Technology, the Alphabet and Gold: Marx and the Through-Line of Civilization
By Elaine Diane Taylor
August 23, 2026
The alphabet fractionalized language visually.
Before print and the alphabet, language was something heard, something understood by the ear, talked about with others in close proximity, understood in real time.
The alphabet made language visible, linear, a mechanical thing laid out like a road. The eye saw the first squiggles, looking nothing like the actual sound, and interpreted the meaning in silence, sequentially.
The message before print went two ways, between the speaker and listener and then back again within seconds.
With print, for the first time, the message was one direction. From one party to many. One way. Exactly the same each time. The writer did not have to be close or even alive. The idea of individual infamy was new. The writer created meaning and a name that lasted beyond their life.
Each individual interpreted the meaning in their own mind, in private.
– Letters as units
– Words as units
– Sentences as units
– People as units
The medium, the printed alphabet, became the message itself. It mattered less what was said, and the medium organized how humans thought, organized ideas and value, and what they thought about.
People stopped thinking in terms of relationships between people, institutions and them and God. They began to think In sequence. Words were units, ideas were units.
Understanding became something that was learned in steps, instead of insight at once.
Before the printed book there were no nations; there were families, communities, kingdoms, rulers and the ruled.
A person was an individual inside a group of relationships.
After the book, everything became a repeatable unit. The efficiency of the system of repeatable units produced more power, more money, more influence.
The individual became repeatable. Standardized. A soldier in a military formation. A worker on a production line. A citizen in a nation.
The masses became a unit without individual power.
Life became fractionalized with a material ‘thing’ that could be replaced with another.
In medieval times you belonged to a lord and your identity was relational. Today, we see their rooms as sparse and the space inbetween furnishings as huge. While they saw the relation between the material objects, the quality of the space itself and the ratios as the value.
The idea of a nation could not come about until after the individual could see themselves as simply a repeatable unit, replaceable, inside a crowd.
Then came the soldier. Not a specialized weapon like a knight, but a repeated unit that could be easily replaced by anyone else.
The printing press had letters, repeatable units that were replaceable. The idea was turned into a material unit of meaning. Repeated identically.
The nation was not a kingdom ruled by a royal family, but a group of standardized units called citizens who shared the same language, flag, territory, and institutional bureaucracy.
What Marx Saw
Marx saw this, but missed the crucial through-line of civilizations. New technology gives a window of time for those without power to bypass those with it. The new group is smaller and faster and can pivot with new information.
Institutions cannot.
Institutions serve themselves for the good of the people managing it.
Marx saw humans as replaceable units in a mechanical production system. Workers were units with no skill. They were poor, exploited interchangeable parts.
He saw the elite concentrate power by extracting from workers, taking more and more, so the elite became fewer and fewer, while the poor became more and more.
He predicted that the poor would become so numerous and miserable that they would achieve a P-wave consciousness. That they would join together as a crowd, move as one, like a fist instead of fingers, and the worker class would overthrow the few owners.
An blaze of peasants with pitchforks.
An earthquake has an S-wave, individual geography pushing particle to particle to particle, as a wave of pressure, and the P-wave: individual particles moving as one, like a big stick. Push on an end of the stick and the other end moves instantly, having enough force at once to crumble an immovable object.
What Marx Missed
Marx missed that new technology creates a window. He missed the middle class.
Technology created those who learned skills and became specialized. Managers, administrators and white-collar workers.
These ‘jobs’ were also repeatable units, but this new middle class weren’t desperate enough to revolt. They became consumers instead. So the masses in desperation became fewer and did not have enough force to be a P-wave crowd that could overthrow the system.
Marx thought of classes, but he also didn’t consider the nation.
The nation came first.
The alphabet created the nation, which was a collection of standardized units who identified with the flag and what it stood for, and not their class. So poor workers in one nation fought poor workers in another nation.
Class consciousness didn’t fully formed because national identity got there first.
But the movement of value was controlled and slow, so a mass of citizens from different nations could not communicate and build a P-wave strong enough to change the structure.
Gold as the Through-Line
Now we’ll track gold through this same timeline.
Gold is the backbone of all shifts in power and empires.
1933 — The Confiscation
Military force of the developing mechanical age was shifting world power through the world wars.
