When Intelligence Infrastructure Outgrows the Banks

I’m the opposite of an alarmist. I don’t hide from bad news. And I make it my business to look for the ground truth. Facts and seeking to see things as they are and not as I would want them to be is a fundamental part of how I try to operate in the world. That means I pay attention. I read and witness what I disagree with, things I wish I didn’t know, and that is a constant reconciliation of what is, and how it has real implications for my life and the lives of all of us.

I mentor and teach emerging leaders and CEOs tackling complex subjects like throughput management and building and executing complex product and projects for large scale Enterprises. I’m launching my own AI company as I write this, and so everything I’m about to explore is a subject (money systems and how technology is reshaping them and our human systems) has implications in the real world for my own path and for those I collaborate with or advise.

Fundamentally, I try not to make distinctions of good or bad, although I have strong feelings and biases about a lot of things. No human exists without that emotional and psychological subtextual set of screens.

So, when it comes to power and influence to technologically re-engineer and evolve the world and confront global constraints like climate change and affordable clean energy or clean water access (fundamental to life and progress), my interests in data and our monetary systems are both personal and systemic.

They emanate from an intent to generate extreme amounts of wealth, which I am not afraid to say openly, and a desire to use that wealth to express an ethics of care I have about people and our mutual ability to thrive. So, Reader Friend, if I have a bias, it is that.

The Recalibration of Power

There’s a quiet recalibration underway in global markets. The fiat money institutions of the last century (banks and capital allocators) are being eclipsed in market value and economic weight by something new. Not social media, not cloud software. Something deeper. A sea change.

A shift so significant it has reordered the seat of wealth and global human influence, shifting from the industrialists who built their wealth off of petroleum oil and the physical world, to the new data miners, who are not mining gold or real estate and markets built off those hard assets. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a lot of wealth to extract out of the natural and physical world of assets, which is why I’ve spent the last few decades trying to advance technology that addresses the bridges to smarter and more sustainable alternatives.

The new miners have also arrived. They are mining the world’s and people’s data and held knowledge, and they are building the new emerging markets and decentralized, non-fiat financial systems and governance control structures that provide the means to partition off access to this knowledge and data. Some are using it as the new Cold War, as societal power cleavers.

Some, like myself are building the enabling new data mines and power tools for people and governments that recognize sovereign data ownership is imbued in our human rights. We believe people and government built by and for people should serve them, that our data should not be kept apart from us, but instead is a fuel source to unlock our capacity and ability to do more together in ways which can benefit everyone, and not just a select few. The Cold Data War will become increasingly evident when the first technology company rises to offer that alternative. (hint hint).

This new class of private technology company has emerged and their power lies in how they operate at the system level. These aren’t just data platforms. They are intelligence infrastructure providers. They don’t sell consumer experiences or digital ads. They architect the operating systems for governments, critical infrastructure, and the largest industrial players on Earth.

Companies like Palantir are among the most visible members of this class. They provide software that integrates decision intelligence across defense, supply chains, healthcare systems, energy grids, and entire public sectors.

These platforms ingest and analyze massive, messy data in real time. They deliver insights that become policy, that shape military strategy, and that alter the trajectory of national economies. And what they have achieved and will continue to achieve, which includes the underlying AI, agentic, and AGI (advanced generative intelligence) and ASI (advanced system intelligence) platforms emerging today, are the new oil fields and energy and monetary systems of the next level of society.

Their “market” and their social and geopolitical value isn’t based on unit sales or daily active users. Their value is measured by how many lives, institutions, and crisis responses their platforms hold up. Or in the future, the risk is that they can be manipulated or used intentionally to only hold up lives, institutions, and crisis responses that fit an ideological or self interested point of view. I think we’re already beginning to see what that might look like.

Rather than keeping people from opening up credit cards in their own names or entire low income communities from accessing equal credit to buy homes and cars, billions of people’s lives and economic realities can be propped up or wiped out. Or starved, or fed, or accelerated in their learning, or kept ignorant and hungry in order to serve a labor class need.

The realm here is political, to the extent people acquire asset and asset system control to achieve power and impress their ideological biases on others. The world and every human in it is not some game board that should be subjected to the whims of whoever controls the chess pieces. Yet, this is precisely what happened with human evolution and it shows no signs of ending. The shift this time is moving from physical asset control to knowledge asset control. It’s structural.

It will certainly have implications, and there will be many many active forms of resistance against it. But I prefer to understand it, so I can make meaningful contributions not against it, but in ways which provide a more positive and productive alternative to give people the power over their own destinies and data, because wielding the power of knowledge is how humanity accelerates itself on the Kardashev scale.

