What is blockchain?
Those in power will say:
Blockchain is a secure way for people to own and control their digital footprint, the data they create living through devices and wearable / implantable / ingestible technology in “smart” environments. In essence, it is a digital ledger that keeps track of EVERYTHING across a decentralized computer network that is said to be permanent and secure. Picture a real time account book that keeps track not only of your monetary assets (bitcoin – this is how much folks understand blockchain); but also civil records like birth certificates, marriage certificates, and court proceedings; voting records; property ownership; certifications and education credentials; health information, including DNA, bioinformatics, and data from wearable technologies; public benefit access like food stamps; and now even one’s movements (geolocation data) and social interactions via QR code health passports and contact tracing.
What I say:
Whether we know it or not, when we agree to have our lives linked to blockchain, we are agreeing to live in a behaviorist panopticon. In exchange for convenience and limited privileges, we give up our free will. The future being handed to us is one that will be shaped by surveillance, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, machine learning, and feedback loops. We risk swapping our vibrant human spirits, beautiful in their passionate creativity and flawed vulnerability, for sanitized digital twins that will be managed as human capital by callous technocrats to profit social impact investors. Before we walk through the door of digital identity, realize it opens onto a maze designed to disorient, confuse, and control us.
The reason it’s important to talk about this now is because states are setting up task forces on blockchain government. Illinois convened a blockchain working group in 2018. California issued Blockchain in California: A Road Map this July. An August webinar sponsored by the Rhode Island Israel Collaborative on their big-data Covid reopen partnership started with a discussion about the timeliness of moving to blockchain systems and digital governance. All of this is being spurred by the push to virtualize social interactions in response to the lockdowns we’ve experienced over the past six months. With this great rush to adopt emerging technologies, it is important to grasp the bigger picture.
The NAACP spent time considering the racial implications of this technology in 2019 and adopted a resolution that opposed linking blockchain identity to receiving any public service, including education. That resolution passed first in California and later at the July 2019 national meeting in Detroit. You can see the resolution below, pages 62 and 63 of this document, NAACP Resolutions Ratified By the National Board of Directors At Its October 2019 Board of Directors Meeting. A year after this resolution was passed, students in Chula Vista, CA are being asked to have their blood tested with results put on blockchain as a condition of accessing face-to-face public education. The plan is to administer cartridge-based blood tests in school settings where they are not protected by HIPPA and put the information onto the Adiona blockchain system, which was developed by Kahala Biosciences. This is NOT OK.
We need for people to understand blockchain transcripts are one part of a much larger agenda tied to a global economic reboot. A goal of the World Economic Forum is to create a literal Internet of Bodies using 5G (soon 6G) and “smart city” Internet of Things sensors. Whether people are linked to blockchain via Covid biometric health passports or education transcripts, the result will be the same. We are crossing the threshold not just into surveillance capitalism, but into full-on biocapitalism. Our bodies mined for data that will run massive futures markets in human capital. They need blockchain identity, and they need it brought to scale. However until that happens, there is still time to change course and fight for a humane economic system that respects all children of the earth and future generations.
Blockchain will not empower the people, it will turn them into digital commodities. Secured on ledgers, the plan is for us to be scored, sifted, and sorted in a brutish program of fierce competition and precariousness. Make no mistake, the oligarchs value the reliability of robots over the cunning of humans. Universal Basic Income, and digital vouchers for education, housing and healthcare are poison apples, not “solutions” meant to help the masses. Blockchain is a deception. If we take the bait, we’ll end up “playable” characters in an augmented reality “game of life” cooked up by the CIA and defense contractors to benefit hedge funds (webinar on that here). Don’t fall for it.
Ten things you need to know about blockchain:
1. Blockchain provides the “trust” infrastructure that the billionaire class needs to advance Globalization 4.0. The next era of globalization will revolve around platform service and knowledge work and eventually telepresence labor employing remote control robotics. For additional information read this interview with economist Richard Baldwin on the impact of globalization and robotics (globotics) in white collar jobs. This is the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This is the World Economic Forum’s Covid global economic reset.
