Roads and Ways
It was a real moment of innovation when rocks were laid as a technology for road making. Movements of bodies and goods were made safer for humans. On the other hand the use of technologies is often oriented towards a greater supremacist reach for a few. As rolling, crawling, dancing and following paths can be a generative practice of spacing (and roads could be part of it), the orientation of the technology of roading by means of control has set a field of relation preaccelerating certain networks of navigation. The specific preacceleration of highways, railroads and streets for the vehicles to carry ressources lead to an ever more frictionless circulation of goods and an evermore growing safety for the accumulation of wealth and power. (this safety barely extends to common bodies as the most vulnerable people in this world have very often a lesser access to fast and safe transportations).
Moving armies+connecting territories to a metropole+moving goods faster+reducing the dangers of theft and aggression+improving comfort
The ways in which affects, objects and identities are strange to the safety of the pipelined movements shadows a discussion on an off-trails relationship to spaces and times.
Ways and roads are the expression of a network of movements. In this stage of life on earth, the extreme complexity of networks that have been developed to facilitate movements of goods (physical, immaterial or speculative) is limited in its creativity to the transition and the accumulation of value. For instance the transit of the information through waves and the accumulation of dematerialized money are great demonstrations that the things themselves for their materiality are not as important anymore as their capacity to move swiftly. Speed of information between the 5G and a letter sent by pigeon is a differentiation of friction between space and time (times).
The point here is not to talk about submarine cables, space satellites or the speed at which AI moves information, but rather to point at the technologies of movement, of goods in movement and information in movement. Colonization depends on the fast speed at which it can move in time. Other spaces can’t be mined if there is no possibility to control the mined body.
It is not to say that there were no paths before the making of roads, but rather to point at the difference between carving a path (and how easy it is to go off-trail) and exploding dynamite on a road (and how hard it is to exit their course).