The commentators have not yet dared to assess just how much the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 contributed to the collapse of the totalitarian bureaucracy in Russia that began three years later; nor the extent to which the growing powers of spectacular-democratic methods of government, and the excessive use that has been made of them, have contributed to the astonishing atrophy in the strategical sense of those who rule over these conditions.
Guy Debord, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (critical edition)