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.
Legal and Regulatory Restrictions on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) demonstrates that sovereign currency issuers like the United States face real resource constraints rather than nominal revenue limits, spending money into existence through reserve credits while utilizing taxation and bond sales to manage inflation, steer capital, and regulate interest rates (Kelton, 2020; Mosler, 1994). However, despite this operational reality, the US political economy remains legally bound to debt issuance through an entrenched statutory apparatus—including the Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, the Treasury-Federal Reserve Accord of 1951, and Title 31 of the US Code—which bars direct debt monetization and mandates that outlays from the Treasury General Account be matched by collected taxes or open-market Treasury auctions. Consequently, expanding federal spending to address critical public challenges like climate resilience and social welfare requires not only changing the public orthodoxy equating sovereign finance with household budgets, but also actively dismantling the legislative barriers that compel public investment to masquerade as commercial debt.
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.
CIPS vs. SWIFT: Dedollarization or Global Public Good?
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Aug 27) CIPS vs. SWIFT: Dedollarization or Global Public Good? apennings.com https://apennings.com/digital-geography/the-100-trillion-debt-era-mmt-as-permission-sact-as-engine/ Introduction The competition between China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) and the Western financial infrastructure represented by Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is often described as a technological contest where one payment network is […]
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.
The Cost of Fragmentation: What We Lose When Multilateralism Gives Way to Multipolarity
Multipolarity concerns the distribution of power among states; multilateralism concerns the institutional mechanisms through which states coordinate. A world can therefore be multipolar and still be strongly multilateral. The danger is not multipolarity itself. The danger is allowing political multipolarity to become institutional fragmentation.
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
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anthony.pennings@gmail.com
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anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr
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