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• The silver spheres, known as “Orbs”, are part of the Worldcoin platform, which officially launched in July 2023 after an 18-month testing phase.
• Governments are taking note: the Worldcoin platform has already been suspended in Kenya, and is under investigation in several other countries.

Gaze into the Orb

• The Orb uses iris scans to uniquely identify a person.
• The Worldcoin website currently lists 60 Orb locations worldwide, particularly in Europe, Asia, North America and South America, and notes there will also be Orb “pop-ups”.
• At the time of writing, there appear to be no Orb locations in Australia, so people in Australia cannot earn WLD tokens “for being human”.

Cash for eyeballs jeopardises human rights

• Independent reporting suggests the promise of “free” cryptocurrency was a more common motive.
• In most locations, Worldcoin offers a “genesis grant” of 25 units of its WLD cryptocurrency when users scan their irises.
• (The value of WLD fluctuates, but the grant has been worth around US$50, or $A75, over the past month.)
• Offering money for sensitive data arguably makes privacy – a human right – a luxury only the wealthy can afford.

‘Cataloguing eyeballs’: the risks of using biometric data

• Unlike a driver’s licence or a passport, you cannot replace your iris if the data is compromised.
• Surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden has criticised Worldcoin for “cataloguing eyeballs”, and tweeted about the unacceptable risks:
  Don’t use biometrics for anything.
• In either case, the user must simply trust the company to delete the biometric data, or appropriately secure it against misuse.
• Journalist Eileen Guo also points out that Worldcoin has not yet clarified whether it still uses stored biometric data to train AI models and whether it has deleted biometric data collected during its test phase.

Regulatory action

• Regulators in several countries are taking action.
• The Kenyan government has now suspended Worldcoin’s activities, stating regulatory concerns surrounding the project “require urgent action”.

• In our romantic lives, we search for the “one” to be with for life.
• It is easy to think about friends as people who come and go with the seasons of life.
• There is a case to be made that friendship is not the third wheel to these other, more significant relationships.
• I tried to explain to him what I was thinking, why I could not believe what I used to believe.
• But friendship remains perplexing – not least because it is hard to separate it from other kinds of love relationships.

The importance of being different

• We seem to be obsessed with romantic love as the key to a fulfilling life.
• Falling in love, and falling in love for life, is supposed to be the highest relationship goal.
• One of his objections is that romantic love can manifest as a desire to disappear into the other person, a kind of mutual self-dissolution.
• Putting aside whether all romantic love is like this (or only unhealthy versions of it), I think there is some truth here.
• According to Nietzsche, however, great friendship includes an expectation that the other person will pull away, push back, critique.

Intimate knowledge

• It might not seem feasible to include genuine enmity and opposition in your intimate life, but I would argue it is both possible and useful to have personal enmity in an intimate relationship.
• And we can see here how to solve the problem of bad romance.
• A.C. Grayling, an eminent British philosopher, has reflected on the problem of romance and friendship in his book Friendship (2013).
• Grayling can’t escape the basic assumption that friendship and romance are separate kinds of experiences, that one can’t mingle with the other.
• Read more:
  Sex, lies and Hegel: did the intimate lives of philosophers shape their ideas?

Giving and Taking

• Another insight from Nietzsche has to do with giving and taking.
• His idea of great friendship suggests it is OK to be selfish in our most intimate relationships.
• The idea that self-sacrifice is moral and selfishness is immoral has a long tradition.
• It is, rather, the kind of love where you put other people ahead of yourself as a kind of relationship goal.
• There is an expectation that mothers and fathers (but especially mothers) will sacrifice themselves for the wellbeing of their children.
• This means it is OK to be in a relationship for what you can get out of it.

Virtue, pleasure, advantage

• You can see something like this in Aristotle, who thought friendships were based on one of three things: virtue, pleasure or advantage.
• Pleasure friendships are about the enjoyment a person can derive from an intimate connection.
• Friendships of advantage are based on what each person can gain from the other.
• What if someone wants you be their friend so they can provide you with some sort of advantage?
• One of the most important ways to look after yourself is to foster great friendships.

Contest

• This idea about friendship has a broader context, which can be seen in Nietzsche’s way of thinking about relationships in general.
• He starts with the ancient Greeks, for whom contest was an essential part of their social lives.
• For him, contest is at the centre of every intimate human connection.
• It is the form of relationship best suited to sustaining contest between individuals, without rancour or domination.

• But where the nostalgically minded group might have selected a name that, like its progressive counterpart, sounded a call to action – WakeUP!
• “Advance Australia” – now simply called Advance after the word Australia was mysteriously dropped – is a title that hints at progress and modernisation.
• If that’s not confusing enough, Advance, and FA, are fronted by Peter Dutton’s hand-picked shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.

Waging war on ‘woke’

• This “army” of democratic defenders, however, may be less of a “grassroots” movement than it claims.
• A glance at the Australian Electoral Commission’s transparency register of Significant Third Parties shows Advance has received substantial repeat donations above the $14,500 declaration threshold.
• Former Greens senator Lidia Thorpe is also leading a charge against the Voice on behalf of the “Blak Sovereign Movement”.
• “The hypocrisy of elites railing at elites, however, rarely registers with the target audience,” noted Crikey’s Bernard Keane recently.

Borrowed from the US

• The “freedom of mainstream values” may seem like a contradiction in terms, but it only needs to make sense as political messaging.
• This imported “freedom” agenda is ably buttressed by two other headings, security and prosperity.
• But you wouldn’t know it from the way woke politicians and the inner city elites carry on.
• From attacks on Australia Day and the Anzacs by the ABC to the brutal pandemic lockdowns […]
  We believe Australia is a free country.
• But you wouldn’t know it from the way woke politicians and the inner city elites carry on.
• Signatures on its longest-running public petitions reveal its “fightback” is a more of a boutique rebellion than a popular uprising.

• But as a political scientist, I was intrigued by something else: reaction to the tour by government officials.
• New Jersey renamed the state’s famed Taylor ham, egg and cheese in her honor – it’s now the “Taylor Swift Ham, Egg, and Cheese” official state sandwich.
• While these honors make for great photo opportunities for Swifties, the politics of these moves is worth examining.

Celebrities can help politicians

• Unlike many celebrities, Swift does not involve herself much in politics.
• One particular tool of politicians looking to boost their numbers is to get celebrity endorsements.
• Cooper easily won reelection in his heavily Democratic Nashville-based district.
• Although Swift’s endorsements likely did not sway these particular races, celebrity endorsements can matter in close races, particularly when the celebrity making the endorsement is viewed favorably – a likely scenario in Swift’s case.

Fawning = attention

• This is a higher favorability rating than Joe Biden, Donald Trump and both major political parties.
• We’re not talking about endorsements here, though – we’re talking about politicians aligning themselves with Swift with no reciprocity.
• One clear benefit to public officials fawning over Swift?
• Attention – not unlike that seen for Bredesen and Cooper in 2018.

Taylor Swift Post Office?

• There’s an economic angle to this, of course, as a Swift tour stop can generate huge sums in consumer spending.
• In the U.S., however, the honorifics bestowed upon Swift have come since her tour dates were confirmed.
• Taylor Swift is an enormously popular figure, particularly among demographic groups that will be increasingly important in future American elections.