Imperialism as Efficiency
A Primer on Planetary Management
In 2023, the Bank of England and the Bank for International Settlements quietly completed Project Rosalind, a working prototype for a digital pound1. Among the use cases tested: payments that release only when a child completes household chores, and transactions that assess the recipient before funds move.
The technology may seem niche, but the same institutional architecture connects the digital wallet to satellite systems measuring carbon emissions, computer models predicting climate impacts, and international lending rules that already require governments to change domestic policy in exchange for funding.
What follows is an account of how the pieces fit together. But the machinery rests on an older idea — that ethics itself can be clearly defined and even calculated.
The Quantitative Good
The notion that ethics might be a mathematics problem — that ‘Good’ can be measured — has a longer pedigree than one might expect.
In 1867, the artist and theorist William Cave Thomas published The Science of Moderation2. Thomas argued that ‘Goodness’ was not a spiritual state but a mathematical one: the Mean. ‘Evil’ was simply a quantitative deviation — either Excess or Defect — from the centre line. If one can quantify the Ideal, Thomas argued, one can mathematically correct the Error.
He called this the Quantitative Theory of the Good.
Thirty years later, the statistician Karl Pearson provided the state with tools to act on such ideas. In The Grammar of Science3 (1892), Pearson argued that reality is only what can be measured. He developed the correlation coefficient and standard deviation — tools he initially applied to measuring biological fitness — to manage what he termed the ‘National Stock’.
Between them, Thomas and Pearson supplied the intellectual scaffolding for modern technocracy: society as dataset, deviation as risk, stability through correction.
In 1910, Andrew Carnegie created his Endowment for International Peace4 with instructions to ‘hasten the abolition of war’ — on the grounds that war was inefficient. His charter specified that once war was abolished, the organisation should address ‘the next most degrading evil’. The same logic — that central coordination eliminates costly friction — runs through every institution described below.
The Triple Lock
That philosophy is now encoded into three interlocking technologies. Separately, each resembles convenience; together, they form something rather different.
Digital Identity
The World Bank explicitly identifies Digital ID as the ‘enabler’ of all other services. In the UK, the One Login programme5 is centralising citizen data across departments. The infrastructure continues from the Vaccine Passport6 — a verified digital token establishing that the holder is sufficiently compliant to access services.
Programmable Money
Once the ID verifies the holder, the Central Bank Digital Currency controls what they can do. Project Rosalind7 demonstrated that money can carry conditional logic. The pound in your pocket becomes, in effect, a decision-maker.
With conventional money, one buys fuel and the transaction clears. With programmable money, one attempts to buy fuel; the currency checks the Digital ID for a carbon quota. If the holder is in Excess — Cave Thomas’s definition of deviation — the transaction declines.
The Smart City
The final layer is spatial. The ‘15-Minute City’8 is built on Digital Twins — real-time simulations fed by sensors and cameras. When a vehicle leaves its designated zone, the ANPR camera scans it, pings the Digital ID, and triggers a charge to the wallet. If the wallet is empty or restricted, the physical gate does not open.
The Smart City is, in practice, the physical enforcement of the digital ledger.
Measure, Predict, Correct
With the hardware in place, the software runs a straightforward loop.
Choose What to Measure
Sensors, satellites, and even mobile phones produce torrents of data. That data becomes indicators — the metrics against which compliance is judged.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, through its Strategic Foresight Unit9, advises governments on which indicators matter. The practice is called Anticipatory Governance10 — using predictions about the future to shape present decisions. What gets measured gets managed; it follows that whoever chooses the measurements shapes the management.
Perform the Measurement
Dozens of countries share environmental data including satellite feeds through the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS)11. The European Union’s Destination Earth12 project is building a Digital Twin of the planet, incorporating weather data, human movements tracked through mobile phones, energy consumption, satellite imagery of landscapes, and traffic flows.
Predict Through Black Box Models
The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis13 (IIASA) produces computer simulations that inform climate policy worldwide through future projection. These models operate as black boxes — one can see inputs and outputs, but the internal workings remain opaque even to specialists. They become authoritative in part because they are too complex to challenge, creating what critics describe as an accountability gap.
