Tried getting anything on your Compucard today?
Yes, I said…
They’ve frozen them, she said. Mine too. The collective’s too. Any account with an F on it instead of an M. All they needed to do is push a few buttons. We’re cut off.
But I’ve got over two thousand dollars in the bank, I said…
—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
It’s been years since I read The Handmaid’s Tale, but I’ve never forgotten the scene that flashes back to the moment when bank accounts across the country are suddenly frozen after a government takeover by a militant religious sect. Only women’s accounts are frozen, for in Atwood’s prophetic feminist imagination, she envisioned a future dystopia caused by a misogynist right-wing Christian theocracy.
How wrong she was.
Just recently, the bank accounts of scores of people who donated to the Canadian trucker protests were digitally frozen with a click—frozen not by religious fundamentalists, but by a liberal feminist Prime Minister and his female Minister of Finance. All in the name of ending a three-week protest that threatened the Prime Minister’s Covid-19 mandates.
I don’t know if Ms. Atwood has noticed the irony.
Now, you might not think any of this is relevant if you don’t live in Canada, but the implications reach beyond Canada’s borders and beyond bank accounts. Digital banking is only one part of an emerging system to fully digitize our identity. Governments all over the world have been moving toward digital IDs, and the World Economic Forum—everyone’s favorite source for conspiracy theories—has produced a helpful vector graphic to show us a vision of the future:
Thus conceived, the digital ID is a single integrated portal for pretty much everything we do: banking, buying, selling, sending messages, voting, seeing a doctor, getting on a train, logging into social media, everything. And I’m willing to bet all our data will be stored and available for analysis and scrutiny, for ever and ever, like a vast E-Book of Judgement, except the judge is not God but someone slightly less qualified. Like a Prime Minister, for instance.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with the positives. The sales pitch around the digital ID promises all sorts of advantages, like:
It’s faster and more convenient for the user.
It saves money for business and government.
It enhances security and privacy, and reduces fraud.
It democratises society by universalizing access to rights and services.
That last point has been framed as especially relevant to the almost billion people in the world with no legal identity, most of them living in low-income countries, and the majority being women.
But whatever the promised benefits, digital ID systems come with risks and perils that you might not hear as much about. Brett Solomon, executive director of the digital rights NGO Access Now, expressed his concerns in a Wired article:
For starters, we are building near-perfect facial recognition technology and other identifiers, from the human gait to breath to iris. Biometric databases are being set up in such a way that these individual identifiers are centralized, insecure, and opaque. Then there is the capacity for geo-location of identifiers—that is, the tracking of digital “you”—in real time. A constant feed of insecure data from the Internet of Things may well connect you (and your identity) to other identities and nodes on the network without your consent.
So, the digital ID isn’t just a centralized database of all that is you. It can be linked to things as intimate as our eyes and our breath, and it will follow us everywhere. All this turns our lives into a continuous reality TV show, except the only audience is an artificial intelligence machine and, perhaps, a disgruntled world leader and his gaggle of technocrats.
And it might not be secure. Wasn’t security promised to us? I’m not a tech expert but I’m going to hazard a guess: Nothing is un-hackable. Right now, personal databases are still mostly decentralised. If someone hacks into your social media account, it doesn’t usually give them access to your email or bank account. With digital ID a hacker may gain access to your entire digital existence: your services, your money, your rights, your personal history.
The same could happen to a whole country. In October 2021 a lone hacker breached Argentina’s IT network and stole the ID card details for the nation’s entire population of nearly 46 million people. A cyberattack by a hostile state like China or Russia could be devastating in ways that are hard to imagine.
But we haven’t come to the deepest dangers yet. Back to Brett Solomon:
Digital IDs will become necessary to function in a connected digital world. This has not escaped the attention of authoritarian regimes. Already, they are working to splinter the internet, collect and localize data, and impose regimes of surveillance and control. Digital ID systems, as they are being developed today, are ripe for exploitation and abuse, to the detriment of our freedoms and democracies.
