the care used in a marriage bureau. After many tests and long experience together they are officially married by their commanding officer "till death do you part." There is no tongue-in-cheek about this. It is this same kind of total integration into a role that raises the hackles of any literate man faced by the implosive demands of the seamless web of electric decision-making. Freedom in the Western world has always taken the form of the explosive, the divisive, advancing the separation of the individual from the state. The reversal of that one-way movement outward from center-to-margin is as clearly owing to electricity as the great Western explosion had, in the first place, been due to phonetic literacy. If delegated chain-of-command authority won't work by telephone but only by written instruction, what sort of authority does come into play? The answer is simple, but not easy to convey. On the telephone only the authority of knowledge will work. Delegated authority is lineal, visual, hierarchical. The authority of knowledge is nonlineal, nonvisual, and inclusive. To act, the delegated person must always get clearance from the chain-of-command. The electric situation eliminates such patterns; such "checks and balances" are alien to the inclusive authority of knowledge. Consequendy, restraints on electric absolutist power can be achieved, not by the separation of powers, but by a pluralism of centers. This problem has arisen apropos of the direct private line from the Kremlin to the White House. President Kennedy stated his preference for teletype over telephone, with a natural Western bias. The separation of powers had been a technique for restraining action in a centralist structure radiating out to remote margins. In an electric structure there are, so far as the time and space of this planet are concerned, no margins. There can, therefore, be dialogue only among centers and among equals. The chain-oi-command pyramids cannot obtain support from electric technology. But in place of delegated power, there tends to appear