The Reality of the Sustainable Development Goals as an all-encompassing control mechanism

Great post by Escape Key. Who reads the details under the 17 SDGs? But that is where the architecture of the cage is laid out.

Original URL: https://merylnass.substack.com/p/the-reality-of-the-sustainable-development

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.Bait and SwitchIn 1968, Buckminster Fuller published ‘Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth‘ — a book detailing humanity sailing through space aboard a planetary vessel requiring careful management of finite resources…Read morea month ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · esc

In 1968, Buckminster Fuller published ‘Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth‘ — a book detailing humanity sailing through space aboard a planetary vessel requiring careful management of finite resources.

What Fuller envisioned has become real.

The cockpit controls exist, they’re operational, and someone is flying this ship. The question is: who determines when alarms sound and course corrections activate?

The relationship between humans and governance has shifted. While we believed we created tools to help make better decisions, we instead created a system where those who control the parameters control everything.

The genius lies not in the automation, but in the invisibility of the programmers. When an SDG indicator trigger an automated responses, it appears objective — a case of ‘following the science’. But someone, somewhere, decided what numbers constitute a ‘crisis’ and what responses should activate when those thresholds are crossed.

The computational inversion masks human control behind opaque, mathematical authority. The ship appears to fly itself, but someone pre-programmed the course corrections.

The Operationalisation of Spaceship Earth

The Operationalisation of Spaceship Earth

Bait and Switch

On the surface, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals sound wonderful: ‘End Poverty’, ‘Quality Education’, ‘Climate Action’. Who could oppose such noble aspirations? And that’s precisely the point — the SDGs are designed to be uncontroversial while concealing the actual control mechanism.

The real power lies not in the goals themselves, but in the 231 technical indicators that measure ‘progress’ toward these goals. While the public supports the feel-good objectives such as ‘ending poverty’, they never voted on specific surveillance metrics nor the reference values which determine when automatic interventions activate.

Here’s how the control system actually works:

  • Step 1: Vague, appealing goal
    (‘Zero Hunger’)

  • Step 2: Technical indicator conversion
    (‘Prevalence of undernourishment in the population’)

  • Step 3: Continuous surveillance data collection

    (satellite monitoring, economic data, health records)

  • Step 4: Reference value comparison
    (current data vs. predetermined thresholds)

  • Step 5: Automated response triggers when indicators breach acceptable ranges

For example:

  • SDG 1 (No Poverty): Sounds humane
    → Indicator 1.1.1: ‘Proportion of population below international poverty line’
    → Reference Value: $2.15/day
    → Surveillance: Financial transaction monitoring
    → Trigger: Automatic wealth redistribution when threshold breached

  • SDG 13 (Climate Action): Sounds responsible
    → Indicator 13.2.1: ‘Number of countries with climate plans’
    → Reference Value: 1.5°C pathway compliance
    → Surveillance: Carbon monitoring via satellites/sensors
    → Trigger: Automatic behavioral restrictions when emissions exceed targets

*** The SDGs are the marketing campaign. The indicator surveillance system is the actual governance mechanism.

The Sustainable Development Goals

The Sustainable Development Goals

Thresholds as Law

To understand how this works in practice, consider the surveillance infrastructure behind seemingly innocent goals:

SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities) becomes:

  • Indicator 11.2.1: ‘Proportion of population with access to public transport’

  • Surveillance: GPS tracking of movement patterns via smartphones and transit cards

  • Reference Value: 70% public transport usage in urban areas

  • Automated Response: When private vehicle usage exceeds thresholds, congestion pricing activates automatically, parking restrictions tighten, and fuel costs adjust via programmable digital currency

SDG 16 (Peace and Justice) becomes:

  • Indicator 16.10.2: ‘Number of countries that adopt constitutional, statutory guarantees for public access to information’

  • Surveillance: Social media monitoring, information flow analysis, ‘misinformation’ detection algorithms

  • Reference Value: 95% ‘information quality’ score based on alignment with official sources

  • Automated Response: When ‘misinformation’ levels breach thresholds, algorithmic content filtering intensifies and digital identity systems restrict information access

Each SDG contains multiple indicators. Each indicator has reference values. Each reference value triggers automated responses when breached. The result: comprehensive behavioral control disguised as progress measurement.

And those reference values… they’re not necessarily static.

History, Restated

The Pilots

When an SDG indicator crosses its threshold, a predictable sequence activates:

  1. Crisis Detection: Automated monitoring systems flag the deviation

  2. Expert Interpretation: Pre-positioned NGOs declare moral emergency

  3. Solution Design: Trisectoral networks implement pre-planned responses

  4. Automated Enforcement: Smart infrastructure adjusts human behavior

  5. Feedback Loop: Results feed back to refine future interventions

The entire process appears objective, but every step was programmed by specific actors who remain invisible behind the technical complexity.

Please go to the Escape Key site to read the rest.

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