The Cave, the Feed, and the Missing Engelbart
Plato’s prisoners, modern platforms, and what a real networked intelligence would look like.
You probably don’t think of your feed as a cave.
You open an app. The screen lights up: news, jokes, outrage, friends, strangers, wars, memes, disasters. In minutes, you feel informed, connected, inside “what’s happening.” Platforms actively sell this feeling: the global conversation, everyone has a voice, freedom online.
It feels like open air.
Plato would ask: what exactly are you looking at? Douglas Engelbart would ask: what is this system actually optimizing for?
Plato warned about prisoners who take shadows on a wall for reality. Engelbart spent his life trying to design computers and networks that would increase our Collective IQ – our shared ability to understand problems and act wisely.
Most platforms speak Engelbart’s language: connection, community, conversation, wisdom of the crowd. But their structure often looks closer to Plato’s cave than to Engelbart’s workshop.
This essay brings Plato’s cave, Engelbart’s vision and the modern feed into the same frame. The aim is modest and radical at once: that after reading it, you will never see your feed in quite the same way again.
1. Plato’s cave: comfort inside a controlled world
In the allegory of the cave, prisoners are chained facing a wall. Behind them, unseen, a fire burns. Between the fire and the prisoners, people walk past carrying objects. The prisoners see only the shadows projected on the wall.
They talk about the shadows. They name them, predict them, compete over who “understands” them best. For them, the wall is the world.
One prisoner is freed. At first, the light hurts. He staggers, resists, wants to go back. Slowly, he adjusts. He sees objects, then the world outside, finally the sun. He understands that what he once took for reality was real only as a flat, partial projection.
When he returns to the cave to tell the others, he can no longer see well in the dark. He appears confused, clumsy. They laugh at him. If he insists that the shadows are not the whole of reality, they may decide he is dangerous.
The cave is more than a story. It is a structure:
- a closed environment that feels complete,
- a fixed perspective,
- a stream of partial images,
- a community that mistakes those images for reality.
Plato’s warning is precise: captivity is worst when it feels like ordinary life.
2. Douglas Engelbart: the opposite direction
Douglas Engelbart was asking a different question in a different century:
How can computers and networks be designed so that they increase our collective intelligence, instead of just amplifying noise?
He called this capacity Collective IQ: the ability of groups and societies to perceive their problems clearly, understand them in depth, coordinate effective action and improve how they do all of that over time.
For Engelbart, the point of digital networks was not just to connect people. It was to make us smarter together.
Two concepts organize his work:
- Networked Improvement Communities (NICs) – communities that work not only in a system, but on their own methods and tools;
- Dynamic Knowledge Repositories (DKRs) – living memory systems where decisions, arguments, experiments and failures are preserved, linked and revisited.
In an Engelbartian network:
- important threads do not vanish in the scroll;
- decisions are tied to the discussions that produced them;
- groups can see how their understanding evolves;
- participants can influence how their workspace itself is structured.
Technically, this is collaboration software. Philosophically, it is an architecture for leaving the level of shadows together.
The question is: when you look at your feed, does it resemble this kind of environment – or something closer to the cave?
3. Platforms: freedom on the wall
Platforms present themselves in terms that would have appealed to both Plato and Engelbart: “giving everyone a voice,” “where the global conversation happens,” “community, learning, connection.” They often do enable real conversation and organizing.
But structurally, three features matter more than their marketing.
3.1. The feed as a luminous wall
The feed is a wall that never goes blank.
It feels like “the world in real time,” yet it is always a selection – a personalized stream shaped by ranking algorithms, recommendation systems and moderation rules you never see.
You experience a continuous flow of content, some of it meaningful, much of it emotionally charged, all of it framed as “what’s happening.” You rarely experience the criteria that decided this specific sequence, or the deeper artifacts that hold the context behind it.
As in the cave, you see shadows – vivid, engaging, partial.
3.2. Freedom promised, optimization elsewhere
From the user’s point of view, platforms feel open: you can post, reply, like, share; follow and unfollow; join and leave groups.
From the system’s point of view, something else is happening. Large platforms are optimized primarily for:
- engagement (time, clicks, reactions);
- growth (more users, more usage);
- monetization (ad impressions, data for targeting);
- and, increasingly, regulatory and political pressure.
Collective IQ is not the main variable in the objective function.
The system is not asking: “What sequence of information would best help this person and their community understand the world?” It is asking: “What sequence will maximize the signals that matter to our dashboards, under the constraints we face?”
The feeling of freedom is real. But it is freedom shaped inside someone else’s optimization problem.
3.3. Who sets the parameters?
In Plato’s cave, the prisoners do not control the fire or the objects. They control only their reactions.
In modern platforms:
- The platform sets algorithms, policies and default behaviors.
- Governments exert pressure through laws, regulations and informal expectations.
- Advertisers exert pressure through brand safety concerns and revenue threats.
The user contributes content and attention, but has little influence over how ranking works, what is quietly deprioritized, or which compromises are made to satisfy external power centers.
Your account is “yours” in the sense that you can use it. The deeper structure of visibility and silence is not.
4. The inversion of service
If we take Engelbart seriously, the digital order of priorities should look like this:
- Purpose: raise human Collective IQ within the bounds of the law.
- Tools: design networks and software to serve that purpose.
- Business: fit revenue models (including advertising) within that constraint.
