For anyone who has an aversion to reading books, now you have no excuse…
The Sovereign Individual:
Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
William Rees-Mogg & James Dale Davidson, 1997
The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age is a 1997 non-fiction book by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson. Later republished on 26 August 1999 by Touchstone, it forecasts the development of the twenty-first century; focusing on the rise of the internet & cyberspace, digital currency & digital economy, self-ownership and decentralization from the State.
The Sovereign Individual has been recommended by members of the cryptocurrency community such as Naval Ravikant[2] and Brian Armstrong. On 22 December 2021, Bitcoin Magazine ran an opinion piece by Bob Simons calling the book's thesis a "prophecy". In 2020, the book was reprinted with a preface written by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.
The chapters are:
- The Transition of the Year 2000: The Fourth Stage of Human Society
- Megapolitical Transformations in Historic Perspective
- East of Eden: The Agricultural Revolution and the Sophistication of Violence
- The Last Days of Politics: Parallels Between the Senile Decline of the Holy Mother Church and the Nanny State
- The Life and Death of the Nation-State: Democracy and Nationalism as Resource Strategies in the Age of Violence
- The Megapolitics of the Information Age: The Triumph of Efficiency over Power
- Transcending Locality: The Emergence of the Cybereconomy
- The End of Egalitarian Economics: The Revolution in Earnings Capacity in a World Without Jobs
- Nationalism, Reaction, and the New Luddites
- The Twilight of Democracy
- Morality and Crime in the "Natural Economy" of the Information Age
Rees-Mogg and Davidson's main thesis centers around self-ownership and the Individual's independence from the State, forecasting the end of the nations and nation-states. In one chapter entitled Nationalism, Reaction, and the New Luddites, they criticize nationalism and appeal more to giving the Individual control over his destiny rather than the collectiveness given by nationalism. Rees-Mogg and Davidson also refer to a transition to the year 2000, being a birth of a new stage of Western civilization in the coming of the new millennium.
With the rise of the information society, they argue, the Individual would be freed from the oppression of government and the drags of prejudice:
Genius will be unleashed, freed from both the oppression of government and the drags of racial and ethnic prejudice. In the Information Society, no one who is truly able will be detained by the ill-formed opinions of others. It will not matter what most of the people on earth might think of your race, your looks, your age, your sexual proclivities, or the way you wear your hair. In the cybereconomy, they will never see you. The ugly, the fat, the old, the disabled will vie with the young and beautiful on equal terms in utterly color-blind anonymity on the new frontiers of cyberspace.
Rees-Mogg and Davidson also suggested that digital currency/cybermoney would supersede fiat currency:
New technologies will allow the holders of wealth to bypass the national monopolies that have issued and regulated money in the modern period. Their importance for controlling the world's wealth will be transcended by mathematical algorithms that have no physical existence. In the new millennium, cybermoney controlled by private markets will supersede fiat money issued by governments. Only the poor will be victims of inflation and ensuing collapses into deflation that are consequences of the artificial leverage which fiat money injects into the economy.
Rees-Mogg and Davidson's recall of "mathematical algorithms that have no physical existence" is similar to the functional mechanism of certain cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and other proof-of-work currencies. This has led some to call their claim of 'cybermoney' a "prophecy".
Rees-Mogg and Davidson have also predicted that with the rise of this new cyberspace, and consequently cybermoney, it will become harder for a nation-state to collect taxes from its citizens. They compare the State to a farmer keeping cows in a field to be milked but that "soon, the cows will have wings". They predict that for the government to collect taxes from its citizens in this type of society, it would have to violate human rights, even traditionally civil countries would have to resort and "turn nasty":
Lacking their accustomed scope to tax and inflate, governments, even in traditionally civil countries, will turn nasty. As income tax becomes uncollectable, older and more arbitrary methods of exaction will resurface. The ultimate form of withholding tax—de facto or even overt hostage-taking— will be introduced by governments desperate to prevent wealth from escaping beyond their reach. Unlucky individuals will find themselves singled out and held to ransom in an almost medieval fashion.
yt-dlpto get an offline local copy of it