Your Future in a Tokenised World
Everything List is finally complete - whats next.
In a tokenised world, the Everything List is finally complete. You and all other assets, both financial and natural, now exist as a digital token.
The timeframe for a full implementation of the Everything List is unclear. Some of the policies described below are already feasible and with the rapid advances in technology, I’m certain we will see a few of them rise from Dr. Frankenstein’s table in the next decade.
Although this section is speculative, some of these monsters already exist in an adolescent form and if they were conceived in my imagination, you can guarantee somebody else has had the same fevered thought. If you look closely, you will find these proposals in documents marked “Confidential” created by a UN Committee, a private think tank or as part of a government policy review. These ideas are already being discreetly discussed behind closed doors because when the debt based economy implodes, desperate times are going to call for desperate measures.
When the monster does rise from the grave it won’t be presented as a destroyer of worlds. The measures will be lauded as harbingers of choice and fairness, of freedom and inclusivity, of sustainability and transparency, but don’t be deceived. In reality they will be your shackles and the click that you will hear will be the snapping of the lock.
Tokenised Identity
The digital ID is the foundation of the tokenised world. Without every human on Earth accepting a tokenised identity, nothing else follows. For this reason, the development of a global digital ID is a key feature of the UN’s Sustainable Development program and is promoted through the ID2020 initiative. This programme advertises itself as having the charitable objective of providing legal identities to vulnerable communities, providing protection against human trafficking and promoting online safety.
Government controlled media continues to push the digital ID agenda on a number of different fronts - pandemic and health management, international security, immigration control and counter terrorism. But they all hide the real purpose - to reduce each individual to a tradable digital token that can be used as collateral in an energy based economy. The ultimate ‘Bored Ape’ NFT.
Once the system is introduced, the digital ID will represent a unique person operating within the economic and social system. Without a digital ID, a person simply doesn’t exist.
Tokenised Credit
The introduction of tokenised credit or Central Bank Digital Currency will act as a replacement for the existing debt based financial system which is scheduled for demolition in the near future. In many respects the development of a CBDC is the feature of the technocratic future which has made the most progress in the last few years and can be described without too much speculation. In an earlier section it was explained how the programmable nature of a CBDC sets it apart from the type of digital cash we are familiar with through debit cards and mobile digital wallets. However, although it will be sold to us as a convenient replacement for these services, that is not its ultimate purpose.
A CBDC provides a degree of social control that autocracies of the past could only dream of.
All personal financial transactions will be regulated, recorded and controlled. Unauthorised behaviour can be penalised by simply freezing the digital wallet, effectively placing the person outside the economic community. Finer social control will be achieved through a Carbon Credit System, described in more detail later in this section. Introduced gradually as a series of desirable incentives, it would slowly expand until it controls every aspect of daily life.
Tokenised Belongings
In an earlier section it was explained that you don’t really own your wealth - you just have a claim to it, and once you are tokenised this fact becomes even clearer. Monetary wealth, like the savings and pensions that you thought you owned but never really did, will continue to be rehypothecated as before, just using more exotic and imaginative mechanisms.
The great store of wealth of the middle class - property and stuff, will be absorbed into the tokenised system in a number of ways.
The land you lease will still be in your name but environmental sustainability goals will determine how it is used, all under the control of a Natural Asset Company.
Urban housing will be subject to regulations regarding energy usage which will eventually ban and remove all gas appliances in favour of heat pumps with the electric supply checked and throttled by a smart meter. New standards for insulation and energy efficiency will be introduced to address climate change and the move to Net Zero. House owners unable to afford the upgrades can opt for a government scheme that funds the work. To qualify, the property must be partially tokenised and placed into an investment vehicle that repays the cost over time. In this way, whole housing stock- publicly or privately owned - will become globally traded collateral.
It won’t be necessary for auditors to inventory home contents because the information is provided voluntarily to insurance companies and therefore already forms part of the List. Premiums will be reduced for those customers that sign the waiver to allow fractional ownership of the high value items and these will form the lower tranches of the new asset based CDO’s.
