In the emergence of planetary computational infrastructures, intelligence has become a resource as fundamental as energy or water. Seven to eight major intelligence pools have crystallized around historical centers of clean energy, talent, and computation: the technological rimlands of North America; the vast data lakes of China, Korea, and Japan; the energy-rich computational oases of the Gulf; the cloud-to-land network state of Singapore; and, perhaps, the ancient academic nexus of Cambridge, UK. These pools function not as mere repositories but as living systems, pulsing with the flow of computational capacity and cognitive surplus.

The catalyst for this transformation emerged from an unexpected quarter: the global climate crisis. Much as the Marshall Plan once reconstructed a war-torn world, these intelligence pools now form the backbone of planetary reconstruction. They interface with digital currencies, creating intricate feedback loops between computational power and economic value. The system operates through a complex architecture of metered intelligences (metis): standardized units of cognitive capacity that can be deployed, traded, and optimized.

This architecture manifests itself most visibly in the integration of natural systems into economic frameworks. Forests, oceans, and weather patterns, once considered externalities, now possess digital twins—computational models that give voice to their value in global markets. Price discovery has evolved into a multidimensional process that requires metis assistance to navigate. The market itself has transformed into a hybrid ecosystem where regulated metis pools coexist with gray-market cognitive arbitrage.

Yet this system has its own contradictions. The assumption that metis can resolve fundamental physical and sociocultural disparities soon proved as illusory as previous technocratic dreams. China’s experience is instructive: despite unprecedented computational resources, the gulf between Shanghai’s gleaming towers and Qinghai’s rural expanses persists. Simply put, most practical problems face hard physical obstacles (and legal/cultural ones too). The cadres have moved heaven and earth in the past few decades to put roads, hospitals, and schools in the country’s vast interior, yet its shining cities continue to pull ahead. Something about network agglomerations of capital and skills shapes development patterns in ways that resist purely computational solutions.

The gosplan dream to model and allocate the economy remains stubbornly incomputable—not for lack of processing power, but because knowledge that we use to make economic decisions is often tacit. Every day, we use knowledge we don’t know we possess to make choices and engage in exchange. Most people ride bicycles without knowing the underlying physics of how to maintain balance, without solving the equations for the equilibrium; in a similar fashion, inarticulate knowledge informs economic decision-making, and this knowledge emerges from human actions and interactions in the process of exchange.

This human element manifests itself most dramatically in the emergence of new ritual structures. As artificial intelligence assumes more control of head and hand, humanity’s role has shifted toward the heart. This shift breeds tension: humans, fundamentally ritual animals, seek meaning through status games and group belonging. The virtual tribes of cryptobros and techbros exemplify this pattern—communities forming around shared beliefs and practices, much like traditional religious or cultural groups.

Humans have “main character syndrome” and rally around spectacle and transcendence. Few things feel more wonderful than sacrificing everything for a higher good. When real environmental crisis ripped away the bandage of feel-good rhetoric, energetic states took on the responsibility to garden the world. Not to keep the world at some temperature band favorable to artificial intelligences, which then pay human gardeners a living wage, but in a newly imagined ordering of life between nature, metis, and humans.

The planetary garden empires that emerged from this matrix reflect these competing forces, each shaped by existing cultural frameworks and historical legacies. Identical technologies, but filtered through different cultural lenses, produce new planetary structures.

The Chinese state emerged millennia ago from flood management, in which climate crisis responses created and continue to create state legitimacy. From the ancient Dujiangyan irrigation system (constructed in 256 BCE and still in use today) to the Three Gorges Dam in the twenty-first century, the state has evolved from rerouting rivers on Earth to triggering rivers in the sky to rain on command. These are all managed by the latest update to the bureaucratic state—“computational cadres” that are trained on decades of disaster response data to coordinate climate financing, social campaigns, etc. to respond to crisis while maintaining social stability. Metis tokens are minted, pegged to each province’s capacity to process climate data and manage its sky-river infrastructure. Yunnan tokens trade against Jiangsu tokens, funding expansions of solar farms, wind turbines, and silver iodide emitters. The province that more effectively harnesses and distributes rainfall moderates temperature extremes and earns more metis, creating a positive cycle of computing, water, and temperature stability that funnels more local development. There are balance-of-payment crises that computational cadres cannot foresee, and they still need interventions by the People’s Bank (PBoC, where the C stands for China? Climate?).

Over to the west, the Gulf intelligence pool leveraged decades of experience in energy infrastructure to design vast solar arrays, watered by nuclear-powered desalination plants that interface with desert communities to green the Sahel. These desert restoration projects are new sources of national pride and meaning-making. Metis tokens are minted for desalinization optimization in a “water for intelligence” exchange. The flow of metis stimulates desert reforestation, new aquifers are traded on digital carbon markets.

In America’s technological rimlands, the coastal frontiers are peppered with computing oases, some with small-scale, nuclear-fueled AI clusters. In contrast to the Gulf’s massive, centralized installations, the rimlands opt for distributed energy “pods,” with each issuing its own metis tokens to finance local geoengineering projects. The Pacific and Atlantic Oceans are fed with mined iron dust, fertilized and cultivated with precision. Crucially, each enclave holds onto its autonomy, trading with others but otherwise maintaining a tradition of self-governance reminiscent of the American frontier spirit. And so on and so forth.

This new world can still be beautiful to human eyes, like Singapore’s tropical solarpunk of vertical forests arcologies powered by the smart garden state infrastructure as a service 2.0. But outside these pools of intelligence, life can be bleak in the shatterzones, which garden empires strain to integrate to prevent climate migration in the periphery from overwhelming the center.