Excellent summary. It will be very hard to resist your government removing cash, restricting or banning crypto, and implementing a CBDC. The one thing that you currently have any control over is giving up your biometric data, and your government is after that.
I fear you can only delay the process. As I posted the other day, I cannot log into the NHS any more without submitting a video (!) of my face. I have not a shadow of a doubt that this data will be fed into the police live facial recognition platform, in use already at protests.
How long can you hold out, though, as more and more services will be made inaccessible without your compliance? In any case, all you have to do is be arrested for a bogus offence, and the police will grab all your biometrics, including DNA.
Are we going to give up our freedom without a fight? It’s not about ‘nothing to hide, etc’; it’s about a fundamental change in the relationship between the citizen and government. It’s totalitarian control. Look at China if you want to see your future.
That’ll be why there are so many videos online of people living off-grid; a mobile home, van ‘life’, a temporary degradable self-made shelter in the forest. But of course, they’re all providing live-stream content for the Internet.
Individual anonymity is essential. Good and services should be provided equally without picking and choosing based on who you are.
However, reversing the telescope, isn’t this exactly what government expenditure to its suppliers and contractors needs to look like, so we can audit all the money flowing to defence contractors, or covid PPE providers, or hospital tenders? Aren’t the big sums the ones that need tracked more carefully first?
Paul Johnston
6 months ago
Just goes to prove there’s nothing new under the sun. Reading the article I was struck by the similarity between the Worldcoin and like schemes to the common practice of 18th and 19th century factory employers. Wages were often paid in tokens redeemable only at the store run by the factory on goods whose quality and prices were determined by the firm. This practice was made illegal in the UK under the Truck Acts of the 1840s. So I wonder if the Amazon scheme described would be legal in the UK.
It’s also why the Co-operative Movement started, in a Lancashire mill town (Rochdale, 1844) before spreading throughout the rest of the world. Its initial principles have since been somewhat corrupted, and now the Co-op is just another commercial venture trading on the advances made in procuring good food and other goods at a reasonable price for those working in the mills.
Something similar might emerge in the wake of digitial currencies, but perhaps less likely.
This crossed my mind as well. We would do well to remember the reason such things are illegal today is because people protested, lobbied, and campaigned against these practices. The powerful industrialists didn’t simply give up these methods of exploitation voluntarily. They were forced to do so by people acting collectively through unions and eventually through government actions and labor laws when the politics caught up with industrialist tactics. The remedies for present attempts by government and powerful corporations to use new tools to revive old methods of exploitation are the same as ever, free speech, protests, voting, and demanding new laws to account for new technologies. Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.
Whether corporate technocracy or governmental technocracy is preferable is debatable. At a certain point, if people adopt the technology in a free market, it is incumbent upon government to keep civil order in these new arenas through sensible laws that protect individuals from exploitation and criminal activity. While we all rightly fear the specter of Chinese style totalitarianism, we should remember that they do not have free elections, free speech, free press, or any right to protest the actions of government. China is not the UK, or the US, or Europe. It is important to consider the cultural and historical differences between these different cultures. To my mind, globalized corporations accountable to nobody are by far the greater threat. Amazon, one of the worst offenders, continues to resist unionization for the same reasons that textile mills and steel foundries did a century and a half ago. Government at least tends to be slow and marginally competent at the best of times, which limits the damage they can do. Further, governments still have to respond to overwhelming public demands, however reluctantly. See Biden’s recent reversal on the border wall for an example.
Bernard Kelly
6 months ago
There will be no stopping this. The experiment in population control during Covid was a resounding success as most of the population, around 90% in Australia, surrendered their autonomy to Government misinformation, disinformation and outright propaganda. The ‘real’ government knows what works and what it can get away with. As most of the people are asleep, addicted to their ‘smart’ phones, Netflix, online porn, online gambling, celebrity worship, 24/7 sport in super HD, alcohol, drugs etc the proverbial frog is slowly but surely being boiled. “Yes, but I didn’t vote for this, what happened?” “Fool! You think you live in a democracy.” While you were sleeping you lost your precious democracy to the few psychopaths who weren’t sleeping. Now just suck it up. “The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance.” I can’t remember who said it but he was 100% correct.
I believe it was Thomas Jefferson, and never a truer word was said.
Thanks for this excellent summing up. I don’t know what it will take for the boiling frogs to jump, but we’re getting very close to the point of no return.
Right-Wing Hippie
6 months ago
Your identity is your cash, but your cash will increasingly be your identity. You’ll be judged, labeled, by the tokens in your digital wallet. “Ew, you accept Trumpbucks?!”
Just as well that digital currency for the rich and famous has already been patented – Starbucks.
Nick Wade
6 months ago
I think the thing most people forget is, won’t the much despised elites and politicians also have to use the same system, and balk at their shady dealings potentially being exposed? How will they pay for their mistresses, and secret hotel assignations?
