What's Being Built While We Watch the Distractions
On the Casualness of Ten Trillion Dollars
The Threshold Guide series continues on Sunday. I want to bring to your attention two resources I think are important. I became aware of them at almost the same time, and seeing them together tells us something profound.
The first is Brett Scott’s video, Technology Is an Accelerant, Not a Relaxant.
In it, he makes the point that in our kind of economy, technology is never introduced to save time. Instead, it’s introduced to expand the scale at which time gets packed with production and consumption. It’s well worth taking 18 minutes to watch before continuing (and subscribe while you’re there! 👆)
The second is a panel discussion from earlier this month featuring Bruce Flatt, CEO of Brookfield and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, talking about what the next decade of infrastructure investment will look like. I usually pay more attention to what institutional investors like these say than I do to any political leader.
Why?
Because they have a fiduciary duty to keep growing their asset base. If they don’t consistently provide a return to shareholders, their board will fire them. They are just as trapped in a slavery-based monetary system as you and I are.
Fink’s BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with $12.5 trillion in assets under management as of 2025.1 Brookfield has over $1 trillion of assets under management across infrastructure, energy, private equity, real estate and credit.2 Both companies use software developed by BlackRock called Aladdin.3 Aladdin is a complex trading platform that analyzes the entire world’s financial risk.4 In other words, both companies know exactly where institutional funds flow for the best returns.
The specific scene in the panel discussion
The panel discussion runs about thirty minutes. There’s no need to watch the whole thing, but I want to draw your attention to an exchange at about the 03:00 minute mark. The moderator asks Flatt about Brookfield’s positioning in the AI buildout. Flatt answers in the voice of a man calmly describing the weather. He says the world is being rewired. He says the next ten years will see roughly ten trillion dollars laid into power, AI factories, data centers, and fiber. He says, almost in passing, “we’re just rewiring the world.”
“What’s most important is that what’s happening is that we’ve have been, and we still are, and for the next 10 years, we will be rewiring the global economy to lay the networks that are required. In the past we laid highways, utilities, railways and now we’re laying cloud artificial intelligence factories and data centers. That, on the fundamental basis, is what’s happening. So there will be $10 trillion from power, AI, factories, data centers, and fiber buildout laid to basically rewire the world for the new economy that’s coming.” — Brookfield Corp CEO, Bruce Flatt, 03:13
Next to him, you can see Fink nodding excitedly.
What surprised me was the casualness of the comment. Flatt announced the financial commitment of the largest pools of long-term capital on the planet to the construction of an entirely new physical and computational substrate for the next economy. He describes it in the same way one might describe a slight change in weekend plans. He’s this confident because, for him and for Fink, the decision is already settled. The capital is already moving and the conversation on stage is merely about when it will happen.
The question I’m sitting with
What does a Threshold Guide do when the infrastructure of the next decade is financed by people who don’t consult anyone, and who treat the buildout as already decided?
Scott and the panel discussion together force this question into the open. Scott names the mechanism by which technological ‘progress’ traps us, and the panel discussion reveals how the money is already flowing towards the next trap.
What Scott sees
Scott’s argument is a single sentence, and the rest of his piece builds the case eloquently. The sentence is this:
“In our kind of economy, technology is never used to save time. It is used to expand the scale at which time gets packed with production and consumption.” — Brett Scott, Altered States of Monetary Consciousness
The same logic, Scott argues, is now coming for AI. Within a decade the entire economy will be recalibrated to a level of acceleration that assumes AI is everywhere in production. A person operating without it will feel the way a person in 1950s Los Angeles felt without a car: stranded.
The point is that none of us chose this outcome.
What we can learn from the panel discussion
If Scott tells you how the trap closes around the user of new technology, the panel tells you what their vision is for the next ten years and who will pay to build the trap.
Flatt and Fink sit on roughly fifteen trillion dollars of long-term capital between them. Other institutional investors will no doubt be on board too.5 When Flatt mentions ten trillion dollars, he’s naming a budget that is already underway.
Where does the budget come from? This is the part the panel makes unusually clear, and the part I want you to take notice of. Fink, in his answer about who is invested in BlackRock, says at 11:38:
“Over 50% of our assets of the 14 plus trillion dollars we manage are retirement assets. And so our investors are somebody who awarded us $1,000 of their savings through our IRA account.” — Larry Fink, BlackRock, 11:38
He then says, on stage and on the record, that having money in a bank account is one of the worst financial decisions of a lifetime. He explains that BlackRock has been hired by the government of Saudi Arabia to help shift the kingdom from a state-sponsored retirement system to a self-directed one. He explains that the firm’s partnership in India is doing similar work. He explains that Japan’s stock market doubled after the prime minister doubled the tax exemption on self-directed retirement accounts.
My point is that the disturbing pattern is the same in every example. National governments are being persuaded to restructure their retirement systems so that ordinary citizens move their savings out of public schemes and bank deposits and into self-directed private market accounts. Those accounts are then managed by firms like BlackRock and Brookfield. The capital is then deployed into the infrastructure buildout Flatt described in his casual comment at the start of the discussion.
