No You Crypto Freaks Cannot Have My Eyeballs

Fuck off!!!

Mike Licht via Flickr // (CC)

There’s a lot of stuff that the weirdos who occupy that middle segment of the Venn diagram of “crypto” and “AI” want from the general public—stuff like: “respect” and “human love” and “money.” Not that they deserve any of these things, oh no no. What they do deserve is to be blasted with so much ridicule and mockery that they pack up their beep-boop apes and ChatGPT business degrees and just leave the rest of us the fuck alone.

My point here is not so much that I don’t trust the technology itself (though, y’know…I don’t). What I don’t trust is the cavalcade of rich grifters trying to convince enough aspiring rich grifters to suckle at their particular techno-teat in order to keep their Ponzi circle jerk jerkin’ along for a few million bucks more. It’s not like we don’t already know how this all ends, and if you hear anyone say otherwise, feel free to laugh them out of town and into a real job like “lumberjack” or “blogger.” What you should not do, however, is give these freaks your eyeballs. Don’t do it. Bad idea.

From The New York Times:

One evening last month, a crowd of cryptocurrency enthusiasts gathered at an art gallery in downtown Manhattan. They were greeted by a scene from science fiction.

Crypto weirdos in a scene from science fiction? How interesting.

It continues:

At one end of the room was an open bar. Across from it stood a loose array of gray pedestals, arranged like a futuristic Stonehenge, each displaying a metal sphere about the size of a bowling ball.

Do not be afraid of the sphere. Show no emotion when you approach the sphere. The sphere is your friend.

The event was a launch party for Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency project created by Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, and the crypto company he co-founded, Tools for Humanity. As music thrummed in the background, guests congregated around the shiny orbs, which looked like a cross between a giant eight ball and HAL 9000, the rogue computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

I bet that’s not the only eight-ball that was involved in this shitshow.

The gathering was a small step in what Tools for Humanity claims will be a world-changing project: to scan the eyeballs of all eight billion humans, and then use that one-time ID to offer small allotments of cryptocurrency to support them in a world upended by artificial intelligence.

Read that again. Read it a third time. Give yourself a moment to really let it sink in that what these absolute freaks want is to give you very fake money for your very real eyeballs. And what do they want with your eyeballs? To charge you to use their “iris-based system as an alternative to security technologies like CAPTCHA, the photographic test that is used to sort humans from spam accounts.” Put another way, they are asking you to please submit to the orb if you are unable to identify which of these pictures contains a bicycle. Just go right on ahead and pour that slurp juice directly into your eyeballs, human. It’s the only way we can know if you truly exist.

Ultimately, per the Times:

Worldcoin’s backers envision a grander plan to protect people from A.I. advances that they claim will eliminate millions of jobs. They are promoting the orbs as a possible foundation for universal basic income, a welfare system in which everyone receives guaranteed payments, and argue that iris IDs will help distinguish real people from robots.

A-ha. Finally, there’s the real rub. And really, it’s fundamentally the same rub as all these other techno screw jobs:

1. Find something that’s working just fine on its own (paying for things with money, writing your original thoughts down yourself, existing in the world).

2. Create a “solution” to the aforementioned non-problem (crypto, AI, the “metaverse”).

3. Make a fortune selling this solution to the most gullible, least thoughtful rubes on Earth (NFT enthusiasts, media companies, etc).

4. Watch everything go predictably to pot.

5. Sell a new solution to the problem that you yourself created.

6. See step 3.

7. See step 1.

8. Drop dead and spend eternity getting atomic wedgies in hell.

“Tools for Humanity is part of a growing array of crypto firms trying to latch on to the hype around A.I. to propel digital currencies back to relevance after a miserable 18 months of market crashes and bankruptcies,” according to the Times, which is a perfectly Times-ian way of saying that these gold plated assholes are desperately squishing two turds together and hoping you’ll buy their “sandwich” anyway.

Let’s be extremely clear here: there is no Universal Basic Income at the end of this delusional rainbow. And, honestly, don’t worry about any sort of Minority Report-type doom and gloom predictions, either. That sort of dystopian future is possible, I guess, but more likely than not, we’re in for a much more mundane, painfully stupid outcome—one in which anyone dumb enough to let Sam fucking Altman put their eyeball in some corporate database can expect to enjoy a future full of new and exciting ways to be served boner pill ads and car insurance scams. And if they want to opt out? Well, I’m sure the brain geniuses behind “AI-ify your eye for our crypto utopia” would be happy to remove your retina from their company’s server banks. All they’ve gotta do is invent an unnecessarily convoluted way to make you pay for it first.