Alright, so some brave soul over at Forbes decided to stick their face in front of a shiny metal ball for a pat on the head and a digital gold star: “Verified Human.” One minute, they say. One minute to trade a piece of your irreplaceable self for a ping on your phone. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, the kind where the sunlight feels like an accusation, and I’m reading this drivel, another cigarette burning down to the filter, a half-empty glass of something cheap and strong sweating on the desk beside this clattering machine. This world, man. It just keeps finding new ways to be a goddamn circus.
This “Orb,” they call it. Sounds like something out of a dime-store sci-fi novel, the kind with a dame in a silver bikini on the cover. But no, this ain’t fiction. This is real, it’s “shiny,” and it “stares into your soul.” Or your eyes, the writer helpfully clarifies, probably after realizing souls don’t show up too well on biometric scans. The whole setup, a glass-fronted shop in San Francisco, a guide who looks like he escaped from an Apple Store training video – it’s all designed to make you feel like you’re stepping into the future. Me, I’d feel like I was stepping into a well-lit abattoir for the human spirit.
“I obliged. I’m still not sure why.” That’s the line that gets me. That’s the epitaph for the whole damn human race right there. We just… oblige. Because it’s shiny, because someone in a neat shirt smiled, because there’s a line, and if there’s a line, it must be for something good, right? Wrong. Lines are usually for bad coffee, the unemployment office, or the goddamn Orb. And then, ping. “You are now a Verified Human.” Christ. I verify I’m human every morning when I puke up last night’s whiskey and regret. No app needed.
And who’s behind this grand scheme to catalog every pair of peepers on the planet? Sam Altman, the boy wonder from OpenAI, the place that’s teaching computers to write poetry better than half the sad sacks I see at open mic nights. Him and a couple of co-founders, backed by a “hefty war chest” from the usual suspects – Andreessen Horowitz, Reid Hoffman. Those names pop up whenever there’s a new way to turn human experience into marketable data. They’re like flies on a particularly ripe carcass. They’re trying to answer a “deceptively simple question: how do you prove you’re human in an age of AI?”
I got an answer for you, Sammy. You prove you’re human by bleeding when you’re cut, by getting your heart broken by some dame who looked like an angel and drank like a fish, by feeling the existential dread creep in around 3 AM when the bars are closed and the bottle’s empty. You prove it by the scars, the bad decisions, the occasional, inexplicable act of kindness. Not by letting a glorified bowling ball take a picture of your iris.
This “World ID” they give you. A unique digital code. “No names, no addresses, no other data stored.” That’s what they all say at first. Like a cheap date promising it’s “just dinner.” Next thing you know, they’re not just storing your iris scan, they’re cross-referencing it with your porn history and your overdue library books. “Your mom was right all along! You are one of a kind.” Yeah, and my mom also told me not to stick my eye into strange machinery offered by grinning men in polo shirts. Funny how some advice ages better than others.
Then comes the real kicker, the little treat for being a good sheep: Worldcoin. Forty-four bucks worth of funny money, doled out over a year. “There’s always a catch!” the writer exclaims. No shit, Sherlock. It’s the cheese in the mousetrap, the free drink that leads to a three-day bender and a missing wallet. This crypto, they say, is to “incentivize people to join up” and to “raise funds.” Translate that: we need your eyeballs to make our network valuable, and we need your cash to keep the lights on while we figure out how to really screw you later. It’ll also be for payments and services. So, first they scan you, then they own the currency you use. Sounds like a company town, but global. And the company store only takes iris scans.
Naturally, this whole thing is “raising eyebrows as fast as it scans irises.” Privacy, they say. Critics call it a “privacy nightmare dressed up as innovation.” You think? Handing over your unchangeable biometric data to a startup backed by venture capitalists who dream of owning the digital plumbing of the world? What could possibly go wrong? They say they delete the iris image after creating the code, unless you “opt in to data storage.” That’s like a vampire asking permission to just take a tiny sip. The fact that governments in Germany, France, the UK, and Kenya are already sniffing around this operation should tell you something. Those bureaucrats don’t get off their asses unless there’s a real stink in the air.
And the ethics of it all. Rolling this out in “parts of Africa, South America and Asia,” offering tokens to people who might have “little understanding of what they were giving up.” It’s the oldest trick in the colonial playbook, updated for the digital age. Instead of beads and mirrors for your land, it’s a few crypto-cents for your unique biological signature. Exploiting vulnerable populations? Hell, that’s not a risk, that’s the business model.
