A string theory for capitalism
The verticality of the Roman world was very remarkable: not just the height of Trajan’s column, reaching the summit of the hill cleared to make room for it; but the underworld of animal tunnels in the amphitheatres. This was what we might call the hidden wiring. This is where the slaves lived. Without computers such as ours, Romans made buildings like machines in which the appearance of civilisation on the surface was guaranteed by a clockwork of un-persons. In our modern life, on the other hand, we pile surface on surface. But it is the same thing. The indium tin oxide on a smartphone beneath a harmless finger-swipe, the terbium and dysprosium that give the touchscreen colour and the additional neodymium which makes the phone vibrate, the copper throughout which was mined in Kazakhstan or China — everything, in fact, which is used to film and share a clip of a demonstration against dead slavers’ statues — is a new kind of verticality; a string theory for capitalism in which the human dimensions are all rolled up.
Karl Marx understood that capital had annihilated space by time. In some cases it takes no noticeable time at all to make a product cover the circumference of the world. In printing, within a single generation, we have moved to the point that publication on a desktop can be file-shared between continents without getting up from either desk chair; when only forty years ago, a typesetter was producing slugs of type line by line to be composed in a frame before photographing and offsetting; when the movement between rooms of the same printworks was more complex than it is now across the world. That is globalisation changed several steps since the first building of the Roman roads. What the ancient empire hid below to enjoy above as though nothing else existed, the new power provides on the surface as though nothing else matters.
What lies beneath Hadrian’s palace at Tivoli, and what underlies your mobile phone’s restaurant booking app, is not dissimilar at all. If spirituality is a limit-case dimension, at some point we will have hidden it from view.
