The Surveillance Era: 2019
2019
January 31, 2019. Surveillance. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Published. Shoshana Zuboff publishes her 704-page account of how Google, Facebook, and the platform economy claimed human experience as raw material for behavioral prediction products. The book that provides the analytical framework for Aware Trade’s Coercive Capitalism thesis builds on and extends: where surveillance capitalism watched and sold behavioral data, Coercive Capitalism adds programmable money and AI to act on it automatically. Wikipedia
June 18, 2019. Money. Facebook Announces Libra. Facebook announces Libra, a proposed global stablecoin backed by a basket of currencies and managed by an independent association. The first major technology company to propose a private global currency. The announcement triggers immediate regulatory backlash from the U.S. Congress and global central banks, and directly accelerates China’s development of the digital yuan. Libra is later renamed Diem and eventually abandoned in 2022. Aware Trade
2019. China. PBOC Accelerates Digital Yuan Development in Response to Libra. Following Facebook’s June 2019 Libra announcement, the People’s Bank of China accelerates its digital currency development program, which has been underway since 2014. PBOC officials cite Libra as a direct threat to Chinese monetary sovereignty. The competitive pressure from a U.S. technology company proposing a private global currency becomes the catalyst that moves the digital yuan from research to active development toward deployment. Foreign Policy Research Institute
2019. Identity. India’s Aadhaar System Reaches 1.2 Billion Enrollments. India’s national biometric identity system, which assigns a 12-digit unique identification number to residents using fingerprint and iris data, reaches 1.2 billion enrollments. As of May 2023, more than 99.9% of India’s adult population holds an Aadhaar ID, making it the world’s largest biometric identification system. The proof of concept that a national biometric identity infrastructure can be built at a population scale. Wikipedia