Sam Altman’s Worldcoin Orb, or how to design for dystopia

In a design clothing store on the first floor of the World Trade Center mall in lower Manhattan, a shiny chrome ball sits on a black pedestal. A man comes into the store with an iPhone in his hands. He's here to see the chrome ball, or better, to let the chrome ball "see" him. He opens the Worldcoin app on his phone, shows the ball a QR code, and places his eyes in front of the ball's sensors. The scanning process begins, signaled by a led ring surrounding the chrome ball's front cameras. In about a minute, the man's irises have been scanned and archived, proving he's a human, not a machine, and uniquely him. That's not a scene from a dystopian sci-fi movie with a strong undertone of societal criticism, but what I – with many others – witnessed last week in New York. The chrome ball was an Orb, one of many iris-scanning devices recently deployed worldwide by Worldcoin, a startup founded by OpenAI's Sam Altman and Alex Blania. The two co-founders started Worldcoin to solve the proof-of-personhood problem, a type of identification validating that a single and unique real human manages a specified digital account, distinct from any other account. In the ideal scenario that Worldcoin envisions, that should all happen privately by not disclosing the person's real-world identity but just verifying their “uniqueness”.  Solving proof-of-personhood is an ongoing quest that many Web3 projects have been after for a while. Deploying a decentralized, blockchain-based system that could effectively verify people's identity without compromising privacy is fundamental to enabling several important use cases, from privacy-preserving digital IDs to online authentication or digital voting. Worldcoin aims to allow the fair and private distribution of a new digital currency that could underpin a Universal Basic Income (UBI) scheme in a future inevitably dominated by machines and AIs (just like OpenAI's chatGPT).

While the project sets highly commendable goals, its approach to the early development of the system, which included training its AI algorithms by scanning the iris of people in third-world countries, has raised understandable concerns. From a technical standpoint, Worldcoin drew the same criticisms as any other biometric proof-of-personhood system, mostly regarding the ability to provide the promised decentralization and privacy while preventing identity theft and the sale of token identities (which has already been happening with Worldcoin). 
On top of these structural problems, an additional issue with Worldcoin design choices should be addressed. There was absolutely no reason for the iris-scanning device to be shaped like a chrome Orb. It could have been a box or a machine shaped like an ATM, for all that matters. 
Yet, the kids from the nineties who steer the project decided to go for a shiny ball that looks just like a prop from a sci-fi movie inspired by a Philip K. Dick novel. At a closer inspection, the Orb also shares the constructive quality of a movie prop. Its outer case is just cheap plastic with a shiny metal finish. Try holding one in your hands, and you'll notice that it's lighter than you might expect. 
If you put all this together with Worldcoin's triumphant tweets (or X posts) about people all over the world forming lines to get their eyes scanned in exchange for 25 units of the projects' digital play money, it's hard not to think that the whole project is just another Sam Altman marketing ploy. 
The OpenAI founder has been playing this game for a while now. With OpenAI, he's trying to convince governments and authorities that his company is the only dam saving the world from AI deluge. He's also a convinced prepper and a devoted longtermist, believing that the long-term survival of the human race in the future is more important than the lives of those living today.

Altman's doomsday antics and his Silicon Valley stance have spurred a resurgence of a new, subtle flavor of dystopian marketing. Every communication from OpenAi, its aseptic brand design that now extends to Worldcoin, and Altman's public statements on the danger of superintelligent machines taking over to exterminate humanity all play brilliantly together to form a coherent strategy mixing fear and messianism. 

The Orb's design, with its mix of shiny tech and uncanny futurism, comes straight from this playbook. It looks and feels like a device explicitly designed to induce a combination of fear and hope for the future that awaits. A shiny reminder of an impending doomsday and, at the same time, a glimmer of hope in the tech messiahs that would gladly save us from the disaster they've contributed to create. Just watch in the Orb, and you'll be fine.

Opening image courtesy Worldcoin