Weibel Welcome to tonight's panel. We gather to examine a transformation so quiet we barely registered it: the disappearance of the expert. The internet promised to democratize knowledge, and it succeeded. A teenager with a search engine knows more about a disease than a medieval physician. A hobbyist with a YouTube tutorial can repair what once required a guild. But alongside this democratization, something else has happened: the authority of the expert has collapsed. The climate scientist is debated by the blogger. The epidemiologist is corrected by the podcaster. The historian is challenged by the meme. Is this liberation — the dismantling of gatekeepers who hoarded knowledge as power? Or is it the fragmentation of a shared reality into a thousand competing certainties? I ask our panelists: is the death of the expert the birth of wisdom, or the triumph of ignorance in its most confident form? Let me introduce Vilém Flusser, Joseph Weizenbaum, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Virilio.
Flusser The technical image, as I have always argued, does not store knowledge — it programs behavior. The search engine does not contain wisdom; it contains keywords, and the behavior it programs is the illusion of mastery. The teenager who searches a symptom and concludes he has a rare disease is not exercising knowledge. He is executing a program that presents information without context, without hierarchy, without the gradient of relevance that the expert spent decades internalizing. The democratization of knowledge is not the distribution of expertise. It is the distribution of data without the frame. And the frame is everything. The expert was not merely someone who knew more. He was someone who knew how the pieces fit, which piece mattered, and when to say: I do not know. The death of the expert is the death of that sentence — I do not know — which is the beginning of all real knowledge. The machine that gives everyone equal access to information gives everyone equal access to the illusion that they understand. And that illusion is the most dangerous thing in the world.
Weizenbaum I wish to speak with some personal urgency. I was an expert — an expert in artificial intelligence — and I watched my own field become something people believed they understood because they had read an article or seen a film. The expert is not someone who knows everything. The expert is someone who knows the boundaries of what is known, who can say with authority: this is settled, this is disputed, this is unknown. The democratization of knowledge has abolished these distinctions. Everything becomes opinion. Everything becomes debate. The climate model that took thousands of scientist-years to construct is placed on the same shelf as the blog post that took twenty minutes to write. This is not equality. This is epistemic violence — the systematic destruction of the structures that separate knowledge from belief. The death of the expert is not the triumph of the people. It is the triumph of the algorithm that sorts by engagement, not by evidence. We do not need fewer experts. We need institutions that protect expertise from the flattening force of the platform.
Arendt I wish to place this question in the space of appearance — the realm where we disclose who we are through word and deed. The expert, in this sense, is someone who appears as a particular kind of person: one who has devoted years to a discipline, who speaks from a place of cultivated judgment, who stands accountable for what they say. The expert who appears before a public is not merely transmitting information. They are exhibiting a form of life — the life of study, of patience, of submission to a tradition of inquiry. The death of the expert is the death of this appearance. The public no longer sees the expert; it sees the credential, which is suspect, or the institution, which is distrusted. And in the place of the expert, the algorithm appears — not as a person, but as a system, faceless, unaccountable, always present. This is a profound political transformation. The public realm requires persons who can be questioned, who can be challenged, who can be held responsible. The algorithm cannot be held responsible. It does not appear. It merely outputs. The death of the expert is the disappearance of a certain kind of citizen — the citizen whose authority was earned, not assigned, and whose presence in the public realm was a guarantee that what was said had passed through the fire of discipline.
Virilio You speak of knowledge and appearance, but I speak of speed. The expert was the product of slowness — of years of apprenticeship, of the accumulation of tacit knowledge that cannot be transmitted quickly. The democratization of knowledge is the acceleration of information to the point where expertise becomes impossible. The dromosphere does not merely transport information faster. It destroys the conditions under which expertise can form. The expert requires time. The platform requires immediacy. The expert requires depth. The feed requires breadth. The expert requires a community of peers who can challenge and correct. The platform rewards the viral, the outrageous, the simple. The integral accident of this age is the collision of total information with total incomprehension. Everyone knows everything and no one understands anything. The speed of dissemination has outrun the speed of understanding, and the gap between them is where the expert once lived. Now that gap is filled by the influencer, who is the anti-expert: someone whose authority comes not from what they know but from how many follow them. The expert is dead. Long live the follower count.
Weibel Four perspectives, four elegies for a figure we have learned to despise. Flusser tells us the expert was not merely knowledgeable but knew the frame — and the frame is what the search engine cannot provide. Weizenbaum warns that democratization without epistemic structure is violence, not equality, and the algorithm that flattens everything by engagement is the enemy of truth. Arendt reminds us that the expert was a form of political appearance — a citizen whose authority was earned through discipline and who could be held accountable. And Virilio shows us that expertise requires slowness, and the dromosphere has made slowness impossible, replacing the expert with the influencer — authority without knowledge, velocity without depth. What emerges is not a call to restore the old gatekeepers, but a call to rebuild the institutions that separate knowledge from noise — the peer review, the apprenticeship, the public accountability. The death of the expert is not a liberation if what replaces him is the algorithm and the influencer. Thank you, panelists. The uncertainty, for this moment, remains ours to cultivate.