A Pharmakon? In This Economy?

On remedies that are also poisons

In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story about the invention of writing. The god Thoth presents his creation to the king of Egypt as a gift — a pharmakon, a remedy for memory. The king refuses it. Writing, he says, will produce not memory but its simulation. People will appear to know things they do not know. The remedy is also the poison. The word pharmakon carries both meanings in Greek. Plato's dialogues were written down.

The feeds this week have a pharmakon quality that is hard to look at directly.

A scholar who studies American media and grew up inside evangelical Christianity writes a thread that reads less like analysis than testimony: the people now governing the United States, he says, are not merely cynical about the war in the Middle East. Many of them genuinely believe they have a theological obligation to start it. They need, specifically, multiple nations arrayed against Israel, because that configuration is required by their reading of Biblical prophecy. The apocalypse will not arrive on its own. It requires assistance. The war is not a failure of diplomacy; it is a goal.

Does this seem far-fetched? He grew up hearing it. He has witnesses.

Two feeds over: a school in Minab, Iran. U.S. and Israeli forces targeted an IRGC base nearby. Over 150 dead. The statement from official sources described this as a military success. Someone on the feed notes that the reason we have "stupid rules of engagement" is so we do not bomb elementary schools. The rules were adjusted. The schools are not protected by rules. The schools are in the collateral.

Meanwhile: artificial intelligence. The same technology that has spent the last three years disrupting universities, flooding inboxes with generated text, prompting seminars called How to Survive the Textpocalypse — that technology is also running targeting systems in the Iran war. Mother Jones reports, somewhat breathlessly, that "the people building this technology are simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet." The context is military AI. The deployment is active. The fear and the excitement are the same emotion wearing different faces.

Pharmakon.

And: a journalist in Nashville who spent her career reporting on ICE has been detained by ICE and transferred to a facility in Louisiana. She fled Colombia after death threats related to her reporting. She married an American citizen. She filed for asylum. The agency she documented is now administering her case. The system she described from the outside is now the system she is inside. The word for this in Greek is not a word in Greek. It is a particular American arrangement, efficient and self-referential, in which the act of witnessing creates the conditions for punishment.

Here is what the feed is, on a Thursday in early March 2026: a school, a targeting algorithm, a pastor who prayed for this, a journalist in a Louisiana detention facility, a technology that is simultaneously a writing implement and a weapons system.

Plato's king refused the pharmakon. We tend to take it. We tend to be the people who built it, who named it a remedy, who find ourselves unable to stop administering it even as we note, with increasing specificity, what it is doing to us.

The dialogues were written down. We are reading them now. This is the poison and also the cure.