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Patagonia, positioned at the tip of the South American continent, has long been valued for its dramatic landscape, its pristine waters and its unique wildlife. However, for some, the value of Patagonia’s natural treasures has shifted. No longer are its majestic glaciers and temperate rainforests to be protected. Instead, it is now being proposed that Patagonia, with its brisk climate and abundant water resources, become home to a new animal –– the data center.

The proliferation of data centers has become a huge political issue in recent months, particularly in the United States, largely due to concerns about their gargantuan appetite for local resources –– driving up utility prices for everyday consumers and endangering communities where some of those resources were already scarce. Many have been outraged about how their local governments, elected to ostensibly protect their interests, have rolled over for data center developers, promising jobs that rarely manifest and –– if they do –– largely evaporate after the center is built. Meanwhile the technology many of these data centers power, Artificial Intelligence (AI), has also sparked its own set of concerns, nominally focused on AI’s usurpation of human jobs and human creativity while generating generous returns for the ultra-wealthy and dubious benefits for the rest of us.

The predation of Patagonia by data center developers has been greatly facilitated by the policies of Argentina’s president Javier Milei. Milei has made it a point to partner with Silicon Valley, as well as the current U.S. administration –– itself colonized by Silicon Valley to an impressive and unprecedented degree. He has also developed generous tax benefits schemes for foreign U.S. Big Tech firms to operate in the country, while offering those that seek to park their data centers in the country next to no regulation regarding their construction or operation. Earlier this year, Milei wrote an editorial in the Financial Times where he “invite[d] AI to free itself” and proposed allowing AI-run companies with no humans involved to operate in his country. While some pointed out that these statements seemed to value AI activity over human activity, this is not an isolated incident. For instance, one adviser in Milei’s inner circle, Demián Riedel, has controversially argued that humans are, in fact, Argentina’s biggest problem, particularly in Argentine Patagonia, because they present an obstacle to AI infrastructure and development in the region.

Riedel was notably involved in brokering a major deal for what will become a truly massive data center in his country: Stargate Argentina. Stargate Argentina is the newest constellation of OpenAI’s Stargate project, which was initially launched in January 2025 “to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States.” A few months later, in May 2025, OpenAI announced with little fanfare that it planned to internationalize its Stargate project via its new “OpenAI for countries” initiative. Not long thereafter, and with the direct involvement of Milei and his top officials, Stargate Argentina was born.

While OpenAI is now a well-known name, virtually unknown was their partner in Stargate Argentina –– a company called Sur Energy. Not only was Sur Energy unknown internationally, it was also unknown within Argentina, despite being billed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman as one of Argentina’s “biggest energy companies.” Lurking behind this company, which appears to have no real assets in the country aside from letters of intent, is a man who may be slightly more familiar, at least in Argentina.

Emiliano Kargieman is the face of Sur Energy, but it is only his latest venture in a series of companies that have sought to complement the growing influence of Silicon Valley corporations over the public sector. As will be explored in this article, Kargieman’s previous ventures, particularly the satellite surveillance firm Satellogic, not only boasts close ties to current and former top figures in the Trump administration, but has become an increasingly important part of the AI surveillance grid that the U.S. intelligence contractor Palantir has been amassing. In particular, the company is due to enable –– within the next year –– what was once Palantir’s most implausible ambition –– predictive policing of the entire planet in real time via AI-powered satellite surveillance, i.e. total information awareness.

However, more recently through his efforts alongside Sam Altman to create Stargate Argentina, Kargieman has revealed some hidden truths, not just about the data center he hopes to build, but about the data center build-out at large. As will be detailed in this article, Kargieman has casually admitted that Stargate Argentina is not about bringing jobs to locals (despite what some Argentina politicians have claimed), but about generating dollars. Perhaps more revealing of all, he revealed that it is likely that his partner in Stargate Argentina, OpenAI, will not be ultimate end-user of this massive data center, suggesting that the prominent AI firm will collapse under the inevitable popping of an AI debt bubble. In stating this he notes that, whether OpenAI or not, someone will be using this data center. If so, who will use it and what for? Based on Kargieman’s statements and the available evidence, we have attempted to answer those questions, revealing increasingly likely possibilities that will have implications far beyond Argentina.

A Questionable Past

Raised in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires, Emiliano Kargieman’s childhood was characterized by his early obsession with computers and a rebellious streak. For instance, he learned how to repair computers at age 10 and was also kicked out of school for filling the principal’s office with toilet paper. At 15, he claims to have created his first software company. By this time, as a teenager, he had also become part of a hacking collective called “Hacked by Owls”, or HBO. According to Matt Travizano, Kargieman’s long-time friend (and later his co-founder at Sur Energy), some of the HBO members used their technological prowess to spy on the conversations and communications of Argentine Congressmen. Though HBO seemed adversarial to State interests, with its members claiming to espouse “anarchist” ideals, many of its members –– including Kargieman –– simultaneously worked for the Argentine government.

For instance, while Kargieman has declined to disclose this in media interviews, one of his old CVs lists him as working for the Argentine government’s Special Information Security Research Group from age 14 to age 17, overlapping with his time at the HBO collective. This group was part of the DGI (Dirección General Impositiva), Argentina’s General Tax Directorate. This is notable given that, while working for this State agency, Kargieman’s hacking collective was also allegedly spying on elected officials.

In 1997, when Kargieman was 20, he and the broader HBO collective began working directly for Argentina’s AFIP (Administración Federal de Ingresos Públicos; in English, Federal Public Income Administration). That year, the DGI, which had employed Kargieman as a teenager via the Special Information Security Research Group, was placed under the AFIP’s authority. Shortly before then, in 1996, Kargieman had created a cybersecurity company that would later become known as Core Security Technologies. He did so with five of his friends, including Gerardo Richarte, Lucio Torre, and Jonathan Altzszul, who had previously worked at the Special Projects Office at Argentina’s AFIP.

Emiliano Kargieman at a TEDX event in Argentina in 2011. His talk was titled “Hacking Space” – Source

Richarte, Torre, and some long-time employees of Core Security, such as Norberto Kueffner, later followed Kargieman to Satellogic, the satellite surveillance company he would later create. Notably, Kueffner is now Director of IT for Javier Milei’s administration. Another veteran of Core Security, Ariel “Wata” Waissbein, is now the head of Argentina’s Federal Cybersecurity Agency (AFC). Yet another Core Security veteran who also went to work for Satellogic was Aviv Cohen, a former Israeli intelligence officer who was, for a time, Satellogic’s head of “special projects.”

In 1998, a year after becoming entangled with Argentina’s AFIP, Kargieman’s firm Core Security began focusing expressly on the U.S. Market. Shortly thereafter, it attracted significant attention from U.S.-based businesses, such as Apple and Lockheed Martin, and the public sector. Core Security’s main U.S. public sector clients soon included the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the U.S. military’s DARPA, NASA and the NSA.

The same year, in 1998, Core Security was named an “Endeavor Entrepreneur” by the Endeavor Foundation –– a non-profit organization founded the year prior by two Americans, Linda Rottenberg and Peter Kellner. While much can be said about Endeavor, which features prominently in a previous investigation from Unlimited Hangout, their affinity for a small Argentine software company should be of little surprise given the organization’s intimate relations to the South American country. For starters, Rottenberg and Kellner met while in Argentina. Long before the likes of Edgar Bronfman Jr., Reid Hoffman, and Pierre Omidyar had donated vast sums of money to the entrepreneurial evangelicals, Endeavor’s first success story was Marcos Galperin’s MercadoLibre. Galperin became Argentina’s richest man –– on paper, anyway –– due to his firm’s success, before joining Endeavor’s board when the once-non-profit added a new venture capital component to their organization. Endeavor, now advised by Galperin, eventually funded Kargieman’s later company Satellogic, and Galperin now serves on Satellogic’s board.

By 2001, Kargieman’s Core Security also gained the attention of Pegasus Capital. As noted by iProfessional, Pegasus –– beginning in February 2001 –– began “collaborating” with Core in the development of Core’s business model, growth strategy, organizational design and much more. Pegasus Capital was created by Craig Cogut, a key figure in the “junk bond” financial scandal at the now defunct bank Drexel Burnham Lambert. Drexel’s junk bond department, led by Michael Milken, engaged in blatantly illegal activity and used junk bonds to help fuel the takeovers of major corporations by the era’s infamous “corporate raiders” prior to the bank’s collapse. More specifically, Cogut was the lawyer who advised the Milken-run and scandal-ridden junk bond department on the legality of its transactions, including those that saw Milken become a convicted felon. Following Drexel’s collapse, Cogut teamed up with a group of Drexel alumni led by Leon Black –– now best known for his close association with the deceased sex trafficker and Black’s “financial adviser” Jeffrey Epstein –– to co-found Apollo Advisers (now Apollo Global Management) in 1990. Cogut left Apollo to found Pegasus in 1996. Pegasus has since became a key player in several UN-supported “green” finance initiatives, including some which have directly involved Kargieman’s other company Satellogic.

In 2006, Kargieman created Aconcagua Ventures as a joint venture with Pegasus Capital. This firm ostensibly “focused on investing in high-tech startups in Latin America to develop them as global businesses.” By 2009, it had only invested in Core Security as well as the company Popego, where Kargieman served as both CEO and director in 2007. Popego was described around this time as an artificial intelligence (AI) software company.

Emiliano Kargieman in 2011 – Source

Popego, as well as Aconcagua Ventures, backed a non-profit organization that launched in 2009 with the goal of creating a virtual currency related to one’s online reputation. That organization was called The Whuffie Bank and Emiliano Kargieman is listed as one of its founders. The Whuffie Bank, which launched at a TechCrunch conference in 2009, aimed “to promote change in the web by rewarding users with a positive impact on the web with this karma-like digital currency.” This “non-profit” planned to closely surveil social media users by “monitor[ing] [their] activity across various websites, including things like comments, posts, and more.”

As TechCrunch further explained:

“When you complete positive actions, you gain Whuffies, and you lose them when you do something that the organization deems to be detrimental. [. . . ] The algorithm takes into account ‘public endorsements’, or the number of times a user’s tweets are retweeted, or a Facebook post is Liked. It also takes into account who is making the endorsement, and the content in the messages that are being posted.” 

The Whuffie Bank website noted that the goal of the organization was to drive “social change” through its virtual currency, while another Whuffie Bank co-founder, Santiago Siri, has described its goal as “rethink[ing] the future of money.” Siri, while working at the Whuffie Bank, was named a World Economic Forum Global Shaper for his efforts to advance digital, reputation-based money that rewards or punishes users based on their online activity and speech. The Whuffie Bank represents an early effort to link digital currencies to the digital behavior and reputation of its users, efforts which continue today in other forms and have raised concerns about ascendant “social credit systems.”

While the Whuffies went extinct, Kargieman’s next venture Satellogic quickly placed him shoulder to shoulder alongside the very pioneers responsible for digitizing the U.S. financial system, e.g. former U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and current Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (previously the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, the largest dealer of government securities in the country). Before his low Earth observation satellite firm took off, former NASA contractor Kargieman found himself in Northern California, at the very Air Force base where Silicon Valley unofficially took hold of the country’s space program –– taking what was once the pride and joy of the US government firmly into the private sector for good.

Satellogic’s Launch Pad

According to the earliest iterations of its website, Satellogic was founded in 2010 by “two graduates of the NASA Ames-based Singularity University’s Graduate Studies Program” in order to build “shared low earth orbit infrastructure to open real-time satellite data to a new generation of application developers.” Emiliano Kargieman and his co-founder, Andrew Fursman, came up with the “concepts that would become Satellogic” while enrolled in that graduate student program. The program took place at Northern California’s Moffet Federal Airfield –– one of the most prominent locales for NASA’s extensive collaboration with the private sector.

The airport was formerly a US Naval facility. Right up until the year Satellogic was founded, it had housed the Air Force’s 21st Space Operations Squadron. Today, the airport is served by the California Air National Guard, and notably the 7th Psychological Operations Group of the US Army Reserve –– an influential support group for military actions which “involve[s] sharing specific information to foreign audiences to influence the emotions, motives, reasoning, and behavior of governments and citizens” including “cyber warfare and advanced communication techniques across all forms of media.”

NASA’s Ames Center is also known for containing one of the largest free standing buildings in the world –– Hangar One. This building, built in 1933, is over 8 acres large and is known for having fog and other weather-type patterns within its voluminous confines. In addition, it became home to the private jets of past and present Google executives Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt after a $33 million renovation plan Google offered to NASA in 2011. NASA, the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the California Regional Water Quality Control Board eventually came to an agreement in November 2014 which saw Google’s subsidiary Planetary Ventures LLC sign a 60-year lease worth $1.16 billion in rent, which included plans to significantly remodel the famous hangar.

Notably, the first oldest archive version of Satellogic’s website features an image of Hangar One, complete with a five-point star adorning a large bay door and another on top of the building. This is quite likely due to the fact that back in 2009, NASA, Google, and the Ames Center staff collaborated on the founding of the very incubator program that germinated the core ideas of Satellogic.

A photo of Hangar One that was displayed on Satellogic’s homepage – Source

Unlimited Hangout’s first investigation into Satellogic –– April 2024’s Debt From Above: The Carbon Credit Coup –– focused mainly on the firm’s public-private partnerships related to their enforcement of a blockchain-enabled carbon market scheme via satellite surveillance. To spare repeating information regarding Kargieman’s company that was previously addressed, this article will instead focus on placing Satellogic within the context of the decades-long transmutation of America’s space program from the public sector’s federal budget into the private sector powerhouse. From the evidence, it appears that the main figures and sites responsible for NASA partnerships with the Tech industry, not only produced Elon Musk’s SpaceX –– Satellogic’s “preferred vendor for ride share missions” –– but also Satellogic itself. It seems that Satellogic was essentially created to aid both the privatized U.S. space and mass surveillance programs.

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2024/04/investigative-reports/debt-from-above-the-carbon-credit-coup/ Singularity University and the Privatized Space Program

In September 2008, author and futurist Ray Kurzweil teamed up with space entrepreneur and X PRIZE Foundation chairman Peter Diamandis to found Singularity University (SU). Their decision to partner came after Diamandis read Kurzweil’s 2005 book The Singularity is Near, which argues that machine intelligence will soon surpass human intelligence and that humans and machines should, at that point, merge into a transhumanist collective. Diamandis approached Kurzweil after reading and suggested they partner on what would become Singularity University.

The goal of SU is to educate the “leaders of tomorrow” in emerging technologies that Kurzweil, and presumably Diamandis, believe will allow humanity to accelerate the arrival of this “singularity” event and thus a transhumanist future for humanity. Singularity University’s website boasts that it has consequently developed “a global ecosystem of techno-optimists.” This term appears to be a reference to venture capitalist (and current Pentagon advisor) Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” in which Andreessen argues for a full-throated embrace of “transformative” technologies like AI on an accelerated timeline, with complete disregard for whom or for what it could create negative consequences. Kurzweil is notably a “patron saint” of techno-optimism and Andreessen’s manifesto more or less portrays the ideology that Singularity University seeks to instill in its “techno-optimist” graduates.

The “Techno-Optimist” ideology overlaps considerably with Technocracy. This overlap is detailed extensively by Iain Davis in his book The Technocratic Dark State. Davis, in his book, defines Technocracy as a form of governance that claims to maximize efficiency by “scientifically” managing and socially engineering the human population using autocratic sociopolitical and technological behavioral control. In a technocratic system, the management and social engineering of the “human animal” is to be performed by unelected “experts” in science, engineering or technology, also known as the technocrats. This form of governance has been heavily adopted by the wealthiest men in Silicon Valley, including Andreessen as well as others like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

A few months after Singularity University was created, the newly-formed university found a home at NASA’s Ames Center after securing “Corporate Founding” funding from Google and ePlanet Ventures. While Google needs little introduction, ePlanet Ventures is a venture firm associated with Tim Draper’s DFJ (Draper Fisher Jurvetson), whose investment committee once featured all three of DFJ’s partners. One of those partners, Steve Jurvetson –– much like SU founder Diamandis –– is a long-time friend of SpaceX’s Elon Musk, with positions on both the Tesla and SpaceX board. He is also credited with bailing out Musk in 2008 with large investments in both firms. However, Jurvetson hardly deserves singular responsibility for SpaceX’s survival. Two other men who were involved in that rescue also happened to play a prominent role in the founding of SU, where Satellogic was born.

Then-Director of the Ames Center, Simon “Pete” Worden, spoke upon SU’s founding, stating that “The NASA Ames campus has a proud history of supporting ground-breaking innovation, and Singularity University fits into that tradition.” Worden had been selected to run Ames by his long-time friend, Dr. Michael Griffin, who became the Administrator of NASA in 2005. Both Worden and Griffin were alumni of the controversial Strategic Defense Initiative Office (SDIO) –– colloquially known as “Star Wars” due to its early 1980s formalization under President Ronald Reagan –– with Worden having taken over Griffin’s job as Head of Technology in the space-focused missile defense program.

Simon “Pete” Worden near the NASA Ames Center in his favorite costume, a “goat herder” – Source

While at SDIO, both Griffin and Worden were responsible for immense strides taken in fields quite relevant to today’s commercialized space industry. For starters, their work helped pioneer the development of Low Earth Observation (LEO) satellite constellations such as those later launched by Satellogic. Their advancement of satellite broadcasting capabilities in general was accomplished via SDIO’s Clementine project –– a “small, low-cost, and rapidly developed satellite used to test sensor and propulsion technology for missile interceptors” and which also “mapped the Moon.” Additionally, Griffin was working at the Virginia-based Orbital Sciences after his time at SDIO, a company which pioneered the use of “a system for collecting data from remote locations using satellites in low-Earth orbit.” Worden is considered a “crucial innovator and promoter of small satellites in the early years of development” while at SDIO.

