The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson

The book has a strong following among technologists, especially venture capitalists (Peter Thiel leading among them, but also Balaji Srinivasan and to a lesser extent Marc Andreessen and Erik Torenberg), who praise it as prescient, in particular highlighting the way it anticipated the decline of good jobs in wealthy countries, the rise of digital currencies and backlash from reactionary ethnonationalists. The picture painted resembles Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash. From these it derives a series of “predictions” about the collapse of most existing forms of social coordination/cooperation/control (nation states, corporations, unions etc.) into extreme anarcho-capitalism in which adherence to the rules of the game are enforced by various private entities, ranging from robots to mafias. It layers on top of this an Objectivist (viz. The Sovereign Individual takes as a starting point a roughly Thomas Friedman-esque “the internet flattens the world” and a set of predictions about technology that were prevalent in the 1990s. This is particularly true given the pointed nature of that book’s views, as I will highlight below. Intellectual standards are often quite limited in that world and it thus seems worth bringing a bit to bear on something that has gained such currency with so little real scrutiny. However, I’ve become aware, thanks to Max Chafkin’s recent and compelling biography of Peter Thiel, of a book that is rarely read, especially in standard intellectual circles, but has been exceptionally influential in the world of technology. I have never written one of a book published more than two decades prior. Sovereign Nonsense: A review of The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg