I've been reading Sovereign Individual the past week (still not done). For a crypto-native person I'm embarrassingly late to the game.

This coincided with election season where I am. The resonance of the book hit eleven.

I was meaning to read The Fourth Turning first but since I got hold of Sovereign Individual I figured I should start here first. It's said that the two overlaps in ideas.

See, this is a book that was unambiguously written as a prophecy in the late-90s. Reading it at the time it was published would be immensely difficult when you could hardly imagine what "cyber assets" refers to. And then Bitcoin came around and everything about it made sense.

I won't attempt to summarize the book here, the ideas are too vast. But the overarching theme stood out the most to me, something I've felt have never been able to articulate: the whole notion of nationstate democracies will be (or has been) reduced to a joke.

Which is what's going on now. That explains my increasing sympathy with people who choose not to vote. The general state of affair is so overtly rotten that the act of voting itself can feel like being complicit in a heinous deed.

Opting out has great social cost. Not believing in democracy is basically apostasy. You're expected to fulfill your democratic 'duty' because you're born into a democracy. That's sounding like religion.

It's made harder for the apostates when there's no better alternatives. So most of them sit at the sideline and made to watch election shitshows.

Sovereign Individual made the case that when people are in complete control of their assets, states can no longer coerce you with violence. When that happens people get to be customers to governments rather than subjects. Individuals have the freedom to move around the globe patronizing the best governmental service without the burden of suffering bad governments they are born into.

Nationalism is water to fishes. People's minds get trapped in it without their awareness, so they end up asking: "what's water/nationalism?"