The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

It is precisely the fact that violence does pay that makes it hard to control.

The capacity to utilize and defend against violence is the crucial variable that alters life at the margin.

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 ou

it is only a matter of a few years, soon after the turn of the millennium, until bandwidth becomes sufficiently capacious to make technically possible the “metaverse,” the alternative, cyberspace world imagined by the science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson.

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.

All nation-states face bankruptcy and the rapid erosion of their authority. Mighty as they are, the power they retain is the power to obliterate, not to command.

Instead of state domination and control of resources, you are destined to see the privatization of almost all services governments now provide.

This is important because those in power have seldom reacted peacefully to developments that undermined their authority. They are not likely to now.

Every stage of society requires its own moral rules to help individuals overcome incentive traps peculiar to the choices they face in that particular way of life.