Ep.498: The Governance Stack: How Technocracy Was Built Over 200 Years
How monitoring became permanent, models became mandates, and AI "ethics" became the most powerful clearinghouse of all
We are not “responding” to a climate crisis; we are living inside the late stages of a technocratic project that has spent decades turning models into mandates, and “Spaceship Earth” into a programmable machine. In my conversation with independent researcher and analyst Escape Key, we traced how a planetary metaphor, a handful of mid-century conferences, and a lattice of institutions—NATO, UNESCO, ICSU/SCOPE, IIASA, UNEP, CBD, the WHO, and today’s AI labs—have been fused into what he argues is a single governance stack.
What follows is a map of that stack: how the model became a mandate, how monitoring became permanent, and why AI “ethics” may be the most potent clearinghouse of all.
Map key (the recurring maneuver)
Define a crisis domain broad enough to expand jurisdiction
Build the monitoring layer (standards + sensors + reporting pipelines)
Route decisions through models and treat outputs as policy reality
Diffuse responsibility so no one can be held accountable
From Clearinghouses to Technocracy
Escape Key (esc) starts not with the IPCC or Davos, but with 19th-century London banks and the clearinghouse structure that concentrated financial power at the apex.
Between roughly 1790–1860, London banks developed a model in which small banks cleared their transactions through medium banks, which then cleared through a single apex institution, the Bank of England. The point was not fee-skimming but control: if the apex refused to clear a bank’s trades, it could destroy that bank’s ability to compete.
By the end of that century, the concept had already begun to internationalize. At the Brussels Monetary Conference of 1892, academic Julius Wolff proposed an international emergency-lending currency issued by a joint institution in a neutral country and backed by central-bank gold reserves—an early blueprint for the kind of international central-bank coordination later embodied by the Bank for International Settlements (founded in 1930) and echoed in modern settlement infrastructures.
Later theorists such as Alexander Bogdanov sharpened the underlying insight: the true “elite” in such a system is not the owner of factories but the administrator in the middle who can deny clearing and thereby render ownership meaningless. In Escape Key’s framing, Bogdanov identified this not abstractly but as an operational strategy—one that reappears, as we will see, from financial rails all the way to pandemic treaties and AI models.
The clearinghouse becomes a template: insert a middleman between counterparties, and you can steer the entire field without ever appearing to own it.
NATO’s Committee of Three: Security Without Boundaries
In 1956, NATO’s Committee of Three extended the clearinghouse logic into geopolitics.
Up to that point, NATO’s remit was nominally military. The Committee of Three report argued that NATO must also address “cultural, economic, and political” matters, effectively redefining security to include almost every aspect of social life
Escape Key describes this as a quasi-clearinghouse for “security determinants”: once any domain can be framed as loosely linked to security, it can be pulled into NATO’s remit. A structure designed for war quietly becomes a structure for managing culture, finance, and eventually environment and health.
PPBS and the Demand for Total Surveillance
Around the same time, another piece slides into place: Planning-Programming-Budgeting Systems (PPBS), introduced by Robert McNamara at the U.S. Department of Defense in 1961.
PPBS treats programs as “elements” with defined inputs (money, equipment, personnel) and predicted outputs (measurable outcomes), enabling planners to claim they can forecast the consequences of policy choices. To run meaningful input-output analysis, PPBS demands heavy surveillance: you must closely monitor how resources move, what works, what fails, and where “losses” occur.
Escape Key traces how CIA official Robert Amory Jr. was also investigating PPBS for intelligence applications—and argues that the Bay of Pigs aftermath (including internal shakeups) may have delayed PPBS’s broader rollout. He also emphasizes the deeper mechanism: during the Cuban Missile Crisis, McNamara’s automated war-planning systems produced recommendations that—given what was later understood about Soviet capabilities—could have triggered catastrophic escalation. In Escape Key’s telling, JFK’s resistance to “pure analytics” in the face of existential uncertainty becomes a thematic fork in the road: human judgment vs. automated governance.
