Tomás Balmaceda: “The network that excited us no longer exists.”

“I am convinced that thanks to digital environments we are experiencing an unprecedented transformation in all areas of our lives,” says Tomás Balmaceda , a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Buenos Aires and a researcher at Conicet (National Council of Experts). Co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence Group, Philosophy and Technology (GIFT), of the Sadaf/Conicet Institute for Philosophical Research, his most recent book is Volver a pensar. Filosofía para desobedientes (Galerna 2024), and between trips and more trips, between classes and more classes, he finds time to think about how the web of social networks, the media, and science construct and construct us.

–You have a PhD in Philosophy, are a teacher, and are an academic. What interested you in technology, and how do these two universes, which at first seem so contradictory, intersect?

–For almost fifteen years, my academic interest revolved around the philosophy of mind. At the same time, I was also developing as a journalist focused on digital culture, first in the Sí! supplement of Clarín and, for the last decade, on Sundays in Viva. Eventually, these paths crossed, and my interest in the “behind the scenes” of human intelligence paved the way for me to become interested in what we're talking about when we talk about thinking machines. Philosophy, from its origins, has addressed the great human questions, and I think it's clear that technology rewrites many of them. Are humans the only ones who are intelligent? What is knowledge? What is creativity? Is there something that makes us unique? Technologies aren't neutral: they're loaded with values, decisions, and worldviews. And if philosophy doesn't get involved there, then where?

–In an interview, you said that your generation believed that social media was a booster of democracy, but now they see it as a factor that weakens it. What happened?

Those of us who grew up in the 20th century were fascinated by social media because we grew up in a one-way media culture, where a few spoke and the rest listened. Suddenly, the internet promised us horizontality, self-expression, and collective organization. I experienced firsthand how these platforms transformed my professional and emotional life and witnessed how they fueled powerful social movements like #NiUnaMenos and #MeToo, which without social media wouldn't have had the force or reach they had. But the network that excited us no longer exists. At some point, the logic of the platforms changed. Buttons like retweets and shares, and recommendation algorithms that prioritize virality, reconfigured the digital public space. They began to reward outrage over argumentation, polarization over nuance. And what was once a forum for discussion became an arena of combat. Today I see clearly that this promise of democratization wasn't just truncated: it's transformed into its opposite. Social media isn't neutral; it's designed to stimulate our cognitive and emotional vulnerabilities. That's why it's no longer enough to use it "well": we need to rethink it, critique it, and disobey its most harmful logic. And we need to rethink—as a society—what kind of public conversation we want to have.

–Another aspect of social media is that you see how its logic has ended up permeating the way we think and live together. Could you give me an example of this and explain why this happened?

–I think we see it every day, even if we don't always register it. A good example is how social media has changed the very idea of ​​trust. For a long time, we trusted institutions: media outlets, universities, experts… Today, however, many people distrust them but blindly believe an unknown influencer who "seems authentic." Another example is cancel culture. Unlike the escrache of the 1990s, which had a politically motivated rationale, cancel culture is often impulsive, fueled by the very design of social media: the need for a quick reaction, the pursuit of likes, belonging to a digital herd. This logic of hyperstimulation prevents us from thinking deeply and makes us more reactive than reflective.

–Can networks and the use of artificial intelligence ultimately destroy the idea of ​​truth as a means of organizing knowledge and information?

–I don't think they'll completely annihilate it, but they are seriously weakening its traditional role. Networks and artificial intelligence aren't simply neutral technologies: they're designed to capture our attention, not to guarantee truthfulness. This means that what's disseminated and goes viral isn't necessarily the truth, but rather the most attractive, the most outrageous, or the most emotional. And this has a corrosive effect on the place truth once held in our public conversations. Furthermore, the algorithms that decide what we see and what we don't operate with opaque and biased logic. They reproduce successful patterns of the past, consolidate the status quo, and tend to reinforce our bubbles. They don't seek to broaden our horizons, but to keep us hooked.

–Is the use of technology that guides us through the streets, writes for us, finds what we need, and selects what it knows we like making us less intelligent?

–I wouldn't say it's making us less intelligent, but it is transforming us. Perhaps we're not experiencing a general decline in intelligence but rather a redesign of our cognitive capacities. We delegate functions we used to perform: remembering, finding our way around with a paper map, searching for bibliographies or references in books, writing… It seems we have less sustained attention, less deep thought, and more stimulation. Losing our capacity for deep reading isn't just about no longer having an intellectual skill, but about losing a way of thinking with different tempos and nuances. Furthermore, we live in a state of "perpetual now," always updating, clicking, responding. We struggle to sustain attention, read a long text, tolerate the void. This temporal intolerance—the constant urgency of information—erodes our capacity for reflection. Intelligence, in this context, isn't knowing how to use technology well, but knowing when not to use it, how to resist its automatism, how to exercise our autonomy in the face of convenience. And that's where, I think, philosophy can help a lot.

Rethinking. Philosophy for the Disobedient, by Tomás Balmaceda (Galerna).