At one time you went to a grocery store, took the goods you wanted to buy to the cash register—and gave cash. Now, most people pay by credit card. Whole Foods—owned by Amazon—is not using your palm print to pay for goods.
““Give me convenience or give me death!” goes the Dead Kennedy’s satirical parody of the infamous Patrick Henry quote. American consumers may soon get both, good and hard.
Last month, Amazon announced plans to implement palm-scanning payment systems in all of its Whole Foods stores and other commercial outlets under its dominion by the end of the year.
The corporation calls its project “Amazon One.” Biblical prophecy calls it the “mark of the beast.” (There’s a justifiable reason, from my perspective, that I call my personal publication Armageddon Prose.)”
What could go wrong? One hack, just like using your credit card, and you have bought goods all over the country. I love technology, but this seems to be technology just to prove you can do it.
Techno-Hell: The Mark of the Beast Descends on Whole Foods
BY BEN BARTEE, PJ Media, 8/7/23 https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/benbartee/2023/08/07/techno-hell-the-mark-of-the-beast-descends-on-whole-foods-n1716922
“Give me convenience or give me death!” goes the Dead Kennedy’s satirical parody of the infamous Patrick Henry quote. American consumers may soon get both, good and hard.
Last month, Amazon announced plans to implement palm-scanning payment systems in all of its Whole Foods stores and other commercial outlets under its dominion by the end of the year.
The corporation calls its project “Amazon One.” Biblical prophecy calls it the “mark of the beast.” (There’s a justifiable reason, from my perspective, that I call my personal publication Armageddon Prose.)
Via TechCrunch:
Amazon’s palm-scanning payment technology known as Amazon One is prepared to make a significant expansion across the U.S. The retailer announced this morning the payment tech will come to all 500+ Amazon-owned Whole Foods Market stores nationwide by year-end. The biometric payment system works by having the customer hover their palm above a reader device. The device then identifies the individual’s unique palm signature which is then associated with the customer’s payment card on file in order to charge them for their purchases.
Since the technology’s launch in 2020, Amazon One’s service has been established at more than 400 locations across the U.S., the retailer notes, and has reached a milestone of over 3 million uses. These locations have included Amazon’s own retail stores, including its Amazon Go convenience stores, as well as various sports stadiums, entertainment venues and travel retailers like Hudson, CREWS and OHM at several U.S. airports, in addition to Panera Bread through a partnership announced in March 2023.
Now it’s making good on that pledge.
This lady at Whole Foods scanning her palm enthusiastically seems nice enough, but she’s also very naïve. “I’m at Whole Foods and I’m about to pay for my groceries with my hand,” she tells the camera excitedly, in nervous anticipation. “That’s the coolest thing ever!”
It’s definitely not the coolest thing ever.
How does this woman think she’s going to purchase her overpriced organic kale from Whole Paycheck when the government decides she’s a domestic terrorist — based on some Instagram post that runs afoul of some unseen technocrat, or an AI algorithm that no one, not even its creators, fully understands — and cuts her palm scanner off?
What is she going to do when she is relegated to, as my friend and radio host Hrvoje Moric terms it, the “algorithm ghetto”?
“I’m not a domestic terrorist,” she might say in response — the classic “I don’t have anything to hide” retort of NPCs for time immemorial. (I don’t know anything about this woman’s politics, so this is purely a hypothetical example.)
Well, today’s model citizen is tomorrow’s domestic terrorist, as they say. One can never know what sacred cows will be birthed out of the bowels of the technocracy tomorrow, especially when the supercomputers (programmed by Social Justice™ fanatics) are fully running the show
