TRASHFUTURE - Oh Sovereign, My Sovereign feat. Quinn Slobodian

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

This week’s free episode is all about William Rees Mogg and James Dale Davidson’s book “the sovereign individual,” which describes a wonderful world in which fifty rich men live in armoured citadels and everyone else scrapes a living off the land. Do not become addicted to water, my friends! If you want to learn more about Quinn Slobodian's work, check out his site here: https://www.quinnslobodian.com If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *MILO ALERT* Here are links to see Milo’s upcoming standup shows: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of TF that we will be releasing at some point over Christmas, whether it's free or paid, when we don't feel like recording an episode. Ho ho ho. It's a very Christmas episode, we're going to learn the true meaning of Christmas on this episode. Yeah, but it said the Christmas episode where like it's in the stocking, you don't really know whether it was exactly what you wanted, but you can, you can, you like it. Yeah, yeah, it's the Christmas episode where it's like, yeah, you know, it's, you know

what, you don't have to spend money on toothpaste for like a month now, because you just have some. Yeah, you know. It's like for Link's Africa. The podcast that comes to your house and brushes your teeth. That's the TF promise. That's right. It actually does clean your teeth while you sleep, and that is medical advice.

It's the KitKat Chunky and KitKat branded mug gift set. No, it's the Big Tobler, and I feel like the Big Tobler, and it's actually the best way of putting it. Oh, maybe. The Big Tobler is more desirable. I like the Big Tobler. You don't really think you want it, but when you get it, you don't complain about it. I want to be very clear to anyone listening to this who's considering buying me a Christmas

present. I think I want a Big Toblerone, and I want a Big Toblerone. I love Toblerone. It's so good. How much did Toblerone kick in for this? Less than you'd think. They sent Riley one Big Tobler. They sent me a little bit.

They sent me a normal candy bar-sized Toblerone that you get for several euros at the airport. However, it is in the spirit of festive cheer that I would also like to introduce our guest for this episode. It is Quinn Slobodian, who is a presser of history at Wellesley, author of the book Crack Up Catabolism, and also the author of a recent article on a book called The Sovereign Individual, which we're going to be talking about, Quinn, as a man with a wonderful first name. How's it going? It's going well.

How do you feel about Toblerones? I know you're like a serious academic, but I don't want to stop talking about Toblerones just yet. I'm quite into this now. I'm trying to cut back, I must say. Just outside the club at 3 a.m. like, oh, I'm trying to quit. I'm more of a social Toblerone eater. I became a Marxist because the economy happened and they started trying to invent ways of

making Toblerones smaller without you getting mad at them. So where before you would have like the big Toblerone, now they're selling like little Toblerones and bags and like individual triangles and shit like that. And so, you know, I know they're so expensive, I've had to start rolling my own Toblerones. Well, I'm actually, it's weird that actually Kirstarmer is going to try to ban Toblerone flavored vapes, even though it helps a lot of people stop eating Toblerone. There's no chocolate in there.

It's just flavoring. No, indeed. So, look, Quinn, you've recently written this article for the New Statesman about the sovereign individual, this book by James Dale Davidson and William Rees Mogg, Jacob Rees Mogg's father. But also, you're kind of a sovereign individual head. You've actually had several editions of the book. You have the most recent one by Peter Thiel.

So what got you into the sovereign individual fandom? Well, it's kind of the book that I've been looking for, which is kind of like the mask off version of the world is flat, right? I mean, as a child of the 90s, I was raised with a very positive, you know, the propagandistic view of globalization was all around us, and the sort of Coca-Cola, UNICEF, you know, folkloric and holding unity version of globalization. So it was actually kind of bracing to come across like the most full-throated like cynical dark globalization tract, which is really what the sovereign individual is.

Its story is interesting. Its afterlife is quite interesting. It's one of these things that as we begin to talk about the book and its afterlife, you'll see its fingerprints in a lot of what we've talked about, especially places, especially, in fact, you'll see it in our discussions of like some cathedral and bizarre stuff comes up in there. At the same time as well, like when we talked about Prospera, we did that double episode on Prospera.

That's basically someone took this book as an instruction. Is it Cookbook? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. As to how to found a new society. The Libertarian's Cookbook. It's even worse than the Anarchist's Cookbook. Yeah.

It just teaches you how to make a big Toblerone. Yeah. It just expects that someone else is going to make the bomb for you and never actually details how anything that's made. Yeah. The frictionless action of the market will necessarily produce all of the bombs that we need. Provide me this bomb.

If you get the extended edition, it tells you, Teacher Gives has this very good recipe on how to make a roast chicken in which it tells you to keep the skin a kind of whitish pink because food safety standards are something set by the government and you shouldn't respect that. And you got to roast it on top of slices of garlic bread. That's right. The garlic bread has to be overdone. That's the way that you do a perfect roast chicken.

If you make meat thermometer, I want you to do it some other way. Before we get into this, though, I do have a little bit of front matter that's not connected entirely to the news cycle, which is ... Do you want to show us your front matter? I do not, which is we have a line update. The line. Oh, yes. There's further information.

Meanwhile on Friday night. Yeah. Which is, Saudi Arabia is now saying that directly build their futuristic city, The Line. No. What? They were so close. The line is more of a vibe, actually. We're renaming it the vibe.

Is it going to be only metaverse? What happened to the winter? What happened to the winter? Moving to the vibe. Well, that's the thing. Milo kind of already said the answer. Oh, for fuck's sake. Which is that Saudi Arabia will not directly build the futuristic city, The Line at Neon,

but will instead use, quote, a lot of artificial intelligence to design a digital twin backbone. So, we're going to do it in the metaverse. I feel like that's probably the only way you could build something like that is if you built it on the Sims. Yeah. That's what they say. We've got to build quite a lot of real estate in a short space of time. Well, we're not actually building The Line.

We're assembling it from a series of modular pieces that are pre-engineered and predetermined as to what they do that will first build and design in the metaverse as a digital twin. So, yes, that's right. There, look. Look. The Line is still definitely happening. They dug that big trench in the desert. It is happening.

Yeah. It's like Alamedin. Yeah. What else do you want? We've got two vast and trunculus legs. The rest of it's coming, all right? Well, in this case, we have two vast and trunculus legs in like Unity or the Epic Engine. Well, I like the idea.

Like this sort of reverse. I was a man in statue. Well, that's why they built- Where instead of it being weathered to two vast and trunculus legs, it was simply never completed. Well, this is the thing, right? They had to build the vast and trunculus legs because in the metaverse, you can't have those. Yeah, that's right.

It's actually just a vast and legless trunk, actually. That's the image. It's floating. It says, we're assembling them from a series of modular pieces that are pre-engineered and predetermined as to what they do. So, before they build the line, they have to build the factory that builds the line. Step one. The Neon in the line is actually in the conclusion to my book.

You'll probably not be that surprised to hear. In this example of sort of building cloud first and then land later, that's, I think, probably ripped directly off from the Liberland scheme, which itself was ripped off of the central de-central land scheme. Because what's his name from? Patrick Schumacher has done exactly this, built like an extremely elaborate like swooping, gorgeous version of Liberland, despite the fact that they can't even sort of land there on a speedboat because they'll be picked up by the Croatian border guards.

This is just an exaggerated version of that. But they do have, I saw just yesterday, they're filming their first Bollywood movie in Neon. They're doing some drag racing out there. They're killing some locals. I mean, that is the sport for it, you know? Yeah. No, I mean, they're doing the basics. They're doing the frontier stuff.

When they're filming a Bollywood movie, it's just set in a trench in the desert, I suppose so. I've seen weird, just like only sports that can happen in a straight line. So you've got archery, shoe thing, drag racing, curling, that's going to be, that's going to pop off. Yeah, absolutely. You've got cricket. It's really extreme cricket.