The company, of course, “insists it’s acting transparently, ethically and with privacy at its core.” They always do. They publish their tech specs, get “external audits” (probably from their cousin’s accounting firm), and “commit to decentralizing control over time.” “Over time” is the key phrase there. Like “the check’s in the mail” or “I’ll call you.” It means “when hell freezes over, and maybe not even then.” I’ve seen more transparency at the bottom of a murky bourbon bottle.
So, is it a “humanitarian moonshot or a surveillance scheme”? Why not both? The surveillance part pays for the so-called humanitarian part, which is probably just more surveillance with a pretty ribbon on it. “Do we really need to scan our eyes to prove we’re real? Couldn’t we just click a CAPTCHA?” God, I miss the days when all you had to do was prove you weren’t a robot by identifying a blurry bus. Now you gotta offer up a piece of your damn anatomy. Building a world where access to online life requires biometric ID? That’s not a risk, that’s the goal. Tollbooths on the information superhighway, and the toll is your iris.
But wait, there’s an upside! It’s about “survival,” see? Because AI is getting so good at impersonating us, we need this Orb to tell the fakes from the real McCoys. Or the real Chinaskis, God forbid. So, the solution to too much creepy tech is… even creepier tech. Wonderful. My liver hurts just thinking about it. Time for another puff, another gulp. This is heavy stuff for a Tuesday.
Then Altman, bless his visionary heart, dangles the big carrot: AI-funded universal basic income. Machines will do all the work, AI will generate so much wealth, and Worldcoin, built on your eyeballs, will be the way to share it among “verified humans.” Sounds grand, doesn’t it? Like a fairy tale. Everyone gets free money, lives a life of leisure. What they don’t tell you is what happens when the AI decides who’s a “verified human” worthy of its charity. What happens when the algorithm glitches and your UBI payment for vat-grown Soylent Green doesn’t arrive because your iris scan got corrupted by last night’s cheap gin? You become a pet, fed and watered by the machines, as long as you behave and keep your optical sensors clean for the daily scan.
The writer left the “World Flagship Space” feeling they’d “participated in something important. Or maybe just something strange. Maybe both.” That’s the ambiguity they sell you. It’s important because it’s strange. It’s the future, and the future is always a bit weird, right? “The Orb didn’t feel dangerous. It felt clinical, cool. Like a self-checkout for your identity.” That’s the most terrifying line in the whole piece. A self-checkout for your identity. Cold, impersonal, efficient. Stripping away the messy, inconvenient parts of being human, one transaction at a time. Makes me want to go out and get into a fistfight, just to feel something real.
And now they’re dragging the kids into it. Education. Secure global identity to prevent AI cheating. “Imagine a future where students verify their humanness before submitting work.” Imagine a future where kids can’t even turn in their homework about Huck Finn without getting their eyeballs zapped. “Would students need to scan their eyes to access learning? Could digital identity become a gatekeeper?” Rhetorical questions, pal. Of course it could. Of course it will. That’s the whole point. Control. From the cradle to the grave, all verified, all accounted for. Turning classrooms into checkpoints. What’s next, biometric scans for a library card? For a goddamn beer? Don’t give them ideas.
If this Orb thing succeeds, it “could change how we vote, how we get paid, how we prove who we are online.” You bet your sweet ass it will. It’ll centralize power in ways that would make old kings blush. And if it fails? A “cautionary tale.” Big deal. There are a million cautionary tales in this world, most of them ending with a hangover and an empty promise. This is just another one, shinier, with more venture capital behind it.
The core of it is this: they want to make humanity neat. Quantifiable. Machine-readable. They look at us, with our booze and our bad habits and our messy emotions, and they see a problem to be solved, an inefficiency to be streamlined. They want to trade the glorious, fucked-up chaos of being human for a tidy database entry. And for what? A few digital trinkets and the promise of a future where we’re all equally “verified” and equally beholden to the guys who own the scanner.
I tell you, the only verification I need is the burn of whiskey in my throat, the ache in my bones after a long night wrestling with words, the way a good woman can look at you and see right through your bullshit. That’s human. This Orb, this Worldcoin, this whole grand vision of a perfectly cataloged populace? That’s something else. Something cold. Something that smells like a trap.
I’ll stick to my own methods of proving I’m alive, thanks. They usually involve a typewriter, a bottle, and a profound sense of disappointment in the species. But at least they’re mine. My eyes, my liver, my eventual and unverified oblivion.
Time to find that bottle. The words are swimming.
Chinaski, out. Another shot for the road to ruin.
Source: I Let Sam Altman’s Orb Scan My Eyes. Now I’m A “Verified Human”