On the fringe of mass Suburbia, even the advantages of the primary neighborhood group disappear. The cost of this detachment in space from other men is out of all proportion to its supposed benefits. The end product is an encapsulated life, spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin of darkness before a television set: soon, with a little more automation of traffic, mostly in a motor car, traveling even greater distances, under remote control, so that the one-time driver may occupy himself with a television set, having lost even the freedom of the steering wheel. Every part of this life, indeed, will come through official channels and be under supervision. Untouched by human hand at one end: untouched by human spirit at the other. Those who accept this existence might as well be encased in a rocket hurtling through space, so narrow are their choices, so limited and deficient their permitted responses. Here indeed we find The Lonely Crowd.
The organizers of the ancient city had something to learn from the new rulers of our society. The former massed their subjects within a walled enclosure, under the surveillance of armed guardians within the smaller citadel, the better to keep them under control. That method is not obsolete. With the present means of long-distance mass communication, sprawling isolation has proved an even more effective method of keeping a population under control. With direct contact and face-to-face association inhibited as far as possible, all knowledge and direction can be monopolized by central agents and conveyed through guarded channels, too costly to be utilized by small groups or private individuals. To exercise free speech in such a scattered, dissociated community one must 'buy time' on the air or 'buy space' in the newspaper. Each member of Suburbia becomes imprisoned by the very separation that he has prized: he is fed through a narrow opening: a telephone line, a radio band, a television circuit, a broadband line. This is not, it goes without saying, the result of a conscious conspiracy by a cunning minority: it is an organic by-product of an economy that sacrifices human development to mechanical processing. Suburbia offers poor facilities for meeting, observation, collective debate, and common action - it favors silent conformity, bot rebellion or counter-attack. So Suburbia has become the favored home of a new kind of absolutism: invisible but all powerful.
I might be uneasy about the validity of this analysis had not the prescient de Tocqueville anticipated it long ago, in Democracy in America. He sought to 'trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world.'
"The first thing that strikes observation [he says] is an uncountable number of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to produce the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them living apart, is a stranger to the fate of all the rest - his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country."
De Tocqueville was describing in anticipation the temper and habit of life in Suburbia, a habit that has worked back into the city and made even democratic nations submit, with hardly a murmur, to every manner of totalitarian compulsion and corruption. What this great political philosopher foresaw with his inner eye, less gifted observers can now see with their outer eye. This is the last stage in the break up of the city. The expansion of our technology only quickens the pace of this change. What is left, if no counter-movement takes place, will not be worth saving. For when the container changes as rapidly as its contents nothing can in fact be saved.
Mumford, Lewis 1961 The City in History pgs. 583~584