In order to address climate change, general asset sharing and pooling will be encouraged, checked in and out by the tokenised system. Vehicles (EV’s) will be leased and items that you once owned to enrich your life such as music, art and literature will be digitised and moved to a subscription model, a process which is already fairly advanced.
Very slowly the concept of outright property ownership will be blurred and muddied until one day it fades from memory entirely and you will be happy.
Tokenised Consumption
In the technocratic future the basic unit of account will be energy and the Everything List will be used to keep your account up to date. In the name of sustainability and in the pursuit of a Net Zero target, each person will be allocated an annual budget of Carbon Credits and their consumption of goods and services will either add or subtract from the bottom line.
For example, if you plan to book a flight abroad, this will levy a carbon tax which will be set against your annual allocation. Similarly, each charge of your EV will reduce your allowance as will any travel outside of a designated area. A similar system will be used to regulate carbon emissions in the home with credits expended against the overuse of heating and lighting, all monitored through the smart meters so actively promoted and encouraged by the power utilities. In an attempt to reduce methane emissions and achieve a Net Zero target, the consumption of meat and dairy products will be severely restricted through price and scarcity in the first instance, and then through a carbon tax. Under normal conditions this regime would be impossible to enforce but since the Everything List can assess information at the point of purchase, “meat shaming” will become a common experience at the hypermarket self-service payment points. Through the introduction of store cards, the public is already conditioned to expect a shopping experience tailored to our purchases - the Everything List will just integrate the data to make sure we make the right choices for a sustainable future.
But even this misses the point of the Everything List, because in a tokenised world, all assets are tradable and personal carbon units are no exception. You may have the units in your account to travel abroad but if you don’t have the CBDC tokens to make that dream a reality, what use are the carbon credits?
In the future you be able to sell your carbon units on the Carbon Credit market and exchange them for CBDC tokens or some other asset you require, such as food. Each individual will become a single unit of account in the new carbon economy with a total energy balance evened out across all the participants using a trading system. How do you think the CBDC rich will maintain a lifestyle which allows monthly flights abroad? They’ll access the carbon exchange and gain credits sourced from the CBDC poor. The same goes for credits required to cover the heating bill for the beach-view property and the 21 day aged rib-eye steak. So long as the overall carbon account balances and the Net Zero climate targets are achieved, these luxuries are permissible… but just not for you.
Although this might all sound a bit conspiratorial, of all of the possible scenarios enabled by the Everything List, this is the most likely. The concept of a personal carbon budget is the one that most frequently turns up in policy documents issued by think tanks and UN committees and has even found its way into the real world.
The Eco Benefits program for Visa cardholders includes a carbon calculator with offsetting options which encompasses pretty much all the features described above - just the enforcement is missing. Estimates are made of the carbon footprint on the purchase history and options are then provided to offset their carbon credits through a partnership with a third party exchange, Carbonplace. The mobile banking app from NatWest app also includes a carbon footprint tracker that estimates emissions from spending categories like transport and food and can offer carbon reduction tips. In both cases members receive extra rewards for sustainable behaviors instead of punitive punishments but no doubt that upgrade is in the pipeline. It’s all there ready to go, you just have to see it.
Tokenised Health and Education
Once a person is integrated into the Everything List the only question you need to ask is:
“What other aspects of an individual’s token can be commoditised, sold and traded?”
Turns out there’s quite a few.
If an investor can invest in fractions of a property in the expectation that the asset will provide return in the future, why shouldn’t you be able to do the same thing for a person?
After all, isn’t that the very definition of the education system? Investment up front in the expectation that the individual will become a useful contributor to the economic system in the future. This might appear to be a rather parsimonious attitude towards the noble undertaking of learning but it’s accurate nonetheless. At a practical level an investor might invest funds into an education token that pays out on the expectation of future earnings, a type of twenty year bond if you like. Just like personal loans, there are going to be good and bad bets hidden amongst these tokens, so to mitigate some of the risk they would be aggregated together with payments managed by smart contracts. Using the reverse logic, a pension is just an investment platform that uses current earnings to provide a future return. This could be achieved through a token system that cuts out the pension fund manager entirely.
