Jared Brock’s Future Faith podcast is also available for free on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Hello brothers and sisters,
Welcome to Future Faith, a podcast, newsletter, and publication about living faithfully in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance. Future Faith is now available for free on Substack, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. I’m your host, Jared Brock, and today we’re going to discuss what many people think is the scariest thing in the Bible, the Revelation 13 passage that predicts a day will come when Christians will be excluded from the global economy.
This episode is sponsored by Swanbitcoin. Visit www.swanbitcoin.com/jaredbrock to get $10 in free Bitcoin to spend. That’s $10 in free Bitcoin at www.swanbitcoin.com/jaredbrock
Today’s episode is entitled The Panopticoin Is Coming. Let’s dive in.
“The more strictly we are watched, the better we behave.” — Jeremy Bentham
At some point between 1785 and 1786, while visiting his dictator-serving brother in Russia, the now-stuffed-in-a-glass box utilitarian social engineer Jeremy Bentham started asking himself a series of questions that two centuries later are about to yield disastrous consequences for your freedom, privacy, and personal autonomy:
What if there was a way to design a prison that would allow one person to oversee the activities of thousands of inmates?
What if the watcher couldn’t be seen by the inmates, and therefore not even need be on duty at all times, effectively leaving the watching to the watched?
What if the surveilled inmates were coerced into working in their cells in order to stay alive?
What if the prison was named after Panoptes, a mythical Greek giant who possessed a hundred eyes?
The result was the Panopticon.
The Panopticon prison design was devilishly brilliant. The inmate cells lined the outer circular wall, with a surveillance tower in the center. The watcher could see all cells at all times and even speak to the inmates through a network of “conversation tubes,” but the inmates could never see the watcher.
Bentham declared his invention was a “new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.”
Only a dozen or so Panopticons were ever constructed — Fidel Castro was once imprisoned in one — but unfortunately, it created an insidious panopticon paradigm that lasts to this very day.
Because a panopticon is no longer just a physical building; ultimately, it’s a system of totalitarian control.
Panopticon Power
Patrick Henry said, “give me liberty or give me death,” and he wasn’t being hyperbolic.
He understood that humans without freedom are just inmates in a panopticon prison —without free will, we’re just dead people walking.
Free will, of course, is an incredibly dangerous thing. It’s what allows us to choose God, but it’s also what allowed a small group of moneyed elites to murder Jesus in the first century A.D.
Panopticons derive their ultimate power by creating a state of conscious visibility, assuring automatic obedience through coercive and anonymous power.
Under the panopticon eye, people wither and die.
Panopticon Today
We already live in a panopticon.
Anyone who owns a smartphone is being surveilled at all times.
Every word spoken…
Every sentence typed…
Every photo and video taken…
Every item purchased…
Every relational connection forged…
Every movement made…
All tracked.
The only difference between today and Bentham’s poor prisoners is that:
a.) most people aren’t punished for wrongthink, wrongspeak, and wrongaction, and
b.) most people aren’t conscious they’re being watched.
Yet.
Panopticon Tomorrow
“All data is credit data, we just don’t know how to use it yet.” — Douglas Merrill, Google
Nearly all the other pieces necessary for a modern panopticon society are already in place:
CCTV
Facial recognition
Voice recognition
Digital fingerprinting
IoT surveillance (via your fridge, car, etc.)
DNA banking
GPS tracking
Credit scoring
Non-anonymized consumer data harvesting
Biometric under-the-skin tracking
Heart rate and body heat monitoring
We’ve literally never been more surveilled at any point in human history.
Social cooling
Panopticon culture is already changing our behavior and policing our free speech.
We’re becoming more risk-averse.
We’re self-censoring constantly.
There’s even a term for it: Social cooling.
Have you ever not said something because you thought it would hurt your reputation
Have you ever avoided posting something online for fear of reprisal at work?
Have you ever hesitated to click on a link, watch a video on Youtube, or buy a book on Amazon for fear it might be tracked and come back to bite you in the future?
That’s social cooling.
When we let elite-controlled algorithms change our behavior in any way, we become less human.
And now there’s a piece of technology coming on the market that will make everything monumentally worse:
Digital surveillance currencies.
Panopticoin
Panopticoin: A digital currency that allows totalitarians to surveil and completely control the economic activity of their subjects.
Imagine a world in which all money is digitally controlled and monitored by corporate-corrupted national governments.
Yes, we already have digital $USD, but this is something else.