There’s no conspiracy here. Two hubristic men said what they did because they believe it’s the right thing to do. Fink believes that the wages of ordinary people won’t keep pace with AI-driven capital returns, and that the only way to broaden economic participation is to get citizens’ savings into the same vehicles as institutional money. I’ll leave it to people who better understand macro-economics to debate whether he’s right, but to me, something feels deeply wrong.
What I’m asking of you is to notice the shape of these kinds of move. The next decade of infrastructure requires capital at a scale that hasn’t existed before, at least according to these two men. The capital will be sourced by reorganizing the savings systems of entire populations. The reorganization is communicated to those populations as financial wisdom. By the time the rewiring is complete, the populations will be holding the financial exposure to it. None of them will have been asked whether they agree.
This is the point Scott is making, told from the institutional financing side. The user of the new technology is never asked whether they want the rewiring. The funder of the new technology is never asked whether they want their savings to be used. The two ends of the same process meet in the middle, and the middle is the panel discussion at the Milken Institute’s 2026 Global Conference, where Flatt and Fink are agreeing with each other in the casual manner you and I might agree on the weather.
What this means for you and me
Most of us aren’t in a position to redirect ten trillion dollars. But we are in a position to do something else.
The people in your close circle are already inside this acceleration. It could be children who sense something is wrong but have no words to explain why, or it could be clients completely strung out, but without knowing why. It could be teenagers who plan their afternoons to the minute using three different apps, or colleagues who treat a Friday evening text as urgent because that’s what we’re trained to do. None of us chose to be inside this acceleration, yet here we are.
Scott’s video is useful here in a specific way. He has spent a decade working on one node of refusal. He defends physical cash. He calls cash the bicycle of payments and argues for bicycle lanes. The tech buildout keeps moving, but he keeps championing to maintain one channel open inside the acceleration. His work has cost him careers and friendships, but he does it because the alternative is to drift into this current of technological ‘progress.’
What’s the equivalent refusal for you and me? There’s no tidy answer. What I will say is that refusal in this paradigm looks different from what we may have done in the past. Protesting won’t stop the juggernaut and opting out will become increasingly more difficult. The infrastructure simply won’t allow it. We’re all part of this system, whether we like it or not. The work is to build and defend smaller and slower channels in which a different kind of exchange remains possible.
In money, that looks like Scott’s campaign for cash and, further along the same line, the bioregional monetary experiments that thinkers like Bernard Lietaer spent his working life pointing towards.6 I’m talking about currencies designed at the scale of an actual watershed or food system. Local exchange units that hold value inside a region rather than draining it.7 Initiatives like these won’t stop the rewiring, but the more examples we have, the longer we keep a door open. The Threshold Guide series is, in part, an attempt to build the frame inside which those constructions become possible.
What I’m not sure of
I’m not sure how much time the bioregional monetary experiments have. The financial architecture being put in place this decade will, by design, make local and slower forms of exchange much more difficult to sustain. People like Scott and Ruddick know this.8 Both are doing the work anyway. Whether the work coheres and compounds in time to actually make a difference remains to be seen.
I’m also not sure what the right move is for you as you ask, quite reasonably, what to do tomorrow morning. The honest answer is that no single essay can provide that answer. The work is slower than that.
Closing
Flatt told us on stage in his casual voice what we can expect over the next decade. Fink nodded along enthusiastically. The capital is already earmarked and governments are lining up.
At your kitchen table, the teenager is doing homework on a device that will be used to train the next AI model. The household budget runs on credit cards that support the same architecture. In the interconnectedness of everything that makes our daily lives function, we’re being asked whether any of this makes sense.
Both situations are real: the panel discussion on stage and the kitchen table. Right now, the panel is louder than any household conversation. Whether it gets the last word is a different question.
BlackRock shares slump even as assets hit record $12.5 trillion on market rally: https://www.reuters.com/business/blackrocks-second-quarter-profit-rises-market-momentum-2025-07-15/
The Brookfield Ecosystem provides unparalleled intelligence by combining over $1 trillion of assets under management, 250,000 operating employees and more than a century of owner-operator insights. https://bam.brookfield.com
Brookfield uses 8 technology products and services including Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, BlackRock Aladdin, SAP, and more. https://leadiq.com/c/brookfield/5a1d95ef2300005a00848c61
Aladdin is a technology system developed by BlackRock founder Larry Fink, the world’s largest asset manager. It analyses the risks of investing in particular stocks, figures out where to sell bonds to get the best prices, and tracks those trades. It combs through huge data sets to find vital pieces of information for investors. See https://bit.ly/BR-Aladdin
I haven’t had the time to do the research on the views of State Street, Vanguard, Berkshire Hathaway, and other institutional investors, but all asset managers are legally obliged to chase wherever the money goes, and right now, outside of AI, there isn’t much investment happening at the scale they require.
Bernard Lietaer (1942-2019) was a Belgian civil engineer, economist, author and professor. He studied monetary systems and promoted the idea that communities can benefit from creating their own local or complementary currency, which circulate parallel with national currencies. He proposed the Terra TRC, which has still not been implemented anywhere. See https://bit.ly/BLiet for his books and talks.
I maintain a record of working examples around the world at https://bit.ly/42ZbN7H
Will Ruddick is an American development economist focusing on currency innovation in East Africa. He is the creator of the Sarafu Network and Grassroots Economics. His work is bringing to life Community Inclusion Currencies. See https://bit.ly/WRuddick