Social Impact Bonds, "Pay For Success," Results-Based Contracting, and Blockchain Digital Identity Systems

By Todd Feathers

"People around the country are furious after being denied their unemployment benefits due to apparent problems with facial recognition technology that claims to prevent fraud.

Unemployment recipients have been complaining for months about the identity verification service ID.me, which uses a combination of biometric information and official documents to confirm that applicants are who they claim to be. The complaints reached another crescendo this week after Axios published a “deep dive” article about the threat of unemployment fraud based on statistics provided to the outlet by ID.me.

Some unemployment applicants have said that ID.me’s facial recognition models fail to properly identify them (generally speaking, facial recognition technology is notoriously less accurate for women and people of color). And after their applications were put on hold because their identity couldn’t be verified, many should-be beneficiaries have had to wait days or weeks to reach an ID.me “trusted referee” who could confirm what the technology couldn’t.

On Twitter, there are dozens of complaints about ID.me per day, and local news articles all over the country have detailed the problem over the course of months. In California, 1.4 million unemployment beneficiary accounts were abruptly suspended on New Year’s Eve and the beneficiaries were required to re-verify their identity using ID.me, a process which many found difficult and resulted in them waiting for weeks to reactivate their accounts while they struggled to make ends meet."...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dbywn/facial-recognition-failures-are-locking-people-out-of-unemployment-systems 

By Avi Mizrahi

"Greenwich Associates interviewed 213 global market participants said to be working on blockchain technology. Respondents included representatives from an array of corporations, like technology vendors, exchanges, and consultancy firms, but almost half (49%) work in the banking sector. And 93% of them are said to be either key decision-makers or actively involved in blockchain initiatives.

The researchers note it is fair to say that “the industry has lagged behind its own optimistic expectations from two years ago. Implementing enterprise technology designed to replace decades of legacy market infrastructure is no simple task, and 57% of blockchain executives told us it has been harder than expected.”...

For full story, please visit

https://news.bitcoin.com/research-corporations-fail-to-deliver-on-blockchain-hype-scalability-a-top-concern/ 

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2022-01-24-what-could-web3-mean-for-education 

By Colin Todhunter
"The UK government’s Behavioural Insights Team helped to push the public towards accepting the COVID narrative, restrictions and lockdowns. It is now working on ‘nudging’ people towards further possible restrictions or at least big changes in their behaviour in the name of ‘climate emergency’.

From frequent news stories and advertisements to soap opera storylines and government announcements, the message about impending climate catastrophe is almost relentless.

Part of the messaging includes blaming the public’s consumption habits for a perceived ‘climate emergency’. At the same time, young people are being told that we only have a decade or so (depending on who is saying it) to ‘save the planet’.

Setting the agenda are powerful corporations that helped degrade much of the environment in the first place. But ordinary people, not the multi-billionaires pushing this agenda, will pay the price for this as living more frugally seems to be part of the programme (‘own nothing and be happy’). Could we at some future point see ‘climate emergency’ lockdowns, not to ‘save the NHS’ but to ‘save the planet’?

A tendency to focus on individual behaviour and not ‘the system’ exists.

But let us not forget this is a system that deliberately sought to eradicate a culture of self-reliance that prevailed among the working class in the 19th century (self-education, recycling products, a culture of thrift, etc) via advertising and a formal school education that ensured conformity and set in motion a lifetime of wage labour and dependency on the products manufactured by an environmentally destructive capitalism.

A system that has its roots in inflicting massive violence across the globe to exert control over land and resources elsewhere.

In his 2018 book The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequalities and its solutions, Jason Hickel describes the processes involved in Europe’s wealth accumulation over a 150-year period of colonialism that resulted in tens of millions of deaths.

By using other countries’ land, Britain effectively doubled the size of arable land in its control. This made it more practical to then reassign the rural population at home (by stripping people of their means of production) to industrial labour. This too was underpinned by massive violence (burning villages, destroying houses, razing crops).

Hickel argues that none of this was inevitable but was rooted in the fear of being left behind by other countries because of Europe’s relative lack of land resources to produce commodities.

This is worth bearing in mind as we currently witness a fundamental shift in our relationship to the state resulting from authoritarian COVID-related policies and the rapidly emerging corporate-led green agenda. We should never underestimate the ruthlessness involved in the quest for preserving wealth and power and the propensity for wrecking lives and nature to achieve this.

