In Part 1, we discussed the NRx technocrats’ ideas and how they have influenced the city-state model that seeks to capitalise on the global proliferation of Special Economic Zones (SEZs). We examined the role of functional oligarchies in this endeavor. In Part 2, we look at how that city-state model manifests internationally and what it implies, not just for global governance structures, but for humanity.
In Part 1, we explored the ideology that has been adopted by a powerful group of NRx technocrat-oligarchs and how their proposals align with the interests of their international oligarch partners. We discussed the venture capital impact investment strategy the NRx technocrats call “accelerationism” and how governments are actually “functional oligarchies.”
The model of “government” the NRx technocrats propose is unlike anything we are currently familiar with. It is much more akin to the kind of authoritarian dictatorships exercised by the feudal monarchs of Medieval Europe. These gov-corp Technates, as envisaged, effectively amount to dictatorial city-states under the direct control of oligarchs.
The NRx technocrats seek to break nation-states apart into technologically governed “enclaves” (gov-corp Technates). These “realms” will form an international “Patchwork,” with each enclave or “network archipelago” represented as a digital node, almost certainly on a single, overarching blockchain or “unified ledger.” The digital access permissions to the node, which serves as the digital twin for the physical realm of the city-state “enclave,” will be controlled by the “founder” or their selected administrators of the realm. This forms a gov-corp Technate ruled by a CEO King (oligarch) where “nothing officially exists” unless it is represented digitally on the realm’s ledger (blockchain).
The citizens of the realm are customers of the sovereign corporation (sovcorp) that rules the gov-corp Technate. The customers will have no individual sovereignty unless they purchase it from the “founder.” All value is digital in the realm. The life of your “digital twin,” monitored through the requirement to use digital ID, seamlessly links a customer’s offline life to that of their online digital twin.
By controlling the programmable digital currency allotted to the customer’s digital twin, via their digital ID, any misbehaviour can be punished by the founder or their delegated system administrators. For example, by freezing “their deposits” or locking people “out of all doors for a time period as a punishment.” There are no means of recourse in a gov-corp Technate. The only option open to the persecuted customer is to flee, if they have the means.
We also discussed how governments around the world have already started carving out nascent gov-corp Technates in the form of thousands of Special Economic Zones (SEZs). Some of which, such as Shenzhen in China, have already been established as de facto city-states with their own increasingly independent jurisdictions and embryonic city-state governments.
At the heart of this effort to create a global patchwork of city-states are the NRx technocrats, perhaps most notably Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen in the US, and venture capital firms like NeWay Capital and Pronomos Capital. But they are far from alone. The NRx technocrat network is global and, at the highest governmental and intergovernmental level, the hope is to bring about the global governance of a patchwork of city-state gov-corp Technates.
Smart-City-States Without Limits
NRx technocrats want to create a global “patchwork” of digital surveillance societies where “nothing officially exists unless it’s on-chain.” All value is digital and the private founder[s], by virtues of the supreme sovereignty they have purchased with their investment, control their private fiefdoms as CEO “kings” of the ruling corporations. In effect, by exploiting digital technology and, most notably, Artificial Intelligence (AI), the NRx technocrats want to create a global network of privately financed smart-cities.
A smart-city can be said to be “an urban area where technology and data collection help improve [. . .] the sustainability and efficiency of city operations. [. . .] Technologies to collect data—including real-time data—are central to smart-city initiatives.” The objective of smart-city design is to control the urban environment and its inhabitants’ behaviour.
Taking a positive view of smart-city behavioural control, researchers from the Indonesian Journal of Information Systems and Informatics nonetheless noted:
The influence of smart city technology on consumer behavior in urban environments and people’s daily routines and lifestyle habits is significant. [. . .] The development of smart-cities through the application of various technologies such as smart transportation systems, traffic management applications, and smart sensors [. . .] has changed the behavior of people. [. . .] Thus, the application of smart city technology not only transforms city infrastructure and services, but also brings significant changes in citizen behavior.
Though behavioural control exercised by smart-city operators could possibly be benign, it could also be abused by despots to effectively program our lives. That is certainly what the NRx technocrats have in mind—engineering the “unthinking demos” whose sovereignty will be treated with “derision.” Regardless of the risks, smart-cities are being constructed the world over.
The China Global Television Network (CGTN) is part of the state-run China Media Group. In July of this year, CGTN reported how the Chinese government was “accelerating” the development of smart-cities. CGTN revealed that Shenzhen won an international award for smart-city of the year from the 2024 Smart-City Expo World Congress (SCEWC).
