“Davos Can Really Replace the UN”

Inside the book that maps the architecture behind global governance — from the Epstein files to the Pact for the Future

On June 13, 2019, the United Nations and the World Economic Forum signed a partnership deal to “accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” That same evening, WEF president Börge Brende — Norway’s former Foreign Minister — had dinner with Jeffrey Epstein at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. The Epstein files, released January 2026, contain an exchange between the two from the previous year. Epstein to Brende: “Davos can really replace the UN. C21, cyber, crypto . genetics. .. intl coordination.” Brende back to Epstein: “Exactly — we need a new global architecture. World Economic Forum (Davos) is uniquely positioned — public private.”

The next day, the UN General Assembly adopted the framework for restructuring global governance.

That sequence — the partnership signing, the Epstein dinner, the candid admission about replacing the UN with a public-private architecture, and then the formal adoption — opens Jacob Nordangård’s The Digital World Brain. Pages two and three. Footnoted to the UN resolution number, the Epstein files, and the General Assembly record.

I keep coming back to it because it captures what this book does that almost nothing else in the independent research space manages. I’ve followed Jacob’s work for years now and interviewed him about his research. Each book peels back another layer of the same institutional architecture, and each time I think he’s reached the limit of what can be documented, the next one goes further. Nordangård doesn’t speculate. He doesn’t editorialize much. He lays institutional actions next to each other in chronological order and lets the pattern announce itself.

Get the book: pharosmedia.se

The Researcher

Nordangård has a PhD in Technology and Social Change from Linköping University. Master’s degrees in geography and in culture and media production. He’s taught at three Swedish universities. His doctoral work traced how institutional networks shape EU biofuels policy — mapping the actors, the funding flows, and the coordination mechanisms that produce outcomes which look spontaneous but aren’t.

He’s been applying that same method to global governance for over a decade now, across five books. Rockefeller: Controlling the Game followed the money behind the climate agenda from the 1950s forward — Rockefeller Foundation grants to climate scientists, Rockefeller Brothers Fund involvement in virtually every major environmental conference and agreement. The Global Coup d’Etat documented the pre-existing plans that the pandemic accelerated. The Digital World Brain, first published in Swedish in 2022 and now out in an expanded English edition, takes the UN Secretary-General’s 2021 report Our Common Agenda and its twelve commitments apart, chapter by chapter, tracing the institutional genealogy behind each one.

The man also fronts a doom metal band called Wardenclyffe whose lyrics are drawn from his research. Make of that what you will.

What the Documents Actually Say

Our Common Agenda proposes twelve commitments. Read casually, they sound like boilerplate — leave no one behind, protect the planet, build trust, upgrade digital cooperation. The kind of language that slides past without friction.

Nordangård slows down and traces where each commitment came from, who drafted it, who funded the drafting, and what it requires in practice. A “new social contract” that ties your individual obligations to planetary boundaries defined by a scientific council you didn’t elect. Digital identity for every person on earth, connected to monitoring infrastructure. A Futures Lab to collect and analyse data on citizens’ attitudes, opinions, and life choices using AI. A Climate Governance Council. A Special Envoy to speak on behalf of future generations — meaning, in practice, an unelected office with a mandate to override present democratic decisions in the name of people who don’t yet exist.

Traced back through the commissions and think tanks that produced them, these twelve commitments form a three-layer governance structure. At the top, an upgraded United Nations with enforcement powers and a standing army. Beneath that, anticipatory governance — mass data collection feeding AI systems that predict behaviour and detect non-compliance. And at the base, multi-stakeholder governance: public-private partnerships implementing decisions at every level of society.

The preparatory work goes back to at least 2015, when the Albright-Gambari Commission — supported by the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank sitting at the intersection of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the major philanthropic foundations — recommended a World Conference on Global Institutions to coincide with the UN’s 75th anniversary in 2020.

Two months before that anniversary conference could take shape, COVID-19 shut down the world. The questions that had been prepared for member state discussions — “What are today’s most fundamental global challenges? How is the UN standing up to new challenges?” — suddenly had a very specific answer.

The New Material

This English edition adds two chapters covering events through early 2026, and they’re the reason even readers of the Swedish original need this book.

The Pact for the Future was signed at the UN Summit of the Future in September 2024. Nordangård documents the signing and the opposition — such as it was. Russia objected. But Russia’s complaint wasn’t about individual freedom or democratic accountability. It was about ensuring Russian participation as an equal partner in the new architecture. The BRICS nations voted against Russia’s procedural amendment. They didn’t want to stop the digital governance infrastructure. They just didn’t want to be junior partners in it.

The chapter called “The Great Disruptor” will unsettle people across the political spectrum, which is probably the point. Nordangård maps the network connections between the Trump administration and the very institutions Trump’s supporters believe he opposes. J.D. Vance came up through Peter Thiel’s venture capital world. Thiel sits on the Bilderberg Group’s steering committee — alongside WEF’s Börge Brende. His company Palantir was seed-funded by the CIA’s In-Q-Tel and is a partner of the WEF’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. ICE is now using Palantir’s AI surveillance to generate “confidence scores” for tracking immigrants. Elon Musk’s grandfather ran the Canadian branch of Technocracy Inc. Musk himself was named a WEF Young Global Leader in 2008. The book includes an appendix table of Young Global Leaders with ties to the Trump administration. It runs long.

Nordangård isn’t arguing that Trump is a puppet. He’s documenting that the institutional connections run in every direction, and that what looks like opposition may be accelerating the dissolution of the old order in ways that serve the same technocratic endpoint. The evidence is specific enough that readers can evaluate it themselves.

