How to Become an Optimist
…and Survive the Information Ice Age
Freedom is a weird thing. It stays completely invisible until you hit the fence.
In 1997, The Sovereign Individual predicted "cybermoney based on mathematical algorithms that have no physical existence"—twelve years before Bitcoin. At the time, it seemed obvious this would make tax collection harder for governments and empower individuals.
Today, we know that the information age provides authorities with equally powerful tools. Yes, “cybermoney” exists. But so do facial recognition, on-chain analysis, social credit systems, and AI-powered surveillance.
But that's not the book's biggest miss—the state isn't the only one building fences anymore. Algorithms are the new rules, incentive structures, and gatekeepers.
The Old Playbook is Dead
Your job application? Filtered by AI screener. Your emails? "Summarized" and never read by the person you wrote to. Your social media? Shadow-banned—but your screentime keeps growing, exploiting brain patterns you don't control.
Under the hood, the world’s mechanics faced dramatic updates, but the surface looks like it always did:
We save for retirement knowing the pension system won't survive.
We take 30-year mortgages in a world falling below replacement fertility.
We enjoy stable employment at companies that already quietly stopped hiring.
We read our social media feed, but everyone suddenly sounds like a robot, using fancy phrases like 'watershed moment' and 'infrastructure play' that they never used before.
It’s not certain what the algorithm is up to. Will it take your job? Quietly filter who you interact with? Stealthily push you into buying stuff you otherwise never would?
If you feel lost, I'm with you. After the EU just killed my business—regulated out of existence overnight—I'm starting this year by figuring out the path forward myself, and I see a different world.
The old playbooks are over, and I don’t have all the tactics yet.
We’ll be exploring them here, preserving the “sovereign” vision from ‘97 using whatever tools we find. But here's what I believe:
Investing is no longer about comfortable retirement. It's what gives you options, independence, and makes staying sovereign possible.
From Earning to Owning
For 200,000 years, Homo sapiens lived as hunter-gatherers, spending all day trying to find meat, berries, and shelter to survive till the next day. In a way, it’s a metaphor for how many of us still live today.
10,000 years ago, agriculture changed everything: instead of daily grinding, we invested time into production and storage. That investment gave us time to think, plan, build civilization.
The work/save/retire playbook was how industrial societies organized life.
For many it still meant a never-ending grind, but it worked. Now industrial “hunter gatherers” have entered an ice age. Woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats are going extinct. While some are already learning to farm the digital land, most are still hunting what's no longer there.
For thousands of years, we lived the same lifestyle our grand-grand-grandparent did, and our grand-grand-grandchildren would. Today, we can't predict our reality a decade ahead. We need new rules and new tools. Just buying S&P 500 and cruising toward retirement is not a plan anymore.
No Crying in the Casino
When I started investing, I understood it essentially as a tool to grow the available amount of dollars over time. Yes, “growth assets” and “compounding interest”, but still denominated in dollars at the end. It’s intuitive: money is a language everybody understands. Unfortunately, broken monetary policy made many people see the market merely as a casino:
When you read today’s financial discussions and opinions online, the perspective that dominates is that investing is betting. Prediction markets, NFTs and Pokemon cards, SPACs, leveraged ETFs—whatever can offer a moonshot. “No crying in the casino,” says Chamath Palihapitiya in the prospectus of his SPAC AEXA.
Dividends? Fundamentals? Too slow. If you’re risk-averse, buy Bitcoin.
The market goes “long degeneracy” because it lost hope, but gambling is a game with very few winners. Everybody knows that one day the setup will break, yet economic uncertainty pushes people to embrace high-risk bets, because “If I can’t succeed the way my parents did, maybe I can get lucky.”
I believe you can still win. You just need a new map.
The Sovereign Optimist Way
First, accept the new reality:
The rules of investing changed, but most advice didn’t
Investing is not optional anymore, it’s a defense
The system’s safety nets are vulnerabilities
Simple single-thesis portfolios are over
The digital farmland is a place of opportunities, but it’s a new game:
Build a strategy that doesn’t depend on a single job, a single country, or a single asset class. Protect your offline networks. Own illiquid assets that can’t be hacked, censored, or remotely locked. Your unique skills, your kids—those are investments too. This is diversification. There is a place for alternative assets like collectibles and prediction markets, but I see investing as growing your stash of things you own, not multiplying dollars.
Stop thinking in dollars, because the future may favor a different denomination, and may not have a salary for everyone, but what it will surely have are goods and services other people want. Start packing all you can find into your barn, and store safely.
Winter is coming.
✦
Staying sovereign is about living on your own terms. The future will offer multiple models, but choice will be reserved for those who secured their options. Everyone else will receive defaults.
Sovereignty without hope is paranoia. Optimism without independence is wishful thinking. I am becoming a Sovereign Optimist.
This year, I post every Saturday. Have an amazing weekend, and see you next week.
…and if you want to go more tactical: