The slide towards decentralization: clock and computer

In the pre-modern world, people mostly lived in small communities, and work was accomplished individually or by a small group of people. There were few occasions that called for coordinated effort by a sizeable group. In such instances, the coordination was secured by generating a rhythm. Peasants pulling a heavy load, seamen unfurling sails and soldiers marching into battle coordinated their actions by generating a rhythm with the help of a song, drum beat or some other such means. Sometimes the rhythm was happily generated and at others it was coerced. In general this bygone world was a world of rhythms. Today, we live in a world of synchronization. The world of synchronization is very different from that of rhythms. While rhythms are context laden, synchronization is universalistic. Rhythms vary in speed and intensity with changing environmental conditions, both physical and psychological. Synchronization works out of a uniform grid of time. It requires a mechanical timing device such as a clock. As the scale of human activity increased with the advent of industrialization from the local towards the global, once locally rooted natural groups were gradually replaced by geographically dispersed systemized collectivities. The new social formation that emerged in the course of industrialization was fragmented at one level and integrated at another. While the division of labor fragmented the society, the communications technologies reintegrated the different components into a unified system. This new social system was too complex and geographically dispersed to be coordinated via rhythms. It had to be synchronized. As we traveled down the industrialization path, the social system remained in a perpetual ‘crisis of control’ because the complexity of a