Take a photo of a barcode or cover
36 reviews for:
The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
James Dale Davidson
3.79 AVERAGE
36 reviews for:
The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
James Dale Davidson
3.79 AVERAGE
One of those reviews that will be hard for me. Full disclosure: I am working in IT security and have read Rand, Friedman, Hayek, etc. I do believe that corporations will take over more and more responsibilities of states over time. This book was recommended to me, and it should be one which I should agree to.. sadly life is not that easy.
The basic idea of the book is that governments are inherently evil and more akin to organized crimes and not worth keeping. They force taxes upon population and the "most deserving" population (the richest 1%) don't get most out of it and should leave ship (by crossing borders). Also, unions are evil and thugs. Privatizations are great. Global warming has less impact than global cooling, large-scale wars will not happen anymore and companies are well suited to take care of the common good (e.g., global warming). Some of those premises might not worked out all that well.
They claim that "micro-processing" (the book was written in the last century, over-usage of the prefix cyber for everywhere is a sad sign of its time) would remove the link between territory and work, e.g., a software firm could just pack up its employees/computers and leave while a typical industrial company (e.g., with lots of machinery) cannot. So wars do not make any sense anymore, as wars only target industrial-age resources. After the Ukraine-war and the current supply-chain problems this might not be perceived as 100% true: if few companies control all the resources needed to create computers or if a single company controls all the machinery, i.e., ASML, this assumption does not hold up to well anymore.
"In the information age a 'job' will be a task to do, not a position you 'have'" --- 100% agree to that. This adds to other stuff that they got right: location-independence, choosing your country, communication in general. Please note: when they talk about digital cash they do not talk about bitcoin but rather about a closed ledger or (maybe) a stablecoin.
"Modern computers cannot be threatened by ruffians with crowbars" -- there's a thing called rubber hose crypto-analysis.. most of the computer analogies are outdated or do not show deep technical knowledge. One reoccurring thing: "the web not being able to be monopolized".. sounds well in theory, in practice (2022) this is rather an illusion being uphold by the monopolies for advertisement purposes. Even the web3 movement is highly monopolized if you look at access gateways.
"no risk of virtual shrapnel" -> life must be easier pre- ransom-/destruction-ware.
The aristocratic upper class (5%) of learned vs the lower 30% underclass "as stupid as pig dribble" (to quote them quoting another author) will become problematic. Inequality due to skill.. the growing underclass with nationalist or anti-technology bias. the anti-globalization Luddites are sadly spot on.
A bit less praise of colonialism might fit better.. the same one-sideness when it comes to discrimination. this taints other claims. trying to justify witch burning by stating that witches were women that were ransoming people.. okay.. the paragraph about black-anger and welfare queens (I assume they liked Reagan) feels out-of-place too.
Some of the stories seem overly biased, some arguments are classical straw-man arguments. When talking about history there is a tendency to mangle causality and correlation. Primary sources often repeat. Communism and Socialism is used changeably. There are some occurrences of "it has been evident that.." without giving any evidence --- this makes some of there conclusions stand on very shaky grounds.
You can interpret a lot of things into the book -- cloud, IoT, etc. information warfare and the whole march-analogy feels wrong or at least with a bit of selection bias: the example of Andorra as a march is fine, but how would Afghanistan fit the picture?
"the most productive pay the most [taxes]" -- without any explanation. Ignore, that they use absolute payments instead of relative ones, there is still one big hole in this theory: capital is mostly inherited, seems the most productive way of living would be to be born rich. It's (re)productive in a way, but not in the way the authors might have meant.
Governments should be controlled by the people that pay most (e.g., the rich in absolute terms) and they should heed the rich's needs (i.e., limit tax income). Question: if the rich won't make up most of the income anymore (due to tax changes, or we switch from absolute to percentage-based metrics), should the "working poor" than be able to take all the money of the rich (as they would be able to control the government)?
After government and regulations are gone, there is no risk coming from corporations because.. that point is sadly missing. Historically there was a time when Corporations ruled the work (after an increase of efficiency), the age of the trade companies (e.g., East Indian, VSOP, etc.). Not the best time.