2. The labor force will be reduced to atomized skill sets, so artificial intelligence can efficiently sort individuals to meet the rapidly changing needs of free-market digital labor. Low-wage, micro-work contracts will be offered to those with the highest reputation scores. In the United States, jobs have been assigned skill codes by the Department of Labor. This system managed by O*Net will be the basis for the regional planned economies laid out in the Workforce Opportunities and Innovation Act guidelines. Below are excerpts from the regional workforce plan for southeastern Pennsylvania where I live. A high-growth area will be the gig economy. Most jobs will pay sub-standard wages that will not allow families to maintain a decent standard of living in a high-cost urban housing market.
Source – Page 15
Source – Page 13
3. The Davos crowd envisions the “future of work” as a vast task-rabbit economy where people from around the world compete against one another on digital platforms in real time. Blockchain “transcripts” will be needed to sift and sort children and workers based on demonstrated standardized skills. That is the “trust” part. Almost all professions will lack stability, benefits, and retirement opportunities.
Those in power imagine a day when no bricks and mortar schools remain. Children instead acquire skills Pokemon-Go-style in community-based settings like museums. They call these “learning ecosystems” or “cities of learning” where knowledge acquisition must be performed on a digital device for it to be made discoverable as a blockchain credential and used as impact data to fuel human capital bond markets. Read about this vision in the Ford Foundation-backed white paper Building the Future of Education: Museums and the Learning Ecosystem from 2014. The screenshot below states today’s schools are not preparing children for this planned “gig economy.”
4. They will call it “lifelong learning,” and everyone must anticipate being constantly re-skilled. Credentials will be uploaded to a learning record store. People will be made redundant, always needing new sets of skills that will require financing (debt – income sharing agreements) to cover the cost of soul-sucking online training modules. Again – “lifelong learning” credits will be logged on blockchain. See K12 “mastery transcripts” segueing to human resource “learning record stores.” The perpetual, just-in-time re-skilling model will destroy higher education as we know it. Face to face liberal arts education will be accessible only to top-tier students whose social capital allows them to obtain work outside the artificial intelligence-mediated, badge-sorting platforms.
More on blockchain learning record stores here.
Institute For The Future’s video conceptualizing the use of income sharing agreements on blockchain in which private investors cover training costs for individuals using smart contracts that garnish a student’s future wages.
The test-pilot is Purdue’s “Back a Boiler” income sharing agreement. Source
Global finance already has plans to securitize ISA debt to craft more instruments of predatory “innovative finance.” Click here to watch a short clip from a 2018 ASU+GSV conference panel on income sharing agreements. Full talk here.
5. xAPI captures information about competencies people successfully demonstrate. Competencies include cognitive skills as well as “soft” skills and desirable behaviors. Artificial intelligence incorporates behavioral data into predictive profiling for future micro-work assignments and wage allocations. xAPI tracks “learning” performance using digital technologies including smart phones, tablets, virtual and augmented reality, and other wearable technologies. These digital platforms can capture biometric information tied to physical and behavioral characteristics in very subtle ways. Such information can be stored on blockchain and used to refine profiles on students and workers.
This video shows how “learning” is captured as noun-verb-object statements. Education reduced to narrow performance measures aligned to just-in-time workforce demands. Note the title, We Can Track It. Surveillance and signals intelligence for social engineering is built in. This is military technology. More on xAPI here.
Full slide share on VR training, including work-based training for youth, from JCA Solutions, Orlando, FL defense contractor here.
6. In a world of uncertainly, employers want to know the mind-set of the workers whom they engage via digital contracts. Grit, resilience, empathy, and collaboration are considered prized traits. For that reason, social-emotional learning is being prioritized above knowledge acquisition. Cognitive skills have taken a backseat to the “soft skills” demanded by the business sector. A well-educated populace is one that might question the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s robot agenda. Can’t have that. Instead, focus on compliance training and figure out how to make money on it, too.
Devices, especially virtual and augmented reality, are being used to predict, track, and shape behaviors. In fact, measurable behavior change has been identified as a global human capital impact market. As a result, blockchain, Internet of Things sensors, xAPI technology linked to Learning Record Stores, and skills badging, will be used to monitor behavior change in students over time (see JCA Solutions slide share above). This aggregated data will underpin emerging futures markets in digital educational programming / behavioral brainwashing.
