> I am reminded that the only real power comes from violence

Rather from numbers in my opinion. "Divide and conquer", or its modern equivalent "confuse and manipulate", is what makes violence effective. It is always striking to compare how much people are similar, even in our divided society, versus how much dissimilar they think they are. I'm used to help organize long boat trips with all kind of people from various backgrounds, and it's funny to watch.

In the past it was easy to convince people that "the other" was strange and dangerous, due to physical distance. Today we achieve the same with social media.

> Rather from numbers in my opinion.

Because for now more people means more violence. If you control more people, you control more potential violence. So if your enemy controls more people, you need to either amass more people in your cause or divide the enemy's cause.

And there are limits to how many people you can control. Even in the past, they were surprisingly large to my liking. Helot slaves to their Spartan owners were 7:1 at some point apparently. Soldiers in WW1 had riles and bayonets, yet one guy with a revolver could send dozens of them to their deaths. But still, it was impossible to censor communication among ordinary people and prominent enemies of the regime required constant supervision by another person. Digging up dirt or evidence could take months of work. Now so much communication is online, detecting dissent can be automated to a large extent. There's a limit to how many people can be in prison without starving and without the state collapsing by how many people need to perform useful work and how many people you need to guard them.

But I bet soon we'll see a new dystopian nightmare where prisoners are watched by automated systems 24/7, increasing the prisoner to guard ratio. And finally, look at Ukraine. Artillery was the primary cause of casualties in the past century of wars and you needed people to transport heavy shells, load and fire them. Apparently 1 ton of explosives per death. Now it's drones, which can be mass produced largely automatically and controlled automatically. And they are so precise you could use them to target individuals in crowds.