Worden and Griffin were also both instrumental to the commercially-viable build out of the reusable, vertical take-off and landing of the “DC-X” rocket, which set the stage for SpaceX’s commercially-viable building of reusable, vertical take-off and landing Falcon 1 rockets. In fact, Musk himself told former manager of SDIO Jess Sponable in 2013 that SpaceX was “just continuing the great work of the DC-X project!” While many details remain outside of the scope of this article, Griffin’s stint running a budget-starved NASA while Worden merged the space program with Silicon Valley at Ames led to accusations from Ames employees that the two men were “part of a conspiracy to destroy America’s space program.”

Michael Griffin Sworn in as NASA Administrator by Vice President Dick Cheney in 2005 – Source

There are few people more responsible for the private sector takeover of the space industry than Griffin, Worden, and Diamandis –– all of whom have their unique ties to Elon Musk and the founding (and eventual success) of SpaceX.

In August 1993, the Falcon 1 predecessor “DC-X” took its first lift off in White Sands, New Mexico during testing by contractor McDonnell Douglas on behalf of the SDIO. Griffin, the Deputy Director of Technology for SDIO at the time, stated that the “DC-X was government R&D at its finest.” The DC-X took its last flight in 1995 before being upgraded to the DC-XA, which was promptly passed back within NASA proper, only to be shuttered after a final flight on July 31, 1996.

In May 1996, the month prior to the shutdown of the DC-X project, Diamandis officially founded the X Prize. The prize offered $10,000,000 to the team that could successfully breach the lower atmosphere. While the winning team would not do so until 2004, the prize kick-started the private, commercial space industry, and was influential in addressing new forms of fundraising and project management for NASA. The original X Prize Foundation Committee, announced in December 1996, featured Worden in addition to astronaut Buzz Aldrin, among others. Due to the nature of the prize being first announced in 1996, the many teams competing had to spend years building their rockets and technology, causing nearly a decade of waiting for the new space industry to blast off.

During this interim period, Diamandis got a call from Bill Gross, the founder of the early tech startup incubator Idealab, in 2000 to come aboard a new company as CEO. That new company, called BlastOff!, was given a $1 billion budget to organize a private moon mission. In a 2008 video for the Google Lunar X Prize, which officially brought together the Griffin-led NASA with SU’s funder Google and Diamandis’ X Prize, Diamandis describes the team at BlastOff! as having eventually decided to use the Russian ICBM “Dnepr” to launch their moon mission. BlastOff!, which operated in stealth, eventually shuttered in January 2001.

From left to right: Rob McEwen, James Cameron, Peter Diamandis, Elon Musk & Jim Gianopulos – Source

Only a few months prior, in October 2000, Musk was replaced by Peter Thiel as CEO of PayPal/X.com, with PayPal also having come out of the Idealab incubator (as Confinity) with an early investment from Gross and Idealab in January 2000. Furthermore, the first board member of PayPal was Idealab VP Scott Bannister, who graduated college with PayPal founder Max Levchin, and who was responsible for introducing Levchin to Peter Thiel. As previous investigations from Unlimited Hangout have aimed to prove, Idealab –– despite being little known today –– is intimately connected to the primordial origins and subsequent immense success of Google, PayPal, Palantir, Tether, PolyMarket and arguably Musk’s SpaceX.

Out of a job and about to be flush with cash from the sale of PayPal to eBay, Musk set his sights on the stars, Mars, and beyond. The year after he was ousted from PayPal, Musk met Griffin at The Mars Society in 2001, which kicked off their lengthy friendship. The Mars Society was previously formed in 1998 and boasted Griffin as a founding Steering Committee member. X Prize Foundation Committee member Aldrin, and a plethora of employees from NASA’s Ames Center soon joined him. Musk made a large donation and subsequently joined the Steering Committee alongside Griffin. Musk has since overtly promoted the idea of establishing a technocracy on Mars. Affinity for technocracy seems to run in Musk’s family, as his maternal grandfather previously led the technocratic movement in Canada.

In 2001 and 2002, Musk and Griffin made multiple flights to Russia in an effort to purchase Dnepr rockets in order to begin experiments in space travel, arguably continuing the work of the Idealab-sponsored BlastOff! On one of their trips to Russia, after finding the purchasing price of the Russian ICBMs too high, Musk typed out a model to manufacture the rockets needed, but at low cost. He reportedly came up with the plans for SpaceX on the flight back alongside Griffin. Griffin was offered a role as Chief Engineer at SpaceX, but decided instead to become the President and COO of the CIA’s investment firm, In-Q-Tel. Musk allegedly named his son Griffin Musk after his friend, and eventually gave Griffin an advisory role at SpaceX-subsidiary Castelion in 2022. Castelion boasts mass-production capabilities of hypersonic missiles, and additionally features fellow In-Q-Tel-alum Lisa Porter on the advisory board.

Griffin left In-Q-Tel to take the reigns at NASA in April 2005 after being selected by President George W. Bush. Only a week after his appointment, Griffin met with Musk at NASA Headquarters. Two key changes to NASA’s status quo occurred at the onset of Griffin’s term –– massive budget cuts to the likes of the Ames Research Center in November 2005, and the authorization of the “Prize Authority.” This novel fundraising and budget concept had been pioneered by Diamandis’ X Prize. Only a few years later, Google, NASA and X Prize collaborated together on the aforementioned Google Lunar X Prize in 2008. Griffin was quoted as being “an advocate for the use of Prize Authority we’ve had at NASA since 2005.”

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin (left) meets with the CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk (right) at NASA Headquarters in Washington – Source

Griffin used his position at NASA to further advocate for the commercial and private space industry, and when Musk’s SpaceX nearly folded after three failed rocket launches, Griffin and his friend Worden came to Musk’s aid. In April 2006, after the explosion of a Falcon 1 on its maiden voyage, the Pentagon selected Worden to lead the inquiry into the mishap, as DARPA had helped fund the launches. The very next month, in May 2006, Worden was selected by Griffin to lead the ever-important Ames Research Center. Two years later, in December 2008, the Griffin-led NASA formally partnered with X Prize and Google, and gave $3.5 billion in contracts to SpaceX and Griffin’s former company Orbital Sciences –– saving Musk’s then-troubled company in addition to the aforementioned private bailout from Jurvetson.

The next month, January 2009, Singularity University was announced by X Prize’s Diamandis with support from the Griffin-led NASA and with funding from Google and the Jurvetson-affiliated ePlanet Ventures –– stationed at the Worden-led Ames Research Center. Early reports of the announcement even listed Worden as an official founding member of SU, although he never appears in later iterations of their founding story. When Worden finally announced his 2015 departure from the NASA Research Center, he specifically referred to “the nine years he spent at Ames” as “the most enjoyable of his 40 years of public service.” Worden furthered:

“In the last nine years we have launched dozens of small, low-cost satellites – and helped ignite a major new industry in this area… Ames has provided entry technology for the emerging commercial space launch sector. We have helped launch small satellites working with a number of nations. And we’ve hosted and inspired thousands of students.”

It is hard to separate Worden’s musings on his time at Ames from Kargieman’s decision to found of Satellogic. Not only did Kargieman become interested in the commercial space launch sector and “small, low-cost satellites” while studying at the Worden-linked, “techno-optimist” graduate program, but the same Ames facility where that program was hosted also apparently became Satellogic’s first home. Thus, more than just sparking the idea for Satellogic, Ames seems to have incubated it as a company. Furthermore, it remains difficult to parse the beginnings of Satellogic from its connections to major players in the privatization of the military and space programs. Many of these companies have been discussed in prior investigations from Unlimited Hangout –– including SpaceX, Tether, and Palantir –– not to mention their willing public partners within the US government. Notably all three of these companies have since become directly and significantly partnered with Satellogic.

In addition, one simply has to look at Satellogic’s board members, both past and present, to understand that Kargieman’s company is hardly a simple tech startup, and operates far more like a cog in a well-designed, multi-headed apparatus developed by the U.S. government but profiteering as a private company.

Satellogic’s board as shown on its website in April 2024 – Source

As previously stated, much was written about the founding and funding of Satellogic in Debt From Above, but the more recent developments deserve reminding for the context of this piece. For starters, in 2022, the current Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who boasts intimate ties to stablecoin issuer (and eventual Satellogic investor) Tether, helped connect Kargieman’s company with former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who then funded Satellogic via his firm Liberty Strategic Capital. Both Lutnick and Mnuchin joined the Satellogic board that same year. Another board member who also joined that year has direct connections to the Pentagon –– Liberty Strategic Capital’s Senior Managing Director General Joseph Dunford (Ret.), who was the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the first Trump administration. In addition, Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald notably helped take Satellogic public, with the ticker $SATL.

In February 2022, Satellogic also officially partnered with Palantir, the privatized version of the Pentagon’s controversial Total Information Awareness program. Satellogic claimed in a press release that its partnership with Palantir was intended to “leverage Palantir’s Foundry platform” in order to “accelerat[e] business process, rapid image product delivery, AI model training, and enterprise-wide data integration.” The partnership also saw Satellogic become a major provider of space-based surveillance data to the U.S. government via Palantir, which contracts with all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, the military and many other U.S. federal agencies. According to Satellogic’s press release, as part of the deal, “Satellogic will provide Palantir’s U.S. government customers with ready access to Satellogic’s high-resolution satellite imagery to drive analytical insights across a range of mission-oriented use cases.”

Kargieman poses with one of Satellogic’s satellites in 2023 – Source

A few months after announcing their partnership, in April 2022, Satellogic and Palantir launched their “first Edge AI-enabled satellite into space” with assistance from SpaceX’s Transporter 4 mission. This trio working together directly lends credibility to the theory described above that the common players behind all three companies were building collaborative infrastructure –– in this case, satellites, AI and rockets. According to their press release, the “new Edge AI-enabled NewSat” is the product of a “six-month project” in which “Satellogic adapted its hosted payload program and edge computing hardware” in order to “run Palantir’s Edge AI platform.” Their “joint project” aims to “deliver[. . .] new capabilities which will have broad applicability across mission sets in both government and the commercial sector.” This technological collaboration allows for quick swapping between different algorithms depending on its location. The press release furthers:

“We are able to hot-swap between models and chain capabilities, depending on mission requirements and terrain. For example, when the satellite passes over a port we can run the cloud detector, image segmentation, and ship detector models, and when passing over a town we can switch to vehicle and building detectors.”

In total, the Satellogic hardware is capable of running 6 additional third party models, including Palantir Omni and Palantir Overcast, in addition to Xailient, Pilot.ai and Mind Foundry. According to Palantir, “the Palantir-Satellogic collaboration represents a significant step in expediting delivery and dramatically improving the quality of data sent back to customers.” Palantir’s blog post on the collaboration concluded that:

“[T]his pioneering application of Edge AI in space aims to serve as the foundation for advanced analytics that can inform timely solutions to address critical global priorities, like combatting climate change, preventing disasters, and improving emergency response.”

One of Satellogic’s more recent announcements relates to the imminent launch of a new constellation of satellites it has named Merlin. Due to launch this October and become active some time in 2027, Merlin will “support persistent monitoring of unlimited locations worldwide” by “enabl[ing the] daily remapping of the entire planet at one-meter resolution.” Presumably, this will also grant its analytic partner, Palantir, the same capability.

In announcing Merlin, Kargieman stated the following:

“Until now, organizations had to choose between global coverage at low resolution or high-resolution monitoring of a limited number of sites. Merlin removes that trade-off and enables persistent monitoring at planetary scale.”

In an interview earlier this year with Forbes Argentina, Kargieman remarked that Merlin will soon “allow us to do things we never imagined. With AI [and Merlin] we can begin to predict the future.” As noted in previous reporting from Unlimited Hangout, a long-time major focus of Palantir is predictive analytics, particularly predictive policing –– often referred to as “pre-crime.”

Merlin exemplifies Satellogic’s efforts to push planetary surveillance into a new paradigm. Kargieman has referred to this new paradigm as “Persistent Global Intelligence,” a departure from the existing Earth Observation paradigm of “episodic imagery.” Its efforts in this regard are meant to empower global intelligence and defense agencies, particularly those of the United States. This is reflected, not only by Satellogic’s existing and new U.S. government contracts, but also through their recent partnerships with U.S. government contractor SynMax (AI surveillance data analytics company backed by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s 8VC) and appointing one of the main architects of the U.S. military’s controversial Project Maven (AI-powered weapon targeting software) as a strategic advisor.

Stargate Argentina

While engineering Satellogic’s pivot to AI-powered “Persistent Global Intelligence” satellite surveillance, Kargieman decided to create yet another company –– this one aimed at cashing in on the AI “boom.” He, along with Matt Travizano and Stan Chudovsky, founded Sur Energy in 2025. Travizano was an Argentine who was also the head of Sur Ventures, which invested in Satellogic, and had long-standing business interests in California. He is also credited with connecting the administration of Javier Milei to prominent figures in Silicon Valley. Travizano died last year while scaling California’s Mount Shasta, shortly after founding Sur Energy. Meanwhile, Chudovsky was previously VP of Messaging at Meta/Facebook and, prior to that, VP of Growth and Global Strategy at PayPal.

Shortly after launching, and even before having a website presence, Sur Energy announced a massive partnership with OpenAI, the formerly non-profit but now for-profit AI company run by Sam Altman and the developer of ChatGPT. Altman is a protégé of Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir whose recent move to Argentina and meetings with Milei and top government officials earlier this year made international headlines.

OpenAI executives meet with Javier Milei (center) and some of his top officials, including Demián Riedel – Source

The Sur Energy-OpenAI partnership, formalized in October 2025 via a letter of intent, seeks to develop a $25 billion data center in Argentina’s Patagonia region called Stargate Argentina. Oracle, the CIA-linked data infrastructure company helmed by Larry Ellison, will likely operate Stargate Argentina upon its completion, per Kargieman. Oracle is notably OpenAI’s partner in the U.S.-based Stargate project, which –– per OpenAI –– now has global ambitions. Kargieman has also claimed that construction on Stargate Argentina will begin this year and end in 2027, even though the planned location of the site has not been made public. Notably, Milei’s administration was intimately and directly involved in the discussions that led to the signing of the letter of intent between Sur Energy and OpenAI.

In announcing the project, OpenAI’s Sam Altman referred to Sur Energy as one of Argentina’s “leading energy companies,” which it is not. Upon the announcement, even Bloomberg noted that Sur Energy was entirely unknown in the sector and had exactly zero assets in the country. OpenAI later clarified that Sur Energy was instead “the energy and infrastructure developer” of the project, not the provider.

Reports have suggested that the majority state-owned nuclear power firm, Nucleoeléctrica, may play a role in the project. Significantly, Milei’s government announced its efforts to privatize Nucleoeléctrica just weeks before Stargate Argentina was announced. Forbes pointed to the involvement of Nucleoeléctrica’s former president, Demián Reidel, in Stargate Argentina. Reidel, prior to leading Nucleoeléctrica, had been a top advisor to Milei and an architect of his administration’s policies on AI and nuclear power. In that role, he had controversially claimed that Argentina, Patagonia in particular, was ripe for AI development, but that its main problem was that it was too populated with Argentines.

It was later revealed that Sur Energy had signed two memorandums of understanding with two other Argentine power providers prior to announcing the project in October of last year. Those companies are Central Puerto and Genneia. Central Puerto is the formerly state-owned power provider of the Buenos Aires area, which was privatized in the early 1990s and has since expanded to several other areas of the country. The second, Genneia, is an interesting company to explore in this context, as it shows how Milei’s administration has become entangled with the network supporting Milei’s ostensible worst enemies.

Genneia was created in 1991, initially operating as a natural gas distribution company under the name Emgasud. It rebranded to Genneia in 2012 following a pivot to renewable energy. This pivot was driven by the introduction of a new crop of shareholders, namely Argentine businessman Jorge Horacio Brito, his son Jorge Pablo Brito and his long-time business partner and brother-in-law Delfín Jorge Ezequiel Carballo, all of whom joined the company’s board a year prior to the rebrand in 2011.

Brito was the long-time head of Argentina’s Grupo Macro, which includes and was built around Banco Macro. Brito’s early banking enterprise was initially launched as a financial company during the 1970s, when Argentina was under dictatorship. His company was closely related to figures who would later become top officials in the government of Raúl Alfonsín, after Argentina transitioned away from dictatorship and toward “democracy.” One such figure was Mario Brodersohn, who was Alfonsín’s Treasury Secretary when Brito and Banco Macro were granted banking licenses in the late 1980s. Brito allegedly used his close ties to the government for privileged access to information. In one notorious example, his bank bought 3 million dollars prior to the Alfonsín government’s disastrous “Spring Plan” (Plan Primavera) that saw the Argentine peso sharply devalued. He was investigated, but never charged.

Under the subsequent government of Carlos Menem and a wave of privatizations, Brito again received preferential treatment. When the province of Salta had its regional bank privatized, Brito’s Banco Macro was the only buyer put forward. Other provincial banks were privatized in a similar fashion, netting Banco Macro millions of taxpayer dollars annually just in payment for its maintenance of provincial bank accounts.

During the Argentine economic crisis of 2001, Brito’s Banco Macro came out on top, buying up collapsing banks and expanding its footprint. Meanwhile, the bank participated in the notorious “corralito,” a government policy whereby depositor funds were essentially frozen for over a year and Argentines could only withdraw $250 a week from domestic banks. During that time, the Argentine peso was, again, sharply devalued, and depositors lost a significant portion of their wealth.

Brito subsequently became extremely close to the political power center of Argentina yet again under the “center-left” Kirchner political dynasty. This coincided with Brito’s appointment to chair ADEBA, the Association of Private Banks of Argentine Capital. Brito was again a major beneficiary of Kirchner-era policies, including the decision to have ADEBA banks manage pension pay-outs. He was also investigated for his apparent role in moving suspect funds in one of the worst corruption scandals of the Kirchner era, the Ciccone Case. He was allegedly involved in several other corruption scandals that plagued the Kirchner presidencies, but was never properly investigated. His coziness with political power even continued under the “right-wing” government of Mauricio Macri, leading some media outlets to call Brito “the banker friend of political power, who never loses.”

