Engineering and Freedom, Part 6

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Formerly, the word “communication” conveyed the idea of what terms such as “transport” or “transportation infrastructure” mean to people today. 

“Communication” means literally to “bring people together,” and this is precisely what technologies such as the rail train, the automobile and the airplane carry out. 

However, all of these automated forms of communication require expensive and elaborate infrastructure in order to be functional. This infrastructure, in order to be realized, had to rely on subsidies provided by the state. In the past, transportation of people and goods was synonymous with the “communication” (in the contemporary sense) of news and information from elsewhere because news could travel only as fast as people. 

The shipping of goods en masse by turnpike, canal and railroad communications went together with the advertisement of these goods in periodical media. 

With the invention of the telegraph in the 1840s, communication of information transcended the communication of goods and people. Just as the railroad resolved the problems inherent in the communication of goods over long distance, the telegraph resolved the problem of the communication of “news” over distance. 

The railroad and the telegraph newspaper together created the abstract “market,” as opposed to the situated marketplace. General-interest newspapers, subsidized by advertising dollars and fed with information by the telegraph, were the only medium with enough reach to create mass interest in the goods on promotion. 

However, the subsidy of postal communications was key to the newspaper boom in the period after the founding of the United States. Paul Starr, in the Creation of the Media, observes that 

[The U.S. postal] network far exceeded the postal systems of any other country. As of 1828 ... the number of post offices per 100,000 inhabitants had grown to 74 in the United States, compared to 17 in Great Britain and 4 in France. In fact, the per capita volume of mail was about the same in the United States as in France, but the American postal network was more comprehensive. The French authorized a new post office only where it could generate $200 in revenue, a principle that would have closed 90 percent of the post offices in the United States. A radical new conception of postal communication emerged in the earliest years of the republic. ... the postal service as a medium of civic communication and nation‑building was embodied in the legislation that became the new system's charter, the Post Office Act of 1792. The law ... had three key elements: It made Congress itself responsible for designating postal routes, gave newspapers special discount rates and privileges, and categorically barred government officials from violating the privacy of letters. By assuming direct control of postal routes, Congress opened a direct political channel for local demands that would spur the development of a broader network. The clamor from localities for new post offices and post roads was incessant, but Congress was not merely acceding to local interests; it wanted to tie the western territories to the union, and postal service helped to achieve that purpose. From 1792 to 1828, Congress established 2,476 new postal routes, abandoning the principle that every route had to be self‑supporting. In 1825, it authorized the postmaster general to designate a post road to the courthouse of any new county seat. As the Post Office did not run a deficit in this period, the federal government was, in effect, using surpluses from the older states to subsidize service into newer ones; almost half of every dollar in revenue from the mid Atlantic states went to support routes in the South and West. (Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, New York, Basic Books, 2004, p. 88.) 

“In contrast,” Starr continues, “British North America as of the 1830s had a far more limited postal system. From Quebec east to New Brunswick, there were more than 100,000 people but only seven post offices. While the Canadian Post Office returned a surplus annually to the British Treasury, it was unable to respond to continual pleas for service from new settlements. Rates were high, and the volume of postal communication was low. In 1846, an assembly petitioned the queen for more adequate postal service so Canadians might be on an equal footing with the citizens of the United States .... In the United States, the subsidies to newspapers adopted in 1792 were critical to the emergence of the first national news network.” (Starr, The Creation of the Media, p. 89).

The situation in Europe was quite different. Not only did the state provide no subsidies to newspapers sent through the post, all nations (Britain included, until 1855) imposed “stamp” taxes on newsprint and advertisements. This had the effect, Starr writes, of inhibiting the emergence of “publics”, as existed in the United States. 

Private capital accumulation was not adequate enough to finance nationwide postal networks, in the U.S. or anywhere else. The costs of transporting printed information over the long distances, even of the original 13 states, would have been too high in order to sustain a large enough reading public, to support in turn mass-market publications. 

