As for the rest of your response:
1) Science fiction isn’t really always about the effects of technology as in gadgets. Plenty of science fiction is social, the classic example being post apocalyptic.

2) I have never argued that technology was a sole determinant of progress. Ancient Egyptians and Greeks did know how to build steam engines. They just didn’t know what to use it for, having no immediate problems like coal mines that flooded all the time. On the other hand, arguing that technology has little effect on history and that political events are everything, is highly myopic. I used the printing press example before. That’s a pretty undeniable example of technology radically altering the possibilities of politics. There are plenty of other examples, like various iron implements for the Assyrians, or stirrups, or creating corn out of teosinte.

3) I have never said that techonology forces change in and of itself. Plenty of technology comes and goes without much of an effect. I have said, and am saying, that the current political structure is vulnerable to erosion by certain technologies that enable more participants to assert themselves at a more equal level to TPTB. Nobody has said it was everything.

4) I find your use of the Keynesians and Neoclassicals obtuse and trivial. If you look at politics, well, then of course, you’ll find that politics is important to politics. I’m looking at society at all levels. Only a minority of sf, and a not very large one, deal with politics in any real sense. They tend to deal with society, not the shape of politics. In any event, trying to argue about whether neoclassicals were more “primitive” than keyenisians technologically is an absurd argument. The reasons for the rise of the conservatives do not have much to do technological progress one way or another. Technology helps shape what the usual patterns of technology will take after. Iron plows, harnesses, saddle and tack, determines whether the boss rides on a horse or plots in a river clift castle. Sometimes it does more. Sometimes it does less.

I understand your technology argument, but I simply don’t see much evidence of it. And the problem is, we’ve had a tremendous amount of science fiction that claimed that various technologies would be the driver of extremely substantial political and economic changes. And, put as simply as possible, essentially none of the political and economic changes have arrived. Arguing that all that change is somewhere in the future……well, that’s fine, but we really didn’t see that much change from many previous technologies that are also very fundamental.

What, ultimately, I’m beginning to argue is that a central presumption behind science fiction is effectively a wrong and misleading one. That central presumption is that technology is the major driver behind political change. What would I counterargue to this presumption is that it simply isn’t very true in reality. (We’ve had a lot of technological change in the past 50 years, and very little political change in the countries most technologically advanced.)

So, this central presumption is misleading the readers of science fiction as to how technology works – “works ” here in a political sense. Instead, I would argue that politics really depends not on technology qua technology, but upon the political ideas people have. I.E., not modern science in isolation, but political philosophy is what is important.

Let us examine, for instance, the conservative political and economic movement that so dominated the last 30 years of the twentieth century. It’s connection to technology was limited – even it’s most charismatic leaders preferred the use of television and especially radio, and almost entirely ignored the Internet. A large part of it’s success was due to the difficulties that the Keynesian school had in dealing with the economic crisis of the 1970s, and the resulting simultaneous aggressive self-promotion of the neoclassical economists. If anything, the neoclassicals tended, in practice, to focus much more on static equilibria and to be more primitive in their assumptions than the Keynesians. It’s hard to say that the neoclassicals were more “technologically” advanced than the Keynesians.

So, the dominant economic ideology of the last part of the twentieth century had no close relationship with the huge technological innovations going on throughout that time. (And, I would argue, the neoclassicals had far LESS understanding of technology that Sraffa or the early twentieth century institutionalists or several other schools of economics). What we take away from this understanding is that it is politics itself that is important, not technology. I.E. our primary goal is then to understand politics from a political perspective, not from a technological or economic or geographic perspective (though all of these things help us greatly, they are subordinate to our primary study of politics as politics).

The central premise is that nominally transparent and connected systems are typically not truly transparent. There is usually a hypocrisy tax—usually taken in the form of a set of rentiers skimming some cream off the top and suppressing the economy a bit. That doesn’t typically matter to TPTB, they want control of the machine and typically have rule or ruin mentality at that.

