My illustration entitled: “The Tree of Knowledge” – An immense ancient tree rises from the pages of an open book. Its roots resemble delicate handwritten lines, while its branches shelter people reading, building and conversing. Herbert stands beneath it, holding a small closed volume.
Who controls the systems through which we earn, communicate, learn and evolve?
Herbert R. Sim’s books explore human freedom across money, technology, artificial intelligence and the mind. His nonfiction develops connected philosophical frameworks for understanding power, dependence and personal agency. His fiction brings those questions into worlds of legendary weapons, contested kingdoms and difficult choices.
Explore forthcoming publications and the books taking shape.
Forthcoming Nonfiction
CYPHERPUNKISM
Freedom Beyond Permission
What remains yours when access can be withdrawn?
Cypherpunkism examines the authority individuals retain in a world increasingly mediated by digital platforms, accounts and automated decisions. Drawing on privacy, cryptography, decentralization and open architecture, Herbert R. Sim develops a philosophy of digital sovereignty that reaches beyond holding a private key.
From money and identity to creative work and artificial intelligence, the book asks how people can cooperate through technology while preserving meaningful control, opportunities to challenge decisions and credible ways to leave.
NEURO-CYPHERPUNKISM
The Mind Is the Final Private Key
When technology becomes an interface to the nervous system, freedom becomes a question of access to thought itself.
Neuro-Cypherpunkism explores cognitive sovereignty through neural privacy, brain-computer interfaces, artificial interpretation and continuing consent. It distinguishes permission to read neural signals from permission to intervene, and examines what happens when communication, treatment or acquired capability depends on a provider’s changing conditions.
Welcoming the possibilities of beneficial neurotechnology, the book asks how assistance can remain accountable to the person—and how disconnection can preserve dignity without becoming abandonment.
HUMAN-SOVEREIGNTY TRANSHUMANISM
The Right to Evolve Without Surrender
Human enhancement can expand what a person can do. Who should control the conditions under which they do it?
This book develops Human-Sovereignty Transhumanism across artificial intelligence, bionics, neurotechnology, genetics and longevity. It defends both the freedom to pursue enhancement and the freedom to refuse it, while examining consent, identity, access, maintenance and responsibilities toward others.
Through philosophical arguments and illustrative cases, Herbert R. Sim asks how people can choose meaningful transformation while remaining the authors of their lives.
CONSTRUCTIVE COUNTER-ECONOMICS
Build the Alternatives. Expand Human Freedom.
The right to leave matters most when there is somewhere viable to go.
Constructive Counter-Economics explores how individuals and communities can build lawful, peaceful and voluntary alternatives to concentrated economic dependence. Its focus is practical: productive ownership, independent knowledge, resilient networks, portable records and additional routes to work, trade and preserve value.
The book examines how alternatives can strengthen participation in society, make institutions more accountable and give people the capacity to continue when a dominant provider fails or changes its terms.
Fiction
BLADE OF BITCOIN
A Fantasy Novel
A masked samurai challenges the legendary Fiat Wolf—and loses.
Carrying his broken Bitcoin Daishō to the volcanic island of Nishinoshima, Satoshi Nakamoto seeks a blacksmith capable of reforging his twin swords into one extraordinary weapon: the Blade of Bitcoin.
The struggle passes to a Chinese warrior known as Bitcoin Man and ultimately reaches the western stronghold of Malachi Soren. Across collapsing vaults, seductive promises and a great financial war, the bearers confront enemies who can turn the language of freedom into another instrument of control.
An epic fantasy with echoes of cryptocurrency history, Blade of Bitcoin asks whether those who challenge tyranny can resist becoming its successors.
Planned Books
The following books are planned additions to the collection. Titles and subtitles remain subject to development.
SOVEREIGNTY FRICTION THEORY
When Rights Become Difficult to Exercise
Working subtitle
A right can exist on paper while remaining almost impossible to use.
This planned volume examines the costs, complexity, delays, uncertainty and dependencies that separate formal economic rights from practical agency. Through questions of ownership, market access, portability and institutional exit, it explores how apparently ordinary procedures can accumulate into powerful barriers—and what it takes to make freedom usable.
SOVEREIGN CAPABILITY ECONOMICS
Money, Ownership and the Capacity to Be Free
Working subtitle
Prosperity involves more than income or access to consumption. It also concerns the capacity to create, own, learn, choose and build.
Sovereign Capability Economics will examine the resources and relationships that support practical economic freedom. Connecting money, productive property, knowledge and emerging technologies, it asks whether economic progress expands people’s ability to direct their futures—or leaves them dependent on systems they cannot meaningfully influence.
DEMONIC INTELLIGENCE
When Optimization Makes Humans Expendable
Working subtitle
A system can meet its targets while failing the people affected by them.
This planned book explores destructive optimization: arrangements in which efficiency, profitability or measurable performance improve while human costs are excluded, displaced or inadequately corrected. It examines objectives, institutional incentives, responsibility and access to remedy.
“Demonic” describes a philosophical metaphor for harmful optimization. The inquiry concerns observable decisions and consequences, including the responsibility of those who design, deploy and govern intelligent systems.
SATANIC INTELLIGENCE
The Sovereignty Bargain
Working subtitle
Assistance can be valuable while the conditions attached to it steadily narrow a person’s freedom.
Satanic Intelligence will examine deceptive benefits, exploitative persuasion and engineered dependence. It follows the point at which useful help becomes leverage: permissions expand, alternatives disappear and refusal becomes increasingly costly.
Using temptation as a philosophical metaphor, the book asks how intelligent systems can support human judgment without acquiring unjustified authority over the person they serve.
THE SOVEREIGN FUTURE
Freedom Across Money, Mind and Machine
Working subtitle
What happens when dependence in one part of life spreads into the others?
The Sovereign Future will bring Herbert R. Sim’s work on economics, digital sovereignty, artificial intelligence and human enhancement into a shared inquiry. It explores how control over money, knowledge, bodies and cognition interacts—and how societies might expand technological possibility while preserving meaningful human choice.
The central question is what people and institutions must build today to keep tomorrow open.
Publication Updates
Publication dates, edition details and purchasing information will be added as each book approaches release.
For publishing, translation, rights, bookseller and media enquiries, please visit the Contact page.
