The Twilight of Sovereignty
Wriston, Walter B.
2007
Wary Eye
Government viewed these developments with a wary eye. In 1835 Emperor Francis I of Austria turned down a request for permission to build a steam railroad lest it carry revolution to his throne. He was more right than he knew. | |
Years later with the advent of the telephone another sovereign saw danger in a new technology. Leon Trotsky reportedly proposed to Stalin that a modem telephone system be built in the new Soviet state. Stalin brushed off the idea, saying "I can imagine no greater instrument of counter-revolution in our time." | |
What would he have thought if he had lived to see the Yeltsin coup which utilized an independent computer network called Relcom that links Moscow with 80 other Soviet cities and can and was plugged into similar networks in Europe and the United States to spread the news of coup? | |
Even more ironic was the fact that Yeltsin communicated with his greatest ally, Mayor Sobchak in Saint Petersburg via the government's own telephone network. The speed of such modem networks and their ability to carry massive amounts of data to the far corners of the world is hard to overestimate, but perhaps can be set in context this way: The Library of Congress aspires to contain all that was published in the United States in the last 100 years. If the contents of all these books and papers were transmitted over ordinary copper phone wires it would take about 500 years. Today they could all be sent over fiber optic cable in eight hours. But what has such speed and volume done to the way the world works? | |