Architects of a New Dawn

We’d like to show the side of the world you don’t normally see on television.

Excerpts from the Sovereign Individual

"The Information Revolution will liberate individuals as never before, Genius will be unleashed, freed from both the oppression of government and the drags of racial and ethnic prejudice."

ideasarewealthAnyone with a portable computer and a satellite link will be able to conduct almost any information business anywhere, and that includes almost the whole of the worlds multitrillion-dollar financial transactions.

The Information Age will be the age of upward mobility. It will afford far more equal opportunity for the billions of humans in parts of the world that never shared fully in the prosperity of industrial society.

The brightest, most successful and ambitious of these will emerge as truly Sovereign Individuals.

Sovereign Individuals will compete and interact on terms that echo the relations among the gods, in Greek myth. The elusive Mount Olympus of the next millennium will be in cyberspace a realm without physical existence that will nonetheless develop what promises to be the world's largest economy by the second decade of the new millennium.

The greatest source of wealth will be the ideas you have in your head rather than physical capital alone...

There will be no cyberwelfare. No cybertaxes and no cybergovernment...

In cyberspace, the threats of political violence that have been the alpha and omega of politics since time immemorial will vanish...

Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nationstate, creating new forms of social organization in the process...


THE FOURTH STAGE OF HUMAN SOCIETY

The theme of this book is the new revolution of power which is liberating individuals at the expense of the twentiethcentury nationstate, Innovations that alter the logic of violence in unprecedented ways are transforming the boundaries within which the future must lie. If our deductions are correct, you stand at the threshold of the most sweeping revolution in history. Faster than all but a few now imagine, creating new forms of social organization in the process, This will be far from an easy transformation.

agesThe challenge it will pose will be all the greater because it will happen with incredible speed compared with anything seen in the past. Through all of human history from its earliest beginnings until now, there have been only three basic stages of economic life:

(1) hunting and gathering societies;

(2) agricultural societies; and

(3) industrial societies.

Now, looming over the horizon, is something entirely new, the fourth stage of social organization: information societies.

Each of the previous stages of society has corresponded with distinctly different phases in the evolution and control of violence. As we explain in detail, information societies promise to dramatically reduce the returns to violence, in part because they transcend locality. In the new millennium, the advantage of controlling violence on a large scale will be far lower than it has been at any time since before the French Revolution. This will have profound consequences.

One logical implication of falling returns to violence is the eclipse of politics. There is much evidence that adherence to the civic myths of the twentieth century nation-state is rapidly eroding. The death of Communism is merely the most striking example. As we explore in detail, the collapse of morality and growing corruption among leaders of Western governments is not a random development. It is evidence that the potential of the nationstate is exhausted. Even many of its leaders no longer believe the platitudes they mouth. Nor are they believed by others.


History Repeats Itself

This is a situation with striking parallels in the past. Whenever technological change has divorced the old forms from the new moving forces of the economy, moral standards shift, and people begin to treat those in command of the old institutions with growing disdain. This widespread revulsion often comes into evidence well before people develop a new coherent ideology of change. So it was in the late fifteenth century, when the medieval Church was the predominant institution of feudalism. Notwithstanding popular belief in "the sacredness of the sacerdotal office," both the higher and lower ranks of clergy were held in the utmost contemptnot unlike the popular attitude toward politicians and bureaucrats today'

We believe that much can be learned by analogy between the situation at the end of the fifteenth century, when life had become thoroughly saturated by organized religion, and the situation today, when the world has become saturated with politics. The costs of supporting institutionalized religion at the end of the fifteenth century had reached a historic extreme, much as the costs of supporting government have reached a senile extreme today.

We know what happened to organized religion in the wake of the Gunpowder Revolution. Technological developments created strong incentives to downsize religious institutions and lower their costs. A similar technological revolution is destined to downsize radically the nationstate early in the new millennium.


The Information Revolutioninforev

As the breakdown of large systems accelerates, systematic compulsion will recede as a factor shaping economic life and the distribution of income. Efficiency will rapidly become more important than the dictates of power in the organization of social institutions. An entirely new realm of economic activity that is not hostage to physical violence will emerge in cyberspace. The most obvious benefits will flow to the "cognitive elite," who will increasingly operate outside political boundaries. They are already equally at home in Frankfurt, London, New York, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Hong Kong Incomes will become more unequal within jurisdictions and more equal between them.