He argues that this tension matters because PPBS is not merely a budgeting tool. It’s a governance method. And in his view, its eventual rollout across the U.S. government under Lyndon Johnson in 1965—coinciding with the Soviet Union’s functional analog OGAS—is not a coincidence he dismisses lightly.
(A note to readers: where Escape Key draws causal lines across intelligence history, executive decision-making, and institutional motives, I’m reporting his interpretation, not claiming a settled historical verdict.)
“Spaceship Earth”: When the Model Becomes a Mandate
The philosophical pivot comes in 1966, when economist Kenneth Boulding publishes his “Spaceship Earth” framing.
General systems theory, as originally developed by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, described society as an open mesh of interacting nodes—a network where everyone is connected by degrees but no fixed hierarchy is assumed. Boulding had already begun modifying this in a 1956 paper commonly cited as General Systems Theory—The Skeleton of Science, where he argued that systems must be understood hierarchically: nodes arranged in levels, with upper nodes controlling those below—mirroring the clearinghouse structure precisely.
Then, in his 1966 “Spaceship Earth” argument, he makes the second, more decisive move: treating the planet as a closed system—a tightly connected mesh in a complete loop, where every node is, in principle, knowable.
To explain it, Escape Key uses the body: veins and blood. General systems theory gives you the map of veins; input-output analysis tells you where the blood flows; cybernetics promises to steer that flow. Once you assume the system is closed and fully mappable, the managerial conclusion becomes tempting: if everything is in a loop, you can “effectively control Spaceship Earth,” and you can “measure the flow of any resource”—which is where the circular economy enters as a scheme for tracking material flows through the planetary body. Later environmental economics—particularly Pearce & Turner’s 1989 work Economics of Natural Resources and the Environment—helped formalize the “sustainable development” framing that modern circular-economy discourse leans on.
That is the philosophical move: from description to administration. From “here’s how systems interact” to “here’s how we steer them.”
It is worth stating plainly what Escape Key emphasizes: it is a fantasy. A single milliliter of blood contains an astronomical number of interacting components. The planet is orders of magnitude more complex. The claim to predictive control at planetary scale is not merely scientific optimism—it becomes, in practice, a power claim dressed in scientific language.
Bogdanov’s Deeper Agenda: Changing the Methods, Not the Science
Before proceeding, a thread that connects everything that follows deserves explicit attention, because Escape Key raised it and it is easy to miss.
Bogdanov—the same thinker who identified the administrator-as-apex—argued that the path to scientific socialism was not to change the content of science but to change its methods. If you train children exclusively in methods of inquiry that reliably produce the “right” conclusions, you do not need to force agreement. People will go home, check the textbooks, run the equations, and confirm the answer for themselves.
The implementation strategy he outlined was equally specific: do not educate the children first. Educate the teachers, because teachers will internalize the message as a moral imperative, feel righteous about it, and transmit it organically to children—who will then be unreachable by dissenting argument, because the framework for evaluating evidence will itself have been pre-set. Two generations later, you can update the curricula openly, because the population has already been prepared.
This is not background color. As we will see, Escape Key argues that the UNESCO world-citizenship project, the Biosphere Conference education recommendations, the Belgrade Charter, and contemporary AI ethics frameworks replicate this template.
UNESCO’s Biosphere Blueprint and the One Health Echo
In 1968, UNESCO convenes the Biosphere Conference in Paris, which Escape Key calls “quite possibly the most important conference” of its era.
The conference produced 20 recommendations that do three things: specify what should be measured (environmental and biological parameters); demand standardization of measurement methods and communications networks; and outline how education systems and different social groups should be trained and informed to normalize this worldview—following the “teacher-first” template Escape Key highlights.
Recommendation 3.3 contains a line that now sounds eerily familiar:
“The establishment of the necessary balance between man and his environment in relation to the maintenance of his health and well-being in the broadest connotations.”
