What's interesting to me is that we're in a constant war between the technologies used by governments to control their people and the technologies used by people to uproot their governments. There's a post below about mesh networking, I can see in a few years cell phones being powerful enough to broadcast network over a large enough area that they'll be ad hoc networks without a central kill switch.

One thing I fear is that eventually we'll reach a point where a dictatorship will establish itself and be so cruel and effective that it'll represent a permanent power which will dictate until it's own will to govern expires. North Korea seems like a close enough approximation but with the weapons and technology of the modern world it doesn't take that much creativity for a psychopath to imagine a world where that can occur.

Perhaps it's time I re-read Cryptonomicon.