Well that's funny, I don't recall having to submit my info to a digital ID company 20 years ago..

With your first point you conflate the technology with the devices themselves. The direction of the original poster was correct, look at the armored bulldozers caterpillar sells Israel, they are killing machines meant to crush civilians as well as level structures.

And do you want to tell me it's an impossibility that ICE for example would dip into commercial surveillance networks they previously didn't have access to? The chronology of "they've moved past this tech" doesn't even line up with your absurdist take about using lawnmowers etc.

Will somebody please think of how the poor surveillance dragnet has suffered through all this?

The promise of government investment is the only thing that is exciting about Intel in 2026.

How much do you have to pay somebody at a respected outlet like Wired to normalize this shit?

Meta already wants to provides AI bots so your dead relatives can sell you things, which is comparably worse

But it is about people, these companies are wrapped up around the personalities and egos of their founders / CEOs, not to mention machinations around their other hobby horses and bounce houses--like worldcoin, or even zuck's failed demiruge VR project. But at least zuck didn't launch a digital ID currency partially off the biocredentials of peasants in the third world.

Oh, my sweet summer child..

Phones for all their surveillance uses still won't serve up information about your body state to your employer, which constitutes some of the hype around a future of employers requiring wearables. The public applications are of the sort people would volunteer for: payment and identification including for physical access.

Granted I'm sure there are other technologies that could obsolete needing a chip, but my overall point is that these technologies are presented to the public as a negotiation of conveniences--especially with air travel in particular, where the state has recently seen fit to insert part-time gestapo as a solution to a problem that never existed.

"You don't have to wear the bracelet if you just get the chip, you know."

I agree except for "Irak created ISIS" , as it wasn't merely a consequence of our interference, but a deliberate funding and arming of extremist Sunnis that make the Taliban or Al Qaeda look tame. google Timber Sycamore

He gave over $10,000,000 to them in 2023. In that regard, he's not very different from so many other vampire billionaires https://archive.is/RgXOg (Rolling Stone)

for brokering Donald Trump.

Oh I don't know, maybe read the fucking news the last two days.

NPR is propaganda too: it always serves to whitewash and minimize the crimes of the US and its allies to a liberal audience. It does so in between delightful slice-of-life pieces, some pretty good music selections, and its own variety of vanilla latte capitalism ("Marketplace") where every stupid carbon capture pilot technology is offered to the audience as completely viable for "well-meaning capitalists" (their phrasing, not mine) to invest in.

NPR went hard on the Russiagating as well.