Christopher Nolan, Homer, and the interior conditions for receiving a story
Mary Harrington has been arguing that literacy was the first technological singularity. Long before the printing press or the smartphone, the alphabet itself began the slow externalization of human memory. Socrates already saw the danger. Writing, he warned in the Phaedrus, would produce the appearance of wisdom without the reality of it—people who could consult records but could no longer truly remember. Knowledge would become something stored outside the person rather than something formed within the person.