"Machinery is accomplishing in the world what man has failed to do by preaching, propaganda, or the written word. The aeroplane and wireless know no boundary. They pass over the dotted lines on the map without heed or hindrance. They are binding the world together in a way no other system can. The motion picture with its universal language, the aeroplane with its speed, and the wireless with its coming international programme -- these will soon bring the world to a complete understanding. Thus may we vision a United States of the World. Ultimately it will surely come!"
The writer is Henry Ford, in his memoir My Philosophy of Industry, published 1929. The quotation is printed in David Edgerton's excellent book The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, which I just finished reading. On the next page Edgerton quotes George Orwell's response to such claims, from a 1944 column:
"Reading recently a batch of rather shallowly optimistic 'progressive' books, I was struck by the automatic way people go on repeating certain phrases which were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are the 'abolition of distance' and the 'disappearance of frontiers'. I do not know how often I have met with statements that 'the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance' and 'all parts of the world are now interdependent'.
Edgerton goes on to show that in most cases the hype has not been borne out, and in fact sometimes the opposite happens -- many such technologies foster self-sufficiency and isolation instead.
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