State-run postal systems operate by having short-distance mail subsidize the costs of long-distance routes, which is why a postage stamp costs the same, whether mailed across town or across the country. The subsidized postal system in the early United States gave publishers the opportunity to have regional and national audiences. 

These rates were, moreover, the same for big players as well as the smaller ones. “Infrastructure” means, literally, “between structure,” and historically, the state has established the ground, or network, by which communication throughout the polity takes place. 

Later on, after the first Great War, industrialists took to the new medium of radio to broadcast to an even larger audience — more numerous because it included even those who could not or didn’t like to read newspapers or other periodicals. Both radio and then television were developed not through the direct sale of entertainment product to viewers, but rather, through the purchasing of air-time to advertisers, and the industries that underwrite them. 

Broadcast media, like mechanized transport, would not have become generalized network systems if they relied for their financing market demand based on price. Just as no ordinary motorist could really afford to bear solely the costs of automobile transport, no average viewer could afford to shoulder the direct cost of the entertainment programmes she enjoys watching or listening to. 

Where private industry did not finance through advertising the construction of broadcast media networks (ie. everywhere except the United States), it was the state that did so. 

The “new” media such as the Internet and wireless telephony, which are seen popularly as manifestations of the capitalist ethos at its anarchical best (or worst), in fact are the products of government/military research and development. 

What might be called “the problem of communication” has been throughout history both the end and the cause of much government intervention and regulation of the civil society. In ancient times, only the most centralized of governments were able to build sophisticated road communications to bring far-flung, diverse populations together. Some states were able to achieve a high degree of centralization through the control of a natural waterway, such as the ancient Egyptians did with the Nile. 

In modern times, governments have solved the problem of industrial overproduction by building canals and railways between markets. Governments also stepped in to build highways to accommodate automobile traffic, as well as airport facilities. 

Advanced transport facilities serve to liberate people from “journey”, travel as ponderous and even dangerous travail. At the same time, they come under the regulation of state, which subsidizes some or all of the costs of sophisticated media of communication. Of all means of transport, sailing has always been the least dependent on state subsidy in order to prosper. 

Governments have been involved in the construction of naval fleets and port facilities, but nautical communication can function very well without a centralized authority for financial support. 

The great commercial city-states of ancient and modern times were nearly all sea-bound traders. The cities of the Hansea league of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries became a powerful confederation through the mastery of the North Sea trade, until their independence was swallowed up by the land-based feudal monarchies of Europe. 

Empires arise from the meeting of land and sea, when those dependent on the commodities-wealth of territory bump up against the shipping-based wealth of the cities. The former usually subjugates the latter, using the conquered city as a capital by which to control both land and sea communications. 

The financing of sophisticated communications technologies such as the rail train, the car, the airplane, radio, television, wireless and the Internet, contradicts the classical-liberal idea of capital accumulation. 

Where production is regulated by prices only, a firm can increase profits by improving productivity, or introducing some innovation — the proverbial “building the better mousetrap.” With these profits, the business would re-invest some (or ideally all) of the profits into further improvements in production, with the aim of increasing profits even more, which can again be re-invested for a better profit margin, and so on. 

This is a gradual process, though, where technology progresses by increments. It is a valid description of certain, relatively simple (but still important) technologies. The sophisticated, networked technologies under discussion here required great outlays of capital at the initial stages, in order to be functional at all. 

Private business was often involved in the development of these media from the beginning, or became involved subsequently. But it was the state which provided the impetus for them. The cash economy is self-regulatory, because demand and production are determined by prices. The market price to consumers of modern technologies would have been too much for any but a wealthy minority to bear. 

However, these same media depended upon mass demand to function, as well. Accordingly, the state subsidized the cost of their infrastructure, in order to inspire such a level of demand. Investment in transportation and communication was a form of socialism, but practised by all modern and modernizing governments, no matter what their political persuasion. 

