Semper eadem - Always the same

An interesting juxtaposition.

From Open Skies and Open Spectrum: The occasional power of simple ideas by Christopher Demuth.

When Tom Whitehead arrived in Washington in 1969, long-distance communications were government-protected monopolies — the Bell System (AT&T) for telephones, the three broadcasting networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) for television and radio. Telephone service, broadcast TV and radio, and the military all depended on Ma Bell’s terrestrial transmission system, which was well engineered but also expensive and inflexible. Bell Labs had made important technical inventions, but the only new products anyone knew about were color television and color telephones. New technologies were cropping up — cable television, mobile cellular telephones, microwave transmission, satellites — but were being treated as appendages to the old systems. Cable television was long extension cords for delivering broadcast TV to rural communities with poor rooftop reception. Communications satellites were a government monopoly, COMSAT, operated in partnership with Ma Bell.

All of this was assumed to be the natural order of things, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) protected that order zealously. It prohibited cable-television operators from offering programs of their own, lest they siphon viewers from the networks. For the newfangled cellular telephones, it reserved licenses for AT&T alone.

And this passage I read this morning from Adam Nicolson's God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. Nicolson is commenting on the inflection point between the emerging dynamism of Britain and the withering away of the old regime of Queen Elizabeth I.

England was full of newness and potential: its population burgeoning, its merchant fleets combing the world, London growing like a hothouse plum, the sons of gentlemen crowding as never before into the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, plants and fruits from all over the world arriving in its gardens and on its tables - but the rigid carapace of the Elizabethan court lay like a cast-iron lid above it. The queen's motto was still what it always had been: Semper eadem , Always the same. She hadn't moved with the times.

All systems are prone to sclerosis where entrenched interests stand in the way of change. Any change entails the potential redistribution of advantage and benefit from one group to another and therefore generally to be opposed or coopted (through regulatory capture) by the entrenched interests and sought after by those seeking a better way.

In the above examples, one change led to an acceleration of mass knowledge and connectedness, in the other, the more ancient, it led, among many other outcomes, to the King James Bible; perhaps among the most influential single texts in human history.