Digital Infrastructure: Innovation or Control?

By 2028, the UN-led 50-in-5 campaign—backed by individuals like Bill Gates—aims to create a global digital public infrastructure that integrates biometric data, digital IDs, and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). Critics worry that it will centralize control, allowing governments to watch and control people’s lives, while supporters assert that it will improve innovation and access. The increasing demand for such systems is demonstrated by both historical instances, such as digital health certificates during COVID-19, and new technologies, such as blockchain-based asset tokenization. Critics worry that these technologies endanger individual liberties and autonomy by prioritizing control over advantages.

Editor’s Note: The rapid push toward a global digital public infrastructure, as described, raises serious concerns about personal freedoms, inequality, and unchecked power. The centralized nature of digital IDs, CBDCs, and biometric systems allows for widespread monitoring and manipulation, notwithstanding supporters’ claims of ease of use and accessibility. While people, particularly those in vulnerable communities, incur the dangers, those with hidden agendas—governments vying for power and businesses making money off the infrastructure—stand to benefit the most. Many people are essentially shut out of vital services and economic disparities are widened because they cannot afford the devices or access needed to engage in this system. The promise of innovation is overshadowed by the danger of turning individuals into mere data points in a system designed for control rather than empowerment. [See other articles about the caveat of the ongoing push for digital infrastructures on our sister site Fully Human: here, here, and here]

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