The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age by James Dale Davidson

CHAPTER 1
THE TRANSITION DF
THE YEAR gDDD
The Fourth Stage of Human Society
"It feels like something big is about to happen: graphs show us the yearly

growth of populations, atmospheric concentrations of carbon
dioxide, Net addresses, and Mbytes per dollar. They all soar up to an
asymptote just beyond the turn of the century: The Singularity. The
end of everything we know. The beginning of something we may never
understand.'
'' —Danny Hillis
Premonitions
The coming of the year 2000 has haunted the Western imagination for the
past thousand years. Ever since the world failed to end at the turn of the first

millennium after Christ, theologians, evangelists, poets, and seers have
looked to the end of this decade with an expectation that it would bring
something momentous. No less an authority than Isaac Newton speculated
that the world would end with the year 2000. Michel de Nostradamus,
whose prophecies have been read by every generation since they were first

published in 1568, forecast the coming of the Third Antichrist in July 1999.

2 Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, connoisseur of the "collective unconscious,"
envisioned the birth of a New Age in 1997. Such forecasts may easily be
ridiculed, but there is no denying that they excite a morbid fascination at a

time when many are not entirely sure what to believe.

A sense of disquiet about the future has begun to color the optimism so
characteristic of Western societies for the past 250 years. People everywhere
are hesitant and worried. You see it in their faces. Hear it in their conversation.

See it reflected in polls and registered in the ballot box. Just as an
invisible, physical change of ions in the atmosphere signals that a thunderstorm

is imminent even before the clouds darken and lightning strikes, so now, in the

twilight of the millennium, premonitions of change are in the air. One person

after another, each in his own way, senses that time is running
out on a dying way of life. As the decade expires, a murderous century
expires with it, and also a glorious millennium of human accomplishment.
All draw to a close with the year 2000.
We believe that the modern phase of Western civilization will end with it.

This book tells why. Like many earlier works, it is an attempt to see into a
glass darkly, to sketch out the vague shapes and dimensions of a future that
is still to be. In that sense, we mean our work to be apocalyptic—in the
original meaning of the word. Apokalypsis means "unveiling" in Greek. Webelieve

that a new stage in history—the age of the Sovereign Individual—is about to be "unveiled."
"Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within
thy borders ..." —Isaiah 60: 18
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 twentieth-century nation-state. 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, microprocessing will subvert and destroy
the nation-state, creating new forms of social organization in the process.
This will be far from an easy transformation.
The challenge it will pose will be all the greater because it will happenwith 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.

The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age by James Dale Davidson