Why is having a digital ID that captures your biometric information, that is central to accessing many services so amazing? Please elaborate. I guess if it was allowed to be purchased by a foreign actor, it's not so amazing after all...
They also make it easier for nation states to cut off access to public and private services when they don't like what a citizen is doing. It's wasn't normalized by choice - it was forced upon people. I'm sure NGOs and governments love it but that certainly doesn't mean that citizens do, which governments are supposed to serve. The paranoia is very valid. [1]
My in-laws in rural Gia Lai love having a biometric ID as does my extended family in rural Northwest India.
Before there was significant friction when setting up physical IDs and bank and government services simply couldn't scale down to the village level, which would make routine paperwork a multi-day affair.
Being able to do almost all government-related and banking paperwork over the Internet has legimately made it easier for my extended family in both VN and India to become banked, access public welfare without dealing with corrupt local apparatchiks, and accessing capital to think about making MSMEs.
As I mentioned above, this kind of performative activism is a luxury belief.
It's already possible to do government-related and banking paperwork over the Internet without digital identities linked to your biometrics. We do it every day in the United States.
You're also conveniently ignoring the fact that the system in Ethiopia is being used for far more than banking or government services - their website lists obtaining internet access, sim cards, transportation etc... These digital identities are being used to surveil the activity of citizens and lock anyone the government doesn't like out of commerce.
In the US most households have already had records and identities associated with themselves for decades. In most of the developing world, most people didn't even have a drivers license 20 years ago.
> their website lists obtaining internet access, sim cards, transportation etc... These digital identities are being used to surveil the activity of citizens and lock anyone the government doesn't like out of commerce.
So what?
Ethiopia is also a country with active insurgencies and security risks. The benefits of security and stability outweigh the alternative.
Look at China - it's progress in building digital public infrastructure is what helped it expand dramatically in the 2010s [0].
This is the same thing India is doing [1] (who implemented this project in Ethiopia btw), as is Brazil [2], and other Global South members. Even the EU is looking at adopting similar tenets as well [3].
Is expansion all that matters to you? What about human rights and personal sovereignty? Do you think China is a bastion of democracy and freedom? The benefits of security and stability do not outweigh the alternative when authoritarian governments decide to curb stomp the natural rights of people that don't want to comply with their agendas. You sound like an individual who would gladly take the mark of the beast if it was offered to you. Count me out (of this back and forth as well).
I care about expanding public service delivery capacity. In developing countries, the only cheap and efficient manner to do so is via DPI.
The only countries that escaped the middle income trap have either been subsidized by EU development grants, oil exports, or US largess.
For countries where none of those are the option, you need to make do with what you have.
> The benefits of security and stability do not outweigh the alternative when authoritarian governments decide to curb stomp the natural rights of people that don't want to comply with their agendas
When the decision is between luxury beliefs or survival, and in a country like Ethiopia whose developmental indicators are comparable to Afghanistan, the latter will always win.
I wonder why their developmental indicators are so poor? Perhaps it's because of NGOs like the IMF and World Bank and the loans they issue to these nations and the structural adjustments that keep these nations in cycles of poverty. Amazingly it's the same NGOs that are handing out money to implement digital identities. I'm noticing a pattern here...
> IMF and World Bank and the loans they issue to these nations and the structural adjustments that keep these nations in cycles of poverty
IMF led reforms in the 1990s are what allowed PRC, Vietnam, India, and Bangladesh to start breaking out of the cycle of poverty that trapped their then developmental peers like Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Pakistan.
Also, the IMF and WB are not NGOs. Heck, countries like China and India are some of the largest shareholders in both.
> I wonder why their developmental indicators are so poor
Limited institutional capacity because most countries in the world were either in the midst of or recently ended major civil wars or conventional wars in the 1980s-90s.
Which is the situation that led to the conflict in Ukraine in 2013/14 - an IMF loan that was up for renewal with harsh structural adjustments.
The IMF / WB consistently consult with NGOs and allow them to heavily influence their policies. You can point to four success stories of countries accepting IMF loans and recovering. There are 86 to 91 developing countries as of late 2025 that are still indebted to the IMF, especially in Africa.
It's a monetary tool for Western hegemony. Pretending it's anything else is disingenuous.
It sounds great until all of an individual's activity online and offline starts being tracked through it, because transactions require a single digital ID (potentially even accessing the internet). And then, when the government decides it doesn't like what you're doing, it's amazingly easy for them to cut off your access to essential services like banking, transportation, etc...
Because your physical ID isn't scanned every time you access your bank account, and your bank (hopefully) doesn't check with some central database the government controls before issuing you an account. With a digital ID controlled by your government, that is required for accessing your account on the other hand...
We're not talking about just governments, we're talking about the private sector having to verify a digital identity tied to your biometrics before allowing you to participate in commerce. This is a whole different ball game than having to present a physical ID before being granted access to government services.
The latter is quite normal and the former is extremely dystopian.
What about when obtaining a SIM card or internet access? What about when purchasing a bus or train or plane ticket? Do you think you should have to identify yourself with a digital ID to withdraw your own money from your own bank account? Your average citizen isn't on a sanction list or a politically exposed persons list. In a national digital ID system they will be on a list regardless of whether or not they've done anything wrong, and the government can easily block their access if they don't like what they've been doing. Governments should not have this kind of control over the lives of ordinary citizens.