The automobile, the airplane, the other internal-combustion technologies, as well as the mass media, effectively formed the engineered environment of modern times. Material culture is fed by the mass production, that so depends on regulation and subsidy of transportation in order to be a going concern. Commercial enterprise and exploitation has taken place within the engineered civilization, on a scale not witnessed in the past, but it did not come about as a result of market demand, nor could the price-driven marketplace accommodate its development. Internal combustion, and the earlier types of engines, objectified the body’s digestive system, and thus automated the action of the hands and legs in production and transport. It gave rise to the industrial engineering of the nineteenth century, and the automobile and airplane in the twentieth. 

During the course of the last century, engineering advanced from the automation of physical actions and processes, to objectifying the nerves and senses in electric communications media such as the phonograph, radio, the movies, television, and most recently, the Internet. 

The mass media, all of which present a counterfeit of direct experience, are really the objectified and extended voices and countenances of they who own and control them. These technologies, and particularly the broadcast media, have been used to engineer markets and society for decades, to the detriment of reason and individual freedom. 

In the early industrial era, capitalism was synonymous with heavy manufacturing and resource extraction, and the proletariat were alienated from work through the limited use of their skills in the mass production process. 

The face of big business, which was the big businessman’s face and name, was a very ugly one indeed. Business during the nineteenth century had learned how to automate many of the physical actions, and even some of the gross mental aspects (the telegraph’s imitation of the electric charge of nerves) of the human body. 

It yet had no means, however, to bring together mentally the fragmentation of talent and skill that raw industrialism represents. Broadcasting, first with radio and then with television, was developed as an instrument of propaganda, initially for commercial purposes during the 1920s, and then increasingly for political ones during the ‘30s and ‘40s, by totalitarian regimes and by Western governments that fought the totalitarians. 

After the war, though, broadcasting became exclusively the domain of commercial propaganda, as the more overt political boosterism of state broadcasting was toned down for purposes of “neutrality” (socio-political propaganda was left to the state school system). 

Axiomatically, advertising spreads the gospel of its sponsor, presenting the product only with “the best face.” Early on, business hired stars of stage and screen to personify their products. Hosts of TV news, sports and chat programmes are unlike movie stars in that they are not supposed to provoke the audience. An even, calm disposition must be kept by TV hosts at all times. In so far as the faces that appeared on commercial television had to be acceptable to its customers — big business — TV personalities have become, too, the acceptable face of the business-financiers of electronic media. 

Television was a godsend to the public relations side of business, at least, because unlike other forms of mass media, it can actually present a face, an actual person’s face, communicated immediately to millions of people. 

The ubiquity of corporate spokespersons since the beginning of commercial television, reflects the desire of businesses to create icons — “icon” in the sense of representative, rather than celebrity hero — to stand in for themselves and their entire organization. 

The spokesperson usually has absolutely no input in the decisions which he is to convince millions of people are wise or good for them. In so far as they are simply faces and voices for the decisions of others, for all intents and purposes they are nothing more than the masquerades or imposters, for the collective decision-making of corporate or bureaucratic management. In essence, television allowed business corporations to become “incorporated” in the symbolic, as opposed to legal, sense. 

Businessmen had extended the mechanical powers of the human body through their possession and management of capital property. The electronic image allowed them to extend also their own powers to appear and to speak to the masses, through the hiring of media spokespersons. 

Spokespersons were the idols, the living fetishes, representing concerns whose actions and decisions were suitably obscured by the attention that the many paid to the fetishes. Broadcast advertising employs the tactic of the medicine man or spiritual healer the world over, who distracts his trusting crowd with the one hand, in order to do a sleight with the other hand, to achieve his seemingly miraculous feat. 

This is the technique of professional magicians, too, and advertising has always had a subliminal association with evil, the devil in the older sense of a trickster rather than as a bloodthirsty man-wolf. It is the corporate spokesperson himself who is the idol, the fetish is the product itself, and the advertisement the sleight-of-sight-and-sound which distracts the audience from the merits or lack thereof of the product itself. 

The corporation itself fulfills its legal wish to be an artificial person by becoming, through its spokespersons and public relations representatives, an actual symbolic person, its reality maintained by constant doses of media exposure. 

