What The Sovereign Individual Got Wrong: The Blind Spots

If the previous article in this series was an honest accounting of what Davidson and Rees-Mogg predicted correctly, this one is the necessary counterweight. The Sovereign Individual contains real intellectual achievements — we have acknowledged them plainly. But it also contains failures of prediction, failures of moral imagination, and assumptions so deeply embedded in the authors’ worldview that they could not see them as assumptions at all. A framework that generates accurate predictions in some domains while failing catastrophically in others is not useless, but it is incomplete, and treating it as gospel is precisely the kind of institutional dependency the book itself warns against.

Shoshana Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), provides the most thorough articulation of the failure Davidson and Rees-Mogg could not have anticipated, and the one that most thoroughly undermines their central thesis. The information revolution did not simply liberate individuals from institutional oversight. It created entirely new mechanisms of control.

The Original Argument

Davidson and Rees-Mogg’s framework rests on a specific assumption about the relationship between information technology and power: that technology shifts power from institutions to individuals by reducing the state’s ability to monitor, tax, and coerce. The logic seems clean. Digital money is harder to tax. Remote work is harder to regulate. Encrypted communication is harder to surveil. The state’s grip loosens as information flows freely.

The assumption they failed to examine was that the same technology could be deployed in the opposite direction — that it could enable surveillance at a scale and granularity that no prior state apparatus had ever achieved. They imagined individuals using encryption to shield their transactions from government eyes. They did not imagine governments — and corporations — using the same technology to monitor every transaction, every communication, every movement, every preference, every relationship, and every deviation from the norm.

China’s social credit system is the most visible example, but it is not the most important one. The more consequential development is the quieter, ambient surveillance embedded in the infrastructure of daily life in democratic countries. Your phone tracks your location continuously. Your browser records your interests. Your financial transactions are monitored by algorithms designed to flag anomalies. Your communications metadata — who you contact, when, how often, for how long — is collected and retained by telecommunications providers under legal frameworks that require minimal judicial oversight. Zuboff calls this “surveillance capitalism”: the systematic extraction of behavioral data for prediction and control, conducted not primarily by states but by corporations whose business model depends on knowing more about you than you know about yourself.

Davidson and Rees-Mogg could not have predicted this specific configuration. But the failure runs deeper than missed specifics. Their framework contains no mechanism for technology increasing institutional power. It treats the information revolution as unidirectional — a liberation tool — because that is what their ideological commitments required it to be. A more rigorous framework would have recognized that technology is agnostic about power; it amplifies whatever capacities already exist, including the capacity to surveil and coerce.

Why It Matters Now

The platform monopoly miss may be the most structurally significant error in the book. Davidson and Rees-Mogg imagined a decentralized economy — millions of sovereign individuals transacting freely in a competitive digital marketplace. What materialized instead was an economy dominated by a handful of platform monopolies whose power exceeds that of most nation-states. Google controls the discovery of information. Apple and Google together control the mobile platforms through which most digital life is conducted. Amazon dominates ecommerce logistics. Meta controls the social graph of billions of people. Microsoft controls the productivity infrastructure of most businesses.

These are not traditional monopolies that control a commodity. They are infrastructure monopolies that control the conditions under which economic and social life occurs. When Google changes its search algorithm, businesses rise and fall. When Apple changes its App Store policies, entire industries restructure. When Amazon adjusts its marketplace rules, thousands of small businesses lose their livelihoods overnight. Davidson and Rees-Mogg imagined sovereign individuals escaping the coercive power of the state. They did not imagine those same individuals becoming utterly dependent on private platforms whose power is less accountable than the governments they were fleeing.

The violence prediction failed in a specific and instructive way. The book argued that information technology would reduce the returns to violence — that digital wealth, being intangible, could not be seized by force the way land or factories could. This was half right. You cannot send an army to confiscate Bitcoin. But information technology has been weaponized for surveillance, drone warfare, social control, and the manipulation of public opinion at scale. Violence has not decreased; it has been made more precise, more targeted, and more deniable. A government that cannot tax your Bitcoin can still track your movements, freeze your bank accounts, manipulate your information environment, and deploy a drone to your coordinates. The returns to violence have not diminished; the forms of violence have changed.

