Broad relinquishment would require a totalitarian system to implement, and a totalitarian brave new world is unlikely because of the democratizing impact of increasingly powerful decentralized electronic and photonic communication. The advent of worldwide, decentralized communication epitomized by the Internet and cell phones has been a pervasive democratizing force. It was not Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank that overturned the 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, but rather the clandestine network of fax machines, photocopiers, video recorders, and personal computers that broke decades of
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