This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca!
Transcript:
Hey, remember “Adam Ruins Everything?” It was a show starring Adam Conover. Personally, I never watched it because I’m bigoted against this entire look–all of it. The hair, the smirk, the suit, I’m sorry, I can’t help it, it awakens some ancient survival instinct in my lizard brain, but I still appreciated that it existed, because the conceit was that this man, Adam, debunks a different commonly held belief each episode, which is obviously something I think is a very good thing. For instance, various episodes explained how vitamin supplements aren’t necessarily good for you, that Christopher Columbus was a genocidal asshole, and how broken America’s immigration system is, all things that I’ve talked about on this very channel!
You know what, maybe I should reconsider my innate bias against white men with abnormally tall hair. After all, I met Conan O’Brien once and found him absolutely delightful! Adam Ruins Everything ended in 2019, so let’s check out social media to see what Adam Conover is up to these days.
Oh cool, he’s going to debunk crypto scams straight to the face of the scammers, all while taking their money! Awesome! Let’s see him hammer them with those skeptical questions!
…
Wow, such skepticism! Very hard hitting journalism. So, he’s genuinely taking money to promote something called “the orb.” He wants to know if I’m gonna “get myself orbed.”. No, Adam. No, I will not be getting myself orbed. Because as fucking dystopian as “the orb” from “World” sounds, the reality of what it is is actually so much worse.
But yes, even what you learn in the video is fucking horrible: it’s a machine that scans your eyeball in exchange for $41 in a cryptocoin so that it can then use your biometric data to verify your identity to various corporations. And yes, they called the machine “the orb” and their company “World.” Well, they’re calling the company that now, but a few years ago it was better known as Worldcoin.
Oh, and before that “Worldcoin” was actually the name of the product, not the company. The guy who helped create it was Sam Altman, the OpenAI guy, and he envisioned it as a “collectively owned global currency” that would be given to everyone on Earth, provided they submit to an iris scan. According to Altman, the scan was really important because it made sure that nobody could get more than their fair share of Worldcoin.
So, how did they train the “orbs” to distinguish humans based on their irises? By exploiting people, of course. In 2022, MIT Technology Review conducted an in-depth investigation that found that Worldcoin had spent the previous year canvassing developing countries in Africa and Southeast Asia, offering the world’s poorest people cryptocurrency in exchange for their eyeballs–a cryptocurrency that hadn’t even launched yet, so no one had any idea how much it would be worth.
In some places, like Sudan, people didn’t even have email addresses so had no idea what crypto even was, so Worldcoin operators gave away Airpods. And in Indonesia, they applied to teach a class on cryptocurrency to HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS, and then only taught them how to scan their irises and log into the Worldcoin app.
Worldcoin promised that they would eventually delete the biometric data they collected from these people, which also included 3D body scans and other data, once they finished training their “orbs,” but security experts were skeptical that the company WOULD keep their privacy promises and even that they COULD keep them. It turns out, they were right to be skeptical, because a year after the MIT Technology Review investigation, Worldcoin got hacked. Several orb operators had all their credentials stolen and posted on the dark web, giving anyone access to the full Worldcoin dashboard, because it didn’t even require 2-factor authentication.
MIT Technology Review noted that Worldcoin was also conducting scans in Europe, leading to a lot of issues with the EU’s stronger privacy laws. Sure enough, as of last year at least 14 countries on three continents were investigating Worldcoin for ethical violations like signing up children, as they did not only in that Indonesian high school but also in Portugal, whose government joined every other EU country besides Germany in banning the company entirely.
So here we are a year later, and Worldcoin is now simply “World,” and they’ve convinced professional skeptic Adam Conover to tell his legion of fans that they should “get orbed,” you know, if they want to. Because there’s lots of cool stuff on the app, if you’re into crypto, which he isn’t. Also, the video he posted cuts away before he actually puts his eyeball up to the orb, causing one to wonder if he’s not really into giving his biometric data to a deeply unethical corporation, either. Maybe he’s just really into money, and I don’t mean $41 of Worldcoin.
