Own nothing. Clear everything.
A Field Guide to Planetary Management
Part 1 developed the intellectual blueprint; the purposive–normative–pragmatic–empirical framework, adapted in context of Moses Hess. Part 2 identified the banking dynasties and industrial philanthropies that occupy the decisive structural positions. Part 3 shows how modelling institutions and central banks operationalise that power.
This post is a field guide to the whole thing: what is argued, how the parts fit, and why it matters.
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I. The Control Architecture: From Marx’s Ledger to BIS Rails
It began with the London Bank clearinghouse model in the 19th century: local banks at the edge, clearing banks in the middle, the Bank of England at the apex. International replication followed: the Federal Reserve in 1913 and Bank for International Settlements in 1930 simply extended that template — local banks flowing to central banks flowing to BIS.
Meanwhile, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx sketches socialism as transparent social accounting: labour-time recorded, production and consumption consciously regulated by ‘associated producers’ — in effect, a clearinghouse for economic life. In the Fragment on Machines, that logic upgrades: coordination and knowledge migrate into the machine itself — the ‘general intellect’ objectified in systems, with humans reduced to ‘watchmen and regulators’. Bogdanov’s Tektology later generalised this to all organisation; AI completes the arc — the ‘general intellect’ now running on silicon, with humans tending systems they can neither understand nor audit.
Lenin compresses Marx’s social accounting into a slogan: ‘Socialism is primarily accounting’. Whoever defines what is measured, how it’s measured, and what the figures mean, controls the system regardless of who owns the factories. This has now been implemented at planetary scale.
Tektology served as a precursor to systems theory, which saw rapid growth through the 20th century, eventually leading to adaptive management and contemporary AI. Leontief’s Input-Output Analysis led to Planning-Programming-Budgeting Systems and Results-Based Management, which turns Lenin’s ‘accounting and control’ into matrices, indicators, and budget constraints across whole states. And now BIS digital rails — mBridge, Helvetia, Nexus, Genesis, Rosalind, Mandala, Ellipse, Gaia, Symbiosis — provide a global set of money, asset, compliance and supervision rails that make programmable settlement technically trivial for even the individual transaction through CBDCs with conditional payment functionality built into the wallet.
The key move is simple and devastatingly effective: control clearing, not property.
You don’t need to own factories, farms, or homes if you control what counts as a legal transaction, what must be reported, what can settle, and what capital is allowed to touch. At that point ‘ownership’ is irrelevant; the skeleton is the clearing architecture.
Plank 5 of the Communist Manifesto — centralisation of credit — was implemented as the backbone of the planetary management system. However, the clearinghouse model gradually migrated to Carnegie’s ‘Peace’ initiative, and the League of Nations through Leonard S Woolf and Alfred Zimmern, eventually leading to the founding of the United Nations.
In contemporary terms, CBDCs, ISO 20022, stress tests, CBAM, ESG-linked capital rules, ‘macroprudential’ constraints: these are not discrete policies. They are the wiring of a single control stack extending down to the individual transaction through conditionality built into the CBDC architecture.
II. The Biological Substrate: From Gaia to One Health
A control system needs something to control. That’s where Gaia Theory and Spaceship Earth enter.
Over the last half century, the planet has been redefined as a single managed organism. Gaia theory reframed Earth as a self-regulating system. Spaceship Earth reframed humanity as crew on a finite vessel. One Health, Planetary Health, and Circular Health reframed human, animal, and environmental health as one integrated ‘biosecurity’ domain. The Circular Economy reframed production and consumption as flows within a closed material loop.
On the surface, these are scientific and ethical frameworks. Underneath, they are also control justifications. If the planet is one organism, then local autonomy becomes ‘systemic risk’. Subsistence becomes ’unsustainable practice’. Dissent becomes ‘denial’ or ‘threat to global health / climate stability’.
Add in indicator grids — SDGs, Aichi biodiversity targets, WHO surveillance metrics, risk scores, vulnerability indices — and the biosphere stops being a world you inhabit and becomes a dashboard to manage.
Ecological and health frameworks — Gaia, One Health, Spaceship Earth, planetary boundaries — have been operationalised into a circular compliance system where care for life is indistinguishable from permanent surveillance and intervention.
‘Health’ becomes a justification for continuous pathogen surveillance, digital identity gates to access services, movement restrictions in the name of biosecurity, food and land-use transformation in the name of planetary limits.
What Marx glimpsed for labour — human beings formatted around the needs of the machine — is now applied to bodies, animals, ecosystems, and genomes. The biosphere itself is converted into a managed asset base. Circular Health closes the biological loop, humanity included. The 1968 UNESCO Biosphere Conference called to ‘balance humanity with nature’; closed-loop systems theory finally makes it possible.