The Sovereign Individual explores the social and financial consequences of this revolutionary change. Our desire is to help you to take advantage of the opportunities of the new age and avoid being destroyed by its impact. If only half of what we expect to see happens, you face change of a magnitude with few precedents in history.

The transformation of the year 2000 will not only revolutionize the character of the world economy, it will do so more rapidly than any previous phase change Unlike the Agricultural Revolution, the Information Revolution will not take millennia to do its work. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, its impact will not be spread over centuries. The Information Revolution will happen within a lifetime.

What is more, it will happen almost everywhere at once. Technical and economic innovations will no longer be confined to small portions of the globe. The transformation will be all but universal. And it will involve a break with the past so profound that it will almost bring to life the magical domain of the gods as imagined by the early agricultural peoples like the ancient Greeks. To a greater degree than most would now be willing to concede, it will prove difficult or impossible to preserve many contemporary institutions in the new millennium. When information societies take shape they will be as different from industrial societies as the Greece of Aeschylus was from the world of the cave dwellers.

internetPROMETHEUS UNBOUND: THE RISE OF THE
SOVEREIGN INDIVIDUAL

The coming transformation is both good news and bad. The good news is that the Information Revolution will liberate individuals as never before. For the first time, those who can educate themselves will be almost entirely free to invent their own work and realize the full benefits of their own productivity. Genius will be unleashed, freed from both the oppression of government and the drags of racial and ethnic prejudice. In the Information Society, no one who is truly able will be detained by the illformed opinions of others.

It will not matter what most of the people on earth might think of your race, your looks, your age, your sexual proclivities, or the way you wear your hair. In the cybereconomy, they will never see you. The ugly, the fat, the old, the disabled will vie with the young and beautiful on equal terms in utterly colorblind anonymity on the new frontiers of cyberspace.

 By 2025, the cybereconomy will have many millions of participants. Some of them will be as rich as Bill Gates, worth over $10 billion each. The cyberpoor may be those with an income of less than $200,000 a year.  The cybereconomy, rather than China, could well be the greatest economic phenomenon of the next thirty years.

The good news is that politicians will no more be able to dominate, suppress, and regulate the greater part of commerce in this new realm than the legislators of the ancient Greek citystates could have trimmed the beard of Zeus. The liberation of a large part of the global economy from political control will oblige all remaining forms of government to operate on more nearly market terms. They will ultimately have little choice but to treat populations in territories they serve more like customers, and less in the way that organized criminals treat the victims of a shakedown racket.

Beyond Politics
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What mythology described as the province of the gods will become a viable option for the individual a life outside the reach of kings and councils. First in scores, then in hundreds, and ultimately in the millions, individual will escape the shackles of politics. As they do, they will transform the character of governments, shrinking the realm of compulsion and widening the scope of private control over resources.

The emergence of the sovereign individual will demonstrate yet again the strange prophetic power of myth. Conceiving little of the laws of nature, the early agricultural peoples imagined that "powers we should call supernatural" were widely distributed. These powers were sometimes employed by men, sometimes by "incarnate human gods" who looked like men and interacted with them in what Sir James George Frazer described in The Golden Bough as "a great democracy."

When the ancients imagined the children of Zeus living among them they were inspired by a deep belief in magic. They shared with other primitive agricultural peoples an awe of nature, and a superstitious conviction that nature's works were set in motion by individual volition, by magic. In that sense, there was nothing selfconsciously prophetic about their view of nature and their gods. They were far from anticipating microtechnology. They could not have imagined its impact in altering the marginal productivity of individuals thousands of years later. They certainly could not have foreseen how it would shift the balance between power and efficiency and thus revolutionize the way that assets are created and protected. Yet what they imagined as they spun their myths has a strange resonance with the world you are likely to see.

Alt.Abracadabra

The "abracadabra" of the magic invocation, for example, bears a curious similarity to the password employed to access a computer. In some respects, highspeed computation has already made it possible to mimic the magic of the genie. Early generations of "digital servants" already obey the commands of those who control the computers in which they are sealed much as genies were sealed in magic lamps. The virtual reality of information technology will widen the realm of human wishes to make almost anything that can be imagined seem real. Telepresence will give living individuals the same capacity to span distance at supernatural speed and monitor events from afar that the Greeks supposed was enjoyed by Hermes and Apollo.

The Sovereign Individuals of the Information Age, like the gods of ancient and primitive myths, will in due course enjoy a kind of "diplomatic immunity" from most of the political woes that have beset mortal human beings in most times and places.

