![](https://counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Estonian-ID-card-260x173.jpg)
An Estonian ID card inserted into a digital ID reader. Estonia has been using digital ID since 2018. Photo courtesy of Flickr.
1,121 words
How time flies, said Fred with scintillating originality. When I was a young lad in rural Virginia in the mid-Sixties, the only thing digital was the local drive-in movie, known colloquially as the Finger Bowl. Now the world runneth over with bits and bytes and screens and all. Regarding which:
Much of the unpleasantness of life springs from the need to identify ourselves. To this end we have driver’s licenses, passports, ID , and credit cards.
None of this is really necessary. Let us assume hypothetically that face recognition is infallible. It isn’t, quite, but let us pretend. We would then not need a driver’s license: The cop would scan your face and your license, if any, would pop up on his screen. No passport, either: Coming into America the camera would scan your face and all your passport info would pop up. To fly, you would not need a ticket or need to check in: The system would scan your face and know you had a ticket for UAL 3325 to Chengdu.
Actually, face recognition is not quite perfect, so to get admission to the CIA’s murder records you might need an additional scan of iris or fingerprints, which would leave no doubt. This latter is now used at airports: “Put your fingers on the glass . . .”
All of these technologies are well known and work in practice. China uses face recognition, in which it is the world leader, for practically everything.
Making ID-less life run smoothly and efficiently would require considerable programming, but no new technology. Government could have a record for every citizen with everything from passport to medical records, each being accessible only to entities needing them. For example, a hospital could see your medical records but not your driver’s license or credit-card transactions. Things of this sort are already done in various countries. They just haven’t been glued together, except largely in China.
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You can buy Christopher Pankhurst’s essay collection Numinous Machines here.
The convenience would make this a fairly easy sell to the public. No fumbling with cards, proof of insurance, redundant medical tests. In principle people fear surveillance, but in practice they will go with convenience every time.
Now, the digital dollar. It is coming. Officials of the government and of the Federal Reserve seem to talk out of both sides of their mouths, but they are considering it, as are the central banks of over a hundred countries. It will probably be introduced gradually, maybe first for transactions between banks, then as an option for the public. But it is coming. Watch. The aim, probably not stated, will be to go cashless, as China has said it wants to do, with transactions made by cell phone, as is already almost universal in China. It will be convenient.
The digidollar software necessarily will also make a record of every transaction: time, place, amount, and to whom made. This sounds shocking, but isn’t much different from records made by credit card companies and banks. Somehow this sounds less ominous than the feds having them, though it can get them if it wants.
Some interesting effects will flow from cashlessness. Robbery will become difficult. If I put a gun to your head and demand your money, you will probably give me your dough, phone to phone, rather than have your head blown off. But the system will make a record of who I am, the time, place, and amount, which is not optimal for those in the robbery business. When you report the crime, the system will take the money back out of my phone, give it to you, and close my account. I will not be able to open a new account, because doing so involves face recognition and I will be blacklisted — and therefore unable, in any way, to get money in a cashless world.
The drug problem would end in about three days. Artificial intelligence routines would have no problem noticing multiple sales in known drug markets of 50 dollars, or whatever a hit of coke or fentanyl costs. It would be easy to check the identity of the recipients with police records of known dealers. There would be no need to arrest them. Just block their accounts and put a note on their screens telling them that if they want access to money again, they need to come into the police station.
All in good fun. But government could — would — use the same techniques to track and control people it didn’t like, such as people named Fred who say not nice things about said government.
There is little doubt that Washington would use the digidollar for purposes of social control, potentially absolute. “Washington” of course means Google, Facebook, the media, Wikipedia, and all the other de facto parts of government. Already people and websites that say bad things have their credit cards cancelled, find themselves delisted by Google, banned by Facebook, erased from the Wikipedia, and ejected from YouTube. There is much of this, though I suspect that most of the public is unaware of it.