But the most unsettling material in the new edition is a May 2025 white paper from the WEF’s Global Government Technology Centre called The Agentic State. Nordangård catches something in the title that the authors may not have intended to advertise. In psychology, the “agentic state” is Stanley Milgram’s term for the mental condition in which a person stops seeing themselves as responsible for their own actions and becomes an instrument of authority. It’s the mechanism that made ordinary people administer what they believed were lethal electric shocks in Milgram’s obedience experiments.

The white paper’s meaning is the other one — a state governed by AI agents. But the resonance hangs in the air.

The paper proposes that laws can evolve from static rules into “a far more dynamic living system, continuously interpreted, tested, and refined by agents.” Human legislators would set “broad societal goals.” Everything else — specific rules, thresholds, requirements — gets “adjusted dynamically by agents with limited or no human intervention.” Compliance becomes continuous, monitored in real time by AI systems issuing yes/no attestations across health, safety, financial, environmental, and ethics domains. Citizen input comes through “emotion detection in digital interactions” feeding into the system’s self-adjustment loops.

The authors ask what safeguards would be needed if AI agents could “issue fines or trigger legal action in real time.” They don’t answer their own question. They move on.

This isn’t a leaked memo. It’s a public white paper from a WEF-affiliated centre whose founding strategic partners include IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and Huawei. Its lead author is the Chief Information Officer of the Estonian government. Nordangård’s contribution is placing it in the context of everything else in the book. After 250 pages of institutional genealogy, the paper reads less like futurism and more like a product specification.

The book runs 283 pages with more than 250 footnotes, a multi-page bibliography, and appendix tables cross-referencing WEF Young Global Leaders to government positions, milestones in the digital ID agenda, and the full timeline of climate governance from a 1971 MIT study through the 2024 Pact for the Future. It’s dense, and it demands an engaged reader. This is a reference work — the kind of book you come back to six months later when something shows up in the news and you want to understand which institutional thread it connects to.

Where It Comes From

The concept of a “World Brain” was articulated by H.G. Wells in 1938. Oliver Reiser, a philosophy professor at the University of Pittsburgh, developed it further through the 1940s and 1970s into a vision he called the “World Sensorium” — all of humanity integrated into a collective technological organism, governed by a World Organisation, guided by what he termed “radio-eugenics.” His book Cosmic Humanism and World Unity was published posthumously by the World Institute, which operated from offices at the United Nations Plaza in New York.

This wasn’t fringe material that got ignored. It ran directly through the Club of Rome, the Club of Budapest, the World Future Society, and into the bodies that drafted Our Common Agenda. Nordangård traces the institutional lineage. That lineage is the book’s spine.

In 1968, Columbia University professor Zbigniew Brzezinski — later US National Security Advisor, co-founder of the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller — wrote that new technologies could make possible “extensive population control, including the monitoring of each citizen and maintaining up-to-date files on their health or personal behaviour.” Power, he wrote, would “gravitate into those who control information and can correlate it most rapidly,” encouraging “tendencies during the next several decades toward a technocratic dictatorship, leaving less and less room for political procedures as we now know them.” That was 1968. The technology now exists to do everything Brzezinski described. The institutional architecture to deploy it is what this book documents.

The Proportionality Problem

One detail from the conclusion stays with me. Human-generated CO2 represents roughly 4% of total atmospheric carbon dioxide, which itself makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere. That comes out to about 16 parts per million. To influence a fraction of those 16 parts per million, the plan requires digitising, monitoring, tokenising, and subjecting to real-time compliance enforcement essentially everything — food production, energy, transportation, land use, individual consumption. All overseen by unelected “Planetary Stewards.”

Nordangård asks the obvious questions. How much energy will the Digital World Brain itself consume? Can the stated carbon targets be reached without measures indistinguishable from permanent authoritarian control? The white papers don’t address this.

Read the Documents

The Pact for the Future has been signed. The Global Digital Compact is annexed to it. The WHO Pandemic Agreement was adopted in May 2025. The Agentic State white paper is online for anyone to read. The UN-WEF partnership agreement is a matter of public record. The foundation funding behind the organisations that drafted all of this is disclosed in their own annual reports.

What Nordangård has done across 283 pages and more than 250 footnotes is demonstrate that these are not independent initiatives happening to converge. They are components of an architecture that has been under construction for decades, advanced by identifiable people through documented channels. He’s brought the receipts.

The book ends on a note of conviction — that this system, however carefully engineered, cannot ultimately prevail against what he calls humanity’s “natural intelligence.” Whether or not you share that faith, the institutional map he’s drawn demands a serious response. The documents are real. The signatures are dated. The timelines check out.

Read the book. Then read the documents it cites. Nordangård includes the URLs in his footnotes. You can verify every claim that matters without leaving your desk.

Then decide for yourself what a system designed to monitor every person, predict every behaviour, and enforce compliance in real time through AI agents actually is — regardless of what its architects choose to call it.

Jacob is an independent researcher doing work that no university department and no mainstream publisher would touch. He funds this through book sales and reader support. If what you’ve read here matters to you, buy the book. Give it to someone who’s starting to ask questions. This is the kind of research that deserves to find a wider audience, and that only happens when readers carry it forward.

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The Digital World Brain: Our Common Agenda and The Pact for the Future by Jacob Nordangård, PhD. First English edition, 2026. Pharos Media Productions.

Get the book: pharosmedia.se

Follow Jacob’s research: drjacobnordangard.substack.com

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