Novelty, Self-Worth, and Hidden PsyOps. 1/22/26

The idea: “What is new today, was once old.”

With all the hype of AI, I’ve been looking for comparisons to the past when there have been huge shifts. 

Did you know that the famous philosopher Socrates was not a big fan of the new technology back in the day. He thought it’d ruin things, corrupt the populace, and was generally a bad idea.

What was the new technology?

Writing.

Yes, taking speech and transcribing it, something we use without thinking about, had an origin, and it was not viewed as a fully positive thing.

He thought that the creation of books was a net negative. In the dialogue Phaedrus he broke out several intense criticisms of the written word. 

One, something that we can all agree with, is memory loss. When you have to remember a whole book or dialog, and keep it in your head, you have to stretch those muscles. The Iliad was entirely orally presented for millennia. What we write down, we often forget, because we know where to find it.

Two, write ideas applied to inappropriate settings. There is no filtration method like a professor for a book. You can read advice that is not intended for someone like you, and act on it. It is superficial understanding, not deep. 

Three, the words are static and defenseless. Once you have stated a point of view, there are a thousand ways to tear it down. 

I think it’s useful to see that everything old is new again. We have a new technology coming, and no one knows how to react to it. Some are concerned, some are overjoyed. Most are worried about their jobs. The implications. The future. 

For all of history in the ancient world, stories were spoken. There are some proto-written systems, written characters approximating numbers for transactions for example. Slowly, writing takes shape. Some systems have words be individual symbols (looking at you Chinese). Then alphabets begin to form, in different and interesting ways (do a quick google search for the emergence of the written word. It’s wild. The things we take for granted, things like should we write down vowels or only consonants, spaces, paragraphs, are all themselves cultural inventions.)

What does it mean, now that we can record stories?

Well, some jobs will go away. The traveling story teller may find himself out of work when the library has more stories than he’ll ever get. 

We know now that the threats of the down side of books did happen (we don’t remember full stories now. The written word is easy to attack, misunderstand, etc). However, the upsides were so many, so incredible. We now write stories about people burning books as scary warnings of possible dystopian futures (Fahrenheit 451 sound familiar?) because that’s what we would think of a regimen that burns books.

The Encouragement: You do not have to prove your self worth, or work to be enough. Attempting to do that only admits that the question is up for debate, and it's not. You are enough. You deserve to be here. Really.

The Advice: Pick some hot button issue and ask “What do people have to gain getting me upset about this.” There is almost always an answer somewhere in there.

Have a great week!