Comment by nephihaha a day ago
The problem isn't where digital ID starts, it's where it ends. It will start by being benign enough, and end with the ability to cut off dissidents in an instant. I'm aware that some Swedes are already getting microchipped. If you want to be branded and tracked by the state, that is your choice... Don't force it on the rest of us.
These things start out as voluntary and then you find it difficult to function without it. My local bank is always busy, but there is a bank employee nagging everyone to use online banking. We're lucky it is still open, because every bank is shutting branches. They close branches and make them inconvenient to use, and then say the public want it. Yes, some do, but not everyone does and some want both options.
Similar scenario here. The old boiling a frog scenario. Some company trying to persuade its employees to get microchipped. Also other interests trying to push it. The dog thing is not unconnected, even with that, doing it to pets is partly a soft sell to saying humans can get one too. It has been normalised in science fiction films for decades.
"Their hand, their choice" turns into "they got a microchip, and why don't you?" into "everyone's got a microchip, why don't you?" and then "why the hell don't you have a microchip?" and eventually legal consequences for not having one. Of course microchips are only one possibility for tagging people... And the idea won't go away.
https://www.newsweek.com/people-get-microchips-implanted-tha...
Read some later articles. The first guy who did this was maybe that magician from Missouri, or at least one of the first ones (there aren't many). And it's turned out to be a useless gimmick, that magician's implant is currently inoperative. Forgot a password for re-programming it, or some such.
Mandatory microchipping people is firmly in sci-fi land, and, as many other things first tried out in sci-fi land it's not something particularly relevant for a very long time, I suspect. It's not very useful, to start with (compared to what we use already).
Online banking vs physical buildings.. that's a purely economic issue, and can't be compared to something like chipping.
Dogs and cats are microchipped because they can't talk, and for other non-human reasons.
This from Newsweek in 2022 about Sweden.
https://www.newsweek.com/people-get-microchips-implanted-tha...
"In 2017, a railway company in Sweden began allowing travelers to load their ticket information onto the microchips implanted in their bodies, according to BBC News. Railway conductors were then able to use smartphones to detect the chip and confirm the travelers' tickets."
This has nothing to do with the "state microchipping people" this is biohackers loading NFC train tickets onto a chip they chose to have implanted? The level of intellectual dishonesty is gross. You don't have to have an NFC chip and even if you did how would that be any more of a UUID than a LIDAR scan of your face?
Buddy, you're talking about 4000 VOLUNTEERS in a country of 11 million people (0.04%).
We can probably find more crack addicts in Sweden...
Let put the brakes on these slippery slopes, otherwise we'll be afraid of our own shadows soon. Scepticism is fine, paranoia isn't.
Those 4000 are bellwethers for whatever other impressionable idiots will follow them. (I'd forgotten it was that many, I thought it was a fraction of that.) Then it becomes mandatory, then compulsory, like so many other things.
You mention crack addicts there. Yeah, they're kind of similar. With a new drug like cocaine, it starts with a handful of impressionable people who get given it cheap. Then they influence other people who take it up, and before you know it you have drug epidemic on your hands. (As most developed countries do.? The difference is that the ruling class doesn't openly encourage cocaine use, because it doesn't benefit them in anyway (other than doping up potential troublemakers).
You should read some of the Fourth Industrial Revolution material that governments and their advisers put out. They are quite plain about where they want this to head. Transhumanism is sold as a means to improve us, but it can also be used as a means of control. (There is a lot of hypocrisy in such documents — how can one argue that we need to lower carbon emissions and at the same time engage in project which increase electricity usage? That seems contradictory at least for now, because even renewables generate have environmental issues. These data centres will gobble up more energy than people's homes do.)
"I'm aware that some Swedes are already getting microchipped."
If you mean Swedish dogs and cats, then yes. Otherwise, no.