The Sovereign Individual

Strategic Next Actions

1. Continue to keep Involgize out of the schools and any mainstream organisations for the foreseeable future.
2. Continue to stay abreast of the development of key subjects like Crypto and Artificial Intelligence.
3. Continue to develop and disseminate the how to think ideas of Involgize in support of decentralisation.
4. Continue to make long-term investments in proof-of-work crypto projects like Litcoin.
5. Continue to keep up to date with crypto developments that concern Bitcoin Smart Contracts.
6. Encourage others to read this book review (“The Sovereign Individual) in conjunction with the “Softwar” to quickly get up to speed on the significance of violence when carrying out global analysis.
7. Continue to encourage and show others how to discover their unique Genius.
8. Continue to show others how to use knowledge to act and think (strategically) in order to express their Genius (purpose).
9. Continue to prioritise reading and processing information to create valuable intellectual property (ideas).
10. Continue to focus on structuring your life in a way to grant you full autonomy and independence (Involgize Capital).
11. Continue to visit small countries and island to consider taking up residence.
12. Continue to drop the desire to be physically attached to any particular nation or group (decentralisation).
13. Acknowledge that the majority of people are simply not going to be able to keep-up with what’s coming. Expect it to cause others to suffer a major disorientation that will threaten their businesses, investments, and way of life.
14. Continue to acquire a breadth of knowledge strategically, being willing to take two steps back in order to move three steps forward.
15. Look into what the writers have written after the publication of “The Sovereign Individual.”
16. Consider inspectionally reading Frederic C Lane’s book about violence: “Profit from Power.”
17. Continue to reduce your consumption of all forms of mainstream news media.
18. Continue to strengthen and perfect your thinking ability (book reviews: elaboration).
19. Continue to stay attuned to the development of crypto privacy coins and protocols.
20. Consider strategically reading books about free-masons and European history in general in the near future.
21. Travel to the Middle-East to further consider building up Involgize Capital from there (tax-haven).
22. Expect large governments to breakdown in the future in line with microprocessing technology (decentralisation).
23. Find out the latest activities carried out by “Anonymous.”
24. Continue to build a private and individualised intelligence programme.
25. Continue to triple-down on the building of Involgize Capital.
26. Continue to acknowledge that by its very nature Involgize is unlikely to appeal to the majority of people.
27. Continue to acknowledge that a lack of racial intelligence impairs a person’s thinking (strategic) ability.
28. Acknowledge that you are living in a world where the majority of people are severely under-educated by design.
29. Become a customer of a government or protection service rather than a citizen.
30. Aim to never leave your money in any jurisdiction that claims the right to conscript you, your children, or your grandchildren. 
31. To optimize your wealth, aim to primarily reside in a country other than that from which you hold your first passport.
32. To optimize your wealth, keep the bulk of your money in a third jurisdiction, preferably a tax haven.
33. To optimize your wealth, acquaint yourself with the alternatives by travelling widely to visit attractive locales where you might wish to secure the right to reside in an emergency. 
34. Continue to read books about business and the behaviours and attitudes of successful people in the knowledge that becoming a success is a choice. 
35. Continue to focus on teaching yourself how to solve problems: as “success in business, as in most areas of life, depends upon being able to solve problems.”

