When Worldviews Become Code

Centralised Intelligence and the Future of Freedom

Since around the early years of this century, seared into memory by the attack on New York’s Twin Towers, we’ve been living through a transition. Sold to us as “progress” it feels, in the body, more like enclosure. This transition is being branded by its prophets as an “Intelligent Age”, as though a neutral force called technology is lifting us all into a higher state of efficiency and convenience. But if we look carefully at how power is rearranging itself, it’s increasingly difficult to avoid a more elemental question: is this actually a new civilisational upgrade, or the re-emergence of an older pattern – a form of digital feudalism masked as modernity?

I have spent much of my life tracking and documenting how worldviews become world-systems: how the stories a civilisation tells about itself harden into infrastructure, institutions, habits and laws; and how those structures, in turn, sculpt the inner lives of individuals and communities. In that sense the current fascination with “intelligence” – artificial, augmented, ambient – is less about smart machines and more about an attempt to redesign human agency. Who gets to decide what counts as rational? Who administers the flows of information, credit, and permission? And what becomes of democracy when governance migrates from parliaments into code?

The emerging pattern is familiar, even if the tools are novel. A relatively small cluster of corporations, financial conglomerates and transnational policy networks now sits at the pivot points of daily life. They own and operate the platforms through which we speak, work, pay, learn, travel and heal. They frame the policy options available to governments. They set standards for what “responsible” innovation looks like. In many cases they do so without any meaningful consent from those whose lives are being reformatted.

This is not a conspiracy in the Hollywood sense. It’s closer to a convergence of habits and incentives among a managerial establishment who see the world as a system to be tuned from above, in alignment with their priorities and preferences, because it is assumed they know best. In that worldview, societies are complex machines, and the task of “leadership” is to maintain stability by adjusting key variables like consumption, labour, liquidity, and sentiment – using data dashboards and the levers of digital control. Public discourse is then reduced to a theatre where decisions already taken in private are rehearsed and presented as inevitabilities.

Within that frame, Klaus Schwab’s remarks on the “Intelligent Age” are not just throwaway lines from yet another conference. The World Economic Forum is a significant player in the global economy, and his remarks signal how an entire stratum of global decision-makers has come to regard rapid, coordinated, top‑down transformation as both desirable and morally self‑evident. The premise is that because technological capacities exist – in automation, surveillance, programmable money, digital identity and algorithmic management – they must be rolled out at speed. The debate is reduced to pacing and branding, rather than purpose and ownership.

Why is that so corrosive? Because power in this configuration ceases to be anchored in explicit rules we can debate, amend or refuse. It migrates into the background conditions of everyday life: the default settings on a device, the scoring model behind a loan, the content moderation policy on a platform, the eligibility rules coded into digital payments. These are not neutral technicalities. They are the new laws of motion for social behaviour, written by actors who are accountable primarily to their investors and peers, not to any demos.

This kind of arrangement gives rise to a society in which we have inverted means and ends. Technologies, institutions and markets were originally devised as means to support human wellbeing in its many forms. Increasingly, life itself is being reorganised as a resource to feed the machines we have built: data to train algorithms, attention to monetise, carbon metrics to trade, behaviour to steer. When that inversion is complete we will find that we’re inhabiting a world-system that is technically sophisticated and administratively efficient yet spiritually impoverished and politically anaemic.

I can see this inversion most clearly in the arena of work. The current rhetoric around automation and “reskilling” is framed as a benevolent offer: your job is at risk, but don’t worry, we will retrain you for the new economy. Deeper assumptions are rarely questioned. Why is it acceptable that vast populations should be periodically discarded and remoulded according to the investment cycles of machines and capital? Who decided that the primary obligation of society is to adjust human beings to fit the requirements of an automated, financialised economy, rather than the other way around?

It’s not that technological displacement is new. Far from it. Humans have always adapted tools that render some tasks obsolete and open up others. The difference now is the density and centralisation of control. When automation, data extraction and algorithmic management are concentrated in global platforms and financial institutions, the power to decide which kinds of work remain valued, and under what conditions, is similarly concentrated. “Reskilling” under such circumstances easily becomes a euphemism for re‑sorting people into narrower roles within a system they didn’t help design.

