Written more than 2,300 years before the invention of the iPhone, Plato’s The Phaedrus includes what has become one of the most weaponized examples of reactionary techno-skepticism.
“But there is something yet to be said of propriety and impropriety of writing,” Socrates says to the titular Athenian aristocrat. He then tells the fable of the Egyptian god Theuth delivering the gift of letters to King Thamus. Theuth expects gratitude; instead, Thamus laments that writing will weaken his subject’s memory. “The parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions,” the wise king concludes. Here Plato seems to dismiss one of the most fundamentally useful technological innovations in human history.
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Source: The Myth of Technophobia | WIRED