Convenience is control

Editor’s Note: Dropping this back in 2025 was a move. Looking back, we had the receipts then and we still have them now. Read this for the foundation; the rest is just noise.

Rueben stands under the flickering fluorescent lights of a convenience store on Eglinton West, Toronto. He is trying to send a remittance to his mother in Kingston Jamaica, a ritual of survival he has performed for twenty years. Today, the screen on his phone demands a facial scan he didn’t sign up for. The app, part of a new interoperable framework, tells him his identity cannot be verified. He tries again; the camera lens stares back, cold and indifferent. Rueben is now a ghost in the machine, his hard-earned money frozen by an algorithm he cannot argue with.

Across the ocean, in a humid office in Port of Spain, a young Indo-Trinidadian woman named Priya is told her new passport application requires a biometric link to a national digital ID, a system backed by World Bank initiatives. She is told this is for efficiency and “inclusion. She is not told that her data will be stored in databases accessible to a consortium of global banks and tech oligarchs. She feels a tightening in her chest, a sense that her private life is no longer her own, but a commodity to be traded…

As 2025 draws to a close, these stories are not isolated incidents; they are the opening movements of a global symphony of manufactured consent.

The rollout of digital ID systems in 2025 has been masked by a glossy marketing campaign. Governments and corporations have spent millions to frame these systems as tools for security and financial inclusion. In the European Union, the EIDAS 2.0 framework promises a secure way to store credentials, while China has launched a National Online Identity Authentication Public Service integrated with state databases. The narrative sold to the public is one of empowerment: digital ID will unlock access to healthcare, education, and finance.

However, the reality is a reversal of democratic norms. These systems shift the burden of proof onto the individual, requiring citizens to constantly verify their status and identity to participate in basic society. This is a form of coercion that forces submission to ever-increasing levels of surveillance. For the Afro/Indo Caribbean diaspora, this inclusion often means being funneled into a system that tracks their movements, their work permits, and their family support networks across borders.

The infrastructure of this new era is built on a Mission Creep that began over a decade ago. Consider India’s Aadhaar system. Launched in 2010 for simple welfare subsidies, it ballooned by 2016 into a mandatory requirement for banking, taxes, and mobile services. By 2025, it was processing billions of authentications, moving from aid delivery to debt recovery and state surveillance. What starts as a voluntary convenience quickly becomes a mandatory gatekeeper for survival.

In the United Arab Emirates, the digital ID was repurposed during the COVID-19 pandemic to enforce lockdowns through geolocation and contact data. It was a clear transition from identity verification to real-time behavioral control. This same pattern is now creeping into the West. Canada has standardized its approach via the CAN/DGSI 103-0:2025 code, aiming for interoperable credentials across provinces. By 2026, Canadians will face national standards for digital wallets, and by 2027, biometric requirements for citizenship grants will be collected at Service Canada.

The driving force behind this rollout is a merger of state power and corporate profit, surveillance capitalism in its purest form. In Canada, a $150 million national digital ID system is backed by a consortium of the nation’s largest banks: RBC, BMO, Scotiabank, CIBC, and TD. These financial giants, under the Digital ID & Authentication Council of Canada (DIACC), are partnering with tech firms to integrate fingerprinting and automated identity services into federal workflows.

This is a global network of control. Mastercard has inked deals with the Ukrainian government; Microsoft Entra is streamlining verifications across North America; and companies like Socure and Trinsic are centralizing data in corporate hands. For marginalized communities, this means their most intimate biometric data is now a monopoly held by the very institutions that have historically excluded them. When data is centralized, a single breach or a “biometric mismatch” can result in total social exclusion.

As these systems become mandatory for accessing employment, healthcare, and social protection, a two-tier society is emerging. The wealthy, with passive income and private resources, may find ways to opt out or navigate the system with ease, but for the working poor and recent immigrants (particularly Afro/Indo Caribbeans) the digital ID is a digital cage.

In the Caribbean, nations like Jamaica and Trinidad are under intense pressure from the World Bank to align with these global models. They are told this will help manage remittances and immigration. In reality, it turns the identity of the diaspora into an oligarchic lever of exclusion. If an immigrant’s digital ID is flagged, their ability to send money home, or renew a visa can be frozen instantly, without recourse or human intervention.

The creeping dread is no longer a shadow on the wall; it is the device in your pocket.

The year 2025 has seen Brazil connect all 27 states to a blockchain-based ID, and Nigeria upgrade its NIN platform to register 59 million more people by 2026. These are the construction of a global panopticon.

The creeping dread is no longer a shadow on the wall; it is the device in your pocket. The end-of-year reports for 2025 show a world where privacy is evaporating in favour of state-corporate trust frameworks. The erosion of truth and humanity is nearly complete when a person’s right to exist in the economy is contingent on a biometric scan that feeds into a central database.

For Rueben on Eglinton West, the convenience of the app has become a wall. For Priya in Port of Spain, the inclusion of the passport is a leash. The propaganda tells us we are being brought into the future, but the evidence shows we are being locked into a system where our movements, our finances, and our identities are no longer ours to own.

As we move into 2026, the mandate is clear for those who still value freedom: demand audits, demand the right to opt out, and reject the Orwellian blueprint before the digital cage is permanently locked. The stakes are not just about data, hell! We wish that is all it was. Nah. This is about who owns your life