Proposed by Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev in 1964 to measure a civilization’s level of technological advancement based on its energy consumption and control, the scale defines civilizations as:

• Type I: Harnesses all the energy available on its home planet (e.g., solar, wind, geothermal). Earth is currently around Type 0.7.

• Type II: Captures the total energy output of its home star (e.g., via a Dyson Sphere).

• Type III: Controls energy on the scale of its entire galaxy.

In essence, it’s a way to track how advanced a civilization is by how much energy power it can wield and how much of the universe it can bend to its will.

Which could sound threatening and scary if you think about it from the perspective of those who control knowledge also can control energy. Those who control knowledge and control people and resources to generate and distribute energy towards the things that they want may not necessarily believe in abundance for all of humanity. And that reality is at the heart of the new Cold Data War. Which, if you think about it, it isn’t a new conflict. It’s the ancient human conflict. Manifest destiny in all its forms.

It’s super fun to imagine advancing and accelerating space travel, reverse engineering materials from captured UAP spacecraft not of this planet, or ushering in fusion energy to make the cost of any form of energy literally zero.

But it is very naïve to assume that these things that positive technology advances will result in different outcomes than oil under the ground ushered in. Data is the new oil and the energy (food and fuel) it creates is the abundant, low cost resource that will fuel the new world order. It is happening much much sooner than most people are either willing to accept or can see. And so we should try to understand it.

Data and the monetary system shift is a very big part of understanding these implications for what the near future holds for everyone on Earth.

Eclipsing Global Banking Reserves

Now imagine one of these new Data Is Oil companies eclipsing a global bank (as happened recently, where Palantir has eclipsed the value of Bank of America) in both cash reserves and market value. Not because it expanded credit or offered a new interest rate product, but because it became the nervous system for multiple sovereign and corporate bodies. That’s not a what if scenario. We’re already there.

When we talk about companies like Palantir, we’re not just talking about software. We’re talking about a new organizing force in the global economy.

Operating as:

• Systems orchestrators, not app developers

• Embedded sovereign assets, not service providers

• Long-cycle partners, not quarter-to-quarter vendors

• Secure-by-default platforms, hardened for critical decision-making under pressure

These firms are defining a new economic hierarchy where value accrues not through capital control, but through strategic coherence. The ability to see, decide, and act faster, cleaner, and more comprehensively than legacy institutions. Architecting these capabilities “outside” of government as a service relationship might seem prudent today, but if you partition off the ability of self governments to provide this level of capability for themselves, we’re already seeding control of that capability to those whose ultimate goals may not be aligned with what’s in the best interest of everyone in the system. Likely they will not be.

What happens when this private class of companies becomes more trusted than banks? When governments (be they stolen governments or democracies that allow themselves to slip into a kind of numb ignorance) depend on them to function, and investors favor them not for growth, but for resilience?

A new social and economic imbalance is created, one that dwarves what occurred out of oil in the industrial revolution. I always say that we know what we know, we know what we don’t know, but we don’t know what we don’t know. Well that third line of reasoning is a weapon or tool to keep a lot of people blind to what they don’t know, in a kind of self-imposed fog. Data is insight. Data cures fog. If we can’t see it, we’re operating in the fog.

Robert McNamara was instructive about this. He was the U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, serving under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He was a central architect of American military strategy during the Vietnam War and is widely known for bringing systems analysis and data-driven management to the Pentagon, a legacy shaped by his earlier career as a Ford Motor Company executive and one of the so-called “Whiz Kids.”

He said, “In a sense, we all make our mistakes in the fog of war.” - Robert McNamara, The Fog of War (2003)

This quote is central to the 2003 Errol Morris documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, where McNamara reflects on the moral complexity and strategic errors of modern warfare.

The phrase “fog of war” itself refers to the uncertainty, confusion, and imperfect information that cloudy decision-making in times of conflict can yield, where clarity is rare and consequences are permanent.

The quote is a haunting admission that even the best-educated, most data-driven decision-makers can lead nations into catastrophe when they fail to see through the haze of ego, ideology, or flawed assumptions. But sometimes that fog can be intentionally perpetuated, while it is fully cleared out for others.

That’s why as we’re embarking upon a time when the operating system of the modern economy no longer lives inside a bank vault but inside code, models, and mission-aligned platforms built to carry the weight of a system in motion, it’s a very good idea indeed to understand what’s happening and not bury our heads in the fog of this new Cold Data War.

Investors, builders, and policy shapers would do well to recognize that this shift isn’t temporary. It’s structural. It’s redefining how trust is built, how decisions are made, and who gets to architect and reap the benefits of this near built, reengineered future.

I’m really interested in opening up the doors and windows to this whole conversation, that includes data and the shift in our monetary systems of course, but more broadly and deeply all the topics that make up the new world that technology is ushering in in all its forms. I hope you’ll share what you think and know.