Fichte is important today because we've lost contact with ourselves as selves. Consciousness is already a pretty weird thing, but in the age of social media and mass-effect it's even more tenuous and elusive. Consider all the posts here on HN from people who sincerely believe that without their smartphone or social media account they "are nothing".

I encountered Fichte while researching Lacan's "mirror stage" in psychology, an interpretation that seems very important in the age of the "Black Mirror". Indeed, following that rabbit hole I discovered William Du Bois with his "Double-consciousness" [1] theory, and a rather interesting young American Jonathan N. Bertrand [2] who has been exploring what he calls a "Triple Conscious Theory" of how social media intervenes and distorts our self-image to exacerbate power inequality.

How I read Fichte is that when the "self" is distorted, so is all other knowledge and perception of the world. He still has enormous currency for "identity politics" in an age where everybody wants to tell you who you are. That's an oblique way of telling you what you can do and think.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-consciousness/

[2] https://jonathannbertrand.com/