I think about that passage a lot. Like, I don’t disagree with Plato that writing will inevitably degrade certain aspects of our capacity to think. The key question for me is whether it’s worth it — what do we gain from writing, and are those gains worth what we lose? I think about this mostly in the context of other technology besides writing, namely AI.

Going back to writing though, I wonder whether Plato would still hold the same anti-writing views nowadays. Paper and high quality ink is readily available, and even archival quality stuff isn’t hard for a regular person to get. We can trivially make additional copies of important documents through photocopying, scanning and printing, as well as backing things up in different formats. He was also just writing in a completely different culture too, where oratory was far more valued than writing — and much of the extant writings from the time are effectively just notes for giving lectures.

I feel like he’d probably still be grumpy. He strikes me as that sort