However, it seems that Brito’s strategy to be as close to political power as possible was not only about making massive profits, but also about preventing investigations into his apparent criminal dealings. Banco Macro, under Brito, was an avid money laundering enterprise. When Argentine authorities began fining banks for violating anti-money laundering (AML) practices in 2010, Banco Macro was fined for just that five times in less than a year. A few years later, in 2015, Banco Macro had some of its activities temporarily suspended by Argentina’s National Securities Commission (CNV) for continuing to fail to enforce even the most basic AML practices. The bank then issued a short press release (without providing evidence) that it had, in fact, complied and, thanks to Brito’s political connections, the suspension was lifted after just one week.

Jorge H. Brito (left) and his son Jorge P. Brito (right) in an undated photo – Source

Brito was eventually forced to step down from Banco Macro following his role in the Ciccone Case, the aforementioned Kirchner-adjacent corruption scandal, as well as money laundering concerns. He returned to lead the bank in 2020, once he and his associates believed the fallout from the scandal had died down, only to die in a bizarre helicopter crash a few months later. After his death, his son Jorge Pablo Brito took the reins of his business interests along with Delfín Jorge Ezequiel Carballo, who was Jorge Brito’s long-time partner and brother-in-law.

When Javier Milei ran for Argentina’s presidency, he ran against what he called a political “caste” that included, not only politicians, but the businessmen who enabled and often benefited from brazen acts of political corruption. Banco Macro, under both Britos, has been a key financial enabler of this political caste, with some former Argentine politicians calling it “the bank of Argentina’s [establishment] politics” because of its long-running and often insidious relationship with national politicians. The Brito family and Banco Macro are arguably a key financial node that has allowed this political “caste” to function and metastasize. Milei has even privately referred to Jorge Pablo Brito, chairman of the board of Genneia, as one of the main financial backers of his party’s opposition.

Nevertheless, under Milei’s government, Brito’s Genneia has been given preferential treatment compared to other domestic energy companies and given million of dollars in government contracts, undermining both Milei’s supposed commitment against the entrenched “caste” of Argentine political corruption as well as his supposed commitment to free market competition. Perhaps Brito’s and Milei’s shared interest in turning Patagonia into an AI “hub” was enough for Milei to look the other way.

However, even the deals with Genneia, as well as Central Puerto and Nucleoeléctrica, may not be enough to power Kargieman’s Stargate Argentina. According to press releases and reports, Stargate Argentina is planned to have a capacity of up to 500 MW “to support advanced artificial intelligence computing.” This means that the data center will use roughly 500,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) every hour, and thus roughly 4.38 billion kWh annually. As a result, Stargate Argentina, once it is fully operational, would aim to use a supply of electricity roughly equivalent to 3.4% of all electricity currently produced in the entire country annually. In contrast, in the United States, all data centers, AI-related and otherwise, use roughly 4-5% of domestic electricity production annually. Kargieman himself has said that Argentina “generates and consumes approximately 14 gigawatts of energy in terms of capacity”, and that, with his data center alone, “Argentina would go from consuming 14 to 14.5 gigawatts.” Kargieman himself acknowledged this jump is a “significant percentage.”

On top of that, Stargate Argentina has claimed it will only use renewable energy sources, which currently represent slightly under half of Argentina’s total energy production. Some Latin American news outlets have noted that Stargate Argentina’s ambitions will be difficult to achieve given that, in order to have the advertised capacity, all existing renewable energy sources in Argentine Patagonia –– from the flared gas of Vaca Muerta in the Neuquén province to the wind and hydro plants of its southernmost regions –– will not be enough to meet its demands.

A data center corridor in the Neuquén province proposed by its local government. Some have speculated that Sur Energy will choose this location for Stargate Argentina – Source

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean the project is infeasible. For instance, the Neuquén province in particular has the promise of generating much more energy over time, though increased energy production would likely have to precede Stargate Argentina’s full build-out, as currently planned. Indeed, in a recent interview, Kargieman has alluded to this, stating that Sur Energy is planning “to build the infrastructure for the generation and distribution of energy to supply the data center,” but that it planned to partially rely on existing power infrastructure. In addition, the Milei government has made it a point to attract AI-related investment, including data centers, through its new tax incentive scheme known as RIGI, which provides tax benefits for large, often foreign investments in the country. Stargate Argentina is a known beneficiary of the RIGI scheme. This, coupled with Milei’s deregulatory bent, could allow data centers to quickly colonize Patagonia, particularly given that data center construction and operation is almost entirely unregulated in Argentina (e.g. they face essentially no legal obstacles related to their potential impact on the environment or local inhabitants).

“A Source of Dollars”

Like in many other countries, Argentines are wary of AI and, as a consequence, local and federal officials have touted the build-out of data centers, particularly in Patagonia, as projects and investments that will create significant employment opportunities for locals. For instance, the Planning Minister of the Patagonian Neuquén province, Ruben Etcheverry, has claimed that a proposed data center “corridor” in Neuquén will “open new economic opportunities for the local population.” Meanwhile, Argentine president Javier Milei, proclaimed earlier this year that, while “many fear that there will not be enough work in the Argentina of tomorrow,” these new industries –– e.g. energy, mining, critical mineral processing, digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence –– “will more than meet the demand for labor withdrawn by the old industries, and with much better salaries.”

Screengrab of Kargieman’s recent interview with La Nación with the headline reading: Emiliano Kargieman: “An AI data center is not a source of employment for Argentina. It is a source of dollars” – Source

However, the main figure behind Stargate Argentina, Emiliano Kargieman, apparently disagrees. Last December, Kargieman, in an interview with La Nación, claimed that AI data centers, including his own project, “are not a source of jobs in Argentina.” Instead, he posited that they are, in actuality, “a source of dollars.” More specifically, Kargieman stated that:

“For construction, data centers require employing thousands of people. For its subsequent operation, it employs about a hundred people. It is not a direct source of employment. [. . .] That is not the way this investment is going to contribute to the country [. . .] The development of AI infrastructure contributes to the country not only by generating a line of income from exports of computing services, dollars. It also allows us to position ourselves strategically and improve the competitiveness of companies and the efficiency of the State.”

Kargieman’s claims that data centers are not a direct source of employment is supported by local and regional investigations. One such investigation, jointly written by Brazilian and Argentine media outlets, found that data centers in South America “do not create local job openings and much of the investment funds [destined for job creation] instead go to technological teams, which are generally imported.”

Thus, even Kargieman has acknowledged that projects like Stargate Argentina are not about creating jobs for locals. Given this admission, it is worth mentioning again that a key architect of Milei’s AI policy and his alliance with Silicon Valley –– Demián Riedel –– had previously claimed that local Argentine populations were the main obstacle to AI infrastructure development.

Javier Milei and Argentina’s Digital Transformation

Once Stargate Argentina is up and running, who is likely to benefit most of from this massive Patagonian data center? Per Kargieman, it may not be his main partner in Argentina –– OpenAI. In his recent interview with La Nación, Kargieman noted that OpenAI’s Sam Altman has acknowledged to him (and also publicly) what many investors have been warning more feverishly in recent months, that there is an AI market “bubble.” Kargieman says that such a bubble existing is “normal,” adding that “all the major industrial revolutions were accompanied by bubbles.” In the case of those who invested in factories or other infrastructure in past bubbles linked to past industrial revolutions, Kargieman stated that “whoever invested in that building goes bankrupt, but someone ends up using the building.” Thus, he sees it as irrelevant whether Stargate Argentina is ever used by OpenAI or not and, in his words, seems to imply that OpenAI itself may disappear after an inevitable market correction.

Sam Altman (left) and Javier Milei (right) during Milei’s trip to Silicon Valley in the U.S. in May 2024 – Source

From Kargieman’s point of view, it doesn’t matter “whether it is OpenAI or not [using Stargate Argentina’s projected data center], what matters is the long-term demand of the sector.” In response to that statement, his interviewer said: “So, if OpenAI does poorly, there will be others looking to use this type of infrastructure.” Kargieman responded in the affirmative and stated that “the infrastructure is going to be used for something regardless of whether it is OpenAI or not.”

While Kargieman seems to imply that OpenAI may not be the ultimate user of Stargate Argentina, but rather a corporate accelerator of its construction, he does hint at one of the actors he thinks will ultimately be using Stargate Argentina and for what purpose: the Argentine State. Kargieman stated in that same interview that the State would be among the main beneficiaries of Stargate Argentina because, over the next decade, “States will transform to be more efficient using AI.”

Kargieman then added the following:

“This can only be done if citizens’ data is handled in an environment over which the State has jurisdictional control. A data center of this type in Argentina gives the country its initial stepping stone for a profound transformation of the efficiency and transparency of the State’s operation, based on data control. These things are not minor. It is a long-term strategic function.”

Open AI itself has a similar view. For instance, one of OpenAI’s press releases about Stargate Argentina stated that:

“In addition to developing the infrastructure needed to power AI, we are discussing opportunities with the Argentinian government to drive AI adoption across Argentina, as part of our OpenAI for Countries initiative [of which Stargate Argentina is part], starting within the government itself.”

If Argentina’s government is to be one of the likely ultimate users of Stargate Argentina, it is important to examine what its government is already using AI for and how else they plan to use it.

While much has been written about Milei’s laissez faire policies with respect to AI and corporations, including allowing for AI-only companies with no humans involved to operate in the country, it is his government’s use of AI that has been largely overlooked.

One of the Milei-led government’s earliest domestic policies with respect to AI came in 2024, when former Security Minister Patricia Bullrich announced that the government would surveil Argentines’ social media activity with AI in order to “predict future crimes.” To do this, Milei’s government created a new subagency of the Security Ministry called the AI Applied to Security Unit (La Unidad de Inteligencia Artificial Aplicada a la Seguridad). The new Unit works to “patrol open social networks, applications and internet sites,” in order to “detect potential threats, identify movements of criminal groups or predict riots.” The Unit also uses AI to “analyz[e] security camera images in real time in order to detect suspicious activity or identify wanted people using facial recognition” while also “patrol[ling] large areas using drones, provid[ing] aerial surveillance.” This aerial surveillance would also be fed into the AIs used by this new subagency. The Unit also identifies “suspicious financial transactions or anomalous behavior that could indicate illegal activities” through its automated surveillance activities, while also “us[ing] machine learning algorithms to analyze historical crime data and thus predict future crimes.” The program is remarkably similar to a U.S. proposal that was made under the first Trump administration in 2019. That program, known as SAFEHOME, sought to use AI analytics on Americans’ social media posts to identify potential “warning signs” of individuals who may commit acts of violence, allowing those individuals to be “disrupted” by the government before they could commit an illegal act.

Around the same time that the AI Applied to Security Unit was created in Argentina, it was also reported that the Milei-led government planned to replace human government workers and organizations with AI, further underscoring Milei’s commitment to the Argentine State’s “digital transformation.”

More recently, in May of this year, Milei’s government announced a new AI public policy “innovation” – the creation of a “digital twin” for every Argentine based on their online activity, as surveilled by the State. This “twin” would then be cross-referenced with other government databases and then used to create predictions that would then inform public policies. This, notably, is quite similar in some ways to the concept of futarchy, which seeks to use prediction markets to dictate public policy. In announcing the policy on X (formerly Twitter), Milei remarked that “Argentina anticipates the future, because the future does not wait” and treated this new policy “innovation” as a global milestone.

In announcing the policy, the Argentine government stated that: “a State that not only observes reality once the problems have already occurred, but also has the capacity for anticipation, simulation and prevention.” It then described a “digital twin” as “a tool aimed at transforming data into prediction capacity and strategic design of public policies.” The video Milei posted to X when he announced the policy noted that this use of a “social digital twin” would allow the State to “predict the future” from a person’s childhood until “autonomy” (i.e. adulthood) in order to “anticipate the impact at each [life] stage.” One image shown in that video shows Argentina’s Minister of Human Capital, Sandra Pettovello, talking to officials from the United Nations and European Union as part of the project. It also displays the logo of Amazon Web Services (AWS), a CIA contractor, suggesting that they would also be involved in the project. However, the Ministry later clarified that “no external companies” would be involved in the development of the system.

An image from the “digital twin” announcement video Milei posted to X showing Sandra Pettovello talking to UN and EU officials as part of the new policy – Source

Notably the concept of the “digital twin” was developed in the 1960s by NASA, which –– as previously explained –– played a major role in Kargieman’s past and his decision to launch his company Satellogic. As previously noted, Kargieman’s company is now shifting gears to offer “Persistent Global Intelligence” by remapping the planet daily with satellite surveillance at high resolution for its clients, most of which are intelligence and defense agencies. Notably, NASA has more recently argued that digital twins are important for “predictive maintenance” of complex systems. When applied to Argentine society at large, the proposed digital twin system is likely to synergize with the Security Ministry’s new AI unit, which already focuses on “predictive policing.”

As previously noted, Satellogic’s soon-to-be-launched satellite constellation, Merlin, which will have AI-native capabilities will, per Kargieman, “allow us to do things we never though possible” such as “begin to predict the future” using AI-powered planetary surveillance. Satellogic and Kargieman are not alone in this endeavor, as industry publications have recently noted that “space-based predictive analytics” will be a “gamechanger.” One top executive at a Canadian satellite surveillance company was recently quoted as saying:

“Predictive analysts is going to be more important going forward. Be it in terrorism or nature in terms of wildfires, predictive analytics will aid the earth in a completely new way.”

Thus, Kargieman –– whose Stargate Argentina is slated to serve as an essential data repository for these type of AI predictive programs with national security applications –– is also committed to predictive analytics through his other main venture, Satellogic. Notably, Satellogic and its imminent predictive capabilities are being marketed largely to the U.S. national security apparatus and its web of private contractors. With Argentina a signatory to the U.S.’ new and highly secretive Pax Silica agreement, both Argentina under Milei and Kargieman’s affiliated business interests are seeking to make Argentina a critical node of U.S. power projection with respect to emerging technologies and the often Orwellian applications of those technologies for population control and the suppression of dissent.

As previously reported by Unlimited Hangout, a network of former counterterrorism and surveillance projects once hosted by the U.S. Military’s now shuttered Information Awareness Office (IAO) at DARPA were privatized after garnering significant public controversy due to extreme privacy concerns in the early 2000s. The privatization of this network of programs was largely made possible by one man –– Peter Thiel. One of Thiel’s companies, Palantir –– the privatized version of IAO’s Total Information Awareness program –– is closely partnered with Kargieman’s Satellogic, as previously mentioned. Total Information Awareness was explicitly created to target “terrorism” after the 9/11 attacks, but treated everyone as a suspect. Its goal was to use predictive analytics to stop “terrorists,” or anyone they defined as such, before they could commit any attack.

As noted earlier in this piece, Satellogic appears to be part of another, related nexus of companies born out of the effort to privatize major aspects of the controversial Strategic Defense Initiative Office (SDIO) or “Star Wars” project of the Reagan era, a project which was also closely linked to the architect of DARPA’s IAO, John Poindexter. As noted in previous Unlimited Hangout reporting, Poindexter was also a key figure in Thiel’s efforts to privatize Total Information Awareness as Palantir. Today Palantir offers predictive analytics with applications for national security and law enforcement, with the ultimate goal of preventing crime and terror events before they occur –– just like Total Information Awareness.

Peter Thiel recently made the decision to move to Argentina, largely due to the governance strategies, public policies and ideology of Javier Milei. Shortly before Thiel met with Milei and top government officials, the Argentine government announced its “social digital twin” initiative, leading some international and domestic media outlets to speculate about a connection between Milei’s meeting with Thiel and the project’s announcement. Many of those outlets made note of Thiel’s role as both a co-founder of Palantir and as the current chairman of its board. Palantir, unsurprisingly, offers digital twin functionalities as part of its product suite for both national security and corporate applications.

Thiel is, of course, also well known for his controversial political views. While often publicly posturing as a libertarian, Thiel clearly has no interest in defending the civil liberties of the general public, if his business record is any indication. His political views are better classified as neo-reactionary, as he is now known to be a central figure in the growing nexus of Silicon Valley “techno-optimist” billionaires who are overtly transhumanist and seek to balkanize and privatize the public sector into “smart” city-states. Milei, similarly has publicly postured as a libertarian and freedom maximalist, while his governance decisions –– particularly those related to AI –– show that he is functionally a freedom minimalist with respect to the Argentine public. His “chainsaw” approach to shrinking the government has been heavily applied to those agencies that had provided social benefits, while the size of the government agencies dealing with surveillance and “security” has ballooned.

It is quite clear from the evidence that what is emerging in Argentina under Milei is a beta test for what will likely become a global model for techno-authoritarianism, where AI-powered capitalism (likely with minimal human involvement) enjoys complete freedom while human beings enjoy essentially none. Herein lies the potential for a disturbing return to the data-sharing operations that were used to hunt and murder dissidents during the era of CIA-backed South American dictatorships, such as Operation Condor, in which Argentina’s dictatorship enthusiastically participated. In that context, it is worth pointing out that Argentina’s dictatorship had attempted to create “paper twins” of its citizens by collating its surveillance data (e.g. wiretapped phone recordings, etc.) in order to predict their likely behavior and if they might present a threat to the dictatorship. These primitive data-based dissident elimination programs were closely associated with the disturbing and extensive crimes of those dictatorships against their own citizens.

With the technology of today, Milei’s “digital twin” efforts and other AI-powered programs could rapidly resurrect and improve the infrastructure of atrocity from Argentina’s dictatorial past, allowing them to commit crimes against humanity and against human freedom faster than ever and at much greater scale. In these efforts, Milei has no greater ally domestically than Stargate Argentina’s Emiliano Kargieman, who is building both the planetary surveillance grid and the terrestrial data depository that will make it all possible.

How “Argentina’s Elon Musk” Is Bringing Technocracy To Patagonia.

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The Praxians—a new breed of tech billionaires—form the core of the Silicon Valley-rooted wing of the global oligarchy. The Praxians are a subset of the network of tech moguls who are embedded within and encircle the Trump administration. The Praxians are distinguished by their close affiliation with the ideas of the Neoreactionary movement (NRx) and by their enthusiasm for building their own private city-states.

