Globalization and the Problem of Exit

By Robert Ryan Jennings Published Sep 24, 2026 8:15PM 13 min read

society technology economics
globalization sovereignty ai data-sovereignty economics resource-based-economy
Globalization and the Problem of Exit

Part III of After Scarcity, Before Sovereignty: Sovereignty Is Having an Exit, What If Work Became Optional?, and Globalization and the Problem of Exit.

Globalization can produce substantial benefits. Trade lets regions specialize. Knowledge, capital, technology, and medicine can move farther and faster than they once did. Foreign investment can create infrastructure and productive capacity that might otherwise take decades to develop.

The problem starts when interdependence becomes dependency.

Late-twentieth-century globalization accelerated the movement of goods, factories, capital, and people across borders. The internet added something much stranger: identity, software, communication, operational control, and data could become global even when the people and institutions depending on them remained local.

AI may push that separation further. A person can interact with one interface while the work behind it crosses models, APIs, clouds, data centres, suppliers, and legal jurisdictions they never see.

We increasingly live in a world where the physical geography of society and the operational geography of society are not the same.

The internet crosses borders more easily than law does

Legal authority still attaches to jurisdictions, people, organizations, and property that exist somewhere. Much of law is organized through territorial jurisdictions and legal entities, companies are incorporated somewhere, and physical assets generally have a location.

The mental model is roughly:

flowchart LR A[Person] --> B[Activity] B --> C[Jurisdiction] C --> D[Law]

The internet does not fit cleanly into that model.

A Canadian user can authenticate through an American identity provider, connect through a global CDN, use an application running in several regions, keep one database physically in Canada, create backups elsewhere, and call an AI model operated by another company in another country.

flowchart TD U[Canadian user] --> ID[Foreign identity provider] U --> APP[Application] APP --> CDN[Global network] APP --> DB[Canadian database] APP --> API[Foreign APIs] APP --> AI[AI model] DB --> BACKUP[Cross-border backups] ID --> CTRL[Foreign control plane] AI --> CTRL

So where did the activity occur?

Technically, perhaps in all of those places. Legally, that answer is much less useful.

The OECD’s work on cross-border data flows frames the same tension in policy terms: data flows underpin trade, logistics, communication, and digital services, while also raising questions about privacy, security, national security, regulatory reach, and government access.

Global infrastructure works remarkably well while the participants broadly trust one another. The difficult cases are the ones where that assumption fails.

Data residency is not data sovereignty

Data makes the mismatch unusually visible.

Keeping information physically inside a country’s borders can be useful. It does not answer every sovereignty question. A locally stored database may still depend on a foreign-owned cloud provider, foreign identity systems, remotely controlled encryption keys, overseas administrators, foreign software updates, or contracts subject to another country’s law.

The Government of Canada’s current Digital Sovereignty Framework extends this distinction beyond storage location. It addresses jurisdictional complexity, reliance on global suppliers, operational resilience, and institutional control as parts of digital sovereignty.

That gives us two different questions:

QuestionConcern
Where is the data physically stored?Residency
Who can ultimately compel, deny, alter, or administer access?Sovereignty

Data is also unlike a factory or a port. It can be copied without moving the original, replicated automatically, transformed into derived datasets, embedded in models, and accessed remotely across a border without any obvious physical transfer.

A foreign manufacturer may own a factory in Canada, but Canada at least has physical jurisdiction over the factory. A foreign digital platform can provide an essential Canadian service while much of its actual control plane remains elsewhere.

The dependency can look domestic until the moment sovereignty matters.

Corporations became the transport layer of globalization

Corporations are not inherently the problem with globalization. They are one of the main mechanisms through which its benefits happen.

Multinational companies are extremely good at moving capital, technology, labour, data, supply chains, standards, and organizational knowledge across borders. UNCTAD’s World Investment Report documents the structural role of foreign direct investment and multinational enterprises in the world economy.

flowchart LR C[Multinational corporation] C --> CAPITAL[Capital] C --> TECH[Technology] C --> DATA[Data] C --> SUPPLY[Supply chains] C --> LABOUR[Labour] C --> LAW[Legal structures]

The asymmetry is that corporate operations can span many jurisdictions while lawmaking, taxation, enforcement, and democratic accountability remain largely jurisdiction-specific.

A company can extract resources in one jurisdiction, manufacture in another, sell in a third, process data in a fourth, and structure its finances across additional jurisdictions. Pollution, waste, labour disruption, infrastructure costs, and ecosystem damage are much harder to move.

Foreign investment can genuinely create prosperity and still increase dependency. The risk does not require hidden intent: years of rational integration can erode fallback capacity until leaving becomes prohibitively expensive.