Corporations and bureaucracies, in putting their best face forward through media marketing, are doing no more than what any individual person does when in public, but on a massive, global scale. 

They take the same risks as any person who assumes an appropriate face for the public, only to find that image betrayed by word of her behaviour outside the eyes of the public. 

On the model of the corporate spokespersons, politicians and celebrities have learned to use electronic media to sell themselves to the public, thereby taking the risk that this image will be undermined by their behaviour when outside the sight of the cameras. 

Nevertheless, the growing expense of marketing through electronic media has meant that only larger concerns can shoulder the cost of it. When this principle is applied to the electronic media itself, it means that the total number of information sources available to people in any particular medium is limited. Media which are financed by the monies of corporate and government advertising are considered “mainstream.” 

Those media which are not so subsidized are called “fringe,” “underground” or more recently, “alternative.” Corporations, through broadcast advertising, seek to inspire behaviour that is the very opposite of what they require of their own personnel in order maintain themselves as an on-going concern. 

Work life, particularly at the junior and senior executive levels, requires a high degree of commitment, planning, organization and hard work. Yet the consumer ethic, as expressed in advertising, seeks to undermine all of these values in favour of spontaneity, leisure and profligate expenditure (See Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, New York, Basic Books, 1976).   

Moreover, advertising wants to foment not judicious and individualistic decision-making in purchases, but instead, the type of herd behaviour generally associated with “fads” or “crazes,” where people buy something just because everyone else is buying it. This is social behaviour in its most basic form, where the logic and correctness of any action is simply that others around you are doing it, too. 

Encouraging pack behaviour is in keeping, on the other hand, with what might be termed the “communistic” nature of modern business organizations. Virtually any ladder-climber today knows that to get ahead in the business game, work comes first, and family, friends, romance and everything else non-work comes second. This is only a symptom of a more general trend, where work and work-life itself has become the primary social unit for many people. Increasingly, corporate management seeks to control not only the skills of its workforce, but their minds, too, with racial and gender sensitivity training and cult-like “motivational training.” 

Part 7 of Engineering and Freedom 

Engineering and Freedom, Part 5

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If, during the early twentieth century, governments had chosen to allow the automobile to succeed only through the price economy, no mass market would have been there to for Henry Ford to establish his assembly-line method of car production. 

The assembly-line is strongly associated with capitalist production, but “Fordism” was imported into socialist economies, as well, and functioned (and dys-functioned) not altogether differently there than in countries where industry was in private hands. 

Henry Ford once said outright that there was no demand for automobiles before they came into existence. However, there is demand for anything, so long as it is sold cheaply enough. Without governments subsidizing the costs of automobile communications, the car would not have been sold cheaply enough to inspire mass demand. 

Governments throughout the world have also been involved in the construction and maintenance of the first mechanization of the wheel, the railway. This is true even in the “free-market” United States, where government loans and guarantees were essential to the building of the railways which “won the west” during the nineteenth century. 

In Canada, and in most of Europe, railroads have been (until recent privatization) owned and managed by the state. In Great Britain only were railways entirely a concern of private enterprise, right up until they were nationalized by the Labour government of 1945-51. It was, of course, in Britain where the steam engine was first applied to transport. 

This lends credence to the argument that private business can, without the “meddling” of the state, succeed in creating an innovative form of communication. However, Britain is exceptional due to its relatively small size. During the early years of the railway in the 1830s, tracks were built mainly for short-haul routes. 

By 1850, there were 6,000 miles of track in Britain, but very few of these were longer than fifty miles. There were, early on, longer routes from the North to London, but regular service between Wales and England, and especially Scotland and England, was relatively late-coming. 

Private business was able to finance railways in England, because heavily-populated centres there were close enough together to make it economical. In the U.S. and Canada, population centres were much further apart. 