Some Praxians, such as Marc Andreessen, openly declare their adherence to NRx principles. Others, such as Mark Zuckerberg, extol NRx ideology through their corporate sloganeering. And still others, such as Peter Thiel, continuously fund specific NRx projects, such as Praxis in Greenland (see Part 1).

Ironically, there are aspects of the technology that the Praxians are encouraging us to adopt for their own ends that we could instead repurpose to finally free ourselves from their hierarchical authoritarianism. We could flip the features of programmable digital currency, such as central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) or stablecoins, and turn them from the ideal tool for centralised control into the means by which we achieve monetary and economic emancipation. And we could use some facets of the network state—the Praxians’ own technology-based nation-building strategy—to construct new models of sovereign decentralised sociopolitical structures.

In my book, The Technocratic Dark State, I wrote:

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), such as blockchain, could be used to liberate instead of enslave us. Artificial intelligence (AI) could be used to improve our lives, not diminish them. Digital currencies, decentralized finance (DeFi), and financial technology (Fintech) could free up investment and lead to an explosion of economic, scientific, technological, and social innovation that benefits humanity, not just the oligarchy. [. . .] We could build homes, towns, and even cities that maximize our individual sovereignty and independence from authoritarian control.

It is a choice. It is our choice. Humanity, not oligarchy, is the dominant force on this planet. But if we don’t get on with building the world we want, and if the oligarchs succeed in imposing the world they want, future generations will face a long and arduous struggle to once again free humanity from slavery.

Praxian Libertopia Is Not Libertarian

There is no need to doubt what the Praxians and their oligarch partners want to construct. The NRx’s oligarch backers, like Peter Thiel, have been transparent—at least in part—about what they are trying to achieve.

Speaking in 2010 at the Libertopia anarcho-capitalist conference, Thiel explained why he co-founded PayPal and why the Thiel Foundation bankrolled the Seasteading Institute:

The initial founding vision was that we were going to use technology to change the whole world and basically overturn the monetary system of the world. [. . .] We could never win an election [. . .], but maybe you could unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people, who are never going to agree with you, through technological means. [. . .] This is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.

This kind of rhetoric resonates well with libertarians, who are opposed to the imposition of centralised authority by governments. When, in 2008, Thiel seed-funded the “startup” called the Seasteading Institute, the media widely reported it as a libertarian project. Such media reports, which paint the Praxians as libertarians or anarcho-capitalists, are commonplace. Framing Praxians as libertarians serves as propaganda to entice genuine libertarians to make a massive error of judgement and get on board with Praxian city-state projects.

As Thiel outlined at Libertopia in 2010, in the Praxian world view, technology enables them to unilaterally change the world without other people’s consent. If, as the libertarians who have fallen for the NRx’s alleged Libertopia believe, the objective were simply to build parallel societies where people could voluntarily co-exist outside of the current political system, where their individual sovereignty would be maximised “through technological means,” then NRx-aligned libertarians would have reason for hope.

But that is not what oligarchs like Thiel, Andreessen, Musk, and Zuckerberg have in mind. Rather, they want to use technology to literally replace human agency with Agentic AI. They want to offer us Governance-as-a-Service (GaaS), which they will program and control unilaterally. And they want to change the “monetary system of the world” for their benefit, not humanity’s.

The Praxians are part of a global oligarch network that has adopted the smart city-neostate model as the best route to stamp its centralised authority on the entire planet and on every individual inhabitant of the planet. Their collective ambitions could not be further removed from the libertarian ideal.

The Praxians are highly deceptive. For example, Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto reads like an attack on the centralisation of authority and global governance structures. Andreessen claims that “statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, [and] central planning” are among the accelerationists’ “enemies.” He attacks the stakeholder capitalists and, by supposedly denouncing “the limits of growth,” also attacks globalist think tanks like the Club of Rome. Andreessen says that the self-styled NRx optimists stand against “Sustainable Development Goals” and other UN initiatives. Again, the attempt to appeal to libertarians is plain.

Yet, the Praxians are trying to construct exactly the world order most desired by the UN. The Praxians call it their “Network Empire,” while the UN calls it “multipolarity.” As we’ll cover shortly, the UN considers “institutional innovation” through a global network of smart city-states essential for it to implement technocratic global governance through the enforcement of SDGs. Contrary to Andreessen’s Praxian propaganda, the Praxians do not oppose UN sustainable global governance; they are working tirelessly to enforce it.

The Network Empire Manifesto

The Praxians’ ultimate goal is to create a web of interconnected smart city-states that are either public-private or completely private and that will form the NRx’s “patchwork of realms.” The United Nations (UN) supports the Praxian idea of a lattice of city-states because it views it as the most effective method of establishing, for the first time, genuine centralised global governance over the world’s population. (We’ll also elaborate on this point shortly.)

The Praxians are eager to accelerate the global governance agenda. They want to go further than stakeholder transnational capitalist oligarchs have gone thus far—by dispensing with the public sector entirely. Either way, whether the smart city project be public-private or purely private sector, the Praxian model of the network city-state—the neostate—has the backing and blessing of their international and “globalist” peers.

The original 2024 version of the Praxian Manifesto—the version reported by Gil Duran at his informative website, The Nerd Reich—has been removed from every Praxis Nation site and has not been archived. All that remains is the 2024 Declaration of Ascent.

Fortunately, Gil Duran preserved some of it, including the following excerpts:

Network States offer a path to crypto’s next wave of adoption by integrating onchain infrastructure into the parallel institutions supplanting the global system’s core functions. [. . .] As local communities dissolve and Nation States stumble, Network States will ascend. Soon, Network States will be your most important group affiliation, passport, and community. Network States will represent Citizens controlling trillions dollars of assets, represented on their native asset registries. We’ll watch the flippening of Network States over Nation States in real time. Network States will coalesce neighborhoods and build cities. The next global superpower will be a Network State. The next America will be onchain.

The notion of the system’s “core functions” references the 1934 publication of the Technocracy Inc. Study Course, where “a governance of function, a Technate” is described. The Praxians’ objective is to supplant the current Westphalian-based global order with a patchwork of network states, otherwise known as a governance of function—aka, a global Technate.

In the 2022 book The Network State, referenced repeatedly in the original, now-removed Praxis Nation Manifesto, author Balaji Srinivasan determined that “all value eventually becomes digital” and that “nothing officially exists unless it’s on-chain, in the blockchain system of record for that society.” The adoption of programmable digital currency by captured populations forms “the backbone” of the neostates. Though all references to The Network State have now been dropped from the Praxis Nation Manifesto, what remains is even more concerning.

In the new Praxis Nation Manifesto there’s a “Declaration by the Founding Citizens of the Praxis Empire” that is littered with quasi-mystical New Age junk. In that declaration, the billionaire Praxians tell us:

We, the founding citizens of Praxis, declare our intent to ascend [. . .] and establish a new form of human civilization: the Network Empire. [. . .] As the warrior-kings once sought the sacred Grail, so too shall we build an empire where true power flows from heroic courage and alignment with the divine order. [. . .] We, the founding citizens of Praxis, hereby pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor in pursuit of these noble aims.

Who knew that subjecting humanity to techno-feudalism would be regarded as a “noble aim”?

Original image taken from the Praxis Nation Manifesto. Now removed from the Praxis Nation Website – Source

To what extent the Praxians seriously believe this puerile nonsense is debatable. Their practical application of technology to build the “Network Empire”—namely, using artificial intelligence and surveillance technology—is less debatable. We can now see why Praxians consider AI to be their “Philosopher’s Stone.”

Within their “noble aim” of “Sovereign Intelligence,” the Praxians decree that “AI’s omnipresence in physical production, media, and governance will remake the world in the image of whoever’s moral paradigm it serves.”

Can you guess whose paradigm it serves?

The Praxians boldly outline how their AI-based sovereignty will serve them and their oligarch partners:

Artificial intelligence is driving the greatest power transfer in human history. As AI surpasses human capability, trillions in annual economic value will shift from labor to capital, never to return.

The AI revolution is seen as a mechanism to permanently transfer all power and all sovereignty away from humanity—whose labour is no longer necessary—to those who hold all the capital: the transnational capitalist oligarchs.

The oligarchy knows it is currently more exposed than it would like to be. Its ability to rule without challenge is in notable decline. Its vanguard Establishment does not serve as the protective layer it once did.

If there is a real race, it is not a technological race between nations but a race for sovereignty between humanity and oligarchy. Either we humans assert our equality, our individual sovereignty, or the unseen sovereignty of a ruling oligarchy will be strengthened and reimposed. That is the whole point of the new global governance system we’re about to discuss.

In the section of their Manifesto extolling alleged “Sovereign Intelligence,” the Praxians disclose their key sales pitch to their fellow so-called elites. They explain why the global governance agenda needs to accelerate:

We face a decisive moment — before our power slips away, we must gain control of our civilization’s mind. [. . .]

The $50 trillion in annual costs of production currently flowing to wages will then accrue to the owners of AI infrastructure — the companies controlling models, chips, data centers, robotics, energy, metals, and more. Those who control AI will shape our world through control over three key channels: The production of goods, services and infrastructure, [. . .] [t]he creation and curation of media, [and] [t]he administration of governance. [. . .]

As such, the beliefs and intentions of the people who control AI — the primary source of all goods, beliefs, and governance — will determine the destiny of every society where it is employed.

We should take the Praxians at their word. They are serious about seizing control of everything and constructing a system where a small group holds unprecedented power. Again, from the Praxians’ Manifesto:

AI becomes responsible for cultural production, physical production, and the administration of governance — curating content, growing food, writing laws, negotiating alliances. The small number of people prompting this tool will have power unprecedented in human history.

Writing that “Zuckerberg and Ellison running companies from Hawaii” and that Thiel “securing a passport in New Zealand” are examples of billionaire Praxian oligarchs exiting from “jurisdictions [. . .] they don’t trust,” the Praxians reflect on what they call “Singularity Politics.” The alleged singularity is the purported existential threat that has obsessed the thinkers behind the Dark Enlightenment.

In their reflection on the singularity, the Praxians lay out their Network Empire-building strategy in full:

Digital Nations are polities that form online around shared values, accumulate economic and political capacity, and settle physical territory. As existing nations lose coherence, Digital Nations will fill the void, [. . .] powered by their Sovereign [Artificial] Intelligence. Praxis is the first Digital Nation. We are uniting [. . .] $2T tech net worth in a coalition dedicated to the revitalization of Western Civilization.

We are building a shared way of life, aligned technology, and eventually physical territory. As AI alters the political landscape, we must act before misaligned governments accumulate power they were never built to wield.

The kind of power oligarchs accumulate and exercise is not meant for governments to wield, and, according to them, it never was intended for this purpose. After all, oligarchs are the rarefied few who assume for themselves the divine right of kings. The Praxians’ Network Empire is the methodology they propose to finally secure total global control.

The Praxians’ Secret Enclaves

As previously discussed in this series, Praxians Peter Thiel and Alex Karp sit on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group. Occupying this lofty position proves they have already been invited to join the same global oligarchy that they have attempted to posture against publicly. Thiel also runs a more technology-focused globalist think tank through his off-the-record discussion group for “leaders” called Dialog.

As recently reported by WIRED, a Swiss hacktivist who goes by the name of maia arson crimew claims to have accessed the Dialog website source code, which reveals an attendees list that WIRED journalists say they have seen and confirmed. That the information provided by WIRED is congruent with numerous other reports about the secretive Dialog group makes the WIRED story plausible. The names shown on the list of invitees, such as Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, Joe Lonsdale, and Jared Kushner, also lend it credibility.

The reported topics for discussion at Dialog 2026 are not surprising. “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “Build-a-Cult” are precisely the kind of ideas that secretive oligarch-led think tanks often explore. Not surprisingly, all attendees—most notably the selected politicians and government officials—tried to avoid public scrutiny by signing up using only private email addresses. Power is supposed to be wielded unseen.

Writing on Substack, Hans Jonsson explained that Auren Hoffman, Dialog’s co-founder and chairman, has developed technology firms, such as Safegraph and LiveRamp, that specialise in data harvesting, analysis, and surveillance. Jonsson also noted that, via Dialog, Hoffman has had “off-the-record” chats with government insiders, including Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent and US Sen. Ted Cruz (TX), chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Cruz’s committee oversees the conduct of the Federal Trade Commission, among other matters. The FTC supposedly controls the nation’s antitrust (data privacy) regulations.

Jonsson astutely observed:

The people who build the surveillance systems sit in private rooms with the people who are supposed to regulate and oversee those systems. Off the record. No government email. No public disclosure. Dialog isn’t just a dinner club. It’s where the regulated and the regulator meet without a transcript.

That’s the truth. In reality, so-called elites and state officials, working in partnership, privately collude. They never openly disclose what they are trying to achieve together. This has always been how hierarchical power structures operate. Unfortunately, enabling the technocratic rule of oligarchs is the purpose of the modern system. And, unfortunately, we can see all too clearly how their technocratic rule is evolving.

A New World Economy Under BIS Sovereignty

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the central bank for central banks, has made itself the key institution in the oligarchy’s global monetary and economic remodelling plan.

In The Technocratic Dark State, I observed:

In Working Papers No 1178 [published in April 2024], the BIS described the construction of a decentralized, tokenized, digitized world that will enable the recentralized (unified) surveillance and control of everything. To this blatant swindle the BIS gave the name “the Finternet.”

More recently, in March 2026, the Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), a globalist think tank closely linked to the Soros-Omidyar oligarch group, published a paper written by a research team led by S. Yash Kalash and titled “How The Bank for International Settlements is Redesigning the World Economy.” (For short, we’ll call it the CIGI paper)

In it, the CIGI accurately defined the BIS’ Finternet (which from now on, in keeping with the CIGI paper, we will refer to in the lowercase as the “finternet”):

[It is] a unified, programmable financial internet, where digital money, tokenized assets, identity credentials and compliance logic operate seamlessly across jurisdictions. [. . .] [I]t is a meta-network of interoperable financial systems. [. . .] In a finternet world, assets and money are no longer separate categories; they coexist on a common ledger framework. [. . .] Trust and compliance in the finternet hinge on verifiable digital identity. [The finternet] embeds [digital] identity as infrastructure. [Programmable] code [. . .] governs how money and assets interact. [Programmable] smart contracts [determine] how financial logic instruments such as interest payments, taxes, compliance checks and even monetary policy triggers can be embedded directly into tokens and payment instructions.

Graphical representation of the BIS’ finternet from the authors of CIGI Papers No. 351, March 2026 – Source

Programmable digital currency (PDCs), linked to the digital identities of everyone and everything—from individual human beings to all businesses, alongside existing and new tokenised asset classes and every device connected to the Internet of Things—is the envisaged “backbone” of this hoped-for global governance system. Once the interoperable system is in place, resolving all transactions on a permissioned unified ledger will give those who have access to the program unprecedented control of the planet’s economy.

The CIGI paper examines the forty-five monetary system redesign projects that the BIS has run through its various international innovations hubs in recent years. Nearly all of these projects explored, to a greater or lesser extent, the practical design and application of interoperability. IBM defines “interoperability” as a technological “standards-based approach to enabling different IT systems to exchange data and share functionality with minimal end user intervention.”

The BIS has published a string of subsequent project reports since 2020.

One example, according to the CIGI paper, was the mBridge project, the results of which were published in 2022. The mBridge project was an experiment conducted by the BIS in league with “the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the UAE” to create “a multi-CBDC [Central Banks Digital Currency] platform.” The idea was to see if “different national currencies can transact instantly and directly.”

Another example, according to CIGI, was the Agora project, the results of which were published in 2024. The Agora project was an experiment in which the BIS collaborated with “seven central banks and 40 private financial institutions” to “test the desirability, feasibility and viability of a multi-currency, unified ledger for wholesale cross-border payments,” using systems like mBridge.

The mBridge project, CIGI observed, tested the feasibility of an International Monetary and Financial System (IMFS) that “transforms liquidity geography.”

The current IMFS relies on the “liquidity”—the relative ease of converting assets into capital (cash)—that primarily stems from the trading conducted in the world’s financial centres (the top three being New York, London, and Hong Kong). CIGI noted that mBridge essentially creates a new IMFS where “instead of liquidity pools held in New York or London, settlement can occur anywhere a node of trust exists.”

The BIS intends the “nodes” to be “central bank nodes” on “a unified, programmable financial internet”—the “unified ledger” underpinning the finternet. The CIGI paper points out that a “unified ledger” does not infer the creation of “a single database” but rather “a network of interoperable ledgers linked through standardized APIs [Application Programming Interfaces], digital identity frameworks and verifiable credential systems.”

It is important to appreciate that the CIGI paper was written by a CIGI team led by senior fellow S. Yash Kalash and that they were representing a faction of the global oligarchy. Consequently, when referencing the proposed “unified ledger,” the CIGI paper claimed that there is no implied “centralized authority.” This was directly contradicted within the same paper, however. The CIGI authors also outlined how the BIS’ interoperable finternet system operates as an economic dictatorship:

To understand the emerging digital global order, one must see the BIS not merely as a bank, but rather as the protocol layer of twenty-first-century power — the invisible architect engineering the standards through which the world’s next financial system will operate.

Of course such a system consolidates centralized authority, to an almost unimaginable degree. It is irrational to pretend otherwise.

From the CIGI paper, we can see that, regardless of whatever interoperable wholesale (“reserve”) digital currencies are used, the clearing and settlement of any trade or transaction are set to resolve through the anticipated “nodes.” We can also see that the BIS, which effectively controls the nodes, is building out its global hegemony for a multipolar world. It is assisted in this endeavour by the global public-private partnership (G3P) in which the Praxians are notable partners.

Graphical representation of the Global Public Private Partnership as described in the book “Pseudopandemic: New Normal Technocracy” by Iain Davis – Source

The current IMFS operates as a two-tier system. Transactions conducted everyday by individuals and businesses, usually via commercial bank balance transfers, occur on the “broad” currency layer. Some form of settlement netting eventually enables the commercial banks and financial institutions to settle their aggregate balance of payments between each other, typically using their central bank reserves on the “base” money layer.

