submitted by jwithrow.
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Journal of a Wayward Philosopher
The Rise of the Information Age
February 23, 2016
Hot Springs, VA
“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”
-Thomas Jefferson
The S&P closed out Monday at $1,945. Gold closed at $1,208 per ounce. Crude Oil closed at $33.30 per barrel, and the 10-year Treasury rate closed at 1.77%. Bitcoin is trading around $423 per BTC today.
Dear Journal,
The world has undergone a massive change over the past several decades… The type of change from which there is no return.
This change has been the transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. A transition which is still in its infancy.
The Industrial Revolution, which began in the mid-18th century, lifted more than a billion people from the shackles of poverty… Raised standards of living exponentially… And created the world in which we live today.
Even people of the most modest means in the developed world today enjoy far more comforts and luxuries than the wealthiest kings and nobles of the pre-industrialist era.
Commerce was the driving force behind industrialism. And the market system spawned from free trade and free enterprise.
For all of its revolutionary and wealth-creating qualities, the Industrial Age carried one major limitation, however. It required highly rigid centralization. And centralized institutions require a certain degree of bureaucracy in order to function.
This applies to corporations just as it applies to governments… And it is why corporate organizational structures fundamentally resemble government hierarchies. At these institutions, there are a few people at the top who send orders down to the people below… Who then pass those orders on down the hierarchy. Each successive chain is progressively larger as you work your way down the organizational chart.
The problem with bureaucracies is that they are slow, inefficient, and they carry conflicting incentives and disincentives. These problems become magnified as the bureaucracy grows… And the one consistent incentive present in all bureaucracies is the desire to grow.
As an institution grows, its focus becomes less on innovation and wealth-creation, and more on suppressing competition. That is why centralization only goes so far..
This is why the very institutions responsible for empowering individuals and enriching civilization always stagnate and become parasitic over time. The banking system and the educational system come to mind immediately.
So, the institutions of the Industrial Age began as liberators and innovators. These systems grew to encompass most of the globe, and they came to be thought of as permanent. For many, perhaps they still are.
Francis Fukuyama penned an essay back in 1989 titled The End of History? which suggested that humanity may have reached the end of its sociocultural evolution with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Francis made a number of good points in his essay. And it made perfect sense at the height of the Industrial Age.
But God has a sense of humor and the Universe is unequivocally characterized by change and paradox. The Information Age was steadily beginning its ascent precisely as Mr. Fukuyama was proclaiming the supreme permanency of western regulatory democracy and its established institutions.
Little did the Establishment know that a new disrupting force was rising from the ether…
In fact, Timothy C. May had already penned and presented his powerful manifesto a year earlier at the Crypto 88 conference. History may very well point to Mr. May’s manifesto as the definitive beginning to the Information Age. Here’s May:
A specter is haunting the modern world… Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other…
Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation…
Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions…
The nature of the Information Age was elegantly documented by John Perry Barlow in his A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. This was written in 1996 as a response to the the Telecommunications Reform Act, which sought to snuff out independence on the internet. Here’s Barlow:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather…
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose…
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
This Declaration may sound strange to us at this current moment in history… But I can’t help but notice that we already live in the digital world depicted in Barlow’s writing. Almost every facet of our lives today is tied to or facilitated by the internet.
Our methods of communicating are now digital… Physical meetings have been replaced by digital communications…. Cell phones have replaced landlines…. Text messages have replaced phone calls…. Emails have replaced letters… Webinars have replaced business meetings.
Money and finance is now digital. Aside from physical cash and hard assets, all the world’s financial wealth exists as digits in Cyberspace.
And a large portion of commerce is now digital. People buy goods online using their digital money. Then the products show up on their doorstep in two days, sometimes less.
All office workers now work in a digital world as they sit in front of a computer screen all day, every day. And if you watch people out in public, you will notice that most people are connected to the digital world via their smartphone screen most of the time as well.
So, we already live in a digital world. And the Information Age is only in its infancy. Ten years from now nearly everything we use on a daily basis will be connected to the internet, if it is not already.
The beauty of the Information Age is that it is knocking down walls and crushing barriers to entry. The downside is that personal interaction is diminishing. As are certain cultural norms and long-standing traditions. More on this next week.
In the mean-time, one of my favorite mediums for understanding the transition into the Information Age is a book called The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age by James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. I can’t recommend it enough.
And if you are ready to learn why Bitcoin is the future of money… And why it will be worth tens-of-thousands, if not hundreds-of-thousands of dollars in the very near future, please explore our Finance for Freedom course series at https://financeforfreedomcourse.com/
More to come,
Joe Withrow
Wayward Philosopher