Cool down with your Digital Dystopia, bro

Cool down with your Digital Dystopia, bro

Updated: October 6, 2025

Manufacturing lines come to a standstill. Airport flights get delayed. A healthcare provider gets hacked. A telco provider gets pwned. An EV charger provider suffers a loss of data. The list of fabulous and scandalous goes on and on. You would think this is the plot line of a new cyber-action thriller starring Jason Statham and Steven Seagal. Nope. This is just the last month of IT security bloopers in the sordid reality we live in.

To call the state of digital affairs appalling is an insult to the word appalling. Catastrophically, apocalyptically abysmal would be more like it. You would say, maybe we need to reassess the situation? Maybe put the brakes on the digital "revolution" a little, try to make it more manageable? Ah, no. Quite the contrary! The powers that be are even more keen on taking away your analog controls and replacing them with digital crap. Welcome to the ever-hackable future.

Made with cmatrix in Linux.

GICE - Great Idiot Conditioning Experiment

This experiment started about 15 years ago. It will continue for at least 15 years more. The goal is simple. Make people ever more reliant on smartphones. The reasons are plenty. Smartphone ecosystems are profitable, the user has little to no control, and there are troves of valuable data to be mined and profiled. This is why everyone is trying so hard to make you use smartphones, whether you want it or not.

• To access various online portals, you are often asked to scan a QR code, a shitty pictogram of illiteracy only bested by ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Because QR code means you must use a smartphone app/scanner, for all practical purposes.
• Many banks are retiring always-offline, super-secure physical hardware tokens for login and are replacing them with always-online soft tokens in the form of crappy mobile apps. They also have the audacity of calling this change "more secure". And of course, you must use a smartphone to do this.
• Smartphones on wheels? Yes. EV cars are de-facto smartphones. Many have their own "app" to use with lots of things, including car locking and charging. Another solution that only truly benefits the vendors, never the little consumer. Think about it. EV cars have higher cost, lower range (even more so in cold weather), much longer refueling (recharging time), and shoddy recharging infrastructure in the best case. There is no data as to what will happen with battery packs 10-15 years from now, as no pack has yet existed that long. All of these are drawbacks. Advantages to the consumer? Ha.
• Passkeys? Yes, let's make sure the consumer MUST use a smartphone to log into sites. Their devices will not be a cumbersome single point of failure. Not at all. But companies being hacked and losing customer data every day? Nope. Passkeys, that's the answer to every data leak problem!

This is just a quick, short list of stupid, pointless, inconvenient and costly solutions peddled as a replacement to totally reasonable, cheaper analog amenities we use today. Slowly, step by step, the idea is to make everyone have to use a smartphone all the time. Not choose if they want to. Have to.

Because the next step is ...

Digital currencies LOLZ

The concept of digital money sounds weird - and also unnecessary. First, you already have digital money. Online transactions are digital. Your credit or debit card, digital. And if you associate these cards with your wallet on your smartphone, more digital. So why create yet another digital solution?

The purpose of digital currencies is to make finance more regulated for governments. Printing and minting money costs ... money. A lot of physical tenders gets lots and damaged. It is also hard to trace reliably, and hence, account for when it comes to taxation (and evasion thereof).

Whether you agree with the above or not, there's merit to it. Some merit. Play along. Assume good intentions. But then, a twist! Guess what. How do you think digital currencies will be implemented?

• Answer A: Government-issued hardware token/card that you use for payments in some manner?
• Answer B: Private-company-made smartphones?

Hi hi. And so, we get into the familiar space. If "everyone" uses smartphones, why not give them the "convenience" of using those devices as a wallet, right? Sounds okay, except spend more than three seconds thinking about the concept, and you will realize you already have this functionality with existing banking cards. There's nothing new and useful or novel in this technology.

Except, one day, eventually, it can be used as an excuse to retire all cash money.

If you live in a developed country, you are probably using your banking card all the time, assuming everything is nice and rosy. If you live in a less developed country, then you are familiar with thriving gray and black economies, running parallel to the official financial systems, and backed by barter, cash and goods.

In countries with a high level of corruption, digital money could, in theory, help reduce financial wastage. In practice, it will merely push people to new forms of barter. If paper notes aren't available, some other physical item will become the new currency. Technology does not fix corruption.