In the world of programmable digital currencies (PDCs), broad money transactions are commonly called “retail,” and base money clearing and settlement are called “wholesale.” The BIS would prefer to maintain the two-tier system, where retail PDC transactions clear and settle on the wholesale PDC layer. Instead of being called “two-tier,” however, the two-tier system is referred to as the “hybrid” model of digital currency “ecosystems.”

The Global Blockchain Council, which partners with numerous multinational corporations, government agencies, and academic institutions in hundreds of countries, considered the likely practical adoption of the hybrid model:

In practice, many ecosystems will use a combination of stablecoins, bank money, and potentially CBDCs. Stablecoins [will be used] as the programmable settlement layer for consumer and internet-native payments, [t]okenized deposits or bank-issued stablecoins for regulated payment flows and [. . .] [w]holesale CBDCs to modernize interbank settlement and support tokenized securities settlement with stronger finality guarantees.

Yet the CIGI paper posited:

[P]rivate-sector developments, such as US dollar-backed stablecoin, and public-private hybrids, such as Brazil’s Pix, pose significant challenges and alternatives to BIS led architectures.

The CIGI offers no rationale to explain why the advent of these programmable retail PDCs, such as US stablecoins, would threaten a BIS-led programmable hybrid system hosted on its finternet. Discussing China’s retail and wholesale PDC ecosystem, which operates on a two-tier, or hybrid model, the CIGI stated:

The digital yuan (e-CNY) is already one of the world’s most advanced CBDCs, operating domestically with sophisticated programmability, offline functionality and integration into major retail ecosystems, such as Alipay and WeChat Pay.

Ever since 2020, the BIS has been preparing its “global stablecoin arrangements.” The BIS is seeking to integrate the privately issued PDCs into the architecture of its finternet by setting the interoperability standards for retail PDCs, such as US stablecoins.

There is doubtless some ongoing horse-trading. Representatives of Tether and Circle, the companies that issue the most widely circulated US stablecoins, didn’t respond well to BIS assertions that their coins resemble securities and are therefore not money. Tether made a public statement calling the BIS “ignorant,” adding that its USDT stablecoin users “don’t buy USDT expecting a return, they use it as a digital dollar.”

But Tether’s insistence that its stablecoins are used as “digital dollars” repudiates Sec. 2(22) of the Trump administration’s stablecoin regulation legislation, called the GENIUS Act, which clearly says that US stablecoins, like USDT, are not a national currency, i.e., supposedly they are not “digital dollars.”

Retail CBDC, like cash, is issued as a direct liability of the central bank. Unlike cash, its programmability enables the central bank to have “absolute control” over where, when and how any CBDC transactions proceeds. Central banks are ostensibly public sector entities, whereas stablecoins and tokenised deposits are said to be different because they are issued by private sector entities: stablecoins by non-banks, like Tether, and tokenised deposits by commercial banks, such as J.P. Morgan.

In truth, though, as demonstrated in The Technocratic Dark State, central banks are private sector financial institutions. Furthermore, stablecoins and deposit tokens are just as programmable, and they give “absolute control” to the non-bank and commercial bank issuers. The real three-way debate between central banks, commercial non-bank institutions, and commercial banks is about who should have “absolute control” of transactions using their PDCs.

Evidently China’s hybrid PDC-based financial ecosystem works perfectly well. This fact must please the BIS, given that the essential purpose of its finternet is to expedite the interoperable exchange between all PDCs. There is no technical reason why the BIS global stablecoin arrangements cannot be seamlessly integrated into the finternet. All that remains is for the various players to reach an agreement.

Interoperable Tokenisation on the Finternet

The CIGI outlined how the proposed new IMFS centralises global monetary power. As the CIGI said, the BIS can determine who or what qualifies as a verified node on its finternet. This may be a central bank, but it could also be a BIS-licensed commercial financial institution or an AI algorithmic agent that the BIS favours.

The BIS defines which interoperable digital identity credential the system requires, or permits, in order for individuals and businesses to transact. Through controlling the financial data standards, both for financial communication protocols and for tokenized assets, the BIS determines the conditions for cross-border trade between jurisdictions.

The tokenisation of assets is racing ahead, as intended. Recently the Depository Trust Company (DTC), a subsidiary of the US financial market infrastructure company, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), announced its plans to begin facilitating the global trade in tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) as early as this month (July, 2026). RWAs are digital tokens representing ownership of “tangible physical assets or traditional financial instruments, such as real estate, government bonds, or gold.”

DTC-enabled tokenisation is not replacing the existing financial system with ledger-based decentralised finance (DeFi). In keeping with the BIS agenda to centralise control over a global financial system, DTC-approved tokenisation integrates distributed ledger technology (DLT) financial workflows into the regulated, approved, and compliant permissioned system that largely already exists.

Considering the implication of DTC’s decision, NFT News Today reported:

Tokenization is no longer confined to crypto-native experimentation. The operational challenge now is interoperability — making tokenized assets work across brokers, custodians, exchanges, wallets, compliance systems, and post-trade infrastructure that was built over decades for traditional securities.

The DTC tokenised wallets are designed for institutional investors. Private sector financial giants, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Circle, Citi, and Morgan Stanley, are pushing ahead with tokenisation. BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) is already set up to tokenise RWAs, such as US Treasuries. The trading of highly liquid assets is moved “on-chain” by BUIDL, and the recent DTC initiative vastly increases the potential scale of tokenised RWA trading.

Programmability is built into the system. Compliance and distribution can be automated using smart contracts to determine who gets to profit and who doesn’t. Only the financial institutions permitted to access or operate a “node of trust” will be advantaged by the new token-based economy. These won’t be limited just to US financial corporations. Any “entity,” operating anywhere in the world, could be afforded access. Thus, “liquidity pools” move from their geographical centres to the distributed ledger of nodes on the BIS’ finternet.

Farcically, the CIGI paper maintained that the “BIS envisions the finternet as a public good.” Calling this blatant contradiction “the Paradox,” the CIGI insisted that the BIS is trying to provide “democratized access to global finance.” Yet, simultaneously, it conceded that the BIS’ work represents “a centralization of governance power unprecedented in modern finance.”

Tying itself in more illogical knots, the CIGI added that the “same architectures that democratize access to payments also consolidate decision-making authority in the institutions designing the code.”

There is no “Paradox” here. No institution purposefully designs systems that centralise power to such an incredible extent for the “public good.” The centralisation of authority over the proposed digital IMFS is exactly the BIS’ intention. The motive couldn’t be more obvious. Otherwise, why build such a system?

The CIGI report eventually revealed the central propaganda theme that its oligarch benefactors wish to promote. Insisting that geopolitics are fundamentally shaping the BIS finternet proposal, the CIGI argued that there is “a silent contest between competing visions of the digital global economy.” On the one hand, it said, there is “China’s state-centric model of digital sovereignty” and on the other is the US and EU’s “fragmented regulatory approach,” which is allegedly opposed by “the BRICS+ bloc’s search for parallel infrastructures.”

The CIGI contentions make no sense.

For one thing, nearly all the BRICS national governments have participated in the BIS’ finternet project. Take mBridge for example. Despite widespread media reports that the Central Bank of the Russian Federation (CBR) was suspended from the BIS due to Russia’s “invasion” of Ukraine, at no point did the BIS remove the CBR from its published list of member central banks. The CBR evidently maintained its BIS voting rights throughout its reported exile.

For another, the People’s Bank of China (PBC) was also a BIS mBridge partner. It worked with the BIS to test the possibility of “different national currencies” being exchanged “instantly and directly.” At the same time that the PBC was involved in mBridge, the PBC was also reportedly working with the CBR on cross-border payments using digital currencies (e.g. their respective CBDCs). Obviously, if this is true, both the PBC and the CBR were equally trialing mBridge.

Now we are told by Western news media outlets that the BRICS nations, including Russia, have used mBridge to “bypass” the SWIFT system and defeat various tariffs and sanctions. According to these news sites, apparently the BRICS nations have conducted “over $55 billion in cross-border transactions” “instantly and directly” via mBridge, using “India’s e-Rupee, China’s digital yuan, Brazil’s Drex, and Russia’s digital ruble.”

What this demonstrates is not that there is “a silent contest between competing visions of the digital global economy,” as the CIGI paper claimed, but rather that there is a shared vision and, in this regard, no contest at all.

A Contradictory and Absurd Hybrid War

In the hybrid war we find ourselves in, deceptive propaganda is trotted out to convince us to believe the contradictory and the absurd. Clearly, the BRICS’ use of mBridge evidences the interoperability of their programmable digital currencies. The DTC announcement expands the interoperability of tokenised assets to be traded using interoperable PDCs across borders.

Yet we have people like Zennon Kapron, a contributor to Forbes, who insists that “interoperability is dead.”

In his May 12, 2026, Forbes piece, titled “After MBridge and Agora, Multilateral CBDC Interoperability Is Dead,” Kapron bizarrely declared that because the BIS handed mBridge over to the project’s partner central banks, which then used it to conduct seamless cross-border transactions using CBDCs, “the era of multilateral CBDC interoperability is over.”

Actually, the BRICS have just used mBridge to show the world that the “era of multilateral CBDC interoperability” has just begun. Yet Kapron ignored the obvious and flipped reality on its head.

The apparent point of the Forbes contributor’s flimflam is to sell the idea that the reported tensions between nations—geopolitics—are what we should heed and that the “contest between competing visions” is real. Contrasting mBridge with Agora, Kapron opined that they were not “parallel CBDC experiments”—even though that is exactly what they were.

Agora tested the feasibility “of a multi-currency, unified ledger for wholesale cross-border payments,” and mBridge was a real-time test of a “a multi-CBDC platform” specifically designed to run what Agora subsequently sought to perfect. They are intrinsically and most assuredly two components of one interoperable finternet.

But by emphasising geopolitics, Kapron framed the Agora and mBridge projects as “competing answers to the same question, sponsored by competing blocs, with no overlapping membership.”

No, they were not “sponsored by competing blocs,” and there was “overlapping membership.” They were sponsored by one global financial institution, and it was the leading “member” of both projects: the BIS.

The idea that global financial institutions like the IMF, the BRICS development banks, or the BIS are constrained by geopolitical considerations is laughable. The BIS’ own constitutional Statutes, established by intergovernmental agreement in 1930, afford it “immunity from jurisdiction.” That means from any jurisdiction.

The BIS doesn’t respond to geopolitics. As a world sovereign, the BIS plays a major role in engineering geopolitics. It is redesigning the global International Monetary and Financial System (IMFS) for its own and its partners’ benefit, because empowering itself is the purpose of the global system it leads.

Zennon Kapron is a former global banking executive. He worked out of Shanghai, China, where he was founder and director of his own financial consultancy business, Kapronasia. Prior to that, he was the chief information officer for US-based financial giant Citigroup, a leading partner in the DTC interoperable tokenisation project.

Kapronasia is now an owned subsidiary of Atlas Technologies Singapore. Kapronasia’s consultancy services “help companies understand payments, banking, capital markets and cryptocurrency in China and Asia.”

The fact that Kapron infers that geopolitics between “competing [financial] blocs” determines how investors should strategise their investments in China and Asia and the fact that Kapronasia offers a consultancy service to assist them on that basis indicates that his article possibly reflects a conflict of financial interest.

But more than that, the notion that there are competing blocs is the purported basis for the Multipolar World Order. Specifically, the MWO theory argues that a regional balance of power system is needed for global “stability.” This is what Kapron is apparently promoting.

Most of the estimated “$55 billion in cross-border transactions” conducted by the BRICS using mBridge were ultimately settled using the “digital yuan,” also known as the “digital renminbi” (e-CNY). Furthermore, UAE and Saudi central banks were prominent mBridge development partners. Consequently, Kapron wrote, “mBridge was in practice a renminbi-denominated wholesale settlement rail for trade between China and the Gulf, running outside the dollar correspondent system.”

Because he dismissed interoperability, which has been nearly the sole focus of the BIS for the last decade or more, Kapron had to make the (incorrect) case that Vladimir Putin’s suggested wholesale “BRICS Bridge”—alongside numerous retail currency payment systems, such as “Indonesia’s QRIS, Singapore’s PayNow, and Malaysia’s DuitNow”—is further proof that “interoperability is dead.”

Hardly.

In touting the alleged currency war, Kapron directed readers away from the BIS’ global finternet project and urged them toward the false assumption that the development of digital currencies should be seen in terms of a geopolitical competition between “blocs.” He concluded with this maddening piece of propaganda:

What comes next is a fragmented map of bilateral, bloc-specific, and corporate-built corridors, negotiated one pair of countries at a time. There is no single global rail in it.

He’s got it backwards. The finternet is the “single global rail” running through and interoperably linking (not fragmenting) the “bilateral, bloc-specific, and corporate-built corridors.”

Sadly, by publishing in Forbes, Kapron was informing the chattering middle-class business intelligentsia—or so they thought. Yet, seemingly, his narrative diametrically opposed reality. His readers were, it appears, sorely misled with regard to the new, cohesive global IMFS that is obviously being constructed.

Let’s return to the CIGI May 2026 paper. On the subject of the new IMFS being built, the report concluded:

Collectively, these initiatives aim to create a plural yet interoperable monetary ecosystem — a world where digital currencies of different nations can coexist and interact seamlessly, governed by shared technical and legal standards rather than by the dominance of any single reserve currency. In doing so, they begin to redefine the geography of liquidity, shifting the gravitational centre of global payments from legacy financial hubs to distributed networks of central bank nodes.

Just as in Kapron’s article, so in the CIGI report is there a lot of hybrid propaganda. Nonetheless, the CIGI report’s conclusion, once appropriately filtered, is correct. The BIS and its international coalition of public and private partners are indeed developing a global hybrid IMFS in which PDCs “coexist and interact seamlessly”—an “interoperable monetary ecosystem.” This system will essentially create what current Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney once called a “Synthetic Hegemonic Currency” (SHC).

Speaking in August 2019, when he was Governor of the Bank of England, Carney stressed the importance of constructing a SHC for a “multipolar IMFS” to boom. The SHC he conceptualised was not a single dominant reserve currency but rather a digital “basket of currencies” that could collectively be “seen as reliable reserve assets.” The imperative, Carney said, was to make the IMFS “worthy of the diverse, multipolar global economy that is emerging.”

Seven years later, the CIGI paper referenced this new interoperable finternet-based IMFS as the “proposed multipolar digital financial order (MDFO)” and gave the reason the BIS was building it:

Ultimately, the BIS’s innovation ecosystem represents a new form of monetary hegemony, not through currency dominance but through infrastructure governance. By defining the technical foundations of the finternet, the BIS ensures that even in a multipolar world, the core logic of global finance remains interoperable with — and thus anchored to — the Western institutional order.

The new “Western institutional order” is not based on the dominance of the US dollar (USD) reserve currency or of any reserve currency. It is not based on the economic dominance of any geopolitical superpower[s] either. In the context of the envisaged “Western institutional [monetary and financial] order,” these concepts are anathema.

The CIGI explained:

In the coming decade, the geopolitical economy of digital finance will not be determined by who issues the most powerful currency, but by who writes the code of the system through which all currencies interact. The BIS, operating behind the façade of technocratic neutrality, has positioned itself as the potential custodian of that code.

The new IMFS, or Synthetic Hegemonic Currency system, designed to deliver the tokenised “multipolar digital financial order” is a global hybrid system of interoperable PDCs that operate on a global “network of interoperable ledgers linked through standardized APIs”—that is, on the unified ledger of the BIS’ finternet.

Whoever is given “node” access to “write the code” for the standardized APIs will be the “monetary hegemon[s].” They will be given global authority to control economies by forcing compliance with the coding standards and protocols decreed by the BIS. The “Western institutional order” could be comprised of any selected “central bank” or “licensed commercial financial institution” from any country anywhere in the world—or indeed of any corporation or other private sector “entity.”

Prospective hegemons definitely include the Praxians. As the CIGI observed, the APIs could be programmed using “[AI] algorithmic agent[s].”

Introducing the Praxians’ AI Agents

Using AI agents to control the global monetary system, the economy, and all governance systems is not some distant pipe dream. The Praxians are already building new city-states with infrastructure primed for Agentic AI governance.

They are not alone. Governments around the world are also doing the same, and the UN is actively encouraging them. The UN reasons that hard global governance can finally be achieved through a global network of smart city-states. The oligarchs behind the global governance agenda are aligned with the Praxians.

As we wrote in the introduction to this article, the Praxians are positioned within a wider network of oligarchs attached to the Trump administration. The people in the entourage that accompanied Trump on his recent visit to China and in the group appointed to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) are among the representatives of that wider network.

The Praxians’ clear collective priority is digital transformation. Everything they set their sights on is a target for that digital transformation. Their Praxian intention to turn global society into a Technocracy is exemplified by the BIS’ finternet and by the UN’s sustainable development goals. The oligarchs are united.

The various associated experiments and initiatives are globe-wide, not local, national, or regional projects. The oligarch vision is not dependent on putting certain politicians or political parties into office. They don’t care who holds executive power in any nation as long as they can control them.

