The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When the definitive History of the Thank-You Note Through the Ages is compiled, this whole book could well be an exhibit. It is the third we have done together on various aspects of the great transformation to the Information Age now under way. The Sovereign Individual builds upon research and analysis that went into Blood in the Streets and The Great Reckoning. Like those books, it appropriates the thoughts of many authorities whose work is credited in the texts and citations. It also builds upon insights gained in conversations, both recently and over the past decade. In that sense, we should probably repeat all of our acknowledgments to the friends and accomplices who helped us in crucial ways in our two previous books. For the record, we do. Those whom we have mentioned and overlooked in our previous books, please take note. You have our thanks, cubed, for a decade of stimulation and kindnesses. Our special thanks go to Bill Bonner, who has helped us stay abreast of the changing currents of publishing during the past decade. It is mainly his genius that accounts for the huge worldwide circulation of our newsletter, Strategic Investment. He has helped us formulate ongoing market tests of our ideas. But more to the point, he has been an indispensable friend and sounding board.

We also acknowledge the special friendship of Alan Lindsay; Brian, Donald, and Scott Lines; Robert Lloyd George; Jane Collis; Carter Beese; Andy Miller; Scott Hill; Nils Taube; Gilbert de Botton; Michael Geltner; Mark Ford; David Keating; Pete Sepp; Curtin Winsor, III; V. Harwood Bocker, III; Guillermo Cervino; Eduardo Maschwitz; Michael Reynal; Jorge Gamarci; Jackie Locke; Douglas Reid; Jose Pascar; Luis Kenny; Robert Lawrence, III; Ken Klein; Kim Saull; Jim Moloney; Mike Geltner; Lee Euler; Tom Crema; Nancy Lazar; Greg Barnhill; Becky Mangus; Nancy Oppenlander; Wayne Livingstone; Hans Kuppers; Michael Baybak; Allan Zschlag; David Hale; Lisa Eden; Mel Lieberman; Glenn Blaugh; Sir Roger Douglas; Michael Smorch; Jimmie Rogers; Ambrose Evans-Pritchard; Chris Wood; Marc Faber; Ronnie Chan; William F. Nicklin; Lenny Smith; Jack Wheeler; Jim Bennett; Gordon Tullock; Jay Bernstein; Gary Vernier; Jenny Mitchel; Julia Guth; Lisa Young; Mia; Mark Frasier; Lisa Bernard; Rita Smith; Ruth Lyons; Yarah Chiekh; Fabian Dilaimy; Tim Hoese; and our families.

As before, we apologize to those whom we have overlooked. We are sorry that the acknowledgment we owe them has fallen between the cracks, like an unpaid bill that got tangled up with the grocery circulars and tossed away. Perhaps we can avoid the wrath of the collection agency by posting a bond of thanks to all our unmentioned friends. We depend on you even more than we realize.

Finally, we thank those who were specifically involved in launching this project: our agent, Theron Raines; our editor, Dominick Anfuso; and the other good people at Simon & Schuster, including Carolyn Reidy, Cassie Jones, Ana DeBevoise, and Cherise Grant.

To Annunziata and Brooke,

Sovereign Individuals in the new millennium

The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It is the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

—Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

PREFACE

Medieval men despaired of the will. They thought of humans as wounded and weak. But they respected the intellect. They thought even humans, if we think carefully, have the power to answer the most profound questions of God and the Universe.

Modern men worship the will, but they despair of the intellect. The wisdom of crowds; the swerve of random particles; the influence of unconscious biases: all of these contemporary clichés are ways to talk about intellectual weakness—or ways to talk ourselves into it.

Lord William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson do not promise answers about God and the Universe, nor do they supply any. But their investigation of megapolitics—an anatomy of the forces at work in history and a set of predictions for the near future—is unusual, or even countercultural, because it applies human reason to matters that we have been taught to leave to chance or fate.

Looking back almost a quarter century after the first publication of The Sovereign Individual, the easiest thing to do, and the thing most encouraged by the culture around us, is to look at what they got wrong—almost as if to reassure ourselves that there was no point all along in thinking carefully about the future.

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 version of the Information Age with decidedly nationalist, ethnically homogenous, profoundly statist characteristics. This is probably the single biggest megapolitical development since the book came out. To cite just one key 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.