The problem of exit

A system should be judged not only by how efficiently it works during normal conditions, but by what happens when one participant needs to leave.

Imagine a country integrating deeply into a global service ecosystem for fifty years because the arrangement is cheaper and more capable than maintaining local alternatives. Then a government becomes hostile, a corporation fails, a trade relationship collapses, or an environmental externality becomes politically unacceptable.

Can the country still operate? Can its citizens export their data? Can critical software be moved? Can essential equipment be manufactured without permission from an overseas supplier? Can an AI service be replaced without rebuilding the systems around it?

flowchart TD G[Global integration] --> E[Efficiency + scale] G --> D[Dependency] D --> S[Geopolitical or institutional shock] S --> Q{Can we exit?} Q -->|Yes| F[Federation] Q -->|No| C[Captivity]

In software architecture, a dependency that cannot realistically be replaced is part of the trust boundary. Global systems deserve the same analysis.

This is the argument from Sovereignty Is Having an Exit applied at a larger scale. The answer is not necessarily less globalization. It is globalization with reversibility: portable data, interoperable standards, replaceable providers, local fallback capacity, and enough redundancy that leaving remains technically possible.

Planetary constraints remain shared

There is a harder boundary beneath every political border: the planet itself.

Buckminster Fuller popularized the metaphor of Spaceship Earth: humanity shares one vessel with finite material stocks, bounded ecosystems, and no external place to send most of our waste.

At planetary scale, money is not the final constraint. It is an allocation system layered over physical constraints.

flowchart TD EARTH[Spaceship Earth] EARTH --> ENERGY[Energy] EARTH --> WATER[Fresh water] EARTH --> FOOD[Food + arable land] EARTH --> MINERALS[Minerals + materials] EARTH --> ECO[Ecosystems] EARTH --> WASTE[Waste absorption] EARTH --> COMPUTE[Compute + infrastructure]

The UN Environment Programme’s Global Resources Outlook 2024 reports that extraction of natural resources has tripled over roughly five decades and projects substantially greater extraction by 2060 without major changes. The planetary-boundaries research programme tries to quantify another part of the same problem by describing a proposed safe operating space for humanity across major Earth-system processes.

Any durable model of global coordination also has to account for the physical system underneath currencies, GDP, and political borders.

That does not imply one world government or one planning computer. It means that any system making claims about sustainable prosperity eventually needs a credible resource model: what exists, where it exists, how quickly it replenishes, what extraction damages, what reserves are necessary, and which forms of consumption are physically sustainable.

This is where the Venus Project’s resource-based economy is useful as a provocation even if its strongest conclusions are not accepted. Its important question is not whether money should disappear. It is whether the physical inventory underneath the monetary economy should become much more visible and explicit.

Resource coordination is a cross-border problem

What If Work Became Optional? looks more closely at how sensing, resource accounting, and AI forecasting might support an economy in which basic survival is less dependent on employment. The important point here is narrower: once the physical system becomes part of the model, resource information also becomes a coordination problem across jurisdictions.

Satellites, smart grids, logistics systems, inventories, weather models, agricultural sensors, shipping telemetry, factories, and supply-chain systems already produce large amounts of machine-readable information. AI may improve forecasting and simulation across those systems, but it does not eliminate the information problem or decide which outcomes are legitimate.

A shared resource model therefore does not require a shared sovereign authority.

flowchart TD WORLD[Physical world] --> DATA[Shared measurements] DATA --> MODEL[Forecasts + simulations] MODEL --> A[Jurisdiction A] MODEL --> B[Jurisdiction B] MODEL --> C[Jurisdiction C] A --> PA[Local policy] B --> PB[Local policy] C --> PC[Local policy]

That distinction matters if automation changes the relationship between work and survival. Better information can make physical constraints more visible, while decisions about rights, priorities, scarcity, and acceptable trade-offs remain political choices made by accountable institutions.

The architectural boundary is the same one that appears throughout this series: shared infrastructure can improve coordination without requiring every participant to surrender the ability to govern locally or to leave.

The internet may become infrastructure again

There is another possible change that makes jurisdiction stranger still. The human-facing internet may become smaller while the machine-to-machine internet becomes much larger.

Today the common model is still roughly:

flowchart LR H[Human] --> W[Website / app] --> C[Human-created content]

Increasingly, the human may deal with an AI interface while the underlying network becomes a substrate of APIs, agents, databases, sensors, and machines.

flowchart TD H[Human] --> AI[AI interface] AI --> API[APIs] AI --> DB[Databases] AI --> AGENT[Other agents] AI --> SENSOR[Sensors] AI --> MACHINE[Machines] AI --> WEB[Human web]

That does not mean the internet disappears. It may become less visible in the same way that most people stopped thinking about telephone switching equipment. Websites could matter less than machine-readable services. Search could matter less than synthesis. Content created mainly to attract human clicks or search traffic may lose much of its economic purpose.