COMMODIFICATION OF NATURE

Current green agenda ‘solutions’ are based on a notion of ‘stakeholder’ capitalism or private-public partnerships whereby vested interests are accorded greater weight, with governments and public money merely facilitating the priorities of private capital.

A key component of this strategy involves the ‘financialisation of nature’ and the production of new ‘green’ markets to deal with capitalism’s crisis of over accumulation and weak consumer demand caused by decades of neoliberal policies and the declining purchasing power of working people. The banking sector is especially set to make a killing via ‘green profiling’ and ‘green bonds’.

According to Friends of the Earth (FoE), corporations and states will use the financialisation of nature discourse to weaken laws and regulations designed to protect the environment with the aim of facilitating the goals of extractive industries, while allowing mega-infrastructure projects in protected areas and other contested places.

Global corporations will be able to ‘offset’ (greenwash) their activities by, for example, protecting or planting a forest elsewhere (on indigenous people’s land) or perhaps even investing in (imposing) industrial agriculture which grows herbicide-resistant GMO commodity crop monocultures that are misleadingly portrayed as ‘climate friendly’.

FoE states:
"Offsetting schemes allow companies to exceed legally defined limits of destruction at a particular location, or destroy protected habitat, on the promise of compensation elsewhere; and allow banks to finance such destruction on the same premise.”

This agenda could result in the weakening of current environmental protection legislation or its eradication in some regions under the pretext of compensating for the effects elsewhere.

How ecoservice ‘assets’ (for example, a forest that performs a service to the ecosystem by acting as a carbon sink) are to be evaluated in a monetary sense is very likely to be done on terms that are highly favourable to the corporations involved, meaning that environmental protection will play second fiddle to corporate and finance sector return-on-investment interests.

As FoE argues, business wants this system to be implemented on its terms, which means the bottom line will be more important than stringent rules that prohibit environmental destruction.

SAVING CAPITALISM

The envisaged commodification of nature will ensure massive profit-seeking opportunities through the opening up of new markets and the creation of fresh investment instruments.

Capitalism needs to keep expanding into or creating new markets to ensure the accumulation of capital to offset the tendency for the general rate of profit to fall (according to writer Ted Reese, it has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s). The system suffers from a rising overaccumulation (surplus) of capital.

Reese notes that, although wages and corporate taxes have been slashed, the exploitability of labour continued to become increasingly insufficient to meet the demands of capital accumulation. By late 2019, the world economy was suffocating under a mountain of debt.

Many companies could not generate enough profit and falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cashflows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent. In effect, economic growth was already grinding to a halt prior to the massive stock market crash in February 2020.

In the form of COVID ‘relief’, there has been a multi-trillion bailout for capitalism as well as the driving of smaller enterprises to bankruptcy. Or they have being swallowed up by global interests. Either way, the likes of Amazon and other predatory global corporations have been the winners.

New ‘green’ Ponzi trading schemes to offset carbon emissions and commodify ‘ecoservices’ along with electric vehicles and an ‘energy transition’ represent a further restructuring of the capitalist economy, resulting in a shift away from a consumer-oriented demand-led system.

It essentially leaves those responsible for environmental degradation at the wheel, imposing their will and their narrative on the rest of us.

GLOBAL AGRIBUSINESS

Between 2000 and 2009, Indonesia supplied more than half of the global palm oil market at an annual expense of some 340,000 hectares of Indonesian countryside. Consider too that Brazil and Indonesia have spent over 100 times more in subsidies to industries that cause deforestation than they received in international conservation aid from the UN to prevent it.

These two countries gave over $40bn in subsidies to the palm oil, timber, soy, beef and biofuels sectors between 2009 and 2012, some 126 times more than the $346m they received to preserve their rain forests.

India is the world’s leading importer of palm oil, accounting for around 15% of the global supply. It imports over two-­thirds of its palm oil from Indonesia.

Until the mid-1990s, India was virtually self-sufficient in edible oils. Under pressure from the World Trade Organization (WTO), import tariffs were reduced, leading to an influx of cheap (subsidised) edible oil imports that domestic farmers could not compete with.

This was a deliberate policy that effectively devastated the home-grown edible oils sector and served the interests of palm oil growers and US grain and agriculture commodity company Cargill, which helped write international trade rules to secure access to the Indian market on its terms.

