Mnemosyne: Memory, Literacy, and the Creator’s Bias - By Samuel Loncar, Ph.D.

Part 1 of "Mnemosyne and the Fate of Capital in the Digital Age: Ammon’s Law, Technology, and The Invisible Revolution" by Samuel Loncar in Underground Theory

This is Part 1 of Samuel Loncar’s piece in Underground Theory. More info on how to order a physical copy at the end of this post.

Summary: The rise of alphabetic literacy was the most important technological and cultural revolution in recorded history because it created history as we know it. Due to the fact that it was only in the twentieth century that the scholarship and insight into this revolution emerged, it has never been synthesized with the founding social theories of Marx, Durkheim, or Weber, yet it has profound significance for the central concepts of differentiation, bureaucracy, modernity, and capital. The revolution in alphabetic literacy culminates in the emergence of the computer and the internet and our current crisis, in which the meaning of capital requires fundamental reevaluation.

I. Mnemosyne: Memory, Literacy, and the Creator’s Bias

There is an ancient principle with great power. My argument is going to be that by understanding this principle and its application to computers, we can achieve a radical reframing of the nature of computers and their relationship to memory, the most fundamental dimension of human culture, represented in ancient Greece as the Mother of the Muses, of all arts and inventions. The principle is some 2300 years old, and it is found in one of Plato’s dialogues.

According to Plato, who presents it via Socrates in his dialogue the Phaedrus, it derives from a legend about the Egyptian God Theuth (or Thoth; in Greece, Hermes), the god of communication, science, judgment, media, and technology. It’s a beautiful story, and it’s worth looking at it in context. The Phaedrus is a rich dialogue about rhetoric, communication, and technology, especially writing and speech and how they shape reality and our access to it. The dialogue is one of the most profound treatments of the problem of scientific representation, focusing on the nature and limits of the most basic human medium of communication, language. Although often left to academics with no interests in industry, invention, or business, it is useful for all these domains, properly understood, and should be regarded as perhaps the first extended treatment of the promise and peril of technology in Western culture.

Near the end of the dialogue, Socrates is asking how writing can accomplish its highest function, which in the context of an ancient society is “pleasing the gods,” but which one can gloss as: using and discussing language in a way that accurately reflects its true nature (because the truth of things is what pleases the gods, in Socrates’s view). Here’s the passage, with some key sentences in italics:

SOCRATES: Well, this is what I’ve heard. Among the ancient gods of Naucratis in Egypt there was one to whom the bird called the ibis is sacred. The name of that divinity was Theuth, and it was he who first discovered number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, as well as the games of checkers and dice, and, above all else, writing.

Now the king of all Egypt at that time was Thamus, who lived in the great city in the upper region that the Greeks call Egyptian Thebes; Thamus they call Ammon [a great Egyptian god]. Theuth came to exhibit his arts to him and urged him to disseminate them to all the Egyptians. Thamus asked him about the usefulness of each art, and while Theuth was explaining it, Thamus praised him for whatever he thought was right in his explanations and criticized him for whatever he thought was wrong.

The story goes that Thamus said much to Theuth, both for and against each art, which it would take too long to repeat. But when they came to writing, Theuth said: “O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory; I have discovered a potion for memory and for wisdom.” Thamus, however, replied: “O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.”[i]

Notice a few crucial things in this story. First, Thoth (Theuth’s more common name) not only misjudges the effect of his tool, writing, but he gets it backwards. He thinks he has made a potion or elixir for memory, but in fact writing will dramatically weaken human memory as a faculty. This is, of course, entirely true, as oral societies depend on the living memory of their members for any knowledge, while writing allows things to be forgotten but then recalled through reference to the text.

Second, Ammon notes that writing is a potion for “reminding” not “remembering,” a subtle but major distinction. A tool to increase memory would enhance our power of recollection; a tool to remind us of things is a tool whose function is to reduce the importance of memory in society. In other words, not only does Thoth get his tool’s function subtly but hugely wrong (it’s about memory, yes, but about eroding it, not enhancing it) but as a result he completely misinterprets its social and psychological consequences. Plato is drawing our attention to a very important idea, which I summarize as follows:

Literacy is not a technology or tool among others but a cultural and civilizational transformation: it is a radical revolution of human society and nature.

