The most obvious benefits will flow to the “cognitive elite,” who will increasingly operate outside political boundaries. They are already equally at home in Frankfurt, London, New York, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Incomes will become more unequal within jurisdictions and more equal between them. (Location 152)
“I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.” —HENRY DAVID THOREAU (Location 167)
those who can educate and motivate themselves will be almost entirely free to invent their own work and realize the full benefits of their own productivity. (Location 171)
In the Information Society, no one who is truly able will be detained by the ill-formed opinions of others. (Location 173)
the greatest source of wealth will be the ideas you have in your head rather than physical capital alone, anyone who thinks clearly will potentially be rich. (Location 178)
Equally, in the future, one of the milestones by which you measure your financial success will be not just how many zeroes you can add to your net worth, but whether you can structure your affairs in a way that enables you to realize full individual autonomy and independence. (Location 184)
Persons of even quite modest means will soar, as the gravitational pull of politics on the global economy weakens. (Location 186)
Unprecedented financial independence will be a reachable goal in your lifetime or that of your children. (Location 187)
The liberation of a large part of the global economy from political control will oblige whatever remains of government as we have known it to operate on more nearly market terms. (Location 202)
Governments will ultimately have little choice but to treat populations in territories they serve more like customers, and less in the way that organized criminals treat the victims of a shakedown racket. (Location 203)
First in scores, then in hundreds, and ultimately in the millions, individuals will escape the shackles of politics. (Location 206)
The Sovereign Individuals of the Information Age, like the gods of ancient and primitive myths, will in due course enjoy a kind of “diplomatic immunity” from most of the political woes that have beset mortal human beings in most times and places. (Location 224)
For anyone who loves human aspiration and success, the Information Age will provide a bounty. (Location 229)
This will leave individuals far more responsible for themselves than they have been accustomed to being during the industrial period. (Location 232)
It will also precipitate transition crises, including a possibly severe economic depression that will reduce the unearned advantage in living standards that has been enjoyed by residents of advanced industrial societies throughout the twentieth century. (Location 233)
When technology is mobile, and transactions occur in cyberspace, as they increasingly will do, governments will no longer be able to charge more for their services than they are worth to the people who pay for them. (Location 238)
Anyone with a portable computer and a satellite link will be able to conduct almost any information business anywhere, and that includes almost the whole of the world’s multitrillion-dollar financial transactions. (Location 240)
you will no longer be obliged to live in a high-tax jurisdiction in order to earn high income. (Location 241)
when most wealth can be earned anywhere, and even spent anywhere, governments that attempt to charge too much as the price of domicile will merely drive away their best customers. (Location 242)
Changes that diminish the power of predominant institutions are both unsettling and dangerous. (Location 246)
today’s governments will employ violence, often of a covert and arbitrary kind, in the attempt to hold back the clock. (Location 247)
Weakened by the challenge from technology, the state will treat increasingly autonomous individuals, its former citizens, with the same range of ruthlessness and diplomacy it has heretofore displayed in its dealing with other governments. (Location 248)
The emergence of Bin Laden as the enemy-in-chief of the United States reflects a momentous change in the nature of warfare. A single individual, albeit one with hundreds of millions of dollars, can now be depicted as a plausible threat to the greatest military power of the Industrial era. (Location 253)
They will be increasingly required by the press of necessity to bargain with autonomous individuals whose resources will no longer be so easily controlled. (Location 262)
Fourteen empires have disappeared already in the twentieth century. (Location 264)
Government will have to adapt to the growing autonomy of the individual. (Location 265)
The challenge of setting competitive terms to attract able individuals and their capital will be more easily undertaken in enclaves than across continents. (Location 266)
Groups like the Russian mafiya, which picks the bones of the former Soviet Union, other ethnic criminal gangs, nomenklaturas,I drug lords, and renegade covert agencies will be laws unto themselves. (Location 268)