Back to developed countries. You may think cash is no longer necessary. But then, look at say Sweden, one of the pioneers of digitization. It didn't take long for the country to U-turn on its promise of cashless Utopia, and even have the country's intelligence service and even the king go live on national TV (plus send pamphlets to people's home addresses) and tell everyone to stockpile food and cash in case of ... cough, unprecedented situations. Yes, food and cash.

And now, let's briefly examine the advantages and disadvantages of cash, cards and digital money:

• Cash cannot be hacked, it won't break if you drop it, it does not need charging. Many new notes are also waterproof, fireproof and cannot be easily torn. Plus, if you really care about it, made from recycled materials.
• Cards cannot be hacked (but supporting infrastructure can), they won't break easily, don't need charging.
• Digital money requires a (smartphone) wallet. If it's digital and online, it can be hacked, and needs electricity to work. Your smartphone is, once again, a single point of failure. It will also break if dropped, 5/7 times.

Furthermore, digital money can be tracked. Sure, you can baked anonymity and privacy into the currency. That's fine. The problem isn't the money. It's the "tool" you use to pay with that's 100% traceable. Your smartphone.

Let's say you withdraw 100 dollars from an ATM. You can do with this money as you please. You can store it under your mattress. You can buy food and pay bills or order a coffee in a local shop. You have some semblance of control and freedom in how you utilize your own money.

In reality, your freedom space is very small. There are withdrawal caps on cash. You cannot send more than a certain amount of money between bank accounts without explicit approval by the banking institution, on both sides. You cannot physically carry more than a certain amount across country borders. But you can do as you please within the tight confines of your limited peasantly freedom.

Now, if you use 100 dollars worth of digital money, card or some future token equivalent, this is 100% traceable. Even if a token isn't directly associated with you, the transaction can be traced to very specific location and time, and then correlated to other electromagnetic signals active at that same moment and place. Since your smartphone has a unique identifier and number, it's trivial figuring out who did what, when and where.

You could say, so what? Why do you care if [insert whatever institution] knows what you're doing? The answer to that is, why should they really, deep down? Are we all participating in some secret vouyeristic reality show? We know from all the big tech how much they love data, and how valuable your data is. Why shouldn't you be "paid" for giving all that up voluntarily? Why not be rewarded for giving up a certain level of privacy, which is, as it happens, in most civilized places, a human right, let's not forget that. Also, why would you give up a right for nothing in return?

Indeed, it would seem, this concept of digital money and tracking goes directly against the nature of individualistic societies. For instance, a recent major research into digital currencies conducted in Europe shows that the more people know and learn about digital currencies, the more they are opposed to their use and implementation. In 2023, about 45% of the surveyed people (from a group of almost 20,000 individuals) were okay with the concept of CBDC, but a mere year later, in 2024, that number has dropped to about 40%, despite significant increase in awareness. This was done in the EU, so attitudes and needs in other regions may be completely different, I don't know. Still, it shows that people are not so easily sold on this future cashless "Utopia". Even the normies can understand the implications. No need to spin up any great conspiracies. The major concerns are fairly simple: privacy and security.

Funnily enough, one of the conclusions of this working paper is that there should be more messaging and repeated messaging about digital money. In essence, gentle brainwashing. Sorry, "education".

But forget all this resistance to "new" things. Forget the privacy implications. Forget the fact you will have less control over your financial assets, whatever little control you have now. All of those are highly important, but there's one overriding argument in my mind:

You will need a "smartphone" to use digital money.

And this is the crux of the whole problem.

You are issued digital money by a government. And you need a device to use it. As I already mentioned earlier, but bears repeating. What sort of device will you have?

• Answer A: This will be a government-issued device, given to you free of charge?
• Answer B: This will be a costly proprietary smartphone made by a private company?

And that's THE problem. All of it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Today, if you want to function (in most countries), you can leave your home with some cash in hand, and that's it. You don't need to carry your phone around, if you don't want to (or you don't have one). If you're elderly and you struggle with tech, you can get by with cash. You do not rely on any private company making plastic and metal and software to live. You can get along with whatever your government provided.

You wanna do online banking? Fine. But if you don't, you don't have to. This is very important to remember.