Actually the same logic applies to money. Central banks and bodies like the Bank for International Settlements are now openly exploring digital currencies that can be programmed: money with conditions embedded directly into its code. On the surface this offers clear technical advantages – faster settlement, more efficient targeting of aid, the ability to limit fraud. Yet once permission and purpose can be attached to every transaction, what stops money becoming an instrument of behavioural regulation? Who will decide which purchases are encouraged, which are discouraged, which are prohibited? And what happens when you have no cash in your pocket to give a homeless person.

If cash disappears and all legal tender is programmable, the space of unmonitored, unapproved, unscripted economic life shrinks dramatically. That may be tolerable under an enlightened and benign administration; but do we design the nervous system of a civilisation on the assumption that power will never be abused? History suggests such trust is misplaced.

It is here that critics are right to connect digital finance to a broader architecture of centralisation. The shift towards “asset-based capitalism” – where states align with large investment firms and credit‑issuing institutions to steer everything from energy transition to urban development – reconfigures the role of government. Instead of directly providing services or infrastructure, states increasingly act as guarantors and facilitators for private capital. Public objectives are translated into financial products; citizens become revenue streams.

In this schema, public‑private partnerships are held up as proof of enlightened collaboration. But collaboration between wildly asymmetric partners often amounts to delegation of authority. When governments surrender core functions – such as infrastructure funding, health provision, or even aspects of policing and censorship – to consortia of firms and foundations, they also surrender the ability to be held directly accountable for the outcomes. Responsibility diffuses, while control remains tightly held.

The same pattern emerges in media. The formal story is that we have unprecedented access to information, innumerable channels, and constant connectivity. In theory this should widen the range of perspectives and foster deeper egalitarianism. In practice, ownership concentration and reliance on large sponsors narrow the effective bandwidth of what can be said without severe penalty. Editors internalise the preferences of their funders. Journalists learn which topics attract litigation, which challenge advertising relationships, which jeopardise philanthropic grants.

Across continents, whether the propaganda is crudely authoritarian or smoothly liberal, one finds a shared tendency to portray technological restructuring as both inevitable and beneficial, while dissent is framed as ignorance, unwarranted alarmism or nostalgia. Surveys from very different cultures show that ordinary citizens are uneasy about the pace and direction of change, particularly around surveillance, predictive policing, job insecurity and concentration of wealth. This disquiet, however, rarely finds coherent political expression that can influence the design of the systems being rolled out.

It’s tempting, in the face of this, to search for heroic villains: a handful of names whose removal would reset the trajectory. That is too simple. Figures like Larry Fink in global asset management, Bill Gates in philanthro‑capitalism, George Soros in governance and civil society funding, or Agustín Carstens in central banking, are important because they crystallise a pattern. They operate within a lattice of institutions, conferences, advisory boards and regulatory regimes that reward those who can turn public challenges into private opportunities. Remove any one individual, and the structure persists, unless its underlying worldview is altered.

That worldview can be summarised in a single conviction: complex societies can and should be governed as if they were corporate enterprises, with a unified strategy, a manageable set of metrics, and a cadre of professional managers to align the parts. In such a frame, messy democratic contention, local idiosyncrasies, and divergent cultural priorities are not sources of learning but obstacles to be smoothed away by “harmonisation”.

Is it any wonder, then, that we find more and more of our lives being bound into systems we didn’t choose, or even knew of their existence? Ponder the creeping normalisation of identity systems that tie access to services, employment and movement to a single digital profile. Consider the tightening web of compliance in banking, which purportedly targets crime but often ends up freezing out entire populations deemed unprofitable or risky. Think about algorithmic credit scoring that uses opaque data to determine who may start a business or own a home. In each case, the immediate justifications are plausible: security, efficiency, inclusion. But at a deeper level, these developments share a common effect: they render individuals and communities increasingly dependent on infrastructures they cannot meaningfully influence or escape. Consent becomes simulated consent – ticking a box in order to gain access to essentials.