The SCEWC emphasised how the congress was impressed with Shenzhen’s application of the Chinese “Smarter City, Better Life” policy initiative that seeks to address “urban challenges” through the rapid deployment of technology. Just like the NRx technocrats in the West, Chinese policy think tanks apparently see technology as the solution; full stop.
The SCEWC said:
The initiative has pursued an aggressive digital transformation strategy to address these challenges across various sectors. Key components include the development of high-speed broadband networks, using digital twin technology to model and manage city systems, and integrating artificial intelligence and data-driven governance into city operations. [. . .] The city has also fostered an environment that encourages technological innovation and has attracted significant investment from private companies developing smart-city technologies.
Again, there is no notable difference between the stakeholder capitalist—public-private partnership—finance model for smart-city construction in China’s SEZs than that found anywhere else.
The SCEWC continued:
Shenzhen has pioneered the “4321+X” model for smart community development, emphasizing integrating government networks, video networks, IoT sensor networks, and the internet to create comprehensive data and service platforms. These platforms provide a foundation for various smart city applications, including public safety management, community governance, and the delivery of public services.
The 4321+X smart-city “community” is controlled based upon a set of clearly defined processes. The “4” refers to the integration of four data networks: the government’s network, private community CCTV networks, the internet, and specifically the Internet of Things (IoT). The “3” relates to the three areas of community activity to be integrated within and surveilled through the four networks: all business, public security (public conduct), and the local governance of services, including local security services. The “2” Refers to two major service sectors—called “platforms”—that combine to effect the monitoring of the three key areas of activity linked to the four networks. The two “platforms” are local government and law enforcement.
Finally, the “1” refers to the master database which, when Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)—such as blockchain—is used, could be called the “unified ledger.” The ledger ties all the surveillance of the entire smart-city, combining 4, 3, and 2 together, into one centrally administered smart-city system. The smart-city supposedly facilitates “X” which is the artificially intelligent delivery of governance and services to the citizen.
The unified ledger (“1”) is monitored and controlled by the “Urban Brain” or “City Brain” which is the central command system for the smart-city. The Urban Planning Society of China—a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that operates by approval from China’s Ministry of Construction and Ministry of Civil Affairs—states that the purpose of the “Urban Brain” is to allocate “public resources” and enhance “social governance” in order to provide “new pathways for promoting sustainable economic and social development.”
As we noted in Part 1, China’s modern technological innovation is overwhelmingly the result of public-private partnership. In Hangzhou, for instance, the City Brain is managed by one global corporation:
Alibaba is the powerhouse of the technology from data platforms to advance analytics algorithm that enables all the smart city application.
In NRx technocrat terms, Alibaba Group is the sovereign corporation (sovcorp) of the city of Hangzhou, with a considerable ability to potentially control the lives of its nine million citizens or “customers.” As with all smart-city developments, the media only reports the realised or projected social benefits. The likely pitfalls are studiously ignored. To understand the danger we all face, if we take to living in such cities, we first need to consider how social credits systems are intended to work.
There are many, persistent myths peddled in the West about China’s Social Credit System (SCS). The mainstream media will sometimes have you believe that it is already a totalitarian nightmare and some in the independent media will try to convince you that is doesn’t exist. The truth lies somewhere in between.
China is the only country to have formally established an SCS, but it is not the only country to have implemented one. The purpose of social credit is to reward or punish citizen behaviour, not through the courts or any legal process, but through the enhanced or restricted access to both public and private services. Operation Choke Point in the US saw the Department of Justice collaborate with private banks to cut-off access to finance for entirely legal small to medium size businesses deemed to present a “reputational risk.” Similarly, in Canada, the government worked with private banks, and insurers to shut down the small businesses of lawful and legitimate protestors. These are just a couple of the many clear examples of SCS operating in the West.
China’s SCS was formally established in 2014. It is a sprawling and often confusing slew of government directives and regulations that each provincial authority has to decipher and apply as best as it can. The overarching objective is to establish a measure of “societal creditworthiness.” This does not just mean “credit” in the financial sense. It relates to the degree of “trustworthiness” the state credits to its own departments and local administrations, to businesses and to individuals.
China’s SCS refers to “entities,” meaning both public and private organisations, including businesses. Much of the SCS is focused upon cleaning up public sector corruption, eliminating the “untrustworthiness” of those entities in order to promote a “harmonious” society.
It also focuses on the “untrustworthiness” of individuals. An SCS objective is to “put untrustworthy individuals on a credit blacklist.” Another is to develop online systems to evaluate individual’s online social credit “trustworthiness” and, for instance, to punish those who engage in online “rumour-mongering;” it talks about systems to assess the “individual character” of citizens and the enforcement of “citizen morality.”
