The Biometric State

An Abbreviated History of Rex Scientiae

The Term “Biomedical State” - and other similars - is one I’ve been hearing in the echo chambers I frequent. It’s catchy, isn’t it? A great way to describe a brave new world. The quick may think this is a new term, but it’s actually quite old. In the technical literature, a more common phrase is “The Biometric State”, but the vernacular “Biomedical” can work too.

As the term is growing in popularity, I thought I would do a bit of a deep dive of its origins and hopefully help you, the reader, better and more appropriately use the term. The sooner you take ownership of the term, the sooner you can direct the dialogues around it.

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Prehistory

Biometrics as a concept is far older than biometrics the word. We can find the earliest use of biometrics in cave paintings, if you can fathom that! You’ve likely seen photos of hand-prints in cave art, but you may have missed some of the functional use of said art. Look above, do you notice something about the hands? Look carefully… If you can’t notice it, some of the the fingers are missing. Ordinarily, one may interpret this as a gruesome injury typical for prehistoric man. But look carefully again… Can you see that some of the missing fingers don’t repeat? Unless Humans once had the ability to regrow fingers, this isn’t a fingerless bloke recording his injuries. This is someone recording what may have been a kind of ancient sign language.

I am still not quite sure it is not always an injury being recorded. Certainly some of them may be. But the thing is, these missing finger hand prints often form patterns and structures which seem to encode linguistic-like meaning. It seems hard to imagine everyone in a tribe missing fingers, even children and female handprints. If it was just the men, that may make sense. But for everyone? That’s not injury. It’s language. A culture.

It’s now believed by a growing minority of researchers that these prints may indeed be some form of pre-historic language. But some now consider this even more than a language. It could also be an identification method for tribe members. A kind of biometric password identifying you as a member of a community, determining whether or not to permit entry.

Whatever this pre-historic biometric was, in some Ice Age examples one’s handprint began to be supplemented by several symbols, perhaps stating who you were or what you were known for, as seen below in La Pasiega, Spain.

It’s worth noting that as these proto-linguistic symbols start getting used, the handprint becomes more abstracted into an artistic representation and less a trace of one’s actual hand. And In some caves, insignia of a tribal identity can be found on multiple caves, suggesting inter-cave politics. Just what data these box forms were recording can be guessed. For instance, some seem to record food stores, and others how many people lived in the cave, or for how many units of time they have been there for. But what specifically they are recording is up for debate, and more appropriate for another time, to be sure.

However, I wish to offer an alternative interpretation of many of these artifacts. A far more darker one…

Many of these caves were originally Neanderthal communities. If you dig into the layers at their base, you will eventually stop finding Human bones and tools and start finding Neanderthal bones and tools. Around Thirty Thousand years ago, Human and Human hybrid bones start showing up. A gradual decline in Neanderthal bones is evident, and then a sharp cut, replaced with Humans. What gives?

If you are unaware, Human-Neanderthal hybrid males don’t exist. There’s a scientific reason. Human-Neanderthal male hybrids contained a DNA trigger that would compel a woman’s immune system to attack the fetus. As a result, we have only ever found female hybrid bones. This may change in he future, but for now the data shows the male hybrids never made it out of the womb.

Now, place yourself in the mind of a Human tribal leader. Your people have been living in Europe for a few centuries now. You are aware of a population that looks sorta like you do, albeit they are red-headed and white. Their blue and green eyes are very attractive as well, compared to your brown eyes. However, you’ve noticed something curious. Whenever you marry your sons to their tribe for diplomatic or trade relations, they only ever bare daughters. Never sons. Pretty soon you catch on that sons are an impossibility for these marriages…

If you’re clever, and you are looking to grow your tribe’s influence, you suddenly see the advantage of the Biometric State. You suddenly see the need for these biometric artifacts in the Stone Age. After all, if you can identify Neanderthal from Human, you can “gift” neanderthal mates to the tribes you are in competition with and keep the fertile humans to yourself. You can effectively erase a generation of young men who would be your enemy’s warriors. Any tribe that accepts your arrangements will find in twenty years time, they have no more sons to protect themselves from you. What you have done, is discover biological warfare.

