Recently, digital ID has one again been making waves in the world, especially in the UK, where Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently stated that digital ID will be necessary to work there. Digital ID is rightfully considered a monumental issue of freedom and Christians everywhere ought to vigorously contend against it. At several points in my book, Deep Discipleship for Dark Days, I touch on the issue of digital ID. In one of the early chapters, I note that while we ought to think more broadly about how the Beast-system of the world marks people, rather than merely trying to prognosticate the one specific “mark.” Within this broader application, I absolutely believe that digital ID is one of the ways the global Beast-system wants to mark us and it ought to cause us not only to oppose it and refuse it, but also to be builders now so that we could possibly withstand social ostracization if it became necessary. Below is an excerpt from chapter, “Practice Pioneering.”

For several years, major world organizations like the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, central banks, and many sovereign nations have been working to push and deploy a global biometric digital identity in order to achieve Goal 16.9 of the UN Sustainable Goals by 2030. This digital identity will be linked to virtually every aspect of life: healthcare, mobility, food, financial services, government services, telecommunications, and social platforms. This proof of identity will not just be a card we carry in our pockets. Technology and web applications will increasingly blur the lines between our data, our time, our bodies, and our minds. “What the Fourth Industrial Revolution will lead to,” Klaus Schwab stated at the Chicago Council of Global Affairs in 2019, “is a fusion of our physical, our digital, and our biological identities,” an idea captured by the phrase “internet of bodies.” “Recent technological advancements have ushered in a new era of the ‘internet of bodies’ (IoB),” states a 2020 WEF/McGill University briefing paper, “with an unprecedented number of connected devices and sensors being affixed to or even implanted and ingested into the human body. This has turned the human body into a technology platform. The IoB generates tremendous amounts of biometric and human behavioural data.” Consider a future in which you are constantly connected to, and monitored by, global technology platforms.

The slide into this dystopian future has already begun through wearables and smart devices like Fitbits or Apple Watches, usually connected to digital applications, which track the most intimate aspects of our lives. Shoshana Zuboff chronicles many of these devices and their infractions, including smart beds that surreptitiously collect audio signals from your bedroom, and vacuum robots that calculate room and floor plan layouts of the homes they clean. Anything advertised as “smart” is most likely sending incredible amount of personal, biometric, and/or household data back to the digital cloud. In these cases it is rarely clear how the data is or is not being used, and it can be insufferably difficult for a customer to “opt-out” of the surveillance collection of these devices, or even understand their “privacy” contracts in the first place.

Implants are more problematic yet. Although uptake of electronically connected implants has so far been mostly limited to early adopters and medical patients, the surveillance-economy freight-train is barreling towards what seems like its ultimate goal—every human digitally connected and surveilled. Accenture and Microsoft have produced a persuasive video promoting a global digital ID program for the ID2020 Alliance. The presentation states that over 1.2 billion people live without proof of their identity, and it runs through a series of emotional scenarios facing the underprivileged: mobility issues, health-care problems, etc. Having couched the argument in this language of human rights for the most vulnerable, the narrator provides the answer in a form of a question: “what if your identity was always in your hands?” as it shows the picture of the back of a human hand. Implantable technology seems to be a particular interest of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which has funded implantable birth-control microchips and subcutaneous medical-information storage technology.

Implant technology may soon extend to our minds as well. A WEF article by Kathleen Philips envisions digital augmentation, chip implants, and brain implants which may “allow us to tap straight into the body’s ‘operating system.’” This technology is already available for medical patients, as in the example of an ALS patient who in December of 2021 sent a “telepathic” tweet using Synchron’s brain interface. Elon Musk, the innovator-billionaire behind Tesla and SpaceX, claims to be close to rolling out his brain-computer interface, Neuralink, and has applied to the FDA to begin human trials. In a 2021 demonstration of the technology, a chimpanzee was able to play a simple video game with his mind alone.

Given the pace of progress on brain-computer interfaces, and the startling advances in AI, the future may not “merely” be one of constant digital surveillance, but one in which most of humanity is constantly connected to a global, digital intelligence which exhibits features of omniscience and omnipresence. Even at present, however, the realities of cancel culture, media suppression, vaccine passports, and China’s social credit scoring system all suggest that a comprehensive social ostracization could be coming for those who will not bow to the world-system. If this is the case, it will not only be within the field of education that we need pioneering works. We may need an alternative culture.