Strategic Learning Points

1. Peter Thiel commented within the preface that Rees-Mogg did not anticipate the fact that Communist China would rise in the Information Age to the extent that they have now destroyed Hong Kong. Hong Kong was described within the book as the model of the kind of jurisdiction that we would expect to see proliferate in the future. I wonder, however, whether China’s ability to have defied the prognosis of this book was, in part, due to the fact that key personnel within the Communist Chinese Party had actually read this text. This book may have put them in a position to start thinking about how, strategically, they could cancel out the affects of the Information Age early, and it seems to be currently working. Thus, the learning point for me… continue to move in silence until we have achieved our wider objective. Otherwise, we will just be helping any potential opposition to identify exactly where to focus their efforts in order to counter the change we would like to see.
2. Peter Thiel believes that the current conflict over the future geo or mega-politics has just began (2020) relating to AI and Crypto, but he does not shed any further light on how he thinks that it will all play out. I take this as further reassurance that I did the right thing making the necessary sacrifices so that I could get up to speed in relation to these two subject areas. Intriguingly, he characterises AI as communist (all about control), and Crypto as libertarian (decentralisation).
3. Peter Thiel also encourages the reader to assess their current actions to ascertain what side we are bating for: are we functioning in a way that will encourage and spread decentralisation… or we operating in a way that will allow the masses to be controlled by AI?
4. Crypto is definitely an innovation that encourages the destruction of the nation-state when I think about it. The thing that comes to my mind immediately is crypto protocols that concern themselves with governance (Cardano). Just like “Softwar” characterises Bitcoin as Bit-power, crypto projects are much, much, more than global payment mechanisms. They openly confront and provide solution for all of the existing inefficiencies and corruption points within existing nation-states. This all further support the argument for the superior significance of Proof-of-Work crypto protocols.
5. Similar to “Softwar,” this book kicks off with an analysis of the importance of violence when understanding societies, nations, and geo-politics. As this book was written decades before “Softwar” it is not far-fetched to conclude that Jason Lowery was in fact influenced, directly or indirectly, by the ideas in this book when he wrote “Softwar” in 2023.
6. This text continues to repeatedly make a crucial point: the emergence of new technology (like gunpowder and the printing press) always have the long-term effect of completely changing the status quo, or how a society will start to evolve.
7. This book predicted the emergence of a new powerful “cognitive elite.” It makes me think that this may be precisely the reason why the Chinese Communist Party choose to arrest more than 500 Chinese billionaires as detailed with the book “Red Roulette”.
8. The writers wrote this text in order to position themselves as the advisors to this new emerging cognitive elite. However, their text appears to have, unintentionally, aided the existing powerful players by revealing to them what is highly likely to occur in the future, enabling them to counteract it.
9. Everything is connected. The same forces that are responsible for racial inequality and injustice are the same entities preserving the status quo. The same forces that prevent others from discovering and mastering their unique Genius and purpose in life. It just a case of whether we realise this or not.
10. The greatest source of wealth will be the ideas that we have in our heads as a result of the Information Age. And the brightest, most ambitious, and most successful amongst us will inevitably become Sovereign Individuals. Hence, the reason why the writers of this book wrote it to position themselves to serve this growing market. It makes me wonder whether I am personally destined to become this type of individual as it is something that definitely chimes with my activities, how I see the world, and precisely the future that I envision for myself.
11. “Equally, in the future, one of the milestones by which you measure your financial success will be not just now many zeroes you can add to your net worth, but whether you can structure your affairs in a way that enables you to realize full individual autonomy and independence.” In light of the prevalence of white supremacy, this has always been the most important thing for me to discover. Strategically, how do I structure my affairs in a way that enables me to have full individual control and independence. As, spiritually, I am not interested in strengthen the current inequality and injustices within the system in any shape or form at all.
12. This text argues that there will be increasing small-scale violence with large jurisdictions breaking down into smaller ones due to the information age weakening the hand of politics and centralised government. The people to benefit from this will be ones who are energetic and ambitious. They actually conclude that politics will be dead before the transition is fully complete. “The breakdown of the old order almost always unleashes a surge in crime, if not the outright anarchy.”
13. “The Sovereign Individual will redesign governments and reconfigure economies in the new millennium. The full implications of this change are all but unimaginable.” Hence the existence of the World Economic Forum (WEF). The tremendous downside is that none of this will guarantee the proliferation of decentralisation, which is why it makes sense for Thiel to characterise this as a battle between AI (centralisation) and Crypto (decentralisation).
14. Important point to note: technology is increasing the competition between jurisdictions to compete for global talent and resources (global liquidity); hence, the rise of Middle-East tax havens (Dubai and so forth).
15. Important point to further consider: the rise of the Sovereign Individual will result in governments attacking people with the same ferocity that they use to strike enemy states.
16. This text really reveals the true cost of being taxed within western democracies to the extent that it will amount to millions of pounds if the tax revenue was receiving compound interest over a long period.
17. It’s very true: “Cyberspace is the ultimate offshore jurisdiction.”
18. Using the analogy of an angry farmer that does not want to see her cattle escape, it is expected that the “… state will no doubt take desperate measures at first to tether and hobble its escaping herd. It will employ covert and even violent means to restrict access to liberating technologies.” But, in the long-term, it will prove futile as nothing can stop humans from using things that will solve real tangible daily problems (like the failure of the US war on drugs).
19. “Unlucky individuals will find themselves singled out and held to ransom in an almost medieval fashion. Businesses that offer services that facilitate the realization of autonomy by individuals will be subject to infiltration, sabotage, and disruption” (such as FTX, and CZ at Binance).
20. Being a Sovereign Individual runs counter to many people who are belongers: people who feel such a strong urge to identify themselves as part of a nation or a group that this feeling is easily exploited by organised sport.
21. “… expect to see a fierce and indignant resistance to the Information Revolution” as people are forced to change, but cannot keep up. I guess this would be expected to apply to AI and crypto, but Bitcoin seems to have captured the imagination of the people, and ChatGPT’s growing popularity may just be enough to prevent people from outright rejecting the further development of AI.
22. I looked into the Knights of Malta, the order which is an affinity group for rich Catholics, with 10,000 current members and an annual income of several billions. It was very intriguing to learn about what was happening before modern centralised state governments, which explains the existence of places like Gibraltar, the City of London Corporation, and so forth. Therefore, it is going to be crucial that I see the world anew. That means looking from the outside in to re-analyse much that I have probably taken for granted concerning the structure of society. Otherwise, I will also fall prey to an epidemic of disorientation that lies ahead for the majority of us.
23. Solid point made: “disorientation breeds mistakes that could threaten your business, your investments, and your way of life.”
24. The writers of this book make a crucial point. They are not considered expert in regard to any of the subjects that they cover and discuss in this book. Yet, they have been able to be more accurate than other forecasters who do consider themselves experts. The point: expertise in a particular subject will tend to blind a forecaster into only seeing what relates to their specialised knowledge. Whereas, being multi-disciplinary (knowledgeable about numerous different subjects) enables a forecaster to, clearly, see where the boundaries of necessity are drawn, and thus where those boundaries have been broken, typically, leading to major change.
25. “If lambs suddenly grew wings, lions would starve.” This statement reveals a key point: if we know how to act strategically by leaving western democracies on mass, it would be like lambs suddenly growing wings, causing those groups that feed off of our destruction to starve (the game)!
26. “At a time when experts in North America and Europe were pointing to Japan for support of the view that governments can successfully rig markets, we said otherwise. We forecast that the Japanese financial assets boom would end in a bust. Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Japanese stock market crashed, losing almost half its value.” The writers were right! It will definitely make strategic sense to make sure that I look into what the writers of this book wrote after its publication. Ideally, I’m hoping that they have written another book, but if not, it may make sense to try and get hold of their newsletters.
27. Key point about why the writers were able to provide an accurate prognosis of the future: “in spite of the central role of violence in determining the way the world works, it attracts surprisingly little serious attention.” Frederic Lane’s work on violence and the economic meaning of war is what the writers used as a framework to carry out their analysis of the future in regard to technology and the information age. It may be worth analytically or inspectionally reading the book written by Lane at some future date.
28. “Our purpose is to provide you with a sober, detached analysis of issues that could prove to be of great importance to you.” Similarly, when it comes to others, this is one of my major purposes in life also.
29. The authors characterised their books as thought exercises, revealing that their real work is, actually, all about thinking.
30. “… transaction volumes that could not be managed with old-fashioned nineteenth-century paperwork systems. If such businesses were forced to revert to shuffling paper they could expect to complete only a fraction of their normal transaction volume.” This was a brilliant point that I previously totally missed. We simply cannot go back to pen and paper because the size and speed of the majority of transactions that occur in the world today would become impossible.
31. The signs that a system is coming to an end is when the people become more reluctant to obey its laws (Trump supporters).
32. “No one who depended upon the pretences of officials for his understanding of the “news” would have learned that Rome had fallen until long after that information ceased to matter.” In other words, there will not be footage from the mainstream media outlets reporting the end of the system. It will just happen and they will, more likely than not, try to behave like nothing has happened.
33. The writers argue that forecasting works because in essence… “you can say with a high degree of confidence that if you drop a hundred-dollar bill on the street, someone will soon pick it up, whether you are in New York, Mexico City, or Moscow. This is not as trivial as it seems. It shows why the clever people who say that forecasting is impossible are wrong. Any forecast that accurately anticipates the impact of incentives on behavior is likely to be broadly correct. And the greater the anticipated change in costs and rewards, the less trivial the implied forecast is likely to be.” It is such a powerful strategic point. Violence is equivalent to the $100 dollar bill because its the thing that really influences the behaviour of people. So if we know where the boundaries of violence are (how violence is used and controlled), and how they are changing, then this will give us the heads-up on what is likely to occur in the future (Softwar: Cost of Attack (CoA), and Benefit of Attack (BoA)). 
34. So understanding how governments have always struggled to control the seas (international waters), provides a great starting point for anticipating how they may find it difficult to dominate cyberspace. “Topography is a crucial factor, as evidenced by the fact that control of violence on the open seas has never been monopolized as it has on land. No government’s laws have ever exclusively applied there. This is a matter of the utmost importance in understanding how the organization of violence and protection will evolve as the economy migrates into cyberspace.”
35. This book is first-class because the level of thinking that constructed it is top-notch. Everything is connected, so if we understand how the environment and specifically technology impacts human behaviour (changes power dynamics), it enables us to become very calculated with forecasting what it likely to happen in the future. For example, “If you know that a drop of one degree Centigrade on average reduces the growing season by three to four weeks and shaves five hundred feet off the maximum elevation at which crops can be grown, then you know something about the boundary conditions that will confine people’s action in the future. You can use this knowledge to forecast changes in everything from grain prices to land values. You may even be able to draw informed conclusions about the likely impact of falling temperatures on real incomes and political stability.”
36. The incredible accuracy of their analysis assessing violence and technology to form a framework allowed these writers to foresee the emergence of Bitcoin developers. “As we explore in a latter chapter, we believe that the Information Age will bring the dawn of cybersoldiers, who will be heralds of devolution. Cybersoldiers could be deployed not merely by nation-states but by very small organizations, and even by individuals. Wars of the next millennium will include some almost bloodless battles fought with computers.”
37. “Other things being equal, the more widely dispersed key technologies are, the more widely dispersed power will tend to be, and the smaller the optimum scale of government.” This made me think straightaway about crypto privacy coins or tokens (Tornado Cash). A quick search online revealed that alternative privacy coins and protocols have sprung up as a result of the US Governments clamp down of Tornado Cash. This suggest that it is going to be almost impossible for the US Government or any government to stop the proliferation and spread of privacy coins, because they are equivalent to finding $100 on the street. It just a case of whether we appreciate this fact or not.
38. The rise in farming in the past caused there to be a rise in violence at harvest time, because the produce from the farms increased the benefit of attack (BoA), causing it to outweigh the cost of attack (CoA).” The rise of decentralisation causes the cost of attack to start outweighing the benefit of attack. Therefore, it may be right to assume that AI will do the opposite. AI will cause the benefit of attack to outweigh the cost of attack because more centralisation will lead to more power, control, and thus stolen reward? Centralised crypto-currencies are asking for trouble with hackers (as they hold more assets then their benefit of attack will continue to far outweigh the cost of attack)!
39. Specialists in violence were the forefathers of government.
40. In the past, violence was such an issue that the only way a person could hold on to their property was to give it to the church or wealthier land owners who could afford the horses, armour, and men required for protection.
41. This book is unapologetically Eurocentric in so many places throughout the text: “farming was hard work. The memory of life before farming was that of paradise lost.”
42. Looking at the bigger picture, this book has really allowed me to appreciate that technology (crypto specifically) is likely to lead to the change of everything we are familiar with today. Such as a change in governance, a change in access to information (no censorship), a change in finance and financial control, and so on. It just a question of time for its full effect to play out.
43. I never quite fully understood how the Corporation of London could have it own governance and different rules within the one or two square miles radius of Central London. And how the aristocrats appear to be completely connected to the Royal Family on the outside, yet at the same time function with an extremely self-oriented and independent nature. As a result of reading this book, I now do (historically). “Unlike today, the concept of nationality played little or no role in establishing sovereignty in the Middle Ages. Monarchs, as well as some princes of the Church and powerful lords, possessed territories by private right. In a way that has no modern analogy, these lords could sell or give away territories or acquire new ones by conveyance or marriage as well as by conquest.” I remember a few Afrocentric scholars cleverly drawing the attention of their audience to the existence of these type of entities when trying to explain how the current society is ordered or structured against the interest of the people. “A relatively small, elite group of rich represent a more coherent and effective body than a large mass of citizens. The small group has stronger incentives to work together. It will almost inevitably be more effective at protecting its interests than will a mass group.”
44. “The capacity to mass-produce books was incredibly subversive to medieval institutions, just as microtechnology will prove subversive to the modern nation-state. Because the Church attempted to suppress the printing press, most of the new volumes were published in those areas of Europe where the writ of established authority was the weakest. This may prove to be a close analogy with attempts by the U.S. government today to suppress encryption technology. The Church found that censorship did not suppress the spread of subversive technology; it merely assured that it was put to its most subversive use.” I think this is exactly what is going to happen with crypto-currencies. There are going to be nations in the world, which will unintentionally or intentionally enable crypto-currency development to flourish. And the failure to suppress the technology in these regions will eventually cause the inevitable. It will introduce change in the world that cannot be re-bottled so to speak. This is why I am now seriously contemplating moving to the Middle-East for a period of time (to make full use of my knowledge and understanding).
45. “In The Bishop’s Brothels, historian E. J. Burford suggests that these “idiotic” regulations of marriage helped stimulate the growth of medieval prostitution, from which the Church profited mightily.” The moral of the story is that it is about over-standing that certain groups of people will create situations and circumstances that, absolutely, makes no sense in the name of power and control. Therefore, it is your responsibility to look after yourself. To understand the parameters of the chessboard, and start playing the game accordingly. Your continued survival will depend upon it.
46. “Consciously, or not, the Church tended to make religious virtues of its own economic interests, while militating against the development of manufacturing and independent commercial wealth that were destined to destabilize the feudal system.” This made me think about the strategy that appears to be being used by the Chinese Communist Party to prevent change (Red Roulette).
47. “Before the transition from the nation-state to the new sovereignties of the Information Age is complete, many residents of the largest and most powerful Western nation-states, like their counterparts in East Berlin in 1989, will be plotting to find their way out.” This is what many people in the crypto space have already started to do in regard to relocating to the Middle-East, and something it seems that, inevitably, I will do in the near future also.
48. “The challenge was not to create a system with the most efficient economy or the most rapid rate of growth, but to create a system that could extract more resources and channel them into the military. By its nature, military spending is an area where the financial returns per se are low or nonexistent.” This is a first-class analysis of the strength of western democracies in comparison to communist nations, making this book (knowledge-wise) worth more than its weight in gold.
49. “It is easy to see why governments were more successful in extracting resources when they dealt with millions of citizens individually rather than with a relative handful of lords, dukes, earls, bishops, contract mercenaries, free cities, and other semisovereign entities with whom the rulers of European states were obliged to negotiate prior to the mid-eighteenth century.” This allows me to appreciate that governments have never been as powerful as they currently are right now.
50. As I have always suspected, Nationalism seems to be all about preserving a country’s military power: “… nationalism, which became a corollary to mass democracy. States that could employ nationalism found that they could mobilize larger armies at a smaller cost. Nationalism was an invention that enabled a state to increase the scale at which it was militarily effective. Like politics itself, nationalism is mostly a modern invention.” This makes me think of the patriotism in the US, and the US Military’s use of American Football to advertise the armed forces. 
51. “Congress was not a temple of democracy, it was a market for bartering laws.” This observation seems spot on, suggesting that there is no-way that western democracies will be able to continue in their current form for much longer.
52. Intriguing observation that society’s social systems always tend to mimic the prevailing technological developments. Thus, if everything is becoming miniaturized with microprocessors in the Information Age, then this would suggest that big government would have to become likewise. Just like as “gigantic factories coincided with the age of big government.”
53. “The new intelligent agents of the Information Age, although their activities will be largely confined to cyberspace, add a new alternative. Their loyalties, unlike those of the mercenaries, private guards, and even remote cousins, will be beyond dispute.” So, essentially, new groups of soldiers who fight in cyberspace (maybe like Anonymous) will inevitably alter the power dynamic of centralised governments. This is because it may get to a point where centralised governments become fearful of the ability of such groups to cause mass-scale disruption or use cyber-space to defeat their power plays. It’s going to be really interesting to see how all of this continues to further play out.
54. “The simple fact is that the larger sense of patriotism—a love of nation, a sense of filial duty to it—is not a particularly useful predisposition to have any longer.… Citizens who thrive in the global society will identify themselves globally.” In light of what has happened to people of African descent historically, and what continues to happen, this will most likely be considered by them a desirable requirement.
55. As a result of reading this book, I have really started to look into alternative countries to move too in the long-term, like the Seychelles where Kwame Nkrumah and Yaa Nsantewaa were imprisoned because of its remoteness. This remoteness may now be key to settling within a location that will weather the violent decline that it likely to occur in the near future within western democracies.
56. “Ironically, attempts by nation-states to wage “information wars” to dominate or thwart access to cyberspace would probably only accelerate their own demise.” This seems to be the case within the crypto-currencies space. The more the US and Chinese Governments tried to ban Bitcoin and crypto-currencies, the more popular it becomes. Reassuringly, this text suggests that any continued effort to lead an information war against crypto is only going to increase the rate of adoption. Which reminds me of the importance of investing long-term in proof-of-work protocols. 
57. I wonder if the US Government banning US personnel (who want security clearance) from owning Bitcoin was related to the following assertion: “modern armies are so dependent on information that it is possible to blind and deafen them in order to achieve victory without fighting in the conventional sense.”
58. “The ‘vag’ sits on the edge of the highway, broken, hungry. Overhead, flies a transcontinental plane filled with highly paid executives. The upper class has taken to the air, the lower class to the road: there is no longer any bond between them, they are two nations.” This passage is so true, it reminds me that the extent of the inequality in modern-day society is beyond comprehension. Therefore, I must always strive to always remain aware of reality at all times.
59. “Their [the elite] dismissal of the economic potential of the Net is another proof that being technically well-informed is not synonymous with understanding the consequences of technology.” The same is also true of their standardised education system that is, simply, no match for a private and individualised intelligence programme (such as the discovery of Genius, strategic reading, and the building of a Second Digital Brain). Yet, they will continue to live in denial, failing to understand the full consequences of how technology will dramatically enhance an average person’s IQ to such an extent that being wealthy will provide little advantage.
60. The key difference in the future will be that for “the first time in history, megapolitical conditions will allow the ablest investors and entrepreneurs rather than specialists in violence ultimate control over capital.”
61. It fair to concluded that… “the cybereconomy of the Information Age (crypto-currencies) will be more free than any other commercial realm in history.” It is therefore reasonable to expect that crypto will rapidly become the most important new economy of the new millennium.
62. When it is accepted that politicians no longer have control over the resources, then that is the day that people will forget about politics.
63. Key point: “because location will mean much less in the Information Society, there will be a diminished role in the future for all organizations that operate within rather than beyond geographic boundaries.” This makes me think about making sure that I triple down on my Involgize Capital activities, because it is a business that requires no location, and can operate beyond geographical boundaries.
64. The information age will cause a situation where the most ablest people within many industries will be disproportionately rewarded similar to the way that athletes receive astronomical pay in comparison to that of a spectator.
65. Countries with a single major city are likely to last longer that those with multiple major metropolis (like the US) because there will not be many large interest groups competing for dominance, thus speeding up the occurrence of a decline.
66. “… popular hatred of the information elite, rich people, the well-educated, and complaints about capital flight and disappearing jobs.” I find the idea of a popular hatred against people who are well-educated quite intriguing. This would explain why I observe that many who find out about my work are repelled by it!
67. I have seen what the writers call “narrow-casting” take hold in UK society in the respect that people who see themselves as part of the working class, today, consume news that is not being produced solely by the mainstream media outlets. As a result, they have begun questioning everything, and are choosing to consume news that further informs them about the inner workings of the government and their country as a whole.
68. “Black anger has risen, even as black lifestyles have grown more dysfunctional. Out-of-wedlock births have soared. Educational attainment has fallen. Growing percentages of young blacks are implicated in criminal activities, to the point where there are now more black men in penitentiaries than in colleges” [really!… and what groups of people are benefiting from the destructions of black people? Who are the main financial beneficiaries from the anti-social behaviour of black people? Because black people do not control their communities economically, or their education system, or their mass media, or the government, or the major business and logistics capabilities, or their food, or law enforcement and the criminal justice system so where is all this damaging black lifestyle coming from? (p. 317).”
69. “By this we do not mean to say that we expect to see dictatorship, but rather entrepreneurial government —the commercialization of sovereignty.” Seems to me that the writers are trying to be clever with their use of words. To put what they expect to see in another way, they anticipate the emergence of an entrepreneurial government as a new form of dictatorship focused on the commercialisation of all people and things. Now, how is this going to be beneficial to long-term welfare of the people in general?
70. How much do I appreciate that the majority of people seems to be severely undereducated? “The study, “Adult Literacy in America,” shows that finding a literate audience for any political argument is by no means easy. A large fraction, perhaps a majority of Americans over the age of fifteen, lack basic skills essential to evaluating ideas and formulating judgments.”
71. “In a world of artificial reality and instantaneous transmission of everything everywhere, integrity of judgment and the ability to distinguish the true from the false will be even more important.” This is why, strategically, understanding an Afro-Centric perspective on western society is highly likely to become more and more valuable as time goes on.
72. Intriguingly, the writers claim that in the next century we will see the creation of a world super-class of about 500 million extremely rich people with 100 million being sovereign individuals.
73. We will need to become a customer of a government or protection service rather than a citizen: “the argument of this book clearly informs the decision to redeploy your capital, if you have any. Citizenship is obsolete. To optimize your lifetime earnings and become a Sovereign Individual you will need to become a customer of a government or protection service.”
74. Books practical advice: (1) “you should aim never to leave your money in any jurisdiction that claims the right to conscript you, your children, or your grandchildren.” “Whatever your current residence or nationality, to optimize your wealth you should (2) aim to primarily reside in a country other than that from which you hold your first passport, while (3) keeping the bulk of your money in yet a third jurisdiction, preferably a tax haven.” “(4) To better acquaint yourself with the alternatives, we recommend that you travel widely to visit attractive locales where you might wish to secure the right to reside in an emergency.” (6) The writers advise their readers to read books about business and the behaviours and attitudes of successful people in the knowledge that becoming a success is a choice. (7) Resist the urge to become a computer programmer in the future because of the increasing capabilities of AI. (8) Focus on teaching yourself how to solve problems: as “success in business, as in most areas of life, depends upon being able to solve problems. If you can teach yourself how to solve problems, you have a bright career ahead of yourself.”

