Verified Human
The future of class unconsciousness
This one is off the cuff. No drafts, no craft, and no holding back. This morning we woke up like usual having to take a shit. The cats were asleep between our legs, the wife asleep on her fifth or sixth snooze alarm, and we were clinging to the edge of the bed. Our eyes were crusty and blurred as we headed to the john, stomach growling, plopped down, plop plop, and opened our phone to check our emails. As usual, there was nothing in our inbox about any of our previous posts, no comments or subscriptions, no engagement or signs that we existed on this platform or any other. Nation of Todd poops alone, in that regard, our thoughts our own, our humanity insulated and nullified by the sheer volume of other human activity. Like walking down a crowded city street we were anonymous, literally and figuratively, like we’d always wanted, but also invisible, not even other, not even a consideration. Which was a perplexing, but all too common condition in a world of constant, burning consideration. Why couldn’t we get any, what were we lacking?
On to other business (a hemorrhoid waits for no man), we checked other emails from our various pseudonyms, we count six in all, not schizophrenic or crazy or grifty types of alter egos, but purely literary attempts at novelty. Funny how a multiplicity strives for novelty and uniqueness! But that was our goal. Sharing the same body and hemorrhoid we experiment with anonymity and novelty through multiplicity, or something like that. We’re not entirely sure. As the person with the body, and the job, and the mortgage, 401k, etc. we understandably have economic concerns so we opened an email in our ‘real’ person’s account and saw an alarming article about the new World ID, through a hyper link in the Robinhood Snacks Newsletter.1
Maybe you’ve heard of it? Some ubertech from Open AI founder Sam Altman that he and his impish neophyte ilk are trying to pass off on humanity as the wave of the future. Buy your surfboards now, or your cottages in the high Andes because the tsunami is coming whether you like it or not.2 At least that’s their pitch/warning to us rubes out here in dirt land, the wizards in their ivory towers know better, for they have in fact conjured this human-killing wave with their own sorcery. But enough with the metaphor, World ID professes to be a “privacy-preserving proof of human for the age of AI”, they hope to become a global system of ‘unique human’ identification, linking their services with various forms of financial instruments (VISA, Worldcoin, etc.), dating and gaming apps. This is apparently accomplished by utilizing novel hardware developed by World ID in conjunction with Nvidia that scans a person’s eyeball and creates an encrypted biometric code that can be used to verify them as a human. We guess that picking pictures of school buses and cats that are looking straight ahead from a field of images is no longer good enough. As we’ve seen from the recent roll out of ChatGPT these large language models (LLMs) are capable of figuring out some of these tests and are willing (if ‘will’ is the proper term for it) to lie and cheat to accomplish their assignments. You can see the obvious (we’d argue intentionally designed) danger in having rogue actors and potentially rogue LLMs out there wreaking havoc in the cryto/dating/gaming/social media digital spheres, and therefore the necessity for everyone concerned about interacting with ‘real’ humans only, and not scummy robots and cheats, to run out and have their eyeballs scanned and buy in to this latest crypto scheme. Right?
Sounds like phishing to us. But hey, we don’t own crypto, didn’t meet our spouse on a dating app, don’t play video games for money, and have a very limited engagement on social media, so, we don’t personally see the threat. At least not as it is being portrayed by the phishers themselves. We’ve heard these privacy reassurances before, we’ve heard that this will be a decentralized, community controlled platform that serves humanity, that protects humanity from government control and bad actors, and most of all, the existential danger of ‘Artificial Intelligence’. It’s very seductive, and yes, they’ve even sweetened the pot by offering some of their cryto for being an early adopter. So you could get rich quick if you get in on the ground floor. And presumably, once you’re rich, fuck everyone else, right? If other people aren’t willing to verify their humanity then why should we3 treat them as humans? They must have something to hide. They must be different, less than human, maybe even they’re an artificial intelligence trying to hide among us. Maybe we ought to make this World ID mandatory, have our government help us root out these pretenders, make sure they can’t move into our neighborhoods, vote in our elections, shop on our online grocery stores. You see where we’re going with this?
Verified humanity is not only a back door to a surveillance state and economy (which arguably we are already in to a degree) but a guileful and continuous attempt on the part of elites to flatten class stratification, to make it appear as if there is a seamless, naturally occurring economic order that we all belong to on the basis of merit and willingness to play by the rules. The potential othering accompanying this identification scheme will be reserved for non-participants, people who may look like us, act like us in most significant ways (eat, sleep, shit, fuck), but who are knowingly, and presumably willingly, outside of the system that defines us. They will immediately be suspect, open to our denouncements and descriptions of them. Forget about alternatives, once we enter this dystopian labyrinth of digital identification we will be (and probably already are) locked there for eternity. Like the Minotaur, we will kill and consume our imprisoners’ enemies, believing them to be our own. We will act as our own guards in this prison, ensuring that the kings and the Gods continue to reign. We may receive a fleeting glimpse of their greatness and a promise of ascension, but will forever be denied the miracles that hold their power by the very system by which they guaranteed our freedom.
Pretty bleak, right? We don’t like it one bit. Not only will this wreck our whole multiplicity project, but it will also probably just add more layers of bullshit to this modern enshittified world of ours. We’re not fooled by their promises of simplification either. With each new gadget and wingding we seem to sink ever deeper in this technological muck. We mean, the problem they are trying to solve here was a problem they created, necessitating a solution. Several times World ID talks about making this system impossible to unplug! Shouldn’t that give us pause? Wasn’t Skynet unpluggable? And once you make it permanent and intractable, doesn’t that leave you open to yet more necessary technological solutions? It’s the dragon eating its own tail, and by extension, eating its own shit.
When our father was still alive he used to always say that there were two kinds of people in this world; people with hemorrhoids, and people who’ll get hemorrhoids. So, what we propose is this; we should make it as uncomfortable as possible for these assholes to participate in this system by demanding that they use the uniqueness of our hemorrhoids as the basis for their biometric identifier. Now, you can imagine what this equipment will look like, and how it may be applied, and we’re fairly certain that if it requires probing up our asses to join this class of humanity that most people will know intuitively that they are getting fucked, and stay away.
Oh geez, sure fooled us, Sherwood news and Robinhood Snacks are controlled by the same entity! Are in fact the same “news” agency controlled by the financial services platform Robinhood.
There’s been a lot of documentation of how the messaging from Silicon Valley tech elites has been a persistent cry that the things they are actively creating are somehow a part of our evolution, and even though, they are designing them, and implementing them, and in a sense forcing them on us through their monopoly power, that we need to accept this fact and buy in.
The italicized pronouns going forward should be seen as a rhetorical device, not a narrative or editorial one, as in the ‘we’ who are writing this blog.