the sovereign individual james dale davidson

The Sovereign Individual, published in 1997, begins with a quote from Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia: ‘the future is disorder … it is the best possible time to be alive, when everything you thought you knew was wrong.’ Co-authored by James Dale Davidson, an American financier, and William Rees-Mogg, former editor of The Times, and published in the first year of Bill Clinton’s second term as US president and the beginning of UK prime minister Tony Blair’s, The Sovereign Individual did not attract much attention at first. UK Labour Party communications director, Alastair Campbell called it ‘the most important book you’ve never heard of.’ Peter Thiel claims he read it just before starting PayPal in 1999, which went on to make him billions as the full possibilities of the information era were emerging. One text managed to serve as both a prophesy of and a programme for the future.

It was a decade of grand predictions, beginning with Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) and ending with Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), which predicted that by 2029 artificial intelligence would claim to be conscious. If only we could return to the visionary ambition of the Nineties.

The sovereign individual james dale davidson