Key Strategic Sentences and Paragraphs from ‘The Sovereign Individual‘

Preface

“And of course, there are some things they missed: above all, the rise of China. The twenty-first-century People’s Republic of China under the Communist Party has created its very own illustration, Communist China has crushed the city-state of Hong Kong — whereas Rees-Mogg and Davidson had described Hong Kong as “a mental model of the kind of jurisdiction that we expect to see flourish in the Information Age” (p. 9).”

“In truth, the great conflict over our megapolitical future is only just beginning. On the dimension of technology, the conflict has two poles: AI and crypto (p. 9).”

“Strong cryptography, at the other pole, holds out the prospect of a decentralized and individualized world. If AI is communist, crypto is libertarian (p. 9).”

“… way to think carefully about the future that your own actions will help to create. It is an opportunity not to be wasted (p. 9).”

Chapter 1: The Transition of the Year 2000: The Fourth Stage of Human Society

“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. This will be far from an easy transformation (p. 15).”

“When the payoff for organizing violence at a large scale tumbles, the payoff from violence at a smaller scale is likely to jump. Violence will become more random and localized. Organized crime will grow in scope. We explain why (p. 15).”

“The death of Communism is merely the most striking example exhausted. Even many of its leaders no longer believe the platitudes they mouth. Nor are they believed by others (p. 15).”

“We know what happened to organized religion in the wake of the Gunpowder Revolution. Technological developments created strong incentives to downsize religious institutions and lower their costs. A similar technological revolution is destined to downsize radically the nation-state early in the new millennium (p. 16).”

“The most obvious benefits will flow to the “cognitive elite,” who will increasingly operate outside political boundaries. They are already equally at home in Frankfurt, London, New York, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Incomes will become more unequal within jurisdictions and more equal between them (p. 17).”

“The Sovereign Individual explores the social and financial consequences of this revolutionary change. Our desire is to help you to take advantage of the opportunities of the new age and avoid being destroyed by its impact (p. 17).”

“To a greater degree than most would now be willing to concede, it will prove difficult or impossible to preserve many contemporary institutions in the new millennium (p. 17).”

“The coming transformation is both good news and bad. The good news is that the Information Revolution will liberate individuals as never before. For the first time, those who can educate and motivate themselves will be almost entirely free to invent their own work and realize the full benefits of their own productivity. Genius will be unleashed, freed from both the oppression of government and the drags of racial and ethnic prejudice (p. 17).”

“Merit, wherever it arises, will be rewarded as never before. 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. The brightest, most successful and ambitious of these will emerge as truly Sovereign Individuals (p. 18).”

“Equally, in the future, one of the milestones by which you measure your financial success will be not just now many zeroes you can add to your net worth, but whether you can structure your affairs in a way that enables you to realize full individual autonomy and independence (p. 18).”

“The benefits of declining returns to violence and devolving jurisdictions will create scope for every energetic and ambitious person to benefit from the death of politics (p. 19).”

“Beyond Politics (p. 19).”

“The emergence of the sovereign individual will demonstrate yet again the strange prophetic power of myth. Conceiving little of the laws of nature, the early agricultural peoples imagined that “powers we should call supernatural” were widely distributed (p. 19).”

“The new Sovereign Individual will operate like the gods of myth in the same physical environment as the ordinary, subject citizen, but in a separate realm politically. Commanding vastly greater resources and beyond the reach of many forms of compulsion, the Sovereign Individual will redesign governments and reconfigure economies in the new millennium. The full implications of this change are all but unimaginable (p. 20).”

“As it does, the capacity of nation-states to redistribute income on a large scale will collapse. Information technology facilitates dramatically increased competition between jurisdictions (p. 21).”

“Weakened by the challenge from technology, the state will treat increasingly autonomous individuals, its former citizens, with the same range of ruthlessness and diplomacy it has heretofore displayed in its dealing with other governments (p. 21).”

“The emergence of Bin Laden as the enemy- in- chief of the United States reflects a momentous change in the nature of warfare. A single individual, albeit one with hundreds of millions of dollars, can now be depicted as a plausible threat to the greatest military power of… (p. 22).”

“Technology will make individuals more nearly sovereign than ever before. And they will be treated that way. Sometimes violently, as enemies, sometimes as equal parties in negotiation, sometimes as allies. But however ruthlessly governments behave, particularly in the transition period, wedding the IRS with the CIA will avail them little. They will be increasingly required by the press of necessity to bargain with autonomous individuals whose resources will no longer be so easily controlled (p. 22).”

“As technology revolutionizes the tools we use, it also antiquates our laws, reshapes our morals, and alters our perceptions. This book explains how (p. 23).”

“Tax-free money already compounds far faster offshore than onshore funds still subject to the high tax burden imposed by the twentieth-century nation-state (p. 23).”

“In cyberspace, the meek and the mighty will meet on equal terms. Cyberspace is the ultimate offshore jurisdiction. An economy with no taxes. Bermuda in the sky with diamonds (p. 23).”

“… cows, keeping them in a field to be milked. Soon, the cows will have wings (p. 24).”

“Like an angry farmer, the state will no doubt take desperate measures at first to tether and hobble its escaping herd. It will employ covert and even violent means to restrict access to liberating technologies (p. 24).”

“Their importance for controlling the world’s wealth will be transcended by mathematical algorithms that have no physical existence (p. 24).”

“Unlucky individuals will find themselves singled out and held to ransom in an almost medieval fashion. Businesses that offer services that facilitate the realization of autonomy by individuals will be subject to infiltration, sabotage, and disruption (p. 25).”

“Western governments will seek to suppress the cybereconomy by totalitarian means (p. 25).”

“Many humans, as the passage quoted from Craig Lambert attests, are belongers, who place importance on being members of a group. The same need to identify that motivates fans of organized sports makes some partisans of nations (p. 26).”

“We expect similar clashes early in the new millennium as Information Societies supplant those organized along industrial lines (p. 27).”

“Get ready to duck. With the speed of change outracing the moral and economic capacity of many in living generations to adapt, you can expect to see a fierce and indignant resistance to the Information Revolution, notwithstanding its great promise to liberate the future (p. 27).”

“The new information and communication technologies are more subversive of the modern state than any political threat to its predominance since Columbus sailed (p. 27).”

“This is important because those in power have seldom reacted peacefully to developments that undermined their authority. They are not likely to now (p. 27).”

“Increasingly autonomous individuals and bankrupt, desperate governments will confront one another across a new divide. We expect to see a radical restructuring of the nature of sovereignty and the virtual death of politics before the transition is over (p. 28).”

“Instead of state domination and control of resources, you are destined to see the privatization of almost all services governments now provide. For inescapable reasons that we explore in this book, information technology will destroy the capacity of the state to charge (p. 28).”

“The transformation of the year 2000 implies the commercialization of sovereignty and the death of politics, no less than guns implied the demise of oath-based feudalism. Citizenship will go the way of chivalry (p. 28).”

“More commonly known as the Knights of Malta, the order is an affinity group for rich Catholics, with 10,000 current members and an annual income of several billions. The Knights of Malta issues its own passports, stamps, and money, and carries on full diplomatic relations with seventy countries (p. 29).”

“We explore still other models of fragmented sovereignty in which small groups can effectively lease the sovereignty of weak nation-states, and operate their own economic havens much as free ports and free trade zones are licensed to do today (p. 30).”

“Just as attempts to preserve the power of knights in armor were doomed to fail in the face of gunpowder weapons, so the modern notions of nationalism and citizenship are destined to be short-circuited by microtechnology (p. 30).”

“Because of the competitive position of the two authorities, residents of march regions seldom paid tax. What is more, they usually had a choice in deciding whose laws they were to obey, a choice that was exercised through such legal concepts as “avowal” and “distraint” that have now all but vanished (p. 31).”

“We expect such concepts to become a prominent feature of the law of Information Societies (p. 31).”

“Some of these new entities, like the Knights Templar and other religious military orders of the Middle Ages, may control considerable wealth and military power without controlling any fixed territory (p. 32).”

“They will be organized on principles that bear no relation to nationality at all. Members and leaders of religious corporations that exercised sovereign authority in parts of Europe in the Middle Ages in no sense derived their authority from national identity (p. 32).”

“It will therefore be crucial that you see the world anew. That means looking from the outside in to re-analyze much that you have probably taken for granted (p. 32).”

“This will enable you to come to a new understanding. If you fail to transcend conventional thinking at a time when conventional thinking is losing touch with reality, then you will be more likely to fall prey to an epidemic of disorientation that lies ahead (p. 32).”

“Disorientation breeds mistakes that could threaten your business, your investments, and your way of life (p. 33).”

“Notice that our approach to understanding how the world changes is very different from that of most forecasters. We are not experts in anything, in the sense that we pretend to know a great deal more about certain “subjects” than those who have spent their entire careers cultivating highly specialized knowledge. To the contrary, we look from the outside in. We are knowledgeable around the subjects about which we make forecasts. Most of all, this involves seeing where the boundaries of necessity are drawn. When they change, society necessarily changes, no matter what people may wish to the contrary (p. 33).”

“If lambs suddenly grew wings, lions would starve. The capacity to utilize and defend against violence is the crucial variable that alters life at the margin. We put violence at the center of our theory of megapolitics for good reason (p. 33).”

“At a time when experts in North America and Europe were pointing to Japan for support of the view that governments can successfully rig markets, we said otherwise. We forecast that the Japanese financial assets boom would end in a bust. Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Japanese stock market crashed, losing almost half its value. We continue to believe that its ultimate low could match or exceed the 89 percent loss that Wall Street suffered at the bottom after 1929 (p. 34).”

“We anticipated and explained why the “new world order” would prove to be a “new world disorder.” Well before the atrocities in Bosnia engrossed the headlines, we warned that Yugoslavia would collapse into civil war (p. 36).”

“In spite of the central role of violence in determining the way the world works, it attracts surprisingly little serious attention. Most political analysts and economists write as if violence were a minor irritant, like a fly buzzing around a cake, and not the chef who baked it (p. 37).”

“Lane published his work on violence and the economic meaning of war well before the advent of the Information Age. He certainly was not writing in anticipation of microprocessing or the other technological revolutions now unfolding. Yet his insights into violence established a framework for understanding how society will be reconfigured in the Information Revolution (p. 38).”

“He saw the fact that how violence is organized and controlled plays a large role in determining “what uses are made of scarce resources” (p. 38).”

“But don’t expect most people to notice, much less follow, so unfashionably abstract an argument. While the attention of the world is riveted on dishonest debates and wayward personalities, the meanderings of megapolitics continue almost unnoted determine what types of political systems are actually viable. That is the focus of this book. 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 (p. 38-39).”

“Some of the shrewdest observers of the mid-twentieth century became convinced on the evidence of the day that the tendency of the nation-state to centralize power would lead to totalitarian domination over all aspects of life (p. 40).”

“These works were written before the advent of microprocessing, which has incubated a whole range of technologies that enhance the capacity of small groups and even individuals to function independently of central authority (p. 40).”

“Totalitarian Communism barely outlasted the year 1984. A new form of serfdom may yet emerge in the next millennium if governments succeed in suppressing the liberating aspects of microtechnology. But it is far more likely that we will see unprecedented opportunity and autonomy for the individual. What our parents worried about may prove to be no problem at all (p. 40).”

“Our purpose is to provide you with a sober, detached analysis of issues that could prove to be of great importance to you (p. 41).”

“This book is written in a constructive spirit. It is the third we have written together, analyzing various stages of the great change now under way. Like Blood in the Streets and The Great Reckoning, it is a thought exercise (p. 41).”

“We expect that representative democracy as it is now known will fade away, to be replaced by the new democracy of choice in the cybermarketplace. If our deductions are correct, the politics of the next century will be much more varied and less important than that to which we have become accustomed (p. 42).”

“For quite logical reasons, we believe that microprocessing will inevitably subvert and destroy the nation-state, creating new forms of social organization in the process. It is both necessary and possible for you to foresee at least some details of the new way of life that may be here sooner than you think (p. 42).”

“… transaction volumes that could not be managed with old-fashioned nineteenth-century paperwork systems. If such businesses were forced to revert to shuffling paper they could expect to complete only a fraction of their normal transaction volume (p. 45).”

“University of Paris, claims that this rupture at the end of the tenth century involved the complete collapse of the remnants of ancient institutions, and the emergence of something new out of the anarchy—feudalism (p. 50).”

“Like Spengler, we see the impending death of Western civilization, and with it the collapse of the world order that has predominated these past five centuries, ever since Columbus sailed west to open contact with the New World (p. 52).”

“Yet unlike Spengler we see the birth of a new stage in Western civilization in the coming millennium (p. 52).”

Chapter 2: Megapolitical Transformations in Historic Perspective

“The others won’t. Like an ancient and once mighty man, the nation-state has a future numbered in years and days, and no longer in centuries and decades (p. 53).”

“The fourth stage of human development is coming, and perhaps its least predictable feature is the new name under which it will be known. Call it “Post-Modern.” Call it the “Cyber Society” or the “Information Age” (p. 54).”