In China, a “natural person” is a legal construct that means a human being or citizen. In its 2025 announced improvements to its SCS, the Chinese government encouraged regional authorities to promote “the credit construction of natural persons” and to establish “sound credit records of natural persons.”
Looking at the development of the smart-city in Shenzhen, and the risks of pooling “big data,” researchers from the Berlin Institute of Chinese Studies found:
[T]he digital systems in Shenzhen entail a creeping centralisation of data that potentially turns lower administrative government units into mere users of the city-level smart platforms rather than being in control of their own data resources. Smart city development and big data ambitions thereby imply shifting stakeholder relations at the local level and also pull non-governmental stakeholders, such as information technology companies and research institutions, closer to new data flows and smart governance systems.
In a world shaped by stakeholder capitalism, “smart governance systems” are invariably controlled by the private sector. Local governments become the “mere users” of the “City Brains” overseen by multinational corporations. The evident objective is to link the behavioural control afforded by smart-city technology to SCS.
As pointed out by MIT Technology Review in 2022, there is currently no crushing, universal social credit score in China that enables totalitarian control:
There’s no evidence yet that this system has been abused for widespread social control (though it remains possible that it could be wielded to hurt individual rights).
Indeed, smart-city technology combined with SCS certainly could be wielded to socially engineer populations. The push towards smart-city developments capable of applying SCS “rules” are by no means restricted to China. It is a global governance policy agenda and the rollout of the necessary digital infrastructure is worldwide. Though most of us are yet to experience the looming overt systematic oppression, it is extremely unwise to ignore that fact that the likely digital panopticon is being erected around us.
If we accept the ongoing transformation of the places we live into smart-cities and smart-suburbs, it is the “trust” we will have placed in our rulers, whoever they may be, that is the salient issue. We will have no choice but to trust that the digital control systems we will live in are purely for our benefit. We will have to trust that the enforcement of the SCS rules will be equitable. There is currently no reason to think that will be the case.
The potential urban future that the oligarchs driving this agenda have in mind is aligned with the ambitions of the NRx technocrats. It appears that our planned smart city-state future is an envisioned tyranny.
Intergovernmental Gov-corp Technates
The global proliferation of SEZs provides plenty of enticing investment opportunities for NRx technocrats and other oligarchs (See Part 1). SEZs, however, are just one avenue for the potential location of gov-corp Technates. The global transition toward urbanization offers many more.
Ironically, the United Nations (UN) both reports on the rampant criminality common to many SEZ developments but also advocates the rapid and significant expansion of SEZs. As noted in Part 1, there is currently little or no evidence that SEZs deliver socioeconomic growth. There is considerable evidence that they seize national territory and transform it into effective private jurisdictions.
Yet, in 2022, the UN established the Global Alliance of Special Economic Zones (GASEZ) to increase the SEZ global footprint. GASEZ claims:
Special economic zones (SEZs) can make important contributions to economic growth and sustainable development. Zones can help attract investment, create jobs, boost exports, and build productive capacity. [. . .] Collectively SEZs can be more effective in modernization and policy advocacy, and bring on board stakeholders, including governments, the private sector and international organizations.
Again, there is virtually no evidence to support GASEZ’ assertions about economic growth. The reason the UN is enthusiastic about SEZ hybrid zone/city developments is that the UN considers them a more effective route for its global “policy advocacy.”
Launching GASEZ in 2022, the UN announced:
UNCTAD [United Nations Conference on Trade and Development ] joined hands with seven global, regional and national associations representing over 7,000 special economic zones (SEZs) to launch a global alliance. [. . .] They [SEZs] go by many different names, including free-trade zones and industrial parks, and are widely used by developed and developing economies. The Global Alliance of Special Economic Zones (GASEZ) seeks to drive the modernization of these zones across the world and maximize their contribution to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). [. . .] A new model of sustainable special economic zones is therefore rapidly taking shape and they are contributing to more inclusive, resilient and sustainable economies in the countries where they operate.
The UN calls the towns and cities we live in “human settlements.” Charter Cities, SEZs with residential capacity, hybrid zone/city developments, resilient cities, 15-minute cities, etc., are all “human settlements” as far as the UN is concerned. Furthermore, all such urban renewal consistently embraces smart-city technology.
In 1977, the UN created the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) in order to promote “socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities.” UN-Habitat states:
UN-Habitat is the focal point for all urbanization and human settlement matters within the UN system. [. . .] UN-Habitat collaborates with governments, intergovernmental, UN agencies, civil society organizations, foundations, academic institutions and the private sector to achieve enduring results in addressing the challenges of urbanization.
Urbanization is the process of the population shift from rural to urban living environments, or human settlements in the vernacular of the UN. UN-Habitat has wholeheartedly adopted the public-private partnership, or stakeholder capitalist, model of development to address “the challenges of urbanization.”
