Surveillance society.

Yes, people are resisting social credit scores: systems where code decides your access to loans, jobs and travel, like China's social credit system. Humans do not want to be scored. In the UK, 3 million people signed against mandatory digital ID in days. The control side is live too: Vietnam closed 86 million bank accounts that missed the biometric ID deadline, 43% of all accounts in the country. If your face fails, your funds fail. Europe is next. Every EU state must offer a digital ID wallet by December 24, 2026, and the digital euro follows. Identity, money, movement: China's social credit state rebuilt with European branding. I have warned about social credit systems and surveillance societies for a decade: 2015 dark social, 2018 Cambridge Analytica, 2020 The Social Dilemma, 2022 ChatGPT eating the scraped internet. Technology can empower or control society. Never accept digital slavery.

Governments increasingly use AI to sharpen decisions, public services, and resource allocation. I predict real efficiency gains paired with real dangers, including surveillance, bias, privacy erosion, and concentrated power. I stay consistent and blunt. The same AI that makes government work better can also make it watch citizens more closely: digital ID plus programmable money is a control grid if the wrong people write the rules. On record since 2015: never accept digital slavery, no matter what. Governance of the tool matters as much as the tool itself.

Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are national currencies issued by a central bank in programmable digital form: a digital euro or digital dollar the state itself runs, with rules written into the money. I predict governments keep pushing them while the debate turns fierce: convenience versus surveillance, privacy versus control. The receipts: China's digital yuan is live, the digital euro pilot starts in 2027 with rollout in 2029, and the US banned a retail digital dollar by executive order in January 2025. A programmable currency can settle payments instantly and also track, limit, or freeze every transaction you make. Programmable money is conditional money: conditional on your tax compliance, your political behavior, your carbon score. The technology is neutral. The rules written around it are anything but. I fear people, not technology. Watch the governance, not the code.

I challenge Big Tech because power without accountability stops serving people and starts controlling them. I back innovation and reject monopoly. I name the real risks out loud: AI concentration, platform dependency, surveillance, and manufactured truth. This is not anti-technology. It is pro-human. Technology can empower or control society, and the only thing that controls technology is us, the people. I fear people, not technology. The same tools that can lift a billion lives can also cage them. Someone has to say which.