On one account, this is a blind spot on the part of the authors. On another view, it can seem like China’s Politburo must have been keen readers of The Sovereign Individual. It is only through a unique long-term awareness that looks back to Lenin and Stalin as well as forward to the Information Age that the Party’s leaders prevailed amid the trends analyzed by this book.

Those trends—winner-take-all economics, jurisdictional competition, the shift away from mass production, and the arguable obsolescence of interstate warfare—are still at work today. The rise of China is less a refutation of Rees-Mogg and Davidson than a dramatic raising of the stakes they described.

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. Artificial Intelligence holds out the prospect of finally solving what economists call the calculation problem: AI could theoretically make it possible to centrally control an entire economy. It is no coincidence that AI is the favorite technology of the Communist Party of China. Strong cryptography, at the other pole, holds out the prospect of a decentralized and individualized world. If AI is communist, crypto is libertarian.

The future may lie somewhere between these two extreme poles. But we know the actions we take today will determine the overall outcome. Reading The Sovereign Individual in 2020 is a way to think carefully about the future that your own actions will help to create. It is an opportunity not to be wasted.

Peter Thiel

January 6, 2020

Los Angeles

CHAPTER 1

THE TRANSITION OF THE YEAR 2000

The Fourth Stage of Human Society

It feels like something big is about to happen: graphs show us the yearly growth of populations, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, Net addresses, and Mbytes per dollar. They all soar up to an asymptote just beyond the turn of the century: The Singularity. The end of everything we know. The beginning of something we may never understand.¹

—DANNY HILLIS

PREMONITIONS

The coming of the year 2000 has haunted the Western imagination for the past thousand years. Ever since the world failed to end at the turn of the first millennium after Christ, theologians, evangelists, poets, seers, and now, even computer programmers have looked to the end of this decade with an expectation that it would bring something momentous. No less an authority than Isaac Newton speculated that the world would end with the year 2000. Michel de Nostradamus, whose prophecies have been read by every generation since they were first published in 1568, forecast the coming of the Third Antichrist in July 1999.²

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, connoisseur of the collective unconscious, envisioned the birth of a New Age in 1997. Such forecasts may easily be ridiculed. And so can the sober forecasts of economists, such as Dr. Edward Yardeni of Deutsche Bank Securities, who expects computer malfunctions on the millennial midnight to disrupt the entire global economy.³

But whether you view the Y2K computer problem as groundless hysteria ginned up by computer programmers and Information Technology consultants to stir up business, or as a mysterious instance of technology unfolding in concert with the prophetic imagination, there is no denying that circumstances at the eve of the millennium excite more than the usual morbid doubt about where the world is tending.

A sense of disquiet about the future has begun to color the optimism so characteristic of Western societies for the past 250 years. People everywhere are hesitant and worried. You see it in their faces. Hear it in their conversation. See it reflected in polls and registered in the ballot box. Just as an invisible, physical change of ions in the atmosphere signals that a thunderstorm is imminent even before the clouds darken and lightning strikes, so now, in the twilight of the millennium, premonitions of change are in the air. One person after another, each in his own way, senses that time is running out on a dying way of life. As the decade expires, a murderous century expires with it, and also a glorious millennium of human accomplishment. All draw to a close with the year 2000.

For there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, neither hid that shall not be known.

—MATTHEW 10:26

We believe that the modern phase of Western civilization will end with it. This book tells why. Like many earlier works, it is an attempt to see into a glass darkly, to sketch out the vague shapes and dimensions of a future that is still to be. In that sense, we mean our work to be apocalyptic—in the original meaning of the word. Apokalypsis means unveiling in Greek. We believe that a new stage in history—the Information Age—is about to be unveiled.

We are watching the beginnings of a new logical space, an instantaneous electronic everywhereness, which we may all access, enter into, and experience. We have, in short, the beginnings of a new kind of community. The virtual community becomes the model for a secular Kingdom of Heaven; as Jesus said there were many mansions in his Father’s Kingdom, so there are many virtual communities, each reflecting their own needs and desires.

—MICHAEL GRASSO⁴

THE FOURTH STAGE OF HUMAN SOCIETY

The theme of this book is the new revolution of power which is liberating individuals at the expense of the twentieth-century nation-state. Innovations that alter the logic of violence in unprecedented ways are transforming the boundaries within which the future must lie. If our deductions are correct, you stand at the threshold of the most sweeping revolution in history. 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.

