Monologue: Sam Altman's BS Eye Scanning Startup

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Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life.

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Cold Zone Media.

Hello, and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue.

I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

Better Offline.

Last week, Sam Altman sort of debuted his latest idea, a project called World that claims to be, and this is a direct quote, a network of real humans built on an anonymous proof of human and globally inclusive financial network.

I want to die.

Anyway, this slew of buzzwords is meant to distract you from what World really is, a collection of extremely shitty apps that requires you to scan your eyeball for some reason.

Now, the company behind World is called Tools for Humanity, an annoying name for a company with an annoying tagline that claims they're building for humans in the age of AI.

I note that literally every software company is, by definition, building for humans, unless there is a dog version of Word I didn't know about.

Anyway, back to Altman's latest bullshit.

New users sign up by using one of 7,000 orbs scattered throughout the world to scan their eyeballs, even though it's worth mentioning that the official website only lists 837 locations with the specialist hardware required.

And they're in a seemingly random bunch of countries.

Thailand, the Dominican Republic, and Ecuador are all listed, but France and the United Kingdom and Australia are not.

I imagine due to local laws, or maybe just they didn't want to bother.

It never is obvious with these people.

When a user signs up, they receive 16 WorldCoin or WLD tokens.

These are worth at the time of writing this script 91 cents.

That's a pretty low price to give a random startup a scan of your unique retina patterns, but whatever.

User accounts are registered on the blockchain, which is for some reason a good thing.

And when I read that, I had to convince myself that I hadn't time traveled back to 2017 or 2021 or another time when scam artists were running around this rampantly.

You may be wondering what the point of all of this is and from what I can tell is that it's an attempt to create some sort of verified identification system where companies connect to world systems and can guarantee that each user is real and I'm really guessing here because world does not seem that interested in explaining.

By verifying your identity using this giant metal orb, you get access to a suite of mini apps including the ability to buy stuff with crypto, create human-only Telegram groups, top up a prepaid cell phone using crypto, earn crypto for working out, live stream from your world account, play shitty mobile games, or also use a crypto.

Well, it really...

All of this is just a series of very poorly done apps, and they're all basically crypto apps or something to do with spending your world coins.

And for all the pomp, circumstance, and bullshit press, World's actual product is the same kind of mediocre bottom-of-the-barrel crypto bullshit that scam artists were hawking in 2021, with the veneer of respectability given by Sam Altman and his marketers in place to make sure the media actually covers it.

I should note that you can do all these things already without the additional layer of biometric verification or anything to do with the blockchain.

Now, according to Mr.

Altman and faithfully parroted without a single thought, not one by Kevin Roos of the New York Times and Alex Heath of The Verge, WorldCoin, and I quote Heath, could be used as a form of universal basic income for individuals whose jobs have been replaced by AI.

How?

Where's the money coming from, Sam?

How would that work?

What does any of that mean?

Who knows?

Just write the fucking quote down, I guess.

Just say it.

We don't all have our own personal Masayoshi son to lend us $40 billion whenever we want.

It's just, it's incoherent.

Nevertheless, Mr.

Roos of the Times, Mr.

Roos, went on to say that Altman and Alex Blainier, the other co-founder, believe that something like WorldCoin will be needed to distribute the proceeds and powerful AI systems to humans.

Perhaps in the form, have you guessed it?

And that's my addition.

Universal basic income.

And I know, I mean, I know I bag on Mr.

Roos a lot.

I know I'm merciless with him.

But come on, man.

How?

How?

What does that even mean, man?

When has a tech company ever distributed the proceeds of anything?

Especially one run by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, a company built on stealing people's shit and trying to take their jobs.

It's just...

I don't know, man.

Like, I try not to be so much of a hater, but you see this shit and you, like, Kevin Roos is ostensibly not an idiot.

Like, why wouldn't you just say, hey, yeah,

they say they want this to be universal basic income, but they haven't described why or how

or even what the practicalities are.

And that's a problem.

That would be a good thing for the New York Times to discuss, but no, we need to keep the column going, don't we, Kevin?

Tech companies are notorious for engaging in complex tax avoidance schemes, precisely because they don't like distributing the proceeds of their activities, which normal people call paying our fair share of tax.

Mechanisms designed to tax these companies engaging in aggressive tax avoidance practices are now referred to as the Google tax, precisely because tech companies are the worst offenders.

And I've often said that OpenAI's success is based on impossible things happening, like a company kind of raising more money than any startup has ever raised in perpetuity until some yet unseen breakthrough in maths or semiconductor engineering happens and allows it to essentially crawl into the black but not without first burning hundreds of billions of dollars

this is basically what world appears to be as well except with far less effort like i guess we're gonna put all the eyes in the machine and then something will happen right

wrong nothing's happening World has actually been around for a few years and they've been doing some really nasty stuff behind the scenes, according to Eileen Guo and Addie Rinaldi of MIT Technology Review, who reported in 2022, and I'll be linking in the episode notes, that Orb would hire local Orb operators to sign people up, and I quote, receiving commission for each person's biometric data that they collect, turning them into the equivalent of a door-to-door salesman.

But instead of knives or Kirby vacuums, they're trying to take pictures of your eyes.