The question, then, is not simply how to resist particular policies or personalities, but how to re‑imagine the relationship between intelligence, technology and governance at the societal level. If we accept that tools inherently drift towards centralisation unless deliberately counter‑balanced, how might we cultivate an alternative trajectory: one that amplifies local agency rather than hollowing it out?

One starting point lies in how we understand money and credit. Most people still believe that banks merely intermediate existing savings. Yet it’s well established in central bank literature that commercial banks create new money when they extend loans. This is not a marginal detail; it’s the hinge on which our economies turn. If credit is created primarily to fuel speculative asset booms, inequality spirals and productive capacity wanes. If it is created to support tangible, regenerative activity – farms, workshops, housing, small manufacturers, local services – communities can thrive without being at the mercy of distant capital markets.

Richard Werner’s work on this front is noteworthy because it points to a simple question that anyone, anywhere, can ask: who in our locality has the authority to create credit, and on what terms? If the answer is “a handful of global banks following risk models imported from elsewhere”, should we not explore alternatives – local public banks, cooperative credit unions, mutual societies – that are governed by and for the people they serve? The Bank of North Dakota, operating in an advanced economy yet outside conventional central banking channels, is often cited as a case, but one can also observe regional, cooperative banking cultures in parts of Asia and Europe that have weathered crises better than their centralised counterparts.

Alongside Werner, Steve Keen offers a different but complementary lens on the same terrain. Where Werner exposes the creative power of banks to generate money through lending, Keen tracks the consequences when that credit piles up as private debt faster than incomes and productive capacity can sustain. Using dynamic models of real economies rather than the frictionless abstractions beloved of textbooks, he shows how cycles of leverage and asset inflation are not unfortunate accidents but predictable outcomes of a system that treats ever‑expanding debt as a sign of health. One asks, in effect, “who creates the money, and for what?” The other asks, “what happens to a society when that created money is overwhelmingly tied to escalating obligations?” Taken together, their work tears open a question almost entirely absent from official narratives: if money, credit and debt are being actively designed, why are we tolerating designs that centralise the right of creation, disperse the risks onto households and small firms, and then present the resulting crises as acts of nature rather than as the products of deliberate institutional choice?

Is it an accident that Richard Werner and Steve Keen remain marginal to the official playbook, despite the practical clarity of their work? Each, in a different way, rips away the veil that allows our current financial order to pose as a neutral backdrop rather than as a designed – and designable – system. Werner directs our attention to credit as an act of creation: every bank loan brings new money into existence, and the question of who is permitted to create that money, for what purposes, and under whose oversight, becomes a constitutional issue rather than a technical detail. Keen, by contrast, models what happens when that credit creation is allowed to accumulate as private debt faster than incomes can support: instability is not an accident at the margins but a structural outcome built into the way contemporary capitalism has been engineered.

Taken together, their work raises a civilisational question we have been carefully trained not to ask: if money and debt are designed, why do we persist with designs that centralise the power of creation, socialise the losses, and periodically immiserate entire populations? And if societies in every region – from small island states to vast federations – were to internalise their insights, would it still be politically possible to insist that the only rational future is one mediated by global megabanks, leveraged asset managers and technocratic councils operating above the reach of ordinary citizens?

In my mentoring work with communities across different cultures, I see time and again that those who understand credit as a shared tool – rather than a mysterious product dispensed from above – are better able to secure their basic needs, support entrepreneurship, and withstand economic shocks. The practical implications are clear. If families and local institutions deliberately educate themselves in how money is actually created; if they insist on transparent, relationship‑based lending for productive activity; if they build or reclaim institutions capable of issuing such credit; then the entire dynamic of dependence on global financial cycles shifts.

This is an argument for strategic decentralisation of core functions so that global systems become optional layers, not existential choke points. When more of the essentials of life – food, shelter, energy, basic services – are anchored in local capacity, regardless of whether that locality is a city neighbourhood, a rural township or a dense informal settlement, the leverage of distant technocrats over daily survival diminishes considerably.