In fact, it’s not only “authoritarian regimes” that can abuse or exploit the digital ID, but any government—as recent events in Canada have shown.
That doesn’t mean the freezing of bank accounts will be a common or preferred strategy. Not all abuse is so flagrant. The targeting may be more subtle. More like persuasion; more like a mental massage. Internet search engines and social media platforms can tweak the results for keywords, so that certain results show first on the list while others are suppressed. In the world of digital ID, we end up being the search terms, and our digital environment—any screen or device in our home or surroundings—could be tweaked to manipulate our opinions to align us with officially approved values and policies.
There’s a high risk of the digital ID morphing into a Chinese-style social credit system that punishes and rewards citizens based on their social behavior. By the end of 2018, millions in China had been blocked from buying travel tickets as punishment for their offences, while in other cases people or their children missed out on the best jobs and schools. Punishable offenses included not only illegal behavior like bad driving but playing too many video games and posting “fake news” on social media.
Don’t blame China if the social credit system comes here. We’ve been unwittingly grooming ourselves toward this system for years by participating in an internet universe of star ratings, abuse flagging, hearts, and thumbs up and down, for everything from social media posts to household products. It’s only a small step to turn the system on ourselves.
For youth who’ve grown up with devices in hand—and in a culture of frenzied ideologies that demand severe punishment for perceived social offences—a social credit system might seem almost natural, even desirable. These same youth may become zealous digital apostles when the system expands to reward those who evangelize others into better behavior. Did you convince your cranky old neighbor to stop driving his fossil-fueled pickup truck, or to throw out his collection of Jordan Peterson books? Great job! More points for you!
As technology develops, entwining itself with our psyche and our biometrics, it won’t be long before it gets under our skin. Take, for example, the microchip implants. In recent years, thousands in Sweden have implanted rice-sized microchips into their hands for ordinary things, like accessing their homes, logging into social media, or storing a train ticket.
Not missing a beat, Swedish start-up Epicenter has created a Covid-19 vaccine passport chip implant. Just listen to a few seconds of Chief “Disruption” Officer Hannes Sjöblad:
Implants are a very versatile technology that can be used for many different things. Right now it’s very convenient to have a Covid passport always accessible on your implant. So, in case your phone runs out of battery it’s always accessible to you. Of course that’s how we use this technology today. Next year we’re going to use it for something else.
For something else. I’m sure that hasn’t escaped the notice of authoritarian regimes either. So, if you thought you might get around the digital ID by conveniently leaving your smartphone at home, or slipping it into a Faraday pouch, forget it. Implantable digital ID would follow us everywhere. (Well, I suppose you could wrap your hand in tinfoil to block the signal, but that might be illegal, not to mention weird.)
There’s another issue too, one that could only resonate in a post-pandemic world. Brett Solomon again:
Digital ID should not be mandated. We should have the option to say no to any demand that we have a digital ID, without prejudice or negative repercussions.
Solomon wrote those words back in 2018. Remember those pre-Covid days? We all know what followed. The pandemic sparked the development of vaccines, which gave way to vaccine passports, which led to widespread mandates requiring vax-passes for everything from holding a job to sipping a cappuccino in a café.
And the social consequences for those who refused to comply? Anything from mockery (“unscientific”), to smearing (“extremists”), to estrangement in relationships with families and friends (“sorry, you can’t visit us”); and all the while, a tone-deaf refusal by government or mainstream media to take responsibility for enabling and even encouraging the stigmatization and division.
The same type of mandate can, and I fear will, arise with the digital ID. They won’t try to force it on you. They’d never do that. They’re not going to wrestle you into a doctor’s office or an unmarked vehicle where a cool Swedish dude will be waiting to inject you with an implant. Instead they will say, with a smugness we’ve heard before: Well, if you don’t want it, you don’t have to get it. But you might not be able to buy anything or sell anything, or drive your car.
