On Technological Sovereignty

The economy is not an eternal and infallible means of arranging opportunity in society. It crashes, it favors certain groups, it often pigeonholes the majority of the population into a technological feudalist society. Right now so few people can afford housing outright in North America that the “middle class” can no longer reasonably have a family home and survive a divorce even if both parties are making the median income.

This is because what used to be the middle class, or those with the buying power of the 1970’s, has shrunk to a population smaller than 3.6% of the whole. These realities may change, things could get better and things could get worse. If history teaches us anything, things often have to get worse before they get better.

However bleak this seems, it only seems that way because we are entitled. We have become accustomed to everyone else making our products and for our singular jobs we expect the full breadth of the 1970’s lifestyle to magically become available to us. The truth is we need a new society if we are to thrive, or rather, for some of us to thrive, some of us are going to have to take much more responsibility for our basic needs and stop being entitled to more than we can haul down a highway.

I have been dreaming of technological sovereignty for some time. It’s a post-land-owning philosophy of life where people for the most part sustain themselves on nomadic lifestyles to reduce cost, manage their food and fuel consumption communally rather than economically, and source materials from a closed economy, crafting their own essential kit themselves. This is not a society that fully removes themselves from the economy, rather one that minimizes their dependency on it, giving themselves more buying power at the end of the year.

However, this would have to start from the ground up, because so much of the economy necessary for life requires licenses and some specialization to get those licenses. Manufacturing vehicles and having the right to travel would require technical skill and access to technology that most people do not currently understand, much of which would need to be designed specifically for the lifestyle.

However, having a culture of technological and scientific literacy would become a cultural backbone of such a movement, with children from a young age being familiarized with chemistry, mathematics, physics, and engineering knowledge. This culture would take some engineering, but it could begin with a sole producer and manufacturer of these goods that enables the technologically sovereign lifestyle.

Having done quite a bit of study into this, I have come to the conclusion that some individuals would have to own land to make sites of manufacture where the products could be made by the technologically sovereign. These sites would have to have a charter and agreement by which individuals could purchase material and access the shops needed to make the larger and more technical implements such as the mobile homes themselves.

Regenerative agriculture also fits into the paradigm as a necessary aspect to fuel production and food crop production, allowing for biomass to be produced, harvested, and used for biofuels. The most likely candidate would be phytoplankton, capable of yielding high concentrations of hydrocarbons. While such power generation is necessary for the sites of manufacture and sites of agriculture and could produce fuel which is then fed into a generator with carbon capture, the rest of the economy should be electric for modular power consumption.

As I tend to, I imagine the tech sovereign nomads to form a society with a high standard of education, self-grading and licensing, and self-governing structure. This fits in with my Autonomous Nations model as a form of nation that has little land but lots of capital, and ultimately can exist on its own without the success of Autonomous Nations theory taking place.

In my mind, I doubt the political landscape is ripe for Autonomous Nations, so I intend the philosophy to live on within the technological sovereigns in a prolongation that knows no borders or limitations to its ability to expand and grow. I imagine a strong post-monotheism running through the culture, and in my mind call it “Neo Zion”—a movement that elevates its members to paragons of technological literacy and epistemological affluence.

How much of this is necessary to come to pass? Very little actually. I tend to build philosophies like overgrown trees then let pragmatism prune them down to size. There are many flourishes and spandrels in the architecture of Neo Zion that need to be knocked off, perhaps even the religious philosophy of Gnostic Revisionism needs to be carved off and let it be a secular technological movement, but I have this gut feeling that the resolution of religion is going to be just as key to forming a world that knows sustained peace as any economic or education incentivizing solution.