CBDCs could be too much of a good thing for everyone. In the meantime I’ll carry on using cash as much as possible..
It won’t be used in such a broad way. It will be used to attack political dissidents, much like the truckers in Canda whose accounts were frozen, or politicians who go rogue and go against the official narrative.
It’ll begin as Julian suggests; the initial rollout will not even be programmable. Trust must be gained. You will be incentivised to transfer your fiat money into your digital wallet. The bad stuff comes later, and it will eat the elites and the politicians, too, most of whom are too witless to realise what is happening.
Is there anyway to resist? My debit card, if stolen, can be used as credit card or just tap away. Just like that my money is gone. Would the new system prevent this? I’m just too old, too suspicious and a Luddite. This new system is too invasive. I’m rambling now, but I just want to use cash, which more and more businesses don’t accept.
The grand vision is that you will pay either with a chip under your skin or simply with your biometric ID (face, iris, palmprint or fingerprint). The intermediary stage will be a smartphone. Plastic is probably going to be phased out.
It may well be more secure when it is tied to your biometrics, but a certain Franklin quote comes to mind here.
William Cameron
6 months ago
Banks want cashless. Because they get a cut of every card transaction- but not of cash transactions.
The only good thing about CBDCs is that banks would become redundant. But much as I would rejoice at their disappearance, the handing over of control of our financial lives to the state is far too high a price to pay.
Dumetrius
6 months ago
Interesting that even in China, where virtually everything can be bought via Alipay/WeChat, it is still not that hard to use cash, as i found in my recent ramblings there. The main hassle can be getting the right change but even that doesn’t take too long, most times.
Howard Ahmanson
4 months ago
I was just in Britain for a while, and the number of places that told me “card only” when I pulled out my pounds made me think that by the time Charles III gets his face on any circulating money, circulating money won’t be used any more.
Alan Gore
6 months ago
I don’t like crypto or ‘tokens’, but I love the idea of everyday national currencies in digital form. I just spent the month touring South America. I visited big cities and small towns, did a modest amount of gift shopping, and never had to undergo that infernal travelers’ headache, changing currency. It was Visa Card all the way, and I have no objection to Chase Bank knowing where I went and what I bought. Haven’t merchants needed to know what their customers want since the beginning of commerce?
I love living in the future.
Oh dear, Al. You really haven’t got it, have you. This is not about convenience, it’s about control.
And the “You’ve nothing to fear if you’ve nothing to hide” brigade will be swept up in it like the rest of us.
Excellent summary. It will be very hard to resist your government removing cash, restricting or banning crypto, and implementing a CBDC. The one thing that you currently have any control over is giving up your biometric data, and your government is after that.
I fear you can only delay the process. As I posted the other day, I cannot log into the NHS any more without submitting a video (!) of my face. I have not a shadow of a doubt that this data will be fed into the police live facial recognition platform, in use already at protests.
How long can you hold out, though, as more and more services will be made inaccessible without your compliance? In any case, all you have to do is be arrested for a bogus offence, and the police will grab all your biometrics, including DNA.
Are we going to give up our freedom without a fight? It’s not about ‘nothing to hide, etc’; it’s about a fundamental change in the relationship between the citizen and government. It’s totalitarian control. Look at China if you want to see your future.
That’ll be why there are so many videos online of people living off-grid; a mobile home, van ‘life’, a temporary degradable self-made shelter in the forest. But of course, they’re all providing live-stream content for the Internet.
That’s all good and well, but I was most interested in learning that the former Governor of Maine was one of those evil Republicans.
Why fight? Resistance is futile!
Individual anonymity is essential. Good and services should be provided equally without picking and choosing based on who you are.
However, reversing the telescope, isn’t this exactly what government expenditure to its suppliers and contractors needs to look like, so we can audit all the money flowing to defence contractors, or covid PPE providers, or hospital tenders? Aren’t the big sums the ones that need tracked more carefully first?
Just goes to prove there’s nothing new under the sun. Reading the article I was struck by the similarity between the Worldcoin and like schemes to the common practice of 18th and 19th century factory employers. Wages were often paid in tokens redeemable only at the store run by the factory on goods whose quality and prices were determined by the firm. This practice was made illegal in the UK under the Truck Acts of the 1840s. So I wonder if the Amazon scheme described would be legal in the UK.
It’s also why the Co-operative Movement started, in a Lancashire mill town (Rochdale, 1844) before spreading throughout the rest of the world. Its initial principles have since been somewhat corrupted, and now the Co-op is just another commercial venture trading on the advances made in procuring good food and other goods at a reasonable price for those working in the mills.
Something similar might emerge in the wake of digitial currencies, but perhaps less likely.
