Checking Your Photo for 15 minute City
Verification Legally Required any damn day to use the toilet
I am at the point of becoming very hostile to online “verification” platforms requiring ID and current image. I consistently spend nearly one hour doing so when I use them.
Everything goes awry. The hump on my back does not distinctly show. My fangs are missing. My irregular features too gaunt, too fat, too bony, too bright, not in accordance with my sullen ID picture or the ways my eyes shift all of a sudden mid-picture or my lips maybe, when my laughter turns to rage after one hour of gaming me.
Today I am going to target all these ID platforms as the work of the devil and preach the bonfire of technology! A bonfire of the vanities (Italian: falò delle vanità) is a burning of objects condemned by religious authorities as occasions of sin. The phrase itself usually refers to the bonfire of 7 February 1497, when supporters of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola collected and burned thousands of objects such as cosmetics, art, and books in the public square of Florence, Italy, on the occasion of Shrove Tuesday, martedí grasso.
No, in San Francisco, home of Burning Man, home of the homeless, home to graft and corruption truly global in scope, I wilI listen to the preachings of Brother Ignoramus for St. Stupid’s Day tomorrow and Easter Sunday today.
“The Prophet is above all a Voice to call down Justice. If one is absolutely determined, with or without irony, to bestow this magnificent name upon such a hurler of curses as I am, one must at once accept the consequence, drawn from the very nature of things, that my shouts will have the power to accelerate devastation. In this sense shall I be a prophet, as much as it is possible to be one without divine inspiration, precisely as a man of prayer is a worker of miracles.”
On all the balconies of the horizon; look at those panic-stricken heads, those millions of faces taking on expressions of horror and grief as soon as the Fall and the lost Paradise are mentioned. Here is the universal testimony of men’s consciences: the deepest, the most invincible testimony.
There is but one sorrow and that is to have lost the Garden of Delights, and there is but one hope and one desire, to recover it. The poet seeks it in his own way and the filthiest profligate seeks it in his. It is the only goal. Napoleon at Tilsit and a foul drunkard picked up in the gutter have precisely the same thirst. They must have the water from the Four Rivers of Paradise. All know instinctively that it cannot be bought too dearly. The ditch digger and the tinker spend their fortnight’s salary on it, and Napoleon, four million men.
They're ushering in digital ID via the back door and by blackmail. I have just been told I need one in order to draw the company pension I worked a lifetime to earn. Unless I upload a photo ID, they say my monthly payments will be suspended, leaving me in penury.
What we are undergoing, the collusion of the public and private sectors in pushing through such universally unpopular measures, is the systematic rollout of global fascism - an evil my parents generation fought a world war to keep at bay. Now the Nazis are in our own backyards.