Your Brain Is Your Phone
In 370 BC, Socrates worried about what new technology was doing to young peoples’ brains. As younger scholars moved from oral arguments to written ones, Socrates argued against writing, which he felt would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories.”
Millennia later, little has changed: in the 20th century, moral panic erupted over television, which detractors worried would turn us all into zombified couch potatoes, incapable of creative thought. Decades later, video games were even worse, turning our children into amoral, trigger-happy monsters.