Digital ID is promoted as progress. Promoters tell you it means faster checkouts, smoother travel, less passwords and more security. They tell you that it prevents fraud and streamlines commerce. It makes life easier and more convenient. The narrative is presented as harmless. The consequence is not. A central Digital ID gives the state the master key to every door in your life. Once you give them that key, you surrender the freedom that makes you an individual.
Digital ID creates a single link to connect everything about you. Your face. Your financial transactions. Your medical records. Your location. Your digital expression. Your political participation. Your buying history. Your friends and family. Your travel and movements. All of it becomes available to government and to corporate partners of government. The fusion of state and digital identity dissolves the distinction between public power and private life. That is where freedom dies.
The early version of this is already playing out across the West.
The UK deploys facial recognition vans into public areas to photograph and record everyone in view. Officials claim they delete the data if you are innocent. You have no way to confirm that. Simultaneously, British police are arresting citizens for social media posts, memes, and commentary. Residents have had police visit their homes because the government did not like a joke they liked or retweeted. This is speech regulation directly connected to an identity system.
The EU is pushing in a similar direction. Regulators are threatening enormous fines for platforms who censor too slowly. Elon Musk’s company has been threatened with a fine in the nine figures. The lesson is that speech is not safe until the government agrees that it is safe. Criticism triggers consequences. Australia is on the same path, with increasing surveillance and coercion requirements that are the standard in China: the individual matters only as long as they are compliant.
Digital ID is the architecture that integrates these elements into one enforcement system.
Add a Central Bank Digital Currency and the state gains complete visibility into every purchase you make. It gains the ability to freeze your funds, lock you out of transactions, and deny you access to certain services based on your choices. You can still have some separation between your identity and your money with a traditional bank. A CBDC eliminates that separation.
Add a social credit rating system and the apparatus becomes fully functional. Speech that contradicts the authorities becomes dangerous. Associations with undesirable individuals becomes dangerous. Support for certain political movements becomes dangerous. Your score goes down. Your options narrow. Your livelihood is at risk. You are silenced without a trial. You self-censor or you are erased from public life.
This is the framework for Digital Fascism. Jonah Goldberg predicted decades ago that a soft version of authoritarianism packaged in the language of safety and security causes people to forfeit liberties they never regain. We are now seeing the modernized version of that. It is already embedded into apps, identity systems, payment rails and algorithmic systems of enforcement that require no human intervention. It is does not resemble 20th-century tyranny. It resembles modern convenience.
People counter this with the argument that “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” That statement is false. Privacy is not about concealing your misdeeds. It is about protecting your right to think, to say, to believe, and to live without constant supervision by the state. Freedom requires distance from government power. Digital ID closes that distance. It forces every human interaction to run through a controlled channel. It creates a society where citizens start censoring themselves out of fear of the consequences.
Freedom requires the defense of four principles.
Your right to privacy.
Your right to individual autonomy.
Your right to self-sovereignty over your data.
Your right to say and do what you want without government retaliation.
These rights are not a hindrance. They are the basis for a society where citizens stand on equal footing with their government. When government makes Digital ID mandatory as a condition of participation, they invert that relationship. They put the state above the citizen. They redefine your rights as privileges.
Digital ID moves Western societies closer to the Chinese system than most people are willing to acknowledge. It is not hypothetical. It is not speculation. It is already here. To defend freedom is to oppose systems that consolidate identity, money and expression into the central control of government. Defend your liberty while you can.
About the Author
