The Post-Partisan Emporium

  As CBDCs Roll-Out, Elite-Backed Digital Payment Systems Vie to Build the “Global Payment Standard” As Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) pilots proliferate, a myriad of elite-gilded and blockchain-powered digital payment networks are vying for their technologies and payment systems to be incorporated in the developing digital currency infrastructures of tomorrow. Their end game? A digital financial grid prime for abuse. BY STAVROULA PABST Idris Elba stars in a promotional video for Stellar’s “ Real World ” campaign, where he touts Stellar’s more “equitable” vision of finance, a future where opportunities are “borderless.” “If ideas are borderless, opportunities should be too,” A-list actor Idris Elba recently exclaimed in a video for cryptocurrency player Stellar’s “ Real World ” campaign. In the elaborate promotional video featuring Elba, traditional currencies are portrayed as unreliable and especially detrimental to marginalized people. An immigrant, working class-coded woma...

  Lizard King? Philanthropath? Genocidal Maniac? Follow him into the Gates of Hell ELIZABETH NICKSON The month before 9/11, I was in Seattle interviewing the new digital titans for the  Sunday  Telegraph . My editor, to namedrop, was Emma Soames, Churchill’s granddaughter, who was curious about those unwashed, youthful colonials with “all that lovely money”.  Question: once the flash but cool house and flash but arty dames were enjoyed, what were they going to do?  Answer: good of course, lots and lots of it. Every one of them had a passion, whether art, fair trade coffee companies or the environment – all of which would be on the grand scale. And then of course, I’d ended up at the Gates Foundation, and met their new gal, an achingly polite, somewhat scared but also beautiful brainiac who had been with the Clinton administration. I shook hands with Gates Sr., who seemed a benign older gentleman looking for something worthy to do in retirement, much like my grea...