There’s a kind of collapse that doesn’t come from war or invasion. It comes from within — a hollowing out of sovereignty until nations become stage props for an algorithmic empire.
It’s not sci-fi conjecture. It’s here and it’s the story Patrick Wood tells in this week’s episode of the Collapse Life podcast, with Zahra Sethna. Wood has spent decades tracing the rise of technocracy — a system of rule by engineers, bankers, and “experts” who believe society should be managed like a machine. It’s not new; it began at Columbia University in the 1930s. But thanks to digital surveillance, tokenized assets, and a generation losing faith in the promise and potential of free market capitalism, technocratic rule is starting to gain traction in unprecedented ways.
We talk about how the Trilateral Commission, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and David Rockefeller built the blueprint for a world where data replaces democracy — and why today’s central bankers and Silicon Valley billionaires are just picking fruit that was planted 50 years ago.
The same network that dreamed of replacing money with “energy credits” and citizens with data points is now digitizing everything — from land and water to your medical records and mortgage.
Wood argues we’ve pretty much crossed the crest: technocracy isn’t coming, it’s here. The only question left is how we live with it — or whether we can resist it at all.
