The Sovereign Individual

Kindle Highlights

• If AI is communist, crypto is libertarian.
• Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation-state, creating new forms of social organization in the process.
• transformation. The challenge it will pose will
• Unlike the Agricultural Revolution, the Information Revolution will not take millennia to do its work. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, its impact will not be spread over centuries. The Information Revolution will happen within a lifetime. What is more, it will happen almost everywhere at once.
• In an environment where the greatest source of wealth will be the ideas you have in your head rather than physical capital alone, anyone who thinks clearly will potentially be rich.
• Cyberspace is the ultimate offshore jurisdiction.
• As we explore later, inflation as revenue option will be largely foreclosed by the emergence of cybermoney.
• information technology will destroy the capacity of the state to charge more for its services than they are worth to you and other people who pay for them.
• When the technologies that are shaping the new millennium are considered, it is far more likely that we will see not one world government, but microgovernment, or even conditions approaching anarchy.
• As Arthur C. Clarke shrewdly noted, the two overriding reasons why attempts to anticipate the future usually fall flat are “Failure of Nerve and Failure of Imagination.”
• that is the convention that rules the world. Every social system, however strongly or weakly it clings to power, pretends that its rules will never be superseded.
• important transitions in history seldom are driven primarily by human wishes.
• With the possible exception of the early stages of farming, past transitions have always involved periods of social chaos and heightened violence due to disorientation and breakdown of the old system.
• Corruption, moral decline, and inefficiency appear to be signal features of the final stages of a system.
• it is no coincidence that the seventeenth century, the coldest in the modern period, was also a period of revolution worldwide. A hidden megapolitical cause of this unhappiness was sharply colder weather.
• An eruption of microparasites, such as a viral pandemic, rather than drastic changes in climate or topography, would more likely disrupt the megapolitical predominance of technology.
• Wherever farming took root, violence emerged as a more important feature of social life. Hierarchies adept at manipulating or controlling violence came to dominate society.
• humans have been hunters and gatherers for 99 percent of the time since we appeared on earth.
• With no reason to earn and almost no division of labor, the concept of hard work as a virtue must have been foreign to hunting-and-gathering groups.
• For the members of the typical hunting-and-gathering band, that meant working only about eight to fifteen hours a week.
• The move to a settled agricultural society resulted in the emergence of private property.
• The “Dark Ages” were so named for a reason. Literacy became so rare that anyone who possessed the ability to read and write could expect immunity from prosecution for almost any crime, including murder.
• the invention of the stirrup gave the armed knight on horseback a formidable assault capability. He could now attack at full speed and not be thrown from the saddle by the impact of his lance striking a target.
• The fact that the colder weather, crop failures, famines, and plagues occurred during the run-up to the year 1000 also played a role in informing behavior. Many people were convinced that the end of the world or the Second Coming was at hand.
• Feudalism was the response of agricultural society to the collapse of order at a time of low productivity.
• The biblical parable of the Garden of Eden is a fond recollection of the life of ease enjoyed by the forager in the wilderness. Scholars indicate that the word “Eden” appears to be derived from a Sumerian word for “wilderness.”42
• From the vantage point of the Information Society, the spectacle of soldiers in the modern period traveling halfway around the world to entertain death out of loyalty to the nation-state will come to be seen as grotesque and silly.
• comfortably a mounted knight in full armor. Yet “perfection,” as C. Northcote Parkinson shrewdly noted, “is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse.”
• Like today’s politicians who threaten constituents with curtailed garbage pickup and other indignities if they decline to pay higher taxes, religious authorities in the fifteenth century were also prone to cutting off religious services to blackmail congregations into paying arbitrary fines.
• examples of governments controlled by their customers include democracies and republics with limited franchise, such as the ancient democracies, or the American republic in its founding period. At that time, only those who paid for the government, about 10 percent of the population, were allowed to vote.
• In the United States, for example, state and local governments spend just 3.5 percent of their total outlays on the provision of police, as well as courts and prisons. Add military spending, and the fraction of revenues devoted to protection is still only about 10 percent.
• Rising real incomes allowed governments to adopt a strategy that placed more resources under their control. Small sums taken in taxes from millions could produce more revenue than larger amounts paid by a few powerful people.
• The more likely immediate beneficiaries of increased complexity of social systems will be the Sovereign Individuals of the new millennium.
• An old Chinese folk wisdom holds, “Of all the thirty-six ways to get out of trouble, the best way is—leave.”
• Wherever societies have formed at a scale above bands and tribes, especially where trade routes brought different peoples into contact, specialists in violence have always emerged to plunder any surplus more peaceful people could produce.
• the more competing armed groups there are operating in any territory, the higher the likelihood that they will resort to predatory violence.
• no government has ever been able to monopolize violence on the sea, it is even less likely that a government could successfully monopolize an infinite realm without physical boundaries.
• Government will be no better situated to protect a bank balance in cyberspace than you are. As government will be less necessary, its relative price is likely to fall for that reason alone. There are others.
• the instantaneous sharing of information will be like a solvent dissolving large institutions.
• that some experts examining the Internet in 1995 concluded that it has little commercial potential and almost no significance other than as an electronic medium for chat and an outlet for pornography.
