Turns out Socrates was a tech-phobe. Only, he's not talking about the horror of smartphones. He's talking about reading and writing. Tech panics are as old as philosophy.
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Socrates was right that literacy would change everything. Most people take the view that literacy has been net positive though. The case for that is much harder to make for digital technologies.
is it preventable? humans love to communicate above everything else and technology that facilitates communication will almost inevitably expand and increase signal capacity
from mycelium networks to barbwire telephones to galactic filaments
(the point of this is not that socrates has a problem with technology, for the record. socrates was highly interested in the scientific discoveries of his day and presumably was in contact with a lot of greek scientists at the time.)
I bet any country goat herd of the time would have had a similar take on the urban Athenians - living in city infrastructure with markets full of stuff they didn't make themselves means they have lost all the valuable skills required for survival.
Btw things we need more research on: effect of social web on "pile on" style bullying, affects on those with mental health/esteem/anxiety concerns, ability to filter mis/disinformation. Things I think are silly/probably harmful: a complete ban on smartphones for under 16s.
I'm sure we can find someone complaining about technology in Ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia.
A few centuries or maybe even a thousand years before Socrates
Socrates was also a soldier for more than two decades and used cutting edge tech, selectively quoting doesn't really help bring to light his views here. Also the Ancient Greek idea of memory is not the same as ours today.
like there's that collection of quotes somewhere in pictures showing similar sentiments from people going back generation by generation, warning about the corruption by the Hot New Thing
i'm not saying there's no corruption, or no drawbacks to new culture or technology, but the sentiment against it is useless, old folks keep dying and the youth adopts what's possible
that said, i welcome the rising discussion and collective speculation about how to best construct social media not to be downright harmful to individuals and communities alike. i think we figured out smoking, we can figure this out, too, in time💪
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from mycelium networks to barbwire telephones to galactic filaments
its not much good or bad but rather inevitable
Or was he advocating the oral tradition ?
They're all hack jobs to some extent.
A few centuries or maybe even a thousand years before Socrates
We traded a more accessible and stable technology - writing versus a trained memorizer class - but something was lost.
-- guy we only know about because of writing