Thus, in North America, the short-lines were privately owned, but the transcontinental routes were operated or underwritten by governments. As with the airplane and the automobile, the economics of railway communications militate against scale. It is a paradox: each of these transportation media are meant to overcome scale, but the more wide-scale they become, the less economic sense they make. 

This goes back before the railway, in fact, to the growth of canals in the late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth centuries. While shorter canals were often privately financed, larger projects, such as the grand Erie Canal through New York state, were not (it cost taxpayers $7 million in 1830s’ currency, and was at first nicknamed “Clinton’s folly,” after its booster, New York governor DeWitt Clinton). 

Historically, it has been only the highly-centralized civilizations, such as ancient Rome and the Inca state of South America, which have been able to construct elaborate highway systems. 

More decentralized, mercantile societies tend to forego complex land-based communications systems in favour of natural river and sea routes. Western Europe and Britain were able to develop a highly sophisticated cash economy in early modern times, in spite of the primitive nature of these countries’ land communications, precisely because they had access to and control of the major sea routes. 

Water is an economical medium for the communication of goods and people over long distances, in turn, because it doesn’t require near the elaborate infrastructure that the railroad, motor vehicle and airplane do. Moreover, shipping doesn’t require the level of cooperation between various economic actors, as does long-distance land communications. 

Transportation infrastructure over large areas is necessarily a network. Networks require standards (as for example, the train needs standards of track gauge, or automobiles require standards as to their engines, etc.), but standards are necessarily collusional and anti-competitive. 

Historically, standards have been established in a market as ruinous competition gives way to oligopoly, where one or two large actors agree to cooperate, if only to keep their market pre-eminence. 

With reference to sophisticated media of communication such as airplanes, cars and railways, only the state was strong enough to establish not only standards, but the actual infrastructure of transport itself. 

This is even more the case with the two most sophisticated means of transportation yet devised: the supersonic and the astronautical. Both of these media traverse distance at speeds many times those of the fastest jet plane. Again, neither supersonic or astronautic travel ever had commercial potential. The Concorde jet had been in regular transatlantic service for nearly thirty years (being scuttled only following the crash of one of the supersonic aircraft at Paris airport). 

But with the ticket price at US$5000, only the super-rich could ever fly on it. Still, without the support of the British and French governments, the Concorde would not fly at all. As for space travel, without the direct subsidy of governments (primarily those of Soviet Russia and the U.S.), it never would have occurred, for the simple reason that there is no economic reason for it. 

Eventually, there may well be commercial space flight. But even so, it won’t become a reality without the present massive investment of the state in space exploration. If governments have been crucial to the development and maintenance of modern technologies of transportation, why are governors, even those supposedly devoted to the free market, interested in developing these sophisticated means of communication at all? 

Control of land and air communications confers power over the movement of people and the exploitation of territory. This is why it is was the most centralized and authoritarian states of ancient times that built the most sophisticated road communications. In modern times, governments have sought to control populations through communications in various ways. 

The British government, for example, constructed a major naval fleet in order to control the seas for the betterment of trade. More recently, social control takes place through the regulation of automobile traffic by motorized police sentries. 

Governments throughout the world subsidized airline industries, in order to have access to the technologies that allow them to wage war upon one another. And, of course, space travel was the result of the rivalry between two ideologically-opposed superpowers. Traffic is the content of the civilized life, as before comparatively recent times, communication had to be transported. 

The great highways built by the Mayans and the Romans had as their primary end communication, with trade as a secondary concern. Thus, on the Roman roads, civilian transport had to yield to the legions, whilst even the legions had to yield to the imperial messengers. 

A civilization can be judged by the efficiency of its communications. The decay of Rome was measured in the crumbling of its elaborate highways. As Europe returned to barbarian patterns of life, its people had as little use for these structures, as they had for the stadia and aqueducts that sustained Roman civility. Barbarians may be looked upon as roadless people, for they have acquired the tools of civilization (agriculture and settled life, barter or commodity trade, even the rudiments of writing and governance), except for the ability to network these tools effectively, as civilizations must. 

