The Tokenisation of Everything — and Why It Smells Like Technocracy, By Brian Simpson
The latest techno-buzzword doing the rounds is tokenization: the conversion of real-world assets, rights, and activities into blockchain-based digital tokens. Houses, shares, art, carbon credits, loyalty points — even identity itself — are being pitched as candidates for this new regime of programmable ownership. According to boosters, this is simply the next phase of market efficiency: frictionless settlement, fractional access, global liquidity. According to critics, it is something darker — the financial operating system of a fully technocratic society, where nothing is owned outright and everything is accessed conditionally, at the discretion of code, compliance rules, and corporate-state platforms.
The Technocracy.News article "The Tokenization of Everything, Including You" frames the issue starkly: tokenisation is not just financial innovation but the infrastructure for a society in which assets, behaviour, identity, and ultimately biological existence itself become digitally mediated permissions rather than human rights. The article's central intuition is that once ownership becomes programmable, revocable, and conditional, the distinction between property and privilege collapses. You no longer possess things; you merely rent them from systems that can switch you off.
This fear may sound overwrought. But it resonates because it fits neatly with broader trends already underway: subscription economies, CCP-style "social-credit" logics, biometric surveillance, ESG compliance regimes, and algorithmic governance structures that increasingly mediate access to finance, work, travel, healthcare, and speech. Tokenisation, in this context, doesn't look like neutral infrastructure. It looks like a control layer.
Yet it would be a mistake to treat tokenisation itself as either salvation or apocalypse. The technology is conceptually simple: it represents ownership claims digitally and allows those claims to move more easily between parties. But the social meaning of that infrastructure depends entirely on the political and legal environment in which it is embedded. Tokenisation can be used to democratise access — or to centralise power more efficiently than ever before. The danger is not that blockchains exist, but that they are increasingly being wired into regulatory frameworks, compliance architectures, and identity systems in ways that make programmable exclusion not just possible but routine.
The core anxiety raised by the technocracy critique is not about crypto speculation or financial plumbing. It is about the conversion of ownership into access. In traditional property regimes, ownership implies relatively stable rights: possession, exclusion, transfer, inheritance. In programmable systems, however, assets can be coded to expire, freeze, downgrade, or revoke themselves based on external conditions — political decisions, regulatory flags, behavioural scores, compliance thresholds. What looks like efficiency from above looks like fragility from below. When access replaces ownership, power shifts decisively toward whoever writes the rules of access.
This is not speculative dystopia. We already see its shadow in digital licensing, subscription software, platform economies, smart devices that stop working when support ends, financial accounts frozen without meaningful appeal, and algorithmic risk scoring embedded into credit, insurance, hiring, and policing systems. Tokenisation threatens to universalise this logic across physical property, finance, identity, and eventually biological data. Once the legal object becomes the token rather than the thing itself, and the token is programmable, the individual's relationship to the world becomes mediated by systems they do not control and cannot meaningfully contest.
The Technocracy.News piece pushes this further, arguing that tokenisation naturally converges with biometric identity, central bank digital currencies, ESG enforcement, and smart-contract governance into a unified control architecture. In such a world, your money, mobility, employment, housing, and access to services are no longer independent domains but interoperable compliance channels. One flag in one system propagates everywhere. The frightening part is not surveillance but automatic enforcement — the replacement of law with code, appeal with execution, and politics with infrastructure.
Some of this rhetoric undoubtedly runs ahead of the current reality. Tokenised assets today remain legally dependent on conventional property frameworks. Blockchains do not magically override courts, contracts, and legislatures. Regulators still insist — correctly — that tokenised securities are still securities, tokenised property is still property, and digital representations do not abolish real-world legal rights. Most tokenisation projects today are clunky, illiquid, heavily intermediated, and barely functional outside niche institutional contexts. The idea that we are on the brink of a seamless, totalising token economy is still a little way off.
