I think that's right -- and not just elites, in that case, but any complex system, of which elites are always a manifestation, like the ants around your dropped ice cream cone.

elvismercury

mostly_harmless

Elites, the curse of recursion, and the half-life of policy

I've had a sort of half-baked hypothesis that regimes often fail when the prevailing communications technology changes. I'm thinking specifically about the printing press in Europe and the fax machine in the Soviet Union.

Along the lines you articulated here, regimes (or elites) develop an intricate framework of defenses that usually involves information management. It takes generations for those frameworks to evolve. As with the natural selection process in living organisms, they don't develop protections against threats they haven't faced.

So, when the prevailing information technology changes the elites become exposed in ways they aren't prepared to manage.