DEI
WEF report suggests digital ‘metaverse identity’ will become central to daily life
From LifeSiteNews
Your digital identity will be your passport in the metaverse, where it will be used to surveil, predict, and mimic your behavior while determining your level of access to information and spaces.
Your metaverse identity, with its digital ID, biometric data capture, and behavior profiling, will be central to your everyday life, according to a World Economic Forum (WEF) report.
“Metaverse identity” is a relatively new concept that the WEF and Accenture describe in great detail in a new 48-page report entitled “Metaverse Identity: Defining the Self in a Blended Reality.”
According to the report:
“As people spend more time exploring, playing and socializing in digital experiences, a person’s metaverse identity will be central to their day-to-day life as well as to the way they express their personal identity.”
But what exactly do the unelected globalists mean by “metaverse identity?”
Metaverse identity encompasses three components:
- Representation: including personal, social and role identity, be it through avatars, pseudonyms or other digital expressions.
- Data: capturing the intricate web of knowledge about individuals generated by metaverse supporting hardware and software.
- Identification (ID): be it through driver’s licenses, government-issued IDs, passports, birth certificates, attestations, labels, or usernames and passwords.
According to the report, “Metaverse identity broadens ‘identity’ as it is known today and combines it with the digital underpinnings of the internet. It is a multi-layered construct of an individual or entity, including everything from representation to data and identification.”
With these three components, identity in the metaverse “connects and anchors a person to the physical and virtual world.”
Let’s break them down, starting with representation.
The notion of ‘representation’ is not just about pixels and graphics; it’s a reflection of societal values, inclusivity and the human desire for authenticity […] Representational design choices extend to the design of digital entities – from embodied virtual agents to non-embodied virtual assistant.
Representation has to do with how you present and express yourself in the metaverse, whether it’s a realistic likeness of yourself or an abstract, creative, or artistic version.
The authors say that, “These expressions may extend to include words, actions, behaviors and mannerisms,” so there is an element of behavior profiling going on in the representation category, which we will also see in the data capture and identification categories.
Representation in the metaverse will also take on a new meaning with the introduction of digital entities that act on your behalf.
According to the report, “Digital entities may represent humans, objects, systems or abstract concepts, and are capable of varying degrees of interaction, autonomy and behavior within digital experiences […] They are capable of mimicking human communication and may be used as sales assistants, corporate trainers, social media influencers and more.”
Like non-player characters (NPCs) in videogames, these digital doppelgangers attempt to mimic human behavior.
And like a virtual voodoo doll, if something goes wrong with your digital entity, it could spill over into your personal life in the real world.
“While digital entities can offer innovative interactions and functionalities within the metaverse, they may commit real-world harms,” the report cautions, adding, “The ability to manipulate or create misinformation through digital entities – such as chatbots and photoreal avatars – raises ethical and security concerns.”
Now let’s dig into the data category.
Identity goes beyond ID, like a passport or driver’s license. Metaverse identity includes data points.
The data category of metaverse identity is aimed at gathering and analyzing data to make inferences about you, and it will be used to predict your behavior, thanks to AI and Machine Learning.
“Paired with artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) models that can analyze a person’s interactions, movements and preferences further generates identity,” the report reads.
Whether these (inferred) data points are capturing a person’s current activities, predicting their next action or future preferences, these data-based breadcrumbs provide information into one’s identity.
These attributes may influence the way the virtual environment responds to an individual, and outsiders perceive an individual or entity.
This data aspect of metaverse identity is important to unelected globalists who are obsessed with manipulating human behavior and controlling what people think and do.
There is a risk that governments could use aggregated inferred data for surveillance, monitoring dissidents, or suppressing certain groups without their active consent.
Inferred data, “now aided by AI/ML, can examine seemingly unrelated behaviors, actions and choices to draw meaningful conclusions about a person’s preferences, background and intentions,” according to the report.
Once you know intent, whether of an individual or an unelected globalist think tank, then it becomes a lot easier to predict what they’ll do or say next, even if they deceptively try to mask their true intentions.
And, “While this data is collected to enhance the person’s experience, it could also be analyzed to make inferences as to their real-world identity or preferences and used for targeted advertising or other purposes without their consent.”