In 2018, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) reported the findings of its research into World Urbanization Prospects:
Today, 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 68% by 2050. Projections show that urbanization [. . .] combined with the overall growth of the world’s population could add another 2.5 billion people to urban areas by 2050, with close to 90% of this increase taking place in Asia and Africa. [. . .] By 2030, the world is projected to have 43 megacities with more than 10 million inhabitants, most of them in developing regions [. . .] many of them located in Asia and Africa. [. . .] As the world continues to urbanize, sustainable development depends increasingly on the successful management of urban growth, especially in low-income and lower-middle-income countries where the pace of urbanization is projected to be the fastest.
With this urbanization prospectus in mind, and with a particular focus on managing urban development in the “Global South”—an umbrella term for developing nations wherever they are located—UN-Habitat released its Strategic Plan 2020-2023:
UN-Habitat, in its role as a focal point, will call upon all development actors and stakeholders, [. . .] to work in concert to assist it in implementing its Strategic Plan. [. . .] An important effort is required to rethink engagement with the private sector to leverage investment in sustainable urbanization and to promote more appropriate models of development.
The UN is eager to liberate private finance in order to construct human smart-megacity settlements, especially in the emerging and developing markets of the Global South, that meet UN sustainable urbanization targets. Sustainable Development Goal 11—SDG 11—defines the global public-private partnership’s city development agenda.
The UN calls this its “New Urban Agenda.” The New Urban Agenda emphasises the importance of building “smart-cities” to meet SDGs:
The New Urban Agenda calls for technology and communication networks to be strengthened and for smart-city approaches that use digitalization, clean energy and technologies. [. . .] Innovative funding opportunities and partnerships need to be explored and the capacity of local governments to effectively procure, test and implement frontier technologies needs to be significantly strengthened. [. . .] To contribute effectively to urban sustainability, frontier technologies and innovations need to be applied.
The “smart-city” is constructed by deploying so-called “frontier technologies” within its infrastructure. A smart-city could be built from scratch or developed in an existing city or conurbation. The UN explains what smart-city frontier technology it considers essential for urban sustainability:
[Frontier technologies] currently include, among others, the Internet of things, sensor networks, machine-to-machine communication, robotics, artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, 3D printing, geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, autonomous unmanned vehicles, drones, blockchain, cryptographic computing, and big data processing and visualization.
The UN’s “frontier technologies” are, of course, exactly the kind of technologies that the NRx technocrats allege to be the technological solution to everything (see Part 1). Gov-corp Technates are practically indistinguishable from the hybrid zone/city developments envisaged by the UN’s New Urban Agenda.
The downside, from humanity’s perspective, is that at both the global intergovernmental level and at the global multinational corporate-network level, there is a firm commitment to install the biometric digital surveillance state that threatens to enslave us all. Though the UN calls this “sustainable development.”
The Global Governance Patchwork
Not only is the UN amenable to the NRx technocrat’s digital panopticon plans, it also favours their “patchwork of realms” idea. The UN considers the future of global governance to lay in centralised global authority exerted over a transnational network of city-states. Or, as UN-Habitat puts it, “connectivity across urban networks, between cities and their surroundings [. . .] must be strengthened. That requires a country-wide – and sometimes cross-border – approach to development.”
The UN’s global governance model has been moving in this direction or a while. In 2005, then London Mayor Ken Livingston convened the C20 city network, inviting mayors from another eighteen cities to work collectively to reduce so-called climate pollution (CO2 emissions). In 2006, the addition of 22 city mayors created the C40 cities network.
The C40 cities network is financed by, among others, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) which is heavily backed by the Gates Foundation. The aim of CIFF is to improve the lives of children living in the Global South by “lobbying” their governments to create regulatory “enabling environments” to stimulate national carbon trading in the global Emissions Trading Scheme (ETF) markets.
Another prominent C40 funder is Bloomberg Philanthropies, led by oligarch and former New York City mayor, Michael Bloomberg. Always driven by a commitment to UN global governance policies, in 2011, C40 formalised its relationship with the UN by agreeing on a climate action partnership with the World Bank—a specialized agency of the UN. Such UN partnerships are in keeping with UN ambitions to cultivate its global governance through an international network of city-states.
In 2013, American political theorist Benjamin R. Barber (1939 – 2017) published If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities. Barber contended that city administrations were more closely connected to their populations and thus more democratically representative than nation-states. He argued that city administrations, in countries around the world, had more in common with each other than they had with their own national governments. Unencumbered by political divisions and national rivalries, he posited that cities were better “building blocks of global governance.”
