Oh, trust me, I know that this is a self-inflicted problem — we have too many people who subscribe to conspiracy theories about things like the “mark of the beast”. It's just somewhat impressive to see how effectively companies created a new category of crime to direct attention away from their negligence.
See I do understand the distrust of the state with the ability to cut people off from society, by revoking an id for example. Especially if there are laws around the ID checks being mandatory (which I am generally against).
But I think this is mitigated as long as it’s optional for a company. The company is held liable for any fraud that they allow. The company has the option to use the government ID to prevent fraud, but they can also assume more risk and take on a customer without the “official” gov ID, if they want to.
I can see this resulting in something like creditors saying: “either you can use a govID to sign up for this credit card, like normal. OR you can send us a $10k deposit and forego the govID entirely, if you like.”
This solution makes it so that companies are held more responsible, but decreases the risk of having more government power by making it a decision for the company’s “risk management team” to decide.
> See I do understand the distrust of the state with the ability to cut people off from society, by revoking an id for example. Especially if there are laws around the ID checks being mandatory (which I am generally against).
How does that not already happen, just inefficiently? It's hard to function in the U.S. if you don't have a Social Security Number — that's why people bother using someone else's — and we already have a de facto ID system for most people but it's a patchwork at the state level which was somewhat federalized with RealID.
It's hard to imagine an environment where people would unjustly be “cut off” where the state level system would prevent abuse which would otherwise happen — it's not like, for example, California stopped politically-motivated DHS activity during the Trump era.
The problem isn't with a person having a UUID of some sort (of which their genome is one). The issue is that the Book of Revelations talks about a Mark people will need to have stamped on their arm and/or forehead in order to be able to conduct business. I.e. it's a problem of allegiance, not authentication.
So, in practice, anything that pattern-matches to "people will need to carry some sort of token given by a big organization (private or public) to pay or be paid for goods and services" will be viewed by some as the Mark, or a slippery slope towards the Mark.
They do, but most people aren't aware how Internet works. Hell, most people haven't learned the concepts necessary to comprehend what information is (personal or otherwise) and how it behaves - not in terms of technology, but as a fundamental component of reality.
Anyway, the Mark as described in Revelations is pretty... bodily, for lack of better term. It evokes the image of getting a barcode stamped on your arm or your forehead, in exchange for swearing fealty. The Mark feels like a concrete, physical thing. That's why things like "government ID" or "payment chip in your arm" pattern-match to this prophesy for so many people, while things like "mobile phone number" or "e-mail address" don't.
(There's also a factor of scale/graduality. For people alive this century, countries and governments were always a thing. A big thing. Banks too. The governments, the UN, the international financial system - they look big, evil, and pattern-match to the Beast. In contrast, for most people alive today, mobile phones and e-mail addresses were something they've seen introduced gradually, from great many independent vendors. They don't have this obvious Beast-like quality.)
Source: grew up as Jehovah's Witness. While I obviously can't speak for all fundamentalist Christians, and while JW teachings don't consider government IDs to be the Mark[0], I got pretty familiar with the patterns of thinking people show around this topic.
--
[0] - They do, however, believe that the Beast described in the Revelations is currently embodied by the United Nations. So if the UN ever proposes a common ID scheme or an electronic payment system, I'm pretty sure plenty of Witnesses will throw a fit.