This asks for a distinction between tools we use within profound, hard-to-see, and pervasive systems, like literacy (whose tools include books, paper, pens, screens, etc.), and those systems themselves as a kind of meta-tool. The former I will simply call tools, the latter technologies, referring to the original meaning of the term (the logos, logic or principle of a technē, a body of skills, like an academic discipline or craft, which includes many tools within it). So,

Tool = discrete instrument extending human power, embedded in an ecosystem of use that determines its functions and meanings.

Technology = A system of tools, the logics of their coordination, consequences, interconnections, etc., encoded in but never reducible to its artifacts and skills.

Trying to blend a linear and discrete perspective, which is embedded in the idea of tools, with a non-linear, ecological one (embedded in this idea of technology as a system of logics encoded in skills and artifacts), will be challenging, but both perspectives are crucial, as we will see below.

Here we have the key principle from the Phaedrus:

Ammon’s Law: the creator of a technology or tool is not a good judge of its harms and benefits. Due to the love we have for our own products, the creator’s bias may even cause a reversal of the proper understanding.

We can also refer to this as:

The Founder’s Fate: Founders/Creators will not be able to judge reliably what the long-term effects of their tool/company/technology will be, including whether it is a tool or a technology. A tool enhances the logic of an existing system without fundamentally altering or disrupting it. A technology changes the previous system, altering the meaning of all preexisting technologies and tools. The most reliable founders/creators, then, will evince humility and openness to radical reframings of their work. Their privileged insight always has a correlative blindness, but this can be mitigated through engaging external and critical perspectives.

Mark Zuckerberg started what he thought was a platform for elite students to vote on people’s looks (a function now isolated into left and right swipes on another platform). Now Facebook can be seen as the future of media/journalism, as mass surveillance, and as behavior modification on billions, reshaping marketing, publishing, etc.

Thoth thought he was making a tool to enhance memory, but with this distinction we can see the nature of his mistake is deeper than getting things backwards (harming rather than helping memory).

Thoth’s technology of writing shifts cultures away from memory as the central resource to forgetfulness.

II. Nepenthe: The Revolution of a Forgetful Society

Forgetfulness is not generally a conscious human ideal, and it isn’t until thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche that we see explicit celebrations of forgetfulness in major figures in our cultural history. Such celebration occurs against the backdrop of a crisis of “over-information,” to put it crudely (most specifically, a crisis of historical consciousness, of memory itself as it could be shaped by academic historical research).[ii]

But in fact literacy as a system, specifically alphabetic literacy, converts forgetfulness into a resource, and begins a shift in society that privileges people who can capitalize on the absence of durable, fixed, static bodies of memory.

Consider a situation where forgetfulness is useful. Performing is one of the most common. Take piano performance. When I played a recital as a teenager, I wanted to remember the music I was playing but forget everything else, including and especially myself. That is, I did not want to be self-conscious of how I looked, sounded, what I was doing with my hands, etc. All of this would interfere with the performance. Now this might just seem like focusing, but that’s part of the point. Focusing involves the capacity to shift almost everything but a narrow band into the background. Recovery of the background in a moment of focus disrupts the focus and the performance (Michael Polanyi, the chemist and philosopher, makes a distinction between “focal awareness,” in this case what we have of the music we are playing, and “subsidiary awareness,” in this case what we have, say, of our hands on the keys, etc.).[iii] If everything goes well, when I perform, I might have forgotten everything my teacher and I ever said about the piece, and, indeed, if I never remembered that material again but kept performing well, that is not a loss. That kind of information is supposed to be forgotten, at least in performance.