The challenge it will pose will be all the greater because it will happen with incredible speed compared with anything seen in the past. Through all of human history from its earliest beginnings until now, there have been only three basic stages of economic life: (1) hunting-and-gathering societies; (2) agricultural societies; and (3) industrial societies. Now, looming over the horizon, is something entirely new, the fourth stage of social organization: information societies.

Each of the previous stages of society has corresponded with distinctly different phases in the evolution and control of violence. As we explain in detail, information societies promise to dramatically reduce the returns to violence, in part because they transcend locality. The virtual reality of cyberspace, what novelist William Gibson characterized as a consensual hallucination, will be as far beyond the reach of bullies as imagination can take it. In the new millennium, the advantage of controlling violence on a large scale will be far lower than it has been at any time since before the French Revolution. This will have profound consequences. One of these will be rising crime. 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.

Another logical implication of falling returns to violence is the eclipse of politics, which is the stage for crime on the largest scale. There is much evidence that adherence to the civic myths of the twentieth-century nation-state is rapidly eroding. The death of Communism is merely the most striking example. As we explore in detail, the collapse of morality and growing corruption among leaders of Western governments are not random developments. They are evidence that the potential of the nation-state is exhausted. Even many of its leaders no longer believe the platitudes they mouth. Nor are they believed by others.

History Repeats Itself

This is a situation with striking parallels in the past. Whenever technological change has divorced the old forms from the new moving forces of the economy, moral standards shift, and people begin to treat those in command of the old institutions with growing disdain. This widespread revulsion often comes into evidence well before people develop a new coherent ideology of change. So it was in the late fifteenth century, when the medieval Church was the predominant institution of feudalism. Notwithstanding popular belief in the sacredness of the sacerdotal office, both the higher and lower ranks of clergy were held in the utmost contempt—not unlike the popular attitude toward politicians and bureaucrats today.⁵

We believe that much can be learned by analogy between the situation at the end of the fifteenth century, when life had become thoroughly saturated by organized religion, and the situation today, when the world has become saturated with politics. The costs of supporting institutionalized religion at the end of the fifteenth century had reached a historic extreme, much as the costs of supporting government have reached a senile extreme today.

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.

Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned⁶

—MARSHALL McLUHAN, 1964

The Information Revolution

As the breakdown of large systems accelerates, systematic compulsion will recede as a factor shaping economic life and the distribution of income. Efficiency will become more important than the dictates of power in the organization of social institutions. This means that provinces and even cities that can effectively uphold property rights and provide for the administration of justice, while consuming few resources, will be viable sovereignties in the Information Age, as they generally have not been during the last five centuries. An entirely new realm of economic activity that is not hostage to physical violence will emerge in cyberspace. 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.

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. If only half of what we expect to see happens, you face change of a magnitude with few precedents in history.

The transformation of the year 2000 will not only revolutionize the character of the world economy, it will do so more rapidly than any previous phase change. Unlike the Agricultural Revolution, the Information Revolution will not take millennia to do its work. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, its impact will not be spread over centuries. The Information Revolution will happen within a lifetime.

What is more, it will happen almost everywhere at once. Technical and economic innovations will no longer be confined to small portions of the globe. The transformation will be all but universal. And it will involve a break with the past so profound that it will almost bring to life the magical domain of the gods as imagined by the early agricultural peoples like the ancient Greeks. 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. When information societies take shape they will be as different from industrial societies as the Greece of Aeschylus was from the world of the cave dwellers.

PROMETHEUS UNBOUND: THE RISE OF THE SOVEREIGN INDIVIDUAL

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU

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. 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.

Ideas Become Wealth

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 Information Age will be the age of upward mobility. It will afford far more equal opportunity for the billions of humans in parts of the world that never shared fully in the prosperity of industrial society. The brightest, most successful and ambitious of these will emerge as truly Sovereign Individuals.

At first, only a handful will achieve full financial sovereignty. But this does not negate the advantages of financial independence. The fact that not everyone attains an equally vast fortune does not mean that it is futile or meaningless to become rich. There are 25,000 millionaires for every billionaire. If you are a millionaire and not a billionaire, that does not make you poor. Equally, 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. The more clever you are, the less propulsion you will require to achieve financial escape velocity. Persons of even quite modest means will soar, as the gravitational pull of politics on the global economy weakens. Unprecedented financial independence will be a reachable goal in your lifetime or that of your children.

