KYC once proclaimed as the best way to deal with bad actors in the financial world is now being pushed on the internet as a whole, primarily with VPNs and Social Media being the issue.
Privacy Everywhere. Encrypt All Things.
The cryptowars never stopped. What the panopticon does, is to retreat, make the opponent forget while they regroup with a bigger force hoping the opponent now lies depleted.
They use time as a weapon.
Or the Roman strategy to battle. Rome didn’t become the greatest power by strategy alone. They were defeated disastrously time and time again on the battlefield to always come back again.
They were able to come back with even greater numbers, better prepared even when the opponent thought they would never return.
Decades after the great cryptowars, new opponents arise mostly in the UK (With OFCOM, Stramer, the intelligence community in said jurisdiction and its respective financial supporters), France (Macron and his supporters), Spain (VPN bans and technological attacks against them) and other visible powers all in tandem, all hinting at a larger coordination. All of them now propagandizing a new discourse aimed to protect and to “properly frame” what free speech truly means. There are only two options:
1. To relinquish privacy selectively while pushing privacy to the edges of the internet.
2. Privacy everywhere. To encrypt all things. To decentralize all things.
The Societal Role of Social Media.
Initially presented as a way to connect friends and family together though with a more interesting background specially in its inception and funding, quietly morphed into an advertisement machine used for commerce, politics, media, religion, war and everything in between. Now the tension rises from the control matrix over the social media users. Most governments have imposed rules to varying degrees some of which aimed at controlling the mainstream narrative so that certain powers don’t get tarnished by the opinion of social media, after all, it has covered its own niche and spread over other niches like the corporate media niche who now got to compete for attention with other citizen journalists who may or may not align with their discourse and views. As a result, we get coverage of news and investigations from citizen media that would never make it to the editorial room on corporate media. And user’s attention is limited regardless of optimizations used (algorithmic and structural like content length reduction).
This is undermining one of the cornerstones of state control, the media. Over are the days when we can say that journalism is free on a given society, although freedom of speech has been an outlier historically speaking, when in reality the media is controlled by certain parties whose objective is to support certain messaging for pretty much everyone in the world. Social media, content creators, alternative media outlets have risen to prominence and have consequently been subdued if they become larger than a certain threshold or if they no longer abstain from certain topics which makes them a target of control. Otherwise they will continue to operate unbothered. Once these non-corporate media outlets begin threatening the balance of discourse these start receiving attacks. The situation now is that the only way to regain control over this medium is to IMPOSE a new regulation that will effectively prohibit anonymity, privacy and can be used to identify dissidents at a large scale. Enter VPN bans, Social Media ID on a worldwide push, ID verifications, data regulation laws (GDPR and clones) and many other coordinated efforts.
About Data Custodians.
With the entrance of KYC (know-your-customer), digital copyright laws (like DCMA and clones), Freedom of speech enforcement offices like OFCOM and law such as GDPR or equivalent into many jurisdictions, outside of the financial realm. Users provide a swath of personal and immovable data like biometrics, fingerprinting of many kinds that will be hosted online ready to be used and leaked by many parties. KYC in finance is widespread and it has some degree of validity despite evidence that extensive KYC does little to stop financial crimes. Internet KYC, digital copyright laws, enforcement offices and data regulation laws’ main objective won’t be to help stop said infractions or crimes. The evidence that currently exists tells us that said laws have been used for the most part even near or above 99% to stop legitimate free speech in favor of idea censorship. This combined with the chilling effect of hefty state fines (often threatened to be 6 o 7 USD digit high) this leads to the unavoidable conclusion that this coordinated move true purpose is not the intended and declared objective but something more sinister, censorship.
Does Blockchain and A.I. work against these issues?
The issue projects itself outside the realm of the technical merits of both technologies. Blockchain can be used as a permanent ledger prone to cracking even when said data is encrypted (soon due to vulnerabilities or within 50 years time when said cryptography has been cracked) so putting your biometrics on a permanent ledger is a bad idea wherever you see it. Privacy guaranteed and “it never leaves your device” are common lies being spouted from all the data tracking programs like Persona many of which have already been proven false. The moment it touches a phone, gets stored online or the blockchain or even interact with the camera you can safely assume this information is compromised. Phone software is inherently insecure and no company can be reliably trusted with such amounts of detailed personal data. A.I. can also make this issue worse by using said personal big data to train nefarious models or applications like predictive crime monitors, profiling, face recognition, gait recognition and live tracking thereof.
How to use Blockchain and A.I. the right way.
Using these technologies the right way by creating privacy by default or privacy as a first class citizen is the only way out against these global panopticon plans devised by the architects of the current societal rules. Not for just a few and as luxury goods as the World Economic Forum has proposed so that the general population has privacy as a fundamental and available right, by default.
