It is a curious thing, is it not, that a man may in the same breath swear fealty to liberty and hold the key to thy prison.

Mastercard announced today it would join the Blockchain Security Standards Council as a founding member, to help shape privacy frameworks for tokenized assets, which is either a genuin commitment to the principle of financial sovereignty or the most elegant foxes-guarding-henhouse arrangement the payments industry has produced in some time. I confess I am not certain which.

The announcment was met with considerable enthusiasm in certain quarters and I understand why… having Mastercard inside the tent is better than having them outside of it, generally speaking. But one oughtn’t confuse presence with intention.

For Mastercard has also, quite seperately, trained a generative AI foundation model on billions of anonymised transactions, monitors thy device fingerprints, typing cadence, mouse movements, shipping patterns and login flows in real time, and calls this “Decision Intelligence.”

The model is described as a backend infrastructure tool rather than a consumer facing product, trained on transaction data to support everything from cyber defense to loyalty programs. There is a word in the russian for this “окружениe” the slow encirclement of a thing before it knows itself surrounded. Pushkin understood it well.

The river does not announce it intends to flood the valley. It simply rises, quietly, until the valley is the river. Mastercard sits on the Blockchain Security Council shaping privacy standards for tokenized assets with one hand, and with the other hath built perhaps the most sophisticated behavioral surveillance apparatus in the history of commerce.

I do not say this is villainy. I say only that a man ought to know which Mastercard showed up to the meeting.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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