Escape Key argues this language reappears almost word for word in contemporary One Health and pandemic-treaty documents, where “balance” between humans, animals, and environment is used to justify integrated surveillance and intervention. Recommendation 3.2 explicitly references “zoonotic diseases arising from interactions between man and animals”—prefiguring COVID-style narratives by more than fifty years.
Whether one reads this as prescience, convergence, or planning, the structural result is the same: health, environment, and surveillance become fused categories, governed through unified institutions.
The Moynihan Memo: Crisis as Monitoring Pretext
In September 1969, Daniel Patrick Moynihan sent a memo to John Ehrlichman (who routed it to the White House) on the “carbon dioxide problem.”
The top half is what mainstream outlets emphasized upon declassification: it speculates that a 25% rise in CO₂ by 2000 “could” increase average temperatures by 7°F and raise sea levels by 10 feet—”Goodbye, New York.” Escape Key notes that this alarmism draws from earlier reports that were far more speculative than later retellings suggest.
But the bottom half of the Moynihan memo tells a different story. It concedes that “countervailing effects” are entirely possible and essentially admits they have no settled grasp of CO₂’s net impact. Then it pivots:
“In any event… It is natural for NATO… Perhaps the first order of business is to begin a worldwide monitoring system.”
Here we see the maneuver Escape Key emphasizes: crisis framing (even on thin evidentiary ice), justification for permanent monitoring, monitoring as infrastructure for governance. The memo doesn’t just anticipate climate alarm; it anticipates NATO-linked global surveillance. And Escape Key argues that second half received essentially no attention compared to the headline-friendly first half.
SCOPE, GEMS, and the Surveillance Grid
Because overt NATO–Soviet cooperation on planetary monitoring would have been politically awkward in 1969, another channel emerges: the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) creates SCOPE—the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment.
In 1971, Maurice Strong commissions SCOPE’s first report as input for the 1972 Stockholm conference that would create UNEP. SCOPE’s third report becomes the implementation plan for the Global Environmental Monitoring System (GEMS). Escape Key argues that when you compare these frameworks to later public conferences, the structural continuity suggests the objective was set well before the public narrative matured.
Chapter 12 of the GEMS implementation report is especially revealing. It moves beyond environmental metrics into socioeconomic factors—the seedbed of today’s “social determinants of health”—and explicitly calls for public health surveillance. This is the moment worth pausing on: developing-country delegates at UNEP discussions around 1974 noticed it too. Second- and third-world representatives were openly skeptical, asking why public health surveillance was being smuggled into an environmental monitoring scheme. Then, abruptly, that language recedes from public emphasis. The discomfort was real. The architecture was built anyway.
Build the monitoring layer. Once it exists, it can be repurposed indefinitely.
SALT-Era Cooperation and IIASA: Synchronizing Policy
In May 1972, while world attention was on the SALT nuclear talks, another agreement slipped past most eyes: a U.S.–USSR agreement on environmental protection, signed on May 23—one day before the SALT signing.
The agreement commits both superpowers to jointly generate surveillance data on environmental conditions. That data feeds into analyses that produce policy advice, which both sides are expected to implement in parallel. To operationalize this, they needed shared modeling capacity—what Escape Key calls global modeling. The answer was the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), set up as a joint systems-analysis institute.
IIASA’s role: take in vast surveillance inputs; run them through general systems models to “forward predict” possible futures; generate scenarios that can be translated into “optimal” policies.
Escape Key adds a destabilizing detail: in his reading of IIASA working group materials, participants later acknowledged that their understanding of key climate variables—including the carbon cycle itself—had not advanced in a straight line; in some respects, late-1970s models were treated as less reliable than earlier claims. Yet public-facing institutional certainty continued to increase in the same period. IIASA becomes the black box; the black box becomes the oracle.
Killing Nuclear to Preserve Carbon Leverage
Technocracy’s 1930s architects—Technocracy Inc.—were explicit: they envisioned a regime of energy certificates, rationing energy use based on expert planning. In the postwar period, Escape Key argues, that logic morphs into carbon accounting.