The digidollar would provide a censoric meat axe that would — will — strike fear into dissidents. What remedy would there be? The victim would have to depend on friends even to eat while any drawn-out appeal went on. This sounds, I know, like Right-wing paranoia. How it would be used and to what extent I don’t know, but recent history is not encouraging, and the mere possibility would argue for obedience.
Note that we live in a wired world. We all have cell phones. Mine is an iPhone, which has Siri as digital assistant. She is a good listener. She can be half a room away, or in my pocket, or in a noisy restaurant, but when I say, “Hey Siri, what time is it?” she almost always understands. Those who have iPhones but do not use Siri have no way of knowing whether the microphone is on. Presumably, likewise with Android.
The Alexa boxes in our house understand both English and Spanish well and sometimes rooms away. I don’t know what policies Apple and Amazon have toward eavesdropping, whether they do this when the feds want it, but they assuredly can. The bottom line is that millions of homes host high-grade listening devices inserted with the best of motives — such as making music available — just as password managers, also with the best of motives, extract our passwords. In grade school I was taught that sharing is a good thing. I wonder.
Okay, that’s it for today. A tentacle is coming out of my Alexa box and seems to be reaching for my throat. Maybe it was something I said.
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5 comments
This is from England, but still, good points are made:
https://tavexbullion.co.uk/preventing-the-arrival-of-cashless-society-why-is-it-important-to-prevent-it-from-happening/#Why_Is_It_Important_To_Preserve_Cash
Excerpt:
Why Is It Important To Preserve Cash?
The Greatest Advantages Of Cash Are Freedom, Privacy, And Autonomy
Two parties can carry out a transaction without involving a third party, and no traceable information is left behind. Cash transactions ensure people’s basic rights to privacy, data protection, and identity. To maintain people’s freedom and prevent moving towards a surveillance society, cash must be preserved and its use encouraged.
—-
If you think we are surveilled now, just wait til there’s no cash.
Cashless society would mean a prison world for everyone, but it would be fun to watch the criminal element scramble.
Criminals will adapt, and in fact they already have.
Stealing contactless cards and racking up bills for instance until the card is reported stolen. And if the cards fail, trying to con the store into ‘giving them the goods first and they’ll come back in a bit with the money’.
And with full card details then can still transfer credits or whatever the future bs is to another account. There can be considerable apathy with which the police treat these reports. So no one may actually get ‘in trouble’.
More sophisticated criminals will still be able to operate too. Nothing will actually change there.
Crime can be dealt with remarkably well by excluding high risk criminal groups but that idea isn’t on the table you notice.
Criminals are not the enemy of the system. We are the enemy of the system.
This technology is for policing and disciplining white people but diversity is a very powerful incentive to have a massive security police state.
Thankfully in the US at least, there is a healthy ‘off-grid’ culture of people who like cash, gold, crypto or even plain bartering if it comes to that and enough of them. There will always be a way to conduct private transactions.
Unfortunately a lot of white people, especially young people, especially women (the most malleable of all to these messages) already live in a cashless world, paying for their wine on their Apple phone in between glances of Tiktok and another dose of Zoloft. It’s a pathetic sight.
As Yogi Berra said, it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future. For decades, the government along with banks and retailers, has been trying, with convincing, logical arguments, to eliminate pennies, but they’re still around.
As for the difficulty to commit robberies, that’s might be true for cash, but what about situations like the three guys in Mexico who were murdered last week for their tires. And how many people are murdered for their phones?
And how convenient is the iPhone that falls out of your pocket?
I am a die-hard believer in cash and use it for all face-to-face transactions except those with an amount that’s simply too high. With cash, the bank can know when, where, and how much I withdrew from my account, but the audit trail ends there. What I do with the money afterwards remains my own damn business. Sadly, I know that my days of doing this are numbered. And it isn’t just financial transactions that increasing require the almighty smartphone – I have seen restaurants whose menu is available only via QR code. Increasingly it will become impossible to participate in society without the permission of that rectangular, black-screened master.
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