US Stablecoins Blockchain Networks: Techno-Fiefs or Hyper-Capitalist Rails?
Rather than mutually exclusive realities, these two frameworks describe the twin forces pulling at the contemporary computational economy. When digital platforms use proprietary algorithms to trap users, wall off infosystems, and extract rent from uncompensated data flows, they demonstrate the coercive power of the Techno-Feudal estate. Yet, when developers deploy open-source HTTP primitives like x402 and self-custodial digital dollar rails to dismantle the tollgates of correspondent banking, they unleash a Hyper-Capitalist dynamic that levels transaction costs and extends market access to previously excluded frontiers.
ICT4D and the Geography of AI Computation
The geography of computation is ultimately a geography of opportunity. The central development challenge is no longer simply getting people online. It is ensuring that they can capture data, represent their own realities, retrieve knowledge, access computation, connect tools, coordinate intelligent systems, and convert computational capacity into meaningful action.
A Digital Bobsled in ICT4D
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Aug 29) A Digital Bobsled in ICT4D. apennings.com https://apennings.com/digital-geography/a-digital-bobsled-in-ict4d/ Introduction Cool Runnings (1992) (“peaceful journey”) is not simply as an underdog sports story, but as a parable about entering a technological world without having to become culturally or economically identical to the countries that built it.[1] My earlier […]
The Computerization of Society Revisited: French Social Theory and the Geopolitics of Information and Data Centers in the Age of AI
Nora and Minc concluded that the only way to prevent France from being subjugated by American computing conglomerates was for the state to build and regulate the national telecommunications infrastructure, ensuring that the informational grid remained a public utility rather than a corporate monopoly.
A $100 Trillion USD Climate and Energy Program for the AI Era
So perhaps the most important policy challenge of the AI era is not how much money we can create, but whether we can develop the institutional, computational, and political intelligence to decide what the money should build.
The Three-Layer USD as the Primary Global Financial Infrastructure
This article expands on the argument that the “USD” is the combination of the US dollar and Eurodollars, which includes the petrodollars, recognizing that the US Federal Reserve is still the primary regulator of the global currency.
AI Data Centers in Space?
This forms the first step in SpaceX’s broader vision of space-based AI infrastructure, intended to complement (and eventually potentially rival) ground-based hyperscale data centers for certain workloads. The approach remains early-stage; thermal management, radiation hardening, launch cadence, reliability, and overall economics are still being proven at scale.
The USD System at the Center of China’s Global Engine
The strategic question today is what China would lose if global dollar liquidity became substantially less available. China could continue trading through the renminbi, CIPS, bilateral currency arrangements, and other alternatives, but replacing the dollar requires replacing an enormous coordination infrastructure, not merely introducing another currency.
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About Me
Professor (full) at State University of New York (SUNY) Korea since 2016. Research Professor for Stony Brook University. Moved to Austin, Texas in August 2012 to join the Digital Media Management program at St. Edwards University. Spent the previous decade on the faculty at New York University teaching and researching information systems, digital economics, and global political economy
You can reach me at:
anthony.pennings@gmail.com
apennings70@gmail.com
anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr
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