Social disruption arises from a simple chain: there is more labor force needed -> the ratio between management and labor increases -> this leads to an estranged labor force (as they won't have the same connection to the company/management than before; new technology is always mentioned throughout the book but sadly not mentioned here) -> this leads to more anonymity and thus to violence. According to the authors this is "the law", I'd say that the problem is the estrangement and lets better work on that.
The one-sided coverage of Bill Clinton reaches Pizza-Gate level. This is almost fun to read, in a satirical way but does not help to bring any point across. It is double satirical as the book itself warns about using "good" information sources a couple of pages afterwards. The "whole deep-state and Bill Clinton is a drug dealer" were not one of the good parts of the book. I would be interested what the authors would say about president Trump.
"Canada and Italy are sure to devolve in the first quarter of the century".. let's hope not.
The switch to anti-abortion in the last chapter is.. wild. "a godless, rootless, and rich elite is unlikely to be happy, or to be loved". The last chapter is style-wise and content wise a departure from the rest of the book. The mourning for the loss of conservatism and religion can be felt throughout those pages. Reading "Factfulness" might help. "morality should be religious" --- not that enlightened.
the "Resources for achieving independence" appendix sounds like the typical marketing stuff more often found in esoteric self-help books.
All in all, there is some truth in the book, but overall I am not that impressed. Let's think how to prevent the dystopia they are describing or lighten the impact upon me, who might have counted as sovereign individual. I might even give back my Estonian digital identity after reading the book.
The basic idea of the book is that governments are inherently evil and more akin to organized crimes and not worth keeping. They force taxes upon population and the "most deserving" population (the richest 1%) don't get most out of it and should leave ship (by crossing borders). Also, unions are evil and thugs. Privatizations are great. Global warming has less impact than global cooling, large-scale wars will not happen anymore and companies are well suited to take care of the common good (e.g., global warming). Some of those premises might not worked out all that well.
They claim that "micro-processing" (the book was written in the last century, over-usage of the prefix cyber for everywhere is a sad sign of its time) would remove the link between territory and work, e.g., a software firm could just pack up its employees/computers and leave while a typical industrial company (e.g., with lots of machinery) cannot. So wars do not make any sense anymore, as wars only target industrial-age resources. After the Ukraine-war and the current supply-chain problems this might not be perceived as 100% true: if few companies control all the resources needed to create computers or if a single company controls all the machinery, i.e., ASML, this assumption does not hold up to well anymore.
"In the information age a 'job' will be a task to do, not a position you 'have'" --- 100% agree to that. This adds to other stuff that they got right: location-independence, choosing your country, communication in general. Please note: when they talk about digital cash they do not talk about bitcoin but rather about a closed ledger or (maybe) a stablecoin.
"Modern computers cannot be threatened by ruffians with crowbars" -- there's a thing called rubber hose crypto-analysis.. most of the computer analogies are outdated or do not show deep technical knowledge. One reoccurring thing: "the web not being able to be monopolized".. sounds well in theory, in practice (2022) this is rather an illusion being uphold by the monopolies for advertisement purposes. Even the web3 movement is highly monopolized if you look at access gateways.
"no risk of virtual shrapnel" -> life must be easier pre- ransom-/destruction-ware.
The aristocratic upper class (5%) of learned vs the lower 30% underclass "as stupid as pig dribble" (to quote them quoting another author) will become problematic. Inequality due to skill.. the growing underclass with nationalist or anti-technology bias. the anti-globalization Luddites are sadly spot on.
A bit less praise of colonialism might fit better.. the same one-sideness when it comes to discrimination. this taints other claims. trying to justify witch burning by stating that witches were women that were ransoming people.. okay.. the paragraph about black-anger and welfare queens (I assume they liked Reagan) feels out-of-place too.
Some of the stories seem overly biased, some arguments are classical straw-man arguments. When talking about history there is a tendency to mangle causality and correlation. Primary sources often repeat. Communism and Socialism is used changeably. There are some occurrences of "it has been evident that.." without giving any evidence --- this makes some of there conclusions stand on very shaky grounds.
You can interpret a lot of things into the book -- cloud, IoT, etc. information warfare and the whole march-analogy feels wrong or at least with a bit of selection bias: the example of Andorra as a march is fine, but how would Afghanistan fit the picture?
