This sentence (from Egan's "The Educated Mind") neatly describes an issue I have with a lot of the "tools for thought" work.

"Understanding Computers and Cognition" by Winograd & Flores (amazon.com/s?k=9780893910…) offers a different perspective which I quite like:

More concretely, I think that empowering groups has a much higher ceiling than empowering individuals.

For example, compare the impact of Github vs any individual text editor or IDE.