dys-, from Ancient Greek δυσ- (dus-, “hard, difficult, bad”). topia- from Ancient Greek τόπος (tópos-, “place, region”)
👉TODAY’S Dystopia 101 lesson is about something bright and shiny called “Worldcoin”. It’s not on most people’s radars yet, but if we’re not careful, it—or its future iterations—may become a household name.* And despite the name, it’s not really about money, at least not yet, even though it comes with a cryptocurrency token called the “WLD” (like the US dollar is abbreviated as USD). “Worldcoin is a digital identification platform that aims to provide each person on earth with a convenient way to verify that they are a real human and not a bot or an AI algorithm.” (Forbes) It's about the great wealth of human data that's found in a digitizing world, and if Worldcoin's WLDs take off in value, so much the better.
Worldcoin proposes to
“‘…innovate on the authentication side,’ said Jeremy Clark from the Canada-based Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering. Anyone can use crypto currencies like bitcoin, he explained, signing up with as many identities as they want, but Worldcoin is ‘trying to get one and only one (address) to basically everyone on the planet.’” (Context)
Kenya and Indonesia were the larger of the
initial signup populations. Those who allowed their eyeballs to be raped scanned+
would receive a unique, universal digital ID along with WLDs worth
around twenty-five dollars. In the
developed world there is less interest in the system, thus far, because the
monetary ‘reward’ isn’t worth the hassle. The scanning device itself, the otherworldly
“Orb”, is the mobile scanner used to record each person’s unique iris
‘signature’, which can apparently scale up into the billions. One of the
proposed uses for Worldcoin is to facilitate a comprehensive UBI (Universal
Basic Income). A national welfare program that utilizes an unhackable
ID system such as Worldcoin purports to offer could effectively and safely
restructure public services and budgets to serve the neediest in society, while keeping fraudsters at bay. At least that's the sales pitch. It’s
an interesting idea that has the flavour of being just a little too good to be true.
“In October 2021, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden admonished the idea in a Twitter thread: “Don’t catalog eyeballs,” he wrote. “Don’t use biometrics for anti-fraud. In fact, don’t use biometrics for anything. The human body is not a punch ticket.’”
“At the simplest level, Worldcoin is a digital identity and financial network. That’s the core of it. All of the other things—AI and UBI—are applications,” [Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania] says. “Something like this is going to happen, there’s no way around it. It will become necessary.” (Wired)
If Worldcoin doesn’t take off, no
worries--there are other digitizing initiatives that could complement Worldcoin
or be entirely separate scams schemes. THE THING TO REMEMBER, going forward, is that
they’re all trending in the same direction, namely, the control of more and
more aspects of our public and private lives.
👉For example, Bill Gates and the ever-helpful Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with Mastercard, are piloting a program of “digital public infrastructure” (DPI) incorporating “digital identity (ID), payments and data exchange.” And they're testing their digital 'services' in—you guessed it—Africa, where there are fewer regulations and, in some places, only rudimentary banking services. Promoted ostensibly to aid impoverished populations ‘grow their wealth’,😂what is really going on, as Reclaim the Net’s Didi Rankovic suggests, is “…testing comprehensive Digital IDs, for the whole world.” (As well as getting Global South farmers and low-wage workers on the credit treadmill until they fall off, impoverished or exhausted.) So far, several million have signed up, perhaps not with their eyeballs, and using fingerprints instead, but they're in the system, one that will mine every precious bit of their data until nothing is left hidden from their digital overlords. We will have to wait and see what comes out of Africa.
👉Central Bank digital Currencies (CBDCs) as a means of scrutinizing, to the most granular degree, every aspect of a person’s financial life, I have discussed, here. Several small nations have adopted CBDCs and this experiment, which may be the one to bring home the dystopian bacon, is also ongoing. It should be noted that in 2020 our Davos BFFs at the World Economic Forum (WEF) initiated a “global consortium” (i.e., talk-shop, think-tank, resource centre) on designing “a framework for the governance of digital currencies, including stablecoins [i.e. national digital currencies].” And, our favourite Doctor Evil look-a-like, Klaus Schwab, has for some time been up to his nibs promoting and supporting digital currencies that will come to Canada, if we let our guard down. As mentioned in my previous post about CBDCs, such schemes if implemented, especially in larger economies, have the potential of giving non-elected, faceless bureaucrats control over citizens’ lives unimagined even a few years ago. We may be in for a rude awakening in the years ahead.
Well, good news! And it's brought to you by the same people who made all those colossal mistakes2 and U-turns back then. These folks were wrong or half-assed right about just about everything--from masks, to vaccine efficacy, to alternative treatments, to lock-down protocols and vaccine passports.
“The draft
treaty places the WHO at the centre and solidifies the WHO as the directing
and coordinating authority on international health and gives it sweeping,
legally binding powers to force member states to adopt many of the censorship
and surveillance tools that were imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic.” (Reclaim the Net)
The bureaucrats at the WHO have been working like busy beavers on this treaty since December 2021 and, if it is ratified in 2024 in a vote during the World Health Assembly (the decision-making body of the WHO), then "both the treaty and amendments to the IHR (International Health Regulations) will be legally binding under international law."