Fencing? Like long cricket. Yeah. Like you can hit. It's a big hit. I've hit it for 6,000. But another piece of information, this is actually just something I plan to talk about, but something that just hover across my screen now, yes, it's news cycle connected, but also worth talking

about. Damn. Again, one of the only people worthwhile writing about Kirstarmer is John Stone in The Independent. And he's also playing for England. Who's very impressive at the news. Yeah, that's right. Combining those two things. So Kirstarmer says, there is a case for GPS tagging certain asylum seekers.

Amazing. Didn't Kirstarmer like memorably pled just sort of like compassionate human rights-based approach to migration policy at one point? I'm sure they'll be barely visible from the outside though. This will be humane. Look, some asylum seekers, they're very hardworking and they take their training very seriously and I would like to follow them on Strava to motivate me for my own running goals. And I think that should be available to the populace as well.

I think many of them, you know, having walked here from Syria could set a great fitness example to a lot of people in the UK, you know, who need to get up and get moving. Yeah. If, well, if they can flee a water and country, you can do your 10,000 steps. That's right. So he says basically, look, only while the claim is being processed, before he then says, by the way, it often takes up to four years to process a claim. So that basically means, yet again, once again, just saying, don't worry, we're going to

do pretty much the same thing. We'll make it more efficient. Yeah. But like four years of GPS tagging, but compassionately. You get, but pick whatever like brand you want. You want like a Gucci one. You can have that. But also that he says that the, again, the funding for dealing with refugees, once again,

unsurprisingly, not going to go into say, welcome centers, it won't go into improving conditions for people's lives, whether waiting for their asylum claims to be processed. It won't even go into changing the one law that doesn't allow people to come here easily, which is that airlines, if you get denied entry into the country, airlines have to pay to fly you somewhere else. It's one of the main reasons why airlines won't fly people in to make asylum claims because it's financially risky for them, right? If just not even an effort in changing that.

No, he's going to fund the national crime agency more to crack down on human trafficking gangs. But once again, agent of unreality, Kearstar, I'm sure between now, which is this being recorded on the 5th of December, I'm sure that by the between now and when this comes out, which will be later this month, there'll be more examples of him being an agent of unreality. But we're here to talk about something else. We're here to talk about the sovereign individual and the life and afterlife of this very strange

book. So Quinn, can you give us just the elevator pitch of the sovereign individual who wrote it? What's it all about? You say it's the mask off version of the sort of kumbaya join hands version Coca-Cola globalization story. What is the sovereign individual? How does it work?

What are its moving parts? So this is the third book that Davidson and Rhys Mog wrote together. The first one was called Blood in the Streets after the well-known advice that you should invest when there's blood in the streets. That was in 1987. The second book was called The Great Reckoning published in 1991. And the third one was Sovereign Individual and they were they were publishing the books kind of as greatest hits of the investment newsletter that they were selling subscriptions

to. It's called Substax. It's proto-substax for sure. The investment newsletter has a strong claim. It's a lot less ominous sounding than the first two. Yeah, that's right. It was called Streets of Investment. You had to pay a subscription.

They also sold a 24-hour service to a phone, something called Gold Line, where you could get tips on the rising or falling price of gold in the next new cycle. And these things were actually really big business. Yeah, it's a babe station girl with a Nokia 3310 and you're like, what price is the gold baby? Yeah, perfect. It wouldn't put it past them, but so they the books were basically written by Davidson. I think Reece Mog, you know, he was for those, I mean, I guess probably most people know,

but he was editor of the Times from the late 60s to the early 80s, became a lifetime peer in the 80s and had this sort of like cultural and economic man about town status where he had a kind of a weight to hit the things that he was saying. So the book is really pretty gonzo, hard right, libertarian, apocalyptic prediction, but somehow his sort of accent over top of it makes it seem sort of like not quite as deranged as it might. I think he got it a lot of the relatively positive reception and positive reviews that it got.

But the book is basically arguing that in the next few decades. So IE right around now, from 1997, time of publication, the nation states would be starting to come apart at the seams because mostly because of the rise of cyberspace sort of draining states of revenue. Yeah, and of course he's the agent, he's the manchurian candidate for all of this. But the idea being that states wouldn't be able to tax their populations anymore because people who actually were making money would just be secreting away their money electronically to low and no tax jurisdictions, leaving the welfare state to kind of wither and die, causing

uprisings of anger from the sort of low IQ, you know, leftover, wasteoid citizens that have been left behind as to sovereign individual, this 100 million names, a number of something like, I think it's there are the way I read it over the last few days and it's like, I think he says there will be a maximum of about 100 million at the beginning. It will be about 200,000 and the way he sees it as these are the real humans, right? It's sort of it's the way it's yeah, well, the way it struck me because a lot of this book as well as a lot of like, crankish tellings of history, like there's sort of like a fourth great turning thing. They talk about they talk about how well in Greece, there was the rise

of ancient what we would call classical Greece and about 500 BC, the pinnacle of Rome and about about zero AD, the pinnacle of and then the fall of Rome about 500 AD, followed by like the rise of feudalism in 1000 AD, the rise of the early modern era in 1500 AD and then the transition to something else in around 2000 AD, right? But this is like, again, this is crank history. This ignores kind of everything else that happens in between how contingent it all is. But the way I see it, right, is it's once like so many things, especially that we've talked about recently on this show, is it's a little bit like trying to summarize Hegel after you've been hit by a golf ball that's flying at great speed.

Yeah, I said Marx with a catastrophic head injury and I kind of stand by that. It's like history sort of inevitably progresses to, I don't know what, making more money hanging out with all my friends, I suppose. The sovereign individual, the character of the sovereign individual, as you say, is one of these super high IQ rich people who is, as miniaturization happens, as microprocessing, as they call it, becomes, yeah, well, or as it becomes like... Shatters, nation-style. As it is basically the cotton gin or seed drill of our era and redefines the entire global economy, that all of the inefficiencies that allowed for the great majority of mostly useless low IQ

humans, he does approvingly cite the bell curve in here, by the way, that those efficiencies were all sort of drop away, the ability of these people to exercise political control because of their numbers and the institutional inertia of things like democratic nation-states and stuff are all going to collapse because they'll simply be constantly outcompeted by organizations and people enabled by computers and microprocessing and the sovereign individual is the small number of people who emerge from these ashes, these high IQ cognitive elite, people who are able to be valuable to one another and who will become essentially states unto themselves. That sort of, or something like states unto themselves because they won't be states,

they will be sovereign, they will be humans, they will recognize one another as humans, and as wielders of their own destiny, and they will see everyone else as... Just invented slavery again, but for going on the computer. I swear to fucking god, these people. He predicted that meeting between Tim Cook and Elon Musk. But I mean, that's where the history stuff becomes kind of relevant because the Middle Ages is like their big touchstone. So their idea is that just as that was the time when Europe was fractured into a million little pieces, so too will the future be like that and they'll be sovereign individuals will have their little fortified citadels and readouts and people that they can

bring into their employ, and then beyond that will just be the kind of ungoverned madness of the plebes as they sort of breed themselves first into and then out of existence. It's not slavery. It's road to serfdom brackets positive. It's road to serfdom, but you all are the serfs and I'm on the road to it. Totally. But I mean, the weird thing, the thing that, I mean, me and Riley were talking about it before and he was saying that it seems like there's a disavowed role for the state in all of this, but I think there's a disavowed role for labor in all of it. It's strange how all of this is happening strictly from the point of view of the person who's sort of escaping, but the question

