Digital ID is the key to unlocking digital identity for the DPI panopticon

Your biometrics are your identification, your identity is you; together they feed the interoperable digital control grid: perspective

Digital ID and digital identity are two terms often used interchangeably, but they have different meanings to different people.

ID is for identification; it’s something that shows or proves who you are.

Identity on the other hand, is you! It’s your distinguishing character or personality that includes your beliefs and behaviors.

“Our identity is, literally, who we are, and as the digital technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution advance, our identity is increasingly digital […] This digital identity determines what products, services and information we can access – or, conversely, what is closed off to us”

World Economic Forum, Identity in a Digital World: A new chapter in the social contract, September 2018

When thinking of digital ID versus identity, ID is like a key that unlocks the door to the kingdom of behavioral data that is your identity.

An ID may be a physical card with a photo and a barcode; it can also be an app, a number, or your biometrics.

But beyond the ID, in whatever form it takes, sits a vast and interoperable system pertaining to your digital identity, which incorporates everything about you — your online transactions, your social media posts, your carbon footprint, your medical history, your interactions with the state, and so on.

And beyond digital identity lies Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), which is a civic technology stack consisting of three main components: digital identity, fast payments systems, and massive data exchanges between public and private entities.

When people ask if digital ID is the hill to die on, are they talking about digital identification, digital identity? Probably a combination of both.

You can say that you’ll never voluntarily sign up for a digital ID, and that may be true, but once digital ID moves beyond an app on a smartphone, it won’t really matter because you — as in your physical body — will be the digital ID.

As cameras, drones, and sensors become ubiquitous, the addition of face recognition, iris scans, palm swipes, fingerprints, and gait recognition can all be used for identification purposes, and then matched with existing datasets for confirmation.

We’re being identified in the real world all the time, increasingly more-so in digital surveillance sandboxes like airports and 15-minute smart cities, without ever having to produce any type of document.

And digital ID isn’t just for humans either.

At this very moment, the UN and the Rockefeller Foundation are plowing ahead with something called “Nature ID” to act as a DPI for monitoring, tokenizing, and financializing everything in nature.

“Nature ID: A proposed digital public infrastructure system for integrating and exchanging environmental, social and administrative data to support conservation and sustainability initiatives”

UNDP, The Case for Nature ID, March 2025

In this scenario, it doesn’t really matter what nature has to say about getting a digital ID.

Biodiversity isn’t out there protesting; it isn’t campaigning a resistance, and it doesn’t have a smartphone for opting-in or out.

Not even animals like dogs and cows are exempt from digital ID either as their unique nose prints are being used to identify them.

“The system must enable digital storage and retrieval of comprehensive animal metadata, including identification details, vaccination history, and health information”

United Nations, AI for Good Innovate for Impact Interim Report, July 2025

“Physical identifiers like tags or microchips are vulnerable to tampering or misuse, leading to animal identity fraud, where one animal is intentionally or mistakenly presented as another. This undermines the integrity of registration, traceability, and disease control systems“

United Nations, AI for Good Innovate for Impact Interim Report, July 2025

Humans, nature, and animals are all getting digital IDs, but it doesn’t stop there. Inanimate objects are getting them as well.

From battery passports to farms and enterprises, and trading goods — all are being pegged with digital ID and digital identity.

“End-to-end trade digitalization requires a global approach to digital identities of natural and legal persons as well as of physical and digital objects sending or receiving electronic information to avoid creating digital identity silos”

WEF & WTO, The Promise of TradeTech: Policy Approaches to Harness Trade Digitalization, April 2022

For humans, digital ID is required to slice open your digital identity, to expose it raw to the suckling data brokers to slurp it up and to sell it to the most desirable bidder.

In some cases, that bidder is the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which is setting up a one-stop shop for vendors to sell your most intimate and “anonymized” data to intelligence agencies.