A similar logic applies to information and communications. The proliferation of end‑to‑end encrypted messaging tools such as Signal and Telegram offers one route to preserve some degree of private conversation in an age of ubiquitous monitoring. Privacy‑resistant digital currencies such as Monero suggest that financial life need not be entirely transparent to states and corporations. But we should be wary of fetishising any particular technology. The real challenge is cultural: can we cultivate habits of communication and exchange that do not rely entirely on platforms designed to harvest and monetise our interactions?

In many parts of the world, people already do this out of necessity. Informal savings circles, community‑run mesh networks, local radio, and face‑to‑face councils often carry more weight than glossy apps. The question is whether those practices can be nurtured and modernised without simply being absorbed into corporate frameworks. Can we imagine encrypted channels that are accountable to their users rather than to investors? Financial tools that are transparent to communities yet opaque to predatory surveillance? If such infrastructures existed, would individuals be willing to pay the cost – in learning, inconvenience, and occasional friction – required to maintain them?

Here we confront one of the most embarrassing truths about our present predicament: centralisation persists partly because many of us have been seduced by its conveniences. We trade agency for frictionless interfaces. We accept unprecedented monitoring in return for personalised feeds. We outsource memory, navigation and judgement to devices, then wonder why our collective capacity for long‑term thinking atrophies. In that sense, the “Intelligent Age” is less about machines outpacing us than about our own willingness to relinquish the burdens of mature citizenship.

If that diagnosis holds, any effective response must combine structural change with inner work. It’s not enough to set up a credit union or adopt a privacy‑preserving tool if we continue to think of ourselves as consumers seeking the best deal from competing providers. We must recover an older identity: that of stewards of the systems we inhabit. Stewardship implies responsibility, patience, and a willingness to engage with complexity instead of demanding instant gratification.

The most promising experiments I have observed, on every continent, share certain qualities. They are rooted in clear, local commitments: regenerating a watershed, restoring a food commons, building a shared energy grid, creating a school that answers to parents and students rather than to test scores. They combine practical infrastructure with a conversation about meaning: what kind of life do we actually desire here, and what are we prepared to give up in order to attain it? They use technology, including sophisticated digital tools, but don’t let it dictate the rhythm or values of the community.

At the national level, we are beginning to see attempts, however flawed, to escape from prescribed economic scripts. Argentina’s current experiment in radically restructuring its monetary regime, or El Salvador’s controversial adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender, are often caricatured as reckless gambits. Yet behind them lies an intuition shared by many countries in the global South: the prevailing international financial architecture traps them in cycles of dependency and devaluation. Is it then not rational to test alternative arrangements, even at significant short‑term risk?

I do not claim these particular cases offer models to emulate. Their social and political contexts are wildly specific, and the outcomes uncertain. The point, rather, is that room still exists for deviation. The global order is not fully locked. Sovereignty has not been entirely outsourced. Nations, like communities and individuals, can refuse the framing of inevitability. To do so responsibly, however, they must cultivate their own capacities for foresight, strategy and design. This is why I have argued, over decades, that every society needs to become literate in systemic viability, continuous sense-making, and futures thinking: not as fashionable add‑ons, but as core civic skills. When we lack the ability to ask profound questions, interrogate the systems that keep us at arms length from decision-making, imagine, explore and rehearse alternative trajectories, we become easy prey for those who arrive with ready‑made roadmaps stamped with the logo of progress. We confuse the presence of powerful tools with the presence of wisdom.

The deeper civilisational question running beneath the current fascination with intelligence, then, is not “what will AI do to us?” but “what kind of intelligence do we wish to cultivate as a species?” Do we aspire to an intelligence that optimises for short‑term efficiency, prediction and control, or one that integrates care, foresight, restraint and diversity of perspective? The former is perfectly compatible with a world in which a small cadre of managers orchestrates billions of lives through obscured infrastructures. The latter demands a slower, more dialogical, more distributed approach to governing human affairs.