“Those living during the feudal centuries could not have imagined themselves as living in a halfway house between antiquity and modern civilization until it dawned on them not just that the medieval period was over, but also that medieval civilization differed dramatically from that of the Dark Ages or antiquity (p. 54).”

“This is true for practical reasons. The more apparent it is that a system is nearing an end, the more reluctant people will be to adhere to its laws (p. 55).”

“No one who depended upon the pretenses of officials for his understanding of the “news” would have learned that Rome had fallen until long after that information ceased to matter (p. 56).”

“When the power of predominant institutions is brought into the bargain to reinforce a convenient conclusion, even one based largely on pretense, only someone of strong character and strong opinions would dare contradict it (p. 57).”

“It is about something different—namely, the way that history’s great transformations are perceived, or rather, misperceived as they happen (p. 59).”

“If their views do change abruptly, it probably indicates that they have been confronted by some departure from familiar conditions: an invasion, a plague, a sudden climatic shift, or a technological revolution that alters their livelihoods or their ability to defend themselves (p. 60).”

“You can say with a high degree of confidence that if you drop a hundred-dollar bill on the street, someone will soon pick it up, whether you are in New York, Mexico City, or Moscow. This is not as trivial as it seems. It shows why the clever people who say that forecasting is impossible are wrong. Any forecast that accurately anticipates the impact of incentives on behavior is likely to be broadly correct. And the greater the anticipated change in costs and rewards, the less trivial the implied forecast is likely to be (p. 62).”

“Violence is the ultimate boundary force on behavior; thus, if you can understand how the logic of violence will change, you can usefully predict where people will be dropping or picking up the equivalent of one-hundred-dollar bills in the future (p. 62).”

“The number of unknowable events that could alter the course of history is large. But knowing the unknowable is very different from drawing out the implications of what is already known (p. 62).”

“As economic historian Frederic Lane so clearly put it, how violence is organized and controlled plays a large role in determining “what uses are made of scarce resources” (p. 65).”

“1. Topography is a crucial factor, as evidenced by the fact that control of violence on the open seas has never been monopolized as it has on land. No government’s laws have ever exclusively applied there. This is a matter of the utmost importance in understanding how the organization of violence and protection will evolve as the economy migrates into cyberspace (p. 65).”

“If you know that a drop of one degree Centigrade on average reduces the growing season by three to four weeks and shaves five hundred feet off the maximum elevation at which crops can be grown, then you know something about the boundary conditions that will confine people’s action in the future. You can use this knowledge to forecast changes in everything from grain prices to land values. You may even be able to draw informed conclusions about the likely impact of falling temperatures on real incomes and political stability (p. 67).”

“Technology has played by far the largest role in determining the costs and rewards of projecting power during the modern centuries. The argument of this book presumes it will continue to do so. Technology has several crucial dimensions (p. 69).”

“As we explore in a latter chapter, we believe that the Information Age will bring the dawn of cybersoldiers, who will be heralds of devolution. Cybersoldiers could be deployed not merely by nation-states but by very small organizations, and even by individuals. Wars of the next millennium will include some almost bloodless battles fought with computers (p. 70).”

“Other things being equal, the more widely dispersed key technologies are, the more widely dispersed power will tend to be, and the smaller the optimum scale of government (p. 70).”

“Yet, taking a longer perspective, the more likely risk appears to be a shift toward a colder, not a warmer climate (p. 71).”

“If temperatures were to turn colder, as they did in the seventeenth century, that might prove megapolitically destabilizing (p. 71).”

“Why? Part of the reason is that the normal balance of nature tends to make it beneficial for microbes to infect but not destroy host populations (p. 72).”

“Virulent infections that kill their hosts too readily tend to eradicate themselves in the process. The survival of microparasites depends upon their not being too rapidly or uniformly fatal to the hosts they invade (p. 72).”

“Westerners were armed with unseen biological weapons, their relative immunity to childhood diseases that frequently devastated native peoples (p. 72).”

“Improving public health, and the advent of vaccinations and antidotes, generally reduced the importance of infectious microbes during the modern period, thereby increasing (p. 73).”

“We cross our fingers and assume that the major megapolitical variables in the next millennium will be technological rather than microbiological (p. 73).”

Chapter 3: East of Eden: The Agricultural Revolution and the Sophistication of Violence

“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 (p. 74).”

“A large group of foragers would have laid waste to the countryside through overharvesting like a starving army in the Thirty Years War. Therefore, to minimize overkill, hunting bands had to be small (p. 75).”

“Lacking any sustained and separate political organization or bureaucracy required by specialization for war, hunting-and-gathering bands had to depend on persuasion and consensus—principles that work best among small groups with relatively easygoing attitudes (p. 76).”

“Experts like Stephen Boyden argue that primitive groups were usually not warlike or prone to violence (p. 76).”

“To the contrary, overkill reduced the prospects of finding food in the future, and thus had a detrimental impact on the well-being of the group (p. 78).”

“Farmers were subject to raids at harvest time, which gradually raised the scale of warfare (p. 78).”

“Specialists in violence, the forefathers of government, increasingly devoted themselves to plunder and protection from plunder. Along with the priests, they became the first wealthy persons in history (p. 79).”

“Farming also extended the horizon over which humans had to solve problems. Hunting bands lived within an immediate time horizon. They seldom undertook projects that lasted more than a few days. But planting and harvesting a crop took months. Pursuing projects of a longer time frame led farmers to train their attentions on the stars. Detailed astronomical observations were a precondition for drawing up almanacs and calendars to serve as guides on when to best plant and reap. With the advent of farming, human horizons expanded (p. 80).”

“In fact, a large portion of the surviving cuneiform tablets from Sumer, an early Mesopotamian civilization, record various acts of trade, most of which involve the transfer of property titles (p. 81).”

“In general, risk-averse behavior has been common among all groups that operated along the margins of survival (p. 82).”

“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 (p. 84).”

“As historian Georges Duby observed, “At the end of the sixth century, Europe was a profoundly uncivilized place” (p. 85).”

“Together, these apparently minor technological innovations dramatically devalued the military importance of the smallholders, who could not afford to maintain war-horses and arm themselves (p. 88).”

“The only sure way for a peasant to hold on to the land he tilled was to concede ownership of it to the Church, so he could retain its usufruct.”30 Others ceded some or all of their land to wealthier farmers in whom they had confidence, either friendly neighbors or relatives (p. 88).”

“The poor farmers were also to enjoy the reciprocal support of the more substantial holders, now the “nobles” who were able to afford horse and armor, and thus provide protection to the enlarged estates. Such a bargain can be seen from the new serf’s point of view as a halfway station between continuing economic ownership and foreclosure. More often than not, it was a bargain he could not refuse (p. 88).”

“… that the king or his counts could effectively challenge the local supremacy of the lords (p. 90).”

“Feudalism was the response of agricultural society to the collapse of order at a time of low productivity. During the early stages of feudalism, the Church played an important and economically productive role (p. 90).”

“The relative importance of the Church as opposed to secular authorities is reflected in the fact that by the eleventh century, the main administrative division of authority in most of Western Europe came to be the parish, rather than the old divisions of civil authority, the ager and pagus (town) that had persisted from Roman times through the Dark Ages (p. 91).”

“Even London Bridge, which stood until the nineteenth century, was constructed by a chaplain and financed in part by a contribution of 1,000 marks from the papal legate (p. 92).”

“In many ways, the Church helped to temper the ferocity of violence unleashed by armed knights during and after the “feudal revolution.” Especially in the early centuries of feudalism, the Church contributed significantly to improving the productivity of the farming economy. It was an essential institution, well fitted to the needs of agrarian society at the close of the Dark Ages (p. 93).”

“PARADISE LOST Farming set humanity on an entirely new course. The first farmers truly planted the seeds of civilization. From their toil came cities, armies, arithmetic, astronomy, dungeons, wine and whiskey, the written word, kings, slavery, and war. Yet notwithstanding all the drama that farming was to add to life, the shift away from the primeval economy appears to have been roundly unpopular from its earliest days (p. 93).”

“Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” Farming was hard work. The memory of life before farming was that of paradise lost (p. 94).”

Chapter 4: The Last Days of Politics: Parallels Between the Senile Decline of the Holy Mother Church and the Nanny State

“Yet politics in the modern sense, as the preoccupation with controlling and rationalizing the power of the state, is mostly a modern invention (p. 95).”

“Politics began five centuries ago with the early stages of industrialism. Now it is dying. A widespread revulsion against politics and politicians is sweeping the world (p. 96).”

“Mona Sahlin, a deputy prime minister and presumptive prime minister, was forced to resign in the face of allegations that she used government credit cards to purchase diapers and other household goods (p. 96).”

“As we explored in the last chapter, the Church played a leading role at the end of the tenth century in establishing order and facilitating economic recovery from the anarchy that marked the close of the Dark Ages. At that time, the Church was indispensable to the survival of large numbers of small freeholders and serfs who made up the bulk of the Western European population (p. 98).”

“Technology is precipitating a revolution in the exercise of power that will destroy the nation-state just as assuredly as gunpowder weapons and the printing press destroyed the monopoly of the medieval Church (p. 99).”

“As Huizinga said, medieval warriors were distinguished by “outward signs of… divergences: liveries, colors, badges, party cries” (p. 100).”

“Unlike today, the concept of nationality played little or no role in establishing sovereignty in the Middle Ages. Monarchs, as well as some princes of the Church and powerful lords, possessed territories by private right. In a way that has no modern analogy, these lords could sell or give away territories or acquire new ones by conveyance or marriage as well as by conquest (p. 102).”

“Cities and countries changed sovereigns the way that antiques change owners. In many cases, sovereigns were not native to the regions in which their properties lay (p. 103).”

“Corporate Sovereignty Sovereignty was also exercised by religious corporations like the Knights Templar, the Knights of St. John, the Teutonic Knights, and the Knights of Malta. While the Knights of Malta still exist and as we write are poised to recover sovereignty over Fort St. Angelo in Malta, such hybrid institutions have had no modern counterparts. They combined religious, social, judicial, and financial activities with sovereignty over localities (p. 103).”

“Such bargains proved to be far cheaper to the state and much less troublesome than attempts to assemble military forces by negotiating with powerful lords and local notables, each of whom was capable of resisting demands that ran counter to his interests as no individual citizen in the nation-state conceivably could (p. 106).”

“In the old system, everyone had a different place in an architectonic hierarchy. Everyone had a bargain as unique as his coat of arms and the colorful pennants he flew (p. 107).”

“This blindness to the economic dimension of life was reinforced by churchmen, who were the ideological guardians of medieval life. They were so far from grasping the importance of commerce that one widely applauded fifteenth-century reform program proposed that all persons of nonnoble status be required to devote themselves exclusively to handicrafts or farm labor. No role was contemplated for commerce whatsoever (p. 108).”

“The capacity to mass-produce books was incredibly subversive to medieval institutions, just as microtechnology will prove subversive to the modern nation-state (p. 110).”

“Because the Church attempted to suppress the printing press, most of the new volumes were published in those areas of Europe where the writ of established authority was the weakest. This may prove to be a close analogy with attempts by the U.S. government today to suppress encryption technology. The Church found that censorship did not suppress the spread of subversive technology; it merely assured that it was put to its most subversive use (p. 110).”

“Mass production of books ended the Church’s monopoly on Scripture, as well as on other forms of information (p. 111).”

“The wider availability of books reduced the cost of literacy and thus multiplied the number of thinkers who were in a position to offer their own opinions on important subjects, particularly theological subjects (p. 111).”

“We believe that change as dramatic as that of five hundred years ago will happen again. The Information Revolution will destroy the monopoly of power of the nation-state as surely as the Gunpowder Revolution destroyed the Church’s monopoly (p. 112).”

“Canon law was also imposed to reinforce monopoly prices. The Church earned significant revenues from the sale of alum mined from its properties in Tolfa, Italy. When some of its customers in the textile industry showed a preference for cheaper alum imported from Turkey, the Vatican attempted to sustain its monopoly pricing through canon law, declaring it sinful to use the less costly alum (p. 114).”

“Like the nation-state today, the late-medieval Church not only regulated specific industries to directly underpin its own interests; it also made the most of its regulatory powers to gain revenue for itself in other ways (p. 114).”

“In The Bishop’s Brothels, historian E. J. Burford suggests that these “idiotic” regulations of marriage helped stimulate the growth of medieval prostitution, from which the Church profited mightily (p. 115).”

“Today I have twice become a father. God’s blessing on it.”50 —RODOLPH AGRICOLA, on hearing that his concubine had given birth to a son on the day he was elected abbo (p. 118).”

“DOWNSIZING THE CHURCH By the end of the fifteenth century, the Church was not only as corrupt as the nation-state today; it was also a major drag on economic growth (p. 120).”

“Thus the holdings of Church land tended steadily to rise, as the Church received more and more testamentary gifts from the faithful for financing various social welfare services, chantries, and other activities (p. 123).”

“Consciously, or not, the Church tended to make religious virtues of its own economic interests, while militating against the development of manufacturing and independent commercial wealth that were destined to destabilize the feudal system (p. 124).”

“For this very reason, they were ill-suited to the needs of industrial society, just as the moral, cultural, and legal constraints of the modern nation-state are ill-suited to facilitating commerce in the Information Age (p. 125).”

“An equally striking parallel arose from a tremendous surge in crime. The breakdown of the old order almost always unleashes a surge in crime, if not the outright anarchy of the feudal revolution we explored in the last chapter (p. 126).”

“The end of the fifteenth century was a time of disillusion, confusion, pessimism, and despair. A time much like now (p. 126).”