The rising US empire confiscated the physical gold from its citizens.
Executive Order 6102. Citizens had to give their gold that backed the fiat currency to the Federal Reserve. The government priced it at $20.67 per ounce, then later raised it to $35.
The citizens didn’t get the higher value or control. Instead, they had paper that promised them the value to buy things, but not the gold itself.
This stopped individuals from being able to form into a group large enough to move capital, gold, at one time. It kept the power with the government. Whether a group wanted to move their wealth en masse or else just because a majority were thinking the same thing at once.
The units, the standardized citizens, couldn’t hold the medium that underpinned the monetary system.
Gold was centralized. The nation held the gold as well as the P-wave monetary crowd power.
1944 — Bretton Woods
44 nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. They made a new international monetary system and pegged the currencies to the US dollar.
They could switch their dollars to physical gold at $35 per ounce and global trade was US dollar based.
Gold backed the entire world system.
But only nations could redeem dollars for gold. Not individuals in the US. The standardized unit of the citizen could hold the paper and make purchases, but not hold gold.
This kept the power in the hands of the nations and specifically in the hands of the US.
1948 — The Marshall Plan
The US gave $13 billion in aid to Europe through the Marshall Plan so that Europe could buy US supplies and rebuild after the war.
Gold was the backbone for the dollar, and other currencies were pegged to the US dollar.
By 1951, all the European nations that got aid had surpassed prewar levels and were growing and thriving.
Gold flowed through the system as dollars, not physical metal. The medium remained centralized and the power was firmly in the center.
The 1960s — The Squeeze
The happy European nations started wanting gold instead of US dollars, as the gold was theirs and the US dollars were subject to any whims of the US government. They exchanged their US dollars for gold. US gold reserves dwindled.
The system was under strain.
A Gold Pool, including the US and several European nations, stopped selling gold on the London market in 1968.
From 1968 to 1971, only central banks could trade with the US at $35 per ounce.
1971 — The Gold Window Closes
In August 1971, Congress recommended devaluing the dollar to protect against “foreign price-gougers.” France sent a ship to New York to get their gold. Switzerland left the Bretton Woods system.
On August 15, 1971, Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar to gold. They would not give you gold in exchange for your dollars. You had to hold the dollars.
The gold window closed. The dollar became a fiat currency.
What Happened
European nations chose physical gold over the US fiat paper because gold didn’t depend on what the US did or did not do.
Gold traveled.
Global power was shifting and with it gold always travels.
From individuals (1933 confiscation) to the nation (Bretton Woods) to the global system (Marshall Plan, Bretton Woods). Then back to Europe.
The US government let nations P-wave the gold, believing they would not, but they did. The medium then shifted from gold-backed to fiat.
The worked for a while, but power swings from centralized to decentralized and back again. Central banks, and rising nations, having been buying gold to be ready for the next swing.
The Medium is the Message
The mechanical age required standardized units. It had unit citizens, workers and soldiers. It had laws and institutions that cemented the protection of itself as a structure set in stone. It had a standardized medium to back it all. Gold for nations, and fiat currency for the citizens to keep them fractionalized.
The alphabet had created the individual as a replaceable unit, the production line and the nation. The gold standard underpinned that system.
Now
The electric age shattered the standard.
Information did not move mechanically, step by step, but now was instant on and off and on again.
It took a while to develop, but the individual became a node in a global network, not a standardized unit in a national system.
The gold traveled when the technology developed.
The institutions are cement and serve themselves.
So now a window is open for those without power to develop new systems that circle around the center instead of fighting it.
This new technology can move the value across borders and distances without needing permission, without being slowed down by SWIFT or big banks, with their tolls and opague actions.
Banking services are now divided because technology allows movement near instantly for under a penny.
The through-line of gold remains now too.
There are new ways to move gold as individuals and groups.
Marx
Marx predicted the P-wave intensity and misery would overthrow the owners. He didn’t see that technology would:
1. Create a middle class that diffused the poor P-wave energy.
2. Create nations that redirected extracted worker consciousness toward nationalism.
3. Shift from mechanical to electric, fragmenting the standardized unit back into distributed individuals.
And he didn’t see that gold would be centralized, drained, then released into a floating system where the individual held it again.