But the direction of travel is not imaginary. The institutional interest is real, and not because blockchain technology is beautiful or liberating, but because programmable assets offer something extraordinarily attractive to modern governance systems: granular control without visible coercion. Tokenised money can enforce spending rules automatically. Tokenised property can restrict transferability, usage, or resale. Tokenised credentials can expire, downgrade, or revoke themselves without bureaucratic process. Tokenised access systems replace law with logic, courts with code, and human judgment with automated execution. This is technocracy in its purest form: governance by systems, not by people.
The deeper philosophical shift is subtle but profound. Liberal political orders historically revolve around rights-bearing persons interacting through law. Technocratic orders revolve around compliant nodes interacting through systems. Where liberalism presumes agency, contestability, and due process, technocracy presumes optimisation, automation, and enforcement. Tokenisation, when embedded into identity systems and regulatory infrastructure, becomes the financial grammar of this transformation. It encodes governance into assets themselves, bypassing the messy business of consent, politics, and institutional accountability.
This is why the tokenisation debate cannot be reduced to crypto enthusiasm versus crypto scepticism. The real issue is not blockchain — it is programmable sovereignty. Who gets to decide what conditions attach to ownership? Who writes the code that determines whether your money works, your home functions, your car starts, your insurance pays out, your account remains active? Who governs the governors when governance itself is embedded in technical systems that operate below the level of public scrutiny?
The danger is compounded by the ideology of inevitability that often accompanies technological systems. Once tokenisation is framed as "modernisation," opposition is dismissed as reactionary, anti-innovation, or irrational. But infrastructure is never neutral. It shapes power relations long before it becomes visible politically. The railroads reshaped sovereignty. Electricity grids reshaped cities. The internet reshaped culture. Tokenised financial-identity systems will reshape citizenship itself — not necessarily through tyranny, but through dependency. You will not be told what to do; you will simply find that certain things no longer work unless you comply.
The proper response is neither technological panic nor technological surrender. It is political realism. Tokenisation should be treated as a high-risk governance technology, not merely a financial tool. That means insisting that legal ownership always remains distinct from its digital representation; that assets cannot be rendered unusable without due process; that identity systems are not fused with financial permissions; that programmability does not become an enforcement mechanism for political conformity; and that exit options remain real rather than theoretical.
The first line of resistance is legal. Property rights must remain grounded in human-interpretable law, not smart-contract logic. Tokens should never replace enforceable title; they should merely represent it. If the token can override the underlying right, the system is already tyrannical by design. Second, data sovereignty must be defended aggressively. Biometric identifiers, health data, behavioural metrics, and personal metadata must never become tradable assets or access keys embedded into financial systems. Once bodies become wallets, autonomy collapses.
Third, decentralisation must be substantive, not cosmetic. Many so-called token systems are merely centralised platforms with blockchain branding. True decentralisation requires not just distributed ledgers but distributed governance, open standards, meaningful exit options, and genuine user control over identity and assets. Anything else is technocracy wearing crypto drag.
Fourth, public literacy matters. Most people hear "tokenisation" and think "crypto scam" or "financial gimmick." Few understand its deeper implications for ownership, access, governance, and social control. The battle here is cultural before it is legal. If citizens do not understand the stakes, the infrastructure will be built quietly, marketed as efficiency, and defended as inevitable — until reversing it becomes impossible.
Ultimately, the fight is not against technology but against automation of power without accountability. Tokenisation can be liberating when it removes rent-seeking intermediaries and expands access to capital and ownership. It becomes dangerous when it removes recourse, embeds compliance into infrastructure, and transforms rights into permissions. The question is not whether assets will be digitised — they will. The question is whether digitisation serves human autonomy or managerial control.
Technocracy does not arrive wearing jackboots. It arrives wearing dashboards.
If tokenisation becomes the financial substrate of society, we must decide now whether it encodes freedom or obedience. Because once ownership itself becomes programmable, the last thing standing between citizens and systems is not law — it is code. And code does not listen or care about liberty.
https://www.technocracy.news/the-tokenization-of-everything-including-you/