Use of Virtual Reality headsets to generate “measurable behavior change,” which will be tied to human capital bond markets. More here.
World Economic Forum promoting use of technology to advance social emotional learning in order to enable bond markets in behavior change. Source
Teachers College Columbia University crafted an equation that will enable an 11% rate of return on “high-impact” social-emotional curriculum. Read their 2015 study, The Economic Value of Social Emotional Learning, here.
7. Digital education and the tracking of competencies in learning record stores came out of military training. Transmedia learning is a technique developed by Elaine Raybourn of Sandia National Labs and the Orlando Office of Advanced Distributed Learning where narrative storylines are used to immerse participants in training simulations across a variety of digital platforms. The goal, once again, is measurable behavior change “at scale.” Note the slide below from her 2016 presentation, Transmedia Learning In the Wild: Supporting Military Training Through Story-Driven Engagement.
Transmedia techniques have also been used in K12 settings, in such popular book series as the 39 Clues backed by Scholastic. Unicef’s Innovation Fund has invested blockchain and virtual reality education for all ages. Their primary funder is The Walt Disney Company, pure edu-tainment. Note the emphasis on training and social-emotional learning by Nubian VR, a company in Unicef’s portfolio.
The question we need to be asking is whether society benefits from children being trained using an entertainment-based, chain-of-command, no-questions-asked, information on a need-to-know basis fed by artificial-intelligence scheme where performance on assigned tasks is valued above all else? Or if society benefits from children being nurtured in a way that allows them to engage with the real world in socially-connected ways, explore a wide range of interests, and creatively engage with the challenges they encounter so they can develop genuine resilience and self confidence rather than a dysfunctional Pavlovian response to their world?
Use of transmedia learning to accomplish large-scale training and behavior change in military environments. See work of Elaine Raybourn at Sandia National Labs and Advanced Distributed Learning in Orlando, FL.
Full slideshare of above here.
Nubian VR is part of the Unicef Innovation Fund’s investment portfolio. Source
This interactive map shows relationships between military simulation training, digital badging programs, media engagement, and social emotional data capture and impact investing. Click here for the interactive version. You may click on any dot or line and it will open a related database record. Source URLs can be found as hyperlinks on the right hand side of each record.
8. Blockchain is used to record digital assets, which can include many things, not just crypto-currency. The video game industry in coming to rely on blockchain to manage their in-game economies. These token economies are being normalized for children through the widespread adoption of gamified platforms like Class Dojo, ClassCraft, Red Critter, and PBIS. In a world run by robots and AI, we may very well be looking at a future of behavioral scrip.
Red Critter behavioral currency tied to PBIS programs.
Ripple on in-game economies on blockchain – virtual goods and currencies.
9. Social impact bond markets have been aligned to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to create new financial instruments for channelling global capital. The Impact Management Project features over 2,000 of the world’s largest asset holders, all of whom have a vested interest in seeing human relations run through digital technologies to generate data for their deals. Education is Sustainable Development Goal 4. Blockchain education is a central focus of both the European Union and the OECD. Pilot programs using blockchain transcripts are underway in the United States in Dallas and Tulsa and at Southern New Hampshire University.
For complete list of practitioners click here.
Even though ICT relies on rare minerals mined by child labor and creates problematic e-waste, device-based education is prioritized by the global elite. They demand the human capital data metrics. Source
MIT has been a leader in prototyping alternative credentials on blockchain through Learning Machine, now Hyland Credentials. They are also in the vanguard of developing global digital currencies in addition to being a leader in emerging technology development, much of it tied to US defense interests. Blockcerts was the platform used at SNHU by Paul LeBlanc who is also an advisor to Ridge Lane LP, a merchant banking firm investing in this sector. Source
10. In order to assess their outcomes-based contracting deals, impact investors must compare inputs with outputs. This means transitioning to a system of education finance where funding follows the student. They will call it student-centered funding, and it will likely be weighted funding where larger allocations go to students with more complex learning needs, which will make those children more attractive to digital snake oil salesmen. The first phase involved pilots of education savings accounts (ESAs). I expect these will eventually be replaced with digital vouchers and e-wallets on blockchain.
