Unfortunately his IQ seems to be off the scale, in the wrong direction. - Charles Stross

Superficial appearances are misleading precisely because, so much of the time, they’re accurate.

Worlds with a single planetary government aren’t meant to be peaceful and open and into civil rights! When I see a planet with just one government, I look for the mass graves. It’s some kind of natural law or something—world governments grow out of the barrel of a gun.

You can do magic by hand, without computers, but magic performed by ritual without finite state automata in the loop—calculating machines, in other words—tends to be haphazard, unreliable, uncontrollable, prone to undesirable side effects, and difficult to repeat. It also tends to fuck with causality, the logical sequence of events, in a most alarming way.
We’ve unintentionally rewritten our history over the centuries, would-be sorcerers unwinding chaos and pinning down events with the dead hand of consistency—always tending towards a more stable ground state because chaos is unstable; entropy is magic’s great enemy. When the ancients wrote of gods and demons, they might well have been recording their real-life experiences--or they may have drunk too much mushroom tea: we have no way of knowing.