Give me your biometries and I’ll give you some Worldcoins. Give me your digital soul and I will reward you in cryptocurrency. In a nutshell, obviously very immaterial and liquid in the Baumanian sense, this is the exchange that ended up under the lens of the Spanish Personal Data Protection Authority, analogical and old-fashioned, which would like people to keep their iris and fingertips a little tighter and not prostitute them in exchange for a bit of mining (the process that creates cryptocurrency). But let’s start with the bare-bones news. The Guarantor has ordered Tools for Humanity Corporation, the company that manages Worldcoin, to stop for three months in Spain, where the service already has a huge number of users. Worldcoin (launched by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI) is
in fact the first digital currency to adopt a credential system for use, managed by a biometric device called orb. And with this tool users were scanned, in exchange for the free provision of a digital identity document and a certain amount of cryptocurrency. The scans are intended to serve only as a form of identification, to create a reliable mechanism that distinguishes human users from machines, but the company did not clarify what other purposes they would be used for…
There was a protagonist in Goldoni’s Locandiera who insistently repeated: “I know who I am”, in an attempt to confirm his own identity. But those were good doubts for the age of enlightenment. Now identity is biometric, infallible and, like everything, is for sale. And it is for sale because the boundary between human and digital intelligence is blurred. An identity