I have no proof of this other than this suggestive evidence of Stone Age Biometrics. Human hands and Neanderthal hands were rather different. A pretty easy way to determine which people are going to breed sons, and which ones are not.

I think these cave paintings are documenting a primitive Biometric State segregating caves that could breed sons, and caves that could not.

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History

Once we enter recorded history, things get interesting. It should be obvious that the practice of using fingerprints was the next logical step in the development of Biometric specification, being the next scale of resolution one can document. You may be familiar with the American legend that the FBI first started using fingerprints to index larger criminal organizations, but if you’ve read Sherlock Holmes you likely know that’s a myth. However, not even the wit of Sherlock Holmes was the first to use fingerprints. Rather, the Babylonians were!

The above image is a Babylonian Biometric ID, around the time of Hammurabi, in the Seventeen Fifties BC. A government servant included it with his scrolls as proof of his authorship. His credentials include his face in profile, and his fingerprint. Many such cases exist like this. It appears the Babylonian State must have had some master list of its employees with profile depictions and fingerprints. Why else send a fingerprint as a seal of their authority? It was becoming a Biometric State.

Further proof of this comes from Babylonian artifacts for official state documents. The creative Babylonians would fashion an authoritative document in the form of a cylinder inscription, often with an authoritative tag of some kind. This cylinder would be pressed and rolled into local clay that would copy the authoritative cylinder into a local authorized copy. This created one of the first examples of an archive-copy relationship for official documents. The Babylonians would house an authoritative source in a state archive, and use these to compare with local copies to protect against fraud, and ensure centralized control of official data.

The treasure trove of Babylonian Bureaucracy is grossly underexposed, but the use of Biometrics is perhaps the coolest bit of deep lore with their records.

Most curious, and perhaps tangential to modern political science, is that as the authority of the Biometric State in Babylon grew, its archival authority spread outside the bounds of merely legal documents. They eventually began using the archives to construct official state versions of religious stories. One can read here a kind of foreshadowing of the influence printing presses would have on the protestant reformation many thousands of years later. But none the less, a curious use of the Biometric State apparatus we see re-emerging today, as statements are verified with authoritative and official sources, to be copied and regurgitated locally.

As you gander the below scrolls which are more religious in nature, bare in mind that one of the main reasons Babylonian Mythology was so wide-reaching was not because it was original, nor particularly revolutionary. It was simply copied more by the Biometric State apparatus. This is something to keep in mind, if you are a concerned Christian watching the state seemingly pervert all you hold dear. You aren’t old fashioned, you just haven’t copied your identity and artistic expressions nearly as much as the state has. Fix that, maybe?

On a tangential note, Babylon wasn’t the only one to develop fingerprint biometrics in the BC era. China did too. Below you can see what almost seems to be a derived-form of the earlier Babylonian method. This piece is from around Two Hundred BC.

I hope this preamble of the Biometric State’s deep history is useful to see just how old these approaches are. It doesn’t matter if the Biometric State was a cave, several caves, or an entire empire in the classical era, the use of biometrics - and the perversion of them to spread state-authorized views of things - is something to keep in mind as we do this dance yet again today.

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Modern History

Once again, the American Myth of the FBI starting biometrics in the modern era must be dispelled. You will find some of the first practical emergence of the Biometric State not in the United States, but in the South African State.

In Nineteen Fifteen, the British Colony of South Africa was suffering from rampant labour frauds and scams. Recruiters would send an African to work in one mine, collect compensation for finding the worker, get the worker to desert his post and return to the recruiter, and then send the worker to another mine to collect double commission feeds. Sometimes even triple and quadrupedal! The Crown Prosecution needed some way to index the identification of labour in a verifiable way.

Unsurprisingly, the Hu-wite Man was non-so-good at telling South Africans apart by just their faces, so photographic IDs were not good enough. The technology was also limited, as darker skin would not expose that great onto film and you would essentially have a bunch of black blobs with eyes on IDs that could hardly be told from each other.

