sovereign-individual
In 1997, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg wrote that "digital money will permit holders of wealth to bypass the political process entirely." They wrote this twelve years before Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper, fourteen years before the first real-world Bitcoin transaction,
sovereign-individual
In July 2022, Balaji Srinivasan published *The Network State: How to Start a New Country*, the most ambitious attempt to date to update Davidson and Rees-Mogg's thesis for the post-Bitcoin, post-COVID, post-remote-work world. Where the original *Sovereign Individual* described exit as an individual
sovereign-individual
Davidson and Rees-Mogg do not hide it. In *The Sovereign Individual* (1997), they state plainly that they are writing for "the cognitive elite" — their term, deployed without apology. The book's practical advice assumes the reader has significant savings, marketable digital skills, geographic mobili
sovereign-individual
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 predic
sovereign-individual
In 2019, Shoshana Zuboff published *The Age of Surveillance Capitalism*, and in doing so she named the threat that Davidson and Rees-Mogg never saw coming. Their 1997 book predicted, with remarkable accuracy, that digital technology would undermine state power. What they did not predict — what their
sovereign-individual
Davidson and Rees-Mogg predicted the nation-state would wither. They were half right, which is the most dangerous kind of right — it breeds overconfidence in the half that was wrong. The state has lost significant ground in information control, credentialing monopoly, and the ability to tax mobile d
sovereign-individual
When James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg published *The Sovereign Individual* in 1997, most of the infrastructure we now take for granted did not exist. There was no Google, no Bitcoin, no iPhone, no Zoom. The internet was a novelty, ecommerce was an experiment, and the idea that a person coul
sovereign-individual
In 1997, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg published *The Sovereign Individual*, and the book has spent nearly three decades being both vindicated and embarrassed by history. They predicted the decline of the nation-state, the rise of digital commerce, the empowerment of individuals through
sovereign-individual
In 1997, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg published *The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State*. The book argued, with considerable force and occasional recklessness, that information technology would fundamentally alter the relationship be
sovereign-individual
Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in the ancient world, wrote in his private journal a line that should give every sovereign individualist pause: "What injures the hive injures the bee." He wrote this not as a collectivist slogan but as a statement of fact — an emperor's observation that his ow