of who's cleaning the toilets, let alone who's fabricating the designs or building the houses is all disavowed. I'll say where I think it's actually not there. The perspective is written from. It's not just from the person escaping, but the person escaping is either an owner or manager. This is allowing the owner or manager of capital to wall themselves up in a citadel and then escape from the labor because one of the examples is that they're saying, look, all minimum wages, you're going to have to abolish them because capital is just going to go to where there's the lowest wage because it can now, because all of these funds can be transferred at the touch of a button because we have

cyberspace, which they're really, really into. But it sort of neglects the fact that, well, hang on a second, unless you have a state to enforce things like different wages across borders, then all of a sudden those arbitrage opportunities kind of disappear. Yeah. Unless you have the pet dictatorship or you end up in this sort of weird material situation where you end up with like capital flight to a nominally communist country. Who grows the food? Well, that's sort of hand-waved away. Computers will do it. Who actually does some of the knowledge work? Oh, well, we're going to have AI agents that will do it. The whole story is about these people, these people who are really good at

going on the computer, slowly becoming gods living alone in citadels. And I think these unacknowledged other side of that is, yeah, they become gods living in citadels, living an increasingly self-referential life as the world outside moves beyond needing them, essentially. Yeah. But yet, they're soilent and still being airdropped somehow, like onto their pod by means that we don't really feel like we need to explain. It's really funny to me that one half of this sort of techno-libertarian cyberpunk dystopia was like writing this and at the same time just like, yeah, let me employ the weirdest pseudo-victorian nanny to raise my child. Yeah, exactly. This will surely result in normalcy.

Well, that's what I mean. Perhaps you have to be as kind of like able to just edit out the service class as someone from a hereditary aristocratic class and then going to be able to like just not pay any attention to the kind of reproduction of everyday life that you rely on people like that for. Because it seems like, you know, at least the nannies are going to have to come along, judging from the many photographs over the years of his own family. But they don't get a look in in the sovereign individual. But that's what's so weird about, I think, is it's a kind of a dream of isolation without self-sufficiency because it's not actually about, you know, going off-grid and kind of like creating a totally autarkic zone. It's not about that at all. But how and how

you're actually continuing to plug into sort of distribution channels is just left unexplained. Do you think then that this, you know, Jacob Rees-Mogg's actually act of teenage rebellion was to sort of become a guy who pretends to be a Victorian because his dad was a guy who was pretending to be like a cyberpunk guy from the future? Interestingly enough, actually. Maybe. Maybe he's the dad's like put on the cyberpunk visor and he's like running up to his room like, no, I'm going to look at free raffle like paints. There is a long sort of paragraph, several paragraphs, talking about how it will be

important in the coming cyber age of sovereign individuals without institutions to like force people to act in certain ways and so on because they're all going to die. It will be important for sovereign individuals to cultivate a Victorian sense of morality so that others will find them inherently trustworthy. Pure table legs. That's right. Too horny. Well, I think, I mean, I think that the, you know, the best fictional example of this is Neil Stevenson, the Diamond Age, and there you actually have these, they're called, I think,

the Victorians or the Atlanteans or something who are called themselves equity barons and equity lords and take all of the affectations of the city with, you know, umbrella and top hat, but live in a totally commodified sovereign space. So I think that that combination of kind of the mores and appearances of an earlier, more dignified era matched to this futuristic economic arrangement is actually pretty consistent with the anarcho capitalist vibe. They're often trying to gravitate. They're trying not to be too futuristic because they think you need to anchor the future in some kind of morality. And so, yeah, you like your Hans Raman Hoppe and you cling

on to Western whiteness or your David Friedman, you cling on to some idea of like medieval self care and community or whatever. So that old new combination is actually pretty, pretty typical for this crew. And also, it might be, it could be mentioned that that William Riesmog set up his son with a spot in Rothschild's in Hong Kong in the 90s. He has great columns about seeing his son off to Hong Kong to the bank that he actually sat on the board for along with James Goldsmith in the 90s. And that's where a lot of his reflections about the superiority of Hong Kong came from is going to visit his son and walking around and being like, ooh, I like this. We have a combination of old colonial vibes with like being plugged into the

global economy with this massive hinterland of like low wage labor right at our doorstep. I mean, that really became his mental model, as they say in The Sovereign Individual. It's very funny that he wrote this what two years before that started to come out. Like, he could have just looked at the least document and realized that wasn't going to continue. Now, this was the year. It came out the year that it went back. It was handed over. Yeah. But yeah, I think that two things totally line up because it's like, you saw the fading away of the so the existing best version of the Sovereign Individual model in action. And so you needed then to sort of like salvage the blueprints or the instruction

manual from Hong Kong as it was going down to try to figure out how you had reconstructed after the colony was gone. So this is this is a little bit a little bit more from describing Sovereign Individuals. It says at the highest plateau of again, like productivity of what because they also say that only the ideas in your head rather than physical capital will make you phenomenally rich in the future, right? So productivity of productivity of ideas, I guess, productivity of sales, maybe, but you're not really doing or making much. It's totally immaterial. You're just going on the computer. So where they say productivity is how much you go on the computer. And these guys go on the computer more than going on the computer. It says at the highest

plateau of going on the computer, these sovereign individuals will compete and interact on terms that echo the relations among the gods of Greek myth, the elusive Mount Olympus of the next millennium is going to spring out of one of the other ones heads. Why not? I do often call myself the Hades of posting 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. And no one will have legs. Sort of bordering on like self-awareness here that we're going to create a realm of like petty bickering, squabbling dipshits who constantly interfere in the lives of real people.

But that's what's interesting about the timing, right? Because in 1997, there really wasn't a way to make money on the internet yet, right? I mean, we're at the dawn of like the internet browser, like Mosaic was only invented a couple years earlier. There were no, you know, online market places. There were no apps that were using that were harvesting your data and selling out to average. None of that existed, right? Which is why when Peter Thiel read this, what he took from it was just the cyber money thing. He's like, oh, it wasn't this insight that the internet is where the economy was going to be now. It was just that, oh, we can use the internet to like emissary existing nation states and to make more frictionless. The payment for things that are presumably

happening out in like meat space world, brick and mortar world, because they're not really uploading their consciousness or anything, right? They're not doing like full transhumanism in this. It's just like, we're just going to be rich motherfuckers, like by ourselves making, maybe not even making more money, maybe just keeping all the money we already have and just like milking that nest egg forever. Well, they didn't have the vision of years and years by Russell T. Davis. No, they did not. So we talk about as well, right? This is why I think this book is so strange, right? Because on the one hand, it does make some accurate predictions from the 1990s that did require actually some foresight. Like for example, looking at the

internet and saying, okay, well, this is where a lot of commerce is going to happen. But also, looking at the internet and seeing this is where a lot of commerce is going to happen. And I assume it will be completely de-territorialized and there won't be any kind of, it won't be, say, rooted in states because if you think about this, right? Let's just, when reference to something we've been talking about recently, the sort of spat between Elon Musk and Tim Cook, is that Tim Cook needs to enforce a bunch of like content regulations that Elon Musk isn't keen on because Apple needs to operate everywhere. And if Apple needs to operate everywhere, then essentially it has to operate such that it,

say, can operate in the European Union. And that means that, and that means that like, rather than imagining the internet as this place totally free from national influence, in fact, it is in many ways a channel for national influence, right? That European law is directly influencing what Elon Musk, who is a sovereign individual or is one of the closest things we have to it, can do with the social media platform he bought, simply because like, you can't wish away the nation state as much as these guys want to, and as much as they say, okay, well, we see a decline that the nation state is going to keep trying to assert its power, but it's not going to be able to control cyberspace. It's not going to be able to control these