Under barbarian and savage conditions, there is little “public” as such, no space between the domesticated, to traffic in goods and information. Where, in barbarian societies, settlement is large enough to have the rudiments of a public, but still there is no infrastructure to sustain it as a space apart from the private, the domestic comes to lord over the public, as the most powerful “house” or houses assume the functions of public institutions and infrastructure. 

Often, this sort of arrangement exists suitably enough, such that it is not abolished or overthrown except by outside influence, ie. invasion by civilized states. Barbarian states or semi-states maintain the savage form of association, based on kinship. Politically, barbarians are ruled by networks of powerful kinsmen, wherein communication is kept private, more spoken than written down. 

There is no need for much in the way of transport infrastructure, because the rulers are satisfied with the sort of information communicated through intimate channels. The state, which (unlike the clan) persists apart from those who control it, emerges as the medium of communications, both of script and traffic. 

Just as the state relies on notation, writing and math demand the extension of the senses of the state to the territorial periphery, via highways. The news, be it intimate, top-secret or public, used to arrive only by mail (as many newspapers are still quaintly named) and messenger. In modern times, dictatorships have effectively controlled populations through internal passports, ie. “papers”, which can quickly identify and enumerate everyone. Internal passports both expedite and control communications, by permitting and recording expansive traffic in people and goods. 

In Western democracies, no formal encumbrances on the movement of goods and people are allowed (a largely unremarked-upon pillar of liberal freedoms). Even so, the use of highway communications in the Occident requires several forms of documentation, subject to inspection, suspension and revocation by authorities at any time. 

These, and other “papers”, are themselves constraints on the movement of goods and people in the West, as they are often inconvenient and expensive to transfer through jurisdictions. In any case, the “paper trail” left by everyone’s traffic is valuable information for state and commercial interests alike. 

All societies have been barbarian at one or another time in their history, and at any point in time, most cultures are essentially barbarian in shape. This is true today of large parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Barbarian cultures are not characterized by violence (though violence, and brutality, is often ritualized among barbarians); which is to say, they are not characteristic for being violent. Nor yet are barbarians necessary “primitive” or uncultured. 

It is that they are ruled not by institutions, but by clans. Even where formal institutions exist, it is through kin that people gain their “dope”, and so clans have status as sources of credulity. 

Barbarism can exist even where the material environment appears highly advanced. But such societies, lacking the necessary networks for the traffic of sophisticated processes and technology, inevitably suffer from disregard and devaluation of public amenities, in favour of private luxuries for the very few. 

In barbarian cultures, trade and communication have not been severed, and so goods and services inevitably flow through the hands of the headmen and their families. Trade, like script, is a key element of the “content” or public aspect of civilized life. It speaks the language of money and consumer goods. Writing was invented, improved and simplified largely at the hands of traders, as commerce relies on notation. Early texts were mostly lists and inventories, and communicable notation is accessible, light, transportable (whether by highway or by sea). Thereby, the amount and variety of traded goods burgeons. 

Consumer goods become, in the words of anthropologist Grant McCracken, tools of symbolic meaning and social interaction. Supply, ie. goods and services, are the content of the form of demand, no matter what the economic system. 

Where demand consists of a few consumers of very expensive goods, the content of supply will be far different than where many consumers demand many inexpensive goods. In clan cultures, wealth is held and distributed between intimates, to inspire loyalty and protection in turn. 

The many not within the threshold of the ruling house or houses, communicate other than through text and consumer goods. The primacy of the verbal in communication, means that barbarian society cannot overcome savage patterns of life, in spite of the civilized accoutrements available to it. 

To suggest that barbarism is a “stage” in the cycle of society, between savagery and civilization, is misleading to the extent that barbarism (and for that matter, savagery) has proven to be a durable form in the evolution of culture. Occasionally, barbarian societies evolve into civilized ones. 