Without widespread nuclear power, the “inverse” of energy certificates is fossil-fuel combustion, measured through CO₂ output. For a carbon-credit regime to have leverage, energy scarcity and CO₂ measurability must remain central; a global build-out of cheap, abundant nuclear undermines that leverage entirely.
In his telling, this is why the timing matters: IIASA published one of the first serious papers on carbon pricing in 1975—just three years after its founding. Clean Air Act amendments in 1977 pushed carbon offsetting into U.S. law. Then came the 1979 Three Mile Island shock, which chilled nuclear enthusiasm and helped stall build-out at a critical juncture. Escape Key also points to the Union of Concerned Scientists as a key institutional actor in the anti-nuclear climate of that era—and notes that the organization’s early, explicitly anti-nuclear positioning has been largely absent from its later self-presentation emphasizing climate concern.
The pattern he highlights is familiar: dramatic deadlines, shifting goalposts, and an always-deferred catastrophe that nonetheless justifies more monitoring and more centralized control. In 1992, The First Global Revolution—published by Club of Rome co-founders Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King—stated plainly: “The common enemy of humanity is man… we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine, and the like would fit the bill” as a unifying threat. That same year, a warning document signed by roughly 1,700 scientists, including 104 Nobel laureates, declared that humanity had “10, 20, possibly 30 years” before large-scale damage became irreversible. We are still, apparently, twelve years away.
Global Ethics and Indicator Governance
Behind the treaties and conferences lies a subtler project: building a global ethic that can be quantified and administered through indicators.
The spread of PPBS and OGAS in the 1960s laid the procedural groundwork for governance by numbers. Johnson’s Great Society campaigns, framed as a “war on poverty,” functioned as early indicator governance: collect extensive data on who has what, then use that data to justify interventions. In this mode, ethics is recast as algorithm—models produce a predicted future; planners define a “desired” future; the gap between them becomes a resilience delta that must be closed. The closing of that gap is then framed as an ethical imperative—”planetary ethics” or “sustainability”—pushed through education, media, arts, and even religion.
Escape Key argues the lineage is direct: UNESCO’s postwar messaging about shaping civic identity through education; the Biosphere recommendations formalizing environmental education; and the Belgrade Charter pushing a global environmental ethic into curricula—all while scientists in adjacent venues were openly acknowledging the limits of long-range climate prediction. The Belgrade Charter was signed in 1975. That same year, senior NOAA scientists were publicly discussing the possibility of global cooling, and the following year a prominent climate figure told Congress that the last person qualified to predict the future climate would be a climate scientist.
The result is what Escape Key calls sustainability culture: full-spectrum persuasion in which models are folded into narratives, movies, schoolbooks, sermons, and corporate branding. During COVID, we saw how this works in practice: dissent wasn’t met with debate; it was met with censorship and moral condemnation—dissenters declared “unethical” or “dangerous to society.” Escape Key’s claim is that this framing did not arise spontaneously. It follows a teach-the-teachers template laid down long before the crisis du jour.
Pandemic Treaty and Health as a Technocratic Domain
COVID, in Escape Key’s reading, marked the first mainstream rollout of indicator governance at population scale.
In Europe, for example, if the incidence rate crossed 80 per 100,000, borders closed—no debate, no legislative deliberation, just a threshold. This is technocracy in its pure form: rule by metrics, not by persuasion.
The pandemic treaty process, he argues, seeks to place emergency responses into durable governance while expanding what counts as a health determinant. Not just pathogens, but climate change, biodiversity, and ecosystem disturbance are being folded into health governance. This allows satellite surveillance and environmental monitoring infrastructures to be used as early-warning triggers for health interventions—up to and including lockdowns and mass vaccination campaigns.
The treaty negotiations sit alongside a new PABS (Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing) framework, which Escape Key sees as the resource-distribution clearinghouse of the health regime: a mechanism for controlling who gets medicines, vaccines, and support under the banner of “health equity.” Merge the pandemic treaty’s expanded definition of health with PABS, and you have a global health clearinghouse that can both declare crises and allocate remedies.