small number of phenomenally rich people. Its power is going to ebb away, as opposed to, actually, the nation state and very large multinational companies currently have and always have had, as well as rich people, a very, very, very cozy relationship where the nation state works as hard as it fucking can to make sure that these things can operate where they can operate, yeah. To enable their profit making, yeah, sure. It's sort of like a bunch of guys robbing a bank, and as they're being like, handed the money by like, tellers who are all too glad to get rid of it, and are doing everything possible to accommodate them, they're like, wow, we're the best robbers ever, you know? I don't even need to like, have a gun for this, they're just handing me stuff.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it also points to a couple of things that I've always found interesting about the libertarian imagination, especially the kind of gold bug style, which David's indefinitely tends towards. I mean, first of all, there's just like a basic just juvenile quality to this, like there's a way, and there's this kind of like a 19th century Victorian like adventure novel, like they're just going to get the loot and like head off to a little bay somewhere and stash it in like 80 days. Yeah, it has like this Robert Louis Stevenson kind of thing going, but then also that the fact that like a lot of the proper anarcho capitalists like this are basically like de-growthers, right? Because if you actually organize a world economy based on

this idea of say like, fully gold backed currencies, you immediately eliminate almost all the economic activity happening in the world, right? You have like no credit, you have no debt, you have no ability to like invest in anything basically. God set a certain amount of economic activity by putting the gold in the ground. The more you find, the more economic activity you can have. Yeah, yeah, so there's also this kind of like tabletop kind of gaming quality to it where it's just like you have to just gather as much of the resources and just like withdraw to your starting point and then you'll win. So that's this strange combination of like actual insights into how technology will change the possibilities for making money with a kind of very reduced idea of actually what capitalism

can accomplish. Like they're actually, Marx was much more like a bullish on the transformative quality of capitalism than these guys. You really just think all this means is we'll be able to like gather up all of our toys and hide them in a place no one will ever be able to get them. This is why I say it's like someone summarizing Hegel with a head injury because one of your basic sort of processes of history in Hegel, again from about a billion feet, is that more and more people come to recognize one another as human. It's the fight to be recognized, more and more people to be recognized as human by one another and those who used to treat them as less. Notice the Guardians got anything to say about it. That's the basic quality of it, right? And the whole point is

like the world's ghost is trying to work itself out and the working out of the world ghost is the broader and broader recognition of one another is free and equal, basically, at a very, very, very, very high level. Whereas what they're basically, what they're writing is, look, the world ghost is actually limited to a few hundred thousand people who are fighting to be freed from political control by non-humans, essentially. The rest of humanity. NPCs. Yeah, it's the player characters are trying to be freed from the shackles of, you know, tutorial city that's in the grips of the NPCs. And they talk about this as releasing the economy from political control. Again, it's like complaining that the jet pack you're wearing

is slowing you down because it's heavy. Yeah, releasing car from wheel. I mean, you joke about reading Road to Serfdom the wrong way, but it's almost like reading the time machine the wrong way to like, hey, this Eloise situation seems amazing. You just sit there, food appears incredible. No troublesome warlocks here, certainly. Walk around in rows. The good news is that politicians will no longer be able to dominate, suppress, and regulate the greater power of commerce in this new realm, and the legislators of the ancient Greek city-states who have trimmed the beard of Zeus. Also, that has to assume that, yeah, that that Zeus exists and is doing a real thing in city-states would have wanted to trim

his beard. Whereas like, there are capitalists who do do things as moving the Turks who wanted to trim his beard. So the Greeks would have anything stood against that. Liberation, they say, 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. This will ultimately have little choice but to treat populations and territories that they serve more like customers and way less like organized criminals treat the victims of a of a shakedown racket. Now, this has also been deeply influential, and this is what you write in your article, on the way that a lot of conservative libertarians, especially the current Prime Minister and a lot of his friends, as well as the outgoing Prime

Minister and several other Prime Ministers before her, have thought about- Yeah, Prime Minister is going back as far as six to eight months. Where they are, it feeds into their love of essentially trying to breathe life back into British slash other capitalism by devolving it into smaller territories that will compete with one another on more of a market basis to see you has the best regulations. Right, because like Britain's not small enough, so it needs to be made into ever smaller versions of itself that cannot maneuver. I mean, that's something I write about in the book and that it's been written about before, but it's, you know, Peter Hall, this anarchist

geographer stood in front of the Labour Party in the mid 70s and said, hey, nothing has worked in the inner cities, what if we just lift all regulations of all kinds and turn parts of Glasgow and Liverpool into extra territorial spaces for their own rules and all of that. And we're just going to see what happens. Yeah, and he said, they'll be outside the UK, they'll be outside the European community, they'll be their own entities. And Geoffrey Howe basically heard this and pitched it and that's what the enterprise zones were, of course, that canary wharf being the only one that really worked. But now, you know, unfortunately, there's no new ideas since thatcher in the UK. So

all that keeps happening is like the enterprise zones and free ports keep on getting trotted out like election cycle after election cycle. No one's brave enough to say that you're allowed, you should be allowed to drive 70 miles an hour on a country road. And that's the reason why Britain will always stagnate. Yeah, that's right. Maybe there can be small, delimited areas where you're allowed to. But now, I mean, it's literally the same dudes like Almond Butler, who was at the Adams Smith Institute in like 1980, is sitting on the committee to, you know, plan the free ports for Boris Johnson. Almond Butler, the man who brings me my nuts. So it does genuinely seem like we have this, again, the same people who have been trying to... What's interesting here,

for me, right, is this the same people who have been predicting that this is going to happen because of computers, essentially. Going on the computer is going to create a new kind of world. And that they, at the same time, will stop at nothing short of constantly trying to get into positions of power and influence to actually make it happen. Yeah, and they get discredited every time and humiliated, and then they just pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and walk on like nothing's happened. Yeah, the grip is intense. I mean, you know, someone who studies neoliberalism, like me, I'm like compelled to keep on studying Britain because it's like, you know, Los Alamos, basically, it's just like the place where the detonations keep happening, even though,

as you say, they fail each time. And I think it's, I honestly think like British pundits are just too depressed to face the reality that time never moves forward in the world of policy. So every time there's a new prime minister, there's some murmur about the turn to state capitalism and the end of neoliberalism. And now, at this time, Thatcher must really be dead. But in fact, it just ends up being the same shitty ideas every two weeks. Are you telling me not to get dangerously hyped for Prime Minister Kirstama? Because I've been building a lot on that house and all of this sand under the foundations, you know, it only made it only like redoubles my commitment.

Yeah, the entire collection of British politicians and political journalists are basically a battalion sized element of Japanese soldiers still fighting the war on a Pacific island somewhere. And they was really boring for a long time. And then someone threw Jeremy Corbyn at them for five years. And they got they got to pretend they were fighting a war again. They were stuck in the 80s. So it's like a bunch of like Argentinian conscript told out still fighting the Falklands. My favorite like literal connection to that is Patrick Roberts and the guy who started the Bruges group, which was like the biggest early Brexit sort of fictac later ended up doing PR for an elderly Pinochet. Amazing.

So this book has like three core concepts. Milo, you want to say something? I was just saying, what would the PR for Pinochet be? Just be like, he wanted to give people free helicopter rides. Yeah, he's kept up. They're very slippery. He's very into science, seeing very buttery helicopter. So the three core concepts of this book, as far as I could sort of tease them out, right, are number one, this idea of mega politics. The mega politics is basically

seems like something from the day to day politics is big now. You're listening to mega politics. Mega politics. Well, it's basically like a like a for now, Brattle type concept, right? We're looking at historical trends on the level of like climate, geography, certain seismic innovations like the printing press or whatever. But that their main conceit is that mega politics has now sped up so much that because of might because of miniaturization and microprocessing that it actually matters to be able to predict it within one lifetime, like you can make money by predicting these like,

again, long-duray trends within one lifetime. But also our concept of politics, which is just the control of resources through the threat of mass violence and then technology, which is going on the computer. Are those basically the three main concepts of this and how they're sort of deployed? Yeah, it seems like, I mean, the mega, mega politics is just ripping off like mega trends, which is another sort of airport book from the early eighties. And it could be noted that New Real Rabbini's new book is just called Mega Threats, right? It seems like whenever you want to move some copy, you just put a mega on it.