The new Sovereign Individual will operate like the gods of myth in the same physical environment as the ordinary, subject citizen, but in a separate realm politically. Commanding vastly greater resources and beyond the reach of many forms of compulsion, the Sovereign Individual will redesign governments and reconfigure economies in the new millennium. The fall implications of this change are all but unimaginable.

Genius and Nemesis

For anyone who loves human aspiration and success, the Information Age will provide a bounty. That is surely the best news in many generations. But it is bad news as well. The new organization of society implied by the triumph of individual autonomy and the true equalization of opportunity based upon merit will lead to very great rewards for merit and great individual autonomy. This will leave individuals far more responsible for themselves than they have been accustomed to being during the industrial period. It will also reduce the unearned advantage in living standards that has been enjoyed by residents of advanced industrial societies throughout the twentieth century. As we write, the top 15 percent of the world's population have an average percapita income of $21,000 annually. The remaining 85 percent of the world have an average income of just $1,000. That huge, hoarded advantage from the past is bound to dissipate under the new conditions of the Information Age.

As it does, the capacity of nationstates to redistribute income on a large scale will collapse. Information technology facilitates dramatically increased competition between jurisdictions. When technology is mobile, and transactions occur in cyberspace, as they increasingly will do, governments will no longer be able to charge more for their services than they are worth to the people who pay for them. Anyone with a portable computer and a satellite link will be able to conduct almost any information business anywhere, and that includes almost the whole of the world's multitrilliondollar financial transactions.

This means that you will no longer be obliged to live in a hightax jurisdiction in order to earn high income. In the future, when most wealth can be earned anywhere, and even spent anywhere, governments that attempt to charge too much as the price of domicile will merely drive away their best customers. If our reasoning is correct, and we believe it is, the nationstate as we know it will not survive in anything like its present form.

THE END OF NATIONS

Changes that diminish the power of predominant institutions are both unsettling and dangerous. Just as monarchs, lords, popes, and potentates fought ruthlessly to preserve their accustomed privileges in the early stages of the modern period, so today's governments will employ violence, often of a covert and arbitrary kind, in the attempt to hold back the clock. Weakened by the challenge from technology, the state will treat increasingly autonomous individuals, its former citizens, with the same range of ruthlessness and diplomacy it has heretofore displayed in its dealing with other governments. Increasingly harsh techniques of exaction will be a logical corollary of the emergence of a new type of bargaining between governments and individuals. Technology will make individuals more nearly sovereign than ever before. And they will be treated that way. Sometimes violently, as enemies, sometimes as equal parties in negotiation, sometimes as allies. But however ruthlessly governments behave, particularly in the transition period, wedding the IRS with the CIA will avail them little. They will be increasingly required by the press of necessity to bargain with autonomous individuals whose resources will no longer be so easily controlled.

The changes implied by the Information Revolution will not only create a fiscal crisis for governments, they will tend to disintegrate all large structures. Fourteen empires have disappeared already in the twentieth century. The breakdown of empires is part of a process that will dissolve the nationstate itself Government will have to adapt to the growing autonomy of the individual. Taxing capacity will plunge by 5070 percent. This will tend to make smaller jurisdictions more successful. The challenge of setting competitive terms to attract able individuals and their capital will be more easily undertaken in enclaves than across continents.

We believe that as the modem nationstate decomposes, latterday barbarians will increasingly come to exercise power behind the scenes. Groups like the Russian mafiya, which picks the bones of the former Soviet Union, other ethnic criminal gangs, nomenklaturas,* drug lords, and renegade covert agencies will be laws unto themselves. They already are. Far more than is widely understood, the modern barbarians have already infiltrated the forms of the nationstate without greatly changing its appearances. They are microparasites feeding on a dying system. As violent and unscrupulous as a state at war, these groups employ the techniques of the state on a smaller scale. Their growing influence and power are part of the downsizing of politics. Microprocessing reduces the size that groups must attain in order to be effective in the use and control of violence. As this technological revolution unfolds, predatory violence will be organized more and more outside of central control. Efforts to contain violence will also devolve in ways that depend more upon efficiency than magnitude of power.

