The End of Distance and the End of War

Abstract

This chapter addresses the potent US utopianism that greeted the Atlantic Telegraph Cable of 1858. US Americans tethered perfection to new telegraph technology with all the idealism utopia has come to connote but without the spatial or temporal inaccessibility that we traditionally associate with the “no-place” coined by Thomas More in his 1516 Utopia. In most formulations, utopia is set in a far-off land or distant future. Yet for many US Americans, the moment the Atlantic Telegraph Cable was strung across the ocean and Morse code was sent pulsing beneath the waves, this technologically empowered utopian world began to arrive. With an anchoring focus on the Oneida Community, a small religious community that became obsessed with the telegraph’s possibilities for unity among all people and with God, this chapter argues that in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, utopia was not understood as a distant land or future event. Rather, the utopianism of this network imaginary demands a redefinition of utopia as proximate.