of attention where meaning is monetized and virality is treated as the highest good.
A small circle of content creators now commands the nation’s gaze. Armed with ring lights and an instinct for spectacle, they decide what millions discuss, mock, or forget. Politics, religion, and morality bend to their rhythms. A scandal at dawn becomes a meme by dusk; a tragedy this week is buried under next week’s challenge. Memory itself has been replaced by momentum.
This domination is not merely cultural but economic. The promise of monetization, though often modest in reality, sustains a relentless hunger for visibility. With livelihoods shrinking, virality has become a form of survival. What emerges is a theatre of self-exposure where humour, grief, and poverty are reimagined as content for an audience always watching. The internet has turned into a restless marketplace where truth and talent compete for attention, and everyone is a participant. What emerges is a moral economy that rewards noise over nuance, provocation over principle. The absurd, once a philosophical condition, now dances to a soundtrack, smiling for the algorithm.
This new culture of distraction is not accidental; it reflects a deeper logic of control that has migrated from politics to the digital sphere. The absurd, once imposed by failed governance, now reproduces itself through the mechanics of attention. What began as survival has become spectacle; what was once despair is now amusement. The very energy that could fuel awareness is continually diverted toward trivialities.
Here Noam Chomsky’s warning rings true. Modern power, he observed, no longer depends on censorship but on saturation. Dissent need not be silenced if it can be drowned in noise. Societies awash in irrelevance stay talkative yet thoughtless, trapped in a state of permanent conversation without communication. Flooded with the superficial, citizens lose the ability to tell significance from spectacle. Distraction itself becomes repression.
This logic finds its cruelest expression in the “dead-cat theory,” the idea that when attention drifts toward something consequential, a grotesque distraction is thrown onto the table. Nigeria’s digital ecosystem has perfected this instinct without needing a strategist. Every serious conversation about insecurity, inflation, corruption, or moral decay is swiftly displaced by a fresh viral absurdity. The result is a landscape vibrant yet hollow, loud yet paralyzed. Outrage trends for a day, clarity flickers briefly, then both are buried. The nation mistakes activity for awareness, engagement for understanding, laughter for liberation.
The tragedy of Nigeria’s digital age is not merely that its people are distracted, but that they are distracted into meaninglessness. The rituals of scrolling, reacting, and forgetting mirror the country’s larger cycle of futility: motion without arrival, noise without consequence.
Camus’s Sisyphus would recognize the pattern. Condemned to roll his boulder forever, Sisyphus at least knew his task was futile. The digital Nigerian performs the same labour without that clarity. The boulder has become a glowing screen, endlessly refreshing and endlessly disappointing. The algorithm resets, and the boulder falls. What was once myth is now interface, the architecture of daily life.
Camus urged that we imagine Sisyphus happy, believing that rebellion lies in awareness. Yet awareness is what the digital order erases. Algorithms reward reaction rather than reflection, engagement rather than discernment. Nigerians are not merely enduring absurdity; they are performing it, liking it, and sharing it. The absurd has been domesticated, packaged, and sold back as entertainment.
The internet, in this form, is the perfect political instrument: it diffuses anger without change, offers catharsis without consequence, turns despair into spectacle. As Chomsky quipped, power no longer needs to silence citizens when it can keep them busy “debating sports while the world burns.” Nigeria’s digital culture embodies that paradox. The absurd, once a philosophical condition, has become programmable.
Religion and politics, once the twin pillars of Nigerian meaning, now drift atop these digital currents. The true architects of distraction are not the politicians or the religious leaders but the countless content creators who flood public consciousness with spectacle. Their work is not social engineering but survival. For a few naira in monetization, they manufacture outrage and laughter at industrial scale. Politicians, meanwhile, thrive in the chaos, since there is no need to silence critics when laughter does it better.
And yet, Camus would remind us that revolt remains possible. The absurd begins when people awaken to the emptiness of the systems that govern them. Nigeria’s digital absurdity persists because that awakening has been outsourced to algorithms deciding what we see, forget, and feel. Politicians and preachers may profit from the noise, but the crowd now governs itself through its craving for amusement. The spectacle sustains itself.
To resist is not to log off but to wake up within, to reclaim consciousness from the machinery of distraction. For Camus, the triumph available to the absurd human is lucidity, the ability to see the void clearly yet choose to live. In today’s Nigeria, revolt means slowing the reflex to scroll, refusing to mistake reaction for reflection, and recovering the lost discipline of stillness. It is the courage to hold one’s gaze amid the glare of perpetual motion, to look and truly see.
Such resistance begins with one radical virtue, seriousness. In a culture addicted to irony, seriousness itself becomes an act of rebellion. It means refusing to turn every crisis into comedy or every tragedy into trend. It means asking, each time a new spectacle erupts, who profits from our attention and what truth is being buried beneath our laughter. Behind every viral diversion lies something festering in poverty, violence, corruption, and the slow corrosion of hope. To look away is to join in our own erasure.
Yet the internet itself is not irredeemable. It can still become a medium of meaning if Nigerians learn to treat attention as a moral act. Every pause before sharing, every moment of reflection instead of reaction, every refusal to perform for the algorithm becomes a small rebellion against the empire of noise. The screen that numbs can also illuminate, if we choose to look with consciousness rather than hunger.
Here, Chomsky and Camus converge. Both believed the first duty of a free mind is to stay awake. For Chomsky, consciousness pierces propaganda; for Camus, revolt is the refusal to live thoughtlessly. Each demands courage, to think when thinking no longer pays, to care when caring seems naïve, to remember when forgetting feels easier.
If Nigerians are ever to escape the digital absurd, they must learn to treat attention itself as rebellion, to reclaim it not only from politicians and religious leaders but from the glowing screens that devour their inner lives. In doing so, they may recover more than political agency, perhaps the dignity of meaning and the quiet power of a people who can still look at chaos and say, with Camus, the struggle itself is enough to fill a human heart.
For now, the absurd republic scrolls on. Timelines refresh, influencers perform, and the people laugh through their exhaustion. The boulder has become a screen, and Sisyphus, still pushing, is trending.
Michael Dugeri is a Toronto-based digital policy expert whose work explores the impact of emerging technologies on creative industries in Africa.