History in Reverse

The process by which the nationstate grew over the past five centuries will be put into reverse by the new logic of the Information Age. Local centers of power will reassert themselves as the state devolves into fragmented, overlapping sovereignties. The growing power of organized crime is merely one reflection of this tendency. Multinational companies are already having to subcontract all but essential work. Some conglomerates, such as AT&T, Unisys, and ITT, have split themselves into several firms in order to function more profitably. The nationstate will devolve like an unwieldy conglomerate.

Not only is power in the world changing, but the work of the world is changing as well. Microprocessing has created entirely new horizons of economic activity that transcend territorial boundaries. This transcendence of frontiers and territories is perhaps the most revolutionary development since Adam and Eve straggled out of paradise under the sentence of their Maker: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." As technology revolutionizes the tools we use, it also antiquates our laws, reshapes our morals, and alters our perceptions. This book explains how.

Microprocessing and rapidly improving communications already make it possible for the individual to choose where to work. Transactions on the Internet or the World Wide Web can be encrypted and will soon be almost impossible for tax collectors to capture Taxfree money already compounds far faster offshore than onshore funds still subject to the high tax burden imposed by the twentiethcentury nationstate. After the turn of the millennium, much of the world's commerce will migrate into the new realm of cyberspace, a region where governments will have no more dominion than they exercise over the bottom of the sea or the outer planets. In cyberspace, the threats of physical violence that have been the alpha and omega of politics since time immemorial will vanish. In cyberspace, the meek and the mighty will meet on equal terms. Cyberspace is the ultimate offshore jurisdiction. An economy with no taxes. Bermuda in the sky with diamonds.

When this greatest tax haven of them all is fully open for business, all funds will essentially be offshore funds at the discretion of their owner. This will have cascading consequences. The state has grown used to treating its taxpayers as a farmer treats his cows, keeping them in a field to be milked. Soon, the cows will have wings.

The Revenge of Nations

Like an angry farmer, the state will no doubt take desperate measures at first to tether and hobble its escaping herd. It will employ covert and even violent means to restrict access to liberating technologies. Such expedients will work only temporarily, if at all. The twentiethcentury nationstate, with all its pretensions, will starve to death as its tax revenues decline.

When the state finds itself unable to meet its committed expenditure by raising tax revenues, it will resort to other, more desperate measures. Among them is printing money. Governments have grown used to enjoying a monopoly over currency that they could depreciate at will, This arbitrary inflation has been a prominent feature of the monetary policy of all twentiethcentury states. Even the best national currency of the postwar period, the German mark, lost 71 percent of its value from January 1, 1949, through the end of June 1995. In the same period, the U.S. dollar lost 84 percent of its value.6 This inflation had the same effect as a tax on all who hold the currency. As we explore later, inflation as revenue option will be largely foreclosed by the emergence of cybermoney. New technologies will allow the holders of wealth to bypass the national monopolies that have issued and regulated money in the modem period. The state will continue to control the industrialera printing presses, but their importance for controlling the world's wealth will be transcended by mathematical algorithms that have no physical existence. In the new millennium, cybermoney controlled by private markets will supersede fiat money issued by governments, Only the poor will be victims of inflation.

Lacking their accustomed scope to tax and inflate, governments, even in traditionally civil countries, will turn nasty. As income tax becomes uncollectible, older and more arbitrary methods of exaction will resurface. The ultimate form of withholding tax de facto or even overt hostagetakingwill be introduced by governments desperate to prevent wealth from escaping beyond their reach. Unlucky individuals will find themselves singled out and held to ransom in an almost medieval fashion. Businesses that offer services that facilitate the realization of autonomy by individuals will be subject to infiltration, sabotage, and disruption. Arbitrary forfeiture of property, already commonplace in the United States, where it occurs five thousand times a week, will become even more pervasive. Governments will violate human rights, censor the free flow of information, sabotage useful technologies, and worse. For the same reasons that the late, departed Soviet Union tried in vain to suppress access to personal computers and Xerox machines, Western governments will seek to suppress the cybereconomy by totalitarian means.

RETURN OF THE LUDDITES

Such methods may prove popular among some population segments. The good news about individual liberation and autonomy will seem to be bad news to many who are not among the cognitive elite. The greatest resentment is likely to be centered among those of middle talent in currently rich countries. They particularly may come to feel that information technology poses a threat to their way of life. The beneficiaries of organized compulsion, including millions receiving income redistributed by governments, may resent the new freedom realized by Sovereign Individuals. Their upset will illustrate the truism that "where you stand is determined by where you sit."

