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I sometimes think about informational life before the invention of effectively instantaneous communication aka telegraph. Before then it didn’t matter how important a bit was, it traveled at the speed of transportation on average. Best case was line of sight optical semaphore.
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Civilization was designed around fundamentally delayed information flows. Want to track a shipment? That information could not really travel faster than the shipment itself. Want to tell someone you’ll drop by for dinner? Drop by now to tell them (or send another human)
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Lightspeed communications create a temporal duality in civilization. States that can be synchronized instantaneously vs those that cannot. Materiality is non-simultaneity. The fact that a thing has mass is less relevant than the fact that it cannot be somewhere else instantly.
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It’s easier to understand this in futuristic terms. If you’re chatting with someone from Pluto, it’s a 5 hour delay. Optimal way to talk is via duplex 5 hour monologues. The optimal way to use letter writing when telegraph and telephone are NOT options for escalation is forgotten
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I've thought a lot about this too -- the effects of nearly-instantaneous communication are so omnipresent and woven into the fabric of our epistemology, it's hard to inhabit what the world was like for Morse and his forebears
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Pony Express was faster than average transport, but that was exception. The dude who ran to Marathon to report news (then fell over dead) also another exception. The expansion of railroads is what created unified sense of "time", and also greatly integrated nat'l memetic fields.
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It's always been interesting to me how much trains, transport, time & timetables factor into many Sherlock Holmes stories. He was often able to illuminate a case based on reducing possibility space by his supreme command of what was feasible transportation.
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