Define the Boundaries
In 2009, a group of scientists proposed Planetary Boundaries14 — nine environmental limits humanity must stay within. One architect wrote that enforcement would require an institution ‘acting on behalf of humanity as a whole’15 to become ‘the ultimate arbiter’ of trade-offs between nations. The boundaries are not self-enforcing. Something must translate limits into consequences.
Sell It as Ethics
The enforcement is packaged as an ethical imperative. Lyndon B Johnson’s Great Society16 programmes applied indicator-driven methods to domestic policy, framing welfare metrics as a moral crusade against poverty. The pattern has repeated: terms such as Planetary Stewardship17 and climate justice18 frame compliance as ethical obligation rather than political choice.
Disagreement becomes not merely wrong but immoral.
Enforce Through Conditional Money
The Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System19 (PPBS), developed by RAND and implemented by Robert McNamara and Lyndon B Johnson in the 1960s, linked strategic objectives to resource allocation first within the US defence establishment (McNamara under JFK), later within the entire federal government (LBJ).
The same logic now operates internationally through Results-Based Management20, where funding releases against Key Performance Indicators21 — indicators that increasingly map to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals22.
The IMF and World Bank attach conditions to loans23; countries implement specific policies before receiving funds. Development aid, and more recently Ukraine war aid, arrives with strings requiring particular reforms, often relating to the environment or public health. The World Bank averages nearly ten conditions per loan.
Central bank digital currencies extend conditionality to individual transactions. Project Rosalind demonstrated that the architecture releasing pocket money for completed chores scales to any restriction one cares to programme.
Automation
The intellectual lineage runs from cybernetics and systems theory through adaptive management to Digital Twins and artificial intelligence.
In November 2025, President Trump signed an executive order launching the Genesis Mission24, directing the Department of Energy to build an integrated AI platform combining federal datasets, supercomputers, and machine learning. The order describes this as comparable in urgency to the Manhattan Project. The effect is to remove the human bureaucrat from the loop, replacing politics with adaptive systems theory.
The components described earlier now converge.
Anticipatory Governance generates the predictions from ‘black box’ modelling.
The Digital Twin models deviations from the Mean.
The Planetary Boundaries define the acceptable range.
Planetary Stewardship frames compliance as moral duty.
The Quantitative Good (the ethic) — operationalised through SDG indicators — defines what counts as deviation.
The Digital ID — built on the Vaccine Passport infrastructure — verifies identity and compliance status.
The programmable currency, with its conditional logic, ensures spending aligns with the ethic.
The Smart City enforces the outcome spatially.
No official needs to approve or deny. The system self-corrects. Measure, predict, correct, enforce — automated.
The Omega Point
Some see this trajectory heading toward Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point25 — a convergence of human consciousness and technology into a single unified nervous system. Brain-computer interfaces26 would make this literal rather than metaphorical. Both BCIs27 and AI28 such as ChatGPT or Gemini are subject to centralised ethical governance29 — internationally through UNESCO, domestically through executive orders — such as Trump’s December 2025 AI framework30 — that assert federal authority over what counts as truthful or ideologically neutral output.
The same architecture handles any declared emergency. The ‘black box’ models predict complex global shocks31 — pandemic, climate event, supply chain collapse. Those predictions, opaque to public audit, trigger restrictions. The Digital ID verifies compliance. The programmable currency enforces it. The Smart City locks down spatially.
The loop runs identically whether the variable is carbon or contagion — thus scaling seamlessly to the polycrisis32 or metacrisis, where overlapping emergencies justify permanent activation.
Whether one finds this vision inspiring or alarming, the infrastructure is now built. The philosophy is the Quantitative Good; the logic is Efficiency; the enforcer is Programmable Money; the cage is the Smart City.
The machinery exists, the measurements flow, the boundaries are drawn, and the money is conditional. The question is no longer whether the ship is being built, but whether the passengers aboard Spaceship Earth are crew — or cargo.
Once this is set up right we'll all be fine, as long as the world never changes...
;-/
Concise