Most of us, I'm sure, don't care two figs about what these UN technocrats are up to, but we should be aware that the surveillance techniques and restrictions used during the Covid pandemic will be put in place again, regardless of what individual countries and their populations might want. Tech firms will be required to delete "dis/misinformation" by order of this unelected body. There will be a much greater emphasis on censorship and "infodemic management" (as Orwellian and phony a term as ever there was!) It was coined by the WHO and it refers to “too much information including false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak.” Feel the noose tightening? WTF!?
AND the United States wants to go even further expanding the surveillance state during the next pandemic scare by encouraging the WHO to adopt "global surveillance measures that require the mass collection of genetic sequence data." among other measures.(Reclaim the Net) And on and on it goes.
And like froggies slowly boiling in an increasingly hot pot, we'd be wise to step out and dip our pinky toes in the water before deciding whether to jump back in.
🔘Frogs have been around for more that 200 million years.
🔘The world's largest frog is West Africa's "Goliath" frog which can grow to 15" in length.
🔘There are over 6,000 species of frogs; some of the amphibians can live more than 20 years.
🔘Frogs are cold-blooded. To survive in winter some burrow into mud at the bottom of ponds, hibernating until spring.
"The wood frog can live north of the Arctic Circle, surviving for weeks with 65% of their body frozen. It uses glucose in its blood as a kind of anti-freeze, protecting its vital organs from damage."
🔘TOADS are frogs with a warty, rough skin and shorter legs.
Cheers, Jake.________________________________________
* Worldcoin was started in 2022 by Sam Altman the founder of OpenAI, which created and markets the ChatGPT (“Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer”) software which “is an AI-powered language model developed by OpenAI, capable of generating human-like text based on context and past conversations.” So, instead of me painfully typing out this post, I could have AI assistance from composition to typos. Dang! Where do I sign up?! In devising a technology that can mimic human text to the point that someday the two are indistinguishable, it’s no surprise Altman (or his AI avatar—who knows?) thought up a system that can identify actual humans from machine-learning bots.
“Ironically, Altman has played a central role in sparking the current AI gold rush, [with his ChatGPT software] which has significantly worsened the very problem Worldcoin proposes to solve.” (Forbes)
Remember all those CAPTCHA ("Completely
Automated Public Turing test
to tell Computers and Humans Apart.") we had to complete to log into
sites a while ago? We users were training AI machine learning software how to
recognize text by our digital responses. Now, those annoying pictures
we click on are meant to improve AI facial recognition algorithms among
other visual acuities. AIs should be paying us for all the bother!
+ It was learned that in addition
to iris scans, the miniature death stars orbs also recorded body, face and
eye information, including heartbeat, breathing and other vital signs. When
this was made public, Worldcoin said it would discontinue scanning for such bio-metric information. It reminds me of that scandal a few years ago around
“Alexa”, Amazon’s AI personal assistant device that activated, unbeknownst to
its users in their homes, recording their private conversations. That was a definite
oopsie! for the tech giant. Worldconcoin received less blowback for its faux pas because
early users of its digital ID service, who had their bio-metric information scanned
and logged, were from the developing world, where the reward of $25 was the
primary motivation for signing up.
Additionally, iris scans are valuable as IDs because:
“The algorithm used for iris ID scanning targets about 240 unique features in
an iris in order to determine identity. That’s about 5 times as many as
fingerprinting. The error rate is about one in a million—even less when
you correlate it with other biometric scanning like fingerprinting and facial
recognition.”
1. There is an additional whiff of controversy
hanging over Worldcoin because one of its earlier investors was Sam Bankman-Fried (SBK), the former CEO of FTX, accused
of perpetrating an $8 billion fraud at the collapsed crypto hedge fund Three
Arrows Capital. Until he was arrested, SBK was also involved in some shady
dealings in Ukraine with the Zelensky regime. He is currently on trial in New York.
2. "Mistakes" being a very charitable adjective to describe what may have been collusion at the highest levels of national governments, international organizations like the WHO and UN, as well as the deep pockets of vested interests like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, other assorted billionaires, business elites, think tanks like the WEF, etc.
"Collusion" meaning the deliberate use of a viral outbreak, (from a lab or otherwise), in order to do 'trial runs' on various measures, programs, legislation, some temporary, others still on the books, to surveil and control global populations for profit or power, or both. Fun times are ahead, comrades! Buckle up!
3. Which is not to say that such technologies couldn't be used to better our societies and improve peoples' lives world-wide. But given the lies and chicanery we've witnessed these last few years, trust in government and authority in general has eroded to the point where people no longer have faith in elites that are seen to act entirely for their own benefit, and care not a whit about the broader community.
FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! FREE JULIAN ASSANGE!
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