Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance

From Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement

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.

Montreal Anarchist Tech Convergence: 2025 We're Back!

From Montreal Anarchist Tech Convergence

Technology is a steaming pile of whatever. The salad of transistors, capacitors, and wires that we marinate in for 17.2 minutes before we drink our coffee are the first thing we see each morning, while our subversions of the droppings of surveillance capitalism are the last things burning their images into our retinas before we close our eyes each night. The AI-augmented totality that numbs our senses and optimizes our labour lumbers on, vulnerable but unhindered. Let's not say we never tried.

Alexa, take me to Prison!

From Muntjac

We are under assault by an apparatus of technological counterinsurgency – it feels like the space in which we aren’t subject to an array of surveillance technology is shrinking out of existence. But you didn’t need me to tell you that. Especially since, outside state surveillance infrastructure, it’s the personal devices we deploy ourselves which are driving the expansion forward. We don’t even crack jokes about our phones listening any more, for the observation has become trite.

Isabelle Santin of Chosen Few Software

From The Child and Its Enemies

Episode 2

Isabelle and mk discuss Chosen Few Software—the trans-anarchist tech company run by entirely youth and teens—as well as liberatory education, trans identity, and why, in Isabelle's words..."anarchy is the purest form of decentralized control. In my mind, its the ideal way to organize a massive network, whether that network is made out of computers or people, it makes little difference to me. The reality is that the computers we build are just as fallable as us. They just tend to do more and more of our thinking for us, as they become more powerful and reliable. I think its an important part of the future of human evolution, but we live at a point in time where our societies are beginning to show their scars, show their weak points."

Boundless Conformity

Received via email

Social Democracy had decayed, said Walter Benjamin in his 1940 essay “On the Concept
of History,” without the expectation that revolution would make “the continuum of history explode.” Already, within three decades, Social Democrats had managed virtually to erase the name of Blanqui, associated as it was with insurrection, “though it had been the rallying sound that had reverberated through the 19th century.”

Dispatches from the Fediverse

From From Embers

Our fediverse correspondent Lenny returns to discuss the FBI seizure of the servers of Kolektiva.social, the largest anarchist instance on Mastodon. We also talk about the continuing discrediting of big tech companies such as Twitter, Meta and Reddit, and what that might mean for people working to build an open-source, decentralized alternative to corporate social media platforms.

On Anarchism, Technology, and Transhumanism

From The Commoner by reimagining

The more I wrestle with it, the more I become sympathetic to, if not a full-blown supporter of, anarchist-transhumanism. After much interrogation, the notion of technology as a neutral tool that can be leveraged to act as an oppressive method of control (to reduce agency and confine), an emancipatory tool (to resist domination, to expand agency and empower), or a complex overlapping web of both seems to generally ring true.

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