But yeah, I think that it's not, it would be, I think a mistake to see it as like a fully thought out theory of the deep future or something. I mean, like all investment manuals, it only has to work for the next trade, so to speak, right? I mean, it has a very, actually like a short-term quality to it, which is similar to, for example, the wonderful title of Peter Navarro, the former trade advisor for Trump's book was called If It's Raining in Brazil by Starbucks, because you know, it's meant to be this sort of like rule of thumb for the day trader. And that's definitely how the sovereign individual like- Sounds like a George Formby song from the 1940s.

If it's raining in Brazil by a Starbucks, and I'll meet you down in Lambeth Square. So the, as you were, the core prediction, so some of the core predictions, right? That would be our all-favorite. Unusual, but a lot of them are just, they observed things that were, let's say, not insightful to observe in the 1990s. Like, for example, you couldn't swing a cat, but for hitting someone in international relations or politics talking about the relative decline in the importance of the nation-state. Also, or the sort of growth of barrier-less trade. Again, this is a couple of years before China joins the WTO,

NAFTA's already signed. Yeah, and stuff that like trickles down to popular fictions, about the time you get like Jennifer Government and stuff a couple of years later, it's like, and also stuff like, well, you know, Cyberpunk, like Snow Crash or whatever, where it's like, it's all corporations, it's all Zibatsu or whatever. So they, they say, if our reasoning is correct, the nation-state will be replaced by a new form of sovereignty, some of them unique in history, some of them reminiscent of the city-states and medieval merchant republics to the pre-modern world. What was old will be new again after 2000,

and what was unimaginable will be commonplace. As the scale of technology plunges, governments will find they must compete like corporations for income, which is again like the concept of Prospera, right? We are going to try to have a contract of regulatory system to create a tax base. It's a concept of Britain as well. But if you want your international relations title, it's like searching for like a millennial Vestphalia, right? Like it's a new sort of like way of organizing the state in service of capital. Yeah. And so what they see, right, is they, they say, look, that citizenship, the concept of citizenship, again, they're right. The concept of citizenship is not eternal. You know, if we were just, if we were in, you wouldn't have considered

yourself a citizen, for example, of like, of like Charlemagne's empire, you wouldn't have necessarily, right? That doesn't really make a lot of sense. Citizenship sort of is more connected to like, I don't know, your status as a burger, really. It's an Enlightenment notion fundamentally, yeah. But I'm going to become a burger. But they say, right, that the important trying to explain citizenship to an American, imagine a burger. Imagine only five guys are about to become citizens. If you can understand how and why the importance of chivalric oaths faded away with the transition to an industrial organization of society, you'll be better positioned to see how citizenship as we know it could fade away in the information age.

Both served a similar function, facilitating the exercise of power under two quite different sets of mega political conditions. And it's observations like this could that sort of, I find quite arresting, right? Because on the one hand, the returns to citizenship, especially of citizenship in, say, like a lot of the industrialized world, have gotten considerably worse, right? Your experience as a normal citizen of somewhere in the industrialized world has gotten on average considerably worse, your access to health care is much less, and so on. Yes. However, it is still, it's like become increasingly the wire, like you talk about the wire and the wire shrinking and like, you know, sort of lifeboat ethics and all of this. We see what happens to

people who do not have desirable citizenship after all. Yeah, I was going to say that, I mean, it is both true that being a citizen is worth less and less, but what citizen you are is still the thing that makes the biggest difference in your life chances, right? The kind of Branko-Milanovic point is like the passport you're born with is the biggest determiner of what happens the rest of your life. And their argument, of course, is that the, again, the advent of computers, because of course they don't believe in any of that climate change malarkey, like James Dale Davidson is, I believe, a main investor in Newsmax as well. Just another day-to-day ass name there. Megapolitics on Newsmax. You're watching Newsmax with me, Max News.

But essentially, right, that the future they envision is that when production is decentralized, completely dematerialized, completely de-territorialized, it's nothing but sovereign individuals in gigantic castles surrounded by armed guards with the fucking battle royale exploding collars on. It's nothing but that. That will actually be a great moment for social justice because all of these hyper-talented cognitive elite currently languishing with non-valuable citizenships will rise to the top as well and join the ranks of sovereign individuals while sort of like, say, middle income earners in developed countries will be plunged down into the depths. And, you know, again, this is, it seems, it's something

where that there has been something of, something that looks almost, if you squint, like an accurate prediction of what politics will do, how politics will be experienced by a lot of downwardly mobile people in the developed world, but how that's not just being facilitated by going on the computer. That's been an active political choice that's been campaigned for, that's been put into place by a lot of these people who like this book and how, you know, that in, and that, you know, in many cases, right, the, we're not really, you know, you don't really have to do a lot of competing for sort of rising wealthy from like China or, or various parts of like Nigeria or whatever. You don't have to do a lot of competing for them. They still come to the

high-tech jurisdictions because that's where the fanciest cities are, where they can, you know, have their beautiful pet houses and so on. Yeah, they want to ruin your housing market. It's missing an analysis of treats is the thing. Yeah, I mean, I think that, that is why it's a good book in a way, is they're just being completely unromantic and, and the opposite of, they're celebratory about the things that people are usually bemoaning, which is like, you know, stratification of societies, securitization of living places, like people withdrawing to like armed compounds in this, of the style of Brazil. I mean, the gated communities that everyone was like really concerned about in the 1990s, they have become normalized. But those are the kind of

things that most people were worried about. And they're just saying, no, this is the frontier in the future. What's to worry about? This is great. Like, let's invest in these more and let's go. Which is kind of, you know, then their argument is with the other elites, because, you know, the, the plebs are never really going to be too much of a concern because you can just keep them at bay. But what they don't like, and this is the whole sort of anti-woke capitalist thing, right? I mean, the only socialists left from the point of view of right-wing libertarians are other elites, the ones that, you know, are in social democratic party positions and working the European Commission or whatever. So it's those people who could still stand in the way of the plans of the

sovereign individual sort of escape strategies. That's why they are the, they're the primary enemy, not the kind of masses. And in fact, there is a great deal of, let's say, unkind things written about Clinton and Blair in this book, even though, again, this book really is a kind of peon to the world that those guys were actually making. Yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah. Yeah, like, it's the kind of thing that gets you to calling Bill Clinton a communist, right? Well, the kind of thing that gets you to calling Bill Clinton a communist is living in the world Bill Clinton wants to make, but wanting to believe that you made it with your going on the computer

skills. Yeah, basically. And so this is sort of a little section on the collapse of the state and the death of politics in general, right? I think that there is politics versus efficiency. Politics is the rule of power. Efficiency is the rule of the market. Again, there's no combination, let's say, this combinatorial relationship between these two things. They see sort of that when they talk about, they say that the Don Quixote of the 21st century will not be a knight-errant struggling to revive the glories of feudalism, but a bureaucrat and a brown suit, a tax collector yearning for a citizen to audit. Or again, you have to ask yourself, well, hang on, who is the one? In this view of the ultra-libertarian going on the computer future, where does all the labor come