It would be misleading, however, to attribute all the bad feelings that will be generated in the coming transition crisis to the bald desire to live at someone else's expense. More will be involved. The very character of human society suggests that there is bound to be a misguided moral dimension to the coming Luddite reaction. Think of it as a bald desire fitted with a moral toupee. We explore the moral and moralistic dimensions of the transition crisis. Selfinterested grasping of a conscious kind has far less power to motivate actions than does selfrighteous fury. While adherence to the civic myths of the twentieth century is rapidly falling away, they are not without their true believers. Everyone who came of age in the twentieth century has been inculcated in the duties and obligations of the twentiethcentury citizen. The residual moral imperatives from industrial society will stimulate at least some neoLuddite attacks on information technologies.

In this sense, this violence to come will be at least partially an expression of what we call "moral anachronism," the application of moral strictures drawn from one stage of economic life to the circumstances of another. Every stage of society requires its own moral rules to help individuals overcome incentive traps peculiar to the choices they face in that particular way of life. Just as a farming society could not live by the moral rules of a migratory Eskimo band, so the Information Society cannot satisfy moral imperatives that emerged to facilitate the success of a militant twentieth century industrial state. We explain why.

In the next few years, moral anachronism will be in evidence at the core countries of the West in much the way that it has been witnessed at the periphery over the past five centuries. Western colonists and military expeditions stimulated such crises when they encountered indigenous huntingandgathering bands, as well as peoples whose societies were still organized for fanning. The introduction of new technologies into anachronistic settings caused confusion and moral crises. The success of Christian missionaries in converting millions of indigenous peoples can be laid in large measure to the local crises caused by the sudden introduction of new power arrangements from the outside Such encounters recurred over and over, from the sixteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth century. We expect similar clashes early in the new millennium as Information Societies supplant those organized along industrial lines.

The Nostalgia for Compulsion

The rise of the Sovereign Individual will not be wholly welcomed as a promising new phase of history, even among those who benefit from it most. Everyone will feel some misgivings. And many will despise innovations that undermine the territorial nationstate. It is a fact of human nature that radical change of any kind is almost always seen as a dramatic turn for the worse. Five hundred years ago, the courtiers gathered around the duke of Burgundy would have said that unfolding innovations that undermined feudalism were evil. They thought the world was rapidly spiraling downhill at the very time that later historians saw an explosion of human potential in the Renaissance. Likewise, what may someday be seen as a new Renaissance from the perspective of the next millennium will look frightening to tired twentieth-century eyes.

There is a high probability that some who are offended by the new ways, as well as many who are disadvantaged by them, will react unpleasantly. Their nostalgia for compulsion will probably turn violent. Encounters with these new "Luddites" will make the transition to radical new forms of social organization at least a measure of bad news for everyone. Get ready to duck. With the speed of change outracing the moral and economic capacity of many in living generations to adapt, you can expect to see a fierce and indignant resistance to the Information Revolution, notwithstanding its great promise to liberate the future

You must understand and prepare for such unpleasantness. A transition crisis lies ahead. The new information and communication technologies are more subversive of the modern state than any political threat to its predominance since Columbus sailed. This is important because those in power have seldom reacted peacefully to developments that undermined their authority. They are not likely to now.

The clash between the new and the old will shape the early years of the new millennium. We expect it to be a time of great danger and great reward, and a time of much diminished civility in some realms and unprecedented scope in others. Increasingly autonomous individuals and bankrupt, desperate governments will confront one another across a new divide. We expect to see a radical restructuring of the nature of sovereignty and the virtual death of politics before the transition is over. Instead of state domination and control of resources, you are destined to see the privatization of almost all services governments now provide. For inescapable reasons that we explore at length in this book, information technology will destroy the capacity of the state to charge more for its services than they are worth to the people who pay for them.

Sovereignty Through Markets

To an extent that few would have imagined only a decade ago, individuals will achieve increasing autonomy over territorial nationstates through market mechanisms. All nationstates face bankruptcy and the rapid erosion of their authority. Mighty as they are, the power they retain is the power to obliterate, not to command. Their intercontinental missiles and aircraft carriers are already artifacts, as imposing and useless as the last warhorse of feudalism.

Information technology makes possible a dramatic extension of markets by altering the way that assets are created and protected. This is revolutionary Indeed, it promises to be more revolutionary for industrial society than the advent of gunpowder proved to be for feudal agriculture. The transformation of the year 2000 implies the commercialization of sovereignty and the death of politics, no less than guns implied the demise of oathbased feudalism. Citizenship will go the way of chivalry.

