feudalism replaced republicanism.

     It seems obvious enough that technical means of speed-
up should wipe out the independence of villages and city-
states. Whenever speedup 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 alphabet 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