Finding out about that 3D printed gun has gotten me all excited, so I've collected down a few things that I've been looking at:

Propaganda Machine

The Internet is destroying the "gate keepers" of the propaganda machine. Just a few decades ago, the only news we received were through the handful of FCC-licensed broadcasters, the FCC-licensed radios, or newspapers. We now have choices of literally thousands of digital radio channels, and cable television shows. But the real dog in this fight is the Internet... the free media, social networks, and instant-reporting by the individual have made the gate-keepers obselete, and the propaganda machine is slowly dying.

50% swing against support for drones over past year.
Ron Paul doubled vote between 2008 and 2012.
Trust in Federal Government at historic lows, just 26%
Obama favourability at 46%. Lowest at point in time for any modern President.
Congress has a 14% approval rating.
First time ever, majority of Americans support marijuana reform.
Cable news ratings fall across the board.
Rapid increases in the number of children homeschooled.

Guns

One of the most important part of controlling a nation is controlling the guns. After all, that's how Government enforces its laws: by having the larger guns. How many people would pay their taxes, if the Government was limited to water pistols?

And this is where the gun printing comes in. Some 3D printers are now as low as $1200, and the price will keep falling. The costs of the materials are dirt cheap. This technology is still in its infancy, but is developing at a heart-stopping rate. Within 5 to 10 years, this will be accessible to any middle-class family, without a doubt.

If you have a 3D printer, and you live in New York, you can already defy the state's magazine ban with a downloaded 30-bullet clip. Assault weapons banned in Colorado? Not if you have the Internet.

And that project only started in August. As it gains notority and funding, plus the general nature of the snowballing effect due to its open source nature... what will the state of it be by the end of this year?

Communication

For quite some time, the state had the upper-hand in communication technology, but in the past two decades, this technology was reversed. Look at the spread of communication for the Arab spring through Twitter. It also has its downsides, like with the London riots. Both of these things had another upper-hand over the state: BBM. Blackberry Messenger. People with their ordinary mobile phones had a technology that the law enforcements of their country could not crack or monitor.

Money

One of the ultimate tools of control that the state employs is through its control over the money supply. By controlling the money supply, they have control over an important component of every trade that happens in their jurisdiction. Through controlling the money supply they can also pass draconian laws which force banks to supply all "suspicious" behaviour over to the Government. If they don't, they'll lose their banking license, and their ability to use the state's money. By controlling the money supply, they can also far more easily tax their citizens, and use processes such as inflation to destroy the wealth of the ordinary citizenship, to enrich the political class.

Clearly, control over money is quintessential to the existance of the modern state. But what if money was decentralized? What if money was completely untrackable, and, if done right, completely and 100% anonymous? What then? Then the state could no longer use its control to enrich its friends, it could no longer tax, it could no longer spy, and it could no longer regulate.

Oh wait, such a money already exists? Yeah, it's Bitcoin. And it's growing fast. Oh, and it's EXPLODED since the Cyprus fiasco.

Goddamn it. I was thinking about buying some Bitcoin a couple of weeks ago. I wish I had.

Decentralization is the wave of the future, but its easy to forget that this decentralization is ironically enabled by massive centralization (namely the Internet, relying on major telecommunications infrastructure overseen and regulated on an international scale, or the technology behind 3D printers)

It sure would be nice, but I don't think the state is done yet. Who knows what will come in the future, but near term, I see governments really tightening control in many areas. They certainly won't give up their power quietly.

It's trying to extend and build itself up, yes, but its very foundations are cracking, that's what is important.

Of course they won't give up power quietly, they're psychopaths and tyrants. They NEVER give up their power quietly. But, really, before the decade's out, the very ideas behind what the state is, where it gets its power from, and why it is needed, will all be significantly challenged. Hell, within 5 years, complying with the state will be optional, so long as you keep your head down. You'll be able to buy everything you need to survive (and more), with untraceable currencies, you'll be able to communicate without being spied on, your very existance could happen under their nose, and they wouldn't know.

