Writing is eerie. Considered as a technique or technology, it seems almost magical: a teleportation of ideas and facts from one mind to another, via a few scribbled marks on a page. Many early thinkers were deeply unsettled by this power, worrying that writing would deform our thoughts, and society too. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates frets that writing will kill face-to-face debate and “induce forgetfulness” in learners’ souls: If you could store knowledge on a scroll, why bother committing anything to memory? The Roman philosopher Plotinus thought writing would expose you to uninformed attacks on your ideas. Rousseau figured it
Let’s imagine you wanted to instant message with someone in a completely secure way. You don’t want the National Security Agency to listen in, and you don’t want a company like Google scooping up and analyzing your words so it can tailor ads to you. How would you do it?
In the late 1870s, the advent of the telephone created a curious social question: What was the proper way to greet someone at the beginning of a call? The first telephones were always “on” and connected pairwise to each other, so you didn’t need to dial a number to attract the attention of the person on the other end; you just picked up the handset and shouted something into it. But what? Alexander Graham Bell argued that “Ahoy!” was best, since it had traditionally been used for hailing ships. But Thomas Edison, who was creating a competing telephone system for
