We Accidentally Slipped Into a 1984-Style Dystopia. It’s Time to Pull Ourselves Out.
A world of quiet and constant surveillance has quietly arrived.
Guest post from Justin Giudici, Telos
Somewhere between the rise of online banking, social media, streaming apps, and the explosion of AI, we quietly sleep-walked into a world that looks uncomfortably close to 1984.
Not because of a single authoritarian regime, but because we built, piece by piece, a surveillance ecosystem so comprehensive that no dystopian novelist could have designed it better.
And the wild part?
We did it unintentionally. We even agreed to it, one signup form at a time.
We’re now living in what I’d call the KYC Era: the Know Your Customer era. Or, more honestly, the Surveillance Era.
The KYC Era: How We Got Here Without Noticing
Today, every business, platform, and digital service demands a staggering amount of personal information.
It starts when you sign up, and it accelerates with cookies, pixels, device fingerprints, and a shadow economy of cross-site tracking.
Most of us have accounts on hundreds of services.
Together, they know:
Your name, date of birth, home address
Your SSN
Everything you buy
Where you physically go
What you search, read, like, and think
And by linking your Reddit, X, Instagram, and browsing patterns… even who you are
This isn’t paranoia. This is the business model of the modern internet.
And then come the hacks - massive ones, constant ones.
Your credit card numbers, passwords, home address, and identity data have likely been leaked many times over. Not hypothetically - mathematically almost certain.
We’ve built a world where your sensitive information is both everywhere and nowhere secure.
So the real questions are:
Why do these companies need all this information in the first place?
Why does Apple need my date of birth, phone number, home address, and credit card info just so I can watch a movie?
Why does a random new AI model need me to create an account and subscribe to a monthly plan just to run a single prompt?
Why do we trust them to store it securely?
They’ve proven over and over that they can’t.
Why can’t we just interact with a service—pay, access, use—without a signup wall?
Imagine how much faster innovation would move if “Try now” didn’t always mean “hand over your identity.”
Even solutions like X402 address payments, but they intensify traceability. The surveillance problem remains intact - sometimes amplified.
AI Is About to Make This Much Worse
All this scattered, duplicated personal data used to be difficult to assemble.
Not anymore.
AI collapses the cost of correlation.
Anyone - from a marketer to a state actor to a criminal who gets access to your data from the dark web - can query:
“Where does person x shop most often?”
“What sites does he/she log into daily?”
“Where does he spend time on weekdays?”
“Where does person x live?”
This is no longer a sci-fi threat model.
And ironically, Web3 as it exists today can make this problem even worse - public ledgers create a behavioral and financial breadcrumb trail that AI can plug into with ease.
We have accidentally built an extreme surveillance system.
A KYC-first, privacy-last digital society.
And unless we deliberately change course, the next decade will look exponentially more invasive than the last.
Introducing the DKYC Era: Don’t Know Your Customer
If the KYC Era was about collecting everything,
the DKYC Era is about collecting only what is absolutely necessary—nothing more.
In a DKYC digital world:
You can pay for a service without handing over your identity.
You can access an app without signing up for a massive data suck.
You can prove your age (“I am over 21”) without revealing your date of birth.
You can prove you live in the right region without exposing your full address.
Zero-knowledge proofs are already capable of this. They let you prove facts without surrendering personal information.
If I buy a service, it should not require:
My address (unless shipping something)
My SSN
My bank balance
My full purchase history
My behavioral data
The DKYC philosophy is simple:
Reveal only what is necessary for the transaction. Nothing more.
This isn’t anti-regulation.
It’s pro-safety, pro-innovation, and pro-human dignity.
What Happens If We Don’t Fix This?
If we stay in the KYC Era, the consequences are obvious and accelerating:
Bad actors, corporations, and governments will possess absurd amounts of AI-queryable personal data.
Hacks will grow, because the honeypots of stored data will grow.
Targeted scams, identity theft, and physical-world safety risks will continue to worsen dramatically using AI.
Banks and financial systems will lock people out more aggressively as AI risk models tighten.
Innovation will stagnate, because the friction of signing up for new apps chokes experimentation.
We are already in a society where using any new service puts more and more information out there and feels cumbersome.
That’s how you kill creativity, exploration, and economic velocity.
But…
If We Shift to DKYC, We Unlock the Next Era of the Internet
Imagine:
Fast, private payments/micropayments
Freedom to use hundreds or thousands of single use services (no monthly lock in)
No sign-up walls
No massive data trails
No duplicated identity records vulnerable to hacks
No universal tracking footprint for AI to harvest
A world where humans can interact digitally without sacrificing their personal safety or identity every few minutes.
That’s the transition we need:
from the KYC / Surveillance / 1984 Era → to the DKYC Era.
An internet where we get all the benefits of digital convenience without handing over our entire lives every time we click “Sign up.”
Yours in privacy,
Justin Giudici
You can follow Justin here.
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NBTV. Because Privacy Matters.
And the plan for reaching this new utopia is what exactly? And it will be achieved precisely how? There are thousands of data brokers making $ billions $ from harvesting/buying this data; they certainly won't get behind this idea because it would break their business models. And without a plan it's nothing more than a dream. Sadly even if this dream came to fruition Palantir and state surveillance would both persist.
this was not an accident we fell into. government has been pushing for more and more data, more and more surveillance and more and more authorization/control since 1996 clinton at the latest- https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-and-others-challenge-internet-censorship-bill-signed-president-clinton (back when the aclu used to focus on shit that really mattered not someone's 'gender identity').
it used to be the gop was against centralization (of everything including data) and believed in 'our founding principles'. democrats were for free speech (which is threatened by surveillance). now both parties have joined hands to surveil and control us all. and if they can get us all into one massive "Epic" medical database, all the better for controlling us when someone gets out of line.
every day i hope nk launches a (non nuke) emp and wipes out the satellites. thats the only way i see out of this dystopia. government is never going to allow us to go back to anonymity and privacy, despite that being exactly how out country was founded https://csac.history.wisc.edu/2022/07/22/pseudonyms-and-the-debate-over-the-constitution/