Chapter 5: The Life and Death of the Nation-State: Democracy and Nationalism as Resource Strategies in the Age of Violence

“The Berlin Wall was built to a very different purpose than the walls of San Giovanni—to prevent people on the inside from escaping rather than to prevent predators on the outside from entering (p. 128).”

“That fact alone is a telling indicator of the rise in the power of the state from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. And in more ways than one (p. 128).”

“Before the transition from the nation-state to the new sovereignties of the Information Age is complete, many residents of the largest and most powerful Western nation-states, like their counterparts in East Berlin in 1989, will be plotting to find their way out (p. 129).”

“With governments mostly organized on a large scale, even the few small sovereignties that survived, like Monaco or Andorra, needed the recognition of the larger states to ensure their independence (p. 132).”

“The same megapolitical revolution that killed Communism is also likely to undermine and destroy democratic welfare states as we have known them in the twentieth century (p. 135).”

“Those governments that are more effective in mobilizing military resources, even at the cost of wasting many of them, tend to prevail over those that utilize resources more efficiently (p. 140).”

“The challenge was not to create a system with the most efficient economy or the most rapid rate of growth, but to create a system that could extract more resources and channel them into the military. By its nature, military spending is an area where the financial returns per se are low or nonexistent (p. 141).”

“We could hold an ad hoc election, what H. L. Mencken described, with less exaggeration than he might have thought, as “an advanced auction of stolen goods.” And to make the example more realistic, we would agree to share some of the money we collected from you with these anonymous bystanders in exchange for their support (p. 141).”

“It is easy to see why governments were more successful in extracting resources when they dealt with millions of citizens individually rather than with a relative handful of lords, dukes, earls, bishops, contract mercenaries, free cities, and other semisovereign entities with whom the rulers of European states were obliged to negotiate prior to the mid-eighteenth century (p. 143).”

“Almost all warmaking states borrow extensively, raise taxes, and seize the means of combat—including men—from reluctant citizens who have other uses for their resources” (p. 143).”

“Other things being equal, therefore, you would expect a higher proportion of total resources to be commandeered by government in a mass democracy than in an oligarchy, or in a system of fragmented sovereignty where magnates wielded military power and fielded their own armies, as they did everywhere in early-modern Europe prior to the eighteenth century (p. 145).”

“A relatively small, elite group of rich represent a more coherent and effective body than a large mass of citizens. The small group has stronger incentives to work together. It will almost inevitably be more effective at protecting its interests than will a mass group (p. 145).”

“Democracy became the militarily winning strategy because it facilitated the gathering of more resources into the hands of the state. Compared to other styles of sovereignty that depended for their legitimacy on other principles, such as the feudal levy, the divine right of kings, corporate religious duty, or the voluntary contributions of the rich, mass democracy became militarily the most potent because it was the surest way to gather resources in an industrial economy (p. 146).”

“Nationalism Much the same can be said of nationalism, which became a corollary to mass democracy. States that could employ nationalism found that they could mobilize larger armies at a smaller cost. Nationalism was an invention that enabled a state to increase the scale at which it was militarily effective. Like politics itself, nationalism is mostly a modern invention (p. 147).”

“It is now a reactionary force, inflamed in places with falling incomes and declining prospects like Serbia (p. 148).”

“Congress was not a temple of democracy, it was a market for bartering laws (p. 148).”

“The shift in technology that is eroding industrialism has trapped many countries with governments that no longer work. Or work badly. Legislatures, in particular, appear to be increasingly dysfunctional. They grind out laws that might have been merely stupid fifty years ago but are dangerous today. This was spectacularly obvious in Peru, where the internal sovereignty of the state had almost collapsed by 1993 (p. 149).”

“Representative democracy in Peru was like a pair of loaded dice. As a decision mechanism for aggrandizing the state, it was unsurpassed. But when new circumstances called for devolving power, the inherent biases that made democracy so useful under the old megapolitical conditions made it increasingly dysfunctional (p. 149).”

“The Information Age will require new mechanisms of representation to avoid chronic dysfunction and even social collapse (p. 152).”

Chapter 6: The Megapdlitics of the Information Age: The Triumph of Efficiency over Power

“Kevin Kelly, editor of Wired, puts it this way: “To multiply several prime numbers into a larger product is easy; any elementary school kid can do it. But the world’s supercomputers choke while trying to unravel a product into its simple primes (p. 156).”

“Everywhere you look in the universe, you see systems attaining greater complexity as they evolve (p. 156).”

“Systems that work most effectively under the widest range of conditions depend for their resilience upon spontaneous order that accommodates novel possibilities (p. 157).”

“There has always been a strong tendency for social systems to mimic the characteristics of prevailing technology. This is something that Marx got right. Gigantic factories coincided with the age of big government. Microprocessing is miniaturizing institutions. If our analysis is correct, the technology of the Information Age will ultimately create an economy better suited to exploit the advantages of complexity (p. 157).”

“For example, the late physicist Heinz Pagels wrote in his farseeing book, The Dreams of Reason, “I am convinced that the nations and people who master the new science of Complexity will become the economic, cultural, and political superpowers of the next century (p. 157).”

“Lane had nothing to say about the implications of the possibility that large amounts of commerce could be made all but immune from the leverage of violence (p. 158).”

“Microtechnology allows firms to be smaller, more footloose targets. Many deal in services or products with negligible natural-resource content. In principle, these businesses could be conducted almost anywhere on the planet [Billionaire Bitcoin-Miners]. They are not trapped at a specific location, like a mine or a port. Therefore, in the fullness of time, they will be far less susceptible to being taxed, either by unions or by politicians (p. 159).”

“Most were successful. Similar episodes occurred in every industrialized country. The workers simply seized the factories and ransomed them back to the owners. It was a tactic of great simplicity, and one that in most cases was profitable and fun [really!… the writers clearly lack empathy and spiritual consciousness] for those participating (p. 161).”

“The whole logic of government and the character of power have been transformed by microprocessing. This may seem exaggerated when you first think about it. But look closely (p. 162).”

“The absence of significant operating advantages in a given locale means that coercive organizations, like governments and unions, will inevitably have less leverage to exploit in trying to extract some of those advantages for themselves (p. 168).”

“It is obvious beyond dispute that an illiterate or semi-literate could not program a computer. It is therefore equally obvious that any value in programs compiled by others could not have been stolen from him. This is why cries of “exploitation” by workers are now heard mainly among janitors (p. 171).”

“Not only will one individual be able to manifestly multiply his activities by employing an essentially unlimited number of intelligent agents (p. 173).”

“He or she will even be able to act after death. For the first time, an individual will be capable of carrying on elaborate tasks even if he is biologically dead. It will no longer be possible for either an enemy at war or a criminal to completely extinguish the capability of an individual to retaliate by killing him. This is one of the more revolutionary innovations in the logic of violence in the whole of history (p. 173).”

“The fact that intelligent agents will be available to investigate and perhaps retaliate in one fashion or another against those who initiate violence is merely a hint of this new vista in protection (p. 173).”

“This is only one of many ways to enhance protection that are being opened by the technology of the Information Age, most of which tend to undermine the near-monopoly on protection and extortion that has been enjoyed by governments in the past two centuries (p. 174).”

“For all the variety of means of protection that have been employed historically, one method has dominated all others—the capacity to trump violence with violence…[increasing the CoA: the cost of attack] (p. 174).”

“The new intelligent agents of the Information Age, although their activities will be largely confined to cyberspace, add a new alternative. Their loyalties, unlike those of the mercenaries, private guards, and even remote cousins, will be beyond dispute (p. 174).”

“Local competition in the use of violence has usually meant paying higher costs for protection and enjoying less of it (p. 175).”

“… plunderers, and maintained his territorial monopoly long enough for custom to make it legitimate,”31 —FREDERIC C. LANE Government as a Seller of Protection.Government is not only a protection service; it is also a protection racket. Governments, as Charles Tilly has pointed out, may perhaps be best understood as “our largest examples of organized crime (p. 176).”

“We are not alone in seeing that bandwidth (or the carrying capacity of communications media) is destined to trump the territorial state (p. 178).”

“Jim Taylor and Watts Wacker, authors of The 500-Year Delta: What Happens After What Comes Next, do not define their argument as we do, but they see clearly that “access creates globalism, and globalism disrupts political systems by making the concept of borders obsolete (p. 178).”

“As they say, “On the horizon waits a much purer form of individualism than democracy as we now understand it allows (p. 178).”

“The simple fact is that the larger sense of patriotism—a love of nation, a sense of filial duty to it—is not a particularly useful predisposition to have any longer.… Citizens who thrive in the global society will identify themselves globally (p. 178).”

“The logic of force, therefore, tells you that the more competing armed groups there are operating in any territory, the higher the likelihood that they will resort to predatory violence. Without a single overwhelming power to suppress freelance violence, it tends to proliferate, and many of the gains of economic and social cooperation go up in smoke (p. 180).”

“The society of what we call the modern age is characterized, above all in the West, by a certain level of monopolization. Free use of military weapons is denied the individual and reserved to a central authority of whatever kind, and likewise the taxation of the property or income of individuals is concentrated in the hands of a central social authority (p. 181).”

“This is why capital-intensive operations are uneconomic in the American slums, as well as in Third World societies where ad hoc violence is endemic [really!… so white supremacy is not a cause or even a factor?… we see you, nice try… lol] (p. 186).”

“Industrial society as a whole was able to proceed because a certain kind of order was established and maintained. Enterprises were subject to regular, predictable shakedowns, rather than erratic violence (p. 186).”

“The Information Age is bringing into being a fifth stage in the evolution of competition in the use of violence in the West. This stage was not anticipated by Lane (p. 186).”

“That is the fact that governments have never established stable monopolies of coercion over the open sea. Think about it. No government’s laws have ever exclusively applied there. This is a matter of the utmost importance in understanding how the organization of violence and protection will evolve as the economy migrates into cyberspace, which has no physical existence at all (p. 187).”

“For the same reasons that Lane noted in observing that 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 (p. 187).”

“Andorra survives as a kind of fossilized march region between France and Spain, an artifact of megapolitical conditions that made it difficult for either kingdom to dominate the other in that cold and almost inaccessible area of 190 square miles in the Pyrenees (p. 188).”

“A consequence of Andorra’s ambiguous position was that almost no laws were enacted. Andorra has enjoyed vanishingly small government and no taxes for more than seven hundred years. Today, that gives it a growing appeal as a tax haven (p. 188).”

“The whole place is snowed shut from November through April each year. Even in summer, Andorra is so cold that crops grow only on the southern slopes. If our description makes it seem unappealing, you have just learned the secret of its success. Andorra survived as a feudal enclave in the age of the nation-state because it was remote and dirt-poor (p. 188).”

“Almost as a matter of course, the subjects were lured into settling in the march by freedom from taxes (p. 189).”

“To resolve this contradictory obligation, almost everyone up and down the feudal hierarchy could choose whose laws to obey through a legal process called avowal [this is what some Afrocentric Scholars were focusing on in relation to individuals being able to refuse a courts jurisdictions in relation to the committing of alleged offences] (p. 189).”

“… cyberspace is likely to be in due course the richest of economic realms. It will therefore tend to be a growing rather than a receding frontier (p. 189).”

“Few persons at the core regions of medieval society would have wished to move to frontiers without strong inducements, often including religious imperatives, because these regions tended to be violent and poor (189).”

“For the territorial states to create an effective cartel to keep tax rates high will be all but impossible (p. 190).”

“For evidence, consider the move by the Seychelles, a tiny country in the Indian Ocean, to enact a new investment law that U.S. government officials describe as a “Welcome Criminals” act. Under the law, anyone who invests $10 million in the Seychelles will not only be guaranteed protection against extradition, but will be issued a diplomatic passport. Contrary to the assertions of the U.S. government, however, the intended beneficiaries are not drug dealers, who are generally under the protection of more important governments in any event, but independent entrepreneurs who have become politically incorrect (p. 190).”

“The competition that information technology is driving governments to engage in is not competition of a military kind, but competition in quality and price of an economic service —genuine protection. In short, governments will be obliged to give customers what they want (p. 190).”

“Whatever governments do, however, they will be unable to saturate cyberspace with violence in the way that they saturated the territories they monopolized with violence in the modern world. No matter how many governments try to enter cyberspace, they will be no more capable or powerful in that realm than anyone else (p. 190).”

“Ironically, attempts by nation-states to wage “information wars” to dominate or thwart access to cyberspace would probably only accelerate their own demise (p. 191).”

“Short of a massive and comprehensive destruction of all information technology, which would bring the world economy literally to a halt, cybercommerce and virtual reality will remain beyond the capacity of any government to stifle, much less monopolize (p. 191).”

“Modern armies are so dependent on information that it is possible to blind and deafen them in order to achieve victory without fighting in the conventional sense (p. 192).”

Chapter 7: Transcending Locality: The Emergence of the Cybereconomy

“As recently as the early twentieth century, it was common to find Chinese villages lying only five miles apart speaking mutually unintelligible dialects, even along the coast (p. 198).”

“We have explored some of the difficulties imposed upon peasants by the confines of closed village life. Even now, as we write, at least a billion people, mostly in Asia and Africa, struggle to survive on less than a dollar a day (p. 199).”

“This fear was captured by John Dos Passos in The Big Money: “The ‘vag’ sits on the edge of the highway, broken, hungry. Overhead, flies a transcontinental plane filled with highly paid executives. The upper class has taken to the air, the lower class to the road: there is no longer any bond between them, they are two nations (p. 199).”