III. The Architects: Who Sits on the Levers
But who actually navigates this thing?
The answer splits into four overlapping networks.
Banking Dynasties: Purposive and Empirical
The Rothschild arc is the clearest case.
Alfred de Rothschild at the Bank of England celebrated the London Clearinghouse as ‘approaching perfection’ and advocated paper-based international clearing at Brussels in 1892. Victor Rothschild commissioned the early work that led to the Gaia Theory. Miriam Rothschild co-authored Science and Ethics in 1942 and co-founded IUCN in 1948 with Julian Huxley: science-derived planetary ethics as institution. Edmund de Rothschild invoked Nietzsche and Teilhard on ‘administering the earth as a whole’ at the World Wilderness Congress, then helped midwife the World Conservation Bank that became the Global Environment Facility — the mechanism that monetises nature through ecosystem service provision. Evelyn, Ariane, David, and Lynn span interfaith business ethics, conservation finance, environmental hero branding, and the Vatican-backed Council for Inclusive Capitalism.
Across 135 years, the same dynasty repeatedly occupies both the Purposive level (what counts as good via evolutionary ethics, planetary stewardship, interfaith consensus, Vatican partnerships), and the Empirical level (monetary infrastructure, conservation finance, ESG capital gating). When you define the ethics and operate the ledger, everyone else becomes project management.
Industrial Philanthropies: Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford
The Rockefellers supply the scaffolding.
John D. Rockefeller Jr. provided UN land and League of Nations funding. The Rockefeller Foundation funded the Club of Rome, Limits to Growth, Boulding’s Spaceship Earth, and the Keeling Curve. Maurice Strong bridged the network to UNEP, Stockholm, Rio, UNFCCC, and CBD. Kissinger built the petrodollar architecture. Stephen Rockefeller drafted the Earth Charter.
Carnegie and Ford fill out the lattice. The Carnegie Endowment shaped international law and arbitration: peace as compliance with external standards, backed by economic consequences. But Carnegie’s ’peace’ initiative is really a war clearinghouse — it doesn’t abolish conflict, it routes it through a single moral and institutional centre. The arbitrator with the biggest stick and best PR becomes the judge. Wars that clear through the institution are ‘peacekeeping’ or ‘humanitarian intervention’. Wars that don’t are ‘aggression’. Same bombs, different branding. Same logic as financial clearing: whoever controls the clearing node controls what counts as legitimate.
Leonard Woolf’s International Government (1916) did the same for politics. Alfred Zimmern used it as the blueprint for the League of Nations, later the United Nations. The UN alphabet soup is the result — each agency a specialised clearinghouse for a domain that used to be sovereign. Health clears through WHO. Food through FAO. Labour through ILO. Education through UNESCO. Trade through WTO. Development through the World Bank. Currency through the IMF.
National policy that aligns is ‘best practice’, while policy that doesn’t is ‘non-compliant’. ECOSOC extends the logic to civil society. Through Trisectoral Networks, NGOs with General Consultative Status gain access to UN proceedings — submitting statements, shaping policy. Which voices count? The ones ECOSOC credentials. Which get credentialed? Those aligned with the architecture. These NGOs align with Woolf’s international organisations by design — and they’re often funded by the same foundations that built the architecture in the first place.
Rockefeller, Ford, Open Society, Gates foundation money flows to NGOs that receive ECOSOC status and participate in UN processes as ‘stakeholders’. ‘Legitimate’ civil society clears through ECOSOC. Everything else is irrelevant or invisible to the process. The funders, the credentialers, and the credentialed form a closed loop.
Three domains, same template:
Financial clearing: Rothschild → London Clearinghouse → BIS → CBDCs.
‘Peace’ clearing: Carnegie → international arbitration → Security Council.
Governance clearing: Woolf → Zimmern → League → UN specialised agencies.
Route everything through a legitimating node, call it neutral expertise, become sovereign over the domain. That’s the architecture proven across 130 years. The Carnegie Corporation standardised education and curriculum. The Ford Foundation funded population and development programmes, environmental governance, and Resources for the Future.
Together they create the institutional latticework: legal frameworks, research agendas, treaty architectures, and moral vocabularies that make the planetary control system appear as peace, progress, and sustainability.
Contemporary Orchestration: Gates, Wellcome, Soros
In our era, Gates and Wellcome control global health models (IHME, Imperial), implementation bodies (GAVI, CEPI), and surveillance infrastructure (genomics, identity), turning health into a programmable domain. Open Society captures the civil society layer: NGOs, media, legal activism, ‘democracy promotion’ — shaping what counts as legitimate opposition.
This is about architecture, not omnipotence. They don’t control everything; they control the rails on which everything must run.
Modellers and Central Banks
The middle of the system is the modelling stack.