However, many people have a problem with the system the way it is. One of the most efficient ways to change the system is to increase the hypocrisy tax to unacceptable levels such that the response will be to your advantage. The internet is just the cherry on top of it all. Halting State is about the intersection of foriegn policy, domestic policy, spying, internal security, and economics and also about how people are taking advantage of the supposedly nominal system to push the de facto system to operate according to stated principles. This pushes the ultimate stakeholders to use ever more oblique tactics to keep the actual levers of the system away from the public. The strength of the irony in the book derives from closing the circle by involving the public and other unsavory elements like gamers as a tactic in keeping power from the public.

I don’t think the internet was really a mature phenomenon until at least 2004 or so anyways. However, the genuine consequences of the Internet is still ahead of us, I think. What is behind us actually is financials. The mass democratization of the markets pushed the elite towards ever more sophisticated financial instruments in the attempt to be the ones at the top of the hill. Ever more sophisticated attempts to do end runs around provisions for insider trading, front running, maintenance of minimal capital levels, and other scams led to ever larger pocket universes full of cash in financial officer’s pockets. In the end, the transparency and nominal equality under the law aspects of society brought the whole thing crashing to earth. Now, take a look at the debt situation and the looming saturation of the bond market with all of the countries seeking lender cash. A great deal of Masters of the Universe people are going to lose a great deal of power and control.

The printing press didn’t change anything radically for several decades, but even so, it eventually did affect everything. It took some time for networks and machines to be built as well as people getting used to mass media. The same for radio and telephone and tvs. The same process is happening here. Keep a sense of perspective of time. The Internet is still pretty young tech. As fast as things happen (and has always happened, despite how poorly documented the past was), even the internet still needs time.

A note, the main reason, for me, why deflationary scenarios is so damn scary is that deflation catalyzes reductions in civil rights in the political sphere.

Yeah, but that describes England 1630-1680 too, which went through a lot more political changes in that time than England 1959-2009. Even if the system of government in a given area was uninterrupted monarchy for fifty years, there would usually be at least one succession in that time, which was a much bigger, and riskier, deal than a presidential handover, there would be a good chance of wars, or famines, or epidemics…

Seriously, throw a dart at a map of Europe, pick a fifty year period at random from the last millennium, and you’ll probably find plenty of events that the people who lived through them would have found pretty exciting – more turbulent than the last fifty years of the English speaking world, which I presume is were most of this blog’s readers are from.

I just don’t see the internet as something that has changed politics very much. Will it do so in the future? I’m fairly dubious about it – I’m not convinced even TV changed politics very much (not as much as radio), yet TV is probably a more fundamental technology than the Internet (TV got people used to sitting in front of screens…..). One could just as easily argue that there was a wave of success until just a few months ago for conservative politics that relied primarily on the older technologies of radio and TV (Berlusconi in Italy, the conservatives in the US, etc.) and mostly ignored the Internet.

Certainly, I wouldn’t assert that there has been notably massive political change since 1995/1996, the date of the emergence of the Internet as compared with many earlier similar sized periods – take 1914-1927 or 1931-1944 or 1959-1972 – all of which had vastly more political change than 1995-2009.

I don’t think Stross is really talking about the usual class and otherwise warfare. My take on things has always been that we’ve switched from an nominally obscurantist type of government and economic systems to a nominally transparent systems of governments and economic systems over the last 150 years or so. However, the system, pretty much all realistic systems, exists to serve the people on top (and the idealization of what being on top means). Both types of rule, open or closed system, have their pluses and minuses.

Given that we are in systems that value open sociopoliticoeconomic lines of authority. All rules must be easily available to everyone, rules have to have the consent of the stakeholders, free and fair elections, etc, etc. That doesn’t change the fact that would be Masters of the Universe do strive to attain more-equal-than-other-people privileges. They create systems of pretexts like “markets always know best!”—think “Party Commitee Knows Best”. They also create nests of nominal purpose privileges that create serious principle-agent issues, like hyper-person corporations, secret agencies within police and intelligence outfits with black budgets sometimes augmented by illegal drug and laundering activities, $100K is more important than 100K votes, and presidential priviledges. There are always “ticking bomb scenarios” for all of these occlusions.