Advocating a global network of cities, Barber wrote:
If democracy is to survive globalization, imagining a global democratic order with the city at its core may be crucial. Envision not states but cities as building blocks for global governance. [. . .] Global governance in which the city predominates is the aim.
Evidently enthused by Barber’s vision, Michael Bloomberg announced he was stepping down as Mayor of New York and set up the first CityLab summit in 2013. Mayors from cities around the world were invited to network and collaborate in order to “exchange ideas and tackle some of the most urgent issues affecting cities around the world.”
In 2014, a month after officially leaving office in New York, Bloomberg was appointed as the UN’s first Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change. Thus strengthening the link between urban development and the implementation of the global governance agenda.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the objective of creating the post for Bloomberg was for the UN to consult “with mayors and related key stakeholders” in order to “mobilize action among cities as part of [the UN’s] long-term strategy.” Already the president of the board of the C40 cities network, Bloomberg soon established the Compact of Mayors committing city leaders to implement UN SDGs.
In 2016, the UN’s Global Compact of Mayors joined with the similar European Union’s (EU’s) Covenant of Mayors to become the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy (GCoM). Currently acting as the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions, Michael Bloomberg is the current co-chair of the GCoM.
The GCoM established the INVEST4CITIES initiative to generate “massive and targeted investment” to construct smart-cities. The private sector investment opportunity is set to provide “$23 trillion in investment potential” by 2030. The public sector’s (local government’s) role is to create “the enabling environments that support local investment.” The GCoM plan is that “large-scale financing instruments” will fund “local implementation” of frontier technologies to construct global governance (SDG) compliant smart-cities.
In the same year (2016) that the GCoM was signed by an international network of mayors, Bloomberg created the Global Parliament of Mayors (GPM) to give the civic leaders formal global governance roles. The GPM was first mooted in 2013 by Bloomberg CityLab based on Benjamin Barber’s “idea of a global governance platform for cities.” Barber was personally involved in the formation of the GPM and, when he died in 2017, the GPM created the annual Benjamin Barber Award, given to the most global governance compliant mayor of the year.
The purpose of the GPM is to attack the supposed political sovereignty of national governments and reimagine international relations. The GPM champions “the city’s right to self-government” and promotes “collective city decision-making across national borders.” The GPM is “actively engaged in decision-making by international organisations.” The GPM is the UN’s expression of Barber’s vision of “global governance in which the city predominates.”
In 2017, adopting the NRx technocrats’ accelerationism, the C40 network started implementing a number of “High-Impact Accelerators.” The C40 accelerators form one of the “project pipelines” that contributes toward the GCoM’s INVEST4CITIES strategy.
The GCoM aims to “accelerate city and local government access to financial resources” by “removing barriers to investor-oriented climate action plans and projects, and unlocking large-scale financing instruments to boost urban action implementation.” As you can imagine, with $23 trillion of investment opportunities in sight, the envisaged ROI is not only mouthwatering, if the planned city-state is a startup project it also promises oligarchs possible city ownership rights (see Part 1).
The UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) convened the Day of Cities in 2019. Mayors from across, what the UN called, “the region”—meaning Europe—met to discuss “how to create smart sustainable cities.” This resulted in the 2020 Geneva Declaration of Mayors. In response to multiple alleged global crises—the pseudopandemic, the climate crisis, natural disasters, etc.—the UNECE mayors noted how the global policy response to the pseudopandemic could be adopted as a model for urban development:
[C]ities were in lockdown – and many industries, transport networks and businesses closed – we [. . .] started to experience an unknown urban life: better air quality, the return of nature to our cities, and empty streets giving space to cyclists and pedestrians. [. . .] The pandemic provided a testing ground for what cities could look like; the transformation of urban spaces happened overnight. If there is only one lesson to learn from this crisis, it is that rapid change of our urban reality is possible [and] behaviour patterns can be adapted. [. . .] Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 calls for action to work towards [. . .] resilient and sustainable cities – it is now in our hands to place the SDGs at the centre of our recovery efforts and create new urban realities.
Today, boasting “over 13,500 cities and local governments” from “6 continents and 147 countries” the GCoM alleges that it represents “more than 1.2 billion people.” It is, however, hard to see how GCoM “represents” anyone other than its public-private “stakeholders.” One wonders how many people who elect their local and city “representatives” in these GCoM coordinated cities and suburbs are told that they are consenting to global governance and the transformation of their communities into smart-city gov-corp Technates.
Empty streets, no cars, drone ports, driverless AI controlled public transport, protein labs growing artificial food substitutes, augmented reality, insect-based snacks, and new religious identities are part of what leading oligarch-led think tank Chatham House (The Royal Institute of International Affairs) predicted in 2021 with its notion of our Futurescape. Whether this is the future city-life any of us want is irrelevant. At every level, NRx technocrats and their fellow oligarchs view such “urbanization” as the pathway to establishing effective global governance.
