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For the last few weeks I’ve been having dreams that I feel are vivid and crowded with detail, but of which I can recall only tiny fragments upon awaking. One such detail, from last night, was a man driving a small Formula-1-type racecar, but made of wood and powered by a 2CV engine through the hallways and offices of an old building. Afterward, my first thought was “but wouldn’t wood be too heavy if he was planning to race?”

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Dave Malki! Creator of Wondermark, has been posting lately on the history of technology, a subject I assume he came to through collecting 19th-c images for his webcomic.

For the last few weeks he and his readers have been digging up “damn this modern technology” screeds from different eras; and have at length got back to Socrates vs. the written word. The pattern that’s been coming out, though, is less a straight “curmudgeons vs. new stuff” and more of a “centuries-long, back and forth battle over whether the spoken or the written word is superior.” Go read it, it’s well worth a look.