This concept was floated in a 2017 report by the Joint Research Centre for the European Commission, Blockchain Education. The Heritage Foundation was also talking about this in 2017. With Covid, the shift to learning ecosystems, cyber home schooling, and micro-schools has sped up. I anticipate there will be considerable pressure from families wanting to escape the system, and that will push the expansion of educational voucher programs. The obvious model is Arizona’s ESA, which is attached to a debit card and can be used to purchase a variety of education-related materials and services. What people don’t yet understand is that no money from the government comes without strings. Utilizing these vouchers will surely require adoption of standardized curriculum and sharing of impact data. That’s the whole reason they are dismantling the current system – to unbundle everything and unlock opportunities to run capital through expansive new education investment markets tied to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4. All of it will run on data and all of that data will be stored on blockchain.
They will tell you blockchain credentials and transcripts are about “convenience” and “privacy.”
They don’t want you to know online education systems are steeped in military research and development.
They don’t want you to know blockchain education vouchers will be tied to social impact metrics.
They don’t want you to know micro-credentials and artificial intelligence-mediated human resource platforms will catalyze race-to-the-bottom globalized slave labor.
They don’t want you to know they will put our entire life on blockchain, risk-profiling and threat-scoring children as fodder for their gig economy.
They don’t want you to know about behavior modification programs that use virtual and augmented reality to track compliance on blockchain.
They don’t want you to know debt agreements tied to perpetual re-skilling will be put on blockchain as well.
Blockchain is the ledger that will run biocapitalism. The plan of Klaus Schwab and the Davos elite is to create a world for themselves and their robots with a few non-billionaires tasked with keeping the blockchain up and running. Don’t allow them to blockchain you or your children. To stop the matrix, we must collectively refuse blockchain now. Please share this information with your community and consider passing a resolution modeled after the one adopted by the NAACP.
We have never had free will…it’s always only been an illusion to keep everyone compliant.
Outstanding research! Please include me on your blog list.I have not figured out out how to get on yet!
USSR only a memory but Capitalists still fighting Commies, especially since they know capitalism worketh no more.
“The question we need to be asking is whether society benefits from children being trained using an entertainment-based, chain-of-command, no-questions-asked, information on a need-to-know basis fed by artificial-intelligence scheme where performance on assigned tasks is valued above all else? ”
Nah. There is no debate whether elites have society’s interest at heart. That fraud’s been abandoned. But is their new fraud, the digital dystopia, even good for them? They are insane, no?
Another fraud is that blockchain automates a contract regulated society. Instead, it hides the automation of mass discipline in order to impose a rent on life.
O! The final fraud: God is a computer.
(“We risk swapping our vibrant human spirits, beautiful in their passionate creativity and flawed vulnerability, for sanitized digital twins that will be managed as human capital by callous technocrats to profit social impact investors. “)
– another great post Alison, thank you.
“Come quickly, Lord Jesus!”
Wow. Jaw on the floor. Following!
EVERYTHING you talk about and the WEForum reset all boils down the UN Agenda 21 but people still refuse to say it. Of course A21 has been rebranded the same way they rebrand all of their evil agendas once people start paying attention. Social justice, Sustainable Development, digital economy, white privilege, global reset, SDGs, climate change, destruction of the family-morals-religion-loyalty, smart cities, loss of ALL freedom, loss of private property (remember private property is not just about home ownership…it is about your body and mind too) and the list goes on and on. But at the end of the day it all boils down to Agenda 21 (2030 Agenda) which is nothing more than total global COMMUNISM.
You know the US Chamber of Commerce isn’t Communist. The members of the Impact Management Project are not Communist. I know you have an axe to grind, but it is not helpful and ultimately a distraction from the truth.
You are very wrong about the Chamber. They ARE a certified UN NGO. Do your research before you disparage those that ready have. The Chamber of Commerce is listed as a certified UN NGO.