IIASA and its satellites — IHME, Imperial, Potsdam, WRI — produce climate, health, food, and population models: Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, integrated assessment models, pandemic curves. These models are too complex to audit, too slow to falsify, too deeply wired into policy to challenge. They function as epistemic clearinghouses: they decide what reality is for enforcement purposes.
At the bottom of the stack sit the central banks.
The BIS, NGFS, Basel Committee, FSB, FATF — unelected, legally insulated, and explicitly embedding climate and ESG criteria into capital rules, collateral frameworks, and liquidity access. CBDCs, collateral haircuts, capital charges, stress tests — all weaponised to make certain activities unfinanceable long before any parliament has ‘banned’ them.
The planetary management system is not an abstraction. It has addresses — specific families, foundations, institutes, committees, and central banks occupying every rung of a four-layer stack (Purposive, Normative, Pragmatic, Empirical) in a way that is coherent over more than a century.
You don’t need a conspiracy when the same small set of networks keeps showing up at every structural chokepoint: define the ethics, build the models, structure the organisation, and operate the enforcement rails.
IV. The Whole Machine: How the Layers Lock Together
The control logic comes from Moses Hess, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Alexander Bogdanov, and the clearinghouses.
Hess supplied the blueprint: social justice through economic control, guided by Plato’s philosopher-kings; an enlightened class with messianic purpose.
Marx and Lenin added the bookkeeping — socialism as accounting. The Fragment on Machines embedded general intellect in systems; eventually that became adaptive management and AI.
Bogdanov generalised the whole thing as Tektology, a universal organisation science. Clearinghouses provided the monetary implementation. PPBS, results-based management, and BIS rails operationalised the whole stack.
The substrate comes from Gaia, One Health, Spaceship Earth, the circular economy, and equity. Planet, biosphere, and health reframed as one managed system. ‘Care’ converted into permanent monitoring of bodies, animals, land, and atmosphere. Circular loops and planetary boundaries justifying ongoing intervention. Equity adds the behavioural layer: access, funding, career, and status contingent on alignment with social indicators. The circular economy closes the loop on material flows; equity closes the loop on human behaviour. Together they form a planetary Skinner box — compliance as the condition of participation.
The personnel come from the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, foundations, modellers, and central banks. Dynasties at Purposive and Empirical levels. Philanthropies building legal, institutional, and moral infrastructure. Modelling institutions defining ‘reality’ which is converted into an ‘ethical imperative’. Central banks and CBDCs enforcing via credit allocation and programmable rails, visible at retail level through the BIS Innovation Hub Project Rosalind.
The result is a planetary management system with four tightly coupled layers.
The Purposive layer defines what is ‘good’: SDGs, Earth Charter, Inclusive Capitalism, Omega Point, social justice, sustainability.
The Normative layer defines what is required: indicators, ISO standards, ESG scores, risk metrics, intergenerational justice doctrines.
The Pragmatic layer staffs who or what does it: UN agencies, ministries, NGOs, PPPs, corporate ESG departments, adaptive management loops.
The Empirical layer determines what actually happens: central bank balance sheets, credit flows, CBDC constraints, real-time compliance data.
The operational sequence runs like this:
IIASA and its satellite modellers define the ‘problem’ — climate, pandemic, biodiversity, food systems.
OECD converts the problem into ‘indicators’.
ISO standardises the indicators into compliance frameworks.
UN agencies and treaties provide the legal and institutional scaffolding.
Central banks (BIS, NGFS, Basel Committee) price the alleged risk into capital rules, collateral haircuts, and stress tests — the stick, which makes ‘unethical’ activity unaffordable.
Development banks (World Bank, regional banks) fund what to build — the carrot.
The IMF stabilises currencies and enforces conditionality: structural adjustment rebranded as sustainability.
ESG ratings translate all of the above into capital allocation signals that the private sector must follow or be starved of investment.
The WEF synchronises the narrative annually so everyone pushes in the same direction. That is the machine running.
It’s a technocratic operating system that hosts ‘crisis’ applications. Pandemics and the suggested climate crisis are merely two examples of such applications executing on this platform. The Planetary Boundary framework suggests more are incoming, hence the ‘meta-crises’ label. The UN Emergency Platform generalises these into a common framework, triggered by unaccountable ‘black box’ modelling. The democratic deficit scaled globally — potentially just one ‘emergency’ away from a planetary dictatorship.
Ethics is what makes this run without overt coercion. The foundations, the Earth Charter, Inclusive Capitalism, the Vatican partnership — these frame technocratic control as moral duty. Once the indicators are framed as ‘justice’ and the models as ‘science’, resistance isn’t political disagreement but denial, selfishness… a sin against future generations and the planet itself.
