The Control Code

You're scrolling through your feed, liking a post about government overreach, and somewhere in a server farm halfway around the world, an algorithm ticks a box next to your name. Only because you're human—opinionated, and now, potentially quantifiable.

As the world hurtles toward a cashless, ID-locked future, governments aren't just watching; they're building the infrastructure to own this shitshow. From the European Union's sleek digital wallets to China's ever-expanding digital yuan, the promise is efficiency, inclusion, and security.

But peel back the glossy interface, and you uncover a liberty nightmare: centralized control masquerading as progress, with central planners trying to engineer society from the top down.

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Digital IDs and CBDCs aren’t some dystopian sci-fi riff anymore—they’re the reality unfolding in 2025. During Covid, we’ve seen how power creeps in under the guise of convenience. Today, digital identities (IDs) and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are the new frontier, blending tech utopia with state surveillance.

They're sold as tools to streamline life, but they risk turning voluntary exchange into a monitored mandate, eroding not only privacy but also community bonds. Sociologically, this digital nightmare sidelines families and communities as loyalty shifts to the state, in fear from exclusion for resisters. This isn't free-market innovation; it's state-mandated participation, crowding out the sovereign individual.

The year 2025 has turbocharged the digital ID revolution, with the European Union at the vanguard. The EU's Digital Identity Wallet, which officially kicked into gear after regulations entered force in May 2024, is now in full pilot mode across member states. By 2026, every citizen will have access to this app-based vault for storing credentials— passports, driver's licenses, even health records—all verifiable with a biometric scan, usable anywhere in the bloc.

It's cross-border magic: Verify your age for a beer in Berlin or access benefits in Barcelona without fumbling for papers. Proponents hail it as a leap in inclusion, drawing from Estonia's e-Residency playbook, where digital nomads from afar can set up businesses remotely. Sounds convenient right?

Entwined with these IDs are CBDCs, the digital doppelgangers of fiat money, rising cash like a phoenix from the ashes. By mid-2025, 137 countries—covering 98% of global GDP—are exploring them, with 49 in pilot stages and three fully live: the Bahamas' Sand Dollar, Jamaica's JAM-DEX, and Nigeria's eNaira. China's e-CNY, the digital yuan, is the behemoth here, expanding internationally with a new Shanghai operations center launched in September 2025 to grease cross-border wheels and challenge the dollar's throne. 

Who wins in this digital gold rush? Governments, for starters, notoriously overspending and in dire need for more baseless money to fund their proxy wars. Macro-wise, the distortions are seismic. Unbacked digital money could inflate supplies unchecked, echoing eurozone debt crises. 

Capital controls are now just a keystroke away, stifling the free trade we know and love. But that's just the beginning. Governments are also hungry for surveillance superpowers to silence dissenting voices, eroding the voluntary cooperation that binds democratic societies.

China's social credit system, supercharged by a nationwide digital ID in combination with a CBDC, rates citizens' behavior and doles out rewards or penalties—like travel restrictions or account freezes for low scorers. It's Herbert Spencer's "survival of the fittest" remixed into state-enforced conformity.

The European Central Bank praises China's pilot, aiming at centralized control similar to China. Europe’s initiative aims at securing tech sovereignty for the Continent, yet what ECB President Christine Lagarde tragically overlooks is that China’s Orwellian schemes alienate innovators, dooming Europe to lose the digital arms race to global competitors—and accelerating the rise of decentralized crypto.

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Then there are the technocrats: Bill Gates backs MOSIP, an open-source platform for building national ID systems, framing it as a poverty buster by streamlining aid delivery. Tony Blair's institute is lobbying hard for digital IDs in the UK, claiming it helps fight illegal immigration. What Blair does not say, is that his own son is raking in Billions from digital ID implementation.

In addition to the world’s technocrats like Gates and Blair, corporate giants are feasting on government sponsored contracts, making big bucks from bureaucrats ignoring market signals. This breeds cronyism over competition in Brussels.

So, how do we resist? Well, learn from Covid: Ditching the mandates might be burdensome at first, but done in bigger groups than during the pandemic trial-run it’s very effective.

Wield privacy tools like independent VPN servers, Proton Mail, cold wallet stored cryptocurrencies, and decentralized finance. Don’t swipe your credit card if you don’t have to. Pay in cash. Alternatively, look into crypto cards.

Don’t store your credit card on your mobile phone. And, most importantly, rebuild your communities. Don’t ask what the government can do for you, ask what your neighbor and you can do together.

The digital ID and CBDC glow is as tempting as a vaccine pass allowing you to dine in a restaurant. But the Covid era should remind us all that freedom demands we log off the state's script.