Manuel Cebrián Ramos was one of those. He dedicated a good part of his life to studying how people, networks and machines interact with each other, long before artificial intelligence (AI) or the effects of social networks occupied the center of public debate. But what really interested him was not technology itself, but how we remain human in a world
Last March 31 he left. His absence is still difficult to accept. Not only because of the loss of a brilliant scientist, but because with him disappears one of those exceptionally rare people who seem to always live a few steps ahead of their time. This Monday, June 8
Manuel not only sensed where technology and digital societies were advancing, but also the tensions and voids that these changes would end up producing. There was in him an unusual mix of scientific precision and cultural sensitivity that allowed him to detect not only the visible transformations of the present, but also its more difficult to quantify effects such as contemporary loneliness, digital saturation or the silent erosion of individual and collective identities.
Long walks were an essential part of his mindset. He walked to observe the world and organize ideas, with an almost obsessive attention to what usually goes unnoticed. He was interested in people and cities, conversations and those small everyday details that others barely noticed and that he transformed into big questions. He was also a tireless seeker of stories, capable of linking a cult film, a lost internet forum and a conversation about AI as if everything were part of the same reflection on our time.
Doctor in Computer Science from the Autonomous University of Madrid, he was one of the international pioneers of computational social sciences. His academic career took him to institutions such as Brown University, MIT, the University of California in San Diego, CSIRO in Australia and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. In his last years he returned to Spain to continue his research from the Carlos III University and, finally, the.
Won a foundational experiment
His scientific work was enormously influential. Many years before certain issues became social concerns, Manuel was already investigating how digital platforms were transforming collective human behavior. Its name was associated with that of 2009, considered one of the founding experiments of modern collective intelligence. His team managed to locate ten red balloons distributed throughout the United States in less than nine hours, mobilizing thousands of people through social networks and innovative incentive mechanisms. This showed that the Internet could be used not only to communicate, but also to coordinate large-scale collective intelligence.
His most influential contributions include pioneering research on the behavior of AI systems, the use of social networks to assess damage after natural disasters, and the potential of digital tracking to contain epidemics. But Manuel also soon understood the contradictions of the digital ecosystem. Faced with a culture obsessed with virality and instant visibility, he warned that the great current mistake was to confuse the diffusion of a problem with the real ability to mobilize society to solve it. He thus defended that profound transformations depend less on the massive circulation of information than on the ability to sustain collective action.
To reduce Manuel solely to his scientific contributions would be to lose an essential part of his legacy. His intellectual concern went far beyond the traditional compartmentalization of knowledge. He understood science, art and thought as different languages to explore the same reality, convinced that truly important questions almost always appear in the spaces where they intersect. Many of his scientific questions later reappeared in his essays, where he explored with special lucidity the cultural and emotional consequences of digital life. This concern appears especially clearly in one of the texts that best condenses his thoughts. There he describes how places capable of generating shared experiences were being replaced by non-placesdominated by the permanent flow of information, attention and consumption. From that idea he developed a critique of the cultural and emotional homogenization of a hyperconnected world that he called “”.
Art occupied a central place in that search. His painting, begun around 2017, was intense, fast-paced, and almost anxious, as if trying to visually capture the cognitive and emotional noise of the Internet. Later it evolved into experimental projects such as Sticky Be@rbricks or, a collective conceived at the same time as cultural criticism and aesthetic exploration of contemporary symbolic collapse. His works were exhibited in the United States, China and Germany, including the Caltech Art Contestthe or the Hatch Kingdom Museumand gave rise to proposals such as ARCO Spam in Madrid, with which he came to counterprogram the ARCO Contemporary Art Fair, mixing irony, experimental art and criticism of digital culture.
But those of us who knew him will remember him above all for something difficult to describe and even more difficult to find. Manuel shared ideas, references and improbable connections with a disarming naturalness, although perhaps his most unique talent was something else. He saw possibilities where others only saw separate trajectories. He imagined projects that did not yet exist and recognized in those around him capabilities that often not even they had discovered themselves. Many of us end up getting to know each other thanks to him and discovering horizons that perhaps we would not have imagined on our own.
He did not see AI as a neutral tool or as a simple consumer product, but as a new space from which to observe contemporary human behavior. He was less interested in the technical vulnerability of the models than in the motivations, impulses and tensions that emerge around them. Even now, at a time when AI forces us to rethink the role of science and knowledge, perhaps the question Manuel leaves has less to do with algorithms than with ourselves. How to build spaces where more people like him can flourish, with free, curious and generous minds, capable of connecting ideas, but also the people who give them meaning?
Manuel’s loss is irreparable. But within the immense sadness of his absence, gratitude and the privilege of having met someone like that already emerges in us. Manuel was that rare mix of scientific rigor, artistic imagination and infinite curiosity that made any conversation with him always end up taking you to an unexpected place.
