Analysis and Synthesis of The Digital Economist (TDE) 2026 Whitepaper Collection 0.4
Hyperonomy Digital Identity Lab™ – hyperonomy.com • Jan 9, 2026

Copyright © 2026 Michael Herman (Bindloss, Alberta, Canada) – Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License

PART 0 — Introduction

This document delivers three outputs based on the analysis of 37 papers from The Digital Economist (TDE) website’s 2026 whitepaper collection:

1. A visualizable strategic framework

2. A board-level briefing

3. A mapping of all 37 papers into a common analytical grid

PART I — The Strategic Framework

The Five Orthogonal Axes

The entire collection can be located in a five-dimensional space:

  1. Agency — Who acts? Humans, institutions, AI systems, or hybrids.
  2. Governance — Who decides? Centralized authority, distributed coordination, or emergent norms.
  3. Value — What counts as success? Efficiency vs resilience, profit vs regeneration, growth vs sustainability.
  4. Inclusion — Who benefits? Elites vs societies, Global North vs Global South, firms vs communities.
  5. Trust — Why believe the system works? Institutions, technical verification, ethics, or culture.

These axes form a minimal spanning set. Every paper in the collection is a projection onto this space.

Visual Framework

Imagine a pentagon:

  • Each vertex is one axis: Agency, Governance, Value, Inclusion, Trust.
  • Each paper plots as a shape inside the pentagon.
  • The collection as a whole forms a dense center: a governance-first, trust-dependent, inclusion-sensitive vision of AI-enabled society.

This is the operating system model of the portfolio.

PART II — Board-Level Briefing

Executive Brief

This is not a technology agenda. It is an institutional transformation for the AI era.

The collection asserts that:

  • AI is becoming an economic and organizational actor, not merely a tool.
  • Digital systems are becoming de facto governance structures.
  • Markets now form moral architectures, shaping inclusion and exclusion.
  • Trust is the binding constraint on scale.

Strategic Implications for Leadership

  1. From adoption to redesign: The question is no longer “How do we use AI?” but “What institutions must change because AI exists?”
  2. From control to coordination: Centralized governance models cannot keep pace with agentic systems, decentralized finance, and cross-border data flows.
  3. From ESG as reporting to ESG as an operating system: Sustainability and ethics move from compliance to core strategy.
  4. From globalization to pluralism: The future is not one system but interoperable systems with shared principles.

Risks Identified Across the Collection

  • Legitimacy collapses if AI scales faster than governance
  • Inequality amplification through uneven access
  • Institutional hollowing as automation replaces discretion
  • Trust erosion through opaque systems

Strategic Opportunities

  • Positioning governance as a competitive advantage
  • Designing trust as infrastructure
  • Treating inclusion as growth strategy
  • Using decentralization pragmatically, not ideologically

PART III — Mapping the 37 Papers

Legend: Primary axis = main contribution; Secondary = strong supporting theme.

#****Paper (short title)Primary AxisSecondary Axis1Reimagining Digital CommonsGovernanceTrust2Playing to Win at AI TableValueGovernance3Kouroukan Fouga WisdomTrustInclusion4Trust in a Broken WorldTrustGovernance5ROI of AI EthicsValueTrust6Rise of Agentic EconomyAgencyGovernance7Poverty & Behavioral EconInclusionValue8Onboarding AI in BusinessAgencyTrust9Grow the PieValueInclusion10Blockchain in GovernmentGovernanceTrust11Authoritarianism in Complex AgeGovernanceInclusion12AI TradeoffsAgencyValue13AI & Doughnut EconomyValueInclusion14Autonomous ComplianceAgencyGovernance15It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane…AgencyTrust16Leadership in SilenceGovernanceTrust17Healing a Broken WorldTrustInclusion18LEO Satellites & ClimateValueInclusion19Sustainable Investing GensValueInclusion20Responsible AI in PracticeTrustAgency21Digital DGAIAGovernanceTrust22ESG Needs a JoltValueGovernance23Carbon CrisisValueTrust24Capital for Common GoodValueInclusion25Global Coalition for GovernanceGovernanceInclusion26Bridging the AI DivideInclusionGovernance27Blockchain as GovernanceGovernanceTrust28Blockchain Digital AssetsValueGovernance29Beyond Neo-colonialismInclusionGovernance30AI in Latin AmericaInclusionAgency31AI Agents in ChinaAgencyGovernance32AI Agents as EmployeesAgencyTrust33Incentives & VerificationTrustValue34Robots & HumanoidsAgencyInclusion35GenAI in HealthcareAgencyTrust36Small is Beautiful (AI SMEs)InclusionValue37Terms of Engagement (Roundtables)GovernanceTrust

Orthogonal Clusters

Dominant Primary Axes

  • Governance (12 papers)
  • Agency (9 papers)
  • Value (9 papers)
  • Inclusion (5 papers)
  • Trust (2 papers)

Trust appears less often as a primary axis because it is the implicit substrate of everything else.

Conclusion

This collection constitutes a coherent doctrine for the AI age:

We are not facing a technological transition.
We are facing a transition to civilizational governance.

The work positions The Digital Economist not as a thought leader in AI, blockchain, or ESG separately, but as an architect of the institutional logic that must bind them together.

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