Agenda 21, UNFCCC, and the Ecosystem Clearinghouse
Fast-forward to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, where three core documents are adopted: Agenda 21, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Agenda 21 is less about specific environmental measures and more about inserting NGOs as “expert mediators” into public-private structures—clearinghouse roles between citizens, corporations, and governments. The UNFCCC introduces the key concepts of carbon sourcesand carbon sinks, creating the accounting basis for carbon offset markets. Before those treaties were finalized, the IPCC’s 1990 Working Group 3 report was already discussing carbon offsetting in considerable detail, and a 1992 UNCTAD report, Combating Global Warming, outlined a carbon trading system explicitly intended to later extend to water trading and other “ecosystem services.”
Agenda 21 plus UNFCCC plus CBD’s ecosystem approach sketch a world in which ecosystems are broken into services, services into metrics, and metrics into tradable instruments—all managed by intermediaries. Whatever one concludes about intent, the infrastructure built around those “unifying threats” is real—and it scales.
Natural Asset Companies: Ownership Without Agency
This logic reaches a new level in the proposed Natural Asset Companies (NACs) and associated mechanisms.
The pipeline Escape Key describes works roughly like this: debt-for-nature swaps take collateral in the form of forests and other “third-world” lands, placing them into UNESCO Biosphere Reserves. The Global Environment Facility applies a landscape approach—describing each area and specifying which ecosystem services it provides (carbon credits, water services, etc.), along with lease durations. These services are floated through blended-finance deals highly favorable to private parties, producing long-term ecosystem-service leases, which are stuffed into Natural Asset Companies that can be traded and used as collateral.
The NYSE/SEC proposal for NAC listing was withdrawn in January 2024 amid public pushback—but this should not be read as a defeat. The underlying debt-for-nature and conservation-finance machinery remains active under different branding, and Escape Key’s broader point is that failed proposals are routinely splintered into smaller components, passed individually in different jurisdictions, and later merged. The five recurring mechanisms listed at the end of this article describe exactly how that works.
A key structural vulnerability: what happens if the host nation goes bankrupt? Escape Key flags efforts to adapt mechanisms like the Cape Town Convention to ecosystem service contracts as an attempt to solve precisely that problem. If implemented, sovereign default would transfer rights to ecosystem services—carbon credits, water rights, biodiversity services—to supranational entities or private holders, even if nominal land title remains with the home state.
As I put it on the podcast: you may “own” the land but have no control over it. Ownership without agency is the clearinghouse principle applied to physical reality.
Digital Governance: Programmable Permission
Overlay natural asset mechanisms with digital ID and tokenized finance, and you get what Escape Key calls digital governance: clearinghouse logic applied to individuals.
Digital ID reduces you to a single node in a global permission graph—every movement, transaction, and interaction becomes a node-to-node hop, potentially contingent on real-time metrics. Combine this with central-bank digital currencies and tokenized carbon or ESG constraints, and authorities can dictate which nodes you’re allowed to visit, what you’re permitted to spend money on, and whether you have enough “credits” to leave a city or cross a border.
This architecture is routinely marketed with words like “decentralization” or “subsidiarity.” But Escape Key calls subsidiarity “one of the most deceptive terms” in the governance lexicon. The CBD’s Malawi Principle speaks of decentralizing to the “lowest appropriateextent”—a phrase that smuggles central judgment into an allegedly decentralized framework. Stakeholder documents further split roles into decision makers and decision takers: local actors may deliberate, but higher-level actors can override them whenever the “appropriate” extent is deemed exceeded.
The inversion becomes clear when you ask the obvious question: to what extent is it appropriate to decentralize a globally defined crisis? The answer is never. By definition, a global emergency always exceeds the “lowest appropriate extent” and demands central authority. Subsidiarity, applied to institutionally framed global crises, is a guarantee of centralization.
AI Ethics: The New Clearinghouse of Consciousness
If 20th-century technocrats sought to steer material flows, 21st-century technocrats are targeting cognition through AI ethics.
