Digital identity wallet: police humans, destroy the planet

The application is presented as extremely practical for its future users: in a few movements of the finger, it will be possible to prove your identity, sign contracts electronically, retrieve and generate supporting documents. No need to bother with a few cards and other permits, it's all in the portable machine. The dream? Not quite: this new outgrowth of the technological system raises questions.

Colonizing technology

Let's start by noting that this innovation is part of a more general trend: the technological system is constantly colonizing our existence. The implementation of these digital wallets is one example among other techno tricks. Through these (apparently) practical innovations, it interferes in every part of our activities. Under the guise of efficiency and for liberate tasks presented as “tedious” (in this case, have a wallet in your pocket)^[1]), technological innovation is promoted as a solution. Of course, it is not really one, or in any case it gives rise to other difficulties: everyone can attest to the vagaries of technology, of its Bugs and of its Lags. Equipment is expensive in terms of money, and therefore in terms of working time for individuals. Finally, their claimed effectiveness is often illusory, and their use is largely counterproductive.^[2] even though it is becoming omnipresent and — in a certain way — obligatory. Digitizing wallets is the umpteenth movement in the “digitization of our lives”, as Matthieu Almiech noted.^[3]. But at what price?

https://youtu.be/YSb0nLRte_A?si=oksv4oHaZwPK0vFt

A propaganda video by the French industrialist Thales supposed to show how much easier life is when you are chained to your smartphone. The industry constantly insists on safety in its techno-propaganda, suggesting that technological progress would lessen dangers for citizens. However, we note that industrialization is causing increasing instability in the world, whether at the geopolitical, social, ecological or climatic levels. An Interpol report published last year also showed that the development of digital technology greatly benefited organized crime and terrorist groups.

Digitizing is greening to destroy

We often hear that digital technology is the solution against global warming. Many politicians and business leaders insist on greening their institutions by promoting the digitization of their services. Digitizing would eliminate a whole range of wastes: for example, an email transfer to a public administration would avoid wasting paper in superfluous printing. In our case, one might think that digitizing identity papers makes it possible to no longer produce millions of laminated identity documents. Thus, we would save the planet by multiplying the machines.

This discourse is either deluded (benevolent hypothesis) or cynical (critical hypothesis). In both cases it is wrong. Digitizing does not mean preserving the planet, it is participating in the acceleration of its destruction, and this at several levels. First, the massive use of computers and the Internet is a major contributor to global warming. Digital technology represents 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Data centers, which store data, consume a lot of electricity: a 10000m warehouse² consumes more than a city of 50,000 inhabitants^[4] ! Their energy consumption - growing exponentially - at the global level already exceeds that of the whole of France^[5].

Then, the production of the various elements of the computer network (cables, batteries, antennas...) is allowed by an international system that pollutes enormously. This production also requires large-scale extractivism that destroys land. In short, digitization is an environmental disaster^[6]. It is also a societal disgrace: miners who extract the metals needed for the digital industry in the southern part of the world often work in inhumane conditions. It's real modern slavery^[7]. Behind the smooth, clean screens, there is the blood of millions of slaves, often women and children, with the result of the destruction of the land.

It is clear that we cannot blame the “consumer-actors” individually on this point. It is national and European public policies oriented by the lobbying of digital industry giants that lock us into this suicidal impasse that is forced digitalization.^[8].

Intensified policing

The technological destruction of the planet's living conditions is not the only challenge in the digitization of our lives in general, and of our digital wallet in particular. Sharing identification papers and entrusting them to meticulously codified computer machines makes it possible to pursue control and security objectives for governments.

As noted by Célia Izoard^[9], the digital identity wallet is part of the continuity of the health pass. It suggests a perspective of policing accompanied by constant disciplinarization. By linking identity control to the smartphone, this tool that has often become an extension of the hand, we produce addiction and a self-disciplined reflex. It's becoming so easy to pull out your phone to identify yourself at the various access points that you end up getting used to it.

Even as the French government is increasingly openly repressive against social movements, and in particular environmental activists, one can question the possibilities opened up by this new addition to their techno-security arsenal. The possibilities of resistance and avoidance of the repressive apparatus are constantly limited by these innovations, as they increasingly encircle the existence of individuals.

Private and public techies, same fight

This issue of digital wallets is interesting because it presents an important facet of technological development. First, we see how a new element of daily life is identified and constructed as a problem to be solved through technological innovation. What was previously out of the question now requires polluting and expensive equipment. Note that this dependence on digital technology produces exclusion among those who are less able to use it (especially old people).

This digitization of the portfolio is also interesting because it makes it possible to identify the interrelationships between public and private actors in the extension of this field of technology. Technologies are not the work of solitary inventors in their garage: on the contrary, they are the result of public research programs and/or abundant funding of private companies by States or supranational institutions such as the European Union^[10]. By choosing to direct their policies towards the digital wallet, the European Union is promising big profits to the companies that are responsible for the design and implementation of these new infrastructures. The appointment as European Commissioner of Thierry Breton, former CEO of Atos^[11], illustrates in an almost caricatural way this public-private interconnection that it is essential to put at a distance in order to fully understand the challenges of the digitization of our lives.

Finally, note that the company Thalès, a French digital flagship in the French digital world in a pole position in the implementation of the digital portfolio, accumulates dystopian projects. On the one hand, generalized techno-totalitarianism with the digital wallet, on the other, a project for a “network of solar power plants in orbit”^[12] ”. Are we really going to let these lunatics take us with them into the abyss?