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"

Guerilla armies only work when the opposition has (or is forced to have) scruples, or the country is just weak. As Russia proved in Chechnya: if you're willing to just flatten the area you're supposed to be pacifying, you can make them a non-factor pretty quickly. You lose any attempt at the moral high ground in the process, but all of the so-called difficulties of modern guerilla warfare break down to the fact that no-one, even countries like Syria, are willing or have the geopolitical immunities to use scorched-earth tactics on their own people (Syria could probably pull it off, but then they definitely would be invaded and lose. Russia could pull it off because no-one's willing to take a bite out of that apple. China could probably do it too).

It's not cyclical so much as predicated upon a nation's primary mode of production. The information age will lead to a broadening decentralization in some respects because more people will be able to participate in ways that they've never been able to participate before. Where anti-democratic backlash hits in is at the peak of inequality spurred by rapid economic change, whether it's put-upon peasants or industrial laborers seeking justice against the fast-moving rapacious forces of capitalism, the noveaux riche fearing such a peasant revolt and making sure that only the right people get a say in how things are run, or the old middle class looking askance at how the once-great land has become rapidly deformed and seeking a forcible return to national purity.

The creeping authoritarianism of the welfare state in the developed world was due to a different factor, the fact that modern systems have become too complicated for anyone to manage fairly and need regulation. The information age allows transparency to catch up to that, so while we won't see government's role diminished per se, we will see the ability of the bureaucracy and special interests to draft and run their own policies diminish to naught.