A great many scientific studies in the humanities and social sciences have shown that the spread of a technology always goes together with imagined and utopian technophile scenarios where the assumption is that technical innovations are the necessary driver of social, individual and collective progress. This point of view is operative in day-to-day communication and a highly fertile source of discourse on the virtues of digitisation in education. Among the multiple promises of digitisation, the development of autonomy has had pride of place for many years. In this article, we keep today’s prevailing technophile ideologies at a distance to offer a critical analysis of the promise whereby digitisation necessarily promotes autonomy in students.