from? Where does the food you eat come from? What role do you have in, say, as capital or management? What role do you have in producing the food and things and battle royale collars for your armed guards? And the assumption is that with the advent of the going on the computer, there will no longer need to be large-scale organization of production, that it will be sort of automated and almost post-scarcity, but post-scarcity for a small number of humans. And that, to me, seems like, again, it would be a very funny idea, if not for the fact that a number of people directly in power actually seem to believe elements of it. This kind of feels like a screed of pure coat. It kind of feels... And I don't know, I'm interested

in the historical context of this a little bit more, because it kind of feels like... I was thinking about what you were saying about the whole... The idea that these types of guys, the types of guys who were really kind of falling for this, were the ones who really wanted to sincerely believe that Blair and Clinton were straight-up communists, and the sort of faturite world that maybe they had envisioned and really invested in was about to die, rather than sort of recognizing the reality that no, it continues, and every objective bit of evidence suggests that that would be the case. And in that way, because if you read it as just pure coat, and they don't really have to think about, like, okay, well, in this future, where do I kind of... The terminal

question that I keep coming up to whenever we talk about startups, like, who deals with the poop, right? Where does the poop go? Who deals with the poop? Who takes it away? Really important thing, like, you know, same, who are the bin men in this scenario, right? But it doesn't really matter to them, because... Because that's... Okay, there we go. Title, title. I was... Yeah, oh, fuck, that's great. But I think that seems to be it. It's kind of, like, they don't... This doesn't... And I guess the question is, like, was this a book that wasn't supposed to be taken that seriously, but, like, the problem now is... And the reason why it sort of shows up on all the sort of, like, great business books that you should read, is that people take it,

are taking it much more seriously than it necessarily warranted. Not necessarily intended, but... Yeah, and as a result, and I was, like, reading... When I was reading, like, the New Statesman piece, where I'm sort of looking at, like, how Sunak and kind of... And I guess, like, even Liz Truss and stuff, how they are sort of influenced by this idea of that. And again, it kind of comes down to, like, this is a blueprint for how to do politics without really having to do politics. This is the way to do politics without having to, like, think about what the purpose of, like, a state is and what its responsibilities are. And I wondered whether there's sort of, like, a dissonance in that. Like, were the... Was, like, Riesmog and this other guy, like,

do they, like, intend this to kind of be, here is a blueprint of what the future will be like? Or is this the case of, like, I'm kind of mad that my party didn't win, but also, I'm having a great time on the computer, and all my friends are on there, so why can't everyone else's friends be on there as well? Yeah, I mean, I think that it's, you know, more than being a kind of work of history or political theory, it's really kind of a self-help manual, right? I mean, because if you think about it, if you think about its popularity amongst, let's say, young striving would be Kings of Silicon Valley or something, it's not that they read it and say, through close analysis of this text, I can understand better what the world would be like in a hundred years

or what it was like 500 years ago. But that through reading this, I can embody the kind of, like, subjectivity of its authors, right? I mean, the same reason people read Ray Dalio. They don't read Ray Dalio because they're, like, interested in exactly what's happening with, like, Chinese industrial policy. They're reading it to become Ray Dalio. And if you read it in that way, and then success becomes the number of ways in which you see your own life being similar to what the life is you're being, you're reading about in the book. So let's say you can order Door Dash and it appears at your door and you haven't had to think about who made it or whatever the conditions. Then, wow, I just became a little bit more of the sovereign individual without even having to try that hard or spend that

much money, right? So then, I think that's, it's like, it's more like a kind of, the medieval reference would be something like these, these texts that describe you how to live a saintly life. It's kind of like the inverse of that, right? It's like, how can you live the most sovereign life you can from day to day as a kind of a mindset and a way of being rather than, like, a nuanced understanding of the Middle Ages? Because that's really kind of beside the point. And I also kind of wanted to ask a little bit about, like, how that influences stuff like effective altruism. So, like, obviously, like, one of the examples that I was thinking about when I was reading about this book was obviously, like, Will McCaskill's one, I think it's the latest one

about, like, I can't remember what it's called, but it's the one that's come out. Yeah, exactly. And like, one of the arguments sort of being that, like, or what it seems to be, because again, I haven't read it, I've only sort of read segments of it, but it seems like a lot of his argument is like, yeah, it seems sort of apocalyptic in some ways, but it's like, yeah, you'll sort of be fine. And all the problems that you sort of envision, like, you know, robots will do it, right? Or like AI will sort it out, or like, you know, you'll just learn how to deal with it, and things will be fine. And like, it seems there seems to sort of be similarities between this book, like, the sovereign individual and that type of, like, effect. And I guess,

like, I sort of wondered whether effective altruism sort of comes out of this type of thinking, is it sort of like a spin-off? Or is it, or is, like, effective altruism just like a way of repackaging, like, the ideology behind the sovereign individual, but to sort of make it appear to be much more kind of like, or much more of like a so-called community? Yeah. I mean, I think that they really get off on, you know, feeling like they're operating at a kind of a spock-like level of rationality that most people aren't have no access to. So, like, that they think in turn at the level of the population, like, through some kind of Richard Dawkins kind of like induction thing. And so that if you, if you convince yourself,

you can think in terms of, like, millennia and then population sizes, like, faster than we can actually conceptualize, then mostly just an ego boost, right? But I think that the effect of altruism, it seemed to me just like a kind of a white pill version of Rocos Basilisk, where it's just kind of like, rather than saying, you're doing this because you don't want the AI to destroy you in the end. You're just sort of, you're doing this because you want, actually, for your own genetic material to be the one that gets through and then it defines the kind of population in the long run. That seems to me the place where that stuff actually, that population level thinking becomes attractive to Silicon Valley people is where it can just potentially mean just like

your own cloning into the deep future. So it seems like it's the kind of the mystique of of the human sciences mixed with some kind of supposedly counterintuitive utilitarian rationale rationale that would just like, charm any kind of high school debater. Yeah. These guys aren't necessarily utilitarian. They're trying to be to be materialists, but they're being materialists who are too enamored with computers. They're being materialists who are, who forget that as long as there will be humans, humans will have bodies and bodies will require material things that aren't just able to be dealt with on a spreadsheet. But it's hard to know what relationship like William Riesmaud could have even had to a computer,

right? I mean, he was pretty old already when he wrote this. Like how down with like coding and stuff was Riesmaud? Probably not very. Like he was probably using analogies to things like you were saying before, like the spinning Jenny and stuff, just like, this is going to be the breakthrough technology. And I don't know how it works exactly, but it will sort of change the way we live. Yeah. Well, that's how I see this, right? As a fundamental misunderstanding of like the role of capital and capitalism, the role of computers and planning, that what they're talking about with the sovereign individual really is a group of fantastic planners who will be able to plan an economy that separates them from the rest of

the non-human animals in a great citadel, but that the planning has to go somewhere. You don't have to know how a carton gin works to get rich, you know, owning a carton. In that sense, getting rich is the easy part, right? So long as you're in the situation that allows you to do it, it requires very little sort of expertise. Also, you know, what the sort of long-term consequences of that are, you don't have to think about that much. And that's sort of gotten us into this situation in the first place. So when we talk also about this, about the state, right? They talk about the different ways that the state can relate to its individuals, or that the different ways the state can be

controlled. It can be a potentate or like some kind of like a kingship, whatever. It can also be controlled by its customers, which is of course what they want, right? Where the state will provide the best service. This gets funneled down to the sort of the Elon Musk thing, where the state is a kind of reddit. Yeah, indeed. Where, you know, I'm going to move to Texas because, you know, they're not doing like woke stuff like Gavin Newsom. But also the interesting thing I'd look at is when they talk about, well, as the state as controlled by its employees, where we will see a little bit of the shadow of that cathedral and bizarre thing that we talked about last week. They say,