- Governance: ensure no single actor can quietly hijack the purpose.
In practice, the order is often inverted:
- Growth and revenue targets at the center.
- Regulatory and political constraints orbiting them.
- Algorithms tuned to satisfy both.
- User attention as raw material.
- Collective intelligence as a hoped-for side effect.
Instead of infrastructure serving the long-term intelligence of communities, the intelligence and attention of communities serve the short-term objectives of infrastructure and its stakeholders.
From Plato’s angle, we inhabit a cave that calls itself the world. From Engelbart’s, we call “intelligence” something that is not designed to be intelligent for us.
Recognizing this inversion is the first step toward correcting it.
5. Plato, Engelbart, and the right sun
Putting Plato and Engelbart in dialogue clarifies what is at stake.
5.1. Shadows vs. knowledge
For Plato, the problem is mistaking shadows – flat, contextless projections – for reality. For Engelbart, a healthy network must produce knowledge structures – linked, revisitable, improvable representations of understanding.
Most feeds excel at producing shadows: fast fragments, isolated reactions, fleeting peaks of emotion. They are weak at supporting knowledge structures: deep context, recorded reasoning, durable memory.
You can feel “very informed” after an hour of scrolling. But if you ask: “Where is the full argument? Where is the timeline? Where is the artifact my community can build on?” the answer is, most of the time, nowhere in particular.
5.2. Prisoners vs. Networked Improvement Communities
The prisoners can talk at length, but cannot alter the cave. NICs, as Engelbart envisioned them, can work on their own methods, tools and representations.
On platforms, we have unprecedented capacity to talk. What we rarely have is a way to reshape the underlying environment, or a path to influence how our collective intelligence is represented and improved.
We are not treated as networked improvement communities. We are very active residents of a largely fixed architecture.
5.3. Choosing a sun
In Plato’s story, the journey is from shadows to objects, to the world, to the sun symbolizing the Good. In Engelbart’s work, there is another “sun”: the idea that digital infrastructure should be oriented toward increasing Collective IQ, not just showing us more images more quickly.
If we take both seriously, a healthy digital system would:
- never ask us to worship the wall;
- expose the machinery behind the projections;
- be judged by whether it actually helps communities see more clearly and act more wisely over time.
Instead, we often treat a well-tuned feed as if it were the sun itself. The problem is not that the wall exists. The problem is forgetting that it is a wall.
6. A quiet self-audit
You do not have to accept any of this on faith. You can test it against your own experience. The next time you open a feed, you might ask:
6.1. What is being optimized?
- If this system had a single goal, what would it be? My clarity? My group’s capacity to think and decide? Or my engagement and compatibility with advertisers and regulators?
- When something appears that makes me angry, euphoric, anxious – is that because the system is tuned for my understanding, or my reaction?
6.2. Who benefits from my time here?
- After an hour, what do I actually have? A clearer model of some issue? A traceable discussion with my group? Or mostly exhausted attention and updated metrics on someone else’s dashboard?
- If a government or a major advertiser quietly demanded that whole topics be less visible, would I even notice the difference?
6.3. What kind of memory am I building?
- Where do the conversations that truly changed how I think live?
- Can my community reconstruct why we believe what we believe, or is it just an accumulation of impressions?
- Is this system helping us remember, or trapping us in an eternal present of the latest shadow?
These questions are not meant to induce guilt. They are a way to measure how cave-like your digital environment has become. Once asked honestly, they are hard to unask.
7. Beyond brighter walls
An Engelbartian network does not mean a perfect world or an ideal platform. It means a different center of gravity.
Imagine a digital environment where:
- The declared and enforced purpose is to support real communities in understanding real problems and coordinating real action.
- Memory is treated as infrastructure: important threads become part of a shared, navigable repository.
- Filters and ranking are transparent and, as much as possible, under community control.
- Governance is not monolithic: there are ways for participants to influence how the system itself evolves.
In such a setting, users are not raw material; they are the reason the system exists. Advertisers, if present, play by rules that prioritize Collective IQ. Governments can enforce the law, but cannot quietly redefine the system’s purpose.
This is the direction Engelbart pointed to. It is also the direction in which protocol-first projects now tentatively move: away from captive platforms, toward shared infrastructure where the “sun” is intelligence, not attention. Names and brands matter less than this reorientation.
8. Seeing the cave
Plato would recognize our feeds as a sophisticated wall of shadows. Engelbart would recognize in them an enormous missed opportunity: computers and networks deployed at planetary scale with very different goals from the ones he spent his life articulating.
It is easy to turn this into a simple story: platforms bad, users good. Reality is more entangled than that. These systems do real good. Many people within them push for better design. And none of us are forced by anything more than habit and incentives to stay inside them.
But the structural inversion remains:
- We are told that the system exists to serve our intelligence.
- In practice, our intelligence and attention are often there to serve the system.
Seeing that does not require drama. It requires a shift in where you point your suspicion and your hope.
The next time you scroll, you can keep Plato and Engelbart in the back of your mind: Plato asking, “Is this the world, or a wall?” Engelbart asking, “Does this raise your Collective IQ, or someone else’s metrics?”
The first step out of any cave is not smashing the wall. It is recognizing it as a wall. Once you do, you might still use the feed. You might still enjoy it. But some part of you will be watching not only the shadows, but also the shape of the cave – and wondering what it would take, finally, to design something closer to daylight.