At the highest plateau of productivity, these Sovereign Individuals will compete and interact on terms that echo the relations among the gods in Greek myth. The elusive Mount Olympus of the next millennium will be in cyberspace—a realm without physical existence that will nonetheless develop what promises to be the world’s largest economy by the second decade of the new millennium. By 2025, the cybereconomy will have many millions of participants. Some of them will be as rich as Bill Gates, worth tens of billions of dollars each. The cyberpoor may be those with an income of less than $200,000 a year. There will be no cyberwelfare. No cybertaxes and no cybergovernment. The cybereconomy, rather than China, could well be the greatest economic phenomenon of the next thirty years.

The good news is that politicians will no more be able to dominate, suppress, and regulate the greater part of commerce in this new realm than the legislators of the ancient Greek city-states could have trimmed the beard of Zeus. That is good news for the rich. And even better news for the not so rich. The obstacles and burdens that politics imposes are more obstacles to becoming rich than to being rich. 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. Even the consumers of government services will benefit as entrepreneurs extend the benefits of competition. Heretofore, competition between jurisdictions has usually meant competition by means of violence to enforce the rule of a predominant group. Consequently, much of the ingenuity of interjurisdictional competition was channeled into military endeavor. But the advent of the cybereconomy will bring competition on new terms to provision of sovereignty services. A proliferation of jurisdictions will mean proliferating experimentation in new ways of enforcing contracts and otherwise securing the safety of persons and property. The liberation of a large part of the global economy from political control will oblige whatever remains of government as we have known it to operate on more nearly market terms. Governments will ultimately have little choice but to treat populations in territories they serve more like customers, and less in the way that organized criminals treat the victims of a shakedown racket.

Beyond Politics

What mythology described as the province of the gods will become a viable option for the individual—a life outside the reach of kings and councils. First in scores, then in hundreds, and ultimately in the millions, individuals will escape the shackles of politics. As they do, they will transform the character of governments, shrinking the realm of compulsion and widening the scope of private control over resources.

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. These powers were sometimes employed by men, sometimes by incarnate human gods who looked like men and interacted with them in what Sir James George Frazer described in The Golden Bough as a great democracy.⁷

When the ancients imagined the children of Zeus living among them they were inspired by a deep belief in magic. They shared with other primitive agricultural peoples an awe of nature, and a superstitious conviction that nature’s works were set in motion by individual volition, by magic. In that sense, there was nothing self-consciously prophetic about their view of nature and their gods. They were far from anticipating microtechnology. They could not have imagined its impact in altering the marginal productivity of individuals thousands of years later. They certainly could not have foreseen how it would shift the balance between power and efficiency and thus revolutionize the way that assets are created and protected. Yet what they imagined as they spun their myths has a strange resonance with the world you are likely to see.

Alt. Abracadabra

The abracadabra of the magic invocation, for example, bears a curious similarity to the password employed to access a computer. In some respects, high-speed computation has already made it possible to mimic the magic of the genie. Early generations of digital servants already obey the commands of those who control the computers in which they are sealed much as genies were sealed in magic lamps. The virtual reality of information technology will widen the realm of human wishes to make almost anything that can be imagined seem real. Telepresence will give living individuals the same capacity to span distance at supernatural speed and monitor events from afar that the Greeks supposed was enjoyed by Hermes and Apollo. The Sovereign Individuals of the Information Age, like the gods of ancient and primitive myths, will in due course enjoy a kind of diplomatic immunity from most of the political woes that have beset mortal human beings in most times and places.

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.

Genius and Nemesis

For anyone who loves human aspiration and success, the Information Age will provide a bounty. That is surely the best news in many generations. But it is bad news as well. The new organization of society implied by the triumph of individual autonomy and the true equalization of opportunity based upon merit will lead to very great rewards for merit and great individual autonomy. This will leave individuals far more responsible for themselves than they have been accustomed to being during the industrial period. It will also precipitate transition crises, including a possibly severe economic depression that will reduce the unearned advantage in living standards that has been enjoyed by residents of advanced industrial societies throughout the twentieth century. As we write, the top 15 percent of the world’s population have an average per-capita income of $21,000 annually. The remaining 85 percent of the world have an average income of just $1,000. That huge, hoarded advantage from the past is bound to dissipate under the new conditions of the Information Age.