Tomorrow, you WILL have to carry a shitty phone along, whether you like it or not, and do all sorts of QR code rituals to pay for stuff. You will have "charge anxiety" because if your phone battery runs flat, you will not be able to buy things. Like some peasant following a new religious ceremony, just like EV car drivers, you will need to carefully plan your "journey" so you don't run out of electrons. Today, your card and cash will never run out of proverbial juice. You are only limited by your own wealth. Your phone may suddenly stop working, due to a hardware failure, or due to a software bug in some shitty app, and boy are those a-plenty.

You can easily have three or five debit or credit cards, each issued separately. Most people will not carry five smartphones will them. So effectively, they will have all their digital money tools on one device, which can easily be lost, stolen, damaged, or run out of power, to say nothing of data harvesting and profiling. You will also be forced to buy new phones all the time, because digital tools will most likely only support the latest and greatest version of whatever. This already is the case with mobile banking apps. You will need to buy a new Android or iPhone because one tiny app demands it. Reverse economy FTW!

There's also the tech gap. People born in the 50s aren't that Internet-savvy. People born in the 70s have an aversion for touch tech. People born in the 90s and later still haven't reached the grumpy years when they start resisting stupid solutions. But it will happen one day. And they will too be forced to recon with shitty new tech that's made for 20-year-olds with a fancy dark theme and pale fonts and similar crap.

And you won't have a choice. This is much like the 2035 EV mandate nonsense. No charging infrastructure at your poor place of living? Cope harder, peasant.

Today, you can get along with no phone or a cheap dumb phone and some cash. A decade or two from now, you will have to actively spend money to maintain your own mini IT infrastructure to be able to conduct any sort of financial transactions. This is the paradox of the whole thing.

And it gets worse. Smartphones are connected online tools, heavily reliant on "cloud" setups. Now, look at the current sorry state of affairs in the IT security world. Most online services are not secure. Far from it. But you can get by without relying (too much) on them, because the world gives you options not to use them. I'm not saying you should avoid the online world, and some digital convenience is fine. But you have the utility, the freedom to avoid most of it, because of the security implications.

Now, imagine how much worse it will get when everything goes digital? Once every smartphone IS a digital wallet, what do you think will happen? Less hacking or more hacking? Hue hue.

Conclusion

I cannot blame the common human. They have no idea how crappy all this so-called modern tech is. But I do blame the nerds. Every time a person with tech backgrounds willingly scans a QR code, installs a useless app on their touch device, buys a car with only touch controls for essential functions, sets up a passkey, or pairs a device with Bluetooth, they are actively contributing to the world where the smartphone becomes ever more present in everyday life. And the smartphone is the manifestation of everything that's wrong with IT security today. The whole cloud thing. The whole app thing. The whole stratum of buzzword-happy managers who think they are top dogs because their lame product runs on some fancy tech stack in someone else's data center somewhere. Everyone's cool. Until that crap gets hacked. And it gets hacked, all the time.

If things continue the way they are, the future will be horrible. I repeat, horrible. I'm not talking about any 1984 scenario (although that can happen). Forget that. Focus on the everyday security and sustainability of the digital infrastructure. The cost of living will soar not because the prices will go up, but because the disruption to services will become so frequent, so severe, it will be impossible to maintain high living standards. Right now, there's a mix of digital and analog. And the digital part is already imploding. The hacking incidents are so many, it's ridiculous. Ri-di-cu-lous. Now imagine where EVERYTHING is digitized. My oh my, what a shitshow that will be.

I'm not saying we should go back to the stone era. I'm not advocating for any sort of tech asceticism. But I am advocating for slow, grueling progress with focus on long-term sustainability of systems. Critical infrastructure must not be online. Period. That means less digital crap, not more. I don't see any practical way the future world can maintain a sustainable fully digital economy. It's easy doing big banking transactions the way they are today. That's not the issue. It's the small consumers. Take any country, any, and just give it 48 hours where no one can buy bread or water because the digital payment system is offline, and see what happens. Now, throw war into the mix. There's your cyber-action blockbuster.

We're done. If you want the future to be ever so slightly more manageable, say no to bullshit sci-fi ideas that have no place in the hard, gritty reality. Lastly, this message is not for the ordinary consumer, the clueless peasant. It's for you, the over-enthused tech nerd. Remember this next time you reach out for the overrated smart calculator in your pocket.

Cheers.