Based on the list of PCAST members, we can see exactly whose advice appears to be reaching into nearly every sphere of US government policy (refer here to Part 1). They are:

• Marc Andreessen (co-founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz)
• Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google and its parent company, Alphabet Inc.)
• Safra Catz (executive vice chair of Oracle)
• Michael Dell (founder and CEO of Dell)
• Jacob DeWitte (founder of Oklo)
• Fred Ehrsam (co-founder of Coinbase and Paradigm)
• Larry Ellison (co-founder, executive chair, chief technology officer of Oracle)
• David Friedberg (unicorn investor and founder of The Production Board)
• Jensen Huang (founder, president, and CEO of NVIDIA)
• John M. Martinis (quantum physicist and professor at the University of California)
• Bob Mumgaard (co-founder and CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems)
• Lisa Su (president and CEO of AMD)
• Mark Zuckerberg (co-founder, CEO, chair of Facebook and parent Meta Platforms)

The most prominent business and technology company executives who accompanied Trump on his recent visit to China were the following:

• Tim Cook (CEO of Apple)
• Jensen Huang (CEO of NVIDIA)
• Larry Fink (CEO and co-founder of BlackRock)
• Stephen Schwarzman (CEO and co-founder of Blackstone)
• Kelly Ortberg (president and CEO of Boeing)
• Brian Sikes (chair and CEO of Cargill)
• Jane Fraser (chair and CEO of Citi)
• Jim Anderson (CEO of Coherent)
• Larry Culp (CEO of GE Aerospace)
• David Solomon (chair and CEO of Goldman Sachs)
• Jacob Thaysen (CEO and interim chief commercial officer of Illumina)
• Michael Miebach (CEO of Mastercard)
• Dina Powell McCormick (president and vice chair of Meta)
• Sanjay Mehrotra (president and CEO of Micron)
• Cristiano Amon (CEO and president of Qualcomm)
• Ryan McInerney (CEO of Visa)
• Elon Musk (CEO of Teslia, SpaceX/xAI)

We needn’t delve too deeply into this network to see where its members have found common cause. We’ve already discussed many of their partnerships in Part 1 and Part 2.

Now Marc Andreessen has been appointed to US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s newly reconstituted Defense Policy Board (DPD). Its remit is to provide “independent strategic advice and recommendations” on such matters as US military “strategic planning, the policy implications of [US] force structure and modernization.” Conspicuously, the board will provide independent guidance on “regional defense policies” as a new muscular UN 2.0 multipolar regional balance of power system emerges.

Michael Dell is another notable member of the Praxians’ extended clique. In May 2025, he authorised the publication of his own thoughts on the alleged AI revolution. Explaining how his company, Dell Technologies, provides data centre solutions for Elon Musk’s xAI, among other companies, Michael Dell said:

We are entering the age of ubiquitous [Artificial] intelligence, but it’s not here to replace humans. AI is a collaborator that frees your teams to do what they do best: to innovate, to imagine, and to solve the world’s toughest problems. And Dell infrastructure is the backbone, enabling enterprises to think faster, act smarter and dream bigger.

AI is not “intelligent” at all. In The Technocratic Dark State, for example, I stressed that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or “strong AI”—which could perhaps achieve intelligence if and when significant technological problems are resolved—remains a purely theoretical concept.

Systems engineer Sanath Thilakarathna has said that human intelligence is “characterized by consciousness and self-awareness.” No current AI is capable of, or even close to accomplishing, this cognitive feat.

Instead, so-called Artificial Intelligence uses little more than algorithmic pattern recognition. It can perform complex calculation with amazing speed, enabling it to emulate the appearance of intelligent speech, for example. But current AI is not, by any definition, intelligent.

Considering that Dell was selling his services and products, he understandably had to deny that not only is AI intended to replace humans but that it is already doing so. Presently, in the US alone, 11.7 percent of American jobs are directly threatened by AI, MIT has estimated.

Dell Technologies is leading the development of “edge computing.” In contrast to cloud computing—centralised large-scale data storage—edge computing is a framework that manages the data closer to the source of its generation. Combining cloud with edge computing creates cloud-edge networks capable of managing enormous amounts of data near the source. This is particularly useful for enhancing the data processing capabilities of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as smart vehicles in a smart city.

As Dell Technologies highlights, edge computing is also ideally suited for Agentic AI:

Unlike traditional AI models, [. . .] agentic AI consists of autonomous “agents”—software entities that can perceive their environment, reason about goals, plan actions, and execute them independently or collaboratively. These agents learn from interactions, adapt to changes, and negotiate with other systems and humans to achieve outcomes. The fusion of agentic AI running on edge hardware creates “distributed intelligence,” where smart agents collaborate across devices, forming a self-tuning ecosystem. [. . .] AI agents now work together, learn from local data, and make autonomous decisions.

The possibility that allegedly autonomous Agentic AI could improve industrial, manufacturing, or commercial administrative processes is clear enough. AI agents are not, however, beyond the reach of human control.

AI agents may be capable of a certain degree of autonomy, but only within the confines of their programming and they cannot “reason.” AI agents are programmed, steered, and directed by the people with the digital permissions to do so. Many of them have very specific agendas. Chief among the permissioned people with specific agendas are the Praxians.

Consequently, we should be wary of supposedly autonomous AI agents controlling any system that directly impacts human lives. When running health care and social care systems, financial systems, defence systems, and other highly personal, private, and risky systems, deploying Agentic AI is not simply the application of passive, dispassionate, logical algorithms to improve services and outcomes. On the contrary, it is an agenda-specific method of control exercised by invisible, unchallengeable, and anonymous human beings.

It is through AI agents that these systems can be manipulated for any purpose desired by the oligarchs. The BIS’ finternet-based IMFS is but one example.

Praxian Global Agentic GaaS

Programmable AI agents are ideally suited to enforcing Governance-as-a-Service (GaaS) upon captured populations. Through the enforcement of AI agent-based GaaS, the resultant Agentic State can feasibly dispense with any and all forms of public sector government.

In software engineering, GaaS takes a systematic approach to streamlining workflows. GaaS enables better compliance, risk management, and governance for software-reliant technical processes. It is in this context that the AI analytics platform Secoda describes GaaS:

Governance-as-a-service (GaaS) is a transformative approach that shifts governance responsibilities from internal teams to specialized providers, typically leveraging cloud-based technology. [. . .] In practice, governance-as-a-service integrates governance controls directly into an organization’s digital infrastructure. [. . .]

GaaS provides the automation and seamless integration needed for effective oversight. The core components of GaaS include automated policy enforcement, centralized identity governance, [and] real-time compliance monitoring. [. . .]

These elements ensure governance is consistently applied across the [system]. [. . .] [C]ustomizable AI agents further simplify access and collaboration.

Applied to government decision-making, Agentic GaaS “shifts governance responsibilities from [governments] to specialized [private AI corporations].” Praxian-backed city-state projects, such as Próspera in Honduras, are already implementing GaaS to control the behaviour of their human “customers.”

Lest anyone think that GaaS is simply “hot air,” Próspera Vice President of Growth Lonis Hamaili announced to attendees at an event in London earlier this year, “We’re inventing this new industry we call governance-as-a-service.”

The ordinary libertarian men and women who have been convinced to go along with the Próspera project are not inventing GaaS. Rather, they are participating in a GaaS pilot on behalf of oligarchs. Whether they recognise it or not, they are contributing to the global GaaS experiment that has already begun.

Hamaili appears to understand the global nature of the Agentic State project. Given that his remit is “growth,” he was happy to tell the audience that, once the Próspera project achieves critical population mass and establishes proof of concept:

[W]e can then scale [GaaS] globally and go from 1 to N. We are talking with governments all around the world in Eastern Africa and different parts of Latin America to be able to create these interconnected zones [Special Economic Zones] with a shared jurisdictional layer.

The planet’s first major public-private interconnected Special Economic Zone (SEZ) enterprise, with its own jurisdictional layer, is nearing completion in China with its Greater Bay Area (GBA) initiative. (We’ll cover this shortly.) You may wonder why governments would be interested in a governance system that essentially threatens their existence. But, as we have already highlighted in this series, governments are not in charge. They are marionettes whose strings are pulled by the oligarch class.

China’s government is not a tyrannical oddity. Governments the world over are heading toward implementation of the Agentic State. In fact, in terms of the deployment of Agentic AI, countries like Estonia and Ukraine have arguably exceeded China’s progress.

In Part 1, we discussed the October 2025 Times Radio interview that the head of Palantir UK & Europe, Louis Mosley, gave to seasoned UK journalist John Pienaar. During their discussion, Pienaar said he had spoken to “the tech minister for the government of Ukraine,” who had regaled Pienaar with tales of an “extraordinary new app which seems to do the work of [. . .] many government departments.”

Pienaar put it to Mosley, “We’re looking there at the future of the administration of government, of the working of the state everywhere.” Pienaar was correct. Though he wasn’t familiar with the terms, he was essentially asking Mosley, who is familiar with them, what he thought about the Agentic State operating GaaS.

Mosley responded:

You’re referring to the DIIA app. [. . .] It’s a very, very impressive development. [. . .] The Ukrainians have [. . .] created a way to engage with the state and all kinds of services, ranging from ordering a new passport to obtaining a divorce certificate, [which] can now be done online.

Tellingly, Palantir’s Moseley called DIIA “very, very impressive.” As reported previously by Unlimited Hangout, DIIA didn’t just spring out of nowhere. It WAS developed as an international public-private partnership program. DIIA is an “everything app”—precisely the model that Elon Musk is following in his efforts to transform X (formerly Twitter).

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2023/05/investigative-reports/ukraines-future-lies-in-the-great-reset/

Assuming the Praxians’ Agentic GaaS project continues to expand, the powerless residents unfortunate enough to live in Musk’s Starbase City—which we’ll discuss it in a bit—and other Praxian city-states will inevitably be subjected to the tyranny of Technocracy. Musk has openly stated he wants to establish the components necessary to implement Technocracy.

Among other quests, Musk seeks centralised control of all populations’ access to money. He has long argued that populations everywhere should be totally reliant on the state. And he has persistently advocated for Universal Basic Income (UBI), which, based on his extremely dubious economic theories, he calls Universal High Income. With his proposed X “everything app”—which is imminently incorporating X money—Musk practically declares that his aim is to comprehensively control “your entire financial world.” X money will become a “node” on the BIS’ finternet.

Musk is in the process of seizing control of how we communicate with each other, quite possibly including our access to the internet. His companies have already virtually captured some countries. In 2023, Ukraine’s digital minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, referenced by Pienaar above, was quoted as saying, “Starlink is indeed the blood of our entire communication infrastructure now.”

Mappr, the website that collates maps from around the world, recently used Starlink’s own data to make this case:

SpaceX’s Starlink is now the largest commercial satellite-internet network in history. As of 10 May 2026, its official availability data file lists 166 countries and territories. [. . .] The pattern is striking: Starlink covers more of the world’s land area than any consumer ISP [Internet Service Provider] in history.

The increasingly oppressive surveillance of populations and technological control of human behaviour will eventually enable Technocracy to function as intended, Musk and his fellow Praxians believe. Establishing Technocracy is the Praxians’ objective, and constructing a global Technocracy is the purpose of the multipolar global governance system. Enforcing Technocracy is what global governance does.

Technocratic Agentic Global Governance

Perhaps an illustration would be helpful here.

In October 2024, the World Economic Forum (WEF) set up its specialised think tank, called the Global Government Technology Centre Berlin (GGTC), in order to “accelerate government digital transformation.” Through the GGTC, the WEF brings together “governments, technology leaders, and policymakers to drive innovation and facilitate policy development” to the WEF’s specifications. The WEF is a strategic partner of the UN and the corporate founding partner of the WEF’s GGTC initiative is Capgemini.

Capgemini is a French multinational IT firm that is currently partnered with Palantir to run data mining operations and provide targets to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. Using what is effectively a US population-wide digital surveillance and targetting system, ICE hunts, and sometimes kills, alleged illegal immigrants who supposedly present some sort of national security threat to America. With the full approval of the Trump administration, Palantir has brought back the systems it developed on “battlefields” in Ukraine and Gaza and is now using them against the US population. Capgemini is assisting.

In October 2025, exactly one year after that GGTC report, the World Bank (a specialised agency of the UN) and the GGTC co-produced a blueprint report titled “Rethinking Government for The Era of Agentic AI.” But their “Rethinking” was based on a slew of false assumptions. For example, the report suggested that AI can “reason,” which it can’t. It also asserted that AI makes public services faster and more responsive to public needs, which it doesn’t.

All of us who have experienced the frustration of dealing with public-facing AI assistants know these claims are gibberish. AI is clearly being used as the administrative layer to separate the public from the alleged public services they are finding increasingly difficult to access and use. Deployed in this way, AI serves as a filtering and control mechanism that restricts and deters public engagement. Of course, it does not have to be deployed in this way. It could be used as a true public good.

The 2025 World Bank-GGTC report described the Agentic State in all its glory. When, for example, it cited the DIIA app, called the “Digital State” in Ukraine, it included the comments of Mykhailo Fedorov—the aforementioned Ukrainian minister of digital transformation—who said:

The Digital State was our first step. The next is an Agentic State. [. . .]

By realising this vision, Ukraine has already launched Diia.AI, the world’s first national digital agent that provides government services. [. . .]

AI should become the foundation of public administration, from automating routine processes to delivering personalised services for every citizen.

The same report continued:

The Agentic State represents a fundamental reimagining of how government operates. It is not just a matter of deploying individual AI agents within existing structures; it means a comprehensive transformation of public administration itself. [. . .]

Agentic AI can go far beyond the automation of existing processes compared to previous technology trends, and therefore enables entirely new forms of public administration. [. . .]

Agentic systems can reason through ambiguity, learn from results, and operate with genuine autonomy. [. . .]

The Agentic State is not a distant or utopian future vision but an immediate strategic imperative. The technologies required are already commercially available and become increasingly proven at scale.

Actually, it doesn’t sound “utopian,” and, unfortunately, it isn’t “distant,” either. And anyway, from where, we might ask, did this supposed “strategic imperative” to subject us all to AI governance suddenly appear?

Well, the answer, it seems, lies in the fact that we have a brand-new problem: a novel discrepancy between “the speed of law and the speed of life.” This mismatch allegedly manifests itself through “compliance requirements that change too late, enforcement that comes only after harm is done.” The solution, the World Bank and the GGTC tell us, is predictive AI that will “enhance strategic decision-making in the public sector.” How strange a solution is that, seeing as how Agentic AI inevitably dispenses with the public sector.

Nation-states each have their own systems of law that reflect policy objectives and that affect citizens through regulatory codes and enforcement. As noted above, just as the Praxians’ Network Empire will see “AI become[ ] responsible for [. . .] writing laws,” so, according to the World Bank and the GGTC, AI agents will enforce those laws this way:

In the Agentic State [. . .] AI agents continuously translate policy goals into adaptive, real-time regulations. [. . .] Before enacting new policies, agents test them across synthetic populations and digital twins of social systems. [. . .]

Instead of ambiguous text that requires interpretation, laws are also encoded as formal, executable logic. [. . .]

Agents continuously monitor how rules perform in practice, tracking compliance rates, citizen outcomes, equity metrics, and systemic impacts. When policies drift from intended effects or conditions change, agents propose adjustments.

With Praxian companies like Palantir and Oracle sucking up every scrap of data across whole continents, creating synthetic “digital twins” of populations should be a breeze. No need to ask us what we think. No need for policy or law. Just pump out the predictive models and automatically regulate accordingly, using programmable Agentic AI.

Given that there’s no apparent need for law, government policy, or any human “loop” in the regulatory process—although the World Bank and the GGTC do talk about the importance of human decision-making—it isn’t immediately clear where human decisions fit anywhere into the Agentic State model. The humans who program the agents are the only humans who make any decisions. The authors keep stressing that the planned AI Agents are autonomous and keep emphasising the importance of “Human-AI collaboration,” but human autonomy is notably absent:

Regulator [AI] agents enforce system-wide targets, such as pollution ceilings, leverage caps, safety baselines, while firm [AI] agents optimise local operations within those boundaries. Because compliance is monitored in real time, the system itself can self-balance: [AI] agents track collective performance continuously, tightening oversight when thresholds are at risk and relaxing it when conditions are safe. The result is stricter enforcement of overall outcomes.

The Agentic State is a model for AI governance based on outcomes, not on our needs or our interests and certainly not on our wishes. The Agentic State delivers Governance-as-a-Service (GaaS) in so-called smart cities. Praxian oligarchs are trialing GaaS in places like Próspera and intend to advance it further through many other projects, such as Praxis (see Part 1)—”the first Digital Nation”—and Musk’s Starbase and, as we shall see in Part 4, Gaza.

Agentic States in the Middle East

The UAE is another government claiming to lead the world in smart city development. The UAE is a federation of seven emirates, with each having a degree of jurisdictional autonomy. Dubai is the showcase for the UAE Smart City Initiatives.

In the midst of the conflict between the Israeli-US partnership and Iran, UAE Vice President and Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who is the Emir of Dubai, announced the government’s two-year plan to run fifty percent of UAE government services using Agentic AI. Reportedly, numerous “experts” were delighted.

ServiceNow’s Innovation Officer Jessica Constantinidis was one such expert. She discussed what the new Agentic State would mean for UAE’s people. “The lived experience shifts from dealing with government to government working around you,” she said, adding that this represents a fundamental change in the “relationship between the country and its people, with AI as the connective tissue.” Indeed it does.

In preparation for the move to the UAE Agentic State, ServiceNow agreed to a strategic partnership with Microsoft to provide Agentic State data cloud storage for UAE citizens’ data, harvested using Microsoft’s Azure platform. Microsoft Azure is the same platform that Israeli Unit 8200 evidently used to develop its tracking and targeting of Palestinians, which might give some UAE residents cause for concern.

Under the UAE system, residency renewals, business licensing approvals—and their denials, of course—will be made automatically, alongside “compliance checks, [control of] citizen communication, fraud detection, and [public] service [provision].” All of these system functions, previously the remit of the government, which could be questioned and scrutinised, will be decided by “a network of coordinated AI agents” operating “behind the scenes.”

According to another expert, Sumeet Agrawal, Vice President of Product Management at Informatica, the UAE Agentic State represents an “invisible government.” Like ServiceNow, Informatica has partnered with Microsoft to use Microsoft’s Azure cloud solutions to deliver what Informatica referred to in 2023 as the UAE’s “intelligent data management cloud.”

As a UN partner, Microsoft is also assisting the UN to use “frontier technology” to enforce its global governance Technocracy. This fact might give UAE residents further reservations about their fast-approaching “invisible government.”

Muscular Global Governance

In the 1990s, the UN announced that a “quiet revolution” had occurred. It explained that its global governance reach had now been extended to the private sector and that “the business of the United Nations involves the businesses of the world.”