In an oral society, the capacity to focus is profoundly different, because a loss of access to background information of any degree might spell a permanent deterioration of the community’s knowledge. Focus is essentially limited to narrow situations, which means the extent to which specialization or innovation is possible is highly limited. If my capacity to be very narrow requires not just a moment of time, like that of performing, but a much wider situational and chronological scale—say, ten years to master a technical scientific or humanistic discipline—then I have to be confident that all of the background knowledge, which at some point I may need or depend on, still exists. But it can’t exist in me during that time, and if background knowledge is limited to what any one person can personally remember, then it’s easy to see how specialization is not feasible in such a society.

The more complex and demanding something is, the more we have to be able to exclude, ignore, and at least temporarily forget other things. But we have a hard time recognizing this because the tools of recall are so pervasive that it doesn’t worry us. Literate societies thus are capable of complexity, specialization, and innovation, things that are impossible in oral societies, because a literate society is a society that rewards the capacity to forget things in order to make space for new things. It creates the capacity to store information in a durable and permanently legible form that allows it to be forgotten and then accessed again in a new context.

We can summarize this as the Inverse Memory/Innovation Rule, which encapsulates the following trajectory, in which memory and innovation are related inversely:

The more dependent human societies are on memory, the less innovative and specialized they can be. Consequently, innovation and specialization map forgetfulness and memory decline.

This would predict that at our current moment we have the worst memories in our species’ knowable history—all available evidence suggests this is true.

By creating an economy of forgetting, literacy enables an information society, and thus an information economy.

Literacy as a technology thus follows a trajectory of social, psychological, and economic transformation in which the more advanced and pervasive literacy as a medium becomes, the more things that are unrelated to the past—novelties—will be prized and valued. This is partly because the collectively shared framework of meaning and memory will deteriorate, and thus the more indexed to a wide range of shared knowledge and memory a product, institution, or artifact is, the more esoteric it will be. The novel as the quintessential literary genre of mass printing provides a good illustration of this.

An artifact whose name parallels the epoch it shapes (modernity), the novel both helps produce and express modern individualism.[iv] The story of a person’s self, as in the Bildungsroman, requires very little context to interpret. A classic early novel, like Robinson Crusoe, makes its setting—an unknown island on which the character is shipwrecked—a blank slate in order to highlight all the more effectively the protagonist’s self-making.

Similarly, Goethe’s hugely influential novella, The Sorrows of Young Werther, unlike his poem Prometheus, does not require a working knowledge of classical mythology, for example, to enjoy and appreciate, and it appeals to a far wider class of people than does his poetry.

Literary genres did not and have not become “dumbed down,” but they have come to encode the relative unimportance of deep collectively shared memory. The more literacy as a system advances, the more unimportant memory becomes. Computers and the Internet represent a radical culminating and thus turning point in this process. In order to set the stage for the revolutionary nature of computing in the context of literacy, it is necessary to elaborate further on the transformational effects of literacy.

---

Thanks for reading. Please make sure to subscribe to this Substack if you wanna see more!

This post was an excerpt from Underground Theory: Coming To A City Near You. Enjoy it serially here for free. If you prefer a physical copy, orders within the U.S. can get it at a discount here. Otherwise, I recommend getting it from Amazon. Also, stay tuned for the Audible and e-book version of this - in production now!

Get involved: If you want to get actively involved with ongoing lecture sessions related to timenergy research and critical media theory, become a TU subscriber today here. TU Subscribers also get a PDF of Underground Theory.

Support: If you don’t have time to get involved but wish to support nonetheless, become a patron here.

Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. (Yale), is a philosopher, artist, and editor curating and creating new knowledge at the intersection of science, religion, art, and technology. He practices philosophy as a way of life and integrates scholarship, consulting, and institution-building. His work has been translated into Chinese and Farsi and taught at universities across the world, and he has partnered with clients like the United Nations, Oliver Wyman, and Red Bull Arts.

He is the Editor of the Marginalia Review of Books, Director of the Meanings of Science Project, founder and creator of the Becoming Human Project, and the host of Becoming Human: A Podcast for a Species in Crisis. |  www.samuelloncar.com

---

[i] Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 551-2. 274c-275b.

[ii] The brilliant study of this remains Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980).