Digital Shuffle

Alex Klaushofer has a useful Mercatornet piece on our shuffle towards a digital society.

Sleepwalking towards a digital society: everybody’s shuffling there and nobody’s talking about it

Are convenience and security a good trade-off for surveillance and control?

As the internet becomes ever more crucial to day-to-day life, the world seems to be drifting towards a world where our personal data is no longer personal. Around half the world’s governments are looking into introducing a central bank digital currency or CBCD, with many also pushing for digital IDs.

Ten countries have launched a digital currency, with China expanding the pilot project it’s been running for the past two years. In India, the government aims to have a digital rupee in place by 2023, when the European Commission also plans to introduce legislation for a digital euro. In the US, a recent executive order from Biden has made research into a national CBDC a priority while in New York a pilot for a digital dollar has just begun.

Leading the race for digital ID is India, which started the rollout of its biometric system Aadhaar in 2009. Now, with most of the country’s 1.3 billion population having exchanged fingerprints, iris scans and photos for a 12-digital unique identification number, digital ID is effectively compulsory for participation in Indian life. Internationally, there are suggestions that the two systems should be linked. At a recent meeting between the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Groups, speakers agreed it would be good if CBDCs and digital ID were paired “as a package”.

The implications are colossal, but the World Cup comes first in the mass media game. Then people gluing themselves to art works, then celebrity angst, then hardship stories... 

Meanwhile -

Discussing the possibility of a CBDC in the UK in 2021, Sir Jon Cunliffe, a deputy Governor at the Bank of England said that programming a digital currency for commercial or social purposes is something the British government needs to consider: “You could think of giving your children pocket money, but programming the money so that it couldn’t be used for sweets,” he said. “There is a whole range of things that money could do, programmable money, which we cannot do with the current technology.”

Yet the BBC still finds time to air its obsession with unidirectional racism. Not as irrelevant as it seems of course, not with social credit systems on the horizon.