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.
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.
I Can See Clearly Now: Jimmy Cliff, Cool Runnings, and the Case for Appropriate Development
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Aug 20) I Can See Clearly Now: Jimmy Cliff, Cool Runnings, and the Case for Appropriate Development. apennings.com https://apennings.com/political-economy-of-media/i-can-see-clearly-now-jimmy-cliff-cool-runnings-and-the-case-for-appropriate-development/ Introduction I often use a song to set a theme for my classes. For my EST 230 – Information and Communications Technology for Sustainable Development, I chose Jimmy Cliff’s […]
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.
SACT-AI’s Reinforcement Learning for Realization of Keynes’s Bancor/ICU Proposal at Bretton Woods
Q-learning is the primary policy-optimization engine for a SACT-AI Bancor/ICU because the problem is best framed as learning the value of discrete, rule-based adjustment actions in a high-stakes, partially observable environment with abundant historical data. PPO offers superior stability and is better suited for continuous control sub-problems, but its on-policy nature and lower sample efficiency make it secondary. In Global Spreadsheet Capitalism, the combination of Q-learning’s value-driven symmetry with PPO’s fine-tuning capability creates the most robust, auditable, and adaptive engine for realizing Keynes’s vision of a computable, multipolar monetary order.
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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
About me
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