Telecom Year Zero

Literature more or less begins with an account of a signal crossing space — to be precise, with an account of the network along which this signal travels. In Act 1 of Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon” (458 B.C.), Clytemnestra appears outside her palace, supposedly to announce the news that Troy has fallen. Yet what she in fact describes, in great detail, is the chain of beacon-towers that has conveyed the news to Argos, naming each staging post. I’ve looked into this: these towers weren’t low-tech bonfires; they were complex machines with moving parts and attendant encryption systems. Clytemnestra is describing the nodes and relays of a telecommunication grid.

The argument that the advent of the Internet somehow marks a Telecom Year Zero after which nothing will ever be the same can be made only by ignoring the actual history of literature.

Tom McCarthy, “Writing Bytes”