Thing is, these things are always bad for huge numbers of other people, including other elites of society—especially in a time of globalization! Thus they have motives to stress the system by using the very progressivity of the nominal system—by making it very expensive to be a hypocrite. You can do it via sit-ins as with Civil Rights Movement in a time of the Cold War. Or you can do it via shareholder lawsuits and hostile takeover gambits. You can do it also by packing local school boards with mouthbreathers.

The issues with the communications revolution is that the value derives from massive multi-party particpation. The MORE people have access to high speed, interactive communications, the greater the VALUE of the system for everyone. Part of the value of the internet is how it can set expectations and how anyone can set these expectations. Any dog can proposition a bitch on the internet and no one would know otherwise. Given all the games and the scenarios can be played out in the internet, it gets pretty much impossible use it in a top-down fashion as they do with TV and radio for propaganda. It also gets pretty hard to figure out who is real and who is a cutout. Data-mining can only help so much—you still need to have a huge number of eyeballs to do a decent job. China supposedly has 20k internet monitors, for example.

It gets hard to retain the benefits of the communications revolution without handing power to a great deal of people that TPTB do not wish powerful. The Great (fire)Wall of China only lasts as long the masses aren’t incentivized to seek stuff outside the garden. The Baidu scandal, and to a lesser extent, the milk scandal have been strong demostration to many people that they should be more aggressive about getting accurate information. More events like those scandals and the firewall will eventually erode away under the weight of smuggled cp-free electronics.

Thus power is eroding from central control of an “open” network. A closed system can simply just take away the internet. Or democratic rule. However, the price for that security is massive deflation (which we are suffering anyways, note) and stagnation.

So forth, and so on…

And that’s, of course, the essence of why you don’t understand politics. The point is, rather, that in all previous times under those monarchs, other forms of government were not only possible, but widely considered. In fact, most of the monarchies had areas (whether towns or larger regions) that were ruled internally by non-monarchic principles – i.e. the mayor of the town would be elected, or a certain region run by Church entities, etc.

No one today even suggests that other forms of governance except extremely slight modifications of the ones we currently have are even possible.

No. It changed form slightly.

“Italy just sneaks in converting from a kingdom to a republic. ”

No. Unless you want to believe that the monarchy was going to succeed in 1945 (it wasn’t, and in 1946 Italy became the republic that the allies wanted it to become). The Italian kings weren’t even aiming for an absolute monarchy, but just merely restoration of a constitutional monarchy (based upon the same representative democratic capitalist republic as everywhere else).

“Germany changed three times (Allied Occupation>Divided Allied Occupation>2x Republics>1xRepublic). ”

Again, no. It merely was a question of what form of representative democratic republic Germany was eventually going to become (i.e., an extremely narrow range of options), and in what time frames it was going to do so. As it happened, Germany solidified around a very similar model to every other Western European nation under the Allies, and no serious questions remained by 1950. Eastern Germany, of course, was simply entirely subsumed into West Germany once the Soviet Empire collapsed.

Greece is not in Western Europe.

“And there’s also the emergence of a new semi-sovereign entity – the European Union – to consider, which is certainly a major change in the constitution of its members.”

No, again, it’s not. It’s a form of a representative democratic capitalist republic like all others in the developed world.

Ireland was already a republic according to the constitution of 1937. The changes of 1949 did not change or modify that fact, but clarified where Ireland fit into the Commonwealth.

And why start with 1945, anyway? Just because that was the end of the (relatively recent) last massive period of upheaval in Western Europe?

EPIC PETITIO PRINCIPII FAIL!

No, a more objective approach would be to take the frequency of change of government in the last fifty years (say) and compare that to a few random fifty-year periods from five centuries ago. And most of those, I would think, will be “started out a monarchy, finished a monarchy”.