Paradoxically, geography could become less visible to users while becoming more important strategically. A person may not know where an agent performed a task, but control of data centres, energy, fibre, satellites, identity systems, semiconductors, models, and cryptographic keys still belongs to somebody in some jurisdiction.

The interface becomes global while the dependency remains physical.

Catastrophe does not respect the border

There is another reason isolation is not a complete answer: many of the worst risks are already transboundary.

Environmental shocks move through atmosphere, oceans, rivers, food systems, migration, trade, and supply chains. The IPCC explicitly describes climate risk that is transmitted across borders through trade, finance, food systems, ecosystems, and other inter-regional connections.

Technological failures behave similarly. A major digital disruption can cascade through communications, finance, healthcare, logistics, energy, satellites, and other critical infrastructure faster than institutions organized around one jurisdiction can respond. UN disaster-risk researchers now describe large-scale digital failures as a form of systemic risk that can spill across borders and sectors.

The psychological layer crosses borders too. Fear, misinformation, panic, and social contagion can travel globally even when the physical event is local. The World Health Organization’s work on infodemic management treats trustworthy information, community engagement, and coordinated risk communication as part of emergency preparedness precisely because bad information can spread alongside the underlying crisis.

So environmental, technological, and psychological doomsdays all have the same awkward property: the border is not where the system stops.

That is why I do not think sovereignty should mean walling off the world. My concern is that walls do not eliminate transboundary risks; they can give fear and greed more power over the response. When every external dependency is treated as a threat, fear becomes an organizing principle, scarcity encourages hoarding, and uncertainty rewards whoever can turn anxiety into power.

The opposite mistake is irreversible integration, where local capability is allowed to disappear because global systems work well during normal conditions.

The useful middle ground is cooperation without captivity: share measurements, research, protocols, warnings, and capacity across borders, while preserving local institutions, fallback systems, and the ability to leave a dependency that becomes unsafe.

Global coordination without global captivity

Some problems really are planetary. Carbon, ocean pollution, biodiversity, pandemics, financial contagion, cyber incidents, and global supply chains do not respect political maps very well.

But the need for global coordination does not prove the need for a single global authority. A more resilient model looks like federation: common measurements, interoperable protocols, independently verifiable data, and local institutions that retain meaningful implementation choices and fallback capacity.

flowchart TD WORLD[Shared planetary constraints] WORLD --> A[Jurisdiction A] WORLD --> B[Jurisdiction B] WORLD --> C[Jurisdiction C] A <--> P[Shared protocols + measurements] B <--> P C <--> P A --> LA[Local capability] B --> LB[Local capability] C --> LC[Local capability]

Redundancy costs more than total integration, but it preserves fallback capacity when dependencies fail.

A useful global architecture would therefore preserve several properties that software engineers already recognize:

  • shared protocols rather than one implementation;
  • common measurements rather than one unquestionable authority;
  • interoperability rather than forced uniformity;
  • explicit trust boundaries;
  • independent verification of important state;
  • redundancy for critical capabilities;
  • graceful degradation when global dependencies disappear;
  • and a credible exit path.

The OECD’s “data free flow with trust” work is one existing example of this kind of tension. The objective is not simply to stop cross-border data movement, nor to pretend jurisdiction no longer matters, but to make interoperability possible while preserving protections and trust.

Shared measurements are most useful when their inputs are inspectable, their assumptions are contestable, and independent institutions can reproduce important conclusions. The governance risk rises when the same system controls the measurements, sets the objectives, allocates resources, operates the infrastructure, and decides whether an appeal is valid.

The design question is what belongs at each level

The practical question is: at what level should each capability live, and can the lower level survive when the higher one fails?

Some resources and risks are planetary and demand global coordination. Some services become better and cheaper when they operate globally. Other capabilities are important enough that a society should retain a local fallback even when doing so appears inefficient during normal conditions.

The goal is not isolation, and it is not irreversible integration.

It is a world where cooperation is usually the best option, basic survival can be separated from compulsory employment, the physical constraints of our shared planet are visible, and communities retain enough sovereignty to leave institutions that stop serving them.

Earth may be a spaceship. That does not mean it needs one captain.

These questions have been on my mind for a long time, and some of them have also become a source of inspiration for Entanglement of Ages, the fiction series I am writing. The books approach them from a different direction: through characters, institutions, technological change, resource constraints, and the ways societies respond when old assumptions stop working.

References and further reading