• **Note:** Like bitcoin
• In almost every competitive area, including most of the world’s multitrillion-dollar investment activity, the migration of transactions into cyberspace will be driven by an almost hydraulic pressure—the impetus to avoid predatory taxation, including the tax that inflation places upon everyone who holds his wealth in a national currency.
• surely the most momentous consequence of the new digital money will be the end of inflation and the deleverage of the financial system.
• the global economy should be highly bullish. Whenever circumstances allow people to reduce protection costs and minimize tribute paid to those who control organized violence, the economy usually grows dramatically.
• Specifically, 90 million American adults were judged incapable of writing a letter, fathoming a bus schedule, or adding and subtracting, even with the help of a calculator. Those who cannot make sense of an ordinary bus timetable are unlikely to be able to make much of the Information Superhighway.
• The large city was largely an artifact of industrialism in the West. It arose with the factory system to capture scale economies in the manufacture of products with high natural resource content.
• Every human on earth could be packed into Texas, with each family living in its own detached house with a yard, and still have some of Texas left over.
• A good marker for the viability of cities is whether those living at the core of the city are richer than those on its periphery.
• Painfully Expires.”33 In the postindustrial period, jobs will be tasks you do, not something you “have.”
• The model business organization of the new information economy may be a movie production company.
• The economic value of memorization as a skill will fall, while the importance of synthesis and creative application of information will rise.
• “Nationalism, of course, is intrinsically absurd. Why should the accident—fortune or misfortune—of birth as an American, Albanian, Scot, or Fiji Islander impose loyalties that dominate an individual life and structure a society so as to place it in formal conflict with others?
• the word international was invented by Jeremy Bentham in 1789.
• for all of human existence prior to the advent of agriculture, ethnic groups were “inbreeding superfamilies.” Given this past identity between the family and the in-group, there could well be a genetically influenced tendency to treat the in-group as kin.
• Assets will increasingly be lodged in cyberspace rather than at any given place, a fact that will facilitate new competition to reduce the “protection costs” or taxes imposed in most territorial jurisdictions.
• The triumph of capitalism will lead to the emergence of a new global, or extranational, consciousness among the capitalists, many of whom will become Sovereign Individuals.
• In the Information Age, education will be privatized and individualized. It will no longer be lumbered with the heavy political baggage that characterized education during the industrial period.
• The building blocks of the cybereconomy—cybermoney, cyberbanking, and an unregulated global cybermarket in securities—are almost bound to come into existence on a large scale. As they do, the capacity of greedy governments to confiscate the wealth of “citizens” will shrivel.
• What is remarkable is not that the rate of tax charged should fall as a percentage of income in this particular case, but that it should ever have seemed “fair” that different persons should pay wildly different amounts for the services of government during the twentieth century.
• Most thinking individuals in a world of bankrupt governments will prefer to be well treated as customers of protection services, rather than be plundered as citizens of nation-states.
• Holding a U.S. passport is destined to become a major drawback to realizing the opportunities for individual autonomy made possible by the Information Revolution.
• “[T]he stimulus to collective violence comes largely from the anxieties people experience when established institutions fall apart.
• is not farfetched to suppose that a group will emerge as a kind of merchant republic of cyberspace, organized like the medieval Hanseatic League, to facilitate negotiation of private treaties and contracts among jurisdictions as well as to provide protection for its members.
• In short, we expect that sometime in the first half of the next century the world will experience the genuine privatization of sovereignty.
• if digital money can be transferred anywhere on the planet at the speed of light, conquest of the territory in which a cyberbank is incorporated may be a waste of time.
• The advent of cyberwar will increase the vulnerability of centralized command-and-control systems, while increasing the competitive viability of dispersed systems.
• If democratic selection were truly a superior method to identify competent leaders, you would expect to see it as a universal decision rule. Instead, it is confined almost solely to the political realm.
• A system that routinely submits control over the largest, most deadly enterprises on earth to the winner of popularity contests between charismatic demagogues is bound to suffer for it in the long run.
• A large fraction, perhaps a majority of Americans over the age of fifteen, lack basic skills essential to evaluating ideas and formulating judgments. According to the U.S. Education Department, 90 million Americans cannot write a letter, fathom a bus schedule, or even do addition and subtraction on a calculator.
• Democracy succeeded as a political system precisely because its operation made it difficult for customers to control the government or limit the state’s claims on resources.
• firms will tend to dissolve as information technology makes it more rewarding to rely upon the price mechanism and the auction market to undertake tasks that need doing rather than having them internalized within a formal organization.
• there will be no more conflicts like World War II. The very technology that is liberating individuals will see to that.
• In the future, excessive scale could be not only counterproductive but dangerous. Larger enterprises make more tempting targets.
• Vito Tanzi, in his essay on corruption, shows that “the only way to deter corruption is to reduce significantly the scale of public intervention.”
• For human beings it is the struggle rather than the achievement that matters; we are made for action, and the achievement can prove to be a great disappointment.
• The most successful periods in the history of societies tend to be those in which the collective morality is fully shared.
• A good social morality has certain characteristics. It should contribute to the survival of society and of individuals, in a dynamic rather than static way. It should include tolerance and avoid self-righteousness. It should be religious, rather than merely agnostic. It should not pretend to decide questions of scientific fact. It should be neither anarchic nor authoritarian. It should be widely shared and deeply held.