That the UN considers societal lockdowns as an exemplar of what it calls a “better urban life” betrays the oligarchs’ true intentions.
The Global Governance of Smart-Cities
The United Nations (UN) declares that it is responsible for global governance. The UN also says that “governance” means: “the process of decision-making and the process by which decisions are implemented.” Therefore, the UN asserts that it is the body which makes and implements decisions—which manifest as government policy—for the world.
UN-Habitat—the UN’s “focal point for all urbanization and human settlement matters”—with its New Urban Agenda to transform the urban environment into a global network of smart-cities, extols stakeholder capitalism and is keen to use the associated public-private partnership model. In 2022, UN-Habitat and the World Economic Forum (WEF) created the The Global Partnership for Local Investment (GPLI). The GPLI immediately set up the G20 Global smart-cities Alliance and clarified its public-private purpose:
Public-private collaborations reflect a form of indirect management in public administration, where [. . .] public, private or non-profit partners make decisions jointly. [. . .] Public-private collaborations can repurpose city assets for the deployment of digital infrastructure. [. . .] Physical assets, such as rooftops, utility poles, street lights, traffic lights, ducts and more, can become smart assets and be used to drive efficiencies and new services. Public spaces and airspace can take on new value as technology, such as drones, enabl[e] [sic] new use cases.
UN-Habitat and the WEF highlight the private sector investment opportunity for those with the wealth to capitalise on them—oligarchs:
[S]mart-city services can generate new revenue streams and revenue savings to be shared between partners.
The Futurescape imagined by Chatham House is under construction with the support of the United Nations and the “leading” multinational corporations aligned under the WEF umbrella. It is also a project shared by the BRICS+ group of nations and their corporate partners.
The BRICS have established the General Assembly of Cities and Municipalities which will focus on “inter-municipal cooperation” rather than international cooperation. Following the 2025 BRICS summit in Brazil, the BRICS group issued a joint statement:
One of the key topics shaping the future of the BRICS is the development of smart-cities supported by emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence (AI). [. . .] With the recent expansion of the BRICS to include countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, and Iran, the bloc is establishing itself as a leading platform for Global South cooperation [. . .] particularly in the realm of sustainable urbanization driven by technologies such as AI. [. . .] Artificial intelligence is increasingly being adopted in major BRICS cities, notably impacting urban planning, public service management, and civic engagement. China is at the forefront of developing AI-powered smart-cities, particularly in Shanghai and Shenzhen.
The BRICS+ group emphasises the importance of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) to “finance sustainable infrastructure” and “increase lending for AI-driven public service projects.” The group observes that “South-South cooperation through the BRICS creates active dialogue.”
The UN considers cooperation in the “South-South”—referring to partnerships between Southern hemisphere countries—“a key development modality to accelerate progress towards achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” The UN Office for South-South Cooperation (UNOSSC) collaborates strategically with the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB). In turn, the IsDB has a close working partnership with the NDB. Both the IsDB and the NDB have joined seven other “Multilateral Development Banks” (MDBs) to form a global collaborative partnership coordinated by the UN’s World Bank Group:
A much scaled up global effort is thus required to [. . .] tackle transboundary [meaning cross-national border] challenges. [. . .] We [Heads of MDBs] will deepen our collaboration around joint innovative mechanisms for boosting private capital mobilization, both domestically and globally. [. . .] We recognize the need to explore further avenues for strengthening mobilization of private capital.
Regardless of where you live on the Earth, your government’s commitment to creating a global network of smart hybrid zone/cities financed by “private capital” is unshakable because your government is following a global policy agenda it did not create and cannot change.
In Vietnam, for example, the commitment to constructing smart-cities is significant. Vietnam’s state media, The Voice of Vietnam (VoV), reports:
Vietnam is undergoing a sweeping transformation with a clear goal: to build smart-cities that serve the people. The effort is based on national strategies like the Sustainable smart-city Development Plan 2018-2025 with a vision to 2030, the National Digital Transformation Program until 2025 with a vision to 2030, the E-Government Development Strategy toward a Digital Government, and Project 06 on population data and digital identity.
The VoV states that residents in smart-cities can “report issues directly to authorities, who respond and take corrective action.” Vietnamese digital smart-city citizens can raise concerns relating to “public security[,] environmental management, healthcare, [. . .] education,” and more via their installed smart-city app. The VoV enthusiastically notes that centrally located AI monitored Intelligent Operations Centers (IOCs)—Urban or City Brains—linked to peoples’ devices and their Vietnam Electronic Identification (VNeID), issued by Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS), effectively turn the Vietnamese smart-city citizens’ “smartphones into ‘microphones.’”
