Just When You Think the Bovine Refuse
Could Not Get Any More Thick,
Along Comes Worldcoin and Its Absurdly Comical Orb,
Part 2
Few events have come around lately that really tap into my inner Marxism as has Worldcoin and its endlessly fascinating Orbs. Oh yes, I am an avowed Marxist — Groucho, not Karlo. So for a satirist, it is indeed priceless, when people line up to get their retinas scanned for a bit of crypto that may or may not have any value 6 months from now. Retina scans in exchange for free crypto. What could possibly go wrong?
"What exactly has gone wrong, here?" is now being asked by the government of Argentina. The Argentinian press release of August 08, 2023, announcing its investigation, stated that Worldcoin and the Orbs got on its radar when:
The case reached public notoriety in recent weeks due to the procedure of scanning the face and iris of numerous people in exchange for economic compensation in different parts of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires and the provinces of Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Mendoza and Black river.
France, too, is questioning the legality of Orb scanning in exchange for a bit of crypto. France's Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (CNIL) told Reuters' news agency, "The legality of this collection seems questionable, as do the conditions for storing biometric data." As Foreign Policy noted, August 8, 2023, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom have all opened investigations of Worldcoin and its data collection techniques. As reported by decrypt.co, July 25, 2023, the United Kingdom's, "Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which champions privacy for individuals," says that it and other "organizations need to conduct a Data Protection Impact Assessment before beginning to process "high risk" data." Ah, ok. Likewise, the agencies' counterparts in Germany are investigating Worldcoin. "The Bavarian State Office for Data Protection Supervision," has had an investigation of Worldcoin running since November 2022, reported Reuters, July 31, 2023. The German agency is concerned "that the project seeks to process "sensitive data at a very large scale" using new technology."
Then comes the "scathing assessment of Worldcoin" by other Kings of Crypto. An article that appeared in cryptoslate.com, July 11, 2023, brought some of the harshest criticism of Worldcoin and its Orb. The article quoted VanEck Advisor Gabor Gurbacs, who "questioned why investors would “throw money at nonsense.” Other investors see a potential swindle in the making. Some crypto pros forecast that Worldcoin might well become “the biggest dump-the-premine-on-retail in history.” Investopedia defines premining as "the creation of a quantity of blockchain-based tokens or "coins" before a cryptocurrency is launched to the public." The implication here is that all the hype surrounding Worldcoin and its Orbs is that is nothing more than a 21st century version of an elaborate pump and dump stock scheme.
Furthermore, the Orbs seem to discriminate against Asian eyes, and will not scan them, according to a report in Forbes August 10, 2023. Scannus Interruptus, What a drag! — and very much a possible racial discrimination case in the making. Moreover, that is 4 billion pairs of eyes driven out of the Orb market before it began. Excluding 59.22% of all the sets of human eyes available on Planet Earth does seem to negate the notion of every human being is eligible for a scan and a token. I think they call that a market contraction.
The most poignant commentary of the entire
Worldcoin affair comes from within the pages of Foreign Policy
cited above. 
Quoting Katitza Rodriguez, the Electronic Frontier
Foundation’s policy director for global privacy:
People have been creeped out by this for very understandable reasons... Even if they do have meaningful technical privacy protections, people should not be induced with promises of money to ‘consent’ to something that they don’t understand.
More than one commentator has described Worldcoin as "a solution in need of a problem." As Nathalie Maréchal, co-director of the privacy and data project at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, told Foreign Policy, “A technology or a product exists to solve a problem, so you have to define the problem that you’re attempting to solve." The problem Worldcoin attempts to solve is that there is no single universal signon for our digital world. But is that such a bad thing? Not according to Ms. Maréchal, who represents the thinking of most right thinking people when she told Foreign Affairs, "I don’t think it’s desirable to have a single sign-on for the entire world.” Amen, Sister!
Of course, for me it is the sheer silliness of the entire affair that I find the greatest value.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Gerald Reiff