Mark Hamilton argues that television, photocopiers, and fax machines brought down the Soviet Union by letting citizens see proof of the free world's reality. He sees the same pattern now: the internet and satellite TV are eroding authoritarian control in China and will reshape modern politics through unstoppable technological spread.
The Soviet empire collapsed. Why? People say we outspent Russia, and there's other reasons given, but the real reason is the beginning, the onset of the communication revolution.
And the invention of the television and then the photocopier and then the fax machine. And essentially what happened is as more and more of the Soviet people began to see proof.
Through distribution of materials, through photocopy machines, through television, people in certain portions of Russia could get receive stations from outside their country and through the fax, getting faxes in from the Western world.
The free world.
That'S really what brought down the Soviet empire. And the reason for that is once people see the proof with their own eyes, it's like that Victor Hugo quote.
An invasion of armies can be resisted.
But not an idea whose time has come.
Now, with that in mind.
We have the computer revolution as our proof.
So now, similar now to Chinese communism.
China.
And it's breaking down internally, and business is beginning to thrive within China.
And what's doing that? It's the Internet and the satellite tv. That's what's breaking down communism.
The computer revolution is what's going to break down our political structure as we know it.
Because the computer revolution was proof of.
Unhindered geniuses of society being able to move forward without that.
Regulatory web. The computer revolution happened so quickly, the personal computer so quickly and advanced so rapidly that the government didn't know how to get a grip on it. So we saw what happened. We saw buying power multiply 1000 fold in cases a million fold.