Where so listed? Per Wiki, AARP has consultative status, but not US Chamber of Commerce. Perhaps you are a member?
No axe to grind but the truth is all of what is stated is and always has been part of the A21 agenda.
To truly understand what we see today we must go way back.in time to its roots and A21 is the root. Just like education (ie Common Core and other facets of today’s education) to understand the education agenda we have to again go way back to the root. Even before A21 was formally presented in 1992 the communist understood the way to change a culture was through the children and the biggest audience of children could be found in the schools and that is real reason for copying the Prussian model of mandated public education. So again no axe. I agree with everything you say but I also have researched the roots of what we see today and I not only understand but can prove the motivation behind what we see happening.
Not Communist or Socialist – the old models are not serving us. This is about transnational global capital. https://impactmanagementproject.com/about/
It is FASCISM – TECHNOCRATIC FASCISM! Transnational capital is tyranny beyond anything Orwell could imagine. Nothing to do with communism or socialism. Alison’s work is brilliant at connecting the elite sociopaths’ sadistic power/control agendas together.
The howling lesser capitalists see the feudalistic impoverishment they are being pressed into as the realization of their image of communism. “O! Nothing could have corrupted my precious capitalism but those wicked communists.”
Nice data gathering and presentation of one of the likely worst case scenarios excepting potential extinction level chains of events. I believe that I can relate to most of the core values of the writer as well.
Unfortunately, the stance adopted in the aggregate towards the topics covered in this post is one that I cannot personally endorse because underlying it is the damnable false dilemma that has afflicted us as a species in recent history, undermining discourse and terminating thought:
The myth of free market Capitalism vs socialist Marxist Communism as being the only two options for economic systems in the modern day.
That is a self-fulfilling prophecy of a particularly vile nature, discounting as it does the means by which we managed resource allocation and commerce during the several hundred thousand years or so prior to the first bazaar or Burning Man event.
Instead, belief in that demarcation defaults most people to automatically be in alignment with one of it’s extreme end points:
Either a Social Darwinistic pseudo-Libertarian scrabble for currency and resources that depletes natural capital at a horrendous rate and points towards at best a penultimate “King of the Hill” game as the last spectacle before Entropy takes the figurative ball and arrives home for good; or
An inflexible, dull, and non-adaptive utopian eusociality that discourages most innovation and likely even suppresses or restricts sexual expression for the sake of maintaining homogeniety, that falls apart the moment a natural capitalist enters it unopposed.
Uh, “No” to all of the above, thank you very much.
A basic principle that few people have come across is that the nature of multi-cellular organisms is such that individual mortality cannot be achieved because inevitably a balance will be lost and cells will either slow down en masse, or a few will speed up excessively, ie old age or cancer.
The best that can be done is to maintain the balance for as long as possible, and try to ensure that the best of one’s heritable traits have a good chance at continuance.
That applies to people at all scales of resolution.
The tightly over managed vision of the future presented by this blog post is not a survivable one, let alone desirable to have left to all of one’s relations.
It would flatten out the human ability for synthesis of unlikely characteristics, traits, and concepts, even while enlisting all people in a collective push towards efficiency at ….What? Efficiency for the sake of efficiency as defined by the scions of a barbaric economic feeding frenzy centuries long?
Not good enough, by far.
The problem is, the “cat’s already out of the bag”. People know what the tech can do, and individuals or nations that eschew the platforms will be left at a significant disadvantage unless mitigating factors are at play.
The technologies or their equivalents WILL be adopted, failing a collapse down to pre-industrial levels, that is simply a fact.
The question is, how to domesticate the technology and it’s applications in advance without having to fully participate in the power dynamics that threaten to turn that technology into something malignant?
HA HA HA. Who’s domesticating the technology? Non-abusive technology requires non-abusive political-economy. Fortunately, communism exists elsewhere than your “non-adaptive” extremity.
Unfortunately, most solutions do not come about in “advance”. It’s usually “after the fact”.