Indonesia leads the world in global palm oil production, but palm oil plantations have too often replaced tropical forests, leading to the killing of endangered species and the uprooting of local communities as well as contributing to the release of potential environment-damaging gases. Indonesia emits more of these gases than any country besides China and the US, largely due to the production of palm oil.

The issue of palm oil is one example from the many that could be provided to highlight how the drive to facilitate corporate need and profit trumps any notion of environmental protection or addressing any ‘climate emergency’. Whether it is in Indonesia, Latin America or elsewhere, transnational agribusiness – and the system of globalised industrial commodity crop agriculture it promotes – fuels much of the destruction we see today.

Even if the mass production of lab-created food, under the guise of ‘saving the planet’ and ‘sustainability’, becomes logistically possible (which despite all the hype is not at this stage), it may still need biomass and huge amounts of energy. Whose land will be used to grow these biomass commodities and which food crops will they replace? And will it involve that now-famous Gates’ euphemism ‘land mobility’ (farmers losing their land)?

Microsoft is already mapping Indian farmers’ lands and capturing agriculture datasets such as crop yields, weather data, farmers’ personal details, profile of land held (cadastral maps, farm size, land titles, local climatic and geographical conditions), production details (crops grown, production history, input history, quality of output, machinery in possession) and financial details (input costs, average return, credit history).

Is this an example of stakeholder-partnership capitalism, whereby a government facilitates the gathering of such information by a private player which can then use the data for developing a land market (courtesy of land law changes that the government enacts) for institutional investors at the expense of smallholder farmers who find themselves ‘land mobile’?

This is a major concern among farmers and civil society in India.

Back in 2017, agribusiness giant Monsanto was judged to have engaged in practices that impinged on the basic human right to a healthy environment, the right to food and the right to health. Judges at the ‘Monsanto Tribunal’, held in The Hague, concluded that if ecocide were to be formally recognised as a crime in international criminal law, Monsanto could be found guilty.

The tribunal called for the need to assert the primacy of international human and environmental rights law. However, it was also careful to note that an existing set of legal rules serves to protect investors’ rights in the framework of the WTO and in bilateral investment treaties and in clauses in free trade agreements. These investor trade rights provisions undermine the capacity of nations to maintain policies, laws and practices protecting human rights and the environment and represent a disturbing shift in power.

The tribunal denounced the severe disparity between the rights of multinational corporations and their obligations.

While the Monsanto Tribunal judged that company to be guilty of human rights violations, including crimes against the environment, in a sense we also witnessed global capitalism on trial.

Global conglomerates can only operate as they do because of a framework designed to allow them to capture or co-opt governments and regulatory bodies and to use the WTO and bilateral trade deals to lever influence.

As Jason Hickel notes in his book (previously referred to), old-style colonialism may have gone but governments in the Global North and its corporations have found new ways to assert dominance via leveraging aid, market access and ‘philanthropic’ interventions to force lower income countries to do what they want.

The World Bank’s ‘Enabling the Business of Agriculture’ and its ongoing commitment to an unjust model of globalisation is an example of this and a recipe for further plunder and the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few.

Brazil and Indonesia have subsidised private corporations to effectively destroy the environment through their practices. Canada and the UK are working with the GMO biotech sector to facilitate its needs. And India is facilitating the destruction of its agrarian base according to World Bank directives for the benefit of the likes of Corteva and Cargill.

The TRIPS Agreement, written by Monsanto, and the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, written by Cargill, was key to a new era of corporate imperialism. 

It came as little surprise that in 2013 India’s then Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar accused US companies of derailing the nation’s oil seeds production programme.

Powerful corporations continue to regard themselves as the owners of people, the planet and the environment and as having the right – enshrined in laws and agreements they wrote – to exploit and devastate for commercial gain.

PARTNERSHIP OR CO-OPTION?

It was noticeable during a debate on food and agriculture at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow that there was much talk about transforming the food system through partnerships and agreements. Fine-sounding stuff, especially when the role of agroecology and regenerative farming was mentioned.

However, if, for instance, the interests you hope to form partnerships with are coercing countries to eradicate their essential buffer food stocks then bid for such food on the global market with US dollars (as in India) or are lobbying for the enclosure of seeds through patents (as in Africa and elsewhere), then surely this deliberate deepening of dependency should be challenged; otherwise ‘partnership’ really means co-option.

Similarly, the UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) that took place during September in New York was little more than an enabler of corporate needs. The UNFSS was founded on a partnership between the UN and the World Economic Forum and was disproportionately influenced by corporate actors.

