Abstract

Paul Watzlawick argued that reality is not discovered but constructed through communication. This paper extends his radical constructivist framework to the digital age, tracing how information technologies have progressively automated the construction of what Watzlawick called "second-order reality" - the domain of meaning, value, and significance. The analysis follows three technological regimes. Search engines transferred epistemic authority from human judgment to algorithmic ranking, making relevance a function of network topology rather than truth. Social media fragmented shared reality into parallel epistemic bubbles, where narrative resonance supplants factual accuracy. Large Language Models complete this trajectory: they produce fluent, coherent discourse without comprehension, intention, or reference - making "hallucination" not a malfunction but the default mode of a system that generates meaning without anchoring it to anything beyond statistical probability. The paper introduces the concept of algorithmic constructivism to characterize this new condition, and warns of its anthropological consequence: epistemic atrophy. As sense-making is progressively delegated to automated systems, humans risk losing the capacity to distinguish negotiated meaning from algorithmic simulation - and with it, the ability to construct reality through genuine communicative exchange.