Digital ID – The New Chains Of Capitalist Surveillance – Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement

The world is entering an era where identity is no longer a matter of personal relationships, lived experience, or even paperwork. Increasingly, it is reduced to biometric scans, algorithmic verification, and digital tokens. Across the globe, governments and corporations are rolling out digital identification systems, facial recognition passports, biometric driver’s licences, app-based vaccine passes, QR-coded welfare access, and unified digital wallets. The language that accompanies these projects is familiar – efficiency, convenience, modernisation, inclusion. We are told that digital ID will make life easier, reduce fraud, and open new opportunities.

The reality, however, is far more sinister. Identification has never been neutral, it has always been a weapon of power, wielded by states and capitalists to monitor, control, and discipline populations. From passports to colonial passbooks, from welfare cards to border regimes, the apparatus of identification has always been tied to domination. Digital ID is simply the latest iteration of this long history, but with a scale and sophistication that makes its dangers even more profound. Far from liberating us, it is forging new chains and binding us more tightly to systems of surveillance, exclusion, and exploitation.

Identification as Domination

To grasp what digital ID represents, we must situate it within the longer history of identification as a tool of authority. The passport, now normalised as a necessary object of travel, was originally a way for states to restrict movement. In medieval Europe, peasants and serfs required written permission to leave their estates. Colonial regimes across Africa, Asia, and the Pacific perfected these systems of control, forcing indigenous people to carry passes while settlers roamed unhindered. In apartheid South Africa, the “pass laws” criminalised Black South Africans for existing outside their assigned zones, reducing life itself to a bureaucratic calculation of permission.

Identification has never been about protecting the individual; it has been about protecting property relations. States have needed to know who people are in order to tax them, conscript them, and deny them rights. Employers demanded papers to guarantee that workers were legally exploitable. Landlords used identification to screen tenants, banks to gate-keep credit, police to track dissenters. The notion of “identity” under capitalism has always been bound up with surveillance and discipline.

Digital ID does not break from this tradition but it intensifies it. What once required a physical stamp or signature now demands a biometric scan or QR code. Where once a police officer demanded to see your papers, now an algorithm silently determines your access. The shift is not from control to freedom, but from analogue domination to digital domination.

The Logic of Digital ID

Behind the rhetoric of convenience lies the hard logic of capital and the state. Digital ID is not being built for us, it is being built to extend the power of those who already govern our lives.

At its core, digital ID represents the enclosure of access. Increasingly, the essentials of life, healthcare, housing, employment, welfare, travel, are gated behind digital checkpoints. Without the correct identification, people are excluded. This transforms existence itself into a series of permissions, each mediated by algorithmic verification. Access to food, shelter, or work becomes conditional on whether a machine recognises your fingerprint or face.

It also expands surveillance capitalism. Every scan, swipe, or login generates data. This data is stored, tracked, and monetised. Digital ID reduces human beings to data streams, feeding the profits of corporations like Microsoft, Mastercard, and Accenture, companies deeply embedded in global ID initiatives. Far from empowering individuals, digital ID empowers corporations by turning our lives into commodities to be sold.

Digital ID also disciplines labour. By tying welfare payments, work permits, or banking access to digital identity, states and corporations acquire powerful new tools to coerce populations. In India, the Aadhaar biometric system has left millions excluded from rations and pensions when fingerprints failed to scan, producing not efficiency but hunger. Migrant workers across the world are increasingly monitored through digital verification, making precarious labour even more vulnerable.

Perhaps most insidiously, digital ID normalises surveillance itself. By embedding digital checkpoints into daily life, whether entering a building, logging into a service, or accessing healthcare, surveillance becomes routine. What once might have provoked outrage becomes ordinary. Control does not need to be imposed violently when it is integrated seamlessly into the everyday functions of existence.

The consequences of digital ID are not abstract. Around the world, its implementation reveals the sharp edges of exclusion and control.

As already mentioned India’s Aadhaar project, the largest biometric ID system in history, covers over a billion people. It was presented as a means of reducing corruption and expanding access to welfare. In reality, it has excluded millions of poor and rural people from food rations and pensions because their fingerprints did not register. Reports have documented starvation deaths when families were denied grain for lack of proper authentication. For the poor, the system is not convenience, it is a death sentence.