The twin motive forces for this are trade and war. The pre-classical Greeks were essentially barbarian, having emerged from a Dark Age that began in the twelfth-century B.C. with the Dorian invasions. With few natural resources on their mainland, the ancient Hellenes instead traded on their status as entrepot between Europe and Asia, with Athens becoming what Sir Peter Hall called the first city based on international trade. 

Crucially, Greek communication was based on the seas, not highways, and thus Hellenic civilization did not require an overbearing state. Instead, the shift from barbarism, occurred gradually enough among the pre-classical Greeks, such that barbarian patterns were not entirely absent even during classical times. 

It explains in large part the endurance, unique among Mediterranean civilizations of ancient times, of the city-state or polis as the supreme type of Greek polity. The civilizing Hellene had, imperceptively, transferred his tribal loyalties from blood kin to the polis. But the clansman’s chauvinism and bloody-mindedness had not been eclipsed in the process, such that most Hellenes looked upon members of other poleis as barbarians do rival kinsmen, making federation or even loose alliance impossible. 

Thus, even following the democratic reforms of Athenian government in the sixth and fifth centuries before the calendar (which sought to undermine the older clan-based politics) the Attican populace were still divided into artificial “clans”, which carried out the administration of the region (or “tribe”) over which they ruled. It was in these evolving conditions that the classical Hellenes were able to produce the highest of the civilized arts. 

When following conquest by the Macedonians (another barbarian race), then by the Latins, the Greeks became fully civilized, united in conquest, true citizens of the world. At least on the Greek mainland, this is when Hellenic culture ceased to be innovative. 

The Latins were able to initially emerge from barbarism, like the Hellenes, at the behest of trade. But their full ascent to civilization was accomplished primarily by war. However, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and so too, did the Latins maintain barbarian patterns of life long after republican politics was established in the city on the Tiber. At first, the Romans made profitable alliance with other Latin and “Italian” peoples and cities, as well as the Etruscan people of northern Italy, and the Hellenic colonists in the south and Sicily. Ultimately, relations soured, and with little ease in the contest, the Romans subjugated the entire peninsula, while gaining dominance over Sicily (introducing thereby the Carthaginians as Mediterranean rivals). 

With this, the first stage in what would become the largest empire in the world, the Romans began their civilizing mission. Rome was still a republic, and so in exchange for loyalty to the Senate and other civil institutions, the conquered Italian cities were granted access to Latin law and language, and some measure of self-government (which many of the conquered had not previously enjoyed). 

It was in Romanized Italy that the earliest of the vast road system was constructed, and centuries before Julius Caesar, the practice of divide-and-rule was instituted. Essentially, the patriciate of the subjugated ruling class was Latinized, co-opted into the nascent imperial system. 

The masses were left to be exploited as before, but those not enslaved at least enjoyed some rights as freemen. In any case, the gambit was so successful that the Etruscan tongue, and then the other Latin languages, disappeared completely. On the other hand, the Romans (or at least the Latin ruling class) adopted the Greek language and worldview as its own, using the script developed by the Etruscans to create the Latin phonetic alphabet, still in use today. The Latin elite read and spoke in the Hellenic language, whilst the masses adopted the Olympian deities. 

Of the three nations of ancient Italy, the Latins were the most barbaric compared both to the Etruscans and the Greeks. Their civilizing came (as is often the case) with the conquest of more civilized people. 

Public communications symbolizes discrete domesticity, wherein dwellings and other enclosed spaces act as nodes in the transportation network. Each household stands apart from all others, and relates with them only through the medium of public. Each house is a consumer of communicated ideas and goods, and each one also (ideally) should be a producer of these goods in turn. Communication was not sundered from traffic until the invention of the telegraph in the nineteenth century. 

However, transport has not been completely removed from communications. Communications networks, whether telegraphic, telephonic, cellular or whatever, require significant infrastructure in their own right. They must be easily accessible to construct and maintain, which is why railroad tracks are bordered by telegraph poles, and roadways by telephone “T”-standards. 