Ethics is the legitimation layer that lets the architecture operate in the open while appearing as virtue rather than power. And that ethic is fused into media, art, science, literature, general culture, and even religion.
Yet, it all comes down to conditional finance: the single enforcement mechanism operating from wallet to sovereign, micro to macro. PPBS and RBM trialled at macro; CBDCs and purpose-bound money at the individual level. ESG ratings and capital access at the corporate level. Basel rules and collateral haircuts at the bank level. IMF conditionality and bond market access at the sovereign level. Same logic at every scale — your transaction clears, or it doesn’t.
The infrastructure is already live. ISO 20022 — the new financial messaging standard now being adopted by Fedwire, SWIFT, and central banks worldwide — enables transactions to carry structured compliance data: ESG scores, purpose codes, carbon content. It’s the data layer that makes conditional clearing technically possible.
The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism does double duty: it forces importers to calculate and report embedded carbon across supply chains — creating the metrics — then makes trade conditional on that accounting. Before CBAM, most goods didn’t have a standardised carbon cost attached. After CBAM, they do, because you can’t trade without it. Lenin’s ‘accounting and control’ in real time: build the accounting, then use it for control. CBAM builds the carbon accounting. ISO 20022 carries it. CBDC wallets can act on it.
Clearing presents as neutral infrastructure. It isn’t. When a middleman makes itself indispensable between all parties, it doesn’t mediate conflict — it supersedes it. The original Marxist framing was owner versus worker, direct exploitation. The clearing architecture doesn’t resolve that conflict. It interposes itself between everyone and extracts compliance from all sides. Factory owner and worker alike need the rails to transact. Both become subjects of whoever controls the clearing. The clearer doesn’t take sides in the old war. It ends the war by becoming the new sovereign.
We now live in a system where architecture outranks law, and clearing outranks ownership.
Ethics, science, and finance have been fused into a single control stack run by unelected institutions and dynastic networks, under cover of crisis and care.
V. Why This Matters
You don’t need to believe in any particular plot to see what this does to politics and freedom.
Governance has been replaced by ratification theatre. You can change governments, but you cannot vote away Basel rules, BIS rails, SDG indicators, or WHO surveillance frameworks. Democracy occupies the Pragmatic layer along with the adaptive management protocols which gradually supersede it, while turning the former into an increasingly noisy distraction.
Dissent is converted into pathology. Question the teleology and you’re anti-science, anti-planet, anti-future generations.
Reform is channelled into optimisation. You can argue about how to meet the targets, never about who set them or whether they’re legitimate.
Property becomes conditional use-rights. If activity cannot clear on the rails — financially, environmentally, or morally — it effectively doesn’t exist.
‘You will own nothing and be happy’ is stupid as prophecy; as architecture, it’s already here. You’ll ‘own nothing’ because meaningful ownership now requires access to a stack of permissions, scores, and clearances administered by institutions you never voted for. ‘They’ll be happy’ because they control the rails that decide what counts as valid action, valid science, valid morality.
If the system were legitimate, it would be debated openly. It isn’t.
The silence is the tell.
VI. What Comes Next
This is not meant as doom porn.
You can’t build effective counter-architecture or prepare an adequate response until you understand the cave you’re trapped in.
If the system is genuinely cybernetic — a closed-loop controller with sensors (indicators and surveillance), a digital twin (models and AI), and actuators (finance, law, and emergency powers) — then resistance as mere opinion is pointless. You need structural counter-positions: architectures that can route around or contest the existing rails rather than beg them for mercy. Alternative clearing and settlement systems. Alternative measurement and ethical frameworks. Alternative knowledge infrastructures not dependent on the same funding and career pipelines. Alternative political forms that can actually bite into the Purposive and Empirical layers, not just rotate faces in the Pragmatic layer.
The clearinghouse never owned the assets. It didn’t need to. It owned the clearing.
That, in the end, is the planetary management system in one line:
Own nothing. Clear everything.
And Icarus — don’t fly too close to the sun.
"They decide what reality is for enforcement purposes", that line and a few others grabbed and shook me to my core. They have been waiting for tech too caught up to madness and now are just waiting to create a major electrical storm to lower the boom on all of us. Look at the poor Brits and others in Europe being put into a digital cage while at the same time being replaced. We truly are one of the only species that can't wait to attack each other for control and sport. The song Monster by Steppenwolf from 1969 is like looking into a crystal ball and seeing today in action. We are about to embark on the biggest battle of humanities existence, and the odds are against us, but somehow. someway, I feel the better will come out on top. You are a gem and I love leaving your printed material in random places for others to hopefully read and wake the hell up.
Thank you, esc. :)
I bumped into an account whose boilerplate legalese sounded familiar to me. What do you think — did I call it wrongly?
https://substack.com/@seventhearchivist/note/c-182661469