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Between 1965 and 1975, somewhere between 750,000 and one million Americans left the cities and suburbs and moved to the country [VERIFY exact numbers — estimates range widely depending on source]. They bought cheap land in Vermont, Oregon, Tennessee, New Mexico, British Columbia. They built cabins,
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If the sovereign individual tradition has a contemporary standard-bearer — someone who has taken the thesis from book-club abstraction to something approaching an engineering specification — it is Balaji Srinivasan. No one currently working in public life has pushed harder on the question of what co
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In 1927, a thirty-two-year-old man stood on the shore of Lake Michigan and considered drowning himself. He was bankrupt. His first daughter, Alexandra, had died of polio and spinal meningitis at age four. [VERIFY cause of Alexandra's death] He was drinking heavily, and by his own later account, he h
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In 1845, Henry David Thoreau walked into the woods near Concord, Massachusetts, and began building a cabin on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1885, Nikola Tesla walked out of Thomas Edison's laboratory in Manhattan after a dispute over compensation. In 1927, Buckminster Fuller stood on the sho
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This series has profiled individuals and movements across two centuries — from Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond to the back-to-the-land communes of Tennessee, from Tesla's solitary laboratory to the quiet farmer selling at Saturday's market. The details differ enormously. The pattern does not. Every f
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For every Thoreau who wrote a book, there were thousands who simply changed their lives. They did not publish manifestos. They did not build cabins with symbolic intent. They did not record their expenses to the half-cent for the edification of future readers. They made a calculation — usually priva
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On October 31, 2008, a person or group using the name Satoshi Nakamoto posted a nine-page paper to a cryptography mailing list. The paper was titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System." It described a method for transferring value between parties without the need for a trusted intermedi
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"We are as gods and might as well get good at it." [VERIFY exact wording — this is the 1968 version; Brand later revised it to "We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it" for the Whole Earth Discipline in 2009] That sentence opened the first edition of the *Whole Earth Catalog* in the fall of 1968,
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There is a particular kind of person who would rather be right and ruined than wrong and comfortable. Nikola Tesla was that person, and his life is the most instructive case study we have in the rewards and costs of total intellectual independence. He left the most powerful institution in electrical
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On July 4, 1845 — the date chosen with full symbolic intent — Henry David Thoreau moved into a small cabin he had built on the shore of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. The land belonged to his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. The cabin cost twenty-eight dollars and twelve and a half