I don’t know if there will be many holdouts. If there are, they may well endure the same government-media pincer strategy that stigmatized the unvaccinated. But it’s hard to see how anyone could remain non-compliant with the digital ID. It’s one thing to be non-compliant with a vaccine mandate, which might preclude you from working but not from accessing your bank account or grocery shopping. Non-compliance with the digital ID may cut you off from the necessities of everyday life…unless you already live off the grid, or are willing to learn how.
As in the case of the Covid vaccines, some who are initially hesitant about digital IDs will come to accept and get comfortable with the system. But not all. A minority, I expect, will feel perpetually unsettled by a system that reduces their lives to a cluster of data points: constantly monitored, analyzed, and possibly exploited. And in the end stifled and tamed.
Is this the world we want? Are there alternatives, like non-centralised systems, or an opt-out option? Will the non-compliant be stigmatized as heretics?
“Heretics” might seem a strong word, but there’s a religious aspect here. Some of us have a God. Most of us have a conscience. But whether it’s God or conscience, we all have a “master” of one kind or another that guides our ethical and moral decision-making, and our deepest values. This master is chosen freely and can be refused if we wish. We can question the teachings of our religious faith, or even change them, if there’s a truly compelling reason. We can ignore or question our conscience. This element of freedom is dangerous and unpredictable, even a bit mysterious, but necessary; it’s what makes us human rather than puppet-algorithms.
The greatest peril of the digital ID is that it attempts to become the new master of our core beliefs and values by demanding, with threats of punishment and promises of reward, that we serve it rather than something of our free choosing; by demanding with a machine-like persistence that mentally wears us down—for machines do not grow weary; and in this way binding us to a master we don’t wish to serve.
If it sounds like I’m exaggerating the power of technology, here’s the opinion of someone who knows way more than I do: Yuval Noah Harari, historian, intellectual, best-selling author, and contributor to the World Economic Forum:
The big story of our era is the ability to hack human beings. And by this I mean that if you have enough data, and you have enough computing power, you can understand people better than they understand themselves, and then you can manipulate them in ways which were previously impossible. In such a situation the old democratic system stops functioning. We need to re-invent democracy for this new era in which humans are now hackable animals. You know, the whole idea that humans have this soul or spirit, and they have free will, and nobody knows what’s happening inside me…that’s over.
Harari seems like a mild-mannered guy, but when he says that’s over in the video it’s like a father scolding a child. Give up your fantasy, kid. There’s no spirit, no soul. Just a hackable animal.
For those who agree with this view, the digital ID becomes an obvious candidate for manipulating and managing human life within a re-invented “democracy”. But who will be running this “democracy”? Surely not the “animals” that were hacked?
And follow the logic. If there are hackable animals, there must also be people whose job it is to hack them, and others, even higher up, who govern the system. There must be hacker lords. Who will the hacker lords be?
It doesn’t sound like a re-invented democracy. It sounds like old feudalism: a world governed by a small class of digital nobles, with a vast underclass of digital serfs who are obliged to serve their lords. At least the serfs in the old days were presumed to have a soul or spirit and free will. But even these will be taken from us in the re-invented democracy.
When we dig deep enough, when we hit bottom, the real question behind the digital ID isn’t about whether it’s more convenient or secure or efficient, or any of the things it promises to be. The real question is, Who is our master? To whom, or what, do we belong…and will we still be free to choose once we accept the digital ID?
For those of us who want to shift the current trajectory, time is running out. The EU expects 80% of its citizens to be using digital ID by 2030. Other Western nations are pursuing their own ambitious plans. I doubt the Russian invasion of the Ukraine will slow these plans, unless the conflict widens out of control. If anything, the sense of threat the West now feels will provoke a natural defensiveness and the hardening of ideology.
Against this backdrop expect our leaders to be even more insistent, not less, when it comes to digital ID—and whatever else they have planned.