France incremented its republic count twice. Germany changed three times (Allied Occupation>Divided Allied Occupation>2x Republics>1xRepublic). Italy just sneaks in converting from a kingdom to a republic. Austria went from German Province>Allied Occupied Republic>Resumed Old Republic. Greece changed twice (Kingdom>Dictatorship>Republic) but you may not consider it part of “Western Europe”. The Republic of Ireland became a republic in 1949 and you can’t get more western in Europe than that.

That leaves Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the UK, if you draw a distinction between Western and Northern Europe (and forget the pub quiz tax havens). Otherwise you’ve got to include Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, which considerably strengthens your point as Icelandic independence just misses the cut (1944). And there’s also the emergence of a new semi-sovereign entity – the European Union – to consider, which is certainly a major change in the constitution of its members.

Of course, the very idea of “Western Europe” exists because a lot of countries changed quite drastically and then changed back…

I admit I haven’t read your science fiction works, though I have read your Laundry works.

I don’t think things have accelerated. In fact, I would suggest that things have significantly slowed down. Take a look at political change, for instance: there in fact has essentially been extremely little change in the developed world since 1945 – all the regimes then in existence or founded roughly then are essentially (with very few modifications) the same ones we have today. Except for Spain and Portugal, NO country in Western Europe has changed it’s type of regime since that time. That’s actually very limited change and much slower than previous history would suggest – it wasn’t at all unusual for a single place in the Middle Ages or Renaissance to be several different republics, and under multiple different monarchs and in anarchy all within the span of 50 years. These types of changes were far more radical than we see today – debating the type of government you would have in very radical terms (democracy vs. republic vs. monarchy, etc.)was a very real issue throughout history, and it’s essentially not even a possible subject of discussion now (everyplace is one form or another of a representative democratic republic).

There hasn’t been any acceleration in the erosion of authority. My great-grandmother went in her lifetime from horses and carriages to a man on the moon. In the 19th century we had the start of the suffragist movements (both male and female), revolts against the British Empire in India, mass migration to the USA (away from the control of the European governments), the Holy Roman Empire ended, the successful slave revolt in Haiti, the Spanish Inquistion ended, the Taiping Rebellion, etc. Pre 19th century, we had the French and American Revolutions, the ongoing war of the Spanish Succession, Jacobite rebellion in Britain, the start of the Methodism in England, Cossack Rebellion in Russia, etc. Go back to the Ancient Romans, and you can find them revolting, arguing over the proper privileges of nobles vs the commoners, etc.

Old certainties have been eroding: family, religion, gender roles, race, the hopelessly compromised multinational news media

When haven’t they been?

1959 was after the suffragists won the vote, so gender roles had already changed drastically. Religious upheavals? Something caused the Vatican II council, I don’t imagine it sprung out of thin air. Race – the KKK and the civil rights movement were going strong (Rosa Parks and the bus boycott started in 1955, desegregation in the USA then there. Also, 1959, everyone was worried about a nuclear war break out.

1950s was the decade when my gran talked her way into being the first woman on her local school board. The Second Sex was published in 1949. 1959 was not a decade of stable gender roles.

It seems a bit odd to describe someone in 1959, having come through WWII and the Depression, having a strong feeling of old certainities. How about the Germans grappling with Nazism? The debate about Communism, the expectations amongst many people of the Commuist revolution? The rise of the anti-colonial movements across much of the globe, or should we call them a rise since many of them started before WWII?

“Hopelessly compromised multi-national news media” – have you read Orwell’s criticism of the political prose of his day, written in 1946?

politicians mired in the megaphone era and trying to grapple with ubiquitous information overload

Can you label a decade in which you believe that politicians did not have to grapple with information overload? I suspect it was in the middle of a war, and instead politicians were trying to grapple with a massive shortage of information.

There’s nothing new about old certainities eroding. We grow up in a particular time and place, and then we spend the rest of our lives whining about how it’s changed. I’ve never come across a time in history for which we have detailed information in which family, religion, gender roles, race were not changing.