https://stylman.substack.com/p/the-authentication-layer
or use https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/why-digital-id-hill-die-authentication-layer
The game has never been about what the government can do. It’s about the cost of doing it.
A friend and I got into it recently. He’s smart, freedom-minded, and totally gets the danger of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC). Expiring money, programmable control, carbon budgets - he sees most of the expanding tyranny clearly. And yet he dismisses Digital ID as a distraction. When I try to make the case that digital ID is the gateway to the gulag in the metaverse, he demands I name ONE thing Digital ID gives the government that they can’t already do.
My answer: it enables CBDC.
Of course, governments have already encroached on our privacy and freedoms in ways our forefathers couldn’t have imagined. But even with the creeping surveillance state, the government can’t fully implement programmable currency without authenticated identity on every transaction. They’re components of the same beast. Digital ID is the authentication layer while CBDC is the currency that runs on top of it.
Stop Digital ID and you prevent CBDC from being built at any scale that matters.
The institutions driving this, the usual suspects including the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and the United Nations, are quite explicit about their intentions. Their own documentation spells it out: digital identity is a requirement for centralized digital currency. And in case the documents aren’t clear enough, Agustín Carstens, the former GM of the BIS couldn’t have been more explicit about their goals:
“A key difference with the CBDC is that central banks will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that.”
(more, including video, charts, etc)
Not only that. ...
In case of the Extra-Judicial, Extra-Territorial ECB, the European Union Central Bank, they gain the power of Fiscal policy and the enforcement of it, meaning, they can simply take in a way, that saves them a lot of bureaucratic shit. The signal to noise ratio downstream is decreased.
Where you first had (even just hypothetically and decreasing in appearance in practice) human discretion in HOW and WHEN measures would be executed, part of the legal framework become smart contracts, which execute automatically.
This turns the practice upside down: execution first, then perhaps, a few questions may be asked. This is administrative tyranny.
Another part is, access to participation in society. All life becomes dependent upon the rules and prerequisites of a SYSTEM.
The SYSTEM becomes the arbiter. It cannot be reasoned with. This is the law. Transgressions mean expulsion and exclusion. This is the FEUDAL wet dream. It means that means of exchange become the expression of Life and gain an existence beyond man, totally divorced from man.
It means, human rights are no longer the basis upon and the lens through which measures and the creation of new laws are made.