Blockchain Books
The Sovereign Individual
Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
A 1997 prediction that information technology will dissolve the nation-state — quoted constantly in crypto, read carefully much less often.
This is the book that every crypto Twitter account quotes and almost no one finishes. Written in 1997 by an American newsletter publisher and the former editor of the Times of London, it predicts that the rise of strong cryptography, digital cash, and global information networks will erode the state's monopoly on violence and taxation, producing a new class of mobile, encrypted, post-national "sovereign individuals." Some of it is uncanny. Some of it is embarrassing.
Who it's for
Anyone who wants to understand the political imagination behind a certain strain of Bitcoin maximalism. The book is the closest thing the crypto movement has to a foundational political text, and a lot of arguments you'll hear in 2024 — about jurisdictional arbitrage, about citizenship as a service, about the obsolescence of the welfare state — are pulled directly from here, sometimes consciously and sometimes not.
What it does well
The core prediction — that mobile capital plus strong encryption will erode states' ability to tax and surveil — has aged remarkably well in narrow ways. The chapters on the history of how earlier information technologies (the printing press, the stirrup) reshaped political organization are interesting as long-arc analysis, and the framing of states as protection rackets in competition with each other is, if nothing else, a useful provocation.
The book is also genuinely unusual in being a 1997 text that anticipates digital cash as a real political force, decades before that became a defensible position.
Where it falls short
The politics is ugly and frequently lazy. Davidson and Rees-Mogg are openly contemptuous of democracy, of the welfare state, and of "the masses," and the book reads at times less like analysis than like a wealthy person's daydream of escape. The bits about race, about urban decline, and about the supposed inevitability of mass violence in the developed world are bad in ways that aren't just "of their time" — they were bad in 1997.
It's also intellectually one-eyed. The state has been more adaptable, and digital tools more capturable by incumbents, than the book anticipates. Read it as a primary source on the political ideas that shaped crypto, not as a neutral forecast of the world to come.