Every one of these clearing functions is migrating to AI — the human intermediary replaced by automated assessment operating at machine speed, applying standards compiled upstream, with no democratic feedback at the point of execution...

The modern clearinghouse requires an unnamed committee, a black-box model, an emergency activation protocol, and a programmable currency to execute its verdicts at the point of sale. The function is identical to the banker at the table — the architecture has simply become too large and too technical for the public to recognise it as the same thing.

But the next stage replaces the committee — COVID-era indicator governance, in which thresholds triggered policy in real time, is already giving way to anticipatory governance, in which the model acts before the threshold is crossed.

A cyberattack against the digital infrastructure on which anticipatory governance depends becomes an attack on governance itself — making the system’s self-preservation a qualifying emergency. And the multipolar world order provides the final justification: nation states acting alone cannot manage planetary-scale crises, so authority must transfer to international institutions that no electorate controls.

This was the express intent of Leonard Woolf’s 1916 Fabian report, International Government — the intellectual blueprint for the League of Nations. The emergency becomes permanent, and authority settles with the international institutions that were always intended to receive it. https://escapekey.substack.com/p/the-clearinghouse