The processing and use of information is rapidly replacing and modifying physical products as the most important source of profit. This has major consequences. Information technology divorces income-earning potential from residence in any specific geographic location. Since a greater and greater portion of the value of products and services will be

That is the fact that governments have never established stable monopolies of coercion over the open sea. Think about it. No government’s laws have ever exclusively applied there. This is a matter of the utmost importance in understanding how the organization of violence and protection will evolve as the economy migrates into cyberspace, which has

A good social morality has certain characteristics. It should contribute to the survival of society and of individuals, in a dynamic rather than static way. It should include tolerance and avoid self-righteousness. It should be religious, rather than merely agnostic. It should not pretend to decide questions of scientific fact. It should be neither

Sometime within the next few decades, the new megapolitics of the Information Age will antiquate The Prince. The Sovereign Individual will require a new recipe for success, one which will highly emphasize honor and rectitude in deploying resources outside the grip of the state.

What is remarkable is not that the rate of tax charged should fall as a percentage of income in this particular case, but that it should ever have seemed “fair” that different persons should pay wildly different amounts for the services of government during the twentieth century. This is particularly odd in that those who use government services th

With the possible exception of the early stages of farming, past transitions have always involved periods of social chaos and heightened violence due to disorientation and breakdown of the old system. Corruption, moral decline, and inefficiency appear to be signal features of the final stages of a system. The growing importance of technology in sha

Yet recognize it or not, we are living through a change of historical season, a transformation in the way people organize their livelihoods and defend themselves that is so far-reaching that it will inevitably transform the whole of society. The change will be so profound, in fact, that to understand it will require taking almost nothing for grante

We believe that the age of individual economic sovereignty is coming. Just as steel mills, telephone companies, mines, and railways that were once “nationalized” have been rapidly privatized throughout the world, you will soon see the ultimate form of privatization—the sweeping denationalization of the individual. The Sovereign Individual of the ne

Other things being equal, the more widely dispersed key technologies are, the more widely dispersed power will tend to be, and the smaller the optimum scale of government.