What becomes of democracy when the algorithm of a grocery store tells you that you aren’t worthy of eating natural food?
Global collaboration between grocery monopolies and health insurance conglomerates has led to the deployment of a programmable payments protocol that decides for the working class what food they should be able to purchase.
This is being sold to technocrats, health organizations, and Silicon Valley executives involved in agritech companies as a groundbreaking solution to the global obesity crisis and the associated high cost of healthcare.
A kind and data-driven “nudge” towards sustainability of consumption. The true story is one of the terrible empowerment of programmable money.
With the removal of agency on the part of the citizen, who now has no choice but to eat what the algorithm dictates they should eat, capital has turned human nourishment into a tool of control.
We are creating a food system beyond democracy, in which the rich eat from nature while the working class are fed like livestock from a server rack.
Metabolic Compliance Protocol: How Capital Programmed Hunger
Food is the basic biological necessity of being human. Since food is such an essential aspect of living, it has been class-mediated from the beginning.
The rich have eaten better than the poor since time immemorial. However, even during the most brutal times of industrial capitalism, money itself was neutral. A currency note had no knowledge and no conscience.
Should a poor woman make enough money to purchase her choice of meat or fresh fruit, the seller accepted the payment. It did not matter who she was, what her blood pressure was, or how many hours she worked at the warehouse that week.
In the past 24 hours, the finance and agricultural tech industries have officially ended the neutrality of money.
It involved a combination of the world’s biggest retail grocers collaborating with state-sponsored health insurance companies, launching the “Metabolic Compliance Protocol.” This protocol is completely dependent on the structure of programmable digital wallets and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs).
Through the guise of a public health program, millions of citizens who depend on government food subsidies, EBT, or corporate wellness bonuses have been required to merge their digital wallets with their biometric health records. The payment API now generates a “Metabolic Yield Score” in real time.
When the citizen arrives at the cash register and scans their phone, the algorithm audits the contents of their cart. If the system identifies a shopper who is at high statistical risk of developing diabetes attempting to buy an expensive, natural protein, the system enforces a restriction. The digital wallet physically prevents the transaction from going through for that particular SKU.
The screen turns red. The POS system emits a loud, unmistakable beep. The AI recommends an “Algorithmically Approved Alternative,” always consisting of a block of cheap, mass-produced synthetic starch or engineered insect protein from the very agritech corporations paying for the protocol.
The public relations campaign behind this roll-out is choking in its benignity. According to the technocrats, the working class makes bad dietary choices that cripple the public health care system. They say that programmable money is the ultimate “nudge” that prevents the poor from doing harm to themselves and ensures that the population is healthier on paper.
It is a breathtakingly predatory violation of human freedom. It is the algorithmic financialization of the human diet.
I don’t buy into this personally. What happens to democracy? To the freedom of choice?
While they may present it as good deed, it’s a dangerous control that leaves the masses at the mercy of the elites.
The Double Bind of Synthetic Squalor
In order to fully grasp the brutality of this system, one needs to consider the food that the algorithm actually endorses.
The machine bans natural whole foods not because they are bad for health, but because they cost too much to subsidize. The system compels the working-class shopper to purchase the cheapest, most highly processed synthetic starches.
And they are precisely those highly processed foods that cause the metabolic diseases the algorithm tries to combat.
The corporation puts the citizen in a biological double-bind. The state compels them to ingest the cheap food product made by the corporation that ruins their health, and then the algorithm punishes them for having poor biological metrics by making it harder for them to buy things.
Capital has set up a closed loop of bodily degradation, guaranteeing the state-subsidized income of the agricultural monopoly and an ever-decreasing liability of the health insurance monopoly.
This is not far-fetched from Caloric Laundering and the black market.
In the same way that previous systems generated black markets, this system will generate a barter system right in the supermarket parking lot. The rich citizens who use the unprogrammed money buy the fresh meat, go out into the open, and sell the meat at a premium to poor citizens in exchange for their synthetic products.
The Indignity of the Checkout Line
But we also have to consider the psychological torture of the new supermarket aisle.
The supermarket is a public place. Picture the sheer embarrassment of a man trying to purchase a fresh carton of milk for his child, only to be publicly rejected by the digital checkout because an unseen server rack deemed that his body mass index meant that he was unfit to purchase dairy.
The queue of shoppers behind him watches. The checkout operator looks on.
This man does not merely lack money; he is being algorithmically excommunicated. The state has formally stated, in the presence of his peers, that he is an untrustworthy biological vessel that cannot take care of himself.
How about the mental state of the cashiers and other retail employees? The human cashier is compelled to take on the role of the biological enforcer of an algorithm which he does not control. The psychological burden carried by a minimum wage employee of a grocery store having to tell a mother who is having a hard time, “Sorry, but the computer says that you cannot purchase these apples.”
This friction of programmable money is no mistake; it’s intended to humiliate. It serves to underscore the unforgiving and omniscient control that the state maintains over the bodies of the poor.
Biological Caste System
We are designing a two-tire system in the realm of biology.
The affluent classes will maintain the ability to use sovereign money which cannot be programmed. They will move through the organic aisles, buying the produce of the earth; fresh fruits, free-ranging meats, pure water, all anonymously. The privacy of their bodies will stay intact.
The working classes will become nothing more than state-run cattle. The digital wallets of the masses will be turned into an algorithmic feed trough that feeds them only the caloric intake they are deemed financially worthy of by the state.
By accepting the idea of being able to programme the currency, thus controlling your calorie intake at the point of sale, you accept the most basic principle of freedom. We give up our claim on our very own body. The sound of the beep is the sound of locking ourselves up in the cell where the capital moves inside of our bloodstream.
Everyone needs a farm at their backyard.