paper supplies failed, the roads were vacated, as they were in our own age during gas-rationing. Thus the old city-state returned and feudalism replaced republicanism. It seems obvious enough that technical means of speed-up should wipe out the independence of villages and city-states. Whenever speed-up has occurred, the new centralist power always takes action to homogenize as many marginal areas as possible. The process that Rome effected by the phonetic alpha bet geared to its paper routes has been occurring in Russia for the last century. Again, from the current example of Africa we can observe how very much visual processing of the human psyche by alphabetic means will be needed before any appreciable degree of homogenized social organization is possible. Much of this visual processing was done in the ancient world by nonliterate technologies, as in Assyria. The phonetic alphabet has no rival, however, as a translator of man out of the closed tribal echo-chamber into the neutral visual world of lineal organization. The situation of Africa today is complicated by the new electronic technology. Western man is himself being de-Westernized by his own new speed-up, as much as the Africans are being detribalized by our old print and industrial technology. If we understood our own media old and new these confusions and disruptions could be programmed and synchronized, The very success we enjoy in specializing and separating functions in order to have speed-up, however, is at the same time the cause of inattention and unawareness of the situation. It has ever been thus in the Western world at least. Self-consciousness of the causes and limits of one's own culture seem to threaten the ego structure and is, therefore, avoided. Nietzsche said understanding stops action, and men of action seem to have an intuition of the fact in their shunning the dangers of comprehension. The point of the matter of speed-up by wheel, road, and paper is the extension of power in an ever more homogeneous and