#cryptocolonialism

Pete Howson, a senior lecturer at Northumbria University who researches cryptocurrency in international development, categorizes Worldcoin’s actions as a sort of crypto-colonialism, where “blockchain and cryptocurrency experiments are being imposed on vulnerable communities essentially because…these people can’t push back,” he told MIT Technology Review in an email.

What makes the crypto version even more harmful than other forms of data colonialism is that decentralization, the core tenet of blockchain, makes for “very limited accountability…when things go wrong,” Howson explained. “You’ll often hear this phrase ‘Do Your Own Research’, or DYOR, because these guys don’t care much for rules and regulations.”

But inequities in information and internet access make that “do your own research” ethos all but impractical for many people in developing regions. Similarly, huge economic disparity means that in Kenya, say, the promise of just under half a US dollar could be a compelling incentive for someone to give up their biometric data, whereas in Norway or the US, such an offer wouldn’t go far.

Simply put, it’s just cheaper and easier to run this kind of data collection operation in places where people have little money and few legal protections.

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Speaking to Blania clarified something we had struggled to make sense of: how a company could speak so passionately about its privacy-protecting protocols while clearly violating the privacy of so many. Our interview helped us see that, for Worldcoin, these legions of test users were not, for the most part, its intended end users. Rather, their eyes, bodies, and very patterns of life were simply grist for Worldcoin’s neural networks. The lower-level orb operators, meanwhile, were paid pennies to feed the algorithm, often grappling privately with their own moral qualms. The massive effort to teach Worldcoin’s AI to recognize who or what was human was, ironically, dehumanizing to those involved. 

When we put seven pages of reporting findings and questions to Worldcoin, the company’s response was that nearly everything negative that we uncovered were simply “isolated incident[s]” that ultimately wouldn’t matter anyway, because the next (public) iteration would be better. “We believe that rights to privacy and anonymity are fundamental, which is why, within the next few weeks, everyone signing up for Worldcoin will be able to do so without sharing any of their biometric data with us,” the company wrote. That nearly half a million people had already been subject to their testing seemed of little import.

Rather, what really matters are the results: that Worldcoin will have an attractive user number to bolster its sales pitch as Web3’s preferred identity solution. And whenever the real, monetizable products—whether it’s the orbs, the Web3 passport, the currency itself, or all of the above—launch for its intended users, everything will be ready, with no messy signs of the labor or the human body parts behind it.