“Their complacency rivals that of the British establishment facing the decline of the empire in the 1930s. Whenever elites find themselves threatened, their first reaction is denial (p. 200).”

“Their dismissal of the economic potential of the Net is another proof that being technically well-informed is not synonymous with understanding the consequences of technology (p. 200).”

“We have previously recalled another wildly inaccurate prophecy about the potential of a new technology—the forecast from the beginning of the twentieth century by the makers of Mercedes that there would never be more than a million automobiles worldwide. Again, they knew more about automobiles than almost anyone but they could not have been more wrong in estimating the impact of autos on society (p. 201).”

“Given this tradition of clueless misunderstandings, it is hardly surprising that many observers are slow to grasp the most important implications of the new information technology—the fact that it transcends the tyranny of place. The new technology creates for the first time an infinite, nonterrestrial realm for economic activity. It opens an option to explore the new frontiers of the cybereconomy, to “think globally and act globally.” This chapter explains why (p. 201).”

“A more advanced stage will mark the transition to true cybercommerce. Not only will transactions occur over the Net, but they will migrate outside the jurisdiction of nation-states (p. 202).”

“Payment will be rendered in cybercurrency. Profits will be booked in cyberbanks. Investments will be made in cyberbrokerages. Many transactions will not be subject to taxation. At this stage, cybercommerce will begin to have significant megapolitical consequences of the kind we have already [foresaw the emergence of crypto-currencies] (p. 202).”

“Understanding Chinese You will not only be able to talk and send a fax. In time, you will be able to shorten a multiyear learning process and converse in Chinese with a factory foreman in Shanghai. It will no longer matter as much that you do not speak his language or dialect. His words may be in Chinese but you will hear them roughly translated into English. He will hear your conversation in Chinese. In time, the capacity to employ instantaneous translation will significantly increase competition in regions where obstacles of language and idiom have heretofore been significant When that happens, it will matter little or not at all that the Chinese government may not wish the call to be placed (p. 204).”

“General Electric has redesigned magnetic resonance machines so that they can be used for treatment as well as diagnosis (p. 207).”

“The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves (p. 209).”

“The cybereconomy provides just such an alternative. No government will be able to monopolize it. And the information technologies comprised by it will provide cheaper and more effective protection for financial assets than most governments ever had reason to provide (p. 210).”

“When the black magic of compound interest becomes more clear in the minds of successful people in high-tax countries, they will begin to shop in earnest among jurisdictions, just as they now shop for automobiles or compare rates on insurance policies (p. 212).”

“… you doubt it, merely stop people at random on the streets of New York or Toronto and ask whether they would move to Bermuda for $55 million (p. 212).”

“You need merely lodge your transactions in cyberspace. This will, of course, be illegal in many jurisdictions. But old laws seldom can resist new technology (p. 212).”

“The advantages of operating in the emerging cybereconomy are even more compelling than sidestepping the post office in sending a fax (p. 212).”

“This new form of money will reset the odds, reducing the capacity of the world’s nation-states to determine who becomes a Sovereign Individual (p. 215).”

“Even where different pricing measures are used, or certain transactions continue to be denominated in national currencies, cybermoney will serve the consumers far better than nationalized money ever did (p. 217).”

Cybermoney will be all but impossible to counterfeit in this way, officially or unofficially (p. 217).”

“Use of the new monetary system will therefore probably involve a more explicit transaction cost, perhaps a fee on the order of 1 percent per annum. This will be a small price to pay compared to the annual inflationary penalty of from 2.7 percent to 99 percent imposed by nation-states. All the more so, because there is a likelihood that overall prices will decline in the future as monopolies are eroded and competition intensifies worldwide (p. 221).”

“The real price of gold almost always rises in deflation. A deflation, after all, reflects a shortage of liquidity. Gold is the ultimate form of liquidity (p. 222).”

“Higher real rates all around will spur liquidation of high-cost, unproductive activities, and temporarily reduce consumption (p. 222).”

“It should not be forgotten that governments waste resources on a large scale. Wasting resources makes you poor (p. 223).”

“For the first time in history, megapolitical conditions will allow the ablest investors and entrepreneurs rather than specialists in violence ultimate control over capital (p. 223).”

“The cybereconomy of the Information Age will be more free than any other commercial realm in history. It is therefore reasonable to expect that the cybereconomy will rapidly become the most important new economy of the new millennium (p. 224).”

“If it becomes impossible for politicians to obtain resources to redistribute, the public may respond in a rational way and forget about politics, just as well-intentioned people ceased organizing marches of penitents when the Middle Ages came to an end (p. 224).”

Chapter 8: The End of Egalitarian Economics: The Revolution in Earnings Capacity in a World Without Jobs

“Because location will mean much less in the Information Society, there will be a diminished role in the future for all organizations that operate within rather than beyond geographic boundaries. Politicians, labor unions, regulated professions, lobbyists, and governments per se will be less important. Because favors and restraints of trade wrested from governments will be less valuable, fewer resources will be wasted either to promote or resist lobbying (p. 225).”

“Increasing amounts of wealth will find their way into the hands of the ablest entrepreneurs and venture capitalists worldwide (p. 226).”

“Because the marginal value generated by superlative performance will be so huge, the distribution of earnings capacity throughout the entire global economy will take much the shape it does now in the performance professions like athletics and opera (p. 226).”

“In fact, this is a striking illustration of the fact that any genuine upsurge in opportunity is almost inevitably bound to lead to at least a brief surge in inequality (p. 226).”

“The Information Age requires a quite high standard of literacy and numeracy for economic success. A massive U.S. Education Department survey, “Adult Literacy in America,” has shown that as many as 90 million Americans over the age of fifteen are woefully incompetent (p. 227).”

“From this third of Americans who have not prepared themselves to join the electronic information world, an angry underclass is being recruited (p. 227).”

“At the top of society is a small group, perhaps 5 percent, of highly educated information workers or capital owners who are the Information Age equivalent of the landed aristocracy of the feudal age—with the crucial difference that the elite of the Information Age are specialists in production, not specialists in violence (p. 227).”

“Like a lonely mountain peak, or rather, like the spire of a cathedral, rise the men of high talent and of genius above the broad mass of mediocrity.…The number of the highly gifted is at all events so small that it is impossible that ‘many’ such can have been kept back in lower classes through the incompleteness of social institutions [yea, whatever… lol!] (p. 229).”

“From all this, Otto Ammon drew a number of interesting conclusions. He thought that people’s abilities, broadly defined, determined their place in society and their income. He believed that high abilities naturally result in people rising in income and social position. “Like a lonely mountain peak, or rather, like the spire of a cathedral, rise the men of high talent and of genius above the broad mass of mediocrity,… (p. 230).”

“The Shape of the Turnip Modern industrial societies are indeed all turnips, with a small wealthy and upper-professional class at the top, a larger middle class, and a minority poor class at the bottom (p. 230).”

“There is indeed no lack of social and political evidence that this shift is taking place in all advanced industrial societies, that its pace is accelerating, and that the movement is already a big one. The rewards for rare skills have increased and are increasing (p. 231).”

“If the Information Age demands higher skills both at the top and bottom end, everyone except for the top 5 percent will be relatively at a disadvantage, but the top 5 percent will gain tremendously. They will both earn a higher share of income and keep a greater share of what they earn. At the same time, they will do a greater portion of the world’s work than ever before. Many will emerge as Sovereign Individuals. In the Information Age, the turnip of income distribution will look more as it did in 1750 than in 1950 (p. 231).”

“As the economies of more countries more deeply assimilate information technology, they will see the emergence—so evident already in North America—of a more or less unemployable underclass. This is exactly what is happening. This will lead to a reaction with a nationalist, antitechnology bias, as we detail in the next chapter (p. 231).”

“The Information Age was already looking far better for the top 10 percent, the so-called cognitive elite (p. 231).”

“The Sovereign Individuals of the information economy will not be warlords but masters of specialized skills, including entrepreneurship and investment (p. 231).”

“Yet the feudal hundred-to-one ratio seems set to return. For better or worse, the societies of the twenty-first century are likely to be more unequal than those we have lived in during the twentieth (p. 231).”

“Once-competent governments will no longer be the friends of wealth accumulation, but their enemies. High taxes, burdensome regulatory costs, and ambitious commitments to income redistribution will make territories under their control uninviting settings in which to do business (p. 232).”

“Olson argues, and we agree, that the true obstacle to development in backward countries has been the one factor of production that could not be easily borrowed or imported from abroad, namely government (p. 235).”

“… what its propaganda claimed; on the contrary, its gross effect was constricting and exploitative, or else, it simply failed to operate in any social sense at all (p. 235).”

“The ambitious poor of the world, more than anyone, stand to benefit as information technology disconnects the capacity to earn income from the locale in which one lives (p. 236).”

“The Information Revolution will make it much less important whether governments are able to function capably (p. 236).”

“It will therefore be easier for persons living in traditionally poor countries to surmount the hurdles that their governments have heretofore placed in the path of economic growth (p. 236).”

“Global competition will also tend to increase the income earned by the most talented individuals in each field, wherever they live, much as it does now in professional athletics (p. 237).”

“Innate abilities and the willingness to develop them will be measured on a more equal playing field than ever before (p. 237).”

“The capacity to earn high income is no longer tied to residence in specific locations, as was the case when most wealth was created by manipulating natural resources (p. 238).”

“This competition will eventually apply as fully to the learned professions as to bookkeepers. Digital lawyers and cyberdoctors will proliferate in the Information Economy (p. 239).”

“We also suspect that nation-states with a single major metropolis will remain coherent longer than those with several big cities, which imply multiple centers of interest with their various hinterlands (p. 240).”

“English Canadians resist this argument and tend to resent its implications because they are keenly aware of the large transfers made to Quebec over the years. Nonetheless, the appeal of the Parti Québecois is strong, and it seems only a matter of time until a secession referendum dissolves Canada (p. 241).”

“For London, substitute Toronto, and you are inside an equation that will be running in the minds of many in Alberta and British Columbia. The logic of devolution will prove infectious (p. 241).”

“This is not to say, of course, that there are not special problems arising from the organization of protection on a nomadic basis (p. 242).”

“The acceptance of aliens escaping from some lord as “citizens of the pale” defied the prevailing conventions of feudal law and episcopal authority (p. 242).”

“It is reasonable to expect new institutional refuges to spring up, upon “new legal principles,” to provide fiscal refuge to citizens of the state, much as the medieval town offered refuge to feudal subjects who lived within the shadows of its walls (p. 242).”

“In the industrial era of mass politics, such differences of opinion were fought out in political campaigns that ultimately forced one group or the other to abide by the wishes of the more powerful (p. 243).”

“that big set of industrial cities that now lives on life-support systems—some $360 billion of direct subsidies from all the rest of us every year (p. 244).”

“Big cities are leftover baggage from the industrial era (p. 244).”

“A peculiar irony of the re-emergence of micro-sovereignties or “city-states” is that it may coincide with the emptying out of many cities (p. 244).”

“The largest city in the United States in 1800 was Philadelphia, with a population of 69,403 (p. 244).”

“There is an obvious temptation to think that the growth of big cities is a direct function of population growth. But this is not necessarily so. 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. As Adna Weber argued in the classic study The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century, population growth alone does not explain why people live in urban settings rather than dispersed in the countryside (p. 245).”

“Detroit stands as a reminder that many industrial cities are no longer viable. They will crumble away as information and ideas become more important factors imparting value than fabricating from natural resources. In many cases, the large city has already grown too large to support its own weight (p. 245).”

“In the Information Age, only cities that repay their upkeep costs by offering a high quality of life will remain viable. Persons at a distance will no longer be obliged to subsidize them (p. 246).”

“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. Buenos Aires, London, and Paris will remain inviting places to live and do business long after the last good restaurant closes in South Bend, Louisville, and Philadelphia (p. 246).”

“This implies much more attractive prospects for doing business in areas where indebtedness is low and governments have already been restructured, such as New Zealand, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Singapore, and other parts of Asia and Latin America (p. 247).”

“The production process would have been subject to constant gaming, with small-scale contractors exposing those with higher capital costs to ransom through their ability to thwart output (p. 250).”

“Equipment fitted with microprocessors can monitor the progress of the assembly line much more effectively than managers ever could (p. 253).”

“Protection will become increasingly technological rather than juridical. The lower classes will be walled out. The move to gated communities is all but inevitable. Walling out troublemakers is an effective as well as traditional way of minimizing criminal violence in times of weak central authority (p. 256).”

“Control over economic resources will shift away from the state to persons of superior skills and intelligence, as it becomes increasingly easy to create wealth by adding knowledge to products (p. 256).”

“New survival strategies for persons of lower intelligence will evolve, involving greater concentration on development of leisure skills, sports abilities, and crime, as well as service to the growing numbers of Sovereign Individuals as income inequality within jurisdictions rises (p. 256).”

Chapter 9: Nationalism, Reaction, and the New Luddites

“The trouble with this reasonable expectation is that all previous history suggests that it cannot be accommodated in a reasonable way. The transition it implies will involve a crisis. It entails a radically new way of thinking, a new imagining of community that moves beyond nationalism and the nation-state. As Michael Billig has highlighted, “our beliefs about nationhood, and about the naturalness of belonging to a nation,” are “the products of a particular historical age (p. 259).”

