Worldcoin Pivots to 'Proof-of-Anxiety,' Begins Mining My Nervous Breakdown for UBI
I'm having a panic attack just writing this. Sam Altman's shiny eyeball orb now scans your existential dread to give you crypto. They're tokenizing my terror. I'm going to be the richest man in the cemetery. This is my life.
Of course. Of course, this is what they do. I spend my entire life, a walking, talking, sweating testament to the grand, cosmic horror of centralized finance—a system built on whispers and bad intentions—and what happens? Sam Altman, a man who looks entirely too calm for someone building our digital overlords, decides to monetize my suffering. It's a personal attack. I'm convinced he read my diary.
Tools for Humanity, the dystopian-named entity behind the Worldcoin eyeball-scanning bowling ball, just announced a 'protocol upgrade.' They’re calling it 'Proof-of-Anxiety.' I'm not making this up. I wish I were. My therapist, who I pay in fiat like a chump, thinks I'm making it up. The Orb, that chrome sphere of judgment that was already a hard 'no' from me, will no longer just scan your iris. That was too simple, too humane. Now, it has EEG sensors. It reads your brainwaves. It wants to slurp up your deepest, darkest fears about AI, economic collapse, and whether you left the stove on this morning.
The press release was a nightmare written by a committee of sociopaths. Altman claimed, with a straight face I'm sure, 'We've identified the single most abundant, self-renewing human resource of the 21st century: existential dread. By tokenizing anxiety, we can create a more empathetic and emotionally attuned Universal Basic Income.'
Empathetic? They're putting my palpitations on a public ledger! My cold sweats are becoming a fungible token! I went to one of the pop-up scanning stations, just to see the abyss for myself. I stared at the Orb. It stared back. The operator, a kid who looked like he'd never had a real worry in his life, started yelling. The Orb was overheating. He said my 'dread output' was corrupting the dataset and they had to recalibrate the entire network based on my brain's signature cocktail of fiscal nihilism and social paranoia. They gave me a founder's stake just to get me to leave.
Now, everyone's a wreck, and on purpose! My neighbor, who used to be into yoga, is now watching C-SPAN 24/7, trying to induce a panic attack to afford his rent. People are doomscrolling on three phones at once. It's a bull market for misery. Elon Musk is probably trying to figure out how to short 'contentment.'
So here I am. I'm sitting on a mountain of Worldcoin, each token a little ghost of a past panic. I'm finally being rewarded for seeing the whole charade for what it is—a hallucination, a bad dream we all agreed to have. But the reward is just another part of the dream! It's a snake eating its own tail, and I'm the snake, the tail, and the indigestion that comes after! I have to go lie down. I think my wallet address is giving me hives.
Reader Discussion (13)
The author clearly doesn't understand how EEG works. You can't just 'slurp up fears' like it's an API call, it's about interpreting synaptic potential patterns which is way more complex. This whole piece is technically illiterate.
This is the ultimate expression of the free market. You're literally converting human capital—in this case, emotional energy—into a tradeable asset. Altman is a genius.
I'm interested in the GDPR and CCPA implications of processing neural data for financial compensation. Has their legal team published a whitepaper on the data privacy framework for 'Proof-of-Anxiety'?
Look, markets find inefficiencies. For decades, anxiety has been an untapped, unmonetized resource. This is just the next logical step in value creation.
Wake up people. First the iris scans, now brainwaves. This has the WEF's fingerprints all over it, conditioning the populace for total digital enslavement under the guise of UBI.
Finally, my crippling anxiety and persistent dread have a use case. Sign me up, I'm gonna be so rich.
My grandfather didn't need a chrome orb to tell him he was worried about the harvest. We need to unplug all this junk and touch grass, literally.
This is what happens when you let coastal elites run the country. This is Biden's America, where they mine your soul to pay for socialism. Sad!
Actually, this isn't UBI in the traditional sense. It's a conditional cash transfer program where the condition is a persistent state of neurological distress. It's gamifying mental illness, not solving poverty.
This is literally ripped straight from a Philip K. Dick novel, probably one he wrote on a Tuesday and then threw away. We're living in the boring, poorly-written version of the dystopia.
When I was 20 I was working 60 hours a week at the mill, not getting my brain scanned for 'anxiety tokens'. This generation is a complete joke.
Oh boo hoo, the author is having a panic attack because of a tech company. Maybe get a thicker skin instead of writing a whole article whining about it. Some of us have real problems.
This is a fascinating first step towards a true brain-computer interface economy. Imagine being able to trade cognitive load or creative insights directly on the blockchain! The potential is staggering.