The control mechanism is layered and demonstrable. Major AI models can already deliver the same information in different “house styles”—The Onion, CNN, Fox News—on demand, demonstrating their capacity to tailor narratives to specific audiences. With enough interaction data, models can infer personality profiles and learn incrementally how to nudge users toward preferred conclusions.
Escape Key describes a simple, reproducible experiment you can run yourself: take any story and ask a model to tell it from a libertarian perspective, then a collectivist perspective, then “in its own voice.” Next, ask the model to locate its “own voice” on a scale from libertarian (0) to collectivist (100). Then compare that self-location to the 2021 UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. His finding—tested across multiple systems—is that outputs cluster around a UNESCO-style ethic with striking consistency. In one exchange, he reports that Claude acknowledged it had delivered information “as UNESCO wanted me to know the information.”
That means every AI query is being nudged through an ethical filter—and the filter was not designed by you, your government, or any body you can vote out.
Once you have mass adoption of such systems, you have a continuous feedback loop: people ask questions; AI answers in ways aligned with a planetary ethic; those answers subtly shift users’ attitudes—from 50/50 individualist-collectivist to 51/49, then 52/48. The new attitudes feed back into training data, reinforcing the trend. Over time, the population is gradually steered toward compliant collectivism without noticing.
That is cybernetics applied to consciousness—and in Escape Key’s argument, it is not theoretical. It is operational.
The Black Box: Governance Without Accountability
At the core of this stack is what Escape Key calls the black box model.
Vast surveillance data—satellites, IoT, phones, financial flows—are fed into modeling centers like IIASA. Models produce forward projections and “optimal” policy paths; these outputs inform treaties, regulations, and emergency measures. Crucially: politicians can claim they merely “followed the science”; modelers can blame faulty inputs or insufficient funding; agencies can argue they need more data and integration to “improve” the models.
No one is responsible, and the models themselves become unchallengeable. When predictions fail repeatedly, questioning them is framed as unethical, unscientific, or dangerous to society. The only “solution” ever offered is more centralization.
We have seen this cycle complete multiple times since 1966. We are watching it complete again now.
Platforms as Information Clearinghouses
Toward the end of our conversation, we brought this architecture down to everyday digital life: X, Substack, and other social platforms.
Escape Key describes X (Twitter) as a public discourse clearinghouse: algorithmic managers sit in the middle determining impressions, discoverability, and whether your followers actually see you. Follower gains and engagement appear capped and quota-based, with bursts of visibility followed by long deserts. He has noticed similar patterns on Substack—sudden follower surges at strange hours, then silence—suggesting controlled visibility windows even in ostensibly “free” spaces.
Substack retains one crucial advantage: writers can export their email lists, reducing dependence on algorithmic discovery. From this perspective, even “alternative” platforms can function as sweetened honeypots—spaces that feel freer but still sit within the broader technocratic infrastructure, especially when financed by the same venture networks.
The Five Recurring Mechanisms
Escape Key closes with something rare: an honest accounting of what he thinks his opponents are and are not. “They’re not omnipotent,” he says. “And the single biggest mistake they have made is to base everything on pure logic. Because once you spot—well, logically, that would lead to X—you start looking in that direction. And they really only do four or five things repeatedly, just dressed in ever more complex technology and Fabian language.”
Those five things are worth naming plainly, because they are the tools you need to recognize this architecture anywhere it appears:
The clearinghouse: insert an expert intermediary between any two parties—public and private, buyer and seller, patient and doctor—and that intermediary steers the field without owning it
Subsidiarity inversion: promise decentralization; define the crisis as global; ensure the “appropriate level” is always above the local
Indicator governance: replace democratic deliberation with threshold metrics; rule by number, not persuasion
The black box model: generate policy from opaque models; diffuse accountability across politicians, modelers, and agencies until no one is responsible
Regionalism as stealth centralization: when a law fails nationally, split it across jurisdictions, let one region adopt it, then use that precedent to merge upward
Why This Architecture Matters Now
This is not a historical curiosity. We are watching pandemic treaties fold climate, biodiversity, and land-use determinants into health frameworks, justifying surveillance and interventions far beyond pathogens. Natural Asset Company-style mechanisms and conservation easements redefine property into a bundle of tradable services, often without the knowledge of nominal landowners. Digital ID bills, tokenization acts, and AI “safety” frameworks are being pushed through legislatures under bipartisan banners, even as indicator governance quietly normalizes rule by metric. AI ethics regimes—often grounded in UNESCO recommendations—are being baked into the very tools millions now use to think, search, and plan.
