The Single Individual in the Algorithmic Crowd

Kierkegaard in Cyberspace, Thirty Years On

Nearly thirty years ago, I saved a commentary from the Danish newspaper Information. It was written by the engineer Hans Schrøder and titled “Kierkegaard in Cyberspace”. It was published on 30 November 1996.

The internet was still young. It was something one “logged on to”. The modem made noises, pages loaded slowly, and cyberspace seemed like an almost uninhabited landscape. Here, the single individual could seek knowledge, write, read and communicate directly with others without passing through publishers, editors and institutions.

Schrøder wrote enthusiastically that Kierkegaard’s collected works were making their way into cyberspace. He believed that Kierkegaard would have felt great sympathy for this new realm because cyberspace was not subject to tyranny. It lived a life of its own, he wrote, governed by the individual.

When I read the commentary today, I smile—not because its author was naïve, but because he expressed an expectation that so many shared at the time: that the internet would free the single individual from the gatekeepers and set knowledge free. Human beings would no longer be at the mercy of the crowd. They would be able to find their own way through this new landscape of information.

Much of this came true. Today I can sit at home and read Kierkegaard’s writings, his journals and the extensive scholarship on his work. Texts that once required access to major libraries are now only a few keystrokes away. I can write an essay in the morning and publish it the same day. People I have never met can read it in other parts of the world.

But something else happened too.

The single individual entered cyberspace. There, they encountered the crowd in algorithmic form.

When the Crowd Moved into the Screen

Kierkegaard’s famous formulation, “The crowd is untruth”, can easily be misunderstood. It does not necessarily mean that many people are mistaken while the solitary individual is always right. The crowd becomes untruth when the single individual can disappear into it and evade responsibility for what they say and do.

In the crowd, responsibility can dissolve. Everyone does it. Everyone thinks so. Everyone has read it. No one knows any longer who began it, who investigated it, or who bears responsibility for whether the claim is true.

The digital crowd differs from the crowd Kierkegaard knew. It is not gathered in the town square. It does not need to shout with one voice. It appears as recommendations, search results, shares, rankings and streams of content. Each person sits alone before a screen, but the screen is not neutral. It has already sorted the world.

The algorithm rarely commands. It suggests. It does not tell me what to think, but shows me what it seems natural to consider next. It knows my previous choices and gives me more of what keeps me engaged. I experience myself as the single individual, while at the same time I am carried into currents that I neither see nor understand.

Cyberspace therefore did not become the realm free from domination that the writer had imagined. The old gatekeepers lost some of their power, but new ones appeared. They do not wear uniforms. We encounter them as technical systems, commercial priorities and invisible selections.

Yet it would be too simple to make technology the enemy. The internet has opened doors that were once closed. Artificial intelligence can help us find knowledge, discover connections and formulate questions we have not yet managed to ask. The problem does not begin when technology helps us. It begins when we forget that technology also shapes what we are able to see.

When a Person Becomes a Digital Case

In the commentary, Schrøder draws attention to one of Kierkegaard’s most burlesque attacks on natural science. The researcher rushes from Australia to the moon, then down into a cave and onwards in pursuit of an intestinal worm. The telescope gives way to the microscope. The details multiply, and Kierkegaard impatiently asks who can endure it.

This is not Kierkegaard at his most nuanced. The natural sciences have given us knowledge that has saved lives and transformed our understanding of the world. But behind the exaggeration lies a question that has become even more urgent in our time: what are we to do with all these details?

We have acquired an almost unlimited capacity to collect data. We measure the body, sleep, movement, consumption, ability to work, school performance and digital behaviour. Artificial intelligence can discover patterns in the material that no human being could have detected alone. Yet a pattern is not the same as meaning. A correlation is not understanding. A probability is not a person.

This is where practical philosophy must enter—and where the question becomes crucial for social work.

A person who seeks help leaves information behind. There are case records, assessments, diagnoses, income details, previous interventions, reports of concern, risk assessments and decisions. Each item of information may be necessary. Without documentation, legal safeguards can be weakened, past experience can be lost and assistance can become arbitrary.

But the information also shapes our gaze. A person can gradually become identical with their case. They become the drug user, the violent father, the inadequate mother, the disruptive child or the unmotivated client. An assessment written in one situation may be quoted in the next. What began as an interpretation may gradually assume the character of fact.

Digital systems and artificial intelligence can make this process more efficient. They can summarise extensive case files, identify risk factors and retrieve earlier information. This can be helpful. But the system can also repeat old assessments with new authority. It can make the past more visible than change, and the category clearer than the person.