This crossed my mind as well. We would do well to remember the reason such things are illegal today is because people protested, lobbied, and campaigned against these practices. The powerful industrialists didn’t simply give up these methods of exploitation voluntarily. They were forced to do so by people acting collectively through unions and eventually through government actions and labor laws when the politics caught up with industrialist tactics. The remedies for present attempts by government and powerful corporations to use new tools to revive old methods of exploitation are the same as ever, free speech, protests, voting, and demanding new laws to account for new technologies. Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.
Whether corporate technocracy or governmental technocracy is preferable is debatable. At a certain point, if people adopt the technology in a free market, it is incumbent upon government to keep civil order in these new arenas through sensible laws that protect individuals from exploitation and criminal activity. While we all rightly fear the specter of Chinese style totalitarianism, we should remember that they do not have free elections, free speech, free press, or any right to protest the actions of government. China is not the UK, or the US, or Europe. It is important to consider the cultural and historical differences between these different cultures. To my mind, globalized corporations accountable to nobody are by far the greater threat. Amazon, one of the worst offenders, continues to resist unionization for the same reasons that textile mills and steel foundries did a century and a half ago. Government at least tends to be slow and marginally competent at the best of times, which limits the damage they can do. Further, governments still have to respond to overwhelming public demands, however reluctantly. See Biden’s recent reversal on the border wall for an example.
There will be no stopping this. The experiment in population control during Covid was a resounding success as most of the population, around 90% in Australia, surrendered their autonomy to Government misinformation, disinformation and outright propaganda. The ‘real’ government knows what works and what it can get away with. As most of the people are asleep, addicted to their ‘smart’ phones, Netflix, online porn, online gambling, celebrity worship, 24/7 sport in super HD, alcohol, drugs etc the proverbial frog is slowly but surely being boiled. “Yes, but I didn’t vote for this, what happened?” “Fool! You think you live in a democracy.” While you were sleeping you lost your precious democracy to the few psychopaths who weren’t sleeping. Now just suck it up. “The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance.” I can’t remember who said it but he was 100% correct.
I believe it was Thomas Jefferson, and never a truer word was said.
Thanks for this excellent summing up. I don’t know what it will take for the boiling frogs to jump, but we’re getting very close to the point of no return.
Your identity is your cash, but your cash will increasingly be your identity. You’ll be judged, labeled, by the tokens in your digital wallet. “Ew, you accept Trumpbucks?!”
Just as well that digital currency for the rich and famous has already been patented – Starbucks.
I think the thing most people forget is, won’t the much despised elites and politicians also have to use the same system, and balk at their shady dealings potentially being exposed? How will they pay for their mistresses, and secret hotel assignations?
CBDCs could be too much of a good thing for everyone. In the meantime I’ll carry on using cash as much as possible..
It won’t be used in such a broad way. It will be used to attack political dissidents, much like the truckers in Canda whose accounts were frozen, or politicians who go rogue and go against the official narrative.
It’ll begin as Julian suggests; the initial rollout will not even be programmable. Trust must be gained. You will be incentivised to transfer your fiat money into your digital wallet. The bad stuff comes later, and it will eat the elites and the politicians, too, most of whom are too witless to realise what is happening.
Is there anyway to resist? My debit card, if stolen, can be used as credit card or just tap away. Just like that my money is gone. Would the new system prevent this? I’m just too old, too suspicious and a Luddite. This new system is too invasive. I’m rambling now, but I just want to use cash, which more and more businesses don’t accept.
The grand vision is that you will pay either with a chip under your skin or simply with your biometric ID (face, iris, palmprint or fingerprint). The intermediary stage will be a smartphone. Plastic is probably going to be phased out.
It may well be more secure when it is tied to your biometrics, but a certain Franklin quote comes to mind here.
Banks want cashless. Because they get a cut of every card transaction- but not of cash transactions.
The only good thing about CBDCs is that banks would become redundant. But much as I would rejoice at their disappearance, the handing over of control of our financial lives to the state is far too high a price to pay.
Interesting that even in China, where virtually everything can be bought via Alipay/WeChat, it is still not that hard to use cash, as i found in my recent ramblings there. The main hassle can be getting the right change but even that doesn’t take too long, most times.
I was just in Britain for a while, and the number of places that told me “card only” when I pulled out my pounds made me think that by the time Charles III gets his face on any circulating money, circulating money won’t be used any more.
I don’t like crypto or ‘tokens’, but I love the idea of everyday national currencies in digital form. I just spent the month touring South America. I visited big cities and small towns, did a modest amount of gift shopping, and never had to undergo that infernal travelers’ headache, changing currency. It was Visa Card all the way, and I have no objection to Chase Bank knowing where I went and what I bought. Haven’t merchants needed to know what their customers want since the beginning of commerce?
I love living in the future.
Oh dear, Al. You really haven’t got it, have you. This is not about convenience, it’s about control.
And the “You’ve nothing to fear if you’ve nothing to hide” brigade will be swept up in it like the rest of us.