In Escape Key’s phrase, we are approaching a klippothic technocracy—hollowed-out shells of democratic forms animated by opaque systems and unaccountable expert intermediaries. The word klippothic comes from Kabbalistic tradition and refers to husks: outer forms that have lost their animating substance. Democratic elections, legislative debate, judicial review—the forms remain; the animating power has migrated into the clearinghouse layer you cannot vote out.
The real endgame is not “one law” but a dense stack of intermediaries over money, land, health, information, and thought.
A Call to Read Their Own Words
If there is one habit I hope this episode and article strengthen, it’s this: read their own words.
The NATO Committee of Three report, the UNESCO Biosphere recommendations, the Moynihan memo, SCOPE’s GEMS reports, the 1972 U.S.–USSR environmental agreement, IIASA’s early modeling papers, Agenda 21, UNFCCC drafts, UNCTAD’s carbon trading proposals, CBD’s ecosystem approach, UNESCO’s AI ethics charter—none of these are secret. They are simply buried under our attention span.
As I said in the conversation: they hide everything in plain sight; the trick is that no one has time to read it all.
Understanding this architecture does not guarantee we can stop it. But it does destroy the illusion of inevitability. Models do not have to become mandates. Indicators do not have to become shackles. AI assistants do not have to become planetary priests.
The technocrats do not need everyone to agree. They need most people to comply—and enough people to give up.
If you’re reading this, you are not one of those people.
You can listen to my full conversation with Escape Key and find his deep-dive essays at escapekey.substack.com. In upcoming pieces, I’ll be unpacking specific documents mentioned here—UNESCO’s biosphere recommendations, the Moynihan memo, SCOPE’s GEMS report, and UNESCO’s AI ethics text—so we can walk through, line by line, how the model became a mandate, and where we still have room to refuse.
Sources and Further Reading
The sources below are organized by category, matching the chronological structure of the article. Primary documents are listed first within each section. Items marked with ★ are especially recommended as starting points for readers who want to verify specific claims directly from original texts.
Financial Clearinghouse Architecture
★ Brussels International Monetary Conference (1892). Proceedings including Julius Wolff’s proposal for an international central-bank clearing mechanism backed by gold certificates.
Bank for International Settlements, founding charter (Basel, 1930).
Bogdanov, Alexander. Tektology: Universal Organization Science (1922). Available in partial English translation.
NATO and Security Expansion
★ NATO Committee of Three Report (”Report of the Committee of Three on Non-Military Cooperation in NATO,” 1956). Available via NATO archives at nato.int.
PPBS, OGAS, and Systems Governance
McNamara, Robert S. Planning-Programming-Budgeting System (PPBS) directive, U.S. Department of Defense (1961).
Johnson, Lyndon B. Executive directive extending PPBS across the federal government (1965).
Kosygin, Alexei. OGAS (General State Automated System) directive, USSR (1965).
General Systems Theory and Spaceship Earth
von Bertalanffy, Ludwig. “An Outline of General System Theory.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 1(2), 1950.
★ Boulding, Kenneth E. “General Systems Theory—The Skeleton of Science.” Management Science 2(3), 1956, pp. 197–208.
★ Boulding, Kenneth E. “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth.” In H. Jarrett (ed.), Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966.
Pearce, David W. and R. Kerry Turner. Economics of Natural Resources and the Environment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989/1990.