Making inferences for “other purposes” without the user’s consent is what defense and intelligence agencies are after in the metaverse.
A recent RAND Corporation report suggests as much with respect to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) looking to spy on users in the metaverse, stating, “As DHS grapples with emerging challenges by monitoring and analyzing users’ activity in metaverses, it should undertake legal and ethical reviews of what information is collected and how it is managed.”
Now, we shall move on to the identification category.
The concept of identity is contextual, flexible, complex and fluid […] Identity extends into the intricacies of an individual’s behaviors, actions and choices.
Perhaps the most confusing part of metaverse identity is the identification or ID aspect because digital ID and digital identity are terms that are often used interchangeably, including by yours truly, but they are quite different.
Identification is about identifying, verifying, and authenticating who someone is.
Identity on the other hand, “consists of layered aspects of cultural heritage, ethnicity, age, professional and social roles, hobbies, gender identification, sexual orientation and much more,” according to the report.
Now that we’ve taken care of the distinction between the two, your digital ID will be your passport to the metaverse, and like with a passport, there will be certain areas that you will not be able to access.
According to the report, “Similar to today’s traditional identification systems – like passports and driver’s licenses – IDs may evolve to include unique avatar designs, new body-based attestations or unique virtual signatures that validate one’s existence and grant access to specific realms or activities.”
To illustrate how digital ID plays into digital identity, the authors say, “Forms of ID – such as passports and government IDs – formalize an individual’s identity; additionally, these can serve as credentials or means of authenticating and verifying individuals across physical and digital spaces.”
Metaverse identity is integral to future internet interactions.
Now that we’ve gone through the three components that make up metaverse identity, what are some of the potential drawbacks?
For starters, the report says, “There is a risk that governments could use aggregated inferred data for surveillance, monitoring dissidents or suppressing certain groups without their active consent.”
Your metaverse identity can include your real-time biometrics, such as pupil dilation, heart rate, and brainwaves, so that companies and governments can infer how you are feeling and reacting to their goods, services, or policies.
Historian Yuval Noah Harari spoke of this same technology falling into the hands of dictators at the 2020 WEF Annual Meeting in Davos. There, he said:
Just imagine North Korea in 20 years where everybody has to wear a biometric bracelet, which constantly monitors your blood pressure, your heart rate, your brain activity 24 hours a day.
You listen to a speech on the radio by the ‘Great Leader,’ and they know what you actually feel – you can clap your hands and smile, but if you’re angry, they know you’ll be in the gulag tomorrow morning.
Having a biometric data capturing device attached to your body that knows what you’ll do before you do it raises serious ethical questions about how the data is collected, where that data goes, and who has access to some of the most intimate details of your life.
For the past few years, Meta has been working on Project Aria, which combines augmented reality with artificial intelligence to create realistic 3D renderings of people, places, and things, including living spaces.
When Mark Zuckerberg explained his vision for the metaverse at Connect 2021, he highlighted how Project Aria could map a person’s apartment, including everything in it (see video below).
Imagine how valuable that information would be to companies – knowing which products you use, which ones they think you’ll want, and how you organize your living space, so they can manufacture extremely personalized ads.
What could insurance companies do with that data? How would landlords react?
Now, think about how governments, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement would love to get their hands on that type of data.
With the data collected from someone wearing a pair of AR glasses, who needs facial recognition, geolocation tracking, or contact tracing when governments and corporations can see what you see, hear what you hear, and know where you and what you are doing in real-time?
Of course, these dystopian scenarios need not come to pass, and indeed great efforts are being made to safeguard privacy in the design of these tools and systems – at least for now.
The metaverse identity report is replete with cautionary tales and references to building systems that are fair, just, diverse, equitable, inclusive, privacy-preserving, and every other type of virtuous buzzword they think you want to hear.
Over time, however, goalposts may shift, emergencies may be declared, and laws and regulations may be circumvented.
And what do the authors of the metaverse identity report propose to safeguard the metaverse and its integrity?
Their solution is to put “the onus on the global community.”
The metaverse could be fertile ground for powerful manipulative tactics, putting the onus on the global community to establish robust frameworks that not only facilitate the growth of the metaverse but also safeguard its integrity.