Not to mention the fact that NGOs like the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation are funding this. It's proof that it's more than just nation states that want to implement these digital ID systems. Why should the world bank or Bill Gates have any influence on who can and cannot withdraw their own money?
Ethiopia is in the process of implementing a nationwide digital ID program called Fayda ID. Fayda ID is an implementation of the open source platform MOSIP [1].
The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation is a strategic partner and funder of the MOSIP technology platform. [2]
The digital ID is required by citizens for access to banking, obtaining a drivers license, obtaining SIM cards, and other essential services citizens rely on. [3]
The government of Ethiopia is now receiving funding from NGOs such as the World Bank to implement their national digital ID program. [4]
MOSIP is Indian [0][1][2]. India is exporting multiple different stacks for Digital Public Infrastructure.
This project in Ethiopia is itself being pushed by the Indian government [3][4] and is part of India's larger "Global South" strategy [5].
I guess the question you should be asking is why the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has becoming intertwined with Indian geopolitical power projection.
It's an Indian government project though - the entire MOSIP project was developed in an Indian public university [0] and is directly tied with India's "global south" strategy [1]. Plus the majority of it's governance board is associated with the Indian government or Tata Group.
Digital Public Infrastructure in the "Global South" is India's attempt at building a digital version of OBOR [2].
Since I had to look it up, OBOR = One Belt One Road = Belt and Road Initiative, which is China's project for building infrastructure in developing countries to promote tighter economic integration with China.
It's a more literal translation of the Chinese name "一带一路".
What values? What intentions? These people grin and laugh while talking about AI causing massive disruptions to livelihoods on a global scale. At least one of them has even gone so far as to make jokes about AI killing all humans at some point in the future.
These people are at the very least sociopaths and I think psychopaths would be a better descriptor. They're doing everything in their power to usher in the Noahide new world order / beast system and it's couldn't be more obvious to anyone that has been paying attention.
It's also amusing they talk about democratic values and America in the same sentence. Every single one of our presidents, sans Van Buren, is a descendant of King John Lackland of England. We have no chain of custody for our votes in 2026 - we drop them into an electronic machine and are told they are factored into the equation of who will be the next president. Pretending America is a democracy is a ruse - we are not. Our presidents are hand-picked and selected, not elected. Anyone saying otherwise is ill informed or lying.
Military and intelligence agencies have been involved in Silicon Valley for its entire existence. They were instrumental in helping to create the first computers. The internet was a DARPA project. Facebook sprung up from a failed DARPA project called lifelog. Google received funding from the military industrial complex / intelligence agencies early in its life. These companies have always had a dual-purpose, and I highly doubt the major players in AI are any different.
Material science can't explain how quantities give rise to qualities, or phenomenal consciousness. This is why materialism is bunk - because it doesn't explain much at all. Using it as a litmus test for whether something can or cannot exist is flawed reasoning IME.
All of science depends on materialism. Modern neuroscience strongly suggests that all experience has a material basis. Thus, the hypothesis that whatever “experience” or “qualia” arises from is in fact material seems to be well supported, though not yet conclusive.
No actually, all science does not depend on materialism. Prior to material science being a thing, there were the occult sciences which are still practiced around the world today and most definitely fall under the category of science. One can form a hypothesis, make observations, experiment and base their reasoning upon evidence.
Like you said, it's a hypothesis and you still can't explain the hard problem of consciousness via material science. Just because people think that if they slap enough neurons together they'll achieve consciousness, doesn't mean it's true. It's not well supported because there's no evidence that this is the case, just conjecture.
I agree science doesn't depend on materialism but experimental observation suggests consciousness is a materialistic effect as it's affected by material substances like LSD and ideas of a conscious spirit separate from the body like ghosts don't find much evidence.
We have no idea what brings matter into existence, because material science only takes into consideration what we can measure. We base our understanding of the material world solely on that. We can only measure an infinitesimal amount of the stuff that's out there, and anything we can't measure we come up with blanket terms to describe - like dark energy or dark matter.
What if all matter and our shared reality, is a manifestation of the mind? What if we are all a single mind going through dissociative identity disorder and each of us is like an altar of a person that has multiple personalities? There are all sorts of possible explanations for phenomenal consciousness that material science shrugs off because it limits what is possible to only the matter that we are able to observe and measured, which again is a tiny fraction of all the known matter in the universe.
Edit: All of these downvotes to my original and subsequent reply are quite amusing. HN is honestly a terrible website - people just downvoting anything they don't want to hear. Why even read the website? Just speak your own thoughts into a tape recorder and play them back. Same effect.
The popular narrative must be preserved at all costs. No room for dissenting opinions on this website!
Or for noticing that Discord, Roblox, OpenAI, Anthropic, Persona, and Palantir all have Zionist Israeli founders / co-founders / CEOs / funding. Or that 98% of US congress members received donations from AIPAC or that the US president is a staunch Zionist / supporter of Israel.
In before I get downvoted and flagged for speaking the truth and noticing patterns.
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