We believe that the age of individual economic sovereignty is coming. Just as steel mills, telephone companies, mines, and railways that were once "nationalized" have been rapidly privatized throughout the world, you will soon see the ultimate form of privatizationthe sweeping denationalization of the individual. The Sovereign Individual of die new millennium will no longer be an asset of the state, a de facto item on the treasury's balance sheet. After the transition of the year 2000, denationalized citizens will no longer be citizens at all, but customers.

The commercialization of sovereignty will make the terms and conditions of citizenship in the nationstate 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 twentyfirst century will be customers of governments. These governments will be organized along different principles than those which the world has come to expect over the past several centuries.

A new moral vocabulary will be required to describe the relations of Sovereign Individuals with one another and what remains of government. We suspect that as the terms of these new relations come into focus, they will offend many people who came of age as "citizens" of twentiethcentury nationstates. The end of nations and the "denationalization of the individual" will deflate some warmly held notions, such as "equal protection under the law" that presuppose power relations that are soon to be obsolete.

Just as attempts to preserve the power of knights in armor were doomed to fail in the face of gunpowder weapons, so the modern notions of nationalism and citizenship are destined to be shortcircuited by microtechnology. Indeed, they will eventually become comic in much the way that the sacred principles of fifteenthcentury feudalism fell to ridicule in the sixteenth century. The cherished civic notions of the twentieth century will be comic anachronisms to new generations after the transformation of the year 2000. The Don Quixote of the twentyfirst century will not be a knighterrant struggling to revive the glories of feudalism but a bureaucrat in a brown suit, a tax collector yearning for a citizen to audit.

REVIVING LAWS OF THE MARCH


We seldom think of governments as competitive entities, except in the broadest sense, so the modern intuition about the range and possibilities of sovereignty has atrophied. In the past, when the power equation made it more difficult for groups to assert a stable monopoly of coercion, power was frequently fragmented, jurisdictions overlapped, and entities of many different kinds exercised one or more of the attributes of sovereignty. Not infrequently, the nominal overlord actually enjoyed scant power on the ground. Governments weaker than the nationstates are now faced with sustained competition in their ability to impose a monopoly of coercion over a local territory. This competition gave rise to adaptations in controlling violence and attracting allegiance that will soon be new again.

When the reach of lords and kings was weak, and the claims of one or more groups overlapped at a frontier, it frequently happened that neither could decisively dominate the other. In the Middle Ages, there were numerous frontier or "march" regions where sovereignties blended together. These violent frontiers persisted for decades or even centuries in the border areas of Europe, There were marches between areas of Celtic and English control in Ireland; between Wales and England, Scotland and England, Italy and France, France and Spain, Germany and the Slav frontiers of Central Europe, and between the Christian kingdoms of Spain and the Islamic kingdom of Granada. Such march regions developed distinct institutional and legal forms of a kind that we are likely to see again in the next millennium. Because of the competitive position of the two authorities, residents of march regions seldom paid tax. What is more, they usually had a choice in deciding whose laws they were to obey, a choice that was exercised through such legal concepts as "avowal" and "distraint" that have now all but vanished. We expect such concepts to become a prominent feature of the law of Information Societies.

Transcending Nationality

Before the nationstate, it was difficult to enumerate precisely the number of sovereignties that existed in the world because they overlapped in complex ways and many varied forms of organization exercised power. They will do so again. The dividing lines between territories tended to become clearly demarcated and fixed as borders in the nationstate system. They will become hazy again in the Information Age. In the new millennium, sovereignty will be fragmented once more. New entities will emerge exercising some but not all of the characteristics we have come to associate with governments.


"The universe rewards us for understanding it and punishes us for not understanding it. When we understand the universe, our plans work and we feel good, Conversely, if we try to fly by jumping off a cliff and flapping our arms the universe will kill us." "8 -JACK COHEN AND IAN STEWART

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INTERNET PRIVACY IN EUROPE ERODING - NEW LAW!

In a move that even the most nonchalant of privacy advocates is crying foul over, the UK has put into effect a European Union directive which mandates the archival of information regarding virtually all internet traffic for the next 12 months. The program formally goes into effect today.