Another case in point, back to drones. Domestic drones are not even fully deployed in the US, yet... and there's already a company selling a device that will make it impossible for a drone to operate over your property. http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-03/company-to-make-antidrone-tech-available-to-the-masses

I guess I'm a bit less optimistic about the timeframe in which more people begin to question the legitimacy of the state. Even now, with all of the great examples of state failure all over the world, people still cling to states as the solution. The movement is growing, yes, but it's still really, really small. Partly because it's very difficult to overcome years of state run education to even consider the alternative as a valid solution. (But who will build the roads?!)

Now that's not to say that you aren't right; all of these things are definitely making it easier than ever to give the finger to the state and live off the grid, and as far as your thread question goes, yes. The foundation of the state is beginning to crumble. But it will take a cultural change before the state really begins to lose its power, and I don't think that's something that will happen quickly.

You've really become more vitriolic in the last half-year, haven't you?

Ultimately, the government's lack of control over the internet is only because A: the old guys that run the government still don't quite "get" the internet, and B: The profits of the internet's current relative freedom outweigh the costs (at the end of the day, even the big government guys know that piracy really isn't that huge of a deal).

The question of using the internet to "fight the power" is much like the question of using guns to fight the power. In both cases, if the state really cared, they'd fuck your shit up six ways from sunday.

Iran is actually a decent case study in this. They've blocked VPN access and are in the process of cutting the entire country off from the world-wide-web (having an Iran Wide Web as a replacement). How well the Iranian people will be able to circumvent these changes will demonstrate how the balance of power will tip vis-a-vis the internet when a state really decides that the freedoms of the net are too much of a burden.

Eh, your half right.  The Internet can be shut off pretty eaisly.  (Though not without quite the backlash in a western country.  Well until CYBER HACKERS! gets blown up to such a panic countries convince people each nation needs it's own private interent.

However guns actually does provide a pretty huge threat to the government, at least in the "dictator control" scenario.  As has been shown time and time agan, guerilla warfare when less equiped can be a hell of a pain for a government and even bring it down....

and few guerillia armies would be as well armed as a US one.   They'd be missing some of the heavier stuff like RPG's, but chances are such things would be aquired fairly quickly in the chaos and raids on various armories. 

Considering your political science background you really should know better in this regard.

I just want what's best for people, and I'm optimistic that we'll be close to that within the next few years, if that's your definition of "vitriolic", then, yeah, sure.

It sounds like you don't quite "get" the Internet, either, and controlling it is not as simple as you may think it is. Short of ripping up the entire infrastructure, and raiding every home to remove all the network components, there is literally no way that a Government can effectively do anything to the Internet. Considering how much the special interests that fund most Governments are now hooked to it.. it's not going to happen (you think Wall Street's going to give up algo-trading any time soon?)

Look at China. Over last Christmas, they deployed their "next gen Great Firewall" that was supposed to be all-powerful and even harder to crack. My girlfriend put that to the test when she went home to visit her parents in Feb. On the car journey between the airport and her home, she was on Facebook. Through her phone.

As for Iran. Iran didn't "block VPN", that's impossible. They just blocked popular VPN providers. Blocking proxy servers and VPN providers is kinda like trying to fight bed bugs in a world where DDT is banned. For everyone you kill, 10 more pop up. You say that they're deploying some kind of "iran wide web". If this comes to fruition, it'll be pointless within a month. First, the IWW would become too large to monitor for Iran within an incredibly short period of time, second, nothing's stopping activists from essentially creating little portals, or for people beyond the border to broadcast connections across to Iran, and for activists within Iran from putting up relayers.

These are just ideas I've come up with from the top of my head, if the IWW gets deployed, there will be several million Iranians trying to subvert it every single day, as well as people from all over the world.

"I always made one prayer to God, a very short one. Here it is: "O Lord, make our enemies quite ridiculous!" God granted it." - Voltaire.

""We're all standing in front of this mountain, and it's called Government. We don't know what to do with it, we can scream at it and say 'go away, go away, go away'... it's not getting us very far.

But some very clever people in the private sector have figured out how to dig underneath it, go around it, scale it with special new tools. That's what I think of the digital revolution" -- Jeffrey Tucker"

The pillars of the state wont fall unless they are done installing enough THERMITE. ;)