Those granted a pivotal role at the UNFSS support industrial food systems that promote ultra-processed foods, deforestation, industrial livestock production, intensive pesticide use and commodity crop monocultures, all of which cause soil deterioration, water contamination and irreversible impacts on biodiversity and human health. And this will continue as long as the environmental effects can be ‘offset’ or these practices can be twisted on the basis of them somehow being ‘climate-friendly’.

Critics of the UNFSS offer genuine alternatives to the prevailing food system. In doing so, they also provide genuine solutions to climate-related issues and food injustice based on notions of food sovereignty, localisation and a system of food cultivation deriving from agroecological principles and practices. Something which people who organised the climate summit in Glasgow would do well to bear in mind.

Current greenwashed policies are being sold by tugging at the emotional heartstrings of the public. This green agenda, with its lexicon of ‘sustainability’, ‘carbon neutrality’, ‘net-zero’ and doom-laden forecasts, is part of a programme that seeks to restructure capitalism, to create new investment markets and instruments and to return the system to viable levels of profitability."

Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture and is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal

https://off-guardian.org/2021/11/15/saving-capitalism-or-saving-the-planet/ 

By David McDonald Interest in Canadian “Social impact Bonds” has spiked following HRSDC Minster Finley announcement that the federal government is investigating them for use in Canada. I’ve already commented on the story in The Toronto Star and on The Current (min 16) but I wanted to write my thoughts up in a fuller blog post for readers.

So what is a “Social Impact Bond”? The idea is that a banker or foundation decides to fund a particular service or program. When (you’ll see why I say “when” and not “if” below) the program hits its goals, the government pays the funder back all they invested and includes a profit margin of somewhere in the neighbourhood of 7%-15% on top of the initial investment.

For example, in New York City there is a youth recidivism program. In NYC, half of all youth released from prison will re-offend within a year. This is obviously bad for society and the kids, but it’s also expensive for the government to pay for these kids to be in prison. So a social service agency and the government convinced Goldman Sachs to spend $5 million on a youth recidivism program. The program will take in a portion of the kids released and give them an intensive program. If the program manages to reduce the re-offence rate by 10% compared to the average, then the government pays Goldman back their original $5 million and an additional 13% profit of $650,000, in total paying them $5,650,000.

This stands in stark contrast to actual philanthropy of say a company donating $20,000 to the local food bank at Christmas. They get a tax break for the donation to be sure, but they don’t expect to get their $20,000 back from the government with interest after homeless folks get their Christmas meal.  But that is what happens with social impact bonds—they get the entire donation/investment back with interest once the program is delivered. If anything, social impact bonds are anti-philanthropy.

It’s no surprise why some social service agencies are open to social impact bonds. The backdrop, in Canada and elsewhere, has been a decade of tax cuts and reduced expenditures on social services, leaving social service agencies stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, they see a growing need for their services and, on the other, governments are cutting back resources to deal with the need. If the government is offering them the opportunity to raise new money for social services, its pretty hard to look a gift horse in the mouth.

But this new way of funding social services is a significant departure from how Canadian governments have done it in the past.  en years ago, if a social service agency had a good idea that had been tested elsewhere or tested on a small scale and worked, they’d pitch it to a government granting committee and get it funded. Governments used to just fund new ideas: social service agencies could help kids who’d run afoul with the law, governments would save on prison expenditures and importantly, no one would make a profit.

Social Impact Bonds are a very different approach as they insert a middle man into social service delivery, someone like Goldman Sachs. The bankers are there because they smell an opportunity to make large, government-guaranteed profits. We have to remember that the same industry that took down the world economy not four years ago is the one interested in becoming social services middle men. Whenever there is a middle man, there is always a middle man mark-up.

Often times, these Social Impact Bonds are pitched as if they transfer risk to the private sector. That is, if the project doesn’t hit its 10% reduction in recidivism for example, then the government pays them nothing. In the real world it is quite a different story.

First of all, the projects that would make it to the funding stage are not experimental. They need to have been proven on a smaller scale and in other places. There is no way that Goldman and others are going to put up $5 million with a 50/50 chance of losing it all. Instead they are much more likely to back projects that have a proven track record. Experimentation is almost always going to be on a smaller scale and funded by government money because of the high risk of failure.

