Digital ID: Gift or Key to Control?
Digital ID is envisioned as your gateway to everything
“In our countries, no one can walk the streets with a mask on their face … and yet we allow people to roam freely on the Internet without linking their profiles to a real identity.”
—Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, speaking at WEF 2025
“We’re going to have supervision. … Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
—Larry Ellison, the second richest person in the U.S.
Digital ID Is Coming
A quick hit: According to the World Economic Forum, home of Davos Man, Digital ID will become our mandated future. The chart above, for example, is from the WEF document Advancing Digital Agency: The Power of Data Intermediaries, published in 2022.
Digital ID is envisioned as your gateway to everything but a kiss good night. Every financial transaction, from health care to food to energy, social media, e-commerce purchases — even for citizens to file taxes, vote, collect benefits — will require, under this proposal, a Digital ID. Couple that with a cashless world and everything essential to life must be digitally controlled.
Like any new product, Digital ID is rolling out faster to some places and slower in others. The Starmer government is pushing hard for it. Many in the U.S. are doing the same as well.
What’s Wrong with Digital ID?
While Digital ID is being sold to Republicans as protection from immigrants and their abuses, and to Democrats as safety and access to services, it actually, if taken to its end, is the worst of your dystopian dark-future sci-fi dreams.
Consider this taste of what Digital ID could become — the door to everything, a door you don’t control, a door that ensures your compliance.
They justify this total surveillance under the guise of closing the “identity gap,” claiming the world’s poor need digital IDs to access essential services like banking and healthcare.
The reality? This is the ultimate onboarding mechanism into a system of programmable control, where your access to society and your own money is permissioned and revocable based on your compliance.
This is the bedrock of the new global financial system. It is not about convenience. It is about control. [emphasis mine]
Imagine, if you piss off the government, not being able to buy food?
Is the Nightmare Scenario Likely?
Is that future here now? No; it’s still a dystopian dream. Is it likely? That depends.
Do you think the masters want a locked-down controllable world? Larry Ellison does (see quote above). Does he speak for all billionaires? Is Palantir building a government-wide database because it wants your life good, or it wants you to be afraid? I’ll let you decide.
No question digital id could be used as you describe. As one who uses their own identity online, I have often wanted all of us to be "responsible for our keystrokes" - we seem to behave better when we are known, easier to be awful when you hide your identity. I remember a discussion about a constitutional right to privacy a few years ago, not sure one was found in the current Constitution.
Our digital fingerprints are already everywhere, collected by governments and corporations. Add AI to the mix and we may finally get to George Orwell's Thought Crime.
Best...H
Well as much of an answer to others who have replied, what do we even need to be identified> of course so our identities are not stolen; so voting is secure, banks are not illegally accessed.
But I don't particularly like the entire digital system; if I want to order one thing, why do I have to be==have an account and thereafter receive endless propositions to buy something else. Even on substack, I buy by the ear when I can afford a subscription because I can guarantee you those who insist on my leaving my debit card on fille so they can take out a payment every month are going to be sorely disappointed because every four to six weeks I'm going to report suspicious activity of some kind and change my card number. If I want to buy something, let me decide when and where to do it.
It's not that I don't like the idea of a single ID; I'm not terribly keen on needing to be identified universally at all.
If you want to know the key to the discontent of so many, it's those who have no reason to be identified by many who want to identify them.
People are tired of being targeted and categorized as if we are mere dissections on someone else's laptop, their future behavior predicated on their past behavior.
Maybe these respondents are not, but I am.
What does it matter to any purchase who I am if I wish to purchase online? Why don't I have a right to control my own identity?
I know you're going to give me a thousand reasons why it could be necessary.
They may be correct.
But what is also correct is people are becoming more and more merely computerized bits of information and then you wonder
why society is rumbling; how mass shooters are formed...
I can't go to the face and ask an unknown woman for a spin around the floor, I have to be identified, she has to be identified and then we have to very non-spontaneously meet somewhere in an exposed forum where our identities can be verified before we can proceed to the dance.
Maybe we wouldn't need to worry about identity theft so much if there was less data available to identity Maybe we would be more social, and more accommodating to strangers if everyone wasn't pre-identified.
To reverse an old Garth lyric,maybe we are missing the dance because over-identification as made us so wary of attending the dance that we are heaping all the pain on ourselves by those who make usd think we need to miss the pain.
And there you go. The pain is manufactured by knowing more about your identity than you know yourself and you hide online and venture forth only when the pain is so overwhelming that the Son of Sam of the damned computer is identifying you into a mad ball of passion and you begin to kill.
figuratively or literally, when you have become a microscopic dot what else can be expected?