The Beast Cometh
In the shadowed scrolls of Revelation, the Beast rises not with horns and flames, but with a mark on the right hand or forehead—without it, no buying, no selling, no breath of freedom in the empire’s grip. Fast-forward to our pixelated apocalypse, October 2025, and behold the digital ID: not etched in flesh, but etched in code, promising salvation through seamless logins while whispering chains of surveillance.
It’s the BritCard in the UK, the Real ID in America, the eID in the EU—a velvet glove over an iron fist, sold as efficiency but birthed in the desire for control. As a psychotherapist who’s spent years untangling the knots of human psyches twisted by societal pressures, I’ve seen how small surrenders snowball into soul-crushing conformity. Digital IDs? They’re the next avalanche, burying individuality under data sand dunes. And like any good shrew—those sharp-nosed truth-sniffers from my Substack’s namesake—we’d do well to paw at the dirt before it buries us all.
The sales pitch is sickly sweet: heads of state and tech titans croon about stopping illegal migration, personal convenience and slashing fraud. Keir Starmer, Britain’s fresh-faced PM, unveiled his BritCard scheme on September 26, 2025, mandating it for every working British citizen by 2029. “It will make it tougher to work illegally,” he declared, as if borders weren’t guarded for centuries without apps recording your every step. Across the pond, U.S. states push mobile driver’s licenses (MDLs) tucked into Apple and Google wallets, hailed as privacy protectors yet laced with Real ID microchips that scream “track me.” Globally, the EU’s Digital Identity Wallet rolls out, with new implementing regulations published in July 2025, a “secure” portal for services that conveniently forgets how these “secure” systems invite the world’s sharpest thieves.
But peel back the glossy veneer, and the rot festers. These aren’t tools for tidy living; they’re Trojan horses for total oversight. As Michael Shellenberger warns in his Public substack,
Centralizing data through digital IDs, which could link social media, vaccine, and banking information would actually undermine cybersecurity. Because having separate logins for our financial health, shopping, banking, credit card, and all of our other data makes sure that if one of them is hacked, they aren’t all hacked.
An Oxford IT whiz echoes the dread: “All of your information in one place is a hacker’s dream.” Imagine your vaccine history, bank balance, and social media rants fused into one juicy target. The 2017 Equifax hack exposed 147 million souls; scale that to a national ID, and you’re not just leaking credit scores—you’re hemorrhaging lives. Cybersecurity experts warn Starmer’s plan crafts “an enormous hacking target,” with breaches potentially doxxing millions in a single swipe. India’s Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric ID with 1.3 billion enrolled, has leaked data on 1.1 billion citizens since 2018—corruption, ghost identities, and black-market sales galore. If that’s the blueprint, count me out of the beta test.
Lurking deeper is the behaviourist blueprint, a nod to B.F. Skinner’s boxes where pigeons peck for pellets—and peck harder to avoid the zap. China’s social credit system, refined in 2025 with tougher penalties on “dishonest” businesses and guidelines to “boost high-quality development,” dangles carrots like priority hospital queues for the compliant, while whacking sticks like travel bans for the “untrustworthy.” One study pegged a third of its “offences” as mere moral faux pas, not crimes. Shellenberger spotlights Oracle’s Larry Ellison, the second-richest man alive, salivating over unified data lakes:
Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.
Ellison’s not just talking; he’s funding the frenzy, pumping £257 million into Tony Blair’s institute, which ballooned to employing 900 staff members across 45 countries. Meanwhile, Bill Gates shills AI censors in his Netflix documentary, targeting vaccine skeptics like yesterday’s lunatic heretics. In the UK, Big Brother Watch worries that even a “limited” ID turns into a surveillance gateway, potentially intruding where laws dare not tread.
The backlash? It’s a roar from the margins, shrews gnawing at the machine. A YouGov poll post-announcement tanked support for BritCards to -14% net, from +35% in the summer—a “reverse Midas touch” turning policy to fool’s gold—junk. Over 350,000 Brits signed a petition against it, while cabinet rumours call it “expensive and complicated,” risking Labour’s left flank. Bipartisan fury erupts: Tories decry Big Brother redux, Lib Dems howl privacy foul, even Elon Musk blasts it as a “dystopian nightmare.” On X, the chorus swells: “This isn’t about immigration control, it’s about control of YOU,” one user snaps. Amnesty International flags discrimination risks, marginalizing the vulnerable—migrants, the elderly, the unplugged—who’ll be ghosted from services without an ID scan. Northeastern academics debunk the migration myth: IDs won’t stop mass immigration; history proves illegal crossings happen due to poor restraints and weak laws, IDs or not.
America’s no innocent bystander. Real IDs, enforced federally since May 7, 2025, embed chips that link your wallet to health records, and poof: a Gates-Ellison wet dream. California’s Gavin Newsom greenlit MDLs last year, one chain-link in the surveillance necklace. Shellenberger warns we’re “rapidly moving to the exact same digital ID surveillance and control system as the British,” First Amendment be damned when algorithms whisper dissent. The EU’s Chat Control Act, voting imminent, mandates backdoors in private messages under “security” banners—end of encrypted whispers, dawn of digital diaries for the state. Proponents like the Tony Blair Institute peddle push-polls, priming suckers with “inconvenience” sob stories before slipping in the app euphemism. Honest? Hardly. It’s framing as foreplay to the full seduction.
From my chair in the therapy room, I’ve watched clients unravel under far less. Digital IDs amplify all this unravelling to a societal scale—a panopticon of sorts, a design of prison where all prisoners can be observed by one guard. A society where “best behavior” isn’t a choice, but is determined by an authoritarian code. Vulnerable groups? The 17% of over-65 Brits who are tech-shy risk exclusion from pubs to polls. Marginalized migrants, already shadows, get branded with exclusion algorithms. And the cash cow? Tech behemoths like Oracle rake trillions in micro-fees per transaction, governments rake in billions in contracts for the “analysis.” Starmer swears no personal payday, but the stench of Blair’s billions lingers.
Yet here’s the shrew’s silver lining: resistance ferments in the fringes. Petitions surge, polls pivot, X erupts in defiant memes. The UK has scrapped ID schemes before—the 2006 £300 million flop, axed in 2010 amid 58% public opposition. Free speech warriors, privacy hounds, and everyday skeptics must howl louder. Email grants to investigative packs like Shellenberger’s crew; shun the shiny apps; demand decentralized proofs over data dumps. In a world of sheep bleating for shepherds, be the shrew: nose to the ground, claws out, unmasking the beast before it brands us all.
Ah, but the beast doesn’t slink in on cloven hooves—it arrives via update notification, with a nudge: “For your convenience.” Convenience is the opiate of the tracked masses; wake up, sheep, before the ID app’s ping becomes your prison sentence.