Socrate

Around 370 BC, in Platon's *Phèdre*, Socrate recounts an Egyptian myth: Theuth, a god of Naucratis whose sacred bird is the ibis, brings king Thamus his inventions (numbers, calculation, geometry, astronomy, dice, and above all letters), promising an elixir of memory and wisdom. Thamus rejects the claim. Letters will produce forgetfulness, because those who learn them will stop exercising recollection and will trust external characters that are no part of them. Theuth has found an elixir of reminding, not of memory, and it offers students the appearance of wisdom and not true wisdom.

Jeremy Norman's entry on HistoryofInformation.com reduces the passage, 274c to 275b, to two charges: writing weakens the necessity and the power of memory, and it lets a reader feign comprehension instead of comprehending. Norman files the entry under writing and epigraphy, under education and literacy, and under memory, mnemonics and data storage.

Riley Ralmuto gives Socrate a different job. Against Marc Andreessen, who dated introspection to 1910-1920 Vienna, called it a guilt trip from Vienna, and said he practises zero of it, Ralmuto assembles 2,400 years of self-examiners and opens the list with the maxim that the unexamined life is not worth living, ahead of Marc Aurèle, Sénèque, Augustin d'Hippone, the Bouddha and Confucius.

Neither writer argues with Socrate. Both reach for him as the earliest recorded authority against a confident contemporary claim: one about what an external medium costs the people who rely on it, the other about when humans began looking inward.