Patrick Wood
Patrick Wood is an American economist, author, and editor-in-chief of Technocracy News & Trends, widely regarded as one of the foremost researchers tracing the modern Technocratic Agenda back to its historical roots in the 1930s Technocracy movement. Over several decades, Wood has produced a body of work arguing that contemporary global initiatives — including Agenda 2030, the Great Reset, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution — are not novel policy innovations but a deliberate rebranding of a decades-old ideological project: the replacement of democratic governance with rule by scientists, engineers, and unelected technocratic managers. His collaboration with the late economist and historian Antony C. Sutton produced some of the most rigorously documented research into elite power networks of the 20th century.
Background
Patrick Wood developed his interest in elite economic networks and political power structures during the 1970s, a period of intense geopolitical and financial upheaval in the United States. It was during this era that he began collaborating with Antony C. Sutton, a British-American economist and research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who had already established a formidable reputation for his work documenting Western technology transfers to the Soviet Union and the role of Wall Street in financing the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of Adolf Hitler.
Together, Wood and Sutton co-authored Trilaterals Over Washington, published in two volumes (1978 and 1980), which remains one of the most cited works examining the inner workings of the Bilderberg-adjacent elite planning networks and, most specifically, the Trilateral Commission. The books drew on primary sources, membership lists, and policy documents to argue that the Trilateral Commission had systematically placed its members and aligned figures into the highest offices of U.S. government, international finance, and the media.
Wood's academic and economic background gave him the analytical toolkit to examine the intersection of monetary policy, resource management ideology, and long-range geopolitical planning. Unlike many commentators on elite power networks, Wood has consistently emphasised documented records and primary sources over speculation.
The Technocracy Thesis
Wood's most significant intellectual contribution is what might be called the Technocracy Thesis — the argument that the dominant globalising agenda of the 21st century is not capitalism, socialism, or even fascism in the traditional sense, but Technocracy: a system of governance first formally articulated in the 1930s by the Technocracy Inc. movement in North America.
The original Technocracy movement, founded in the early 1930s by engineers and scientists including Howard Scott and M. King Hubbert (later famous for Hubbert's Peak oil theory), proposed abolishing the price system and replacing it with an energy accounting system. In their model, the unit of economic measurement would not be money but energy — specifically, the number of ergs or joules consumed in the production of goods and services. All of this would be managed not by elected politicians but by credentialed scientists and technical experts.
Wood's central argument, developed across two major books, is that this ideology never died — it was simply repackaged:
- In his book Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation (2015), Wood traces how the language of "sustainable development," "smart growth," "carbon accounting," and "energy transition" directly mirrors the original Technocracy blueprint, substituting carbon credits for the original energy certificates.
- In Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order (2018), Wood extends this analysis to show how international institutions — the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the IMF, and the World Bank — have progressively adopted Technocratic frameworks under the banner of environmental stewardship and global governance.
Wood argues that Agenda 2030's 17 Sustainable Development Goals, the Great Reset as articulated by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, and the broader Fourth Industrial Revolution narrative all converge on a single technocratic endpoint: a globally managed civilisation in which human behaviour, resource consumption, and economic activity are monitored and controlled in real time — not by democratic parliaments, but by algorithms, unelected bodies, and technical managers.
He is careful to point out that this is not a secret conspiracy in the pulp fiction sense, but an openly stated agenda visible in the published documents of the institutions promoting it — which, he argues, most people simply do not read.
The Trilateral Commission Connection
A significant portion of Wood's research focuses on the Trilateral Commission, founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski with the stated aim of fostering closer cooperation between North America, Western Europe, and Japan.
Wood and Sutton's Trilaterals Over Washington documented that within a short period of the Commission's founding, its members had occupied the U.S. presidency (Jimmy Carter), the vice presidency (Walter Mondale), the Secretary of State position (Cyrus Vance), the National Security Advisor role (Zbigniew Brzezinski), the directorship of the CIA, the chairmanships of major banks, and senior editorial positions in the major television networks and newspapers.
Wood argues this was not coincidental but reflected a deliberate strategy of elite capture — placing ideologically aligned technocratic managers into the commanding heights of government, finance, and media simultaneously. He contrasts this with the more visible but arguably less influential Bilderberg Group, arguing the Trilateral Commission operated with a more specific and actionable policy agenda.
The Commission's founding documents, Wood notes, explicitly discuss the need to manage what Brzezinski called "the technetronic era" — a post-industrial world shaped by technology and information, requiring governance structures that transcend traditional nation-state democracy. Wood sees this as the missing link between the 1930s Technocracy movement and the current New World Order architecture.
Cross-referencing with the Club of Rome — whose 1972 report The Limits to Growth introduced the idea of planetary resource limits requiring centralised management — Wood presents a coherent through-line: a network of interlocking elite institutions, all converging on the same technocratic end-state, operating across generations and through multiple institutional vehicles.
Technocracy News & Trends
Since the early 2010s, Wood has operated Technocracy News & Trends (TechnocracyNews.com) as an ongoing editorial and aggregation platform dedicated to tracking the advancement of technocratic policy globally. The site functions as a primary research hub, curating news articles, policy documents, and analyses relevant to the Technocratic Agenda, Agenda 2030, digital surveillance, Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), Smart Cities, and related topics.
Wood writes regular editorial commentary, hosts interviews with researchers and authors, and has appeared at numerous conferences addressing topics including:
- The Great Reset and the World Economic Forum's policy agenda
- Central Bank Digital Currencies and the move toward a Cashless Society
- Smart Cities as technocratic control infrastructure
- Biosurveillance and the expansion of digital identity systems
- The COVID-19 policy response as a vector for technocratic restructuring
He has collaborated and appeared alongside other independent researchers including James Corbett of the Corbett Report, Derrick Broze, and various economists and policy analysts critical of the United Nations Sustainable Development framework.
Wood's platform is notable for its emphasis on citing primary documents — UN resolutions, WEF white papers, government policy documents — rather than relying on secondary interpretation alone. This approach has made Technocracy News & Trends a reference point for researchers across the political spectrum who study the architecture of global governance.
Key Works
- Trilaterals Over Washington, Volume I (with Antony C. Sutton, 1978) — Documents the founding and membership placement strategy of the Trilateral Commission.
- Trilaterals Over Washington, Volume II (with Antony C. Sutton, 1980) — Extends analysis to economic policy, banking, and media influence.
- Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation (2015) — Core statement of the Technocracy Thesis, connecting 1930s Technocracy to modern sustainable development policy.
- Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order (2018) — Extends the thesis to international institutions and the emerging global governance architecture.
Criticism and Context
Wood's work has largely been ignored or dismissed by mainstream academic and media institutions, a fact he addresses directly by arguing that technocratic governance operates most effectively when it is not perceived as ideology at all — when it masquerades as neutral, scientific, and inevitable "progress." Critics from the mainstream argue that comparisons between 1930s Technocracy and modern sustainable development policy overstate structural continuity and understate genuine environmental concern as a motivating factor.
Supporters and fellow researchers, however, argue that Wood's reliance on primary documents and institutional records makes his work difficult to dismiss on factual grounds, and that the ideological parallels he identifies are too precise to be coincidental.
