An influential network of economists and billionaire-backed foundations have laid out this nefarious plan for a futures market in human capital data with the help of complicit academics and think tanks (here, here, here, here, and here). They did it piece by piece, so gradually that few realize the dangers that loom on the horizon. Sitting in oak-paneled rooms and minimalist C-Suites, these change agents bask in entitlement, gloating over the fact that people today needing services (including education) must submit to invasive tracking.
Their profit will be derived from speculation on the debt associated with “processing” children through “evidence-based” interventions, not unlike value chains associated with car parts, soybeans, and smartphones. Children will be triaged and risk-scored through an ever more tightly woven network of digital monitoring. That data will shape markets in human commodities, just as the insurance sector emerged to sustain deadly middle passage maritime trade. In the coming world of ubiquitous technological surveillance, spiritual death may be just as likely as physical death. I doubt they’ll be issuing insurance policies on that, but you never know.
Monopoly capital justifies its profit taking in “human capital performance bonds” using fabricated future cost-offsets, like the carbon credit trading infrastructure devised by social entrepreneur Bill Drayton, now at Ashoka. In this commodification scheme, future life outcomes are the mechanism of trade. People attempting to navigate life in a society where the dignity of living wage work and participatory parity have been denied, are thus compelled to generate data as they make their way through bureaucratic, automated social service and education systems.
Interoperable data warehouses are needed for hedge fund managers to run their commodities futures game. That, in fact, is where the real money is to be made. See the images below featuring Santa Clara County California’s Data Zone and Silicon Valley Regional Data Trust, a prototype investors want to implement nationwide via the National Interoperability Collaborative. It was initially funded through the National Science Foundation, but the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative dropped a sizable grant to expand it throughout the county in 2016. View the Datazone “Impact” slideshare here.
Datazone now holds data from 44 school districts serving 300,000 children. You see how education, social service, health, behavioral health, foster care, and judicial involvement are co-mingled. While the claim is that the data permits service providers to more effectively (cheaply) help children and families, in reality the inoperability allows them to enact the cost-off set calculations, the ones embedded in the 168 pages paid for by Jones aka “Robin Hood.”
If you hear about social service, education, health, and juvenile prison and probation data being pulled together in one place, that should be a red flag. I fear the day universal digital identity systems fully interface with Blockchain smart contracts and privatized public services. When the next-gen slave ship draws up on the beach, you can be sure the investors disembarking will extend greetings and gifts of public programs that are “open,” “transparent,” and exhibit great “efficacy.” And all that flowery language will be thrown out to provide cover for the chains of digital identity, the rails upon which the entire vicious system will run.
That’s what the Gates is working on with his “Level One Project” and the “Better Than Cash Alliance.” The goal is to control the poor using mobile money platforms that are fully integrated with government and aid providers. At that point all economic activities can be factored into ongoing risk assessment and behavioral management.
In a “pay for success” world, the burden is continually placed on the individual to make the “good choice.” As if you can somehow solve poverty with an app delivering “just-in-time” nudges. No structural analysis is ever applied, for good reason. To do so would force financial predators to look in the mirror and see themselves for who they really are.
This new bondage trafficks in digital profiles, reducing the essence of a person to a metric: pre-k now or jail later, English proficiency now or high school drop out later, behavioral interventions now or addiction later, healthy habits now or diabetes later, fiscal prudence now or homelessness later. It is the measurement that matters, the counting, and the data, not the person’s humanity.
The value of the poor is in their data, and they will live or die by their digital dust.
This the third in a series:
Introduction: Could Newsom’s “Choose Children” Budget Advance Digital Slavery in CA?
Part Two: Accounting Ledgers Connect the Dots: From Jamestown to Harlem and Beyond
Part Four: Could “Community Schools” Be Today’s Sugar Refineries?
Part Five: Will We See A Pre-K TARP (Toxic Assets Relief Program) In 20 Years?
Part Six: Stanley Druckenmiller and Paul Tudor Jones: The Billionaire Networks Behind Harlem’s Human Capital Lab
I wish to express my appreciation for the research of Dr. Justin Leroy, Dr. Tim Scott, and Dr. Calvin Schermerhorn, which informed my understanding of finance and racial capitalism. To better understand our present situation of “surveillance capitalism,” I encourage you to explore their important contributions.