The free individuals did not overthrow their masters as Marx predicted. So, communism was pushed on a poor nation, the new rulers exploited the citizens worse, and many millions died.
Capitalism turned into a oligarch institutions over generations, where the central banking and commercial banking systems would extract the whole world in a centralized wheel of global power.
The number of poor are rising, but communism is not the answer to a government using technology for an abuse of power.
The Current Time
The internet technology creates a new possibility.
Communication moving from many-to-many, near instantly. Time and space disappeared across the globe.
Individuals (S-wave) can now be globally connected without becoming a crowd (P-wave).
Individuals can also become a crowd with those they’ve never met in person.
The individual creator or merchant can build trade routes, hold gold, create products, reach cross-border consumers without joining a mass movement, without becoming a standardized unit and without needing a revolution.
In the time of Venice and Florence, the new merchant class did not fight the nobility. Instead they created new trade routes, new systems and new cities, with a new class of customers.
In that time, the new standard gold coin became the currency of the merchant. Stamped, trusted to move long distances without tarnish, rust or need of trust.
Gold was melted and rebranded.
Gold travels through every collapse.
Elaine~
Keys: gold, sovereignty, crowds, medieval history, Venice ducat, Florence florin, merchants, decentralization, Marshall Plan, gold confiscation, centralized power.
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Thank you to Jim Rickards for including me in his New York Times bestselling book The New Case for Gold, as one of the “new guns of gold.”
LINK to purchase the book The New Case for Gold through an affililate link.
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Thank you to Mike Maloney for including my song “Coins and Crowns” in Episode 1 of his bestselling YouTube series Hidden Secrets of Money.
Mike Maloney’s Hidden Secrets of Money:
- Hidden Secrets of Money – Full Series on YouTube (opens in new tab)
- Direct link to Episode 1 – Currency vs Money (the one that features “Coins and Crowns” unplugged): Over 6.8 million views
- Episode 1 – Currency vs Money (opens in new tab)
Elaine Diane Taylor on X @ ElaineDTaylor
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Nothing on this site is intended as investment advice. We’re all watching which way the wind is blowing. Harness it.
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Elaine – Barkerville, Gold Rush Town, British Columbia, Canada
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Coins and Crowns
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
SOCAN/ASCAP
from the album Coins and Crowns
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Not Much of a Holiday (Bank Holidays and Media Persuasion)
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
Single available on iTunes
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Thank you to the late David Crosby for his kind messages, including the compliment on the lyrics and music for A Terrible Breeze.
A Terrible Breeze (War and Social Media)
The news comes down
A little bluebird sings
Words of war
Fire and furious things
Of testing might
‘Til no patience knows
If keeping still
Still keeps you safe at home
There’s a terrible breeze
They speak of today
Of threats that used to live a world away
We all know wind
will blow both ways
And a terrible breeze can blow it all away
A worldwide net
Sees our village grow
Until we all forget
What each one used to know
How a blind bird’s wings
Can reach the shore
And turn that wheel of peace and war
Village fools sinking down, down, down
Debt and gold wound in numbered shrouds
Deal of a life it’s bread and clowns
Can we afford another go around?
The news comes down.
It’s a terrible breeze. The news comes down.
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
Single available on iTunes
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Preparing for the Fall is a live boutique album available for digital download — featuring Wag the Dog, Black Swan Dive, American Pie and Gods of the Copybook Headings. Also available on iTunes, Google Music, Amazon Music and major digital distributors.
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The Gods of the Copybook Headings
words by Rudyard Kipling and music by Elaine Diane Taylor
from the album Preparing for the Fall.
The copybooks of the early 1900s gave us all the wisdom we need. The sayings that were copied are the truths, the gods of our world. All the empires who followed the gods of the marketplace have fallen, and there’s terror and slaughter when the gods of the copybook headings return. Lyrics: Rudyard Kipling.
Another Week on Wall Street
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
from the album Coins and Crowns.
“A little grease (Greece) is floating out to sea, and little pigs (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) are bobbing up and down, they’ll send a storm and we’ll see, when the tide goes out who’s naked on the beach“. The world is changing as we know it.
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Elaine Diane Taylor 