But if by some fluke, the project still doesn’t work as expected, say they only get an 8% instead of a 10% reduction in recidivism; it’s highly unlikely that the government will not pay Goldman Sachs the $5 million. If Goldman Sachs loses $5 million, they aren’t going to come back next year and neither are any of the other bankers and foundations. The investor demands to be paid…with interest. If the government allows project backers to lose their investment, the money to back these projects is going to dry up very quickly.

In either the traditional model or the social impact bond model, it is always the government that pays. However, for social impact bond, the government now has to pay a middle man mark-up. Not only that, but they also have to make sure that Goldman Sachs’ shareholders are happy. If the shareholders aren’t happy with their returns, they aren’t going to pony up the cash next time around.

It is this change of who government serves that really concerns me. People pay their taxes (and expect corporations to as well) in part because they want the government to deliver good services to the people that need them. However, social impact bonds direct tax dollars to bank profits instead of to a homeless person trying to get off the street. This dramatically changes who is being served by the government: from those who need a helping hand to the shareholders of a bank.

There is an alternative. Since the government is going to pay either way, let’s say “thanks but no thanks” to a middle man mark-up. Instead, the government could create its own fund to push forward ideas that have been proven elsewhere. Again, since the government is going to pay either way, why not borrow at historically low rates of 1% instead the of 7%-15% offered by a middle man? When these projects succeed, we can provide them to more people instead of lining the pockets of a bank."..

For full post, please visit:

http://behindthenumbers.ca/2012/11/21/social-impact-bonds-the-anti-philanthropy/

"Digital rights activist Luis Fernando García on the weaponization of personal data and why international agencies are pushing countries in the Global South to collect their citizens’ information."

By Leo Schwartz

"Last December, Mexican lawmakers approved a law that would create a digital identification database — compiling the biometric data of every person living in Mexico — and sent it to the Senate. For Luis Fernando García, the director of the Mexican digital rights organization R3D, the proposal of the Unique Digital Identity Card, also known as CUID, was the latest development in a country that is hurtling down the path of an expansive surveillance state. 

His group was among the more than 25 organizations that called on the Senate to halt the program’s implementation. They argued that, if passed, the law would open the door to authoritarian oversight and security risks for Mexico’s residents. 

The Mexican government has already instituted measures that infringe on digital personal liberties, from a massive centralized urban surveillance system in Mexico City to proposed legislation that would require citizens to turn over biometric information to have access to a mobile phone. For García and advocates like him, the CUID program represents the culmination of a dangerous trend toward authoritarianism by the Mexican state.   

He spoke with Rest of World about the haphazard development of the ID system and why international development agencies like the World Bank are so supportive of its adoption. 

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

How did this digital identity card program get started? 

Around the world, there is a push by corporations and international institutions such as the World Bank to create these kinds of databases to identify people and conflate two things: the right of every person to be recognized legally by a government and an identification system that intermediates people’s transactions with public and even private services. 

In Mexico, there have been several attempts to create a national identity system. There are other identification systems in Mexico, but many of them cost money, so they exclude people. Some of them are just for people over 18 years old. 

So why are you opposed to this system?

Now, the CUID program is being held as the only solution, which is not true. It’s more problematic than all of the other identity systems that have been developed in Mexico. When the government creates this one identity system, every time someone goes to a public or private service, they give the same centralized ID. Before, officials would need to go to different places to collect all the information they need. With the CUID, they would have a way to connect all of the databases. This gives the government and corporations the power to surveil, control, manipulate, and punish people. 

Who is supporting this program? 

Sophisticated intelligence agencies in rich countries are delighted that poor countries are creating these databases of people that they can exploit for their benefit. They have offensive capabilities that allow them to attack, obtain, and collect information that less-developed countries create through these databases. 

International relations are not democratic. They are hostile and colonial and extractive and oppressive. Many Global South governments do not realize — or they do realize and just don’t care — that they are building systems that will benefit their oppressors rather than their citizens. 

Why do you think there is such an international push to get world governments to collect data on their citizens?

Data is very lucrative. It is particularly useful to train and develop the systems that will define who will rule the future. Where you can make money is where the markets have not reached — where many people are not included financially. Because once they are, companies indebt them; companies can sell them goods on Amazon, and then they can train their AI to take their jobs. There are all these profits that capital is salivating for in the Global South that is helped by these identity systems.

