Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practise their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise. (274e—275b, LCL)

Socrates goes on to declare that static texts cannot serve as proper vehicles for philosophy, mainly because they aren’t adaptable to various situations; Plato reaffirms this idea in his seventh letter (343a). Yet Thamus’ description of books is even more thought-provoking in our digital age where we hardly ever commit things to memory. Remember when we would memorize phone numbers? Yes, tools such as Google and Wikipedia are tremendously helpful for ready facts and information, but does this digital world contribute to our wisdom, or is it just full of data? Surely the internet, as Thamus would claim, only hurts our memory, but we won’t stop using the web as a crutch for information. I know I won’t. Technological advances are paradoxical. The more advanced we get, the less it seems that we know how stuff works. So it’s interesting to find similar arguments in the ancient world—that the advancement of writing limits human advancement.