The Sovereign Individual

It feels like something big is about to happen: graphs show us the yearly growth of populations, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, Web 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 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 nationstates 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 6 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 nationstate as we know it will not survive in anything like its present form. ## CHAPTER 2 METAPOLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE "In history as in nature, birth and death are equally balanced" -JOHAN HUIZINGA3 ## THE WANING OF THE MODERN WORLD In our view, you are witnessing nothing less than the waning of the Modern Age. It is a development driven by a ruthless but hidden logic. More than we commonly understand, more than CNN and the newspapers tell us, the next millennium will no longer be "modern." We say this not to imply that you face a savage or backward future, although that is possible, but to emphasize that the stage of history now opening will be qualitatively different from that into which you were born. Something new is coming. Just as farming societies differed in kind from hunting-and-gathering bands, and industrial societies differed radically from feudal or yeoman agricultural systems, so the New World to come will mark a radical departure from anything seen before. In the new millennium, economic and political life will no longer be organized on a gigantic scale under the domination of the nationstate as it was during the modern centuries. The civilization that brought you world war, the assembly line, social security, income tax, deodorant, and the toaster oven is dying. Deodorant and the toaster oven may survive. The others won't. Like an ancient and once mighty man, the nationstate has a future numbered in years and days, and no longer in centuries and decades. Governments have already lost much of their power to regulate and compel. The collapse of Communism marked the end of a long cycle of five centuries during which magnitude of power overwhelmed efficiency in the organization of government. It was a time when the returns to violence were high and rising. They no longer are. A phase transition of world-historic dimensions has already begun. Indeed, the future Gibbon who chronicles the decline and fall of the once-Modern Age in the next millennium may declare that it had already ended by the time you read this book. Looking back, he may say, as we do, that it ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Or with the death of the Soviet Union in 1991. Either date could come to stand as a defining event in the evolution of civilization, the end of what we now know as the Modern Age. The fourth stage of human development is coming, and perhaps its least predictable feature is the new name under which it will be known. Call it "PostModern." Call it the "Cyber Society" or the "Information Age." Or make up your own name. No one knows what conceptual glue will stick a nickname to the next phase of history. 3 Huizinga, op. cit., p.7. ## 26 We do not even know that the five-hundred-year stretch of history just ending will continue to be thought of as "modem." If future historians know anything about word derivations, it will not be. A more descriptive title might be "The Age of the State" or "The Age of Violence." But such a name would fall outside the temporal spectrum that currently defines the epochs of history. "Modern," according to the 0xford English Dictionary means pertaining to the present and recent times, as distinguished from the remote past.... In historical use commonly applied (in contradiction to ancient and medieval) to the time subsequent to the MIDDLE AGES."4 Western people consciously thought of themselves as "modern" only when they came to understand that the medieval period was over. Before 1500, no one had ever thought of the feudal centuries as a middle" period in Western civilization. The reason is obvious upon reflection: before an age can reasonably be seen as sandwiched in the "middle" of two other historic epochs, it must have already come to an end. Those living during the feudal centuries could not have imagined themselves as living in a halfway house between antiquity and modem civilization until it dawned on them not just that the medieval period was over, but also that medieval civilization differed dramatically from that of the Dark Ages or antiquity.5 When the European powers enjoyed a monopoly on machine guns late in the nineteenth century, they were able to use those weapons against peoples at the periphery to dramatically expand colonial empires. Later, in the twentieth century, when machine guns became widely available, especially in the wake of World War II, they were deployed to help destroy the power of empires. Other things being equal, the more widely dispersed key technologies are, the more 40 widely dispersed power will tend to be, and the smaller the optimum scale of government.