Quotes from James Dale Davidson

The new digital money of the Information Age will return control over the medium of exchange to the owners of wealth, who wish to preserve it, rather than to nation-states that wish to spirit it away.

There is a striking analogy between the situation at the end of the fifteenth century, when life had become thoroughly saturated by organized religion, and that of today, when the world has become saturated with politics.

At the end of the fifteenth century, the Church largely controlled the regulatory powers that have since been assumed by governments. The Church dominated important areas of law, recording deeds, registering marriages, probating wills, licensing trades, titling land, and stipulating terms and conditions of commerce.

The technology of the Information Age makes it possible to create assets that are outside the reach of many forms of coercion. This new asymmetry between protection and extortion rests upon a fundamental truth of mathematics.

The power to regulate arbitrarily is also the power to sell an exemption from the harm such regulations can do. The Church sold permits, or "indulgences," authorizing everything from relief from petty burdens on commerce to permission to eat dairy products in Lent.

new revolution of power which is liberating individuals at the expense of the twentieth-century nation-state.

For this reason, it is to be expected that one or more nation-states will undertake covert action to subvert the appeal of transience. Travel could be effectively discouraged by biological warfare, such as the outbreak of a deadly epidemic. This could not only discourage the desire to travel, it could also give jurisdictions throughout the globe an excuse to seal their borders and limit immigration.

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.

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.

For any sin or spiritual defect there was a remedy, a penance that would clear the slate, in what came to be a "mathematics of salvation.

The Church engrossed large amounts of capital in unproductive ways, imposing burdens that limited the output of society and suppressed commerce. These burdens, like those imposed by the nation-state today, were numerous. We know what happened to organized religion in the wake of the Gunpowder Revolution: it created strong incentives to downsize religious institutions and lower their costs.

As Tilly suggests, the important issue was "effectiveness (total output)," not "efficiency (the ratio of output to input)." In an increasingly violent world, the systems that predominated through five centuries of competition were necessarily those that facilitated the greatest access to resources needed to make war on a large scale.

The ban on "usury" was a signal example of the Church's resistance to commercial innovation. Banking and credit were crucial to the development of larger-scale commercial enterprises. By restricting the availability of credit, the Church retarded growth.

structure your affairs in a way that enables you to realize full individual autonomy and independence.

citizens of the pale

DECIPHERING THE LOGIC OF EXTORTION To recognize the megapolitical implications of the current shift to the Information Age, you have to strip away the cant and focus on the real logic of violence in society. This is like stripping away the layers of an overripe onion. It may bring tears to your eyes, but don't look away.

Church attempted to suppress the printing press, most of the new volumes were published in those areas of Europe where the writ of established authority was the weakest. This may prove to be a close analogy with attempts by the U.S. government today to suppress encryption technology.

If our deductions are correct, the politics of the next century will be much more varied and less important than that to which we have become accustomed.

In history, as in nature, birth and death are equally balanced."1 —JOHAN HUIZINGA

In our view, voting was an effect rather than a cause of the megapolitical conditions that brought forth the modern nation-state.

Most people could master the skills required for operating the machines of the mid-twentieth century, but those jobs have now been replaced by smart machines which, in effect, control themselves. A whole arena of low- and middle-skill employment has already disappeared. If we are correct, this is a prelude to the disappearance of most employment and the reconfiguration of work in the spot market.

The "Extranational" Age Ahead As the era of the "Sovereign Individual" takes shape, many of the ablest people will cease to think of themselves as party to a nation, as "British" or "American" or "Canadian."' A new "transnational" or "extranational" understanding of the world and a new way of identifying one's place in it await discovery in the new millennium.

Topographic conditions were the foundation of Greek democracy, just as those of a different kind gave rise to the Oriental despotisms of Egypt and elsewhere.

the higher and lower ranks of clergy were held in the utmost contempt—not unlike the popular attitude toward politicians and bureaucrats today.