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.
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 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.
The USD as the World’s “Exorbitant Privilege”
The modern dollar (USD) is no longer simply a domestic American currency. It is a globally distributed financial network.
Why SACT Logic is the Operational Core of Tokenization
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Jul 31) Why SACT Logic is the Operational Core of Tokenization. apennings.com https://apennings.com/how-it-came-to-rule-the-world/digital-monetarism/why-sact-logic-is-the-operational-core-of-tokenization/ Introduction Last summer, I was reviewing a paper on digital spreadsheets and time-space power that had been rejected by a journal and decided a term I used, “substitution,” needed elaboration. It led to my conceptualization, […]
How Developing Countries Will Access US Stablecoins
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Jul 28) How Developing Countries Will Access US Stablecoins. apennings.com https://apennings.com/uncategorized/how-developing-countries-will-access-us-stablecoins/ Introduction This post covers topics that my students and I have been addressing in a course called EST 230 – Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) for Sustainable Development that I have been teaching for the last six […]
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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@sunykorea.ac.kr
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