According to the Brookings Institution’s analysis of carbon tax timing, high fossil fuel prices are the worst time to impose a carbon tax, but are the best time to build the underlying market architecture. And that infrastructure is rapidly being built and deployed by the biggest multinational corporations, governments and states, and the United Nations — especially in the past few months.
Announced at Davos in January 2026, the carbon market platform EcoGuard automates the full carbon credit lifecycle. The carbon market is expected to reach $5 trillion by 2035. This infrastructure is designed to be “invisible and ubiquitous” — the goal is for every transaction, settlement, and data point to be managed behind the scenes so that the user is not aware of it.
Also at Davos last January, Palantir CEO Alex Karp said that AI “will destroy humanities jobs,” and described a future in which high school students train for factory jobs, no one goes to college or immigrates, and black-box software run by major government contractors determines whether society is being run properly.
For the more compliant, the so-called 15-minute city, smart city, and freedom city models are being built to incorporate digital ID, carbon tracking, and population monitoring. Where you live, how far you travel, and what your carbon footprint is are already being tracked in multiple countries and several US cities. For the non-compliant, the prison business is booming. Federal and state governments have announced over $2 billion in new prison construction in the past year alone — and the private sector dwarfs that. ICE’s detention budget quadrupled when the One Big Beautiful Bill was signed into law in July 2025, adding nearly $11.25 billion to their coffers every year through 2029. An ICE director said he wanted a detention system that runs “like Prime, but for human beings.”
And in order to keep the compliant managed and the non-compliant contained, we have Palantir, which received a no-bid contract from the USDA to track federal employees’ return-to-office compliance with “real-time analytics” and “continuous compliance monitoring.” The contract also includes the initiative, which will give Palantir a unified database of the land holdings, conservation practices, insurance claims, and financial data of every farmer who interacts with the USDA. This is the same Palantir that is proudly assisting the United States and Israel in targeting operations against civilians across the Middle East.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp published The Technological Republic in February 2025. It became an instant New York Times #1 bestseller and has been described as “the AI manifesto inspiring Keir Starmer’s government” by The Times of London. Karp’s central argument is that the state must merge its power with Big Tech — as it did during the Manhattan Project — to “save Western civilization.” The original 1930s technocracy movement, of which Elon Musk’s grandfather was a member, declared that “technocracy stands ready with a plan to salvage American civilization, if and when democracy can no longer cope with the inherent disruptive forces.” Palantir is currently deployed by the Department of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, the FDA, the CDC, and the NIH, and is in discussions with the IRS and the Social Security Administration.
The Bank for International Settlements has been quietly publishing frameworks for CBDC interoperability that would allow all national digital currencies to communicate with each other under a unified settlement layer. Sam Altman’s Worldcoin project is building a worldwide biometric identity system with the stated goal of distinguishing humans from AI agents at scale. It already operates in dozens of countries.
The new system is falling together in pieces: a digital ID to fight fraud, a stablecoin for faster payments, carbon tracking for transparency, and AI for government efficiency. Our driver’s licenses become our digital wallets, and our level of compliance can determine how much access we have to them. There appears to be very little pushback — and soon, it may seem to be the only option available to avoid total collapse.
