This age found its form, as early as the 1880s in America, in a new type of office building: symbolically a sort of vertical human filing case, with uniform windows, a uniform facade, uniform acomodations, rising floor by floor in competition for light and air and above all financial prestige with other skyscrapers. The abstractions of high finance produced their exact material embodiment in these buildings.
Lewis Mumford (51)
Making it possible for one subscriber to talk to many others would have enhanced the telephone as a non-hierarchical means of communication. It was not to be and the very construction of the network system to limit telephony to one-to-one communication is therefore a mark of its repression. That we allow broadcasting, a very much more inherently centralised, undemocratic and controllable technology, to do this is the obverse of that mark.
Brian Winston (60)
