The thesis of the Sovereign Individual holds up well. But there are three major countertrends.
The Individual Sovereign, and Xi Jinping in particular.
The Sovereign Collective, the leverage of nomadic groups.
The Autonomous Robot, as drones also change the logic of violence.
The Individual Sovereign
Technology matters - but so do founders. A sufficiently motivated founder can change the direction of technology. And Xi Jinping has refounded the Chinese state as a formidable, centralized, militaristic surveillance machine.
reuters.com/investigates/s…
The Individual Sovereign is a problem for the Sovereign Individual. A single man at the helm of a total surveillance state is just a different thing than the US establishment. The latter may well *want* to crush free speech & free markets, but lacks the state capacity to do so.
Yes, the US establishment has NSA surveillance, media corps, the dollar, all these things it has inherited.
But fortunately it lacks the leadership to put these together into a systematically effective plan for oppression. So it’s losing control over matters foreign & domestic.
It’s not yet obvious today — you need to extrapolate a few trends — but one scenario is American anarchy, Chinese control, and an International Intermediate.
In the Chinese sphere of influence, the Sovereign Individual would be harshly tamped down by the Individual Sovereign.
This brings us to the 2nd countervailing force: the Sovereign Collective.
We should strive for crypto-civilization rather than crypto-anarchy. Dysfunctional legacy states are getting unbundled, but we need to build better ones.
New states, not no states.
shows.banklesshq.com/p/-crypto-civi…
The Sovereign Collective is a more natural fit for human nature than the Sovereign Individual.
Put another way: technology has enabled us to start new companies, new communities, and new currencies. Can it allow us to start new cities, even new countries?
foresight.org/salon/balaji-s…
The collective exit to Miami was organic and unplanned.
But can we productize it? Build something like Nomadlist or Teleport, but for groups to crowdfund a migration together? That’s the concept of crowdchoice, a core idea behind the Sovereign Collective.
1729.com/miami
The Autonomous Robot
An important part of the Sovereign Individual thesis is the idea that encryption increases the individual’s power to resist coercion. However, drones can also increase state power to coerce in the physical world — without the same need for human conscripts.
Drones and autonomous robots in general are like firearms and encryption — something with nonobvious consequences for the monopoly of violence that underpins the state. They aren’t that easy to build, which favors states. But they are easy to operate, which favors individuals.
This also relates to Thiel’s point on how AI centralizes & crypto decentralizes. A Chinese drone armada may be a centralizing force that opposes the decentralization of crypto. Conversely, drones may make it easier for Sovereign Collectives to ward off an Individual Sovereign.
Each of these trends — Sovereign Individual, Individual Sovereign, Sovereign Collective, Autonomous Robot — are like forces applied to the status quo.
Different outcomes are possible. Many may coexist at the same time in different places. But it’s not just one force.
PS: there is at least one other force that belongs up there, which is quantum computing’s impact on encryption. A lot depends on whether the decryption process is expensive, secret, and available for a while only to a centralized state like China. brookings.edu/techstream/the…
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