The Tool Does Not Think

“It is not things themselves that disturb us, but the judgments we make about them.”
— Epictetus

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I am rereading The Arbiter of Your Destiny by William W. Walter, and in the preface I stop at a simple, almost humble sentence, yet profoundly revealing: even if my message had served to illuminate only one mind, it would have been worth the effort.

Written in 1911, that sentence is not merely an expression of personal modesty. Walter is speaking about propagation—about reach. He understood, with remarkable clarity for his time, that the printing press was not just a technical innovation, but a vehicle of thought, a medium capable of carrying a right idea into many minds and, through that, multiplying its effects.

Walter is explicit: in his century, the printing press became an active ally of the spiritual mandate to heal, to teach, to elevate. Where once a voice reached only a few, the printed book allowed an idea to travel on its own, to repeat itself, to find new minds, to produce results. The message no longer depended on the author’s presence; the medium itself spread it.

Before that leap, books did not circulate—they were copied. Hand to hand. Pulse to pulse. With cold in the bones and ink thickening in the inkwells. They were not copied to multiply, but to preserve. Books were not books: they were scrolls of papyrus, unrolled with infinite patience. Then came parchment—lambskin—and with it the codex, pages that could be turned as we do today. More convenient, yes, but brutally expensive. Copying a Bible took an entire year. And the scribe did not work alone: there were illuminators, rubricators, binders. Gold, silver, precious woods. Books so valuable they were chained to prevent theft.

Knowledge was not a right. It was a privilege.

The printing press shattered that enclosure. It accelerated production, reduced costs, and broke the monopoly of knowledge held by elites and churches. With it came mass literacy. The Renaissance. The Reformation. The Scientific Revolution. And something even more disruptive: the possibility that a right idea could propagate beyond the control of the status quo. The printing press did not merely change communication—it changed the scale of human thought.

Now imagine this.

Imagine that, in the early days of the printing press—when many still doubted its usefulness and others feared it—someone had said that a day would come when the knowledge of the entire world would fit into an object small enough to rest in the palm of a hand. That from it one could read books, watch moving images, hear voices from other continents, access ideas from people not yet born. And that all of this would be done while lying in bed.

To those men, such a statement would not have sounded visionary. It would have sounded absurd. Not because it was false, but because it exceeded their level of understanding. They lacked the mental framework to conceive it. Just as, centuries earlier, the printing press itself had seemed unthinkable to those who knew only the manuscript.

And yet today, that object exists. It is called the smartphone.
We carry it in our pockets. We use it without wonder. And paradoxically, we blame it.

We are living through a technological leap comparable to the printing press. The internet and social networks are vehicles for the dissemination of knowledge so powerful that, seen from another era, they would have appeared as magic—or heresy. But the pattern repeats itself: we do not judge the tool by its potential, but by our level of thought.

We say “the algorithm,” just as people once said “the printing press is dangerous.” But there is something the algorithm has not conquered—just as the press never did: the human gesture. Today, that gesture is called scroll.

The algorithm suggests, nudges, organizes. But it does not compel. It cannot prevent you from passing by. It cannot force you to stay. The scroll is the contemporary equivalent of closing a book, turning a page, lifting one’s eyes. It is small, almost invisible, yet profoundly sovereign.

Perhaps our constant criticism of social media does not arise from its evil, but from something far more uncomfortable: we know that we could know. We know that, with the same device, we could understand how the water cycle works, how writing was born, why the world turns, how other minds thought before us. And yet, when we look up, we realize we have spent hours consuming trivialities, repeating lies disguised as truths, following the latest episode of the eternal spectacle of idiots versus fools—a fight in which we are not merely spectators, but fans.

That is what hurts.
Not the tool.
The mirror.

Like the printing press in its time, social networks do not think. They amplify. They reflect. They multiply. They do not create the final content; they expose it. The tool is the same. What changes is the mind that uses it—and the decision, repeated thousands of times, to stay or to move on.

Here lies a truth we prefer to avoid: reading is tiring. Thinking demands effort. Understanding is uncomfortable. That is why we do not want to read—we want to have read. We want the summary without fatigue, the cultural pill, the feeling of knowledge without the labor that makes it one’s own.

But it is not knowledge that transforms us.
It is effort.

The effort of the mind to pause, to go back, to not understand and continue anyway. That slow, silent labor is the true sediment. The same is true today with social networks: the very device that can empty attention is also capable of teaching philosophy, history, science, music, agriculture, metaphysics. The difference is not in the network. It is in the will to stop sliding the finger.

And now, let us look further.

Imagine a future in which creating worlds becomes as natural as consuming images is today. Worlds like those in a video game: choosing how they are inhabited, what rules govern them, what is built within them. Not as escapism, but as an extension of consciousness. Not to flee reality, but to understand it more deeply.

Today, that idea sounds absurd. Exaggerated. Childish.
Exactly as absurd as the idea of the smartphone would have sounded to those just beginning to accept the printing press.

History is clear: every new tool appears ridiculous until the level of thought rises to meet it. When it does, the tool ceases to feel magical and becomes ordinary. What today seems unthinkable is not impossible—it simply exceeds our current mental horizon.

Social networks are not a bad tool, just as the printing press was not, nor money itself. What disturbs us is seeing our mental level reflected in them: our haste, our dispersion, our forgetfulness of the fact that all real creation demands attention, effort, and vision.

Perhaps the true turning point comes when we understand this: we are the arbiters of our own visualizations—of what we allow in, of what we repeat, of what we turn into habit. Knowledge, and creation, have always spread according to the consciousness of those who receive them.

The question is not what the tools of tomorrow will do.
The question is whether we will be worthy of creating them…
or merely of consuming them.

The tool does not think.
But you do.