Numbered And Owned: Resisting Digital Control In Aotearoa – Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement

RNZ recently published an article Digital IDs Are Coming, the discussion centres on the increasing adoption of digital identification systems worldwide, including in New Zealand. The piece highlights the so-called efficiency and convenience digital IDs offer, such as seamless airport check-ins and streamlined access to services. However, it does acknowledge the privacy and security concerns associated with storing personal data electronically, especially regarding potential cyberattacks and identity theft. Experts like Paul Spain and Joe Edwards emphasize the importance of voluntary participation and the need for individuals to have control over their information.

While the article atttempts to present a balanced view, it inadvertently contributes to the normalisation of digital identification by focusing more on its benefits and downplaying the potential risks. By framing digital IDs as an inevitable progression towards efficiency and convenience, it subtly encourages acceptance without critically examining the broader implications. The emphasis on voluntary adoption and individual control, though important, may not fully address concerns about systemic surveillance, data privacy, and the potential for exclusion of those without access to digital technologies.

In essence, the article serves more as an introduction to digital IDs rather than a critical analysis, potentially paving the way for their widespread acceptance without sufficient public scrutiny about digital IDs being part of a global push to make everyday life more legible to bureaucracies, corporations, and security agencies. The government, banks, and technology firms promise that digital identity systems will make life easier with fewer passwords, less paperwork, faster services, and smoother travel. Yet behind this glossy language of “convenience” lies the oldest trick of capitalist modernity – reducing human beings to data points, codifying them into categories that can be monitored, traded, and controlled.

The RNZ feature lays out the official framing that this is the next step in the inevitable march of technological progress. The message that Aotearoa must modernise or be left behind is clear. Yet what is dressed up as progress is in fact enclosure through a new round of fencing off human freedom, carving it into databases and algorithms that benefit the ruling class. To understand why digital ID matters, and why anarcho-communists in Aotearoa must resist it, we need to place it in its wider political and historical context.

Identification has always been political. From the Domesday Book in Norman England, cataloguing land and subjects for taxation, to the colonial pass laws that restricted the movement of Indigenous peoples, the state has always sought to “see” its subjects. Identification systems allow power to flow one way – authorities gather information about us, but we rarely have any say in how it is used.

In Aotearoa, this began with the imposition of written land titles, replacing Māori collective custodianship with a Pākehā system of property deeds that could be bought and sold. Identification was not just about recognising who someone was, but about displacing entire ways of life in favour of capitalist legality. The Treaty rolls, the Native Land Court, the census were all mechanisms of identification tied to dispossession.

Fast-forward to the 20th century: and we have driver licences, passports, IRD numbers, and WINZ client IDs. Each new identifier promised efficiency but also deepened surveillance. Digital ID is not new, rather it is simply the next step in this centuries-long process of codification, but now accelerated by algorithms, biometrics, and global databases.

The RNZ piece notes that banks, government services, and private companies are keen on digital ID because it cuts costs. Yet what is cost-cutting for them is dependency for us. If every transaction, from paying rent to getting a doctor’s appointment, requires a digital ID, then not having one becomes a form of exclusion.

The rhetoric of “choice” is hollow. Just as with My Vaccine Pass during the pandemic, the infrastructure of compulsion hides behind the mask of voluntarism. Once institutions align around a digital ID, participation becomes mandatory in practice, if not by law. To “opt out” will mean opting out of society.

Here we see the neoliberal logic at work: outsource identification to private tech firms, integrate it into banking and e-commerce, and frame it as a service rather than a state mandate. In reality, it binds us more tightly to both state bureaucracy and capitalist platforms.

Aotearoa’s rollout is not happening in isolation. From the UK to Samoa, all across the world, digital identity projects are being pursued. The World Bank promotes digital IDs through its ID4D initiative, and corporations like Microsoft and Mastercard are eager to integrate them into financial systems.

This is not a coincidence. Capitalism thrives on universality – to extract value, it must make everything comparable, exchangeable, measurable. Just as the enclosure of common lands allowed for capitalist farming, the enclosure of identity into digital form allows for new markets in data, new efficiencies in labour control, new frontiers for surveillance.

The danger is not simply “Big Brother watching you.” It is a deeper restructuring of social life so that every interaction, economic, social, or political, flows through systems owned and operated by ruling elites.

Let us strip away the PR and call digital ID what it is – infrastructure for capitalist surveillance. Imagine a society where every payment, every movement, every healthcare visit, every online interaction is tied to a single ID. The state will say it fights fraud and crime; banks will say it prevents money laundering. Yet the real outcome is that ordinary people become transparent while the powerful remain opaque.

Consider the possibilities:

Employers use digital IDs to track workers’ compliance. Landlords demand them for tenancy, excluding those deemed “high-risk.” WINZ links benefits directly to ID, tightening conditionality. Police access ID databases in the name of “safety”. Corporations mine ID-linked data for targeted advertising and behavioural manipulation.

In short, digital ID is less about proving who we are, and more about disciplining us into who they want us to be.

Proponents often frame digital ID as a tool for inclusion and giving access to services for those who lack traditional forms of identification. Yet history shows that identification schemes rarely empower the marginalised; they entrench their marginalisation.

For Māori, digital ID risks becoming another layer of colonial imposition. Whose definitions of identity are encoded? Whose whakapapa is legible to the system? How will iwi or hapū sovereignty be respected when the state assumes the authority to digitally define who is who? For migrants, refugees, and the poor, digital ID becomes a gatekeeping tool: “Show us your papers, or your app, or your biometric scan.” The promise of access often hides the reality of exclusion.

What, then, is to be done? For anarcho-communists, digital ID cannot be treated as a neutral technology to be tweaked or regulated. It is part of the machinery of capitalist control, and resisting it requires a broader struggle against the system that produces it.

That means rejecting the narrative of inevitability. Technology is not destiny. Just as workers once smashed the machines of the factory system, not out of technophobia but out of class struggle, we too must see digital ID as a terrain of conflict.

Direct action, mutual aid, and solidarity are our tools. We can build alternative forms of verification based on trust, community, and reciprocity, not state databases. We can refuse to normalise ID checks in everyday life. We can support those most likely to be excluded by these systems, ensuring that solidarity, not surveillance, defines our communities.

The fight against digital ID is not about defending some romanticised “old way” of identification. It is about resisting the creeping normalisation of control. The state tells us that security requires surveillance; corporations tell us that convenience requires surrender. Both are lies.

True security comes from community, not databases. True convenience comes from freedom, not dependency on apps. Our liberation will never be found in QR codes or biometric scans. It lies in dismantling the systems that make identification a tool of domination in the first place.

Anarcho-communism insists on a different horizon: a world where people are not reduced to numbers in a system but recognised as full human beings in their collective relations. That is the opposite of what digital ID offers.

Digital IDs are coming, the state tells us. But inevitability is a political weapon, not a fact. Capitalism has always tried to convince us that its enclosures are “progress.” The enclosure of identity into digital form is no different. It will not bring freedom or empowerment. It will bring tighter oppression, disguised as convenience.

As anarchists in Aotearoa, our task is clear: refuse to be numbered, refuse to be reduced, refuse to let our lives be coded into systems of domination. The struggle against digital ID is the struggle against capitalist surveillance, against colonial imposition, against the machinery of control. It is part of the broader struggle for a world beyond state and capital.

When they tell us “Digital IDs are coming,” we must answer “so is resistance.”