The Digital Economist (TDE) 2026 Whitepaper Collection: Analysis, Synthesis, and Orthogonal Clustering 0.4

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

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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.

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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

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PART III — Mapping the 37 Papers

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

#	Paper (short title)	Primary Axis	Secondary Axis
1	Reimagining Digital Commons	Governance	Trust
2	Playing to Win at AI Table	Value	Governance
3	Kouroukan Fouga Wisdom	Trust	Inclusion
4	Trust in a Broken World	Trust	Governance
5	ROI of AI Ethics	Value	Trust
6	Rise of Agentic Economy	Agency	Governance
7	Poverty & Behavioral Econ	Inclusion	Value
8	Onboarding AI in Business	Agency	Trust
9	Grow the Pie	Value	Inclusion
10	Blockchain in Government	Governance	Trust
11	Authoritarianism in Complex Age	Governance	Inclusion
12	AI Tradeoffs	Agency	Value
13	AI & Doughnut Economy	Value	Inclusion
14	Autonomous Compliance	Agency	Governance
15	It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane…	Agency	Trust
16	Leadership in Silence	Governance	Trust
17	Healing a Broken World	Trust	Inclusion
18	LEO Satellites & Climate	Value	Inclusion
19	Sustainable Investing Gens	Value	Inclusion
20	Responsible AI in Practice	Trust	Agency
21	Digital DGAIA	Governance	Trust
22	ESG Needs a Jolt	Value	Governance
23	Carbon Crisis	Value	Trust
24	Capital for Common Good	Value	Inclusion
25	Global Coalition for Governance	Governance	Inclusion
26	Bridging the AI Divide	Inclusion	Governance
27	Blockchain as Governance	Governance	Trust
28	Blockchain Digital Assets	Value	Governance
29	Beyond Neo-colonialism	Inclusion	Governance
30	AI in Latin America	Inclusion	Agency
31	AI Agents in China	Agency	Governance
32	AI Agents as Employees	Agency	Trust
33	Incentives & Verification	Trust	Value
34	Robots & Humanoids	Agency	Inclusion
35	GenAI in Healthcare	Agency	Trust
36	Small is Beautiful (AI SMEs)	Inclusion	Value
37	Terms of Engagement (Roundtables)	Governance	Trust

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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.

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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.