Like many other Global South national identity projects — whether in Kenya, Uganda, or Mexico — the World Bank is behind it. The World Bank is giving Mexico a loan of $225 million to implement the system. It is not promoting this approach in Germany or Canada or the U.S.: countries that do not have a national identity system. But they are promoting it in the Global South, which is very telling.

“Many Global South governments do not realize — or they do realize and just don’t care — that they are building systems that will benefit their oppressors rather than their citizens.”

The World Bank has explained its loan for the program by saying it will strengthen Mexico’s ID system, to facilitate the allocation of services and benefits. What do you think it has to gain by pushing a program like this?

I think the World Bank is more of an instrument for rich countries to impose certain policies that benefit them, rather than an agency that has their own goals. And those rich countries’ governments usually work on behalf of powerful industries, such as the financial sector, rather than the public interest. 

Then why is the Mexican government pushing for this? 

Many people, particularly those with a security lens, genuinely believe universal surveillance will solve corruption and crime. This is a very naïve way of looking at Mexican institutions, which are very weak. Its databases are often breached and accessible freely on the internet. 

It’s also important to take into account that the line that divides government and organized crime is often nonexistent. This needs to inform the discussion about whether it’s wise to create a centralized database of all people in Mexico with biometrics, where that information can be weaponized against its citizens. Because, obviously, the Mexican institutions are infiltrated by organized crime. The problem with crime in Mexico is not that we don’t have enough data from people. 

For decades now, the Mexican government has increased their legal powers and technological capabilities to do interception of communications, to access communications metadata, to do location tracking in real time, and to access financial information. It’s not the lack of technology or legal powers or available data, which the government either has or can obtain legally. That’s not the issue. It’s the fact that there is widespread corruption and collusion with organized crime by the authorities that are supposed to investigate and prosecute them.

https://restofworld.org/2021/the-dystopian-danger-of-a-mandatory-biometric-database-in-mexico/ 

"ZÜRICH, SWITZERLAND – Unfamiliar to many, the recently launched IXO protocol can be traced to a significant and interwoven history of global ‘aid’ organizations, colonial ideals, international finance and advanced technology, that provides important context to understanding what it actually is. What follows below is an explanation of the technical nature of a protocol  that embodies this history of social, financial and digital oppression,  otherwise covered in Silicon Icarus and the work of researchers such as Alison McDowell.

To fulfill hegemonic goals, the wielders of capital, or ‘risk investors’ reform services traditionally provided by government or philanthropy to support their agendas and maintain power. They pursue this by marrying technology platforms, as well as gamifying real life interactions, reducing actions of love to digitally chained ‘data verified outcomes’ which trigger impact bond payouts, globally investable and tradeable through automated digital platforms.

Before diving into IXO I just want to warn readers about the complexity of these burgeoning systems. Besides the likely unfamiliar technological components such as blockchain-based financial and data markets; digitized social impact finance requires significant real life coordination between multiple groups who are tied to blockchain and related technologies. By piecing together the details of scaled ‘social impact investing’ via digital technology, and  using those details to understand how it may play out, we gain clearer insight to the worrisome nature of these mental and technological frameworks. 

– Unfamiliar to many, the recently launched IXO protocol can be traced to a significant and interwoven history of global ‘aid’ organizations, colonial ideals, international finance and advanced technology, that provides important context to understanding what it actually is. What follows below is an explanation of the technical nature of a protocol  that embodies this history of social, financial and digital oppression,  otherwise covered in Silicon Icarus and the work of researchers such as Alison McDowell.

To fulfill hegemonic goals, the wielders of capital, or ‘risk investors’ reform services traditionally provided by government or philanthropy to support their agendas and maintain power. They pursue this by marrying technology platforms, as well as gamifying real life interactions, reducing actions of love to digitally chained ‘data verified outcomes’ which trigger impact bond payouts, globally investable and tradeable through automated digital platforms.

Before diving into IXO I just want to warn readers about the complexity of these burgeoning systems. Besides the likely unfamiliar technological components such as blockchain-based financial and data markets; digitized social impact finance requires significant real life coordination between multiple groups who are tied to blockchain and related technologies. By piecing together the details of scaled ‘social impact investing’ via digital technology, and  using those details to understand how it may play out, we gain clearer insight to the worrisome nature of these mental and technological frameworks." 

For full post, please visit:

https://siliconicarus.org/2021/11/04/token-chains-building-the-human-asset-class-through-the-ixo-protocol/