In Europe, digital ID takes a different but equally insidious form. The EU is developing a unified “digital identity wallet” for banking, healthcare, and travel, promoted as freedom for citizens. At the same time, the Eurodac database stores the fingerprints of asylum seekers to enforce deportations and prevent secondary movement. Digital ID here is double-edged, advertised as seamless mobility for the privileged, but functioning as chains for migrants.

Across Africa, the World Bank and multinational corporations are funding digital ID projects under the guise of “financial inclusion.” Tied to mobile money systems, these IDs are less about inclusion than about expanding debt markets and integrating populations into circuits of extraction. They replicate colonial practices where identification was a prerequisite for resource exploitation and labour discipline.

In settler-colonial states like New Zealand and Australia, digital driver’s licences and facial recognition technologies are being trialled under the language of security and convenience. But both countries maintain extensive databases of their populations, and both have long histories of surveillance and repression against indigenous peoples and political activists. Digital ID here strengthens existing patterns of racialised and political control, embedding them in everyday transactions.

The Role of the State

For anarchists, it is no surprise that the state is at the centre of these developments. The state has never been a neutral provider of services. It is a machinery of class rule, designed to enforce property relations and maintain hierarchy. Digital ID offers the state new levels of efficiency in population management. Welfare can be rationed through digital checkpoints, ensuring that only the “deserving” poor receive aid. Policing is strengthened through biometric databases, making dissent and protest more dangerous. Borders become omnipresent, extending into every workplace, clinic, and street corner. Even the ritual of voting is increasingly tied to digital verification, further legitimising the state’s hold.

But the state does not act alone. The infrastructure of digital ID is outsourced to corporations, tech giants and consultancy firms whose profits depend on extracting and selling data. ID2020, the flagship global digital ID initiative, is a partnership between Microsoft, Accenture, Gavi, and Mastercard. This fusion of state power and corporate capital creates a techno-bureaucratic regime that is incredibly difficult to resist at the level of the individual. It is not simply your government demanding your data, it is a web of global corporations embedding control into the infrastructure of daily life.

Resistance and Its Possibilities

And yet, systems of domination are never total. The chains of digital ID can be resisted, but the struggle requires collective defiance. Individuals cannot simply opt out when access to food, housing, or healthcare is increasingly contingent on digital verification. Resistance must be social, coordinated, and rooted in solidarity.

It begins with exposing the lie of convenience. The marketing of digital ID depends on people believing it is in their interests. By revealing its function as surveillance, exclusion, and profit-making, we can puncture the narrative that it is a neutral technological advance. Convenience is the sugar that coats the poison pill.

Resistance also means standing with those most affected by exclusion. When people are denied access to food or healthcare because a machine rejects them, solidarity demands that communities step in. Mutual aid networks, food distribution, and grassroots healthcare can undermine the state’s monopoly on survival. By caring for each other without demanding documents, communities demonstrate the possibility of life beyond identification.

Direct action has its place as well. Surveillance infrastructure can be disrupted, whether through physical sabotage, digital hacktivism, or leaks that expose the collusion of states and corporations. Every act that slows the expansion of digital ID chips away at its inevitability.

Perhaps most crucially, resistance means refusing to internalise the normalisation of surveillance. We must continue to feel anger each time a new checkpoint is introduced, each time a new biometric system is trialled, each time a new database is constructed. The greatest victory of power is not when it controls us, but when it convinces us that control is natural.

Digital ID is not a neutral innovation. It is the frontier of capitalist surveillance and state control. It deepens exploitation, excludes the vulnerable, and integrates every aspect of life into the machinery of profit and domination. Identification has always been a tool of authority, from medieval passes to apartheid laws, and digital ID is the most sophisticated form yet.

The ruling class wants us to believe digital ID is inevitable. But inevitability is the language of power. Systems of domination can be resisted, sabotaged, dismantled. The struggle against digital ID is not about nostalgia for the days of paper documents; it is about defending the very possibility of living without being constantly monitored, verified, and reduced to data.

What is at stake is not simply privacy, but freedom itself.