On the other hand, over a dozen years before that I worked on a drought-plagued ranch in west-central Texas that employed one or two Mexican wetbacks. Mojados, they called themselves: “wet ones,” who had waded or swum the Rio Grande to get into Texas. They were at some pains to avoid detection by the Border Patrol, who made occasional forays into our neck of the woods, though we were never aware of them. The Mexicans, however, through some type of bush telegraph, somehow knew the BP’s whereabouts, and if danger threatened, disappeared into the thicket for hours or even days with every scrap of their belongings, leaving their bunkhouse as clean as a whistle. These were guys who worked every day from before dawn till supper, with about an hour’s siesta after lunch; yet with their nearest comrades miles away through mesquite and prickly pear, knew what was going on around them.

That system of communication is probably still in operation out in the brush country, but the coastal island isolation has pretty well disappeared. With satellite dishes and phones, and even cell phones working off towers on hills along the coast, the Internet and Twitter and constant messaging are in full cry, and almost anybody can know at almost any time what’s going on almost anywhere else – whether he wants to or not.

As with every scientific advance, there’s good news and bad. Take this computer I’m looking at now and then (I don’t touch-type). What a far cry it is from the tablet paper I wrote my weekly “theme” on 60 years ago; what a difference, even, between it and the old electric typewriter on which I once composed columns: rewriting and retyping past midnight to make a morning deadline, then delivering it by hand to the newspaper office for retyping and editing. When I finish tonight, I’ll save a backup, just in case, and let the text season overnight. Early in the morning I’ll read it aloud to catch what the computer hasn’t, change a few words, save it again, and send it off. The capacity to accomplish the work probably has quadrupled both here and at the office.

On the other hand, the ability to communicate instantly to almost anywhere else in the world has unleashed an impressive flood of content testing the First Amendment to the limit. Much of it is anonymous and doesn’t have to meet the scrutiny of editors, for most of whom facts still are important It often reveals more about the writer than about his subject. The need for schools to help their students distinguish between argument and manipulation is greater than it ever has been.

Other than the convenience of word processing, which I still find astonishing, the Internet and e-mail offer a priceless means by which people who are politically repressed can communicate with some different degrees of impunity. Thus I find the current flap between Google and the Chinese government fascinating and hopeful. China’s government is controlled by superannuated autocrats who seem still to believe that the free exchange of ideas can be controlled. It’s the same mentality that constructed the Great Wall, which in the end wasn’t breached, but simply overrun when it became clear to its defenders that nothing inside was worth saving. Remember how long the Communist government of East Germany sat on its own people, paying or forcing them to inform on each other, and shooting them if they tried to escape their workers’ paradise. Suddenly one evening there was no longer any reason to man the gates, and the wall came down.

In countries with, say, five major newspapers and three television outlets, those can be controlled, and their messages made to accord with the government’s. But when citizens own fifty million cell phones or hand-held communicators, the cat’s out of the bag and the fat’s in the fire.

Governments that exist largely to reap the profits of their citizens’ activity and maintain their own power must become things of the past, thanks to the increasing ability of those citizens to communicate more or less freely with each other. It’s the young who are chatting back and forth – the young who will soon become the remaining classes of society and see clearly what irrational controls are doing to their lives. Can anyone believe that the mullahs of Iran, for example, whether suffering from embargoes or not, can long maintain the fiction that theocracy is the wave of the future? Their volunteer civilian militia, the Basij, have led the counter-demonstrations that support the government and, according to their leader, are about to begin policing the streets of Tehran to enforce a strict Islamic dress code. What is it with militias? In any case, good luck with that.

Any of us can name four or five governments that put their own interests ahead of those of their people, not recognizing that ultimately their interests are the same. In the United States, those who feel the government’s interests are inimical to their own can blog and blather with impunity (though they may lose a few commercial sponsors). But in many countries, because people have families to feed and protect, that freedom is hedged. Autocrats who count on that to maintain control make a grave error. The young folks coming along, chatting and texting and Googling and driving us old folks to distraction, don’t yet have the vested interests their parents have. When they daily chat with their friends, and also get a look at Paree on their iPhones, how is anybody gonna keep ‘em down on the farm? The current revolution is electronic; the next will be political.