The Rise of Sovereign Individuals

And the fall of Empire

“We are rapidly moving to a world where information will be as completely liberated from the bounds of reality as human ingenuity can make it.”

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In How Soon Is Now, I proposed we might better understand the process of civilizational transformation we are undergoing by exploring certain metaphors from the natural world. One of these is the caterpillar-to-butterfly metamorphosis. It turns out that when the caterpillar goes into the chrysalis, it doesn't simply grow wings. Instead, the whole body of the caterpillar breaks down, decomposes, as it consumes all of the available resources in the cocoon. Each caterpillar possesses a handful of what are called imaginal cells. As the caterpillar begins to die inside the cocoon, the imaginal disks spread the new message. They reprogram or re-pattern the entire goopy mass of the caterpillar, tranmuting it into a butterfly.

It strikes me that what we witness with the current Musk/Trump takeover of the US Government is like autophagy: An almost hyper-organic process of the breaking down of the old, dying system. The organism must consume itself, devour all its own resources, before a new being can emerge. What we can’t say at this point is what the new organism will be once this process is over. We may end up with a dead caterpillar. We start to get a sense of what Musk/ Trump/ Thiel/ Ellison intend for us. I hold out the hope we can do better. I am not sure we can. We need a coherent understanding of why this is happening and where it is heading, to intervene effectively.

We’re completing a 6,000-year cycle of Empire — of patriarchal, dominating, male-centric civilization — marked by brute force conquest, empires rising and falling, rapid innovation, colonization, religious frenzies, and exploitation of resources. We must be reaching the end of this cycle, one way or another. Partly because we have run out of new territories to exploit. The final stage of exploitation reaches into the inner reaches of the Psyche — reshaping the cognitive grammar of the mind and the physical hardware of the brain — as much as it extends out into the physical world.

With “cognitive capitalism,” we colonize and, in a sense, cannibalize our inner selves: Our capacity for affective relationships, our spatial navigation skills, our critical thinking skills: these are the primary resources for the new markets. We outsource core elements of our subjectivity into digital apps.

Donald Trump represents an end point in the evolution of the human personality under Imperial Modernity, as does Elon Musk, in his way. These are men who are feverishly self interested, born from privilege, convinced of their own superiority. They lack care, conscience or compassion for other human beings or other beings more generally. Although they rule big chunks of the world, they are emotionally stunted and terribly sad.

One of the cycles that seems to be crescendoing is the old pattern of patriarchal domination. The “toxic masculine” Apex Predator is a trapped adolescent man-boy, motivated by resentments (rooted in loveless childhoods), yearning for vengeance against anyone who mocks or challenges them — or who express basic dignity, ethics, or nobility of character. It may be “based” but it is super lowbrow.

As Elon Musk‘s teenage hackers burrow into the operating system of the US Government and the Treasury, I have this sense I am witnessing something like a parasite or virus feeding on its host but, at the same time, corrupting the source code or genetic code of its host in a way that will, eventually, lead to its undoing. What is happening in real time is the replacement of an admittedly cumbersome system of governance founded on a very useful if imperfect Constitution — on laws and rights, universal principles and separation of power — with a rapidly evolving technocratic system that intends to run the world with AI agents, centrally controlled by a few figures who seek to aggregate all power and authority to themselves and their cronies, outside of any constraint of law.

For Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, and their other allies in the tech world, undertaking this project remains a massive gamble. The legacy system of laws, rules, and norms they are dismantling is what allowed them to attain such extraordinary wealth and cultural cache in the first place. It secured their long-term success. How can they be certain that the vigilante, lawless, power-based system they are seeking to establish in its place won’t explode on them?

I keep wondering: Why are they risking all of it? What for? It seems crazy.

There are many possible answers to this — I considered some in previous essays. The tech broligarchs are men who believe in their own greatness and destiny. They have cobbled together an ideology from different sources including Ayn Rand, Rene Girard, Carl Schmitt, Nick Land, and Curtis Yarvin. Two major influences are The Network State and The Sovereign Individual. In their minds, this ideology — which perfectly fit their preconceptions — justifies what they do. Perhaps some, like Musk, are inveterate risk-takers who get massive Dopamine spikes from pursuing this level of criminality.

One of the most crucial texts for understanding the political thesis of the tech broligarchy is The Sovereign Individual, written in 1996 by Libertarian journalists James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. Peter Thiel wrote an introduction for a reissue of the book, and Mark Andreessen cites it as a major influence. The authors predicted deep societal transformation due to the shift from industrial to informational economies. When Thiel wrote, “I no longer believe freedom and Democracy are compatible,” he was inspired by this work.

Davidson and Rees-Mogg foresaw the disruption of traditional power structures as a result of the shift from physical to digital networks. The diminished influence of nation-states was destined to empower wealthy “sovereign individuals,” transnational oligarchs, as well as criminal syndicates, hackers, and other pirates:

We believe that as the modern nationstate decomposes, latter-day barbarians will increasingly come to exercise real power behind the scenes. Groups like the Russian mafiyas that pick the bones of the former Soviet Union, other ethnic criminal gangs, nomenklaturas, drug lords, and renegade covert agencies will increasingly be laws unto themselves. They already are. Far more than is widely understood, the modem barbarians have already infiltrated the forms of the nationstate without greatly changing its appearances. They are microparasites feeding on a dying system.

As the global economy decentralizes, individuals — such as Thiel with his New Zealand compound and seasteading project — gain unprecedented autonomy to control their financial and personal destinies, and create their own fiefdoms. Tax systems, government services, and, particularly, the monopoly of state violence become increasingly obsolete as technology allows wealth to be mobile, anonymous, and resistant to confiscation. In a sense, they predicted the asymmetric warfare waged by terrorist networks like Al Qaeda and other criminal syndicates, as well as the information warfare used by Russia to undermine the US, and untraceable cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

They also predicted massive turbulence: Social unrest, skyrocketing inequality, and the collapse of Democratic governments along with the dismantling of social services like welfare, health care, and education. These will be privatized, auctioned off to the highest bidder.