This is a classic essay from Dreyfus on how Heidegger saw the connection between nihilism, art, technology and politics:

When everything that is material and social has become completely flat and drab, people retreat into their private experiences as the only remaining place to find significance. Heidegger sees this move to private experience as characteristic of the modern age. Art, religion, sex, education all becomes varieties of experiences. When all our concerns have been reduced to the common denominator of “experience” we will have reached the last stage of nihilism. One then sees “the plunge into frenzy and the disintegration into sheer feeling as redemptive. The `lived experience’ as such becomes decisive.”

That is, when there are no shared examples of greatness that focus public concerns and elicit social commitment, people become spectators  of fads and public lives, just for the excitement. When there are no religious practices that call forth sacrifice, terror,  and awe, people consume everything from  drugs to meditation practices to give themselves some kind of peak experience. The peak experience takes the place of what was once a relation to  something outside the self that defined the real and was therefore holy. As Heidegger puts it:

[T]he loss of the gods is so far from excluding religiosity that rather only through that loss is the relation to the gods changed into mere “religious experience”.

More here (via Peony). Also check out a conversation with Dreyfus and my previous post on Heidegger.