Here's a video from The Grayzone about:
<the USAID's DC rollout of the dystopian Diia "state in a smartphone". It seems as if Ukraine might be something like a test laboratory for this kind of stuff.
https://invidious.baczek.me/watch?v=GLulMeO3yA0Another name for this is the "4th industrial revolution" How this is related to industrialism or why they counted to N°4 already that escapes me. In my mind the industrial revolution started with the steam-engine, the lathe, the printing press, the telegram, chemical fertilizers, … It keeps going and improving until the 70s when neoliberalism begins the ongoing process of de-industrialization.
Cockshot might have called it the Monarchist Revanche
https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=DOGCi1hMRHshence the thread title.
I think that what's going on is the digitization of bureaucracy. I think that the neo-liberals are indeed intending to this to become a total control mechanism, that keeps everyone on a leash, a bit like what absolute monarchies were striving towards.
I do not think that this will kill off cash for example. Governments might abandon cash in the form that you can pay taxes with it, or that you can convert your bank-account money into it without extra steps, but that won't stop people from minting coins or paper-notes. Meat-space is still available and that won't ever change. I also think that this will not stop money laundering or tax evasion, because in the last 200 years the state apparatus always had the ability to crush the mafia, it just doesn't want to. (Relatively weak socialist states with nothing but paper-forms and couriers were able to get rid of the mafia.)
Some people might be tempted to draw a false parallel to Cybernetic-Socialism that also would eventually abandon money. Cybersoc will be able to do that because the digital-labor-time-tokens will be better than money, you'll get more for your labour-time-tokens and those don't carry a risk of having inflation because it's an objective measurement of time. What the Neo-liberals seem to be creating is the opposite of that, they want to use this to hold people down and keep them poor, in that case it will be easy to restore cash money because if people get more for that the masses will shift their behavior towards the better rewards.
I'm wondering to what extend this is related to the Chinese system with those social credits. Given the amount off seething from the Neo-liberals in the corporate press, one is led to believe that those social credits must be something good that benefits common people. I always wondered if that's some kind of alternative to money, something you can collect and then it opens doors that previously could only be unlocked via money. Something that bypasses the wealth-privilege-enforcement structures of the super wealthy, at least that would explain why that stuff was attacked so much in the corporate media. I also don't buy the official propaganda narrative about China, i think that their digital stuff had to bring people tangible material gains or else Chinese people wouldn't have adopted it.
I think that in the west the acceptance for this kind of stuff is low, trust in institutions is low, trust in technology in general is low too ,and the neo-liberals probably don't have the political capital anymore to ram this through. It's also questionable if their Ukraine laboratory test will go through, this might not survive the Ukraine war, since the Russians appear to have begun thinking about regime change.
Anybody in the know about this stuff ?