Europeans and Americans are still living under the shadow of Nazism and communism. We are so impressed by the magnitude of the terror they inflicted and the grandeur of the struggles that led to their fall, we fail to see that more modest and more conventional dictatorships are flourishing as well today as they did in the Europe of the absolute monarchs. Contrary to Francis Fukuyama's promise that history was finished in 1989 leaving liberal democracy as the only way, autocratic China now appears to be  the coming power in the world. Its communist apparatchiks are the Bourbons of our day, admired and imitated by aspiring dictators the world over, most notably Vladimir Putin. Russia and China are not totalitarian states comparable to the slave empires of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. They allow freedom in private life, scientific and technocratic debate and limited criticism of minor abuses. 

In Moscow, a few dissenting newspapers and magazines even publish attacks on the regime, although I accept their journalists have the unfortunate habit of ending up riddled with bullets, but the state retains control of the mass media, as does the Iranian state with depressing efficiency. Naïve Westerners still talk of Tehran's "Twitter Revolution", a revealingly inaccurate phrase that misses the inconvenient fact that the theocracy is still in place and social network sites did not enable the revolution to succeed. How could anyone have thought they would, when new technologies inevitably increase the power of the already powerful with access to the resources and labour that can best exploit them?

We ought to know about the asymmetries of power that technology can bring from our own experience in the West. The main emotion the explosion in computing capability has generated is not jubilation at the bracing challenge it poses to the state but alarm at the opportunities it allows for increased surveillance by the state. The web enthusiast who brags one minute about how he is dethroning the gatekeepers and creating a new age of popular sovereignty will switch in seconds to railing against the government's plan to link biometric ID cards to vast databases that can collect every "registrable fact" about its citizens, including details of their emails and visits to websites. If the database state arrives, our ability to protest on blogs and in the comment threads on newspaper websites will be, I suspect, a small consolation.

Authoritarian governments can go further and actively control protests online. China has tens of millions of bloggers, whom the communists are happy to leave to tap out their thoughts because they pose no threat to the ruling order. In an analysis for Index on Censorship, Rebecca MacKinnon showed that the authorities could make transgressors vanish from cyberspace. "Most Chinese internet users know nothing of the 48 jailed internet writers," she explained. "They have not heard of Hu Jia, the Aids activist, free speech advocate and blogger who was recently sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison [because] China's censorship effectively protects people from themselves." Rather than directly censoring its citizens, the state cleverly holds service providers responsible for the contents of the web just as the European monarchies held printers responsible for the contents of books. If an ISP does not censor, the communists put it out of business. The result, says MacKinnon, is that even "overseas websites, including many of the large international blogging platforms such as Wordpress.com and Blogspot.com have been blocked in China. If a dissident writer creates a website on any overseas platform or independent hosting service his website or parts of it can end up being blocked by the Chinese filtering system if his content contains any blacklisted keywords or URLs."