[Tycho]

Millenniums ago, Socrates warned his students against the rapid spread of a technology that would lay waste to their memories and their instinct for the truth: the written word. In some ways he was right. We’ve lost the memory skills that oral storytelling cultivates, and we’re often manipulated and distracted by seductive writing.

But how many of us would give up the profound gains — scientific, economic, social and artistic — yielded by the collective knowledge, dispersed across the planet and the ages, that writing made possible?

I see this sort of mistake/fallacy a lot. Someone is worried about something they cherish (in this case, oral history), they identify a threat to this cherished thing, and then decry that we should all fight against this threat. Ignoring the possible gains, as highlighted by the Socrates example above. I think there's two factors which contribute to this mistake:

a) the person delivering the warning appeals to 'the greater good' without having to be too rigorous about what that is

b) the upside is hard to imagine. It's easy to see the risk, ie. the things we have which we stand to lose, but hard to see all which we might gain.

Recent examples include resistance to Bitcoin/cryptocurrency on the grounds that we need to be able to manipulate the money supply to sustain our modern economies, or the worry over Apple's 'walled-garden' iDevices.