"the most productive pay the most [taxes]" -- without any explanation. Ignore, that they use absolute payments instead of relative ones, there is still one big hole in this theory: capital is mostly inherited, seems the most productive way of living would be to be born rich. It's (re)productive in a way, but not in the way the authors might have meant.
Governments should be controlled by the people that pay most (e.g., the rich in absolute terms) and they should heed the rich's needs (i.e., limit tax income). Question: if the rich won't make up most of the income anymore (due to tax changes, or we switch from absolute to percentage-based metrics), should the "working poor" than be able to take all the money of the rich (as they would be able to control the government)?
After government and regulations are gone, there is no risk coming from corporations because.. that point is sadly missing. Historically there was a time when Corporations ruled the work (after an increase of efficiency), the age of the trade companies (e.g., East Indian, VSOP, etc.). Not the best time.
Social disruption arises from a simple chain: there is more labor force needed -> the ratio between management and labor increases -> this leads to an estranged labor force (as they won't have the same connection to the company/management than before; new technology is always mentioned throughout the book but sadly not mentioned here) -> this leads to more anonymity and thus to violence. According to the authors this is "the law", I'd say that the problem is the estrangement and lets better work on that.
The one-sided coverage of Bill Clinton reaches Pizza-Gate level. This is almost fun to read, in a satirical way but does not help to bring any point across. It is double satirical as the book itself warns about using "good" information sources a couple of pages afterwards. The "whole deep-state and Bill Clinton is a drug dealer" were not one of the good parts of the book. I would be interested what the authors would say about president Trump.
"Canada and Italy are sure to devolve in the first quarter of the century".. let's hope not.
The switch to anti-abortion in the last chapter is.. wild. "a godless, rootless, and rich elite is unlikely to be happy, or to be loved". The last chapter is style-wise and content wise a departure from the rest of the book. The mourning for the loss of conservatism and religion can be felt throughout those pages. Reading "Factfulness" might help. "morality should be religious" --- not that enlightened.
the "Resources for achieving independence" appendix sounds like the typical marketing stuff more often found in esoteric self-help books.
All in all, there is some truth in the book, but overall I am not that impressed. Let's think how to prevent the dystopia they are describing or lighten the impact upon me, who might have counted as sovereign individual. I might even give back my Estonian digital identity after reading the book.
There were some intriguing ideas presented, and the historical information wasn't something I'd seen before, so that was cool to read about. Given the book is now 23 years old, it's a bit terrifying to see how much they described seems to have come to fruition.
Overall it felt like it bounced all over the place, repeating points and not necessarily flowing well.
Some of the comments, concepts and ideas were awful - some pretty racist/sexist stuff in there - but it was certainly interesting to see another perspective, even if I don't agree with a bunch of it.
Overall it felt like it bounced all over the place, repeating points and not necessarily flowing well.
Some of the comments, concepts and ideas were awful - some pretty racist/sexist stuff in there - but it was certainly interesting to see another perspective, even if I don't agree with a bunch of it.
Does anyone know if it has a non-English edition or is translated to any other language? Specifically, Persian (فارسی)
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
slow-paced
Content Warnings
Moderate: Racism
challenging
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
the expat stereotype always strikes me as disproportionately valuing themselves above the community that enabled them to be; this did little to alleviate that notion.
challenging
informative
slow-paced
While I strongly disagree with many normative statements in this book, it is hard to dismiss the big picture trends identified. There are some conclusions that are pretty unconvincing and appear heavily ideologically motivated and poorly substantiated, but these do not invalidate the most important points.
A thought provoking book with anticlimactic closure. I'm still appreciating how vivid and close to reality of the predictions, while I'm reading 24 years later after it published.
Because it's heavily leaning towards violence theory & framework, somehow I wish that the new edition will give a bit perspective on how 9/11 tragedy affects -or not- the Information Era.
If you're interested in mapping your life for the next decades *and* being okay with repetitive reasoning, flowery words & a very broad explanation that sometimes you could lost in it: this book could be for you.
Because it's heavily leaning towards violence theory & framework, somehow I wish that the new edition will give a bit perspective on how 9/11 tragedy affects -or not- the Information Era.
If you're interested in mapping your life for the next decades *and* being okay with repetitive reasoning, flowery words & a very broad explanation that sometimes you could lost in it: this book could be for you.