A few years later, in 2005, the UN’s special agency, the World Health Organization (WHO), picked up on that theme by announcing that “expectations about the role of government” had changed and that governments’ revised role is now to “create an enabling environment, and invest in equity, access and innovation.” The “quiet revolution,” underway for the past quarter-century, has moved the role of governments, which have always represented the so-called public sector (as distinct from the private sector) to a new status as partners with the private sector. The public sector’s revised role is to establish the “enabling environments” to facilitate private sector “innovation.”

Effectively, then, governments have become “enablers” of multinational corporations’ “innovation.” What this often means is that taxpayers are now investing in—i.e., subsidising—corporate efforts to transform public behaviour, often without public knowledge or consent. While the private sector corporations have to comply with national public sector laws and regulations, the whole point of national public sector “enabling environment” is to engineer the required laws and regulations to “enable” private sector “innovation” to be conducted legally.

As previously covered by Unlimited Hangout, the UN is eager to see nation-states develop and roll out digital surveillance technology, which the UN refers to as “frontier technology.” The necessary enabling environments have been established with this goal in mind.

The UN has also gained new insights from the ideas of Benjamin R. Barber (1939–2017) and others. It now realises that, rather than continue to try to exert control over national—and often nationalist—populations, it will be easier and more effective to enforce global governance through a network of smart city-states.

Although all governments broadly support the oligarchs’ UN-centric global governance agenda, few are as openly enthusiastic about it as the Chinese government. We can at least appreciate China’s candour. When it launched its Global Governance Initiative (GGI) on September 1, 2025, the Chinese government said:

The GGI is another major initiative proposed by China [. . .] on the direction, principles and path for reforming the global governance system and institutions. [. . .]

China will remain firm in safeguarding the international system with the U.N. at its core and the international order underpinned by international law. [. . .]

We will leverage the platforms provided by the U.N. [. . .] to take active actions with all parties and contribute our thoughts and energy to reforming and improving global governance. Priority will be given to [. . .] the reform of the international financial architecture, AI, cyberspace, climate change, trade, and outer space, and to firmly upholding the authority and central role of the U.N. [. . .]

Humanity has become a closely intertwined community with a shared future. Enhancing global governance is the right choice.

Humanity is excluded from any debate about what its “shared future” is supposedly going to be. The ordinary people are utterly irrelevant to the decision-making process. We are just the intended subjects of global governance.

That said, through the UN’s smart city development partners, such as the C40 Cities partnership network, we have an inkling of what oligarchs want our future to be.

In 2019, C40 Cities published a report in which it described how we will be permitted to live. The report says that, in order to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals:

• Meat and dairy consumption will be banned;
• Daily caloric intake will be set at 2,500 kcal or less;
• Allowable plant-based food will come from “sustainable” multinational corporate mega-farms;
• Private vehicle ownership will be outlawed;
• Flights will be restricted to one short-haul return flight per year;
• No more than three new items of clothing can be bought by each person annually.

According to C40 Cities, consumption of everything, from water to energy, from raw materials to manufactured products, will be monitored, restricted, controlled, and allocated as deemed necessary by our appointed dictators—this is the purpose of Technocracy.

We might think C40’s 2019 report is just another example of unhinged SDG extremism, but that would be wishful thinking on our part. The deployment of “frontier technology” as a mechanism for innovative governance in smart cities, and the development by the BIS of the finternet, makes this unbelievable degree of centralised control over the lives of every individual frighteningly feasible.

To this end, the UN is in the process of reinventing itself as it continues to try to establish its global governance dictatorship. It launched its UN 2.0 remodelling project in 2023 and, at the time of this writing, is holding its third annual 2.0 Conference. The UN 2.0 initiative is centred on delivering what the UN calls the “quintet of change”: data, digital, innovation, foresight, and behavioural science.

Unlike you and me, Microsoft, a UN strategic partner corporation, is included in the discussion about “our shared future.” Microsoft is under no illusions about what the UN is trying to achieve. When rhetorically asking if the global “digital transformation [can] become operating muscle rather than a permanent pilot project,” Microsoft, hoping for the former, wrote:

If UN 2.0 succeeds, it changes who has information, who can act quickly, who sets standards, and who gets to decide what counts as evidence.

Centralising control, at the global level, over “who has information, who can act quickly, who sets standards, and who gets to decide what counts as evidence” is the almost incomprehensible authoritarian despotism that is the proposed UN global governance system. C40 Cities was not spouting hyperbole; it was serious.

This is the same global governance system that China’s government wants to safeguard and improve. When the Chinese government says it seeks “reform,” it means it wants to secure and expand its role. As we are about to discuss, if any government is demonstrating, at scale, that digital technology can potentially become “operating muscle,” it is China’s.

To reiterate a previously made point: the Chinese government isn’t alone in advancing the global governance Technocracy. Also on board for instance, is Iran’s Smart Tehran Programme—the Iranian government’s pilot project to test whether it can succeed in subjecting its own population to the same kind of oppression.

And, like China and Iran, the US government is eager to launch Technocracy nationwide. There are many smart city developments underway throughout the US. Hundreds of established and accelerated startup companies are vying for contracts to build US smart cities and install the necessary frontier technology. In addition, there are hundreds of proposed development sites.

If successful, the Praxians’ Network Empire project will supercharge global governance 2.0. Consequently, the Praxians have found willing partners on all continents.

The Praxians’ approach has found favour with other globalist oligarchs, who agree that enforcing global governance through a network of smart city-states will deliver a more efficient and effective global Technocracy. The oligarchy is offering private sector “governance as a service” (GaaS) not because it is committed to libertarianism but because it is committed to instituting a permanent world oligarchy.

The Purpose of the System

State Crimes Against Democracy (SCADs)—see Part 2—such as manufactured wars, fake pandemics, and other various engineered crises are useful oligarchic devices once they are combined with the appropriate propaganda. Our perception of these events, currently under siege by hybrid warriors, can be shaped to convince us to accept whatever policies or emergency measures are needed to move us incrementally closer to our technological enslavement. When the propaganda is successful, these stories can become truisms that no one ever questions.

It is through propaganda that misleading notions such as “there is no single global [financial] rail” and “interoperability is dead” and “we are governed by the government” wend their way into the public consciousness and subsequently become established axioms. The hybrid propagandist’s objective is to engineer public opinion and keep the people engaged in the fake system they are given. We can see this system for what it is only if we pay attention.

As reported by analyst, author, and journalist James Corbett, the aphorism that “the purpose of the system is what it does” (a deduction from the work of Stafford Beer) provides us with a far more useful maxim.

Corbett wrote:

The purpose of the system is what it does. And that is an incredibly simple, yet incredibly powerful observation that we can use to help explain what is actually happening in reality and strip it from all of the rhetoric and political platitudes and pieties that surround systems that are presented to us.

For example, irrespective of who is said to be in charge of the US system of government —a functional oligarchy—Elon Musk has consistently benefited from US taxpayer-funded subsidies and the contracts delivered to him by the system. This is not an accident. Transferring wealth from Americans to Elon Musk and his corporations, thereby empowering him to achieve his objectives, is, in part, the “purpose of the system.”

Bar chart produced by the Washington Post showing the total contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits received by Elon Musk’s companies between 2006 ans 2024 – Source

Musk, who invested at least $277 million into putting Trump in the White House, is a “Dark MAGA” accelerationist who wants us to live in a Technocracy. His family is steeped in the tradition of Technocracy.

As part of his Network Empire-building efforts, Musk is founding his own private city called Starbase in Texas. Arch-Praxian and NRx stalwart Balaji Srinivasan greeted the vote of 283 SpaceX employees to incorporate the city of Starbase with tremendous enthusiasm:

Democracy is creating startup cities. Moving to Starbase was voting with feet. Building up Starbase was voting with wallet. And incorporating Starbase was voting with ballot. This is the future of democracy. Not a two-party system with the illusion of choice. Instead, a 1,000-city system with the reality of choice.

The ambition—shared by the NRx, the stakeholder capitalists, Technocrats like Musk, and the dynastic oligarchs alike—is indeed to construct a “1,000-city system” that forms what Curtis Yarvin calls a “patchwork of realms,” otherwise known as the Network Empire.

Based on the concepts outlined in Nick Land’s Dark Enlightenment and utilising Technocracy as a tool for comprehensive social control, the Praxians suggest moving rapidly to a solely private sector governance structure. They openly advocate reticulated Agentic smart city-states that will rapidly grow as regional centres of power, strangling public sector nation-states and stripping them of their resources. Musk’s Starbase is part of that Network Empire project.

If the Network Empire materializes, then, for the first time, actual global governance can be achieved through private sector oligarchs’ unrestricted control of the distribution and allocation of all resources—Technocracy. If that happens, populations will be forced to accept private sector governance out of sheer necessity. Public sector “government,” as we understand it today, will rapidly become obsolete. At least, that’s the idea.

Democracy (which is nonexistent) is not creating modern startup cities, despite what Srinivasan says. Transnational capitalist oligarchs are. In order for Musk to grab the land for his nascent Starbase city, he took advantage of the tax breaks he gleaned by registering Starbase in a Texas Enterprise Zone—a US Special Economic Zone. Musk received the necessary approval to buy US territory from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

In our proposed “shared future,” our dictators will be the hegemons of the “multipolar digital financial order.” They will be the Network Empire’s “small number of people” who program the code and control access to the nodes in order to hold “power unprecedented in human history.” They will be the “founders” of the Network Empire’s smart city-states who will enforce the global governance agenda decided in “off-the-record” enclaves such as Dialog.

Obviously, we cannot afford to participate in the system these people are building. Its purpose is human bondage, pure and simple. Enslavement of the masses is their aim. Enslavement of the masses is what their system does.

China’s Smart City Global Governance Megalopolis

For more than two decades, the Chinese government has been focused on building the surveillance technology infrastructure, through public-private partnerships (stakeholder capitalism), that will ultimately enable the centralised control of all resource allocation and thus of its citizens’ behaviour. This is the essence of Technocracy. Unsurprisingly, Praxian Elon Musk is working with the Chinese government, not against it, to assist their joint development of the “frontier technology” that the UN wants to use to enforce its muscular global governance.

Just as the Chinese government’s civil-military fusion is not unique to China, so the imposition of Technocracy is not unique to China. Technocracy is being pursued by many other governments. The UK government, for example, is also imposing Technocracy on the British. The UK establishment, however, has acted hypocritically and has hidden its intentions.

By contrast, the government of China, as previously noted, has been more honest and open about its plans. As early as 2014, the Chinese State Council Notice concerning Issuance of the Planning Outline for the Establishment of a Social Credit System declared the following:

Accelerating the establishment of a social credit system is an important foundation for comprehensively implementing the scientific viewpoint of development. [. . .]

Accelerating and advancing the establishment of the social credit system is an important precondition for promoting the optimized allocation of resources [. . .]; and an urgent requirement for improving mechanisms for scientific development. [. . .]

Operational mechanisms are the institutional basis for guaranteeing the coordinated operation of all parts of the social credit system.

Scientifically controlling the allocation and distribution of all resources, and therefore controlling citizen’s behaviour, is the purpose of Technocracy. In announcing its Social Credit System, the Chinese government overtly signaled its commitment to Technocracy.

As we discussed in Part 2, much of China’s technological and economic development has occurred due to central government investment in China’s numerous Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and in the similar Free Trade Zones (FTZs) that often reside within the larger SEZs. For example, the Lin-gang Pilot Free Trade Zone (FTZ) is located within the Shanghai Special Economic Zone (SEZ).

According to the UN, China’s SEZs and accompanying FTZs are not merely hubs for technological and economic development. They are also trialing new governance structures that will spur advancements in Technocracy.

In its 2023 report on the “China’s Pilot Free Trade Zones,” the UN acknowledged:

The core function of [China’s] FTZ is institutional innovation to improve government service, expand integration (notably in the services sector), advance reform and encourage technology R&D for industrial transformation through policy tests and experiments. [. . .]

The Pilot FTZs aim to accelerate industrial upgrading through the shift towards an innovation driven economy. [. . .] This looked similar to the purpose of [. . .] the five Chinese SEZs. [. . .]

For the FTZs, the focus is using more comprehensive and innovative policy measures, [. . .] advancing “integrated industrial innovation”, and “optimizing enabling environment for industrial development” including facilitating freer flow of factors such as capital, technologies, talents, and data through reforms in various policy areas.

Via policy tests and various governance experiments, “institutional innovation” seeks to create the “enabling environment” for public-private partnerships to carry out the digital transformation. An enabling environment is, more specifically, a “business-enabling” environment, created for the private sector by the public sector.

The European Union’s definition of an “enabling environment” is:

The set of policy, institutional, regulatory, infrastructure, and cultural conditions that govern formal and informal business activity. It includes administration and enforcement of government and national and local institutional arrangements that effect the behaviour of relevant actors.

China’s SEZs and FTZs are developing the necessary frontier technology-based governance systems. They are hubs for integrating Technocracy into governance. As China’s government and Chinese corporations are very much part of the global public-private partnership, its institutional innovations are moving us all closer to the UN’s sought-after smart city-state world and the Network Empire.

The UN’s 2023 report continued:

In Qingdao FTZ, digital technologies such as AI and big data have been applied to establish a smart enterprise registration system. It is envisaged that this will drive much more transparent, efficient and convenient government service which is essential for sustained economic growth and integration into the world economy. [. . .]

Lin-Gang is seeking breakthroughs in ICVs [Intelligent Connected Vehicles], service robots, interactive terminals, intelligent wearables and drones to scale up high-end intelligent terminals and to expand demonstration AI application scenarios by focusing on intelligent manufacturing, smart cities, and digital security scenarios.

The UN went on to explain why the Lin-gang FTZ is of particular interest to the oligarchs who are behind blossoming smart city-based global governance structures:

Lin-gang Special Area allows more developers to participate in the transformation of AI technologies that drives the development of key application fields such as intelligent plants, smart transportation and smart cities [. . .] so as to realize the digital transformation of the whole city.

The Lin-gang FTZ is among China’s many technology sector R&D regions that the Chinese government is supporting to advance smart city technology—what the UN terms “frontier technology.” These deregulated regions are exploring the application of AI and how governance systems can integrate with the technology to develop smart systems, including smart cities.

The Chinese government is proud of its status as a world leader in smart city construction. With its Guangdong—Hong Kong—Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) high-speed rail project, the Chinese state is linking its smart city SEZs and FTZs together to form the world’s first genuine megalopolis.

This gargantuan project is the epitome of the large-scale deployment of the very “frontier technology” the UN desires. The GBA centralises state control over the allocation and distribution of resources to approximately 86 million Chinese people. The GBA is the realisation of the regional smart city-based global governance system pursued by the UN.

A Technate is a society under the dictatorship of a Technocracy. China is close to completing the world’s first mega-Technate, and every other functional oligarchy is looking toward China in the hope of emulating it.

Map showing the extent and scale of China’s Greater Bay Area project – Source

In the political context, one could say that “enabling environments” are the formalisation of functional oligarchy. China’s government is leading the way on this kind of oligarch-led governance. Ultimately, the transnational oligarchs, particularly the Praxians, are eager to see not just Chinese peoples’ behaviour but the entire world’s behaviour transformed, for the Praxians’ benefit.

Needless to say, the Technocracy-led transformation of humanity is also central to the UN’s multipolar global governance agenda. Earlier we noted how Microsoft views the UN 2.0 objectives. Microsoft explained that the UN’s new model of global governance seeks to control all information flows. The UN wants to decree who is allowed to act, what acts are permitted and where. It wishes to control the standards by which all systems, products, and services must comply, and it wants to seize for itself the magical authority to decide what counts as evidence and what doesn’t.

For such a system to flourish, the programmable Agentic State, operating across a network of smart city-states and providing Governance-as-a-Service, is the zenith of enabling environments.

Convincingly Broken Government

To summarise: The UN has been working in partnership with the government of China and with other governments on “institutional innovations” to advance its global governance agenda through a network of smart city-states. The UN’s ambitions coalesce with the Praxian dream of Network Empire.

The BIS provides the monetary layer to assist the UN and the Praxians to realize their goals. Its proposed finternet stands ready to stiffen the “backbone” of the entire new Multipolar World Order. In other words, an international nexus of extremely powerful forces has been formed to implement their shared global agenda.

As we’ll discuss in Part 4, Zionism appears to be controlling the policy decisions of the US government and Zionists are seemingly marshalling the most powerful military and the most powerful economy on earth. True, Zionism is incredibly influential, especially on US foreign policy. But deeper structural forces are using Zionism as a front to absorb public attention and to conceal a far more pragmatic and much less ideological global transformation.

What we’re looking at is the merging of: (1) the oligarchs behind the UN, (2) the oligarchy’s Praxian wing, (3) the Bank for International Settlements, (4) aligned international think tanks, (5) the global corporate network (represented by the WEF, the SPIEF, the ASEAN Private Markets Council (APMC), and so on), and (6) governments everywhere.

All of these entities desperately want the world to accept a new polity based upon Agentic GaaS smart cities. In short, they covet a Network Empire within a Multipolar World Order (MWO).

To implement their plan, though, they need to convince the planet-wide population to adopt the necessary “frontier technology” and eventually choose to live—or at least acquiesce to living—in Agentic GaaS city-state realms. Somehow, they have to persuade us that we’ll benefit by going along with their agenda. Bottom line: They must prove to us that representative democracies are dysfunctional and that Technocracy is the only viable system, the only solution to our woes, the only “order” that can come from chaos.

Ravi Agrawal is a frequent contributor to such globalist gatherings as the WEF’s annual Davos soirée and the Munich Security Council conference. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy (FP). The magazine is closely linked to the West’s Deep State think tank network. It’s therefore fair to say that Agrawal is a mouthpiece for the Anglo-American Establishment.

