The Sovereign Individual

It is interesting to hear what libertarians were dreaming about before the internet bubble burst. Lots of VC in the air, cyber-(whatever) was on everyone's lips and evidently people wanted to write a manifesto about tax evasion while grossly misunderstanding how technology works. This is a manifesto of sorts of an adolescent multi-millionaire's son, the inspiration for Bioshock's Andrew Ryan.

There are some glimmers of accurate prediction here. People that think the book predicted cryptocurrency evidently don't remember the virtual currencies that were circulating around in the 90s. The description in the book seems to be hanging on these, rather than a decentralized virtual currency. I think this distinction is more than a quibble and won't award points for thinking about this. The description in the book seems more like what was used in the US pre-civil war where every bank had it's own currency and people had to trust these various notes depending on a variety of factors.

Most of the broad sweeps of the book's predictions were counting on the rise of cheap and easy computing to make assessing the true state or trustworthiness of things trivial or basically free or both. We have instead traded our vast computing power for likes and thirst traps. The few attempts I've seen where people have tried to liberate themselves from the parasite government have ended in fraud and theft. One might argue that I am viewing the world through a loser's lens, and that there are people that are already operating as sovereign individuals but I'm too loser to know about it. Certainly I know of people that have changed citizenship to avoid taxes when living abroad, but that's a far cry from what the authors describe.

Towards the middle and definitely in the end there is some pretty blatantly racist shit being said. And the viewpoint the authors' espouse certainly makes them the most contemptible of human beings in my eyes. I can't really think of a reason to read this book, I'm sorry I broke my recommendation rule (I wait for 2 people to recommend a book before reading) it was a big waste of time.