Human verification cannot be left to the private sector
The practice is inevitable; the only question is whether or not it will be democratically controlled.
Last November, a mysterious device appeared in one of The Gap’s San Francisco outlets: a metallic sphere that, with its embedded camera lens, looks mysteriously like an eyeball. For more than a year local media seemed entirely disinterested in the installation’s significance. A few weeks ago, however, Cydney Hayes at the San Franscico Gazetteer published a disturbing piece on what was actually going on: the device was called an Orb, and its entire purpose was to capture the biometric data of anyone who came near it for a billionaire.
Specifically, the Orb is a project by tech oligarch Sam Altman that is absolutely breathtaking in ambition: to built an iris-scan database of ever human in the world. This in turn will position Altman to monopolize a service that is destined to stand at the center of every economic and political institution you can imagine: human verification.
For now, Altman’s project — the World Network — seems innocuous. If it succeeds, however, the World Network is poised to end democracy as we know it, and consolidate Silicon Valley’s control of a global technofeudalist economy.
