The door is being slowly opened to a bizarre but not impossible future where the world’s great powers might fall to bloodshed due—in part—to matters getting out of hand online. In this dynamic, one is reminded of how the First World War began. As war clouds gathered over Europe in 1914, the advisors to both the German kaiser and the Russian tsar came to the same curious conclusion. Confiding in their diaries at the time, they wrote that they feared more the anger of their populace if they didn’t go to war than the consequences if they did. They had used the new communications technology of the
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