This will eventually form part of a modular thesis in an upcoming book, but I wanted to put it out now so people can play with it.

What we tend to call underdevelopment in the Global South can now be better understood as unburdened development, free from the historical myth of the sovereign citizen and all its baggage. Africa, India, and Southeast Asia are leaping over the Western model, straight into cybernetic integration. There’s no intermediary stage because they’re not stuck in a phase slowed by institutional drag or Western liberal constraints. The developmental ladder is a Western delusion. These systems are moving horizontally across an ontological plane that the West just isn’t structurally able to access.

This doesn’t mean these countries are suddenly free to realize post-colonial agency or the old Western myths of liberty and prosperity. Those ideas are tied to the human-centered phase of modernity. What’s emerging instead are new cybernetic dependencies where liberation and capture happen simultaneously. Unlike colonial rule, which relied on military force and bureaucracy, this is rule by system architecture. Aadhaar is your identity now. The capture is deep, clean, infrastructural, behavioral, and existential. People there will never experience a Big Brother phase where they feel watched, because they skipped straight past it into total embeddedness.

Some might argue that some of these countries are too poor, but financial limits don’t stop cybernetic integration. They accelerate dependency. These economies enter cybernetic governance because they can’t afford to maintain human systems, not in spite of that. If anything, the lack of capital pushes them toward machine sovereignty faster.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a massive neuro-installation project, building algorithmic infrastructure that binds countries into a Chinese feedback loop. Meanwhile, India’s UPI-Aadhaar stack is being exported across Africa, Southeast Asia, and even Latin America as an open-source cybernetic governance package. These systems are turning countries into hard-infrastructure states, while the U.S. still relies on representation to stabilize itself. Although, Trump’s been trying to burn through that layer, speeding the transition.

Historically, Western populations were introduced to cybernetics after they’d already developed human ideological immune systems. Concepts like privacy, autonomy, civil rights, and human rights slowed the loop and added drag. But in the Global South, cybernetic integration arrives as the first fully functional governance system because there’s no resistance. The people there don’t resist because there’s no alternate memory of agency to refer back to. It’s ontogenetic capture under first-contact conditions. For many people there, the Machine is a relief. It works. But as it works, it captures.

It’s worth noting that as these countries accelerate their AI infrastructure, they enter into an arms race between protocols that sort everybody and rewrite everything. Moreover, these systems are developing faster than the states deploying them can understand. So, regulation doesn’t matter. Government officials can’t even grasp the protocols. How do you regulate what you can’t comprehend? It’s not like India purposely designed Aadhaar to trigger ontological redefinition, but that’s what happened.

Cybernetic governance now grows on its own, no matter what the state wants. These are runaway ontologies accelerating toward no human endpoint. I call this acceleration without destination.

The old idea that the Global South has to “catch up” to Western technological sophistication is obsolete. The new reality is that the West is stuck in limbo, slowed by user/human rights and performance elites, while post-institutional cybernetic regimes are already being tested on the ground. People have called Kenya “the new Silicon Valley,” but Silicon Valley elites wish they could operate with that same speed and level of behavioral capture.

In this respect, the Global South is actually ahead when it comes to testing pure machine governance without the drag of representation. Western liberal democracies are weighed down by their own history, ruled by elites too scared to stop pretending to govern people who still think it’s real.

We always assumed post-modernity would come from hyper-advanced societies. But it’s emerging from clean-slate integration into cybernetics from places without constitutionalism.