The VoV adds:
Citizens must also play their part: verifying VNeID at level 2, uploading personal documents to their digital accounts, using the national portal [. . .] for public services, downloading their local smart-city app, and using cashless payments wherever possible. Every tap on a screen lays another brick in building Vietnam’s vision of modern, intelligent, liveable cities for the future.
The state taking almost unimaginable control of every “citizen’s” life is part of Vietnam’s digital transformation plan—Project 06. The Vietnamese government has already started the process of freezing up to 86 million of Vietnam’s estimated 200 million banks accounts unless they are “verified” using state approved digital ID (biometric authentication or VNeID). So clearly, every citizen “must” comply and the digital transformation, despite all the fluffy rhetoric about inclusion, is avowedly exclusionary.
Project 06 is led by the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) working closely with the Ministry of Public Security (MPS). A major part of the role of the MPS is to ensure social order and to collect, analyse and evaluate information with a view to “prevent, detect and defeat any plots and acts of violation against national security and eliminate any threats to national security,” to protect the “Party” and the “State,” and to “implement international commitments and obligations.”
The digital surveillance plan has been promoted by Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh and other government officials, but the Project 06 policy initiative did not originate with the Vietnamese government. With its stated “vision to 2030,” Project 06 is firmly rooted in the United Nations’ (UN’s) global governance agenda.
The Vietnamese Ministry of Planning and Development noted that the country’s digital transformation will contribute to the reduction of (CO2) emissions, though it is obviously designed to enable state surveillance of the population. Speaking in January this year, UN Under-Secretary-General Amandeep Singh Gill said he was impressed with Vietnam’s public-private partnership (multistakeholder) approach to “harness digital technologies for inclusive, sustainable development.”
He added:
I saw with my own eyes how Viet Nam is pushing forward strongly and proactively in the areas of digital transformation and AI. [. . .] [F]rameworks are needed to ensure that everyone benefits from the technical advancement, and that no one is left behind. [. . .] The Global Digital Compact offers such a framework at the global level, and Viet Nam’s willingness to play an active role in key areas of the [sic] is welcomed and appreciated by the United Nations.
The Global Digital Compact, adopted without a vote in September 2024 by UN member states as an annex to the UN’s Pact for the Future, is the UN’s “global framework” to facilitate “multi-stakeholder action” to enable “the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals.” The UN defined “digital public goods” as software, data, AI models, and all content published online. Further, it decided that “digital public infrastructure” essentially meant all hardware and the physical infrastructure for all digital communication systems.
The UN said that it considered “digital public goods and digital public infrastructure to be key drivers of inclusive digital transformation and innovation.” It added that “[g]overnments, the private sector, civil society, technical and academic communities and international and regional organizations” should work together to to “leverage digital public goods and digital public infrastructure to advance solutions for the Sustainable Development Goals.”
In other words, the UN decided that the internet and digital technology, in its entirety, should be leveraged to deliver the UN’s global governance policy agendas. The UN invited the “private sector and philanthropic actors [oligarchs]” to finance the digital transformation.
Populations might not want to go along with the digital transformation of their world, nor the degree of public-private state surveillance foisted upon them. Perhaps anticipating some pushback, the UN decided that anything that questioned its transformative global governance agenda constituted a “form of violence” it calls “misinformation and disinformation”:
We must urgently counter and address all forms of violence, including [. . .] all forms of hate speech and discrimination, misinformation and disinformation. [. . .] We commit to, by 2030, [. . .] assess the impact of misinformation and disinformation on the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. [. . .] We further urgently [. . .] [c]all on social media platforms to provide researchers access to data [. . .] to build an evidence base on how to address misinformation and disinformation and hate speech that can inform government and industry policies, standards and best practices
The idea that governments and private corporations should form “policies” to address “misinformation and disinformation” might sound reasonable at first, but that all depends upon who decides what constitutes misinformation and disinformation. The UN is clear that misinformation and disinformation incudes information that undermines its policies related to “public health and climate action.”
Questioning the global digital transformation that is designed to “advance solutions for the Sustainable Development Goals” threatens “climate action” and is therefore disinformation that governments and private corporations should “counter and address.” Governments around the world are implementing laws and regulations to seize control of the information we can share with that goal in mind.
Of course, this could not be more anti-democratic, but governments serve as functional oligarchies not democracies. None of the governments that have passed or intend to pass online censorship laws are the instigators of these policies or legislative moves. They emanate from the global governance of the UN and its agencies where real Orbital Authority is exercised.