Is “the global community” ever defined in the report? No, but the WEF calls itself the “International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation” and has its Global Innovators, Young Global Leaders, and Global Shapers communities, which might give us a clue as to whom they are referring.
The metaverse will no doubt change the way we work and play, leading to exciting cross-disciplinary collaborations, scientific discoveries, and untapped marketplaces.
But if the unelected globalists and unaccountable technocrats are in charge of governance, the metaverse will be nothing more than a digital playground for the great reset agenda where your digital identity determines your level of entry and where anything you say or do in the virtual world will come back to haunt you in the physical one and vice versa – there will be no distinction between the two.
Once everyone is hooked up to a digital identity while plugged into the metaverse, all that is needed to quash dissent is a simple flick a switch on someone’s digital identity and voila! it’s like that person doesn’t exist anymore.
Your metaverse identity, with its virtual voodoo dolls, autonomous avatars, and digital doppelgangers will be your passport in the metaverse, where it will be used to surveil, predict, and mimic your behavior while determining your level of access to information and spaces.
But not to worry, your metaverse identity will only be essential to your day-to-day life and will only be integral to all your future internet interactions.
Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.
DEI
Trump signs executive order banning men from women’s prisons, gender-confused troops in military
From LifeSiteNews
By Matt Lamb
“I will end the government policy to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life”
President Donald Trump rescinded an executive order that allowed gender-confused people to join the military.
Trump rescinded 78 of former President Joe Biden’s executive orders, including a handful that pushed the LGBT agenda. The decision drew praise from conservative groups.
One of the rescinded Biden directives is “Executive Order 14004 of January 25, 2021 (Enabling All Qualified Americans To Serve Their Country in Uniform),” according to the White House website.
The Biden order made it “the policy of the United States to ensure that all [so-called] transgender individuals who wish to serve in the United States military and can meet the appropriate standards shall be able to do so openly” and without alleged “discrimination.”
It revoked President Trump’s first-term decision to prohibit gender-confused individuals from enlisting in the military.
Trump also rescinded other Biden orders on transgenderism and homosexuality, including several relating to “gender identity” and “sexual orientation.”
The president also made it a policy of the United States that there are only two sexes, male and female. “I will end the government policy to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life,” Trump promised during his inauguration speech, as reported by LifeSiteNews.
Trump fulfilled that promise on Day One, with an executive order titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”
The order states, in part:
Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being. The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system. Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.
Accordingly, my Administration will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.
The executive order also affirms that sex is immutable.
It also took aim at the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision. This decision, authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, read into federal law a “right” to cross-dress at work. Trump said the decision should not be used to eradicate single-sex spaces, such as in education and prisons. Transgender activists have tried to use it to block laws against drugs and surgeries and used it to sue a Catholic hospital for not removing a gender-confused woman’s healthy uterus.
The executive order also rescinded various guidance documents and letters promoting Transgender ideology.
The order also states:
Agencies shall remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology, and shall cease issuing such statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications or other messages. Agency forms that require an individual’s sex shall list male or female, and shall not request gender identity. Agencies shall take all necessary steps, as permitted by law, to end the Federal funding of gender ideology.
Conservatives praise Trump’s support for biological reality
Trump’s swift action to uphold the two sexes and to ensure women are not housed in prisons or have to share locker rooms with men drew praise from conservative groups.
“Today, President Donald Trump has begun the effort of restoring our nation to the principles that made it great. He’s off to an excellent start,” American Principles Project President Terry Schilling stated in a news release.
“With the hundreds of executive orders signed today, President Trump has taken important steps to eliminate gender ideology and DEI from our government, depoliticize our military and justice system, and reinstitute protections for free speech and religious liberty,” Schilling stated.
The president “has made clear he understands and is prepared for the task ahead,” Schilling said, noting there is more work to be done. “We look forward to working with the incoming administration to ensure the president is able to deliver on his ambitious, pro-family agenda.”
Christian legal nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom also celebrated the sex definition order, calling it “momentous” and a return to “reality and common sense.”
‘The fight against gender ideology is far from over, and Alliance Defending Freedom is committed to seeing it through to the end,” CEO Kristen Waggoner stated in a news release. “But today, the U.S. government switched sides in that conflict—from promoting the lie to defending the truth.”