These operators, according to Tech Review, barely knew what they were selling, what World Cord Coin did, or how the information was collected, what was done, were there, any of this stuff.

World preyed upon people in developing and often poor countries like Indonesia, Kenya, Sudan, and Ghana, where people might be tempted with what might be considered by Western standards a pittance to scan their eyes and download the app.

That's an aside, by the way, WorldCoin is now banned in both Spain and Hong Kong.

Almost every article about World takes their idea at face value, that this is a company verifying people's identity using their eyes, and that they will, as a result, be able to connect this to a verified eye database and then do

something.

Just

something will, then something will happen.

It's good to verify people because

AI bots, right?

Right?

I mean, social networks

are full of bots.

And this will stop that somehow, won't it?

Yeah, I mean, I want to be clear that this whole thing is extra normally fucking stupid.

And nobody would have paid attention, even an iota of attention to it if Sam Altman wasn't attached.

And we know that because if you search for biometric blockchain verification funding on Google with the verbatim option option turned on, you see a bunch of companies that have also tried to do exactly the same thing over the past few years.

And while they raised the odd million here or there, especially during the 2021-2022 VC market, they didn't really go anywhere.

On top of the obvious privacy concerns of millions of people creating a giant biometric database of their eyes, World's ideas are somewhere between orsorants and complete fucking nonsense.

World has raised $115 million at a $3 billion valuation, yet has built no infrastructure of apps, no real business model, and nothing other than an aggressive attempt to gather millions of people's eyeballs.

They do also have an upcoming Visa debit card to use your crypto without first converting it into fiat currency, which is an idea that's extremely old and has been done many, many times over the years.

Oh, and they're also going to allow you to verify your identity on Tinder, which is a feature that Tinder already offers.

And really though, biometric verification is already a thing.

There's something called passkeys, which are already being offered as a replacement to passwords on a bunch of sites, like Amazon and I think Best Buy as well.

They work by storing a cryptographic key, not cryptocurrency, cryptographic, it's the maths one, and they store it on your device, which is something you already have, and verify that against something that you can't easily spoof, like a scan of your face and what face ID does, or fingerprints, and yes, your irises in some cases.

And well, the world wants to offer exactly that, but you have to use some giant iScanner thing that you have to physically travel to, one only available in a handful of countries, and give your data to a man who loves to lie and make himself more money.

And while it's true that some in the developing world lack any formal identification, and that in turn makes it harder for them to access travel documents, banking services, and government services, we don't need Sam Altman to solve that problem.

India solved this almost 16 years ago with its Adha program, which now covers 99.9% of the adult population.

Aadhaar gives Indian citizens a 12-digit unique identifier, which is linked to their biometric information, and India managed to accomplish this without crypto or the blockchain.

I'm sure it's not perfect, I'm sure that there are critics of it, but it's definitely better than World.

And also, it's old news and it's not exciting, even though it worked.

Let's talk about Sam Altman and whatever the fuck he's up to.

Now, some people, Alex Heath, have also said that World's platform has over 150 apps, but neglected to check if that was the case.

It appears there are only 63 of them, with the vast majority of them being either a crypto app or an app that otherwise verifies you using your world ID.

It's kind of like how Android has always had more apps than iOS, but they are often low quality, like app-based wrappers of websites you already can read in your browser, or trivial ones like a flashlight app.

Now, to be clear, this is also something that happens on iOS now because Apple doesn't give a rat fuck.

Nevertheless, nevertheless,

World's App Store is nonsense, and to talk about it as a real app store is journalistic malpractice.

Come the fuck on.

I'm sick of this.

If Sam Altman was not involved with this, this wouldn't get coverage and it would never have raised money.

And frankly, I think everyone would be making fun of it.

Now, I've read about 15 different articles about World to write this monologue.

And I was hoping I'd find just a smidgen of information about this company that would somehow show depth or substance or something other than Sam Altman is working on something.

And I'm going to be honest, I came up short.

And what you just heard there was my cat Hal who's decided to join me for this episode.

World is a farce.

It's another cynical con, yes, Hal, peddled by a cynical con man.

20% of World's tokens have, according to MIT Tech Review, already been allocated to their full-time employees and investors, and I cannot find any good reason why this thing even needs a token.

In fact, I really can't find a cogent reason for this company to exist.

I don't see a business model or even much of a product.

World's app is a boring collection of crypto-adjacent bullshit, the kind of which I thought we'd abandoned five years ago.

Their token is yet another phony attempt to connect privacy to the blockchain, which is ridiculous because the blockchain is just a type of database and their mission is almost contemptuous in its vagueness.

World feels like something propped up specifically to absorb data, venture capital, and media attention, and inadvertently proves that something is broken in society that allows companies to raise money to do nothing and use the media as their marketing arm.

In a just society, Sam Altman would be laughed out of the building or unceremoniously launched headfirst from the top of it.

In ours, he's celebrated for his vacuousness, his ideas championed as some sort sort of altruistic blueprint for the future.

Good grief.

Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life.

There was the six-foot cartoon otter who came out from behind a curtain.

It actually really matters that driverless cars are going to mess up in ways that humans wouldn't.

Should I be telling this thing all about my love life?

I think we will see a Twitch stream or a president maybe within our lifetimes.

You can find Close All tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.

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