“The thesis of this book is that the massed power of the nation-state is destined to be privatized and commercialized. Like all truly radical institutional change, the privatization and commercialization of sovereignty will involve a revolution in the “common sense” of the way the world is comprehended (p. 259).”

“An intense and even violent nationalist reaction centered among those who lose status, income, and power when what they consider to be their “ordinary life” is disrupted by political devolution and new market arrangements. Among the features of this reaction: suspicion of and opposition to globalization, free trade, “foreign” ownership and penetration of local economies; hostility to immigration, especially of groups that are visibly different from the former national group; popular hatred of the information elite, rich people, the well-educated, and complaints about capital flight and disappearing jobs; extreme measures by nationalists intent upon halting the secession of individuals and regions from faltering nation-states, including resort to wars and acts of “ethnic cleansing” that reinforce nationalist identification with the state and rationalize the state’s claims on people and their resources (p. 260).”

“PARALLELS WITH THE RENAISSANCE We previously outlined reasons for thinking that the collapse of the nanny state (p. 261).”

“… will have consequences closely paralleling those associated with the collapse of the institutional monopoly of the Holy Mother Church five centuries ago (p. 261).”

“By the early 1520s, millions of good Europeans had rejected the universal authority of the Catholic Church, a heresy punishable by torture and death just a few decades previously (p. 261).”

“The bones of more than a thousand leading English Catholics thought to have been brutally murdered by King Henry VIII have been uncovered at the Tower of London (p. 262).”

“King Henry VIII’s Catholic daughter, Queen Mary, on the other hand, insane with syphilis inherited from her father, incinerated three hundred Protestant heretics at the stake in the last two years of her reign (p. 262).”

“Seen from our vantage at the end of the twentieth century, these expressions of personal belief were well within the range that should be protected by freedom of religion and freedom of speech (p. 262).”

“But there was neither freedom of religion nor freedom of speech in the early sixteenth century (p. 262).”

“The de facto bargain struck at the time of the French Revolution will lapse. The state will no longer be capable of guaranteeing its citizens low-cost or free schooling, much less medical care, unemployment insurance, and pensions in exchange for otherwise poorly paid military service (p. 264).”

“But there was usually a price to be paid for escaping predatory taxation—a loss of economic opportunity and, often, a decline in living standards (p. 266).”

“Such a society will have greater tensions between a small class, who might be termed the information aristocracy, and a growing underclass, who might be termed the information poor (p. 269).”

“As the era of the “Sovereign Individual” takes shape, many of the ablest people will cease to think of themselves as party to a nation, as “British” or “American” or “Canadian.”’ A new “transnational” or “extranational” understanding of the world and a new way of identifying one’s place in it await discovery in the new millennium (p. 269).”

“Now the next stage in the triumph of the market is about to unfold. Not only will individual nation-states begin to dissolve, but in our view even the club for nation-states, the United Nations, is destined to go bankrupt (p. 270).”

“In the new age to come, communities and allegiances will not be territorially bounded. Identification will be more precisely targeted to genuine affinities, shared beliefs, shared interests, and shared genes, rather than the bogus affinities so prominent in the attention of nationalists. Protection will be organized in new ways that cannot be parsed by a sextant, a plumb line, or other early modern instruments in a surveyor’s kit that demarcate territorial borders (p. 270).”

“The boundaries between states and nationalities are not natural, like the boundaries between species or the physical distinctions between breeds of animals, Rather, they are artifacts of past and ongoing efforts to project power (p. 272).”

“The parallel is underscored by the fact that both the new technology of printing at the end of the fifteenth century and the new information technology at the end of the twentieth place formerly occult knowledge at the disposal of individuals in a liberating way (p. 277).”

“The new information technology brings within the reach of anyone with a computer hook-up information about commerce, investment, and current events that previously was available only to persons at the pinnacle of government and corporate hierarchies (p. 277).”

“If manuscript knowledge was scarce and arcane lore, print knowledge lived by reproducibility and dissemination.”36 Very few Europeans were multilingual in 1500. This meant that the audience for works in Latin was not a mass audience (p. 278).”

“It will eventually be reinforced with simultaneous-translation software, making almost everyone effectively multilingual, and helping to denationalize language and imagination (p. 279).”

“Propaganda from the center will lose much of its coherence as immigrants and speakers of minority tongues are emboldened to resist assimilation into the nation (p. 279).”

“What determines the selflessness of the social insects, and why is this pattern so rare in Nature? (p. 281).”

“The logic of the nation-state suggests that the ultimate price of citizenship is sacrifice and death (p. 291).”

“If our view is correct, microtechnology will make it technically feasible for individuals to largely escape from the burdens of subordinate citizenship. They will be extranational sovereigns over themselves, not subjects, in the new “Virtual City,” owing allegiance by contract or private treaty in a fashion more reminiscent of premodern Europe, where merchants secured commercial treaties and charters to protect themselves “from arbitrary seizures of property” and to obtain “exemption from seigneurial law (p. 292).”

“In the cyberculture, successful persons will gain exemption from duties of citizenship arising from an accident of birth. They will no longer tend to think of themselves primarily as British or American. They will be extranational residents of the whole world who just happen to abide in one or more of its localities (p. 292).”

“The commercialization of sovereignty itself depends upon the willingness of hundreds of thousands of Sovereign Individuals and many millions of others to deploy their assets in the “First Bank of Nowhere” in order to secure immunity from direct compulsion (p. 293).”

“Yet notwithstanding the evolutionary novelty of the cybereconomy, it gives humans the chance to express our most novel genetic inheritance—the intelligence that comes along with our outsized brains. Those among the information elite will certainly be smart enough to recognize a good thing when they see one (p. 293).”

“And it further implies that anyone who is serious about realizing the liberating potential of the cybereconomy for himself and his family should begin to stake out a welcome for himself in several jurisdictions other than that in which he has resided during his main business career (p. 293).”

“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 (p. 294).”

“Indeed, the partisans of the nation-state have already begun to complain of the growing detachment of the cognitive elites (p. 294).”

“… the markets in which the new elites operate is now international in scope. Their fortunes are tied to enterprises that operate across national boundaries. They are more concerned with the smooth functioning of the system as a whole than with any of its parts (p. 294).”

“Critics like Lasch and Walzer do not dispute that clearheaded cost-benefit analysis makes citizenship obsolete for persons of high skills (p. 295).”

“… market,” or the tendency of money to “seep across boundaries” in order to buy things which, as Lasch elaborates, “should not be for sale,” such as exemption from military service (p. 296).”

“Note the reactionary harking to the military demands of the nation-state as a sacred ground upon which money and markets should not trespass (p. 296).”

“As the price paid for protection becomes subject “to the principle of substitution,” this will lay bare the arithmetic of compulsion, intensifying conflict between the new cosmopolitan elite of the Information Age and “the information poor,” the remainder of the population who are largely monoglot and do not excel in problem-solving or possess some globally marketable skill (p. 296).”

“Something more nearly the opposite to their expectation is happening. 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 (p. 297).”

“The rise of Sovereign Individuals shopping for jurisdictions is therefore one of the surest forecasts one can make (p. 298).”

“Sovereign Individuals will also have to cope with the corrosive consequences of envy—a difficulty that sometimes detains monarchs, but which will be more intensely felt by persons who are not traditionally venerated but invent their own sovereignty (p. 299).”

“Monarchs, as embodiments of the nation, enjoy a certain immunity to envy that will not carry over to Sovereign Individuals (p. 299).”

“In general terms, the tax consumers will be losers. It is usually they who could not increase their wealth by moving to another jurisdiction (p. 300).”

“If social unrest and crime spread in the old core industrial countries to the degree that we expect, tolerable law and order will be far more appealing in a jurisdiction than a national space program, a state-sponsored women’s museum, or subsidized retraining schemes for displaced executives [Middle East] (p. 302).”

“Within the next few decades, for example, narrow-casting will replace broadcasting as the method by which individuals obtain their news. This has significant implications. It amounts to a change in the imaginations of millions from first personal plural to singular. As individuals themselves begin to serve as their own news editors, selecting what topics and news stories are of interest, it is far less likely that they will choose to indoctrinate themselves in the urgencies of sacrifice for the nation-state (p. 302).”

“Much the same effect will arise from the privatization of education, again facilitated by technology (p. 303).”

“In the medieval period, education was firmly under the control of the Church. In the modern age, education has been under the control of the state. In the words of Eric Hobsbawm, “state education transformed people into citizens of a specific country: ‘peasants into Frenchmen’ (p. 303).”

“In the Information Age, education will be privatized and individualized (p. 303).”

“It will no longer be lumbered with the heavy political baggage that characterized education during the industrial period (p. 303).”

“The ineffectiveness of efforts to bar illegal immigrants convincingly shows that nation-states will be unable to seal their borders to prevent successful people from escaping. The rich will be at least as enterprising in getting out as would-be taxi drivers and waiters are at getting in (p. 303).”

“They will negotiate private tax treaties as customers, along the lines now available in Switzerland, as analyzed in Chapter 8 (p. 304).”

“In fact, 50,000 Swiss francs is an ample annual payment for the necessary and useful services of government. The Swiss surely make a large profit from serving every millionaire who moves in and pays them 50,000 Swiss francs annually for the privilege (p. 304).”

“For this reason, it is to be expected that one or more nation-states will undertake covert action to subvert the appeal of transience. Travel could be effectively discouraged by biological warfare, such as the outbreak of a deadly epidemic. This could not only discourage the desire to travel, it could also give jurisdictions throughout the globe an excuse to seal their borders and limit immigration (p. 305).”

“The United States has the globe’s most predatory, soak-the-rich tax system (p. 306).”

“Instead of constituting a sharp break from ‘normal’ political life, furthermore, violent struggles tend to accompany, complement, and extend organized, peaceful attempts by the same people to accomplish their objectives. They belong to the same world as nonviolent contention (p. 309).”

“Yet blacks, as a group, are major beneficiaries of income transfers, affirmative action, and other fruits of political compulsion. They are also disproportionately represented in the U.S. military. Therefore, they are likely to emerge, along with blue-collar whites, as among the most fervent partisans of American nationalism (p. 310).”

“The multiethnic welfare states in North America were simply more vulnerable to the temptation to foist the costs of income redistribution on the private sector. They were able to do this, while inflaming a sense of grievance and entitlement, by blaming the structure of society as a whole, and white men in general, for the economic shortcomings of various subcultures within society [really… lol… so is he claiming there is no real racism or discrimination it’s all just an excuse? (p. 313).”

“The one coherent thread that runs through these complaints is a steadfast resistance to technological innovation and market change (p. 315).”

“Discrimination,” however, was alleged to account for the failure of those with low skills to develop more valuable ones (p. 316).”

“It was to relieve the bankrupt state of the fiscal pressures of redistributing income. Inculcating delusions of persecution was merely an unfortunate side effect. Ironically, the surge in concern about “discrimination” coincided with the early stages of a technological revolution that is bound to make actual arbitrary discrimination far less of a problem than it has ever been before (p. 316).”

“No one on the Internet knows or cares whether the author of a new software program is black, white, male, female, homosexual, or a vegetarian dwarf [not true… the writers’ racial intelligence is non-existent] (p. 316).”

“While the punishments were cruel and no doubt many innocents suffered from the hallucinations of neighbors under the influence of ergot poisoning, the prosecution of witches can be understood as an indirect way of prosecuting extortion (p. 317).”

“Groups that feel aggrieved over past discrimination are unlikely to quickly relinquish their apparently valuable status as victims simply because their claims on society become less justified or harder to enforce. They will continue to press their claims until evidence in the local environment leaves no doubt that they will no longer be rewarded (p. 317).”

“The growth of sociopathic behavior among Afro-Americans and Afro-Canadians tells you that. It says that there is little balance between black anger and a realistic appraisal of the extent to which black problems are self-inflicted consequences of antisocial behavior [really?… the writers seem so affected by the claims of black people that they have lost their objectivity… very intriguing… smh!] (p. 317).”

“Black anger has risen, even as black lifestyles have grown more dysfunctional. Out-of-wedlock births have soared. Educational attainment has fallen. Growing percentages of young blacks are implicated in criminal activities, to the point where there are now more black men in penitentiaries than in colleges (p. 317).”

“The death of the nation-state and the disappearance of income redistribution on a large scale will no doubt lead some among the more psychopathic of these unhappy souls to strike out against anyone who appears more prosperous than they. Therefore, it is reasonable to suppose that social peace will be in jeopardy as the Information Age unfolds, especially in North America and in multiethnic enclaves in Western Europe (p. 317).”

“This is an example with important application for the future. It suggests that thinking entrepreneurs in the next millennium will first introduce dramatic labor-saving automation in regions without a tradition of producing whatever product or service is in question (p. 319).”

“The world’s nation-states will seek to counteract the cybereconomy and Sovereign Individuals who are able to take advantage of it to accumulate wealth. A furious nationalist reaction will sweep the world. Part and parcel of it will be an antitechonological reaction equivalent to the Luddite and other antitechnology rebellions in Britain during the Industrial Revolution (p. 319).”

“The conclusion is that the most predictable and vulnerable assets of the rich in the coming Information Age may be their physical persons—in other words, their lives (p. 325).”

“We believe that the age of the nation-state is over, but this is not to say that the attraction of nationalism as a tug on human emotions will be immediately quieted (p. 326).”

Chapter 10: The Twilight of Democracy

“We offered a paradoxical explanation in Chapter 5, namely that democracy flourished as a fraternal twin of Communism precisely because it facilitated unimpeded control of resources by the state (p. 328).”

