What Nietzsche sensed as he typed his words onto the paper clamped in his writing ball—that the tools we use to write, read, and otherwise manipulate information work on our minds even as our minds work with them—is a central theme of intellectual and cultural history. As the stories of the map and the mechanical clock illustrate, intellectual technologies, when they come into popular use, often promote new ways of thinking or extend to the general population established ways of thinking that had been limited to a small, elite group. Every intellectual technology, to put it another way,
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