The Crowd (Kierkegaard)

In the AI Story

Kierkegaard distinguished the crowd from the community. A community is constituted by individuals who have each made their own choices and happen to align. The crowd is constituted by the dissolution of individuals into a mass. The crowd offers comfort: the comfort of knowing what to think, what to say, what to celebrate and condemn, without the discomfort of standing alone with a judgment that is one's own. The press of the 1840s created crowds; the algorithmic feed of the 2020s perfects the mechanism by adding personalization — each user receives a crowd-position calibrated to her existing preferences, creating the illusion of individuality while producing its opposite.

In The Orange Pill's documentation of the AI discourse, the crowd appears immediately. Within weeks of the December 2025 threshold, positions calcified: triumphalists, elegists, Luddites. The speed of calcification is diagnostic. People formed conclusions about technology they had used for an afternoon or not at all, based on what others had posted. The discourse became a crowd phenomenon — not rational argument between individuals but the collision of pre-formed positions, each camp providing its members with ready-made responses. The person who says 'I feel both exhilaration and loss simultaneously and don't know what to do with the contradiction' receives no algorithmic amplification because ambivalence is inaudible in a medium optimizing for clarity.

Kierkegaard's concept of leveling — the elimination of qualitative difference between individuals — finds its technological apotheosis in the recommendation algorithm. Each user receives content tailored to confirm existing views, producing a population of isolated individuals each convinced of independent judgment, each unaware the judgment was curated. Pariser's filter bubble and Kierkegaard's crowd are structurally identical: mechanisms providing the appearance of individual thought while eliminating its substance. The algorithmic feed does not lie — it delivers content users engage with — but the delivery produces untruth, the Kierkegaardian category for existence that fails to correspond with the conditions of genuine selfhood.

Origin

The concept was developed across multiple texts: the 1846 A Literary Review (analyzing Thomasine Gyllembourg's novel Two Ages), the 1847 discourses dedicated 'to that single individual,' and scattered observations throughout the pseudonymous works. Kierkegaard's own experience of public mockery by The Corsair newspaper in 1846 gave him visceral knowledge of the crowd's leveling power — he became Copenhagen's most ridiculed figure, followed by children in the streets, his physical appearance caricatured weekly. His response was neither retreat nor apology but intensified philosophical production from a position of isolation.

Key Ideas

Untruth as mode of existence. The crowd is not false (its positions may be objectively correct) but untruthful — existing in a relationship to belief that bypasses individual engagement and existential commitment.

Leveling eliminates the individual. Not through oppression but through providing sameness — identical opinions, vocabulary, reflexes — that make individuality unnecessary and eventually incomprehensible.

Algorithmic perfection of the mechanism. The feed delivers personalized uniformity, creating the illusion of individual judgment while producing confirmation-seeking crowds of one.

The silent middle as resistance. Those who hold contradiction without resolving it, who refuse camp positions, who endure ambivalence — these occupy the space where genuine individuality might take root if the crowd would permit it.

Standing as an individual is costly. The person who refuses crowd-positions risks isolation, ridicule, invisibility in algorithmic discourse — costs Kierkegaard bore personally and considered necessary.