The Sovereign Individual
Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
About the book
The move from industrial society to one based on information, which James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg call the fourth stage of human society, is the subject of their 1997 forecast. They argue the change will free individuals and weaken governments, foreseeing the end of the nation-state. Across eleven chapters they cover megapolitics in history, the agricultural revolution, the cybereconomy, earnings in a world without jobs, nationalism and the new Luddites, and morality and crime in the information age. They predict that private cybermoney will replace fiat currency and that states will struggle to tax their citizens. A 2020 reprint added a preface by Peter Thiel.
Marc Andreessen named it in an AMA, and Marvin Liao of 500 Startups listed it in a Book-Talk interview. James Stanley, founder of SMS Privacy, called it his favorite non-business book and singled out its early prediction of what is now called cryptocurrency.
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This book has 3 recommendations
Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)
Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku
James Stanley (Founder/SMS Privacy)
Favourite non-business book is "The Sovereign Individual" by James Dale Davision and William Rees-Mogg. Written in 1996, there's a page in it that predicts the rise of what they call "cybermoney" (but what we now know as "cryptocurrency") in affording individuals freedom over their money without being subject to coercion or surveillance by banks, governments, etc. Apart from that, there are lots of very astute observations and predictions throughout the book. Its either utopian or dystopian depending on your politics :)
Recommended by Marc Andreessen (Co-Founder/Andreessen Horowitz)
Source: AMA with Marc Andreessen
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James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg
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