This act of fragmentation and delegation blasts Lear, his 
kingdom, and his family. Yet to divide and rule was the 
dominant new idea of the organization of power in the 
Renaissance. “Our darker purpose” refers to Machiavelli himself, 
who had developed an individualist and quantitative idea of 
power that struck more fear in that time than Marx in ours. 
Print, then, challenged the corporate patterns of medieval 
organization as much as electricity now challenges our 
fragmented individualism.

     The uniformity and repeatability of print permeated the 
Renaissance with the idea of time and space as continuous 
measurable quantities. The immediate effect of this idea was to 
desacralize the world of nature and the world of power alike. 
The new technique of control of physical processes by 
segmentation and fragmentation separated God and Nature as