The social fragmentation that the book treats as a neutral consequence of structural change is, in practice, a catastrophe for most people. Davidson and Rees-Mogg describe the dissolution of community bonds, shared institutions, and collective identity as an inevitable byproduct of technological change — regrettable, perhaps, but irrelevant to the sovereign individual who has transcended the need for such things. This is where the book’s emotional tone becomes most troubling. It reads as genuinely indifferent to the suffering of people who lack the resources to exit failing communities. It treats the collapse of institutions that, however imperfectly, provided healthcare, education, social insurance, and communal life as a problem for the people who depended on them — which is to say, most people.

The democracy dismissal deserves direct engagement. Davidson and Rees-Mogg are contemptuous of democratic governance. They view it as a mechanism by which the unproductive majority extracts resources from the productive minority through taxation and regulation. Their disdain is not hidden; it is stated plainly. What they do not engage with — what their framework has no room for — is the question of accountability. If the nation-state declines and private governance rises, who governs the governors? A democratic government can, at least in principle, be voted out of power. A private governance structure — a corporate arbitration system, a platform moderation regime, a gated community’s homeowner’s association — has no such mechanism. The book celebrates the escape from democratic accountability without examining what replaces it. History suggests that ungoverned power does not remain benign.

The Practical Extension

If you are building a personal sovereignty practice — and we believe you should be — the book’s blind spots are as instructive as its predictions. They tell you where the framework fails and where you need additional tools.

Do not assume that technology is your ally by default. Technology is a tool; it amplifies existing power structures as readily as it disrupts them. Every digital tool you adopt for sovereignty — encrypted communication, cryptocurrency, remote work platforms — also generates data that can be collected, analyzed, and used against you. Operational awareness of your digital footprint is not paranoia; it is the minimum competence required by the environment Davidson and Rees-Mogg described but failed to fully understand.

Recognize platform dependency as a form of institutional dependency. If your income depends on a single platform — Amazon, YouTube, Substack, any app store — you have not achieved sovereignty; you have transferred your dependency from a government to a corporation. The practical response is the same one this site recommends for every other form of dependency: diversify. Build on platforms you do not control, but always maintain the capacity to migrate. Own your audience contact information. Maintain your own domain. Keep your content in formats you control.

Take community seriously as infrastructure. The book’s contempt for collective life is not merely morally deficient; it is strategically foolish. The individuals who navigate disruption most successfully are not isolated actors; they are embedded in networks of mutual support, shared information, and reciprocal obligation. A community that pools knowledge about tax optimization, jurisdictional options, health resources, and professional opportunities creates more sovereignty for its members than any individual could achieve alone. The book’s error is treating community as a constraint on sovereignty rather than a condition of it.

Do not confuse exit with accountability. The sovereign individual framework emphasizes exit — the ability to leave a jurisdiction, a platform, an institution. Exit is valuable. But exit without voice creates a world in which power is never challenged, only evaded. If every capable individual simply exits failing systems, those systems continue to fail, and the people who cannot exit bear the full cost. We do not argue that you should sacrifice yourself to fix broken institutions. We argue that the exercise of voice — participation, critique, reform — is a form of sovereignty, not a renunciation of it.

The Lineage

Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is the essential corrective to the techno-optimism embedded in The Sovereign Individual. Where Davidson and Rees-Mogg saw technology as a liberation force, Zuboff documents, with meticulous empiricism, how the same technology has been deployed to create what she calls “instrumentarian power” — the ability to shape behavior through prediction and manipulation rather than through force. This is a form of power that the megapolitical framework has no vocabulary for, because it does not operate through violence or coercion in the traditional sense. It operates through the architecture of choice itself.

The tradition of critiquing technological utopianism is long and distinguished. Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society (1964) argued that technique — the systematic application of rational method — tends to subordinate human ends to technical means, regardless of the intentions of its designers. Neil Postman’s Technopoly (1992), published five years before The Sovereign Individual, argued that technology does not merely add options; it restructures the culture that adopts it, often in ways that are invisible to those living through the change.

We do not reject Davidson and Rees-Mogg’s framework. We insist on completing it. A framework that accounts for the liberating potential of technology but not its coercive potential is half a framework. A model of sovereignty that requires wealth, mobility, and digital literacy but cannot address the situation of people who lack those resources is half a model. The complete version — the one this site is working toward — holds the book’s genuine insights alongside its genuine failures and builds a practice that accounts for both.

The final article in this series addresses the most fundamental blind spot of all: the class problem. Who gets to be a sovereign individual, and what does the framework offer to everyone else?

This article is part of The Sovereign Individual Thesis series at SovereignCML. Related reading: “The Predictions Scorecard: What Davidson & Rees-Mogg Got Right,” “The Class Problem: Who Gets to Be a Sovereign Individual?”