The nation & citizenship will be especially sacred to those who value equality highly. They will come to agree with Christopher Lasch, who followed Hannah Arendt in proclaiming, "It is citizenship that confers equality, not equality that creates a right to citizenship.

Like all truly radical institutional change, the privatization and commercialization of sovereignty will involve a revolution in the "common sense" of the way the world is comprehended. Such change seldom happens in a gradual, linear way.

The processing and use of information is rapidly replacing and modifying physical products as the most important source of profit. This has major consequences.

The thesis of this book is that the massed power of the nationstate is destined to be privatized and commercialized.

In an environment where 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.

The building blocks of the cybereconomy-cybermoney, cyberbanking, and an unregulated global cybermarket in securities-are almost bound to come into existence on a large scale.

Now that efficiency is growing in importance relative to the magnitude of power commanded by a system, small, efficient sovereignties, which produce more protection for their customers at lower cost, will be increasingly sustainable.

It is a fact of human nature that radical change of any kind is almost always seen as a dramatic turn for the worse.

As the bonds of the old system dissolve, the social ethos dissolves with it, creating an environment in which people in high places may combine public purposes with private criminal activity.

mental traits which are largely decisive in the place which a man will occupy in life. self control, will power, industry, perseverance, moderation, regard for family obligations, honesty and the like.

Chances are, whenever a new civil war or insurgency gets under way, the desperately poor combatants will finance their military effort by delivering drugs and laundering drug money.

Many of the economies to be achieved during the industrial era by operating an assembly line on a large scale would have been dissipated if the production had been divided among multitudes of individual contractors.

The Information Age will be the age of upward mobility. It will afford far more equal opportunity for the billions of humans in parts of the world that never shared fully in the prosperity of industrial society.

Technological change has already swept away some of the foundations for confining the vote to geographic constituencies. When modern representative systems emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, almost all communications were local.

Millions will shed the obligations of citizenship to become customers for the useful services governments provide. Indeed, they will create and patronize parallel institutions that will place most of the services associated with citizenship on an entirely commercial basis.

While the reality of discrimination is bound to be less oppressive in the future, that will not necessarily relieve the pressure for "reparations" to compensate various real or imagined wrongs.

When cyberspace comes increasingly to host financial transactions and other forms of commerce, the resources employed there will be more or less immune to ordinary shakedowns and theft.

It is a fact of human nature that radical change of any kind is almost always seen as a dramatic turn for the worse.

Historically, the key to military success was to control territory. All military threats have formed locally.

Ironically, the surge in concern about "discrimination" coincided with the early stages of a technological revolution that is bound to make actual arbitrary discrimination far less of a problem than it has ever been before.