Digital Public Infrastructure
For decades, international lenders have attached conditions to the loans they offer countries in financial trouble. The IMF’s structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s and 1990s1 are the familiar example — a government in difficulty agreed to reforms in exchange for access to money.
The conditions reached into currencies, subsidies, state-owned companies and trade rules. Ordinary people felt the effects, but the agreement itself was between the lender and the government.
Digital public infrastructure changes where the agreement ends.
In the language the United Nations now uses, DPI covers three connected layers: digital identity, digital payment systems, and data sharing between government services2.
Described that way, it sounds like roads and bridges for the digital economy, and it is sold as ‘financial inclusion’3 — bringing the unbanked into the formal system. In practice, it’s the mechanism through which conditions once imposed on governments now attach directly to individuals.
Marx described two directions in which money and goods move. In the first, someone sells what they have to get money, and then uses that money to buy what they need4. In the second, someone starts with money, invests it in production, and sells the result for more money than they began with. Use versus accumulation. Reality, however, doesn’t quite conform as what’s purchased for personal consumption often ends up taking on properties of investment.
Lenin, applying the idea to the Soviet state, argued that building socialism required what he called ‘accounting and control’ over every movement in both directions5. The idea was there, but the technology hadn’t yet reached maturity. Paper ledgers, inspectors on the ground, and reports filed every few months could describe an economy, but they could not keep up with it — even after the big banks had been confiscated for the purpose6.
What was beyond reach in the 1920s is within reach now.
Digital identity sets the standards for who counts within the system, what they are allowed to do, and which rules apply to them. Continuous checking of transaction data does the measuring work, comparing every flow to the expected pattern and raising a flag when something looks out of place. Programmable money then carries out the decision, letting the transaction through or blocking it depending on what the earlier steps found.
The whole loop closes at the individual purchase, which is where the ‘accounting and control’ Lenin wanted finally becomes real.
The pattern runs through crisis.
A country takes serious damage — a war, a collapse of the state, or years of sanctions — to the point where its own institutions can no longer pay for rebuilding. Money for reconstruction then arrives through international channels with conditions attached, and among those conditions are the digital systems through which the aid has to be delivered7. Once those systems are in place, they outlast the rebuilding they were brought in for.
The country is left with permanent infrastructure that was designed somewhere else.
Ukraine is the clearest example so far.
The Diia platform8, which existed before the invasion, has grown rapidly under emergency powers and now handles benefits, reconstruction payments and public services through a single digital identity9.
The World Bank estimates Ukraine needs around $588 billion to rebuild10, nearly three times what the country is expected to produce in a year. The €90 billion loan11 agreed with the EU in December 2025 only releases money when Ukraine meets conditions on rule of law, anti-corruption, environmental rules and digital standards.
Repayment is meant to come from Russian reparations that may never be paid12, which means the conditions are the real thing being bought with the loan. The money doesn’t actually have to come back for the infrastructure it requires to stay in place.
Gaza13 shows the pattern in its clearest form. The GRAD fund14, held in trust by the World Bank, releases money to a US-led Board of Peace15 that directs reconstruction. The World Bank president sits on the Board’s executive16, but the Board itself operates outside the Bank’s governance structure, and no Palestinian official sits on it.
A dollar-backed digital currency and wallet system is planned for making payments, with ‘terror-free zones’ acting as digital fences inside which the money is allowed to be spent. Before the first reconstruction contract is signed, the population will already have been issued with identity credentials, given digital payment accounts, and linked to benefits that depend on meeting the rules.
The digital payment layer is paired with a traceable supply-chain system for goods entering and leaving the territory, with private logistics operators managing warehousing, cargo tracking and security.
Iran, once the current war ends, will face similar terms. A country locked out of the international payment system, with its energy infrastructure damaged, will need outside money to rebuild.
That money will come with conditions, and the conditions will include digital systems.
The men carrying the terms between governments are putting documents together rather than negotiating them.
Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, working outside the usual diplomatic channels, have drafted the frameworks for Ukraine’s settlement, Gaza’s reconstruction, and Iran’s possible return to the international system. Neither is a career diplomat, and Kushner holds no official position at all.
The substance they assemble into the settlement documents comes from further upstream — from the fund structures designed by the World Bank and the EU, from the standards promoted by the Digital Public Goods Alliance17, and from the indicators defined at the OECD18.
The OECD decides what gets measured and how19. Its statistics and its lists of indicators supply the language in which compliance is defined. The UNDP then puts those definitions to work on the ground, through its digital development programmes and its country teams20. Where the OECD defines, the UNDP installs.
Chatham House works in the layer above both21. Its reports on digital government, on net-zero finance, on development agreements, set out the broader case within which the technical work proceeds. When a Chatham report argues that digital identity allows for greater inclusion, that programmable money makes climate accountability possible, and that shared data makes government more responsive, the argument reaches ministries and central banks carrying real authority.
The institution doesn’t give orders, per se. It supplies the framing in which the orders make sense. Chatham delivers the justification.
The form of governance that ties these institutions together has a name.
Trisectoral network governance22, developed in the late 1990s, brings together state actors, private capital, and civil-society organisations into joint decision-making bodies that sit above national parliaments and below intergovernmental treaties. The Global Environment Facility was the early example. The Board of Peace, the GRAD fund, the Network for Greening the Financial System, and the Digital Public Goods Alliance are recent ones.
The model’s defining feature is that the populations affected by its decisions are not one of the three sectors, and therefore have no seat. National governments defer to these bodies because no single government has the scope to act alone. The bodies then produce the standards, indicators, and disbursement conditions that the digital infrastructure enforces.
Yet even the trisectoral model is transitional. As AI systems mature at the classification, measurement and enforcement layers, the sectoral contributions that currently legitimise these bodies become automated functions, and the bodies themselves retain a ceremonial role rather than a decision-making one.
The days of the ‘trisectoral’ clearinghouse are thus numbered. It is being migrated into AI, with conditional CBDCs functioning as the settlement layer232425.
A person in Gaza, in Kyiv, and in time in Tehran will soon walk into a shop holding a credential set by institutions they cannot name, carried to them by negotiators they did not elect, and enforced by a payment system that will only let the purchase go through if the compliance checks pass.
Countries have lived with imposed conditions for decades. What is new is that the conditions now reach the individual directly — and that infrastructure through which they reach them stays in place long after the emergency that justified installing it has ended.
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Short, sweet and to the point. Congrats!!
They now have tools to fully apply communist dystopia. Also, that's the Protocols of the Elders of Zion endgame. Written more than one century ago. Clock is ticking ⏰