The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
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William Rees-Mogg — father of politician Jacob, but no reactionary: as editor of the The Times, he wrote the paper’s legendary editorial “who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?” condemning Mick Jagger’s prosecution on drugs offences.
Much later, in 1997, he and James Dale Davidson wrote The Sovereign Individual, a manifesto of sorts for the coming internet revolution. It was prescient: 1997 was the internet’s infancy, before Web 2.0 (the user-contributing internet) — let alone Web 3.0 (the crypto-metaverse) — properly took hold of the public imagination. In that regard, and at a distance of 25 years, some of its predictions are striking, as is its unorthodox reading of history.
Still, it is to be taken with a grain or two of salt: the historical readings have a definite political/philosophical slant (1997 was the height of the vogue for laissez faire as a panacea for any cultural ill) and in hindsight should be taken for what they were: an argument, not an irrefutable deduction from principles of solid logic.
On crypto
Undoubtedly the Sovereign Individual anticipated cryptocurrency, though was unduly optimistic for its future as a liberating tool for the masses:
“Inflation as revenue option will be largely foreclosed by the emergence of cybermoney [...] In the Information Age, individuals will be able to use cybercurrencies and thus declare their monetary independence. When individuals can conduct their own monetary policies over the World Wide Web it will matter less or not at all that the state continues to control the industrial-era printing presses. Their importance for controlling the world's wealth will be transcended by mathematical algorithms that have no physical existence. In the new millennium, cybermoney controlled by private markets will supersede fiat money issued by governments.”