“But seen from a megapolitical perspective, as they may more likely be seen from the vantage of the Information Age, the two systems had more in common than, you would have been led to suspect (p. 328).”

“Seen dispassionately, democracy was superior to state socialism as a recipe for enriching the state. As we explained earlier, democracy made substantially more money available to the military because democracy was compatible with private ownership and capitalist productivity (p. 328).”

“Residing within the borders of a superpower will mean putting yourself within the bull’s-eye. Instead of federating, locales may make themselves more secure by disaggregating. The advent of cyberwar will increase the vulnerability of centralized command-and-control systems, while increasing the competitive viability of dispersed systems (p. 330).”

“Happily, however, dictatorship is not the sole alternative to mass democracy. Information technology facilitates choice (p. 334).”

“Therefore, as Professor Keech suggests, they will come to see that the benefits derived from employee control of government are outweighed by its costs. They will migrate toward reform (p. 337).”

“Performance-based compensation for legislators would not make everyone chosen at random as effective as Lee Kuan Yew. But paying leaders on the basis of their performance is just a logical extension of Lee’s successful “Flexiwage” program in Singapore, which pays government employees on the basis of the real growth of the Singapore economy. There is every reason to believe that performance would be greatly enhanced if the pay of legislators and executives were keyed to some objective measure of performance, such as the growth of after-tax per capita income. Pay them on the basis of performance, and the chance that they would perform would increase a thousandfold (p. 338).”

“Too little attention has been paid to the fact that electoral politics lures disordered, messianic personalities into positions of power (p. 338).”

“While any of the possibilities we canvass above might be tried with some advantage, our expectation is not that politics will be reformed or improved, but that it will be antiquated and, in most respects, abandoned (p. 341).”

“By this we do not mean to say that we expect to see dictatorship, but rather entrepreneurial government —the commercialization of sovereignty (p. 341).”

“The study, “Adult Literacy in America,” shows that finding a literate audience for any political argument is by no means easy. A large fraction, perhaps a majority of Americans over the age of fifteen, lack basic skills essential to evaluating ideas and formulating judgments (p. 345).”

“Because microtechnology creates a new dimension in protection, as we explored in Chapter 6 and elsewhere, individuals for the first time in human existence will be able to create and protect assets that lie entirely outside the realm of any individual government’s territorial monopoly on violence (p. 346).”

“Dionne sees the material improvements in living standards that were widely shared within rich jurisdictions in the twentieth century as owing mainly to democratic politics rather than to technological or economic development. His message is that hope for the future requires extending the dominion of politics over the technologies of the Information Age: (p. 347).”

“The “art of how we organize ourselves” is a statement that would not have been intelligible prior to the modern period. Societies are too complex to be rightly considered the fruit of any willful effort of conscious self-organization (p. 348).”

“Sometime within the next few decades, the new megapolitics of the Information Age will antiquate The Prince. The Sovereign Individual will require a new recipe for success, one which will highly emphasize honor and rectitude in deploying resources outside the grip of the state. We can predict that such advice will not be read with pleasure by E. J. Dionne, Jr., and the other living social democrats (p. 351).”

“What we now think of as “political” leadership, which is always conceived in terms of a nation-state, will become increasingly entrepreneurial rather than political in nature (p. 351).”

“In such conditions, presently “political” issues will recede into entrepreneurial judgments… (p. 351).”

“With income-earning capacity more highly skewed than in the industrial era, jurisdictions will tend to cater to the needs of those customers whose business is most valuable and who have the greatest choice of where to bestow it (p. 352).”

“Like the late Christopher Lasch, objectors will not only complain that information technology destroys jobs; they will also complain that it negates democracy because it allows individuals to place their resources outside the reach of political compulsion. For this reason, the reactionaries of the new millennium will find the financial privacy facilitated by information technology especially threatening (p. 352).”

“Yet this fiscal limit poses less of a threat than the reactionaries will pretend, for the simple reason that there will be no more conflicts like World War II. The very technology that is liberating individuals will see to that (p. 356).”

“Equally, we doubt that the rational consumer of sovereignty services in the Information Age will care whether Singapore is a mass democracy or a proprietorship of Lee Kwan Yew (p. 357).”

Chapter 11: Morality and Crime in the “Natural Economy” of the Information Age

“The end of an era is usually a period of intense corruption. As the bonds of the old system dissolve, the social ethos dissolves with it, creating an environment in which people in high places may combine public purposes with private criminal activity (p. 359).”

“In a world of artificial reality and instantaneous transmission of everything everywhere, integrity of judgment and the ability to distinguish the true from the false will be even more important and impediments of time and place also tends to raise the value of old-fashioned judgment (p. 360).”

“However much we may wish that human behavior were always subject to the rule of law and “other socially enforced rules of the game” (“political economy”), there is ample evidence that many people “play by the rules” only when it suits them (p. 362).”

“As the gated communities of Los Angeles show, people are even moving some way back towards the medieval concept of a city, where the citizens live behind town walls patrolled by guards, and where access is possible only at controlled gates (p. 364).”

“Kelly foresees the possibility that an automobile of the future, the Upstart Car, could be designed and brought to production by as few as a dozen people collaborating in a virtual corporation (p. 365).”

“Enterprises on all scales will be vulnerable to criminal shakedowns and impositions from organized criminal gangs (p. 365).”

“If you knew nothing else about the world other than the fact that an important monopoly was breaking down, one of the simplest and surest predictions you could make is that its nearest competitors would stand to benefit most. It is therefore not a coincidence that drug cartels, gangs, mafias, and triads of various sorts are proliferating around the world (p. 366).”

“… with arrests, it was replaced with Kurds from Turkey, who completely dominated it for the next two years (p. 366).”

“… pay 30 to 50 percent of their profits to racketeers, not just the meager 7 percent demanded from the American businessman.” In 1993 there were 355,500 crimes in Russia officially designated as examples of “racketeering,” including almost “30,000 premeditated murders,” mostly gangland assassinations of businessmen (p. 367).”

“Governments in territories with powerful organized crime groups can only with great difficulty entertain policies that the mafias oppose (p. 367).”

“Morris recounts Clinton’s fatherless childhood in Hot Springs, Arkansas, a center of gambling, prostitution, and organized crime to which most of his family had some connection. Clinton’s step-uncle, Raymond Clinton, to whom Bill Clinton referred as a “father figure,” was reputedly a leading “Godfather” figure in the Dixie mafia (p. 369).”

“He claims that Clinton’s election as governor in 1984 “was the election when the mob really came into Arkansas politics, the dog-track and racetrack boys, the payoff people who saw a good thing… it went beyond our old Dixie Mafia, which was penny- (p. 371).”

“Given the technological change that is reducing the decisiveness of massed military power in the world, one should perhaps expect to see increasing corruption, if not outright takeover of governments by organized criminal enterprises (p. 372).”

“But it is doubtful on the evidence from around the world whether you can long depend upon a corrupted system with corrupt leaders for the security of your family and investments (p. 373).”

“Information Revolution will significantly reduce “the scale of public intervention” and on that basis holds out hope for a rebirth of morality and honesty (p. 373).”

“The Quakers proved good people to do business with, so their customers came back; there were profits on both sides. As a high-saving community, which honored its obligations, the Quakers had an advantage as bankers, and membership in the Quakers was itself a business asset which inspired confidence (p. 374).”

“The Germans are still a capable and efficient people, but they are not working anything like as hard as they did when they were rebuilding their country after the rain of defeat in 1945 (p. 374).”

“The cycle of prosperity undoubtedly undermines virtues of hard work and modest expectations, which exist at the early stages of successful industrial development. Nations are not able to retain their early virtues, just as individuals can become greedy and lazy with too easy a success (p. 375).”

“Investors should be concerned to avoid the periods of decadence. Even if Germany retains a strong position in the European market, and high industrial skills, high labor costs and short working hours have already reduced Germany’s future potential (p. 375).”

“There has always been a human recognition that hard times may develop, and normally do develop, healthier responses than those of periods of prosperity. In our individual lives, we all try to make ourselves comfortable, we hope to live in a house that we enjoy, have a job that we like, have enough money in the bank, and so on. The struggle to achieve these objectives is a rewarding one. We study at school, we train ourselves, we work hard at our business or profession, with these objectives in mind. In far too many people the achievement of these objectives creates something of a trap. The struggle is better than the achievement (p. 375).”

“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 (p. 376).”

“Conquest implies the destruction of the other party; commerce implies the satisfaction of the other party. As modern technology has made conquest an extraordinarily dangerous policy, commerce has become the only rational approach to the problems of survival (p. 381).”

“The United States is the world’s leading technological power. Many people, including most Americans, would have regarded the United States as a moral example to the rest of the world at any time up to the early 1960s. Now that view is seldom expressed, even by Americans who are proud of their country (p. 383).”

“One could not listen, as the world did, to the O.J. Simpson trial and regard the United States as the simple virtuous Republic it began by being (p. 383).”

“In the next century we shall witness the creation of a world superclass, perhaps of 500 million very rich people, with 100 million being rich enough to emerge as Sovereign Individuals (p. 388).”

“The morality of the individual is partly framed by education, by what the individual has been taught as a child; it is also partly framed by experience of life. Both the education and the experiences of the cognitive elite will be cosmopolitan, and will tend to divorce people from their local communities (p. 389).”

“Our politics may be led by conventional thinkers—Bill Clinton, Helmut Kohl, John Major—but our most successful businesses are led by radicals with a keen understanding of the new technological world; the archetype is Bill Gates. Conventional thinking has been discredited by its inability to deal with the rapidity and the sheer force of change (p. 390).”

“With the loss of tradition, societies can lose the whole vocabulary of their moral consensus. China, with all its advancing power, is now a morally backward country compared to Tibet, impoverished and oppressed as the Tibetans are (p. 391).”

“Today’s world has already changed more than we commonly understand, more than CNN and the newspapers tell us. And it has changed in precisely the directions indicated by a study of megapolitical conditions (p. 391).”

“After a period of slack morality, which is indicative of the end of an era, we will see the awakening of a sterner morality, with more exacting demands to meet the more exacting requirements of a world of competitive sovereignty (p. 391).”

“In a setting where unbreakable encryption will allow an embezzler or thief to securely place the proceeds of his crimes outside the range of recovery, there will be a very strong incentive to avoid losses by not doing business with thieves and embezzlers in the first place (p. 392).”

“This is especially true of the hybrid cultures that have begun to emerge in the hothouse of subsidy and intervention in many parts of the world in this century (p. 394).”

“Like the criminal subculture of America’s inner cities, they retain incoherent bits and pieces of cultures appropriate to earlier stages of economic development, and combine them with values for informing behavior in the Information Age [this guy really hates black people with a passion… lol… smh] (p. 394).”

Afterword: Devolution and the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns

“Hence, the phenomenon of “Parkinson’s Law,” in which the number of employees and expense of operating the British Admiralty skyrocketed over the twentieth century, while the number of ships in the British Navy shrank dramatically (p. 396).”

“In Tainter’s terms, “collapse” is what happens when a centralized control system is no longer worth what it costs (p. 396).”

“We cannot specify who will precipitate the collapse of the overgrown nation-state system, or when it will happen. But extrapolating from Tainter’s and Rashevsky’s analyses of the dynamics of social change, we can foresee collapse coming. The most developed and heretofore successful nation-states are all characterized by dwindling populations and massive, unfunded old-age pension liabilities (p. 397).”

“The argument of this book clearly informs the decision to redeploy your capital, if you have any. Citizenship is obsolete. To optimize your lifetime earnings and become a Sovereign Individual you will need to become a customer of a government or protection service rather than a citizen (p. 398).”

“Based upon the history of other dominant systems facing collapse, those who opt for the ultimum refugium and get out early will be better off for having done so (p. 398).”

“You should aim never to leave your money in any jurisdiction that claims the right to conscript you, your children, or your grandchildren (p. 399).”

“Whatever your current residence or nationality, to optimize your wealth you should aim to primarily reside in a country other than that from which you hold your first passport, while keeping the bulk of your money in yet a third jurisdiction, preferably a tax haven (p. 399).”

“To better acquaint yourself with the alternatives, we recommend that you travel widely to visit attractive locales where you might wish to secure the right to reside in an emergency (p. 399).”

“Any good business bookstore or one of the on-line booksellers, like Amazon.com, can offer you a wide selection of manuals on success. Read as many as you can, not with the idea that any one set of rules will automatically make you financially independent, but with the understanding that success is a choice. If you are to succeed, you must arm yourself with the perspective and habits that characterize successful persons (p. 399).”

“If you are still at the stage of selecting a career, resist the temptation of jumping to an easy conclusion that the best route to success in the Information Age is to become a computer programmer. Yes, it is true that programmers have been in great demand as the Information Revolution unfolded in the last quarter of the twentieth century. But as computational power has increased, artificial intelligence has developed apace (p. 399).”

“The problem with specializing in software or any other rapidly evolving field at the center of the Information Revolution is that your area of expertise could soon be outdated (p. 400).”

“This underscores the wisdom of the traditional liberal education, which aimed to encourage students to develop their critical faculties and thinking skills (p. 400).”

“Success in business, as in most areas of life, depends upon being able to solve problems. If you can teach yourself how to solve problems, you have a bright career ahead of yourself (p. 400).”

“No matter where you live, you will find problems galore in need of solving. In most cases, those who would benefit from solutions of their problems will pay you handsomely to effect them (p. 400).”

IVG (Involgize)