mass democracy leads to control of government by its employees. But wait, you may be saying in most jurisdictions, there are many more voters than there are persons on government payroll. How could it be possible for employees to dominate under such conditions? The welfare state emerged to answer exactly this quandary. Since there were not otherwise enough employees to create a working majority, increasing numbers of voters were effectively put on government payroll to receive transfer payments of all kinds, whether this is healthcare, whether that's direct like welfare payments and so on. In effect, the recipients of the transfer payments and subsidies have to be thought of as government employees who are able to dispense with the bother of

reporting every day for work. But that's the welfare queens again, libertarians, they can't help themselves. But also, right, the other thing is the control of government by employees, they're not just talking about the masses of voters who've been bought off. Again, they admit Romney basically once said several years ago, 43% of people are basically government employees will never reach them. But where we talk about government employees, we also talk about the insiders, the people who do not want to transfer to the new much fairer meritocratic world, the people who are very keen to protect their positions, the people who are insiders, who will claim that there are some kinds of rules and behaviors that you should follow,

who will claim that there are moral codes that prevent this from happening, aka the inhabitants of the cathedral. It is always true that in every right-wing libertarian sort of tract, every single time, they will always say that, look, this is the natural way that human society should exist. This is the way that it would just spontaneously exist. If governments didn't make it, didn't sort of tax a lot of my going on the computer money, right, then there must therefore be a conspiracy of insiders who are, for their own benefit, keeping it this way and keeping my dream from coming true. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely, there was a great re-small column for the 90s. It's called,

It's the Elite that Matter. And I mean, he's consistent with that. Like you mentioned the bell curve, and they use this category of the cognitive elite in the sovereign individual. And I do think you're right. I mean, I think there's this great part where there's, where they're sort of pushing back against Christopher Lash, where he's, they're saying like, Christopher Lash says that, you know, the information elite is out of touch and doing their own thing. And, and Bruce Mogg and Davidson are basically like, damn right, like, we got to do more of our own thing. Like, we need to be even more out of touch than people like Christopher Lash and Pap Buchanan say that, that the information elites are.

But we, what we need to not be doing is, you know, there's this great passage where they're slagging off multiculturalism. They're saying that, you know, these new elites conjure up the agreeable or the world for the new alleges conjures up the agreeable image of a global bizarre in which exotic cuisines, exotic styles of dress, exotic music, exotic travel customs can be savored indiscriminately with no questions asked. The new elites are at home in transit en route to a high level conference, the opening of a new franchise to an international film festival or an undiscovered resort. There's is essentially a tourist view of the world. So it kind of sounds like a kind of right wing hit at globalist, but, but it's quite the opposite

when they're just like, they're not globalist enough. Why are they just going on tour? Why are they just going to a hotel? Why don't they realize they need to create their own nations where they can enjoy all this stuff and not have to deal with anyone? Well, it's like, how dare you go to Vietnam and not open up a garment factory and sort of secede from the coastline and turn like not wrong into like its own autonomous territory? Or, or alternatively, how dare you be okay with the fact that there are Vietnamese people here and not using their desperation to like force them to work for lower wages? Yeah, you know, it's just sightseeing. Yeah. So famously, they talk also, they're famously, you know, this book was been lauded as correctly predicting several things,

such as cryptocurrency, even though I think it's that you can't really make that claim, they say, oh, there's going to be cyber money and people are going to be able to opt out of inflation because it's not going to be controlled by any government. But you know, again, opt out of inflation and opt into a different and much worse system of inflation and deflation. Yeah, a currency that is unusable for any kind of thing. You can't inflate a currency if its value vanishes altogether. Yeah, I was going to say, it's kind of kind of insincere to sort of say that these books predict this phenomenon when the widows who like read them then go on to try and make that also trade.

And also they say, oh, and also they predicted the metaverse and it's like, maybe I don't know if you can predict something that let's say doesn't have legs. Or someone else read about five years earlier. But they also say, you know, they talk about AI, right? They say development of tools with a voice meaning like AI agents for multiple applications creates the possibility for dispersal of the individual into multiple simultaneous activities. So you will be your own cognitive labor force. The individual will no longer be singular, but potentially an ensemble of dozens or even thousands of activities undertaken through intelligent agents.

So they're like the answer to like, when someone asks who clears up the poo and who's the bin man is, it's you. It's like alternate versions of infinite versions of yourself. It's you and the multiverse, you're doing it. Yeah, they predicted the multiverse. They predicted having different tabs open in your browser. This will not only enhance the productive capability of the most talented individuals, it will also make the sovereign individual potentially more formidable militarily than the individual has ever been before. Not only will one individual be able to manifestly multiply his activities by employing an essentially unlimited number of agents, he or she will be able to

check every smog's dad once a fucking mech suit. He or she will be able to act after death. For the first time, an individual will be capable of carrying on elaborate tasks, even if he's biologically dead. Okay, listen. There's a lot going on here. We can analyze it on a number of different levels. The level I have chosen for this episode is Jacob Rees-Mogg's psychoanalysis. And right now, I'm feeling I understand this man a lot more. I understand the reason why he wants to wear the stovepipe hat because he like sort of as a shell peeks around the door of his

dad's study and his dad is banging out, I want to be a sort of ghost vampire robot. Just putting the electrodes on his bald head one by one. So I'm sorry I have to do this, but this does sort of feel a little bit apt, but it does kind of feel like Jacob Rees-Mogg's dad is sort of like the Gendo Akari and all this. And he's like, he's really disappointed that his son is just like this weird kid who like doesn't seem to like seems to sort of like be low on every vitamin and kind of useless. And he's just like, well, rather than sort of like be a father figure, I'm going to imagine that I have multiple sons who are all good at like different things. One of them will pilot the

Eva, but the other one will also clean the poo. And that's what I'm going to spend my time doing rather than like parenting my child. The poo robot. Jacob can make that call to his broker from the limousine, but then it's just like sobbing uncontrollably afterwards till they broke him by an emotion. My father would talk to me if I could somehow have an AI me make all these calls. It says, it will no longer be possible for either an enemy at war or a criminal to completely extinguish the capability of an individual to retaliate by killing him, which is one of the more revolutionary innovations, the logic of violence in the whole of history. Well, that's like, this is the kind of capitalism they're looking at, right? But it's a little bit

of a dark vision of things to come. The more things get like completely de-territorialized and dematerialized, and the more actual returns flow to de-territorialized and dematerialized activities, we already see some of that, right? They're ghost kitchens can sort of pop up and morph into eight different restaurants over the course of a night. High-frequency dropshipping basically just arbitrages like microscopic differences in labor and wages between different territories, right? Again, AI generates some strange shirts. And as the more that you create these various agents or algorithms, the more they learn to talk like humans and not just directly compare numbers, but put like a human face on the comparison

of numbers, then you can see a whole sort of completely dematerialized, de-territorialized, theoretical businesses just kind of wink in and out of existence sort of all the time. And the people actually doing the material work will not understand what they're doing or why. It will be guided by a computer that they'll have no knowledge of, or why it works. And so like, this is the thing, right? But Riesmang and Davidson think that they are describing a kind of libertarian utopia where everyone is able to achieve and enjoy the returns to the maximum amount of the capabilities with which they were born enabled by the decentralizing process of the computer that makes returns to violence less because you can't control big swaths of

territorial factories or whatever, right? But instead, you're just sort of going on the computer and managing global networks of more or less everything with your 100,000 other fellow human friends. But what actually seems to be happening, right, is a slow transformation into building the world from the one-shot role-playing game Paranoia. Friend computer, yes. Exactly. Where we are, where the ultimate fantasy here appears to be that the 100,000 real humans create a mad computer that sort of terrorizes and governs everyone outside of their citadels. I mean, the really sort of like vexing thing for me about this book is it's like we can both say that it's totally implausible and have to admit that

