Each citizen carries on her person a computer more powerful than any available to a billionaire two decades ago, and many are using their devices to express their unbridled rage at the society that put them in our pockets.
(That’s Adam Gopnik, discussing Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger.)
Correction: Everyone is effectively REQUIRED to carry a CIA-rooted listening device in his or her pocket and be ready to answer it when it rings. (You have read the latest from Wikileaks regarding iPhones, of course…)
High tech has empowered the elites. The masses just pay for it.