Hopefully, this will be the boring part, but lets start off by defining what the State is. For my purposes, the State is the belief that people need to be ruled. Those rulers do so through the threat of force. They have the monopoly of force in a given land mass.
Even with the popularity of the use of force that seems to be at a high and rising, there are a number of very important things going on right now that are seriously eroding at the future of this paradigm.
Many believe that crypto currency is the blade that will bleed the State dry, but I think there are a lot of other very capable blades that have also already slashed at the State.
Education: The value of primary and secondary education is being questioned at an unprecedented rate. In primary schools bullies, standardized tests, loss of teacher's sovereignty over their class room, attendance mandates and a host of other reasons have caused a landslide of people to turn to things like homeschooling and other non traditional forms of actual learning and education. In secondary schooling, students are realizing the perceived value of a piece of paper has been all but lost in the work force. Once again, real learning and education are being found in just about every other place than in colleges.
Prohibition: This one may be a bit less black and white on the trend towards ending prohibition, as people seem very quick to want to ban everything, but my personal belief is that we are seeing a much more tolerant society. Most of what we are seeing of these prohibitionist are the fringe loudmouths and the deep pockets looking for regulatory capture. Those are two very powerful forces, but I think the majority of society would be happy enough if we could let "gay guys defend their pot plants with firearms". I don't think we are far off from a real conversations about the ravages of prohibitions.
Media: Mainstream media have all but lost their grasp on our collective thought. They sure did have it in spades for a while, but now that everyone has a nice camera on their internet connected phone, we are really seeing the light cast on some dark areas of society. Look at what we have been seeing concerning police. People have access to troves of information in their pockets and they can actually look into things themselves. This has shattered the grasp that the leaders once had going all the way back to the beginning of newspapers and even back to when there was little else in print beyond the bible.
Open Source concepts: Open source started out as just software and that was ground breaking. That proof of concept has now quietly gone into just about everything such as tools and hardware, education, health care, food, etc. and hopefully the "holy grail" - roads.
Cryptography: Cryptocurrency has it's teeth as a State killer, but the broader use and advancements in cryptography in general is the real power against the ever increasing intrusions of the State. Being able to keep private matter secured and to also transmit and store value outside the control of the State is the great catalyst for all these other things.
I think this is just barely scratching the surface of the things that are killing the State. These are certainly interesting times. It is clear that if we watch the news or scroll Facebook that the message is that the State is growing and the people are begging for it. I think the reality is that there are a lot of people begging for more State, but more importantly there are a lot of people actually doing things to actively defeat the State.