The data retention rules require the archival of all email traffic (the identities of the sender and receiver, but not the contents of the messages), records of VOIP telephone calls (traditional phone calls are already monitored), and information about every website visited by any computer user in the country. The rules are being pushed down "across the board to even the smallest company," as every ISP large or small will be required to collect and store the data. That data will then be accessible -- to fight "crime and terrorism," of course -- by "hundreds of public bodies" to investigate whatever crimes they see fit.

Technically the new directive applies to all countries of the EU, but individual nations appear to be complying with the rules to various degrees. Privacy-obsessed Sweden is reportedly ignoring the rule completely, for example.
The privacy implications of the rule are enormous, as everything UK citizens do online will now be under the watchful eye of EU's powerful Home Office. One privacy advocate, whose anger is clearly barely being held back, called it "the kind of technology that the Stasi would have dreamed of." Naturally, the government counters that this kind of information has already proven invaluable in tracking down criminals, including the killer of an 11-year-old boy a couple of years ago.
Privacy concerns aside, another issue becomes one of how exactly to manage all this data. A report dating back to 2004 estimated that a single, large ISP in the UK would need up to 40 million gigabytes of storage capacity to store the traffic data from a year of user activity. Even in 2009, that kind of storage doesn't come cheap, nor does the challenge of managing it all come easy.
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While i do see the "cybersociety" playing an increasing role in the Information Age, new awareness of the need for the human body/mind to be "grounded" is emerging as greater awareness of how the human operating system works takes place.

As spiritual beings having an earthly experience, we are designed as "multi-dimensional" entities who need succor from many different realms in order to function with peak efficiency. As a electromagnetic energy field, we are designed as both receiving and sending units configured much like a quantum computer. Each cell in our body is identical to that of a computer chip with our brain acting as one type of processor and our heart of another kind. The liquid crystalline of our body acts as a semi-conductor. And, just like any other type of electrical appliance in order to work effectively, we need to be grounded.

Research into this area reveals that grounding takes place via walking barefoot on the Earth so that its energy can travel up through our feet and into the body where the first transformers, our adrenal glands, serve to transduce the energy, and distribute it throughout the body in an even pattern via what is known as our "chakra" system. When we are unable to plug into this energy field, our body's coherence pattern becomes distorted resulting in a state of disease. With the advent of plastic-soled shoes, which may date back to the early 1960's, people have become increasingly dissociated from the grounding the human body/mind needs in order to function properly as the plastic material prevents the energy from traveling into the human operating system. The heart's beat also plays a role in distributing the energy throughout the human body and how we think plays a major role in determining our heart rate. .


I don't have time right now to go into a lot of detail on this, so let me cut to the chase. What i feel is important is that we achieve a state of balance between the technological world and the world of "soul" that is achieved via grounding activities. e.g., going barefoot and maintaining Earth contact in other ways, e.g., gardening which might be called "Mother Nature's health plan, creating earth-centered dwellings, sustainable communities, etc.

There are also other critical factors which play a role in ensuring that out body/mind is in a state of total well-being, (coherence) e.g., eating foods that provide us with the right nutrient balance, getting sufficient sleep, listening to music which is conducive to providing the correct subtle energy vibration in order to maintain a coherent energy pattern, etc. But, let's not leave out exercise and the Chinese have left us a legacy second to none in the form of Tai Chi and Qigong. Studies conducted over a period of several thousand years have provided movements proven to manage the body's "Chi" most effectively.

In the coming years, it is my feeling that we will concentrate more and more on activities in all areas of our lives that bring about what i refer to as Total Wellness. Some of us involved in the Future Dawning organization that i am the Founder of are already in the planning stage for development of programs in many different areas that lead to Total Wellness.

As to the dissolution of Nation-States in order for us to have a healthy future based on cooperation, i have foreseen the need for this move for a long time since Nation-States create artificial boundaries and set up an atmosphere of competition. A couple of authors writing on this have been Ken Wilber in his book: "No Boundaries" and Japanese economist Kenichi Ohmae in his book: "The End of the Nation-State". But, in order to accomplish this, we are probably looking at the end of the Constitution and must consider the battle that will be waged over this issue.

According to the laws of physics, change does not come about without accompanying chaos which may also bring about a great deal of pain due to the structures it will disrupt and cause to fall in our social system. But yet, it is the corruption within these structures that has caused them to fail. Thus a cleansing and healing must take place before we can move on into health and wellness.

I am holding the field for the fullest potential to unfold in this event now in the best interests of all concerned. .

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