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Plato Would Have Wanted You to Unplug
Technology Addiction, Technophobia, and Kids These Days
(real Plato i meant -
Erepublik's Plato wants to use you more! o7


φαρμακός, ὁ:… II. one who is sacrificed as an atonement for others, a scape-goat.
-A Greek-English Lexicon (Middle Liddell)
In ancient Ancient Greece, whenever plague, or famine, or disaster befell the community, the people would pick one or two people to drive out of town in order to appease the gods and bring about healing to the city. It’s unclear what the “driving out” actually entailed, but some ancient commentators insist that these scapegoats were definitely beaten or stoned and probably killed.
This poor guy was called a pharmakos. This is the term—meaning “scapegoat”—from which pharmakon, in all of its myriad drug-medicine-poison-charm meanings is derived. A pharmakon, then, is the quasi-mystical thing you give someone to help them (but it could also hurt them) and you don’t really know how or why it works, but maybe, just maybe, it will fix some stuff.
So far I’ve connected this blue-screens-of-death fear-mongering to technophobia, but I think the root cause of this phenomenon is more complicated than that. What we see in this “blame screens for how terrible the world is now” stance is nothing new. Returning again to the Greeks: the crotchety old dad Strepsiades in Aristophanes’ Clouds can’t stop bitching about the kids these days with their newfangled chariot-racing obsession. But in the Clouds, as in real life, bitching about new technology is just something people do when they are actually worried about something else.
Technology, in our case, is the scapegoat. And the more we learn about the actual mechanisms behind addiction, the more we can—hopefully—get to the root cause of this societal scourge, rather than scapegoating the substance without which an addict cannot function.
After all, if we cling to this primitive idea that an addictive substance must be eradicated, and if we live in a world in which sex and food are considered addictive, where does that leave us as a species? Demonizing the substance, rather than the impulse, behind addiction is what leads us away from true healing and towards damaging narratives. Technophobia isn’t a soothing ointment, it’s pushing some guy you don’t like off a cliff and hoping your pustules magically disappear.


Plato would have wanted you to unplug technology addictions