When the 1979 census was conducted in the Soviet Union, the author of these lines was a young progressive schoolboy. Since life in the USSR was rather dull, the upcoming event seemed to me something epochal, significant, and, of course, very, very useful. “We” would finally learn how many “of us” there were and what kind of “we” we were—how could one not rejoice? I remember my surprise when I did not see the expected joy on the faces of adults. On the contrary, I saw head shaking, downcast eyes, and clicking of tongues. People who, generally speaking, possessed next to nothing, perfectly understood that as a result of any state event, something would still be taken away from them anyway. They did not doubt this for even a second.
Everyone knows that since time immemorial censuses have been conducted, first and foremost, for the purpose of accounting for and controlling the number of little people and their property. That is, for taxation in the broadest sense of the word. For the same purpose, cattle are branded, and slaves were branded in exactly the same way. This is undoubtedly done for convenience—for the convenience of the owner, the one who extracts profit from this property.
Lenin said that “socialism is accounting and control” and was absolutely right. Not only socialism—any state begins with accounting and control. The USSR, as is well known, achieved great success in passportizing the population. Having spent some time as a military man, that is, without a passport and the problems associated with it, the author of these lines, having left the orderly ranks of the still quite armed forces, experienced firsthand what a passport is, or rather, what it means to lack one. Moreover, these were years of freedom, and, as some believe, even the anarchy of the early 90s. It is an amazing system in which the state brands you and forces everyone else to identify you only and exclusively by this brand. Transactions between formally free people are considered legal by the state only if these people have the correct, from its point of view, brands.
It is clear that in Ukraine, throughout all twenty years, the “passport regime” only intensified. However, this note is not about that, but about the fact that “passportization” is advancing throughout the world from the most various sides, and all this looks quite inevitable.
This disorganized and spontaneous process is difficult to describe in a few words. Its most visible manifestation is the movement for “electronic government.” That is, an idea whose essence boils down not simply to “control of the internet,” but to using the internet to make a person even more passported, registered, and burdened with all due taxes and obligations. After all, in the phrase “electronic government,” the key word is “government.” And, undoubtedly, digital government is better and more effective than analog government. Because it better and more effectively does what? Correct.
This is, so to speak, the natural course of things. Such were once the ideas of the nation-state or democracy, or what is worse, universal suffrage. All of them, once implemented, made life easier for the master-state and took even more freedom from its subjects. As is customary, all these transformations are carried out by the hands of progressive public opinion, which, as is well known, is always glad to improve, deepen, and expand. The dream of “transparency” and “civil control” inspires activists and enthusiasts of the electric government, just as the ideas of “equal rights” and “universal suffrage” once inspired their ancestors. Interestingly, today “electronic government” is called completely different things—both useful sites for tracking traffic and other civic mutual aid, and a monstrous creature like the Russian universal electronic card. Activists somehow believe that civic mutual aid and traffic tracking will survive; however, experience (the son of difficult errors) clearly says that in the competitive struggle, the “universal electronic card” or one of its direct heirs will win.
And this is only, I repeat, part of the general process. All these bans on cash, the “fight against money laundering,” the fight against “drug trafficking,” “terrorism,” and so on, have as their ultimate goal the complete and final passportization, the simplest and most accessible accounting and control of us by our owner—the state.
I will be told: but what about progress and benefit? After all, a payment card is very convenient, and transparency, for example, of public procurement—that isn’t bad either? Yes, all this is undoubtedly good and useful. It just seems to me that in order not to get lost in all this and to be able to distinguish benefit from harm, one needs to define some basic property, a criterion, a violation of which turns benefit into harm. With payment cards and cash, everything is simple—there is a clear violation of freedom of choice. In other cases, one can, it seems to me, distinguish a variety of it, which I call “account freedom.”
In one of Wodehouse’s stories, Wooster with his buddies ended up in court on a case of minor hooliganism. Wooster and his pals named themselves Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. The judge fined Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. He was, generally speaking, not interested in the “real names” of our heroes—within the framework of such a case, this does not matter. I don’t know if this is possible in modern Britain (the action of the story takes place in the 1920s), but here is an example of a legal system that does not need monopolistic brands.
On the internet, for now, the same thing is happening. Your accounts, so to speak, “live their own lives”—they earn their reputation, grow connections. At the same time, often your colleagues on this or that forum are completely not interested in what your name is “in real life.” This process is erroneously called “anonymity.” What “anonymity” is there, if such an account in its account-life rotates suns and moves planets! And this despite the fact that “in reality” its owner is a pathetic nerd. This is by no means “anonymity”—it is simply another name, created by the same person for other purposes than in “ordinary life.”
So, we are approaching the conclusion. They forcibly brand cattle and slaves. A free person calls himself what he wants. And all the profits from this go to him—and all the costs as well. That “electric” part of our life, comprising the internet, payment cards, electronic governments, and so on, suffers from the attack on account freedom, the freedom to choose a name for one’s activities, or if you like, the freedom of branding. The state wants to appropriate for itself the right to monopolistically brand. And this poses a huge threat to our “ordinary” life as well. Account freedom—here, in my view, is the concentrated goal that those who do not like the tendency I have been talking about should strive for. I think that the right to account freedom can be preliminarily formulated approximately as follows: “No one should be required to certify their identity if this is not a condition of a voluntary contract.”