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. 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. Anyone with a portable computer and a satellite link will be able to conduct almost any information business anywhere, and that includes almost the whole of the world’s multitrillion-dollar financial transactions.

This means that you will no longer be obliged to live in a high-tax jurisdiction in order to earn high income. In the future, when most wealth can be earned anywhere, and even spent anywhere, governments that attempt to charge too much as the price of domicile will merely drive away their best customers. If our reasoning is correct, and we believe it is, the nation-state as we know it will not endure in anything like its present form.

THE END OF NATIONS

Changes that diminish the power of predominant institutions are both unsettling and dangerous. Just as monarchs, lords, popes, and potentates fought ruthlessly to preserve their accustomed privileges in the early stages of the modern period, so today’s governments will employ violence, often of a covert and arbitrary kind, in the attempt to hold back the clock. 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. The advent of this new stage in history was punctuated with a bang on August 20, 1998, when the United States fired about $200 million worth of Tomahawk BGM-109 sea-launched cruise missiles at targets allegedly associated with an exiled Saudi millionaire, Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden became the first person in history to have his satellite phone targeted for attack by cruise missiles. Simultaneously, the United States destroyed a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, in Bin Laden’s honor. 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 the Industrial era. In statements reminiscent of propaganda employed during the Cold War about the Soviet Union, the United States president and his national security aides portrayed Bin Laden, a private individual, as a transnational terrorist and leading enemy of the United States.

The same military logic that has seen Osama bin Laden elevated to a position as the chief enemy of the United States will assert itself in governments’ internal relations with their subjects. Increasingly harsh techniques of exaction will be a logical corollary of the emergence of a new type of bargaining between governments and individuals. 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.

The changes implied by the Information Revolution will not only create a fiscal crisis for governments, they will tend to disintegrate all large structures. Fourteen empires have disappeared already in the twentieth century. The breakdown of empires is part of a process that will dissolve the nation-state itself. Government will have to adapt to the growing autonomy of the individual. Taxing capacity will plunge by 50-70 percent. This will tend to make smaller jurisdictions more successful. The challenge of setting competitive terms to attract able individuals and their capital will be more easily undertaken in enclaves than across continents.

We believe that as the modern nation-state decomposes, latter-day barbarians will increasingly come to exercise power behind the scenes. Groups like the Russian mafiya, which picks the bones of the former Soviet Union, other ethnic criminal gangs, nomenklaturas,I

drug lords, and renegade covert agencies will be laws unto themselves. They already are. Far more than is widely understood, the modern barbarians have already infiltrated the forms of the nation-state without greatly changing its appearances. They are micro-parasites feeding on a dying system. As violent and unscrupulous as a state at war, these groups employ the techniques of the state on a smaller scale. Their growing influence and power are part of the downsizing of politics. Microprocessing reduces the size that groups must attain in order to be effective in the use and control of violence. As this technological revolution unfolds, predatory violence will be organized more and more outside of central control. Efforts to contain violence will also devolve in ways that depend more upon efficiency than magnitude of power.

History in Reverse

The process by which the nation-state grew over the past five centuries will be put into reverse by the new logic of the Information Age. Local centers of power will reassert themselves as the state devolves into fragmented, overlapping sovereignties.⁸

The growing power of organized crime is merely one reflection of this tendency. Multinational companies are already having to subcontract all but essential work. Some conglomerates, such as AT&T, Unisys, and ITT, have split themselves into several firms in order to function more profitably. The nation-state will devolve like an unwieldy conglomerate, but probably not before it is forced to do so by financial crises.

Not only is power in the world changing, but the work of the world is changing as well. This means that the way business operates will inevitably change. The virtual corporation is evidence of a sweeping transformation in the nature of the firm, facilitated by the drop in information and transaction costs. We explore the implications of the Information Revolution for dissolving corporations and doing away with the good job. In the Information Age, a job will be a task to do, not a position you have. Microprocessing has created entirely new horizons of economic activity that transcend territorial boundaries. This transcendence of frontiers and territories is perhaps the most revolutionary development since Adam and Eve straggled out of paradise under the sentence of their Maker: In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread. As technology revolutionizes the tools we use, it also antiquates our laws, reshapes our morals, and alters our perceptions. This book explains how.

