The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State

Because information technology has undermined the capacity of centralized authority to project power and provide physical security for systems that operate at a large scale, the optimal size of almost every enterprise in the “natural economy” is falling. To respond to this technological change will entail a massive investment requirement (read oppo

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It was precisely the capacity to rake in resources that made democracy supreme during the megapolitical conditions of the Industrial Age. Mass democracy went hand in hand with industrialism. As Alvin Toffler has said, mass democracy “is the political expression of mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mas

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The commercialization of sovereignty will make the terms and conditions of citizenship in the nation-state as dated as chivalric oaths seemed after the collapse of feudalism. Instead of relating to a powerful state as citizens to be taxed, the Sovereign Individuals of the twenty-first century will be customers of governments operating from a “new l

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