Whatever the Everything List is eventually used for, you can be assured that personal health will play a large part. Once individual identity is tokenised, the very next data set to follow will be your medical records because, after selling weapons, selling pharmaceuticals is the next big business.
After a century of allopathic medicine based on drugs and surgery, the western world is faced with a chronically unhealthy population, with one in two people expected to suffer from cancer in their lifetimes and 12% of all adults diagnosed with prediabetes. When you add another 3% of the population with a diagnosis of coronary heart disease, the tidal wave of food intolerances, allergies and disorders in adolescents and the poor mental wellbeing of most adults, it’s clear that we have a problem.
In the UK the National Health Service (NHS) is incapable of meeting these challenges, partly because of the way it’s funded, but mainly because future population demographics will ensure that there will not be enough young healthy people to pay for the treatment of the old sick people. The UK National Insurance and the NHS health care system are both classic Ponzi operations, not investment schemes, and all Ponzi schemes fail in time. This is an inescapable fact and no government inquiry or restructuring plan can avert that collapse. Reviews only exist to buy time while the more practical options listed below are considered:
● Introduce policies that reduce the number of old sick people
● Deliver a different type of health service which drastically reduces costs
● Both of these options
The old Ponzi model will be formally abandoned at some point and a new health system will be introduced based on behaviour modification, preventive measures, diagnosis driven by artificial intelligence (AI), continuous testing and early intervention.
An important component of the new health system will be behaviour modification managed through carbon credits. For example, any patient diagnosed with diabetes will be unable to purchase food items that could aggravate the condition. Similarly, alcohol might be off limits for some patients and any contravention of the treatment plan would result in a levy against the person’s carbon account. Conversely sticking to the plan or reaching or exceeding goals for exercise, weight loss or mobility could be rewarded by additional credits.
The concept of pre-disease will be introduced in order to encourage people to participate in a program of continuous testing on the grounds that early intervention is in their best interest. Preventive care will be based on a program of mRNA-based vaccines and gene therapies that are already in the pipeline to tackle diabetes, cancer and heart disease.
Primary contact with the health system will be triaged though an AI system which will be able to offer advice and issue prescription drugs without requiring access to a healthcare professional. Virtual wards supported by electronic health devices will be introduced which will allow home care. Patients will wear a bio-monitor device that constantly records vital signs, while AI based analysis of blood pressure, heart rate and glucose levels will be used to monitor care and anticipate health outcomes. Secondary healthcare will be centralised and managed in metropolitan areas allowing medical centres in rural regions to be sold off.
For the patients it will seem that this new health business is free, in the same way that Google is free and Instagram is free. However, we all know that if a business does not have a product, you are the product. The amount and quality of data created by this system will create an immensely valuable asset and agreeing to share this data will be the cost of the treatment. When combined with other elements of the Everything List it would form a training set for AI that could underpin a control system that the early Technocrats could only dream about.
So long as the system is not dragged down by an ageing population that sequesters the available resources, all should be well. With this in mind it’s likely that an Assisted Dying scheme will be introduced into the UK based on the successful Canadian Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID) program that has been running since 2021. The proposal will create little controversy as the idea had been constantly promoted by the media over a number of years and had slowly entered the public’s consciousness as a compassionate outcome for the terminally ill… or just ill… or just unwell.
In time the program will be extended to include those suffering from mental health issues and birth defects. Finally, a voluntary scheme for the over 60’s will add Carbon Credits for named dependents and accelerated access to the social housing program. Problem solved.
Summary
The original theory of a technocratic world where all economic and social interaction was governed through scientific principles was doomed to remain just that - a theory - until technology actually allowed it. We are close to reaching that point.
In a technocratic future every resource in the world will be categorised and given an asset value on the Everything List. This resource ledger will provide the collateral to underpin the new financial system and, in its final form, will include all human life.
In exchange for the security and protection provided by this digital cocoon you will surrender the freedoms we take for granted today including the rights of ownership, travel, political representation and bodily autonomy. Once on the Everything List there will be no going back.
To avoid this future the trick will be to stay off the list.
Before then we need to take a short detour to examine how the walls of our new digital prison will be built from a technical perspective, looking at each aspect in turn, from the foundations to the lock and keys.