The Office of the Open Source Intelligence Executive “seeks an approach […] to help streamline access to CAI [Commercially Available Information] for the entire IC [Intelligence Community] and make it available to mission users in a more cohesive, efficient, and cost-effective manner”

ODNI, Solutions Solicitation: Intelligence Community (IC) Data Consortium (ICDC), April 2025

The Office of the Open Source Intelligence Executive “seeks a centralized approach to access CAI [Commercially Available Information] via three primary options—API query, platform access, and bulk data access—from commercial vendors”

ODNI, Solutions Solicitation: Intelligence Community (IC) Data Consortium (ICDC), April 2025

After the sweeping slice of the digital ID scythe cuts into your identity, then comes programmable digital currencies, which fit together with another key component of DPI, fast payment systems.

Governments and corporations can program digital currencies to restrict what you can buy, where you can buy, and when.

In some stores, you can already pay without ever showing an ID, scanning your phone, or swiping a physical card.

All that is required is a wave of your palm.

And as the digital realm becomes more blurred with the physical realm, there will be a metaverse. You will have 80 AI agents acting on your digital behalf at any given time.

As more and more governments pass legislation requiring online age checks, which are essentially internet passports, you can either opt to use a digital ID or you can submit to biometric liveness tests like selfies or videos every time you wish to access the internet or coming metaverse.

“Built upon the robust European Digital Identity Wallet framework, this user-friendly and privacy-preserving age verification solution enables individuals to demonstrate their eligibility for age-restricted online services, such as those restricted to adults, without disclosing more personal information than absolutely necessary”

European Commission, EU Age Verification Solution, July 2025

Digital identity can also act like a voodoo doll where anything you do in the real world can be entangled with your digital representation in the cyberworld — the metaverse.

For whatever you say, think, or do in this simulated world, you can face the repercussions in the physical world, and vice versa.

Whatever you don’t say or do, but what the algorithm deems that you might say or do in the future, can be used against you in these dystopic, pre-crime thought police scenarios that DARPA has been working to implement for decades.

“The MAGICS ARC calls for paradigm-shifting approaches for modeling complex, dynamic systems for predicting collective human behavior”

DARPA, MAGICS ARC, April 2025

With the way that brain-decoding wearables and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are evolving, your thoughts won’t even be your own.

This is all part of the so-called fourth industrial revolution, which according to World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab, will result in the fusion of our physical, biological, and digital identities.

Digital identity was always meant to be merged with our physical and biological selves — no smartphone app required.

It all starts with digital ID, which unlocks digital identity, which feeds into Digital Public Infrastructure.

If this is something you’re not onboard with, then what are some possible solutions?

• Ditching the smartphone will buy some time, but it won’t last forever.
• Refusing to use public-private tech services is also an option, but how long until you are unable to participate in society without them or until the tax authorities come knocking on your door?
• You can vow to only use cash, but when banks go cashless and fully digital, from where will you get your money? How will you be able to buy food, pay the rent or mortgage, or other essentials like healthcare?
• Building parallel systems is another path. You have to get enough people onboard and you have to finance the construction of these systems, but how do you finance them without going to the banks? Bartering?
• Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are an option for financing, but even they are being co-opted by governments and by the likes of powerful individuals and corporations like BlackRock’s Larry Fink.
• Seeking a political solution to the digital gulag is futile. Politicians can never be trusted.
• Maybe lawfare could work? If there were enough class action lawsuits that could prove digital ID and identity were an infringement on people’s constitutional rights, then perhaps that could also buy some time, at least in some countries.

Deploying all of the above solutions, in addition to others not mentioned here, might slow things down when used in combination, like a war of attrition.

Another route to resistance could be just spreading awareness, knowledge, and information to expose these tyrannical agendas.

This is how communities are built.

When people see the emperor has no clothes, the powers that be become a mockery. They can be ridiculed and ran out of town quicker than you can say, “Tarred and feathered.”

Knowledge is power.

But no matter how hard the global public-private-partnership tries to gain control, it will inevitably be met with the same counter-force — for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.

Balance will eventually be restored; it’s just a question of time, and anything can happen at anytime to turn the whole world on its head, whether by chance or by design.

Digital ID and digital identity are two sides of the same coin, both interoperable and programmable for the public-private panopticon.

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Image source: AI generated with Grok