Lana and Andy Wachowski’s classic 1999 film, The Matrix, introduced viewers to the wonderfully fascinating question of how systems of domination and control reproduce themselves. In the film, we learn that the matrix periodically re-boots itself. Most often the reload is so seamless that it is unnoticed by the masses oblivious to the system of power that constitutes their reality. Sometimes, however, a “glitch” in power’s reproduction temporarily reveals the system to humanity, making for a moment of awareness that leads to a potential escape from the matrix. At the United Nation’s General Assembly the matrix was re-loaded on Sept. 25 with the passing of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The SDGs are a set of 17 goals with 169 targets that carry an ambitious agenda for eliminating deeply rooted global inequities and inequalities, including the end of poverty. The agenda is to be accomplished by 2030. The SDG’s also aim to be sustainable for the planetary eco-system. The SDGs replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and are the outcome of the Rio+20 meeting in 2012, which began the global discussions about the post-2015 global agenda. Post-2015 refers to a grander re-loading of the development agenda by U.N. agencies, such as the renegotiation of the Hyogo Framework for disaster risk reduction in Spring 2015 and the upcoming re-booting of U.N. Habitat’s urban agenda, which will happen with the launch of Habitat III in Quito, Ecuador, in October 2015.

Collectively, the post-2015 agenda defines how the global community will respond to major issues such as food security, climate change, public health, urbanization, gender inequality and poverty. It sets the normative framework for how our key institutions will address the most pressing issues of the 21st Century. These institutions include the core global power brokers in the world of development, such as The World Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, or USAID. But, it also includes the wide range of NGOs, such as Oxfam or World Resources Institute, along with an even wider range of consultancy companies that contribute to policy formulation and implementation. Of course, the private sector is present as major stakeholders in how development will solve 21st Century crises. Taken together these actors constitute a development complex of interconnected interests and agendas fundamental to how power functions globally. With the SDGs, these power brokers have reproduced their position as the creators of the agenda as well as the actors who implement the agenda.

A key to the power elite’s reproduction of their capacity to define the agenda for what will become 9 billion people is the seamless transition they executed in New York City on Sept. 25. Amazingly, 193 nations signed onto the agenda, “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” Their signatures resulted from a process of closed-door meetings that created the core agenda before the illusion of consultation was created through a series of engagements with organizations that ostensibly represented civil society. The making of the SDGs largely focused on responding to the criticisms of the MDGs, which complained of inadequate benchmarks for any honest assessment that could determine the success or failure of the development goals. Hence, the SDGs give us a bewildering list of 169 targets to be met in accomplishing the goals. Additionally, growing concerns about the deepening planetary ecological crisis, especially in its climate change articulation, brought the power brokers to the point of needing to include sustainability within the development agenda. To use The Matrix metaphor, all of this work happened without a “glitch to the system” as it rebooted. Hardly anyone took notice, scarce was the debate, and few have asked questions about the fundamental premises of what is now called “sustainable development.”

Like lipstick on a pig, the SDGs are a continuation of the thinking within the MDGs approach to global poverty offering nothing more than a cosmetic makeover. The thinking is goes by the name “development,” which itself is a continuation of the modernization paradigm which was the neo-colonialist attempt in the 1950s and 1960s at putting lipstick on the pig of colonialism. The MDG’s brand of lipstick attempted to lift people out of poverty by promoting economic growth, while refusing to acknowledge that this capitalist cure was the cause of the ill it created in the first place. The SDG’s retain the growth paradigm, while tinting the lipstick’s color with “sustainability.” In the seamless reloading of the matrix, the making of the SDGs advanced the argument that the MDGs were, for the greater part, successful in the goal of reducing global poverty by half. However, that thesis depends on how poverty is measured. If we keep an absurdly low metric of US$1-2 dollars per day, then the MDGs succeeded. But, if the global elite, those who create the parameters of success behind closed-door meetings used humane measurements for a dignified life, then the MDGs were an unquestionable failure. Likewise, those who claim MDG success take credit for advances their policies did not create, such as the massive migration of 300 million Chinese from rural to urban areas.

Critics of the MDGs highlighted the environmental consequences of the growth model. As we face the sixth great planetary extinction, those consequences are nothing short of a total condemnation of the MDGs. Now we are expected to accept the SDG rebooting of the growth matrix, because it adds “sustainability” to the agenda and targets. Sustainability, at best, is a reformist attempt at contending with the ecological disaster caused by 500 years of capitalist development. Capitalism is non-negotiable within the SDGs, and it is assumed by the agenda’s creators to be the only possible way to organize human economy and the only possible solution to the great crises capitalism has created. Fundamental to the reproduction of global capitalism, the SDGs lock humanity into the death spiral of the capitalist cancer until 2030.

The SDGs 17 goals and 169 targets have a staggering price tag, US$3 trillion according to a Reuters news report. Amazingly, when the 193 heads of state signed their citizens onto the agenda the plan for how to finance the goals and targets had yet to be specified. Indeed, the work of figuring out who will pay for the SDGs is the next step in the agenda, and will be the next moment in the matrix’s seamless transition.

What we do know, however, is that the NGOs, consultancies, and corporations are lined up, ready to take their part of the US$3 trillion development pie. The SDGs assure that staff is paid handsome salaries and benefits, that offices remain open, that meetings will be held, field work undertaken, new studies commissioned, and the system reproduced. The SDGs offer profit for the corporations and for-profit consultancies that live off the lard of development capitalism. The SDGs will provide just enough growth so that just enough food, medicine, and education are available for the multitudes to ensure the system remains seamless in its reproduction and capitalism remains non-negotiable.

The matrix will reload until the logical end is reached: the catastrophic collapse of the planetary ecosystem.

Glen David Kuecker is a Professor of History at DePauw University.