Pursuing that second path forces us to rethink not just governance structures but the myths that underpin them. The myth of endless growth on a finite planet. The myth of the isolated individual maximising self‑interest. The myth that competition, untempered, inevitably produces the best results. These stories have been remarkably effective at mobilising energy and innovation; they have also brought us to the brink of societal breakdown. Do we have the courage to tell new stories that honour interdependence without descending into authoritarian collectivism? Can we articulate forms of prosperity that don’t rely on permanent extraction, whether of resources, attention or data?

None of this is abstract. It shows up in whether a young person in Nairobi or Naples feels their primary vocation is to fit pre‑existing corporate templates, or whether they can imagine co‑creating institutions aligned with the needs of their place. It shows up in whether elders in rural India or inner‑city Chicago feel their knowledge counts in designing local health systems, or whether they are treated as irrelevant data points in a global optimisation exercise. It shows up in whether a family in Manila or Manchester can access credit on fair terms to build a resilient livelihood, or whether they are trapped between loan sharks and faceless banks.

Some have begun to describe this emerging configuration as a kind of techno‑feudal order, where the owners of key digital platforms and infrastructures exercise powers that resemble the entitlements of medieval lords more than the disciplined competition of textbook capitalism. Yanis Varoufakis has argued that when access to markets, information and payment rails is mediated by a handful of corporate gatekeepers, supported by friendly regulators and central banks, we are no longer dealing with a free enterprise system in any meaningful sense. Whether his label fully captures the complexity of what is unfolding is an open question. What matters for my purposes is the underlying observation: when platforms and financial networks become the obligatory passage points for work, trade, communication and even political participation, the traditional distinctions between state and market, public and private, investor and subject, start to blur. At that moment, the promise of the “Intelligent Age” as a realm of open opportunity begins to look less like progress and more like the codification of a new hierarchy, with code itself functioning as the primary instrument of command.

The so‑called “feudal reset” is not inevitable. It is a possible future that becomes more likely every time we accept its premises without question: that complexity can only be governed from the top; that security requires total visibility; that prosperity is measured solely in financial terms; that democracy is merely the periodic selection of managers for a machine whose basic design is off limits. To challenge those premises is to invite discomfort, because it means admitting that our own habits and expectations are part of the problem.

Yet the alternative – becoming passive subjects within infrastructures designed without our consent – is, to my mind, far more dangerous. The most radical act available to ordinary people today is not to shout at distant elites, though there are times when direct confrontation becomes necessary. It is to build, patiently and intelligently, the parallel systems that render over‑centralised power obsolete: local credit anchored in real relationships; communication networks that prioritise trust and privacy; food, energy and education commons that reduce dependency on brittle global supply chains; media ecologies that are answerable to their audiences, not their sponsors.

If communities in every region can relearn how to create credit for themselves, to communicate beyond the reach of total surveillance, and to meet a greater share of their needs through cooperative rather than extractive structures, the inevitability of what Varoufakis calls techno‑feudalism starts to fracture. The “lords” of data and debt retain their towers, but their capacity to dictate the terms of everyday life diminishes as parallel, pluriversal systems take root.

These efforts will look different in each cultural context. A cooperative energy grid in Denmark will not resemble a micro‑hydro project in Nepal. A credit union in Brazil will not function like a village savings group in Uganda. Yet beneath the diversity lies a shared intent: to reclaim the capacity of communities to shape their own futures. That, ultimately, is the only reliable antidote to a technocratic order that sees humanity as raw material for optimisation.

I reject the notion that we’re facing the dawn of an “Intelligent Age” - at least in the kind of triumphant sense proclaimed from podiums in alpine resorts. But we are at a crossroads where our collective intelligence is being tested. Will we allow the tools we have built to harden into invisible cages, or will we use them – alongside older forms of wisdom – to design societies that are more alive, more just, and more capable of adapting without losing their soul? The answer will not be given by algorithms, central banks or world forums. It will be enacted, repeatedly and imperfectly, by individuals, families and communities who refuse to outsource their sovereignty and who are prepared to do the laborious work of shaping the systems that, in turn, shape them.