Digital ID, programmable currency, surveillance legislation, and “smart city” zoning all arrive with promises of safety and convenience. Yet together they form a lattice of control that could quietly replace consent with compliance. What kind of freedom survives when every movement, message, and transaction can be tracked, rated, or restricted?
Across the world , and here in Canada, we are watching a convergence of technologies and policies that share one underlying goal: centralized oversight of human activity.
Each measure appears sensible on its own: preventing fraud, increasing safety, managing emissions, streamlining access to services. But when you zoom out, the pattern becomes unmistakable: these systems are quietly rewriting the social contract between citizen and state.
1. Digital Identity & CBDCs: The Financial Panopticon
A national digital ID tied to a central-bank digital currency could make every transaction a data point. Once money becomes programmable, spending could be restricted or rewarded according to political or behavioural criteria. Access to one’s own funds might hinge on compliance, as Canada’s 2022 account freezes already foreshadowed.
Convenience is the bait; control is the hook.
2. Legislative Locks: Bills C-8, C-9, and C-63
These proposed laws expand definitions of “harm,” “hate,” and “misinformation” while granting new powers over speech and online content. Framed as protections, they risk creating a culture of fear where self-expression must pass through filters of official approval. When identity and expression are digitally linked, dissent becomes traceable; and therefore punishable.
3. Smart Cities and the 15/25-Minute Model
Urban planning now promotes “15-minute” or “25-minute” cities: neighbourhoods where daily needs are met locally to reduce emissions. It sounds benign, even progressive. But when movement is tracked through sensors, cameras, and digital passes, the same model can be weaponized. A system built to measure compliance can just as easily restrict it.
Who decides when you’ve travelled too far, emitted too much, or exceeded your carbon quota?
4. Power and Fragility
All these systems depend on continuous electricity and internet access. A large-scale blackout or cyberattack could paralyze identity systems, banking, healthcare, and communications simultaneously. The more centralized the network, the greater the vulnerability; and the greater the potential for intentional control through “switch-flipping” rather than force.
5. The Panopticon: Architecture of Invisible Control
In the late 1700s, philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed a prison he called the Panopticon. It featured a central watchtower surrounded by cells, each visible from the centre but unable to see into others.
The brilliance, (and horror) of the design was psychological: inmates never knew whether they were being watched, so they began to police themselves.
Centuries later, French philosopher Michel Foucault used the Panopticon as a metaphor for modern power: a society where surveillance is constant, invisible, and internalized.
Today’s digital world has rebuilt Bentham’s design in code and screenlight ; cameras, databases, and algorithms forming an all-seeing eye.
The result is voluntary obedience. People adjust their words, movements, and even thoughts, assuming someone, somewhere, might be watching.
6. Freedom as a Living Practice
Freedom is not the absence of structure; it is the right to choose our structures consciously.
To protect that right, we must demand transparency, open-source systems, and true opt-outs. We must defend access to physical cash, independent media, and non-digital forms of identification.
And we must cultivate the inner capacities that no algorithm can regulate: courage, creativity, empathy, and conscience. These are the real firewalls of the human spirit.