The decentralization of all structures – educational, political, military and commercial – is evidenced by the paradox of the commuter who goes downtown to use the telephone!

The effect of instant speeds of information, such as we use with telephone and telex, decentralizes all the forms of organization which had been centralized under the conditions of mechanical hardware.

IN THE WORLD OF ELECTRIC INFORMATION, ALL CENTERS OF POWER BECOME MARGINAL.

And, whereas the mechanical age had been one of center-margin structures, the electronic age is inevitably one of multiple centres-without-margins. Under conditions of simultaneity of access to information, Cuba is not a margin politically, nor is Laos. They are centres as much as London or Moscow or Washington, yet our assumptions are still otherwise. Hence our confusion.

Admittedly, the great plagues of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries interrupted this process for a period of time. But since the introduction of the alphabet, the concept of centralism had gradually gathered force until it reached a complex apotheosis in the nineteenth century.

To put the Florence Nightingale story in new media terms is quite simple. She arrived on a distant scene where controls from the London center were of the common pre-electric hierarchical pattern. Minute division and delegation of functions and separation of powers, normal in military and industrial organization then and long afterward, created an imbecile system of waste and inefficiency. Which for the first time got reported daily by telegraph. The legacy of literacy and visual fragmentation came home to roost every day on the telegraph wire…

The computer is the first component of that hybrid of video-related technologies which will move us toward a world consciousness. It steps up the velocity of logical sequential calculations to the speed of light, reducing numbers to body count by touch. When pushed to its limits, the product of the computer reverses into simultaneous pattern recognition (acoustic space), eroding or bypassing mechanical processes in all sequential operations. It brings back the Pythagorean occult embodied in the idea that "numbers are all"; and at the same time it dissolves hierarchy in favor of decentralization. Any business corporation requiring the use of computers for communication and record-keeping will have no other alternative but to decentralize.

Today the decentralizing of such institutions [as department stores] into a multiplicity of small shops in shopping plazas is partly the creation of the car, partly the result of TV.