In the early twentieth century, the young print journalist Walter Lippmann claimed that U.S. citizens are too gullible and ill informed to govern a modern, complex society. In response, philosopher-activist John Dewey responded that in a democracy, the answer was not, as Lippmann sug-gested, to confine governance to an elite but rather to make the entire pop-ulation less gullible through better public education and better informed through better journalism.69

If you want more than the elite to be free and autonomous, you face the problem that there aren’t enough tutors to explain the meaning of everything. If you want to radically broaden the scope of literacy, the loss of some depth might be part of the price. The question at present, not a new one, is whether loss of depth is preventable or instead is an inevitable consequence of technologies that democratize knowledge.

In academic circles, the attitude taken by Carr and other critics I consider here is called “technological determinism,” and in my opinion it can be as dangerous as a lack of awareness of technology-enabled pitfalls. Humans have agency. The Web wouldn’t have existed without that agency, even given the technical medium of the Internet

eine KI entwickelt, die vorgibt, anhand von Porträtfotos die sexuelle Orientierung eines Menschen vorhersagen zu können. Zwar trifft die Studie keine deterministischen, sondern probabilistische Aussagen, doch beruht sie auf deterministischen Annahmen, die Individuen zu Merkmalsträgern reduziert.