Hi Alison,
I’m a Middle School and High School teacher at a private international school and a father of a 1 and half year old. I am new to your work and have been learning a lot over the last two weeks, and I feel my colleagues should know about what we are enabling. I was thinking to myself that it would be great if there was a webinar just for teachers that I could promote and/or share. I have seen your 5 part interview series with Jason Bosch and the Level Up webinar plus another interview you did on Mind Wars with Chris Ryan. I have also viewed the video series by Book of Ours that credits your work for their tidy summaries of the 4th IR. However, when trying to explain this to other teachers, I find it difficult to paraphrase. Perhaps there is something like a presentation for teachers buried in your blog somewhere. If there is, I’d love to know about it but if not, would you consider putting one together for teachers and perhaps their administrators specifically? I would be happy to help in some way.
Thank you for your kind words. I have some earlier presentations focused on ed-tech. Maybe one of these will help?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z679lwruIfo&list=PLnNSjVGWqTO4aW_lyVaB2LEgdqCkmQX-U&index=18
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHcpol4qRHI&list=PLnNSjVGWqTO4aW_lyVaB2LEgdqCkmQX-U&index=10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvqBJYmpQrY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVVzITZtE0U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGbu-qI6X7g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cOE95s2WlY
Hi, I really appreciate your research and sharing all of this with the public. I’m not very familiar with technology and the way the technocrats use data etc…I’m a homemaker and I’ve honestly tried to avoid it, but as I read what you’ve discovered I feel that I need to educate myself on these topics that you’ve brought up. You mentioned a few folks in one of your interviews on you tube that you’ve learned from and I will look into them. For those of us who feel we need to educate ourselves more deeply on these subjects to fully grasp what is going down could you recommend some books or resources that would be the most effective?
Thank so much for your interest. Strangely enough I don’t really know of many people publishing in this area. I mostly look at original sources. You can check them out here – source URLs on the right side of each record. https://littlesis.org/search?q=blockchain+
Hi Alison, I just discovered your work through watching a video that you were on with Sasha Stone. I am an elementary art teacher who has been teaching in public schools for 20 years. I have always felt this way about technology in education, and it is so wonderful to read your work which confirms everything that I have felt intuitively since the early days of computers in the classroom. My current school uses the PBIS system, but trying to explain to the staff about its detrimental impact is beyond challenging. How can we achieve this? Where do you even start? I approach my teaching without the influence of technology as much as I can get away with, but I am also becoming a dinosaur in my profession. Do you have any more online resources relating to this topic? Thank you so much for your work, and I am so glad to have found your site. Liz
Hi Liz,
I am also a teacher. I have been following Alison’s work for a fairly short time as well (about September 2020). I was also surprised to see the implications of “ed-tech” that she highlighted. My school is a Google Suite school and we utilize PowerSchool to do attendance and enter grades. We are also an IB school. I have had a little luck breaking the ice with some of my. colleagues by printing the Global Educations Futures timeline in full colour and displaying it on my office wall. When folks walk in, they see it and are immediately drawn to it. That’s when I use the opportunity to point out some of the more mundane benchmarks, then get a little conversation going about it. Then, I will point out some “kind of alarming” benchmarks like, “Educational Buildings Rehabilitated for Modern Urban Use”, “Peoplenaires” or “Kids a la Carte: elite gene patterns for kids available for purchase” and then try to get the discussion started on from there. The author, Pavel Luksha is listed on the poster. I then tell them that he is a trans-humanist, look for a reaction and make a judgement call on whether or not to pursue that road.
Go here: https://globaledufutures.org/. (I found this one by typing the search words in on Alison’s blog and then followed the link she provided. This doesn’t come up on any of my search engine searches for some reason.
Another strategy I use is to print resources from Alison’s blog, either her articles or some of the infographics like the Knowledgeworks Forecast 3.0, A Glimpse into the Future of Learning, staple the pages together and then just “accidentally” leave them next to the copy machine or on a table somewhere. (http://www.rodelfoundationde.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/A-Glimpse-into-the-Future-of-Learning-Infographic_0.pdf).
All the best,
Ryan
Thanks for the info, Ryan. All good ideas!
Thank you so much. This is great info. Sharing with all the people who have kiddos.