Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance

Summary

From https://awsm.nz/digital-id-the-new-chains-of-capitalist-surveillance/ The world is entering an era where identity is no longer a matter of personal relationships, lived experience, or even paperwork. Increasingly, it is reduced to biometric scans, algorithmic verification, and digital tokens. Across the globe, governments and corporations are rolling out digital identification systems, facial recognition passports, biometric driver’s licences, app-based vaccine passes, QR-coded welfare access, and unified digital wallets. The language that accompanies these projects is familiar – efficiency, convenience, modernisation, inclusion. We are told that digital ID will make life easier, reduce fraud, and open new opportunities. The reality, however, is far more sinister. Identification has never been neutral, it has always been a weapon of power, wielded by states and capitalists to monitor, control, and discipline populations. From passports to colonial passbooks, from welfare cards to border regimes, the apparatus of identification has always been tied to domination. Digital ID is simply the latest iteration of this long history, but with a scale and sophistication that makes its dangers even more profound. Far from liberating us, it is forging new chains and binding us more tightly to systems of surveillance, exclusion, and exploitation. Identification as Domination To grasp what digital ID represents, we must situate it within the longer history of identification as a tool of authority. The passport, now normalised as a necessary object of travel, was originally a way for states to restrict movement. In medieval Europe, peasants and serfs required written permission to leave their estates. Colonial regimes across Africa, Asia, and the Pacific perfected these systems of control, forcing indigenous people to carry passes while settlers roamed unhindered. In apartheid South Africa, the “pass laws” criminalised Black South Africans for existing outside their assigned ...