Imagine a government-issued cryptocurrency — a digital file created from nothing by the most dangerous power-seeking sociopaths on the planet — that can be completely controlled.
They can create it at will — inflating prices, crushing purchasing power, draining wealth from productive workers to those closest to the money printer.
They can surveil every transaction — knowing exactly how you spend, where you spend, and who you know.
They can destroy it at will — if you fall out-of-bounds of the powers that be, they can delete your money, impoverishing or bankrupting you instantly.
They can exclude you from the global economy — in fact, economic exclusion is an eventuality predicted in the Bible nearly 2,000 years ago. It’s a shocking prediction, especially when you consider that John lived in a time where most of the world was still agrarian and barely monetized. It simply wouldn’t have been possible in his day.
But in a hyper-monetized global economy, there is nothing more dangerous than a surveillance currency that can be tracked, traced, devalued, or deleted at will.
Sure, countries are letting bitboys have their Ponzi-like casino fun with cryptocurrencies for now, but the whole cryptoverse experiment allows them to silently watch and learn.
When governments launch their own Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) — as conformist countries like China have already done — expect them to fully ban cryptocurrency and pair their CBDCs with Orwellian social credit systems and under-the-skin surveillance.
Believe in a better tomorrow
At the end of the day, it all comes down to what we believe.
I believe the United Nations should enshrine into international law the illegality of social credit systems and surveillance currencies as an egregious invasion of the human right to privacy.
I believe in the old-fashioned notion that everyone is legally innocent until proven guilty in a court of law by a jury of their homo sapien peers.
I believe that conformity culture is anti-cultural.
I believe in a future without mass surveillance.
I believe in the right to make mistakes.
I believe in the right to be unperfect.
I believe in the right to be human.
And those are just my earthly under-the-sun beliefs.
I believe we are made in the image of God.
I believe that God is on a mission to restore all things to Himself.
I believe that God is working everything together for the good of those who are called according to His purpose.
I believe that nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.
I believe that our fight is not against flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities in the spiritual realm.
I believe we are to be conformed to the image of Christ, not to an algorithm or a ruling party’s opinion of what is right and good.
I believe that God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power.
I believe that we can resist evil, and that when we do so, it will flee.
In conclusion
We don’t need to live in a panopticoin world.
In fact, we can go in the exact opposite direction, toward a coinified future where there are thousands of non-coercive trust-based currencies, all non-surveilled and even completely private.
We can live in a world where the richest people on earth are no longer able to exploit the poorest of the poor, where the powerful have far less power over the weak, and where secularist governments no longer get to dictate whether or not you get to participate in the global economy because you refuse to believe their lies.
To get there, we need to do a few major things:
1. On an earthly level, we need to vote out of office every single sociopathic corporate-captured politician who’s ever taken a single dollar in dark money. We must absolutely resist digital surveillance currencies.
Maybe that means you need to run for office, or support someone in your church to do so. Perhaps you won’t get elected the first time around, but at least you’ll get to speak truth to power and help planet seeds in the communal conversation.
If you’re a gospel patron or Christian of means, maybe it means you need to help fund candidates or entirely new political parties at a local, state, and national level.
2. Pray. Pray about your role in resisting evil.
How are you helping to spread peace in a world of war?
How are you being light in a darkening world?
How are you giving hope in a society filled with hopelessness?
How are you bringing peace amidst the growing threat of exploitation and control?
These are questions that only you can answer, and only I can answer, when we take time to walk with God, read His word, and commune with His people.
3. Christian technologists need to go all-in on creating new God-honoring currencies. We are the largest and most networked family on the planet; we share the same Father and hold dear the same values and beliefs. If the secular world is going to go down a doomed totalitarian path, there is no reason why Spirit-filled innovators can’t use blockchain technology to protect a remnant from economic enslavement.
As I said last week, it is my strong belief that Christians need to start building new currencies, new economies, and entirely new sovereignties. Churches and denominations need to wake up and re-invest their resources—not in maintaining crumbling buildings, but in building resilient communities that can survive and thrive even in the midst of global economic exclusion.
If we can revolutionize our $10 trillion piece of the global economy before the surveillance coins take over the market, we’ll have a far better chance of securing our future economic freedom for the precious little time we have left on earth.
Otherwise, the panopticoin is coming.
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This episode is sponsored by Swanbitcoin. Visit www.swanbitcoin.com/jaredbrock to get $10 in free Bitcoin to spend. That’s $10 in free Bitcoin at www.swanbitcoin.com/jaredbrock
Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.