Microprocessing and rapidly improving communications already make it possible for the individual to choose where to work. Transactions on the Internet or the World Wide Web can be encrypted and will soon be almost impossible for tax collectors to capture. 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. After the turn of the millennium, much of the world’s commerce will migrate into the new realm of cyberspace, a region where governments will have no more dominion than they exercise over the bottom of the sea or the outer planets. In cyberspace, the threats of physical violence that have been the alpha and omega of politics since time immemorial will vanish. 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.

When this greatest tax haven of them all is fully open for business, all funds will essentially be offshore funds at the discretion of their owner. This will have cascading consequences. The state has grown used to treating its taxpayers as a farmer treats his cows, keeping them in a field to be milked. Soon, the cows will have wings.

The Revenge of Nations

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. Such expedients will work only temporarily, if at all. The twentieth-century nation-state, with all its pretensions, will starve to death as its tax revenues decline.

When the state finds itself unable to meet its committed expenditure by raising tax revenues, it will resort to other, more desperate measures. Among them is printing money. Governments have grown used to enjoying a monopoly over currency that they could depreciate at will. This arbitrary inflation has been a prominent feature of the monetary policy of all twentieth-century states. Even the best national currency of the postwar period, the German mark, lost 71 percent of its value from January 1, 1949, through the end of June 1995. In the same period, the U.S. dollar lost 84 percent of its value.⁹

This inflation had the same effect as a tax on all who hold the currency. As we explore later, inflation as revenue option will be largely foreclosed by the emergence of cybermoney. New technologies will allow the holders of wealth to bypass the national monopolies that have issued and regulated money in the modern period. Indeed, the credit crises that swept through Asia, Russia, and other emerging economies in 1997 and 1998 attest to the fact that national currencies and national credit ratings are anachronisms inimical to the smooth operation of the global economy. It is precisely the fact that the demands of sovereignty require all transactions within a jurisdiction to be denominated in a national currency that creates the vulnerability to mistakes by central bankers and attacks by speculators which precipitated deflationary crises in one jurisdiction after another. In the Information Age, individuals will be able to use cybercurrencies and thus declare their monetary independence. 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, 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.

Lacking their accustomed scope to tax and inflate, governments, even in traditionally civil countries, will turn nasty. As income tax becomes uncollectible, 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. Businesses that offer services that facilitate the realization of autonomy by individuals will be subject to infiltration, sabotage, and disruption. Arbitrary forfeiture of property, already commonplace in the United States, where it occurs five thousand times a week, will become even more pervasive. Governments will violate human rights, censor the free flow of information, sabotage useful technologies, and worse. For the same reasons that the late, departed Soviet Union tried in vain to suppress access to personal computers and Xerox machines, Western governments will seek to suppress the cybereconomy by totalitarian means.

RETURN OF THE LUDDITES

Such methods may prove popular among some population segments. The good news about individual liberation and autonomy will seem to be bad news to many who are frightened by the transition crisis and do not expect to be winners in the new configuration of society. The apparent popularity of the draconian capital controls imposed in 1998 by Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad in the wake of the Asian meltdown testifies to residual enthusiasm among many for the old-fashioned closed economy dominated by the nation-state. This nostalgia for the past will be fed by resentments inflamed by the inevitable transition crisis. The greatest resentment is likely to be centered among those of middle talent in currently rich countries. They particularly may come to feel that information technology poses a threat to their way of life. The beneficiaries of organized compulsion, including millions receiving income redistributed by governments, may resent the new freedom realized by Sovereign Individuals. Their upset will illustrate the truism that where you stand is determined by where you sit.

Sometimes I wondered how I could experience such deep misery over the fate of a handful of men I did not know, playing a game against another group of strangers in a ballpark hundreds of miles away. The answer is simple. I loved my teams. Although risky, caring was worth its price. Sports fired up my blood, excited me, made my heart pound. I liked having something at stake. Life was more vivid during a contest.

—CRAIG LAMBERT

It would be misleading, however, to attribute all the bad feelings that will be generated in the coming transition crisis to the bald desire to live at someone else’s expense. More will be involved. The very character of human society suggests that there is bound to be a misguided moral dimension to the coming Luddite reaction. Think of it as a bald desire fitted with a moral toupee. We explore the moral and moralistic dimensions of the transition crisis. Self-interested grasping of a conscious kind has far less power to motivate actions than does self-righteous fury. While adherence to the civic myths of the twentieth century is rapidly falling away, they are not without their true believers. 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. Everyone who came of age in the twentieth century has been inculcated in the duties and obligations of the twentieth-century citizen. The residual moral imperatives from industrial society will stimulate at least some neo-Luddite attacks on information technologies.