In a leading editorial for a 2022 issue of FP, Agrawal wrote:

By the early 1990s, it was difficult to imagine an appealing or feasible alternative [to representative democracy]. But with the turn of the millennium, global sentiment was shifting. As China’s growth accelerated and Western democracies struggled to enact economic reforms, a line of thinking began to emerge that democracies weren’t well-equipped to tackle the world’s toughest problems. [. . .] The world is a difficult place in 2022. But there is value in hunting for solutions to our challenges—however outlandish they may seem at first.

Other articles in the media have been echoing Agrawal’s contention in recent years. They’ve claimed that our perceived system of government is broken and that we can’t trust it any more. In particular, they have persistently alleged that the Trump administration is undermining democracy and have accompanied this assertion with numerous reports concluding that broken representative democratic governments need to adapt to new global realities. This Western propaganda, replete with China-maxxing, gives readers the impression that the West’s system of government needs to be updated lest it succumb to what it alleges to be never ending global crises.

One of the Praxian’s gurus, Nick Land—the author of The Dark Enlightenment and, according to Mark Andreessen, a “patron saint” of Techno-Optimism—currently lives in Shanghai.

In 2017, The Guardian’s Andy Becket wrote a seminal piece on the topics Land had focused on in his his Dark Enlightenment treatise. In his article, Becket noted that when Land arrived in China in 2004 he was deeply impressed by what he subsequently branded “neo-China.” As Becket tells it, Land thought the rapid economic and technological development underway in China was “the greatest political engine of social and economic development the world has ever known.” In fact, when Land developed the theory that would become the Dark Enlightenment, he already considered China to be an accelerationist society, according to Becket.

Last year Land gave an interview to The Spectator. When he was asked his thoughts on the Trump administration, he responded:

The entire American political system grows out of a Whiggish, English, liberal tradition – law, custom, distance, decentralization. It’s a system designed for power that’s invisible, distributed and procedural.

What Land was referring to was the NRx’s analysis of the social and cultural structural mechanisms through which modern sociopolitical power operates. He and his fellow neoreactionaries call this power structure “the Cathedral.”

Rather than oppose this ideological Cathedral, however, the NRx solution is to convert it into “fungible shares” that can then be bought by anyone with enough cash to own a slice of tyranny. The Praxians have come to believe their own technology companies, including AI firms, can create an Agentic AI Network Empire and thus capture the Cathedral entirely.

It is important to remember that, for the Praxians and for the wider NRx, “dictatorship is good.” Or, as Land is quoted as saying in The Spectator’s 2025 interview, “The best emperor is invisible to society.” With this in mind, Land highlights an important feature of the Trump administration from the perspective of the NRx—and the Praxians:

What’s new with Trump is theatricality, the sovereign as show. But the background operating system, the bureaucracy, the law, the media – all of that stays in place. The show is a symptom of the hollowness of the center. He’s the noise that reveals the emptiness. So in a way he both rejects and confirms the invisible model: he makes the invisible visible by performing the void.

That the invisible “background operating system” stays in place is good news for the NRx, because that’s the part of the power structure they seek to control. What is called representative democracy is the “hollowness of the center”—a hollowness that, in Land’s view, Trump exemplifies.

Trump’s noise “reveals the emptiness” and exposes the “void” that is representative democracy. Even this emptiness is useful to Land, because it shows that the “operating system” is all that truly matters. As Land said: Trump “makes the invisible visible.” Trump’s antics, as unhinged as they seem to be, are perfect as far as the NRx is concerned.

You’ve seen the Praxians described throughout this series as the oligarch faction that currently has the most direct power and influence over the US government—”Praxians in control” (See Part 1). They are bending the Trump administration to their will. Marc Andreessen explained that Praxians support Trump to ensure he is “more favourable” to them and their interests.

One of the Praxians’ objectives is to demonstrate to citizens of the West that representative democracy is broken and needs to be fixed. Their Network Empire solution lies in readiness to “save” us from the inevitable collapse. A Trump administration that appears to be clueless, inept, dangerous, and theatrical to the point of absurdity is very much in the Praxians’ interests.

The Noise that Reveals the Emptiness

Among the many bewildering and nonsensical moves it has made, the Trump administration’s decision to launch Operation Epic Fury and start a conflict with Iran was perhaps one of its worst. There was neither a plausible geopolitical necessity nor an identifiable economic rationale for it. Trump and his team couldn’t even manage to publicly agree which arguments to make in defence of their apparent decision to go to war. The world looked on aghast.

On February 28, 2026, Trump said that “major combat operations in Iran” were underway. The stated aim was to “defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.”

When Trump pointedly blamed Iran for attacking US interests in the Middle East, he was referring to “Iran’s proxy Hamas that launched the monstrous October 7th attacks on Israel.”

He also accused Iran of being the “world’s number one state sponsor of terror” and added that Iran “can never have a nuclear weapon.”

Then he said that the June 2025 US “Operation Midnight Hammer” had “obliterated the regime’s nuclear program.”

Next he said Iran posed a nuclear missile threat to Europe.

So, in February 2026, Trump argued that the US needed to “totally . . . obliterate” the Iranian regime’s military and nuclear capability “again” having already “obliterated” the same a few months earlier.

The first time he vowed to do that very thing was in March 2025, shortly before the US launched “Operation Midnight Hammer.” That was when Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, presented the US intelligence community’s (IC’s) official assessment of the Iranian nuclear threat to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Gabbard testified as follows:

The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme leader Khomeini has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003. We continue to monitor closely if Tehran decides to reauthorize its nuclear weapons program.

In the days leading up to the 2026 attack on Iran, the leading global news agency, Reuters was one of many Western news outlets to report that the Iranian threat assessment had not changed. Trump’s own Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, had previously hedged his words, saying that Iran was “on a pathway to one day being able to develop” ICBMs.

The February strikes on Iran occurred while negotiations between the US and Iran over the latter’s nuclear program were ongoing. Future talks were scheduled for Vienna and Washington. If Iran’s nuclear program was the issue, there was clearly no reason to choose the military option at that point.

On March 4, 2026, US congressman Seth Magazina posted a selfie video on Musk’s X platform reporting on a White House intelligence briefing he had just attended. He said the US Secretary of State (Marco Rubio), the Secretary of Defence (Secretary of War Pete Hegseth), and the CIA Director (John Ratcliffe) were among the officials who told the gathered representatives that the US IC still had “no intelligence that Iran was planning to attack the United States.” Magazina added that the Trump administration said it “does not have a plan for what is going to happen to Iran after the war is over.”

Possibly this explains why, shortly after Operation Epic Fury began, Secretary of State Rubio gave a completely different justification for attacking Iran. Rubio claimed the US launched its assault because that was precisely what the Israeli government was going to do anyway. According to Rubio, Israel’s “Operation Roar of the Lion” initiated Trump’s “Epic Fury.”

As reported by Reuters, Rubio said:

We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action; we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they [Israel] launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.

However, Secretary of War Hegseth gave a different reason. He said Operation Epic Fury was not prompted by Israeli intentions but was, instead, “laser focused” on destroying Iran’s conventional missile and drone manufacturing facilities.

In Part 1, we highlighted that the Praxians’ haphazard digital kill chain, which US forces relied upon, contributed significantly to the murder of Iranian schoolchildren, among many other potential war crimes. Operation Epic Fury was no laughing matter. Nevertheless, the farcical incoherence demonstrated by the Trump administration in the weeks following the launch of the operation was comical.

If we look at the timeline, reported by PBS, of official statements about the anticipated duration of the assault, the impression of a completely clueless US government is hard to avoid.

Initially, former TV personality and serial bankrupt businessman Donald Trump said the operation would last “four to five weeks.” Shortly afterwards, former TV and social media personality Pete Hegseth said “we haven’t stated how long it will take.” A few days after that, Trump echoed Hegseth’s remark, though he insisted it was “his own idea”—which he later claimed came from a feeling in his bones. Mere speculation—which he and Hegseth were chiefly responsible for stoking—did “no good,” Trump insisted. And, with regard to duration, he added, “It’ll be as long as necessary.”

“Necessary” to do what? That seemed to be a reasonable question to ask. For, up to that point, the US government had been unable to clearly specify what the objectives were. And yet its answers were about to get even more confusing.

Declaring tentative victory on March 9, Trump said, “We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough.” Trump didn’t even seem to know whether the government of the nation he supposedly leads was at war or not.

On March 11, Trump was asked if the conflict was a military excursion or a war. He replied “Well, it’s both. It’s both. It’s an excursion that will keep us out of a war.”

Repeatedly claiming the operation was “ahead of our time projections,” while simultaneously saying they had no idea how long the operation would last, Trump finally declared some sort of victory on March 15: “We’ve essentially defeated Iran.”

Throughout the remainder of March, Trump, Hegseth, and other US government officials kept saying how decisively the war, the excursion, or whatever it was, had been won and how the operation had been a “tremendous success.”

On April 1, 2026, Trump totally contradicted all of that celebratory grandstanding with these words:

We are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly. We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks.

On April 5, having already won but not won, Trump took his statesmanship to new heights. He turned to his own social media platform, where he habitually issues threats of war and, supposedly addressing the Iranian government, in reference the Strait of Hormuz, wrote:

Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.

Trump followed up this profanity-laced demand, on April 7, by threatening to exterminate the “whole [Iranian] civilisation,” then again declared “[t]otal and complete victory.”

Remember, Trump announced “his” victory on March 15. A month later, on April 16, Trump observed that the “war in Iran is going along swimmingly [and] it should be ending pretty soon. It was perfect. I mean, it’s perfect.”

By June 20, 2026, the Strait of Hormuz was closed again by the repeatedly defeated and frequently obliterated Iranian government and its forces. The conflict has flared up again as both the US and Iran squabble over control of the Strait of Hormuz. Observably, Trump has been and is detached from reality.

In Part 2, we talked about how, from a military perspective, the idea that the US could possibly conduct Operation Epic Fury in the way it allegedly did is highly doubtful. Added to this, the idea that an erratic, blustering, ill-informed, narcissistic buffoon like Trump actually serves as a functioning “Commander in Chief” of US Armed Forces is both hilarious and terrifying in equal measure. It is a small mercy, perhaps, but when US commanders have to plan a real military operation, they appear to at least have the good sense to eject Trump from their meetings.

In any conflict, war propaganda emanating from combatant governments is normal, but the Trump administration’s consistently incomprehensible rambling wasn’t remotely effective war propaganda. Not only was the propaganda narrative incoherent, the wild claims made were widely known and reported to be completely false.

Prices of everything soared everywhere. People died for no immediately discernible reason. Though, sadly, there were many reasons.

Capitalising on Trump’s Folly

The Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that will, with any luck, eventually bring the conflict with Iran to an end, was signed on June 17, 2026. By early July 2026, US hostilities with Iran spiked again. The restart of hostilities coincided with Trump’s appearance at a NATO summit in Turkey. Trump took the opportunity to complain about other NATO member governments less than enthusiastic endorsement of his Epic Fury fiasco.

Trump also used the NATO summit to drive a wedge between the US and its European allies. He threatened that a further withdrawal of US troops from Europe would leave them vulnerable to alleged Russia aggression. Once again, Trump’s apparent US isolationism provides further narrative justification for a regional balance of power structure in a Multipolar World Order.

Obviously representing the Praxians at the NATO summit, Trump again demanded that the US should be allowed to annex Greenland. Whether he knew it or not, he was effectively promoting the Praxis Nation and the Network Empire.

The Israeli government is not a signatory to the Islamabad MOU. Instead, the governments of Israel and Lebanon have signed a separate US-brokered 14-point framework agreement to potentially resolve Israel’s spurious claim on Lebanese territory. The Islamabad MOU explicitly sets Lebanon as a “front” in the alleged US/Israeli “war” with Iran. Like the US and Iranian governments, the Israeli government also continues to subvert both the framework agreement and the Islamabad MOU with its ongoing and extremely violent occupation of Lebanon.

Chatham House—the Royal Institute of International Affairs—arguably remains the world’s most influential policy think tank. Marc Weller, director of the Chatham House Global Governance and Security Centre, said of the Islamabad MOU:

The 14-point document accommodates virtually the full catalogue of Iranian demands. [. . .] The US is losing its key pressure points, whether economic or military. And Iran’s nuclear obligations are yet to be determined. Other war aims, like stopping Iranian support for proxy forces, do not feature in the instrument. [The US] expressly undertakes to refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Iran as required by international law. [. . . .] To extricate itself from its war, the US has been forced back into reliance on international cooperation and the institutions of the international system. And it is being forced to accept, at least nominally, the principles of the international order it had cast aside.

The “international order” of which Weller speaks is the UN 2.0 Multipolar World Order (MWO) built around the Network Empire. It appears that Trump’s military folly has paved the way for the Praxians their extended oligarch partnership to fulfil their ambitions. The Praxians have long sought a US war with Iran, and now (as we’ll cover in detail in Part 4) it is evident why. The deaths of innocents along the way was just more collateral damage in the Praxians’ digital kill chain.

Trump remains prone to threatening Iran, claiming that Iran will “no longer exist” and so on. His many previous utterances on the same theme have already proven to be nothing more than empty rhetoric. The US military actions that result, however, are still lethal for innocent men, women and children.

Despite the war having been “won” by the US many times, and the Iranian government comprehensively defeated on numerous occasions, the fog of war has never been foggier.

On July 6, 2026, the Iranian government possibly breached the current ceasefire agreement by attacking three vessels exiting the Strait of Hormuz that were reportedly not using the Iranian government’s permitted “transit corridor.” The Iranian government has not denied attacking the tankers but, frankly, that doesn’t mean it did.

After the “unknown projectiles” allegedly struck the Qatar and Saudi Arabian registered tankers, the allegations that Iran was responsible came from the government of Qatar. Reuters reported:

Iran’s foreign ministry said Qatar’s accusations were perplexing and that Tehran was diligently fulfilling its commitments but asserted that commercial vessels faced ‌risks for using routes not coordinated with Iran.

The US retaliated by launching further attacks on Iran and the Iranian government responded to this attack by striking targets in Kuwait and Bahrain. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain are all member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). As we’ll discuss in Part 4, they may have there own reasons for wanting the destruction to continue for a while.

Having started the Epic Fury violence, and engaging in his usual lunatic-fringe style of diplomacy, Trump called the Iranians “vicious, violent people” and labelled them “scum.” He told the press that the Islamabad Memorandum, supposedly underpinning the ceasefire agreement, was over and then indicated that talks would continue.

Journalist and associate editor of The Hill, Niall Stanage, observed that the on-off conflict in the Strait of Hormuz “sent oil prices spiraling, leading to sharp increases in prices at gas pumps across America.” Stanage added:

Prices dropped sharply once the MOU was set and tensions appeared to ease. But the new strikes and Trump’s more bellicose rhetoric caused significant turbulence on energy markets on Wednesday. The price of benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude oil had risen more than 6 percent as of 5 p.m. EDT.

Trump’s “bellicose rhetoric” serves as a market signal. The continuation of the threat of all out war, punctuated by occasional kinetic flare-ups, potentially suits all sides.

The Trump administration threatened to revoke its MOU-dependent license agreement to allow Iranian oil exports, thereby strengthening US government claims that it, not the Iranian government, is in charge in the region. The Iranian used the attacks to again highlight the “Zionist aggression on [Lebanon]” and reassert their claim to be able to make “adjustments to the Strait [of Hormuz].”

The purported tanker attacks enabled the weapons manufacturers, the oil giants and other energy companies, the banks and the financial institutions to continue to make record profits from the war.

But more than this, as stressed by Chatham House fellow Nitya Labh—former UN, CEIP, and DARPA—the ongoing intermittent “war” serves to demonstrate the apparent pressing need for better global governance. She wrote:

According to the International Energy Agency, the blockade has created an oil and gas crisis more severe than those of 1973, 1979 and 2022 combined. The battle to control the strait has led to a slowdown in global economic growth, widespread fuel shortages and deepened humanitarian crises around the world. In Sudan alone, shipping disruption has cut off medical supplies to an estimated 20,000 people.

Global instability, economic turmoil, disrupted supply chains and deaths were always the inevitable and seemingly unavoidable consequences of Trump’s Epic Fury, of Netanyahu’s Roar of the Lion and of the Iranian response, Operation Fateh Khyber. The world is coming to terms with a newly manufactured “geopolitical” reality as described by Chatham House:

Disruption to the critical waterway over the past few months has put a spotlight on maritime chokepoints and the vulnerability of international supply chains. It has also shown how the global economy – often imagined as fluid and borderless – is dependent on a few, narrow shipping channels.

Chatham House emphasises that the world is grappling “with the fallout of Hormuz” but adds that “other chokepoints could pose even greater risks.” The worlds supply of semiconductors could be strangled, threatening technological development such as AI. The World’s food supply of grains and soy could be cut off, oil and energy flows could be further disrupted, the battle against international terrorism stymied, and vital international trade corridors severed.

According to Chatham House, military misadventures emphasise the problem. “Major powers selectively interpret or ignore [international] legal obligations.” Global “enforcement mechanisms remain weak or non-existent [and the] global consensus around these mechanisms” is prone to fracture. Mere “crisis prevention” is not enough when “the legal and institutional frameworks, such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas, are no longer keeping pace with geopolitical realities.”

Therefore, the answer is obvious, is it not?

As Labh’s think tank colleague Marc Weller said, the US government, indeed everyone, now needs to accept “the principles of the international order.” The current Westphalian model is unacceptable and dangerous for the whole planet. Better multipolar global governance is required and we must find solutions, such as new transnational trade corridors that circumvent the “chokepoints.” The re-imagination of global governance through UN 2.0 must succeed.

This is precisely what the Praxians and their oligarch partners want.

In Part 4, we will look at the evidence revealing how construction of the Network Empire in the Middle East is destroying global geopolitical hegemony and eroding nation-states. We will show that the Praxians have been involved in every decision and every step along the path to regional deterritorialization—and that they have a explicit plan for the reterritorialization to follow. The Praxians have positioned themselves as “warrior king” saviours prepared to become the private sector hegemons of the new Network Empire they are planning in the aftermath of the destruction they are accelerating.

The Praxian Genocidal Kill Chain — Part 3.