The Sovereign Individual
Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
A 1997 book that predicted Bitcoin. The world is now unfolding exactly the way it says.
James Dale Davidson, an American investment writer, and William Rees-Mogg, a former editor of The Times, published this book in 1997. It argues that the information age will weaken the nation-state and that money will move into cyberspace, beyond the reach of governments, twelve years before Bitcoin appeared.
A few lines worth keeping:
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.
When technology is mobile, and transactions occur in cyberspace, as they increasingly will do, governments will no longer be able to charge more for their services than they are worth to the people who pay for them.
In the future, one of the milestones by which you measure your financial success will be not just how 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 the Information Society, no one who is truly able will be detained by the ill-formed opinions of others.
The more apparent it is that a system is nearing an end, the more reluctant people will be to adhere to its laws.
Market forces, not political majorities, will compel societies to reconfigure themselves in ways that public opinion will neither comprehend nor welcome.
To dare a thought is to risk being wrong.
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