No, they needed a biometric approach, and in the year Nineteen Fifteen, they got just that. South Africa began transforming into the first Biometric State of the modern era. The ”Native Affairs Department" was born, and a mass-indexing of native fingerprints began. When caught, a deserting labourer was documented and tagged, and thereafter could no longer be an asset to recruiter fraud. Although in its infancy, and often taking many years to document individuals who were good at the scam, other African Colonies soon adopted the same approach. In Nineteen Twenty, just five years later, Kenya developed the Kipande, one of the first unified indexes of biometrics for individuals, allowing mass-control of populations at scales previously not possible.

In an ironic twist, the Kenyans began wearing their Kipandes on necklaces. Their chains no longer needed to be latched onto a post or fixed structure. Now, they carried their chains where they went:

Side note, you can find the occasional Kenyan calling the current Covid Passports a Kipande today on twitter

Once the biometric data was available, the ability to transfer it rapidly between districts became a must. This is the same issue we see today. Where data storage grows, bandwidth requirements grow in-step. So, in these same years, a comprehensive way to record fingerprints was coupled with the ability to convert the data down to basic abstractions, and from those abstractions the data could be compressed into simple numerical values that were sent over Morse code. Upon arrival, a specialized artist - or machine - could re-assemble the fingerprint data at a fairly good resolution, and be used to compare with recently caught fraudsters. This humble way to scan an image and send it over wire developed in Nineteen Fifteen was decades before anything like the internet was available. Perhaps it was a kind-of internet. Something Africans may want to take pride in! Quite the accomplishment for the early Biometric State!

At this point you’re probably smart enough to know what the African Colonies started using the Biometric State for: Apartheid and Segregation. That’s the natural bridge, of course. Once you’ve tagged and cataloged an entire population, you can start ordering and dividing the data as you please. No different than farmers do to tagged animals. The divide between City and Rural was obvious, but a curious pipeline was constructed for the Biometric State which was in addition to these two spheres: The “Reserve”. This was a word for the families of working Africans in the cities serving the colonists. The ordinary rural farmer was divided from the city worker still living in the rural and suburban region. Dedicated Human-farms were developed that were called “Reserves” which would host the families of the city worker. In this way, the family of the worker could be held and controlled in a way that compelled his labor. Nanjala Nyabiola, a progressive writer and activist, offhandedly reveals just how a Biometric State can use the data it has on you to control you in one of her interviews below:

What I find fascinating here is how much Nanjala’s words echo many Reactionary talking points on what is known as the “IQ shredder”. A topic to read up on for the modern city in the west, as well as the broader suburban and urban decline in the west. Often when reading these writers, you can just replace their ethnicity for Anglo and you’ll find much more common minds on the problems of modernity, especially that which the Biometric State can render with its power in big data.

Today we see the Biometric State beginning to emerge and I believe we can all foresee a future - a present for many already, honestly - where our data is used to segregate and control us, blocking us off from some parts of society and the economy, or conscripting us knowingly or unknowingly to servile jobs that kill the soul, rob one’s youth, and render one a childless lonely drone. The Biometric State draws towards the pod life. The Matrix. Morgoth and Sauron’s ideal. The controlled and ordered society.

You may be surprised to find the deeper and broader history here that I’ve shown, but I hope you now have a broader and deeper well to draw from to critique this abominable Biometric State of affairs. Because I suspect you don’t want to end up like the Neanderthals, nor the Kenyans.

Remember to like and share this if you got something out of it!

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Cool Sources:

Hand Traces: Technical Aspects of Positive and Negative Hand-Marking in Rock Art - Patricia Dobrez

Biometrics, Race Making, and White Excepionalism: The Controversy Over Universal Fingeprinting in Keya - Keren Weitzberg

Migrant Labour in South Africa's Mining Economy // The Struggle for the Gold Mines' Labour Supply, 1890-1920 - Alan Jeeves

An Interview with Nanjala Nyabola

Paleolithic Handprints

The Black & White Years

Encoding Fingerprints Over Morse Code

Benjamin J. Muller's Biometric State blog