Essential McLuhan 78 The new expert, along with the old executive, has been swept away in a flood of comedies. New environments of information and enterprise have revealed the contours of these obsolescent types, even as the satellite has created a sudden and universal awareness of “pollution.” MEN OF EXTINCTION UNITE; WITH HARDENINGOF THE CATEGORIES YOU’VE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT THE CHANGE. Lost Interface The French revolutionaries were determined to abolish the ancient regime that had become a rococo masquerade long before 1789. The old feudal hierarchy of costumes and roles had to be scrapped at any cost. Le grand monarque, with his surround of china shepherdesses, was swept aside to make way for l’empereur, whose enormous centralist power was derived, not from the feudal pennies of the peasantry, but from the cannon and “hardware” of the new middle-class manufacturers. The puny and slow- moving bureaucracy of the Bourbons was replaced by the speed of production and road movement of Napoleon’s legions. Napoleon introduced a semaphore telegraph system that gave him four-hour intervals of intercom with Rome. He ran the army and the country as a centralized industrial corporation. He invented the rule of using the right- hand side of the road to create traffic speed and conformity. He introduced the fragmented uniformity of the “metric” system and the speedy Code Napoleon. The old common law disappeared under a monumental catafalque of classical solemnity and senatorial dignity. The egalitarian dreams of the Jacobins were gaily sacrificed, to la gloire et l’honneur de la patrie. The idealists had fought for liberty and equality, and they got a military state with careers open to talents. Napoleon anticipated the later organization chart with “staff and line,” proclaiming the right of every private to envisage a marshal’s baton in his old kit bag. These were the visible developments that reversed the dreams of the avantgarde. A far more insidious force was inherent in the entire speed-up of the new industrial “hardware” complex. 3. “Ground” Remakes “Figure” Hidden Environments Reshape Their Makers In Europe and in England alike the extreme specialism of the industrial revolution created a massive retrieval of medieval sensibility in the arts and crafts, and in religion. This was the new hidden ground that entered into abrasive interface with the pronounced figure of the dominant new industrialisms. This hidden action in the later nineteenth century has its