In this sense, this violence to come will be at least partially an expression of what we call moral anachronism, the application of moral strictures drawn from one stage of economic life to the circumstances of another. 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. Just as a farming society could not live by the moral rules of a migratory Eskimo band, so the Information Society cannot satisfy moral imperatives that emerged to facilitate the success of a militant twentieth-century industrial state. We explain why.

In the next few years, moral anachronism will be in evidence at the core countries of the West in much the way that it has been witnessed at the periphery over the past five centuries. Western colonists and military expeditions stimulated such crises when they encountered indigenous hunting-and-gathering bands, as well as peoples whose societies were still organized for farming. The introduction of new technologies into anachronistic settings caused confusion and moral crises. The success of Christian missionaries in converting millions of indigenous peoples can be laid in large measure to the local crises caused by the sudden introduction of new power arrangements from the outside. Such encounters recurred over and over, from the sixteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth century. We expect similar clashes early in the new millennium as Information Societies supplant those organized along industrial lines.

The Nostalgia for Compulsion

The rise of the Information Society will not be wholly welcomed as a promising new phase of history, even among those who benefit from it most. Everyone will feel some misgivings. And many will despise innovations that undermine the territorial nation-state. It is a fact of human nature that radical change of any kind is almost always seen as a dramatic turn for the worse. Five hundred years ago, the courtiers gathered around the duke of Burgundy would have said that unfolding innovations that undermined feudalism were evil. They thought the world was rapidly spiraling downhill at the very time that later historians saw an explosion of human potential in the Renaissance. Likewise, what may someday be seen as a new Renaissance from the perspective of the next millennium will look frightening to tired twentieth-century eyes.

There is a high probability that some who are offended by the new ways, as well as many who are disadvantaged by them, will react unpleasantly. Their nostalgia for compulsion will probably turn violent. Encounters with these new Luddites will make the transition to radical new forms of social organization at least a measure of bad news for everyone. 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.

You must understand and prepare for such unpleasantness. A series of transition crises lies ahead. Deflationary tribulations, such as the Asian contagion that swept through the Far East to Russia and other emerging economies in 1997 and 1998, will erupt sporadically as the dated national and international institutions left over from the Industrial Era prove inadequate to the challenges of the new, dispersed, transnational economy. The new information and communication technologies are more subversive of the modern state than any political threat to its predominance since Columbus sailed. This is important because those in power have seldom reacted peacefully to developments that undermined their authority. They are not likely to now.

The clash between the new and the old will shape the early years of the new millennium. We expect it to be a time of great danger and great reward, and a time of much diminished civility in some realms and unprecedented scope in others. 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. 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 more for its services than they are worth to you and other people who pay for them.

Governments will have to deal with what sovereignty means.

—ROBERT MARTIN, CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES

Sovereignty Through Markets

To an extent that few would have imagined only a decade ago, individuals will achieve increasing autonomy over territorial nation-states through market mechanisms. 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. Their intercontinental missiles and aircraft carriers are already artifacts, as imposing and useless as the last warhorse of feudalism.

Information technology makes possible a dramatic extension of markets by altering the way that assets are created and protected. This is revolutionary. Indeed, it promises to be more revolutionary for industrial society than the advent of gunpowder proved to be for feudal agriculture. 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.

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 new millennium will no longer be an asset of the state, a de facto item on the treasury’s balance sheet. After the transition of the year 2000, denationalized citizens will no longer be citizens as we know them, but customers.