Electric communications literally follows the patterns of traffic. As for cellular telephones, it is nearly forgotten how these devices were at first marketed as “car phones”, a way of “keeping in touch while on the road.” Today, communication often takes place through satellite, a celestial artefact which is nonetheless as dependent on transport (rocketry) as is the railroad. In fact, the rail train came into its own as a passenger vehicle just as telegraphy burgeoned. 

The train was the first mobile, enclosed, domesticated space, existing completely apart from the immediate public or natural conditions outside. The train-car is a public amenity, that takes the form of a domesticated space. When occupied, the cabin is the private sphere of the passenger, which she surrenders to someone else’s privacy following disembarkment. In this respect the rail train is like a mobile hotel; the grand hotel was an institution which blossomed with the advent of railway communications. 

The telegraph wires built beside rail tracks, transmitted private messages over a public medium. Telegrams had to be translated into Morse code, which meant that the messages contained therein had to observe the necessary proprieties. However, the public nature of the telegraph medium, along with the need for economy in costly wordage, facilitated private codes between correspondents. 

Newspapers developed telegram-shorthand techniques for the same reason. This was reflected in the hackneyed “journalese” of most dailies. Nevertheless, the telegraph allowed for the communication of events thousands of miles away (eventually, across the sea and around the world, too). 

The sphere of the “public” suddenly grew larger, available in a few pages for domesticated consumption. Telegraphy, by subdividing (but not sundering) transport and communications, allowed events to literally always be ahead of those participant in them, who encounter their own public selves in the same vicarious manner as everyone else. 

The confounding of public and domestic, through the railroad and telegraphy, was intensified with the later invention of the telephone, radio, television, Internet, as well as the commuter train and motorcar. 

The automobile inspired the domestication of landscape via parks and suburbia, even as it caused the diminution of truly public society and living. In the age of the car, “public” is experienced within the domestic, courtesy “wired” communications. State involvement in transportation was an essential utility for the expansion of commerce and industry during modern times. 

There can be little doubt that, without the railway, the airplane, the car, etc., industrial society would have a much different, and probably less “developed,” character today. 

Modern transportation technologies have created or expanded national, continental and international markets, institutionalizing what is today called the “global economy.” 

Even if one accepts that government intervention helped achieve economies-of-scale in long-distance road and air transport, it is clear that the cash economy, if left to its own, would have neglected, rightly, modern transportation technologies as unsound investments. 

But where private capital would not invest in territorial communications technology, governments did, to the benefit of at least some players in the industrial marketplace. The prevalence of government involvement in the development of modern transportation media, follows from the logic of technological progress, rather than that of liberal economic laws. 

Which is to say, the price economy does not, on its own, lead to technological advance, at least not of the complex, networked, engineered sort of technology. This applies not only to transportation technology: machine-industrial technology, too, has been developed most successfully not where the state was absent from the process, but where it was intimately involved, either through outright ownership, loans or tariff barriers. 

Britain was able to achieve “industrial revolution” first, and mostly without the use of the state as a lever of growth, again because of its relatively small size compared even to continental powers such as France and Germany, and certainly compared with the Russian empire. It was relatively simple to truck the mass-produced goods from the factories in the North to the major markets in and around London, and task which became increasingly cheaper during the later eighteenth century, through the first decades of the nineteenth, by the development of turnpike roads and small canals. 

The railways in Britain, developed by private capital, were the response of the cash economy to continued growth of industrial manufactures after the Napoleonic wars, and the need to keep goods moving along transit ways that could no longer accommodate the volume. Industrial mass production requires the rapid turnover of goods, so that inventories do not pile up and become, in effect, price competitive with later output from the same factories. 

This is easy enough to accomplish in densely populated territories (such as the isle of Britain), but became more awkward the further away were producers from consumers (as was the case in North America during the nineteenth century). Where communications remain slow or unreliable, the cost-savings achieved through mass production are lost. It was precisely to achieve the industrial might of Britain, that other governments during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries subsidized transportation technology. By bringing together people by rail, road and air, government created unified mass markets and unified political states. 

Part 6 of Engineering and Freedom