I’m building a Digital Framework for Sovereign Individuals and this essay is going to tell you exactly what that means. But first, an update on how we got to this point.
The Sovereign Individual Weekly newsletter is now 16 weeks old. That’s 16 emails in the bag and these have helped me find my regular rhythm and cadence for content writing. I spent the first few months making some mistakes, learning from them, and iterating on the entire production process. Along the way, I’ve learned how to effectively self promote the publication and developed methods to expand my subscriber base.
In this phase, I worked to refine the content I cover and the topics to explore at greater depth. With this trial and error, I now understand the analysis and content that yields high levels of engagement. This experimental format was always part of my plan when launching the newsletter.
The work so far has been a success. But now it’s time to transition to the next phase. The goal was always to focus on creating value through analysis and actionable insights to use in daily life. Selfishly, I am trying to make this content work for me on a personal level and I’m ready for the next steps. By sharing it publicly, my hope is that you will benefit as well.
So what comes next?
Content Curation
The problem is that I’ve now collected many seemingly disparate threads and need to start weaving them together. There are topics that I keep coming back to, and as a result, can more easily explain how they connect to the underlying theme. Despite this clarity, there are other topics that are harder to explain.
This is all to say that I’ve reached a point where I need to take the newsletters and curate them on a macro level. Providing more of a 30,000 foot perspective on what I’m doing and how it all fits together. A calibration of the content covered thus far to create a foundation to continue building upon. Most importantly, it’s intended as an ongoing effort to help explain how and why you should care about reading the newsletter.
At face value, my goal is to develop an organized framework an individual can use to build wealth and prosper in the digital age. Taking the themes covered in the weekly newsletter and adding them to a useful repository of lessons learned along the way.
A Sovereign Individual’s Framework for Wealth and Prosperity in the Digital Age
Digital Framework for Sovereign Individuals: The frame of reference for making use of these topics is the concept of the Sovereign Individual. ie: In the digital age, you must take personal responsibility and ownership for the progress in your life and that no government, group or external entity will care for you better than you can care for yourself. So, the approach to these main topics of the framework will be that they are only actionable through radical personal responsibility. By educating yourself in these areas, you empower yourself to control your personal progress in this transformative digital age.
With this framework, the goal is to identify the main causes that will drive change digital change. It will show you how to measure societal changes and determine the course of actions needed to adapt and thrive in the digital age.
To start, the framework will focus on curating these insights around the following main themes:
Digital Interoperability
The mobile, ubiquitous, and increasingly accessible internet is here. What does that mean for the individual?
The Digital Economy requires interoperability to thrive – different systems working together with common standards, rules & processes. The standardization of communications and processes for the purpose of integrating into global networks – the goal – positioning yourself to leverage network effects on a global scale.
Education & Skills
Standardized education is obsolete. Society is now shifting to an immersive digital age that requires new education techniques and skills. As digital life takes on more meaning, new societal structures are forming that require new skills and the government run education is lagging behind societal needs. This theme focuses on comparing what was important education to what is currently important. And it will help build an understanding of what will be required in the coming years
The overarching question: How do the required skills of an immersive digital age impact the jobs that are going to appear and disappear over the next few decades?
Digital Age Credentialing
How has the internet and subsequent access to all the world’s knowledge impact our ability to signal our knowledge and personal capabilities? How can we effectively measure and adapt to the new standards of signaling value?
As traditional forms of education break down more people will start to look to the internet and uniquely curated information for education. As this happens, traditional forms of expert credentialing that functioned as a gatekeeper to influence will break down. In the digital age, there are new ways to signal your abilities and gain trust online. This topic theme will focus on the details of how traditional credentialing is breaking down and what you can do to become a trusted figure on the web.
Automation
Exploring what automation is and how it will lead to the restructuring of society, especially who and what will be impacted.
Digital Economics
Technological progress is creating a digital renaissance. Individuals and businesses that adapt quickly will dominate the coming decades. The scale of the internet fundamentally changes how an individual can approach business opportunities. A deeper dive into Information Capital Assets and the drivers of wealth in the digital age.
Remote Work
The ability to work remotely on a permanent basis will lead to a reshuffling of factors impacting how workers decide where to live. Digital and location-independent workers of the information age versus the location-dependent workers more characteristic of the industrial age. It’s no longer a blue collar vs white collar divide. Remote work is creating a new social class, The Sovereign Individual Class. Now, the needs of these emergent social classes are changing and leading to societal shifts.
Some of these shifts created by permanent remote work include an alteration to the corporate real estate landscape, an ability for organizations to rethink how they source and manage employees, and a reprioritization of location preferences for both employees and companies.
Digital Age Social Class
As we move deeper into the Information Age, a new social class structure is emerging. There will be winners and many losers based on how each person adapts to the societal level changes. Remote work, new forms of credentialing, new skills and educational requirements, and automation. All of these elements will impact the formation of this new social class. I will dive deep into this theme as it is central to success and prosperity in a digital society.
Geopolitics
A topic at the intersection of digital and physical commerce. I’ll tackle questions such as how are the changing relations between nation states impacting the digital landscape? Is the Digital Age experiencing a period of Neo Medievalism? And explore topics like why the golden trilemma and several events of the past decade make it clear that globalism is dying. And how we can expect it to be replaced with zero-sum nationalism.
Information Capital
I’ll explore in greater detail Information Capital Assets as a driver of wealth in the Digital Age. Information Capital Assets are digital assets with future value. Like a digital spider web, they capture value via an integrated network. But what are they exactly and how can you accumulate them over time?
The Metaverse
The Metaverse is thought of as the next iteration of the internet and it’s the reason for developing the Digital Framework for Sovereign Individuals.
Everything that is happening is driving society towards the Metaverse. All the topics above will lead us here and over time I will work to provide an understanding of how to effectively position yourself for this looming reality. Covering in detail, what is a Metaverse and how and why the variety of definitions have changed over time.
Final Thought
My goal is to build a well-curated repository to function as a living guide. The newsletter will continue to provide a regular summary of my findings along the way. From here on out, these topics will then be woven into an overarching narrative, the Digital Framework for Sovereign Individuals. It will some time to piece it all together in a digestible format. But I figured it was worthwhile to share where this is all heading.
