Table of Contents
Preface
There’s a seductive narrative in tech circles, one that can be boiled down to this: individual sovereignty is simply a matter of better tools. Self‑host your data, run a Bitcoin node, encrypt your communications, and you’ve liberated yourself from the system.
It’s a compelling vision, but it’s incomplete.
Essentially, this is digital primitivism. Like its agrarian analogue, it trades efficiency for autonomy, opts out of centralized systems, and dreams of a world where small, self‑sufficient units replace vast, impersonal networks. I say this with sympathy, I am one of its practitioners.
The uncomfortable truth is that personal sovereignty rests on a foundation most of us prefer to ignore: national sovereignty. You cannot opt out of a world shaped by borders, supply chains, and concentrated industrial power.
The Limits of Self‑Hosting
I run my own Bitcoin nodes. I host my own files, sync my own contacts, and route my own traffic. I’ve cut Google and Apple out of my life to the greatest extent possible. This feels like freedom, and in many ways, it is.
But this stuff runs on a computer built in China, designed in America, powered by Taiwanese semiconductors, and shipped across oceans on tankers insured by Lloyd’s of London.
If the Taiwan Strait becomes contested, I won’t be getting hardware upgrades. If export controls tighten, I’m in trouble. If a state actor decides my traffic is suspicious, it already has all the tools to block it.
Self‑hosting gives me control over my software. It does nothing to secure the physical, industrial, and geopolitical layers beneath it.
This is the same vulnerability Jefferson’s free farmers faced. They could work their own land, govern their own towns, and print their own pamphlets, but they could not build their own cannons, forge rifles at scale, or defend a coastline without a navy.
Autonomy at the local level does not eliminate dependency. The real choice is not between dependency and independence, but between national dependency (resilience‑optimized) and transnational dependency (efficiency‑optimized).
The TSMC Problem
Consider the most foundational technology of our era: advanced semiconductors. There is effectively one company, TSMC, that is the only reliable high‑volume manufacturer of the most advanced chips. This isn’t really a market failure, it’s more of a physics and capital failure. A single leading‑edge fab now costs tens of billions of dollars and requires a decade of specialized expertise to operate.
This is a centralization point of historic proportions. It makes every nation that depends on advanced chips, which is to say every nation, profoundly vulnerable. The global economy’s most critical layer is controlled by a single company, headquartered on an island of immense geopolitical tension.
Bitcoin’s security model assumes distributed hash power. If TSMC were to cease shipping ASICs, replenishing the global hash rate would become catastrophically difficult. A clever consensus mechanism is more or less useless if we can’t fix the fragility of the hardware supply chain.
This is not a problem you can self‑host your way out of.
The Scale Problem
There is a pattern here. Some things can be done by individuals: running software, storing keys, verifying transactions. Some things can be done by communities: operating mesh networks, pooling hash power, maintaining public repositories.
This is the digital analogue of Jefferson’s agrarian republic: a world of self‑sufficient homesteads, each running its own infrastructure, trading surpluses with neighbors, and asking little from the center. It is beautiful, it is desirable, and it is defenseless against a power that operates at scale.
The capital and expertise required to operate a leading‑edge fab are so immense that only nation‑states have both the incentive and the resources to make it happen.
We can call the current state of things transnational centralization (one company, one jurisdiction). The desired, and, in my view, perfectly achievable, better state is national decentralization (multiple nations, multiple independent supply chains).
The Better Model
A more resilient world would have national semiconductor fabs, not because markets prefer it, but because nations insist on it. The logic is no different from food security: we prop up local producers and impose protectionist tariffs not for efficiency, but for survival. The same reasoning applies to sovereign satellite navigation systems, redundant power grids, and every other piece of critical infrastructure we silently depend on.
Is this plain old autarky? Well, yeah. I would even say it’s just a compromise between the ideal of anarcho-primitivism and reality. You can’t get rid of concentrated power and current national identity based communities are a sweet spot.
Why cling to national identity? Because it’s the only way to protect a reasonably decentralized system from invasion by a larger, better‑organized foreign power.
Take Jefferson’s vision of a “society of free farmers.” How do you defend it without a shared identity, a common language, cohesive traditions, and an economy of scale large enough to repel foreign aggression?
You don’t.
This is also why I find the libertarian hostility to industrial policy so misguided. Markets optimize for efficiency, they do not optimize for resilience. A perfectly efficient global supply chain is one where every component is produced by the single lowest‑cost supplier. That is exactly what we built, and exactly why the current system is so catastrophically fragile.
Bitcoin’s Quiet Stake in Sovereignty
Bitcoin maximalists often frame their project as a complete alternative to the nation‑state. But Bitcoin itself is deeply dependent on nation‑states.
It depends on Taiwanese semiconductors. It depends on Chinese manufacturing of mining hardware. It depends on undersea cables controlled by Western intelligence alliances. It depends on a stable global energy market. It depends on the rule of law, and the sanity of lawmakers, in the jurisdictions where exchanges, developers, and node operators reside.
Bitcoin cannot secede from geography. It can only hope to be tolerated by enough nations that no single one can destroy it. This is a bet on a multipolar world order.
But multipolarity alone isn’t enough. You also need to bet on perpetual great‑power rivalry. If major nations ever reach broad ideological alignment, Bitcoin is finished. They would simply agree to coordinate a global, all‑out attack, and there would be nowhere left to run.
Sovereignty Is Layered
Running your own node and supporting your nation’s push for sovereignty aren’t opposing impulses. They’re complementary activities.
Prefer local. Avoid global. And when you can’t avoid it, make sure the global isn’t controlled by a single point of failure.
The personal layer gives you control over your keys, your data, your immediate digital life. The national layer ensures the industrial base that produces your hardware remains plural and resilient. The personal layer is about agency. The national layer is about survival.
Both are critical. Neither can substitute for the other.
This is the synthesis I’ve arrived at after years of pursuing individual sovereignty while watching the world’s most critical supply chains concentrate into single points of failure. You cannot self‑host a fab. You cannot mesh‑network a steel mill. You cannot fork the global supply chain.
But you can demand that your nation build redundant capacity. You can advocate for industrial policy that prioritizes resilience over efficiency. You can recognize that the same centralization risks we fight in software are even more dangerous in hardware, and that the nation‑state is the only institution with the scale and legitimacy to address them.
Personal sovereignty starts with national sovereignty. Not ends there, starts there. The rest is up to us.
Conclusion
In this post, I’ve tried to identify the central flaw in the anarcho‑primitivist logic I largely sympathize with, and to suggest a path forward from the horrors of the “Industrial Society”, as warned by both Ted Kaczynski and, in a far more temperate key, by critics of industrial centralization from Jefferson to Wendell Berry.
I think of digital primitivism as a kind of guiding star. It shows us what full sovereignty could look like. But it also shows us what full sovereignty cannot defend. The homesteader needs a navy. The self‑hoster needs a fab. The commune needs a grid. These things do not emerge from voluntary association, they require the coercive, extractive, legitimized power of the nation‑state.
The task, then, is not to abolish that power. It is to pluralize it.
People are ready to trade some efficiency for more sovereignty and resilience. But expecting the majority to embrace radical, individual‑level decentralization is a fantasy. So let’s start with something achievable: proper national‑level decentralization.
Set the nation‑state against transnational capital. Build redundant supply chains. Insist on national sovereignty. And see what happens.