Dusk of a new order: Absolute surveillance, absolute servility

You are reduced to an account in a system that scores you and controls you. You are allocated, by your gracious masters, who themselves are mastered, quotas of what used to be human freedom; soil and oxygen are taxable.

You exceed your electricity quota, your supply ceases. Travel further than allocated  or attempt travel where prohibited, and you will be halted. Exceed your milk quota? You will be constrained at the cashier, who accepts no cash. Hovering cameras recognise your face, your gait  and the central compilers know if you have paid up your taxes  or not.  

Should you inquire about a forbidden topic  from your neighbour or the web, your penalty will be swiftly dealt. Comment against a policy or project and you will be 404.  

When you break a law, your funds will be debited automatically and your state loyalty score used “to regulate social behaviour and ensure that those being documented remain trustworthy” as digitally evaluated via a multitude of coordinated inputs, will decrease.   Facial recognition is becoming sufficiently advanced to read your emotions and predict your thoughts.  You need not then even violate the rules.  The technology will evaluate the likelihood of your violation based on your expressions and behaviour. Policemen, courts and judges are redundant, since the system architecture will provide immediate digital verdicts without nuance or mercy and execute sentences instantly. The high legislature shall instruct the software engineers. Keen parliamentarians will strut about unpowered. Likewise financial institutions and commercial bankers. If you’re poor, you’ll be privileged with giving up your travel credits to the wealthy, in exchange for protein credits. 

Your safety

Similar legislation is being enacted simultaneously in many countries.  Innocuously named Online Safety acts with vague or absent definitions of “harmful” makes for the abolition of dissent.  The questioning or revelation of state policies and endeavours becomes a crime, and punishment of innocent offenders becomes legal because the evidence they present and the discourse they prompt shall be deemed harmful by those with power to define with expedience.  

Anything that might lead to truth, virtue, responsibility and principle will be unsafe; the flowering of religion, solidarity and resilience in the masses would prove harmful obstacles to the concentration of resource ownership, wealth, and power.

Strange priorities

Fiscal and corporate prioritisation is made for establishment of digital public infrastructure in the name of ‘sustainable development’ in nations where weedicides enhance rice yields, leach into drinking water and ruin kidneys, and farmers’ children remain malnourished.  

Huge national budgets are allocated for digitalisation, in countries struggling to attain self-sufficiency in energy, and having no chemical manufacturing industry.  

Public safety

Related are laws on establishment of Digital Identification systems.  For efficient taxation, national security and prevention of fraud?  A noble service offered to you with no alternative.

Digital ID is “the sum total of the growing and evolving mass of information about us, our profiles and the history of our activities online.” “This digital identity determines what products, services and information we can access – or, conversely, what is closed off to us.” Digitalisation budgets provide for digital infrastructure - for surveillance, centralisation of surveillance data and eventually digital control.  

The digital ID will eventually be mandated for logging in to a search engine, a media or other application – and into your bank accounts. And for accessing every activity and obtaining every service you require.

Thereafter, thou shalt not browse or communicate without your digital ID.  Object to this tool for surveillance and control, or dissent in any other quarter – and you will be expunged from the system to become nameless numberless jobless homeless – a digital leper.  

Beyond censorship and central control architecture, are laws banning the young from social media – because digital ID with its prerequisite biometric measurements will be rolled out on adults to begin with.  

If digitally connected activity of all is to be monitored, stored and integrated, anyone without digital ID needs to be declined connectivity. Further, since those uncaptured by digital ID cannot have their activity captured without it, they must be prevented access altogether.  Hence the sudden concern for children.

Neo-serfism

2030 is impending.  Digital ID by 2026, and centralised programmable digital currency and a cashless society in 2029.  Your money will convert to controlled currency. Conventional and even cryptocurrency accounts get frozen today, and your centralised digital currency will be switched on or off like a lamp in the kitchen.

The impact on you will crush, pulverise.  Know that even submission, obedience and flattery will not save you, because 8.3 must go to 0.5.

It is not an ID, but a noose.  The digital public infrastructure is for the digital gulag. It exists, is operational and is being expanded. Only a united refusal now, can buy freedom.  

(The writer holds a doctorate in Chemical Engineering from the University of Cambridge, is a Certified Corporate Director, and has researched and published widely on international and supranational organisations, covering topics such as law reform, ESG, human rights, health, education, and contemporary ideologies)