Laws of media 381 Today the road beyond its break boundary turns cities into highways, and the highway proper takes on a continuous urban character. Another characteristic reversal…is that the country ceases to be the center of all work, and the city ceases to be the center of leisure. In fact, improved roads and transport have reversed the ancient pattern and made cities the centers of work and the country the place of leisure and recreation. Earlier, the increase of traffic that came with money and roads had ended the static tribal state (as Toynbee calls the nomadic food-gathering culture). Typical of the reversing that occurs at break boundaries is the paradox that nomadic mobile man, the hunter and food-gatherer is socially static. On the other hand, sedentary, specialist man is dynamic, explosive, progressive. The new magnetic or world city will be static and iconic or inclusive. (Understanding Media, 37–8) The reversal aspect of the tetrad is succinctly exemplified in a maxim from information theory: data overload equals pattern recognition. Any word or process or form, pushed to the limits of its potential, reverses its characteristics and becomes a complementary form, just as the airplane reverses its controls when it passes the “sound barrier.” Money (hardware), pushed to its limit, reverses into the lack of money, that is, credit (software or information), and the credit card. At high speed or in great quantity, the motor car reverts to nautical form, and traffic (or a crowd) “flows.” By repetition, an archetype can become a cliché again; or an individual man a crowd (with no private, but rather corporate, identity). Breakdown becomes breakthrough. In “‘Labour-Saving’ Means More Work,” Ruth S.Cowan points to the reversal that every labour-saving device is a new and larger form of work in disguise. “Homemakers,” she writes, “log about the same number of hours at their work as their grandmothers did in 1910, 1920, and 1930. The average homemaker, now armed with dozens of motors and thousands of electronic chips, can still spend up to 50 hours a week doing housework” (page 77). All four aspects of the tetrad can be found in her discussion of the vacuum cleaner, which is a grotesque extension of lungs: For decades prior to the turn of the century, inventors had been trying to create a carpet-cleaning system that would improve on the semiannual ritual of hauling rugs outside and beating them. But the vacuum cleaner’s introduction coincided almost precisely with the virtual disappearance of the domestic servant. For the most economically comfortable segment of the population, this meant one thing: The female head of