BANDWIDTH TRUMPS BORDERS

The commercialization of sovereignty will make the terms and conditions of citizenship in the nation-state as dated as chivalric oaths seemed after the collapse of feudalism. Instead of relating to a powerful state as citizens to be taxed, the Sovereign Individuals of the twenty-first century will be customers of governments operating from a new logical space. They will bargain for whatever minimal government they need and pay for it according to contract. The governments of the Information Age will be organized along different principles than those which the world has come to expect over the past several centuries. Some jurisdictions and sovereignty services will be formed through assortive matching, a system by which affinities, including commercial affinities, are the basis upon which virtual jurisdictions earn allegiance. In rare cases, the new sovereignties may be holdovers of medieval organizations, like the 900-year-old Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta. 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. As we write it is negotiating with the Republic of Malta to reassume possession of Fort St. Angelo. Taking possession of the castle would give the Knights the missing ingredient of territoriality that will enable it to be recognized as a sovereignty. The Knights of Malta could once again become a sovereign microstate, instantly legitimized by a long history. It was from Fort St. Angelo that the Knights of Malta turned back the Turks in the Great Siege of 1565. Indeed, they ruled Malta for many years thereafter, until they were expelled by Napoleon in 1798. If the Knights of Malta were to return in the next few years, there could be no clearer evidence that the modern nation-state system, ushered in after the French Revolution, was merely an interlude in the longer sweep of history in which it has been the norm for many kinds of sovereignties to exist at the same time.

Still another and very different model for a postmodern sovereignty based on assortive matching is the Iridium satellite telephone network. At first glance, you may think it odd to treat a cellular telephone service as a kind of sovereignty. Yet Iridium has already received recognition as a virtual sovereignty by international authorities. As you may know, Iridium is a global cellular phone service that allows subscribers to receive calls on a single number, wherever they find themselves on the planet, from Featherston, New Zealand, to the Bolivian Chaco. To allow calls to be routed to Iridium subscribers anywhere on the globe, given the architecture of global telecoms, international telecom authorities had to agree to recognize Iridium as a virtual country, with its own country code: 8816. It is a short step logically from a virtual country comprising satellite telephone subscribers to sovereignty for more coherent virtual communities on the World Wide Web that span borders. Bandwidth, or the carrying capacity of a communications medium, has been expanding faster than computational capacity multiplied after the invention of transistors. If this trend to greater bandwidth continues, as we believe likely, 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. Stephenson’s metaverse is a dense virtual community with its own laws. We believe it is inevitable that, as the cybereconomy becomes richer, its participants will seek and obtain exemption from the anachronistic laws of nation-states. The new cybercommunities will be at least as wealthy and competent at advancing their interests as the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta. Indeed, they will be more capable of asserting themselves because of far-reaching communications and information warfare capabilities. 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.

A new moral vocabulary will be required to describe the relations of Sovereign Individuals with one another and what remains of government. We suspect that as the terms of these new relations come into focus, they will offend many people who came of age as citizens of twentieth-century nation-states. The end of nations and the denationalization of the individual will deflate some warmly held notions, such as equal protection under the law, that presuppose power relations that are soon to be obsolete. As virtual communities gain coherence, they will insist that their members be held accountable according to their own laws, rather than those of the former nation-states in which they happen to reside. Multiple systems of law will again coexist over the same geographic area, as they did in ancient and medieval times.

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. Indeed, they will eventually become comic in much the way that the sacred principles of fifteenth-century feudalism fell to ridicule in the sixteenth century. The cherished civic notions of the twentieth century will be comic anachronisms to new generations after the transformation of the year 2000. The Don Quixote of the twenty-first century will not be a knight-errant struggling to revive the glories of feudalism but a bureaucrat in a brown suit, a tax collector yearning for a citizen to audit.

REVIVING LAWS OF THE MARCH

We seldom think of governments as competitive entities, except in the broadest sense, so the modern intuition about the range and possibilities of sovereignty has atrophied. In the past, when the power equation made it more difficult for groups to assert a stable monopoly of coercion, power was frequently fragmented, jurisdictions overlapped, and entities of many different kinds exercised one or more of the attributes of sovereignty. Not infrequently, the nominal overlord actually enjoyed scant power on the ground. Governments weaker than the nation-states are now faced with sustained competition in their ability to impose a monopoly of coercion over a local territory. This competition gave rise to adaptations in controlling violence and attracting allegiance that will soon be new again.

When the reach of lords and kings was weak, and the claims of one or more groups overlapped at a frontier, it frequently happened that neither could decisively dominate the other. In the Middle Ages, there were numerous frontier or march regions where sovereignties blended together. These violent frontiers persisted for decades or even centuries in the border areas of Europe. There were marches between areas of Celtic and English control in Ireland; between Wales and England, Scotland and England, Italy and France, France and Spain, Germany and the Slav frontiers of Central Europe, and between the Christian kingdoms of Spain and the Islamic kingdom of Granada. Such march regions developed distinct institutional and legal forms of a kind that we are likely to see again in the next millennium. 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,