Railway lines, roads and canals structured the economy in the previous century. In France, they converged on Paris and accentuated centralization while in Germany they were more of a lattice pattern and encouraged development centred around medium sized towns. The same is true for radio communications but here the pattern cannot be read directly from a map and one has to refer to a more abstract plan, that of a star or a network. The telephone is now so familiar that we have already forgotten what life was like without it. Nevertheless it short circuits the authorities and gives power back to those ready to take it, the entrepreneurs who place themselves in the gaps which others do not see, who exert themselves to process and disseminate information, rather than to those who are content to rest upon their laurels and privileges.
Power is there to be grasped and is continually open to challenge.
It was difficult to seize power but relatively easy to keep once seized because there was a unified response. Machiavelli stated that, as a consequence, power could be seized relatively easily, because discontented barons could always be found as allies but was more difficult to preserve as the barons continued to plot even after one had gained power. This pertinent analysis can be applied to our predictions for the future. The network of communications is bound to create decentralization and the abundance of information flows will mean that operations become physically uncontrollable. In his novel 1984 George Orwell described a police state watching everything through video cameras.