The Rise of the Individual

12 Nov, 2025

Is there powerful enough technology for individuals to control their own finances, bodies, and lives.

To begin, I’ll suggest that technology has changed who controls the news.

The Revolt of the Public chronicles this shift and I believe it accurately captures a shift in how news is created and consumed.

tldr; the internet provided an alternative to traditional top-down government run media bodies. This shifts power from governments to ‘the public’ and allows for a bloom of many different viewpoints. Downstream of this freedom to post and exchange ideas is regime change.

If technology (Internet, iPhone) can overthrow governments can it change how people interact with basic services like healthcare?

This is a question of agency and power. And I’ll suggest that LLMs enable this shift.

I’ll use health insurance as an example.

Would it be possible for an individual person to make their own election for what type of healthcare they wanted?

Could they make a reasonably informed decision about the costs of different options and weigh tradeoffs.

In the past, I’d argue that this would be entirely too complex. Because it’d be too complicated to understand different pdf printouts with information about diseases that are specific to you or your family’s genetic history. And it’d be too challenging to do basic cost benefit analysis on what health care costs to insure (low deductible versus high deductible, discount rates, time value of money).

But with an LLM it’s possible to get a reasonable first approximation. And this is what a person needs to have agency.

They need to be able to get a reasonable answer to their question within about 10 seconds.

The idea that your own healthcare is somehow too complicated to understand is a modern concept. Until about the year 1800 people only took medicines that they understood. And while their understanding of germs, disease, and the rest was poor, the power to make medical decisions rested with the individual and not a hospital, doctor, or nursing staff. ¹

The other question besides reclaiming agency is one of power.

To explore this concept, I’ll suggest that AI agents (like the ones imagined in William Gibson’s Neuromancer) will have legal rights and enough knowledge to take useful actions on our behalf.

These agents will be able to:

• Make phone calls, send emails, and send texts

And this will let them do very useful things like:

• Negotiate for an itemized bill before getting medical services
• Dispute billing charges
• Prepare your taxes and submit them to both Federal and State governments

This leads to:

1. A huge decrease in service sector costs
2. Everyone has access to the best legal council (or 95% as good with much better uptime)
3. Costs stop rising of things that matter most - healthcare, education, and maybe housing if AI-powered robotics works out

This chart, and many things in red are impacted:

This is an argument for individuals taking power back from cartels in healthcare, higher education, and governmental services.

These are a few secrets that may be true:

1. Walled gardens collapse because agent-powered individuals can win when fighting against previously insurmountable bureaucratic barriers
2. Individuals reclaim their healthcare data. Because it’s finally possible to request all healthcare records from 10+ institutions in a single request (William Gibson’s AI)
3. Governmental size decreases as individuals reclaim agency and meet their own needs at a lower cost

This shift in power away from institutions back to people is what I call the rise of the individual.

Thanks for reading.