The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

When individuals can conduct their own monetary policies over the World Wide Web it will matter less or not at all that the state continues to control the industrial-era printing presses. Their importance for controlling the world’s wealth will be transcended by mathematical algorithms that have no physical existence. In the new millennium, cybermo

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. Disorientation breeds mistakes that could threaten your business, your investments, and your way of life.

When returns to violence are high and rising, magnitude means more than efficiency. Larger entities tend to prevail over smaller ones.

Societies that reconfigure themselves to become more complex adaptive systems will indeed prosper. But when they do, they are unlikely to be nations, much less “political superpowers.” The more likely immediate beneficiaries of increased complexity of social systems will be the Sovereign Individuals of the new millennium.

Here are some summary points that you should keep in mind as you seek to understand the Information Revolution: A shift in the megapolitical foundations of power normally unfolds far in advance of the actual revolutions in the use of power. Incomes are usually falling when a major transition begins, often because a society has rendered itself crisi

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.

Our intuition is that history has a destiny, and that free will and determinism are two versions of the same phenomenon. The human interactions that form history behave as though they were informed by a kind of destiny. Just as an electron plasma, a dense gas of electrons, behaves as a complex system, so do human beings. The freedom of individual m

Joaquin Aguirre

We believe that the age of individual economic sovereignty is coming. Just as steel mills, telephone companies, mines, and railways that were once “nationalized” have been rapidly privatized throughout the world, you will soon see the ultimate form of privatization—the sweeping denationalization of the individual. The Sovereign Individual of the ne

As Lane said, “I would like to suggest that the most weighty single factor in most periods of growth, if any one factor has been most important, has been a reduction in the proportion of resources devoted to war and police.”