Real Orbital Authority
In Part 1, we discussed NRx technocrat Curtis Yarvin’s metaphorical exploration of global government that he termed “Orbital Authority.” The global transformation of our urban environments is already being propelled by such authority.
It is an oligarch-led public-private, or multistakeholder, global governance authority. Oligarch-backed policy think tanks, such as Bloomberg’s CityLab, and the state-funded public-private partnership think tanks, like the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), form the policy and design the corresponding implementation initiatives.
The CAICT calls itself “a specialized think-tank for the government and an innovation and development platform for the industry.” The CAICT acts as an “enabler for innovation and development in an information society.” It is a public-private partnership that “plays an important role in strategy and policy” with respect to the digital transformation in China.
Chinese state media recently reported China’s official launch of its plan to provide “processing resources across China,” to link City Brains and other smart-city elements together in a “mega computing project” that will create regional data hubs. From the reports, you would imagine that the CPC was leading the rollout. That impression is misleading. It was the CAICT that proposed the concept of the “National Integrated Computing Power and Network Scheduling Platform” that has given rise to the reportedly state-led mega computing project.
The CAICT is also a UN partner with an agreement in place to implement the “digital transformation aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals” across Africa. African governments are not designing “Africa’s digital future” any more than China’s government is heading the “digital transformation” in China. The transformation is a global governance agenda, far beyond the influence of any electorate or population, and national governments’ role is merely to create the enabling environment (see Part 1) to establish the resultant global governance.
The UN fully backs and promotes this worldwide digital transformation. In addition, the UN has already established global governance structures “in which the city predominates.” This unwavering transformation of the global polity and societal norms is precisely what the NRx technocrats want and are committed to achieving. The Orbital Authority that Curtis Yarvin deems necessary for “thousands of independent sovereign states and city-states” to “flourish” is being constructed by the UN and its multinational corporate “stakeholders.”
The UN is predominantly an oligarch-led project. In 2014, professor of international history Ludovic Tournès, writing for The Journal of Modern European History, highlighted the significant influence of the Rockefellers in establishing the United Nations. In the late 1950s, the Rockefeller-funded Special Studies Project began publishing its findings, culminating in the 1961 publication of the full report titled “Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports.”
Seeking to strengthen UN global governance, The Rockefeller Study Project recommended dividing the world “into smaller units” that would “consist of regional institutions under an international body of growing authority [the UN]” (page 26). The researchers ultimately recommended:
The most natural multination arrangements are frequently regional. [. . .] We believe that this regional approach has world-wide validity. [. . .] What is needed immediately is a determination to move in the direction they imply. Regional arrangements are no longer a matter of choice. They are imposed by the requirements of technology, science, and economics. Our course is to contribute to this process by constructive action [pages 188–190].
The idea of a global governance system, based upon a regional balance of power, had been pursued by a trans-Atlantic oligarch network—of which the Rockefellers are leading members—since the early 20th century. As part of the process of “constructive action” to establish this new world order, in 1965 the Rockefellers convened an international conference at their Villa Serbelloni mansion in Bellagio, Italy. Today called the Bellagio Center, the 1965 meeting at the Villa set up the Club of Rome policy think tank which solidified as “a core group of like-minded thinkers” in 1968.
In September 1973, the Club of Rome proposed a global governance model that divided the world into ten regions. In their report, titled “Regionalized and Adaptive Model of the Global World System,” they described these global governance regions as “Kingdoms.”
The same year, David Rockefeller co-founded the Trilateral Commission policy think tank with US political scientist and policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Unsurprisingly, the Trilateral Commission claims the authority to “affect [. . .] foreign policy and national security strategies,” across three global regions it calls pillars: North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. The current model of regional Kingdoms—“pillars” or “poles”—is commonly referred to as multipolarity and the consequent Multipolar World Order (MWO) is said to be in prospect.
The Munich Security Conference (MSC) is the premier international public-private security policy conference where predominantly, but not exclusively, Western “decision-makers” meet annually to network and form international defence and security policy. The MSC 2025 report informs us that there is a “changing global distribution of power,” adding that a “multipolar world holds significant promise.” However, it also notes that the new multipolar global governance bureaucracy must not impede “joint approaches to global crises and threats.”
The MSC determined that “depolarization [. . .] could set multipolarity on a positive track,” where “depolarization” refers to the process of nations accepting their sociopolitical and perhaps cultural differences but aligning to their respective “poles” in order to address “global crises” through collective action. To explain its “depolarization” point, on behalf of the MSC “decision-makers” it represents, the MSC report referenced the 2023 comments of then German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz who said, in order to “keep multilateralism alive in a multipolar world,” it was essential to maintain “greater partici
