Twenty Other Ways of Looking at a Century

Twenty Propositions - A manifesto for a different world view.

My work for many years has been focused on a specific bet: that the institutional infrastructure of the twenty-first century will not be a refinement of the twentieth, and that the locus of its construction will not be where the last one was built. What follows are twenty propositions about the world we are entering and the layer — cognitive infrastructure — on which it might run.

1. The unipolar moment is over. At the base of our work is the fact that the dominance of the US will ebb. This was not a prediction; more an observation – one that we bet on. The question is no longer whether the world will become multipolar – the last 12 months have proven our thesis out - but what that new world order looks like. It should not be viewed as a net negative.

2. The Global South has emerged. The vocabulary of "emerging markets" was written by institutions for whom these economies were peripheral. It has been for some time, but now it is radically outdated. These economies are no longer peripheral. Roughly eighty-five percent of the world's population lives outside the traditional institutional core, and that share is where the majority of growth both social and economic will come from over the next decade. It deserves an equal footing.

3. The institutional models the West exported over the last seventy years have largely failed outside the West. Not because the populations receiving them were inadequate as was often inferred, but because the models were not built for them. The correct response is not to try harder with the same models or iterate at 99% percentile app layer changes, but to reimagine what models can look like and what that might do.

4. The twenty-first century will be built on cognitive infrastructure. Cognitive infrastructure is the convergence layer of financial rails, balance sheets, data and intelligence that move value, identity and information between people, the institutions around them and their countries. Whoever builds it for the populations coming online now will shape the century in ways that are hard to see fully from inside the present moment.

5. Artificial intelligence makes context affordable at scale. For the first time in the history of institutional design, it is possible to build systems that respect local regulation, local language, local custom and local economic structure without abandoning the cost advantages of standardisation. This is the technical shift that makes everything else possible – we would be foolish to not take advantage of this and simply iterate on old ideas.

6. First-contact data may be the irreplicable asset of the century. The behaviour of billions of people entering digital institutions for the first time — how they save, borrow, identify themselves, transact, form associations — cannot be recovered later by any firm that arrives after the fact. Whoever builds the systems for the first contact holds the intelligence layer that follows.

7. Indigenous knowledge is not an exhibit. The epistemic traditions of non-Western societies contain real intellectual content relevant to how modern institutions should work — theories of obligation, reciprocity, kinship, risk-sharing — that Western firms have spent centuries trying and failing to reinvent. Let’s not keep making the same mistakes. We must save and learn from these ancient wisdoms.

8. Identity is upstream of all challenges. How a person is known, verified and trusted by the institutions around them is a more fundamental problem than how they move currency. Any serious infrastructure project for the Global South must begin with understanding and pricing risk.

9. Sovereignty is the precondition for trust. Infrastructure owned and operated from elsewhere cannot command the legitimacy required to function as civic infrastructure in these new economies. Sovereign systems should not be seen as a form of protectionism. They must be seen as a right and the baseline condition for a functioning economy.

10. Scale without depth is akin to extraction. A firm that has "scaled" across the Global South while building no local capacity, training no local engineers and leaving no local institutional residue has built nothing durable. It has been extractive. All new players must aim to be additive.

11. The Global South is not a market to be served. It is a set of societies with variable and unique trajectories. The vocabulary of "serving the underbanked" encodes an assumption of inferiority that the underlying facts no longer support. These markets once seen correctly will be priced as equal and profitable not needful and charitable.

12. Regulators should be viewed as partners. The best cognitive infrastructure in the Global South will be built with central banks and central institutions at core, not around them. The west’s key innovators have lost time and money by treating regulators as obstacles and have misunderstood the nature of what the ultimate outcomes can be. Public private partnerships are the key to moving at pace and maintaining national autonomy and security.

13. Compliance must be seen as an asset, not a burden. Well-designed compliance is the mechanism by which any flow — be it capital, of identity or information — can be trusted across borders. The question is whether it has been designed for the jurisdictions it serves or imposed on them from elsewhere. The convergence of innovation and compliance must be key to any growth thesis.

14. Deployment speed is a strategic variable. There is a rush now to wire the system, one that can deploy functioning institutional infrastructure at pace and move away from lethargic deployment and to challenge what is politically and economically possible. That is not a feature. It is the point.

15. Cultural Integration & Respect is essential. The broad arc of tech innovation over the past few decades has for the most part been male (yes men) trying to figure out how to insert their business in the middle of things that used to have no middleman and monetizing that middle.

The global south needs to not go down the same route of hyper optimization that exists in the 99% percentile but build solutions that optimize for multiple outcomes. This is not development vs capitalism in extremis – it’s a way of thinking that blends profit – which is a good thing – with social impact, economic capture and human outcomes.

16. Correspondent banking in its current form is a tax on the poor. The structural economics of the cross-border payments system transfer wealth from the Global South to the Global North every day, by design. This is one of many inherited arrangements that the next decade must rework, and it is among the clearest illustrations of what extractive infrastructure looks like in practice.

17. The dollar will not be the sole rail, but that’s ok. The infrastructure for the next century must be plural at the foundation. Infrastructure capable of operating across multiple reserve currencies, multiple settlement regimes and multiple political blocs cannot privilege any one of them as the default. This does not mean the demise of one or the rise of another – it means the most agility to allow growth at pace – both economic and social.

18. Capital without cognition is dumb capital. Trillions have flowed into the Global South over decades with remarkably little real understanding of the societies receiving them. The asymmetry of capital without comprehension produced the outcomes it produced. Better cognition will create more effective capital and more effective outcomes.

19. The assumption that the frontier of innovation must run through California needs updating. The most consequential institutional innovation of the next twenty years must democratise across Africa, the Gulf, South Asia and Southeast Asia.  Not as a replacement of California but as an additive we all benefit from.

20. The purpose of building should no longer be just to dominate. It is to make possible what was not possible before. The question we ask is not who will win the next century. It is what the next century should make possible, and for whom. Let’s move away from winner vs loser mentality and build solutions, products and businesses that create capital, profit and good for all across all domains.