She said ADF plans to work with Trump to “restore common sense in American policy.”
Independent Women’s Forum also thanked President Trump for ensuring biological reality is recognized in law.
“The lie that sex is fluid erases and endangers women,” senior legal advisor Beth Parlato stated.
She also said Trump is “bring[ing] back sanity and common sense.”
DEI
RIP DEI?
From the Brownstone Institute
By
It wasn’t that long ago that America’s strongest and most important export was American culture and the global dissemination of the American Dream. From movies to music, from blue jeans to drive-in movies, and from fast food to fashion, there wasn’t a single country in the world or a single cohort of teenagers and young adults that didn’t want what America was offering.
Unfortunately, throughout the progression of the Vietnam War, American culture started to cannibalize itself. The anti-war, hippie, and protesting counterculture took the reins. American cultural institutions and artists pivoted away from patriotism and moved toward anti-Establishment and anti-Western positions for a variety of reasons, both ideological and financial.
Protest became the foundational position of a generation of artists, musicians, and thinkers. As a result, America’s most powerful civil export was completely defenestrated. The left took ownership of American culture and rebellion. And since then, the American left has adopted an increasingly aggressive and metastasizing woke ideology. The result has been the near complete ideological capture of most of American civil society.
Undeniably, there has been a near ideological capture of public education, public health administration (as evidenced by the Covid years), the legacy media, and the judiciary to name a few spheres of DEI influence. Woke ideology has arguably been the most noxious and dangerous export that America has ever sent out into the world and it didn’t seem like there was an end in sight.
But then, remarkably, in November 2024, America rolled out a blockbuster, the likes of which have never been seen before. It was the greatest comeback story in American history: The Return of President Trump. And in an instant, faster than a speeding bullet, faster than you could sing a chorus of YMCA, led by President Trump, American politics and corporate America began a slow and steady retreat from DEI policies.
These toxic notions have not only poisoned civic life in America and throughout the Western world but have also resulted in public policy decisions that have resulted in catastrophic loss of life and property. The apex of this policy disaster can clearly be seen within the raging blaze of fire in Los Angeles and in all the DEI policies that led to a Dante’s inferno in America. Los Angeles, where the Mayor was in Ghana when disaster hit. Where there was no water in the hydrants, the infrastructure was crumbling, and where diversity was the policy priority for the LAFD and where $1 million of civil service salary buys precisely three woke hires named Kirsten, including one Kirsten who says it’s your fault if you end up in a fire, and where the Governor of California prioritized fish over humans.
Over the past several decades large swaths of corporate North America were bullied by a loud and vocal woke minority into adopting some of the most aggressive and ridiculous DEI and ESG policies on earth. Some corporate converts set their compasses to DEI like a north star and flopped spectacularly. Many, like Bud Light, are still licking their wounds from their predictable and avoidable “Go woke, go broke” fiasco while other companies like Jaguar remained impenetrably thick-skinned and were rightly ridiculed and mocked for brand murder, dare we call it brandicide?
But now, the vibe shift is impossible to miss or ignore. In recent weeks, we have seen President Trump set his sights on DEI in the military and American corporations like Apple and Volvo starting to sing from the new hymn sheet, along with retail giants like Costco.
And incredibly, this was just the tip of the anti-woke iceberg. In early January, following an earlier, fall visit by Mark Zuckerberg to Mar-a-Lago, Facebook announced that it would be discontinuing its third-party “fact-checkers” (i.e. “censorship”) program and cutting its DEI hiring initiatives. And now, they are dropping like flies! McDonald’s and Amazon are the latest to axe their DEI programs.
Unfortunately, the astonishing and heartbreaking scenes in Los Angeles are a direct result of abject mismanagement of the city and state and exacerbated by unqualified hires and anti-human, anti-common sense policies that should never, ever have been permitted to escape the faculty lounges, let alone leap into civic life. The woke petri dish has already created colossal havoc in every element of civil society in America and in much of the rest of the Western world. Deep reflection and immediate change are needed.
If the deep blue voters of California recognize the folly of their choices and the destruction-driven bent of their elected leaders, if they demand answers and repudiate their woke ways, perhaps there is hope. For the good of the country, and indeed the entire Western world, America’s most poisonous export must be put to pasture once and for all.
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