In respect of administrative resources, tendencies towards increasing democratic involvement have as their dark side possibilities for the creation of totalitarian power. The intensifying of surveillance operations provides many avenues of democratic involvement, but also makes possible the sectional control of political power, bolstered by monopolistic access to the means of violence, as an instrument of terror. Totalitarianism and modernity are not just contingently, but inherently, connected, as Zygmunt Bauman in particular has made clear.

XREF: Connects to Bauman's thesis on modernity and the Holocaust, plus later surveillance-state discussions (e.g., digital mass surveillance).

Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Moderni…, loc. 401