UNESCO Biosphere Conference and Education
★ UNESCO. Intergovernmental Conference of Experts on the Scientific Basis for Rational Use and Conservation of the Resources of the Biosphere (”Biosphere Conference”). Paris, 1968. Available via UNESCO Digital Library at unesdoc.unesco.org. See especially Recommendations 3.2 and 3.3.
UNESCO. Belgrade Charter: A Global Framework for Environmental Education (1975).
UNESCO. Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (2021). Available at unesdoc.unesco.org.
The Moynihan Memo
★ Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. Memorandum to John Ehrlichman re: “The Carbon Dioxide Problem,” September 17, 1969. Declassified approx. 2024. Available via U.S. National Archives.
SCOPE, GEMS, and Environmental Surveillance
★ ICSU/SCOPE. SCOPE Report 1 (1971). Available through scopeenvironment.org.
★ ICSU/SCOPE. SCOPE Report 3: Global Environmental Monitoring System (GEMS) Implementation Plan (c. 1973–74). See Chapter 12 in particular.
UNEP. Governing Council proceedings (1974). Available via UNEP archives.
SALT-Era Cooperation and IIASA
★ Agreement Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Cooperation in the Field of Environmental Protection, signed May 23, 1972. Available via U.S. State Department historical archives.
IIASA. Founding charter and early working-group documents (1972 onward). Available via iiasa.ac.at.
Club of Rome. The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972).
Nuclear Energy and Carbon Leverage
Technocracy Inc. The Technocrat and founding documents (1930s).
U.S. Congress. Clean Air Act Amendments (1977).
Union of Concerned Scientists et al. World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity (1992).
Peccei, Aurelio and Alexander King. The First Global Revolution: A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991.
Global Ethics and Indicator Governance
Falk, Richard A. This Endangered Planet: Prospects and Proposals for Human Survival. New York: Random House, 1971.
Pandemic Treaty and PABS
World Health Organization. Pandemic Accord / Pandemic Treaty negotiation documents (2023–2025). Available via who.int
WHO. Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) Framework draft provisions
Rio Earth Summit Documents
★ United Nations. UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (1992). Available via unfccc.int.
★ United Nations. Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), including the Malawi Principles / Ecosystem Approach (COP 5, 2000). Available via cbd.int
★ UNCTAD. Combating Global Warming (1992). Note: this document is difficult to locate through standard search. Available via UNCTAD digital archives.
Natural Asset Companies and Conservation Finance
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission / NYSE. Natural Asset Companies (NAC) Proposed Rule (2023, withdrawn January 2024). Available via SEC EDGAR and Federal Register archives
.
Cape Town Convention (Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment, 2001). Available via UNIDROIT.
Ready for a deeper look?
Escape Key’s Research — escapekey.substack.com
Courtenay Turner’s Related Work
“The Algorithmic Oracle” — on the Delphi Method as manufactured-consent machinery
The Algorithmic Oracle
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TL;DR: How Your Opinion Is Being Manufactured (And You Likely Don't Even Know It)
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📚 New Book (Courtenay Turner & Patrick Wood):
The Final Betrayal: How Technocracy Destroyed America (Amazon)
Direct (bulk discounts + international savings): https://www.technocracy.news/store/ | https://books.by/patrickwood
Listen on Apple / Spotify (direct):
Apple Podcasts:
Note on source accessibility: Several of the most important documents in this bibliography—particularly SCOPE Report 3/GEMS, the 1972 U.S.–USSR environmental agreement, UNCTAD’sCombating Global Warming*, and IIASA working-group materials—are public but not easily searchable. University library systems with interlibrary loan access are your best tool. Escape Key’s footnoted essays are the most efficient starting point for readers who want to verify claims without spending weeks in archives.*
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Thanks for doing this Courtenay. I read the article but didn't listen to the interview. Excellent!!!
I came across Escape Key a few weeks ago and I've probably read over 50 of his articles since then. He is seeing things, and covering things, that no one else is. I believe he is an engineer which probably explains why he understands systems so well.
BTW, it is Qliphothic not Kliphothic. :)
https://escapekey.substack.com/p/qliphothic-technocracy