Here we encounter the distinctive character of the algorithm once again. In casework too, it does not primarily appear as a command. It “suggests”: a risk score, a priority case, a summary that highlights certain information while allowing other details to recede. But this form of the crowd is more dangerous than the one we encounter as consumers because it cloaks itself in the language of objectivity. We know that a recommended video is a recommendation. A system that says “high risk” or “low motivation” can easily present itself as a fact, rather than as one voice among several. The more neutral the language appears, the more easily we forget to ask who is responsible for what the system says.

Anyone with long experience in social work knows that a case file and a human encounter do not always tell the same story. The documents may describe the case accurately, while the person who walks through the door still surprises us. The system may know the case without knowing the person.

The social worker’s task is therefore not merely to collect more information. They must try to understand what the information means in this person’s life. What has happened? What is at stake? What is the person trying to protect? What do they still hope for?

A human being is never merely the sum of what has been recorded about them.

Where Is the Unconditional?

Schrøder was concerned that politics had made everything relative. Religion and natural science, he argued, possessed something unconditional, whereas democracy could say only “on the one hand” and “on the other hand”. Everything became a matter of compromise.

I do not share this distrust of compromise. Democracy cannot do without it. People have different interests, experiences and conceptions of the good life. Politics must often negotiate between considerations that may all be legitimate. Compromise is not always a betrayal of truth. It can also be a way of living peacefully with disagreement.

Yet the commentary raises an important question: is there anything we should not negotiate away?

For social work, the answer may be human dignity.

The unconditional does not reside in one particular method, political solution or professional theory. It lies in the fact that a human being must never be treated merely as a means to the system’s efficiency. A person cannot be reduced to a cost, a risk, a diagnosis or a prognosis.

This does not mean that every wish should be fulfilled or every action accepted. Social workers must set boundaries, protect children, allocate scarce resources and sometimes participate in coercive interventions. This is precisely why human dignity is decisive. It applies even when we disagree with a person, when we must reject a claim, or when society must intervene.

Human dignity is not a reward for having acted rightly. It is what still belongs to a person when much has gone wrong.

Here Kierkegaard’s “single individual” meets the humanism of social work. The single individual must not disappear into the case, the diagnosis, the target group or the statistics. Behind every category stands a person who lives their life only once.

The Single Individual Is Not Alone

At the same time, Kierkegaard’s defence of the single individual requires correction. A human being is not a self-sufficient individual who can be detached from other people and from the society in which they live.

Social work knows that suffering is both personal and social. Poverty cannot be explained as a characteristic of the person who is poor. Addiction is not merely a matter of willpower. A child’s difficulties do not arise independently of the family, the school, the neighbourhood and wider social conditions. The single individual must be seen, but so must the contexts that shape that individual’s possibilities.

Ethics cannot therefore be merely an encounter a person has with themselves, as Schrøder writes. Responsibility is personal, but injustice can be institutional. A social worker can meet a person with respect while working within a system that does not. The good intentions of the individual do not undo the effects of poor institutional arrangements.

Kierkegaard was right that the crowd can dissolve responsibility. But community can also awaken it—and the distinction deserves our attention. Where the crowd allows the individual to disappear, an ethical community is something the individual enters with open eyes and a name. A report of concern is not the anonymous rumour of the crowd, but a person taking responsibility for what they have observed. A multidisciplinary team that brings a teacher, a public health nurse and the child welfare service together around one child may see something that none of them could have seen alone—not because they are more numerous, but because each remains accountable for their part of the picture. The difference between a crowd and a community does not lie in the number of people present, but in whether their presence makes responsibility clearer or more obscure.

There may be no such thing as an ethical crowd. But there are ethical communities.

Humanism must therefore protect both the irreplaceability of the single individual and our dependence on one another. I do not become less myself because I need others. It is through my relationship with others that my responsibility becomes real.

Bringing the Single Individual Back into View

In 1996, it was remarkable that Kierkegaard was making his way into cyberspace. Today the problem is not access to texts. The problem is attention. We can retrieve almost anything, yet we have less and less time to dwell on anything.

Kierkegaard was no philosopher for speed-reading. He wrote for the single reader and expected that reader to stop, return and allow the text to do its work. He would hardly have been impressed that his name produces thousands of search results if none of them leads to an encounter with a thought.

The same applies to social work. Technology is good when it enables us to see the person more clearly, safeguard rights and free up time for conversation and presence. But if the result is more time in front of the screen and less time with people, efficiency has lost its human purpose.

Practical philosophy cannot give us a formula that resolves this. It can do something more modest and perhaps more important: it can keep the question open. What does technology do to our gaze? Who becomes visible? Who disappears? Who bears responsibility when a decision appears to have been made by the system?

Thirty years ago, the task was to bring Kierkegaard into cyberspace. Today the task may be different: to bring the single individual back into view.

Not by turning our backs on technology. Not by romanticising a world before the internet. But by insisting that a human being is always more than what can be recorded, calculated and predicted.

Cyberspace found the single individual.

Now we must find the human being again.