In the summer of 1992, the new graduates of Franklin County (Ga.) High School poured out into the world with the powerful energy and hopes and naïveté of 18 year old Americans who knew no limits. Beginning with a “senior beach week” in Panama City Beach that included so many foolish antics that none of us can now fathom that our parents let us go there without adult supervision, that summer we launched into life – college, tech school, jobs, relationships, marriage. 

America was at that time triumphant and ascendant. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the Soviet Union had disintegrated, Saddam Hussein’s gambit to take over Kuwait had been undone quickly by a U.S.-led coalition. In short, market democracy had defeated fascist and then communist autocracy and flicked away Saddam’s aggression, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt to be the most effective, dynamic, and powerful form of human governance.  Prominent scholars said it was the End of History. 

The U.S. Olympic team arrived in Barcelona that summer as the vanguard of this world-changing power, with a basketball “Dream Team” of superstars including Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and others that dominated the event, winning gold by a margin unprecedented in Olympic history. 

Beyond basketball, other aspects of Barcelona 1992 were even more telling of the new era that America and market democracy had ushered in. South Africa, having abolished Apartheid, participated in the Oympics for the first time since 1960. German athletes again competed on behalf of a unified Germany, rather than as Cold War proxies representing East Germany and West Germany. The independent teams of Estonia and Latvia made their first appearance since the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Berlin, and Lithuania sent its first team since 1928. Other ex-Soviet republics participated as a “unified team,” with medal winners honored under the flags of their newly independent countries.

At this time, Vladimir Putin was an embittered post-Soviet municipal official in St. Petersburg. Xi Xinping was a mid-level bureaucrat in the Chinese Communist Party, which in its fourth decade in power had undertaken murderous oppression in Tienanmen Square in 1989, an atrocity that by 1992 seemed to be an anachronistic outlier from the triumphant Age of Market Democracy.

But in the following decades, it became apparent that History had not yet ended after all.   

This 1992 moment sprung to mind earlier this year in Barcelona, as I attended Mobile World Congress 2025, the massive annual wireless telecommunications conference with over 100,000 participants and thousands of companies from over 200 countries.  By far the largest exhibit at the conference was that of China’s telecom behemoth Huawei – a gargantuan, sparkling, futuristic display of tech autocracy whose tagline, “Accelerating the Intelligent World,” ominously filled the largest hall of Barcelona’s huge convention center. The exhibit seemed to me a foreboding, even threatening message from China’s autocratic government, which incubated and helped build Huawei into the telecom/tech giant that it is today, that the future of the world is China’s all-knowing and all-powerful technology.

And I thought about all this again last week in Royston, Ga., as several middle school, high school, and college kids worked to begin the Founding Citizens Institute, a training program for young Americans to learn the core skills of active citizenship, from how 911 emergency response works to the responsibilities of local government officials to the role of local churches and newspapers.  We met with a bunch of citizen leaders who were exuberant young adults in 1992 and now serve our community – and Georgia and the United States of America – in a wide variety of important roles.  Mayor, superintendent, assistant principal, teacher, clerk of court, fire chief, EMS, emergency room nurse, CEO, truck driver, reporter, veteran, church leader, etc. etc. etc. 

These people are good citizens, and every one of them is a Founder of our country – a nation of the people, for the people, by the people. The kids learned this week that in America, citizens run the country. We are in charge. We are not subjects of an autocratic government.

Citizens and the communities in which they live and serve are the most valuable “infrastructure” of our nation. China and Russia and other autocratic societies have hundreds of millions of residents – subjects – but those countries do not possess the “critical infrastructure” of active free citizens and citizen-led businesses, institutions, and communities.

The human infrastructure of citizenship is at the heart of the American Dream Team. 

And that human infrastructure is what the incredible technology showcased at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is meant to serve. Technology must be designed and deployed to serve us – and our families and our dreams and our self-governance. 

It cannot be the other way around; we are not subjects of a tech-enabled autocracy that surveils and represses us and stifles our expression and ambitions.

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