between the time it was written and now the world has come to look more like the one that they described, right? So it's like kind of both utter bullshit and yet sadly like actually very good diagnostic of the present world. I think something like the Sam Bankman Freed collapse is a pretty good example of something can, you know, how would that be assessed as an extraordinary success or an extraordinary failure? Well, it's both because he actually played an openness in the technology and the regulatory frame exactly like they're suggesting to become extraordinarily rich for a minute till he wasn't. So I feel like their sovereign individual world is like that too. It's sort of their sovereign individual world is sort of both calamitous

failure and a huge success almost like, you know, serially and simultaneously. Those swings in fortune are kind of built into what they're describing. I think it's that the things they attack, they are in large part able to defeat, but the things that they wish to build make no sense and can't be built. It also just seems to be the case that they kind of like the thing they get right in the diagnosis and the thing that a lot of these guys get right in their diagnosis is like the underlying cynicism or like the kind of cynicism has sort of realized and I think what they're sort of aware of is that like the consequences of the politics that they

ardently support and even though they sort of like pretend to sort of lament it and are kind of aware that it won't, you know, the consequences of here to stay is kind of like the thing that they sort of predicted accurately and continue to do so is the ongoing kind of acceleration of isolation and like how that kind of informs the technology that gets funded, the technology that sort of, you know, we are kind of forced to use the technology that we don't get to use, you know, and so like I don't know, like I think it sort of feels like at the core of the idea of being the happy sovereign individual or like to sort of accept kind of being the sovereign individual, you also have to sort of accept

quite a good deal of alienation, isolation, like atomization, right? Yeah, but that's cool to them because they're all nerds. Right. Well, I think they've come to terms with that maybe because they've, maybe because like they've never had friends or like in the case of Jacob Riesmog's dad just did not want to hang out with his son, which like I get, you know, bad vibes and all that, right? But it's kind of like, but it does sort of feel like they've kind of accepted that okay, the future is going to be this sort of intense atomization and everyone spending lots of time on their computer and like making their kind of primary, like their primary relationships

will sort of be realized on the computer and therefore we can sort of build a society around that. And like they could be, and the sad thing is they could be right about that. Like, you know, it seems at the moment, and maybe that's also the reason why it has a lot of staying power and why even though there are certainly parts of this book that sound insane is still kind of something that is used at least as kind of like informing part of the blueprint of like the world that Peter Thiel wants to make. Yeah. I mean, I think that the idea of commodifying sovereignty is sound. I think, you know, it would be a few years after this until geographers started using that category. But they were,

you know, they were right that that is what's driving policy. The self-aggrandizement of thinking of yourself as a sovereign individual is obviously like, you can sell that all day forever. I mean, I had forgotten there's this part where they talk about the possibility of a quote, special passport issued by the League of Sovereign Individuals. You're just able to conjoin the special club. So, you know, you'll always be able to sell that idea of hyper exclusivity. And thirdly, I mean, this idea of blank territory, like it's always going to sell. I mean, you know, colonialism has lasted a long time behind a myth that is actually clearly a myth that there's some part of the globe that you can go to and sort of take over and,

and, you know, govern as if it's your own. And even people who sort of know that that's not true still know that they can always bring in sort of new recruits with the, you know, the dream of, of Niamh or Prospera or Liberland or whatever it is. Yeah, I think that's that goes sort of kind of full circle back to bringing it into the materiality of where, where on the ground and where in the form of wood and bricks and mortar are these places being made because so much of the theorizing is about abstracting from the material of about pretending that no one has to actually make anything and that all the useful economic activity is going to be planning undertaken by sort of a group of super geniuses,

right? Is that everywhere where these things, everywhere there's very sort of tidy ideas come into contact with reality, right? They are stymied. Yeah, they're stymied, they fail, they don't, maybe people just don't understand it enough, right? The pod falls over and fails with water, you know. Yeah, exactly. I mean, my, my favorite, my favorite place to look for like how this, what the kind of end game is of this is in novels actually, because I think science fiction novels are often much better at sort of playing this out. And there's a couple of them, I think that are good examples of like, what does the sovereign individual look like in reality? And one of them is this great book

called Alongside Night from 1979. And it's basically like a battle between the anarcho-capitalist and the Hayekians. So the bad guy in the novel is someone who thinks that you can kind of, that you can do like Milton Friedman style like monetary management and society is falling apart, the American dollar is tanking, and this brave group of anarcho-capitalist rebels kind of start setting up outposts out in the wilderness. And when you go in, you have to sign a contract saying, you know, you're submitting to third party arbitration and everything will be done through third parties, there's no democracy, there's no, and they're kind of like these liberated zones of sovereign individual type behavior. And eventually, there's like this conversion moment where the whole

country decides that this is a better way to operate. And so collectively, like the United States like dissolves itself, and the black and yellow of the anarcho-capitalist flag flies, and everyone now accepts like some sort of encrypted gold backed cash, which is like kind of the heroic version of this. But there's another book called Oath of Fieldty by Paul Anderson, and our posity, I can't remember, but it's about like an arcology being built in the middle of Los Angeles from 1981. You know, like a city corporation, everyone has to buy their way in, surrounded by a poor city, and things last for a while, but then conformity kicks in and like bureaucracy reproduces itself inside the arcology, and eventually the surrounding,

the plebeians basically storm the block and, you know, destroy the libertarians. Oh, so it's like a documentary about a shortage house. Yeah, exactly. So I think this is just an interesting look into one of the, I think, foundational texts of the techno-libertarian movement. Yeah, and what I can't get over is it's so dumb. It's so stupid. It's like sort of airport stock tips book that has grown an ideology, and this is the thing that has sort of triumphed in so many respects despite practical failure every time. I mean, books are in the airport because they sell. All that just like not spend time with your son. I don't know. I mean, I was going to say it

couldn't be me, but it probably would be. I constructed a trans millennial vision of capitalism to avoid hanging out with little Jacob. Sometimes your kid's weird and has bad vibes. I think that's clear. Yeah, I think that the thing that I always remember right is defining what success is, because these things only need to be good enough to win the next battle. And you tell, and as with so many things, right, you tell the crazy story to beat the real thing that exists. You tell the story of the hyperloop to make sure that the train doesn't get built, and you win not because the hyperloop... You don't lose because the hyperloop doesn't get

built. You win because the train never gets built. You tell the story of the sort of libertarian future, not so that you can create a league of sovereign individuals that'll be issuing each other passports that I guess allow you to commit several murders per year, but... Within reason, sort of Russian judicial system. Yeah, but that really what you're actually... What are the things you're doing? Your story of how to live beyond the state is a thing that motivates you and your friends while having deep contempt for democracy and would prefer to live beyond it. So it's important to remember what success means.

Yeah, I mean, I really think... Yeah, exactly. I think that the essence of the Silicon Valley ideology, as much I think has been spilled about it, is that it was a place, at least was, over the last couple of decades, where valuation had no relationship to profitability, right? I mean, it was a place where you could become extraordinarily successful with while losing money every single year. The construction then of a persuasive narrative in that world is not about being logical or being consistent. It's just about producing a kind of a cloud of self-confidence so great that it intoxicates the people around you or whatever this thing book was able to do. Well, I believe I've been sufficiently intoxicated

by the honey-dipped pen of William Rees Mogg and James Dale Davidson. But Quinn, I want to thank you so much for coming and chatting with us about this terrible book today. Yeah, it was a pleasure. And I want to thank you for listening, whether you're listening to one of the Patreon or the Free Feed, at some point close to Christmas when we've decided we want to take a few days off. Yeah, that's right. So, you know what? Happy holidays or maybe happy couple of weeks before the holidays. We're really tired. And we will see you soon. Bye, everyone. Bye-bye.