If we are entering a digital future, then what are the building blocks? And what are the rules of engagement that have been established in the first twenty years of the information revolution? According to Dr. Robert Epstein of the American Institute for Behavioural Research, the chaotic first decades of the internet have culminated in the largest surveillance and manipulation operation in history. And now, the price we’re paying for free services from tech giants such as Google and Facebook are slowly becoming clear. Censorship, personal profiling, and political and social manipulation on a global scale have now become standard and the implications for our privacy and freedom have never been more shocking.

In the history of soft-sells, the New Zealand Reserve Bank’s launching of their CBDC programme must rank as one of the softest of all time. With only fawning reviews of the incredible opportunities of a digital currency, the New Zealand media played along, repeating the promises of something called ‘financial inclusion’. But if the digitisation of our money is in our future, former New Zealand Reserve Banker, Michael Reddell asks what the purpose of it is when our money system works fine as it is? While Sociologist and researcher, Jodie Bruning, explains how the technology of programmability could be used to turn our digital currency into a means of unprecedented state surveillance.

Having worked on both Wall Street and for the administration of a US President, Catherine Austin Fitts has had a view that few others can claim of both government corruption and high-stakes international finance. And what she sees in the worldwide rush to introduce CBDCs, is nothing more than a digital dystopia. Drawing on clips of high-ranking international figures from the Bank of International Settlements, the IMF and the US Federal Reserve, the message Catherine Austin Fitts delivers is that CBDCs are nothing like the soft tools of ‘financial inclusion’ we are told they are. Instead, they are devices of control that once implemented will spell the end to freedom as we know it.

While the New Zealand Reserve Bank (like other central banks around the world) insists it has no intention of replacing physical cash, in the post-covid era of distrust in government bodies many question the sincerity of that statement, as well as the unforeseen impacts of a new digital monetary system. Among those, wealth manager Simon Angelo asks what will happen to independent banks if the New Zealand Reserve Bank goes into competition with them by launching their CBDC? And further, fellow Kiwi wealth manager, Farzin Irani, reports on how India’s non-compulsory Aadhar Digital ID is now impossible to live without on the sub-continent – providing a present-day example of just how easily a ‘inclusive’ digital technology can be used to exclude non-complying citizens from society.

Hot on the heels of hearing about how the Aadhar Digital ID has become compulsory in India in all except law, Jodie Bruning rejoins the conversation to explain what shape our New Zealand Digital ID infrastructure is taking. And it turns out New Zealand is further down the road to a unified digital ID than most people thought. And again, it is being built largely away from the glare of media questioning and public scrutiny, leading to more questions than it supposedly solves.

The framework of digital currencies are in place and almost every country in the world is developing their own CBDC. Yet still the world’s media seem completely uninterested in what surely is an even bigger story than the covid crisis. It is the complete redesign of the world’s monetary system, and one of the few who is following the story is Israeli independent journalist, Efrat Fenigson, who explains to us the status of CBDC trials around the world – including the disastrous rollout of the Nigerian eNaira and the geo-fenced and expiry-dated Thailand CBDC – before explaining the benefits of decentralised crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin.

After weeks of hearing frightening stories of a programmable CBDC dystopia, entrepreneur, investor and author, Aaron Day is one of the few voices intent on empowering people with the knowledge of how to live outside the mainstream monetary system. To him, what we are seeing is a complete and deliberate deconstruction of the world’s monetary system, with the intention of implementing an all-controlling CBDC system. Yet he also maintains there are ways of living outside it and today travels the USA explaining how.

If there is a grandfather of financial-system-scepticism for our generation, it is G. Edward Griffin. The 90-year-old author of the seminal book on the creation of the Federal reserve banking system, ‘The Creature from Jekyll Island’, Griffin is the one who can tell the story of the digitisation of our monetary system better than any other. Explaining the forces behind programmable CBDCs, Griffin explains the ‘why’ and the ‘who’ and the ‘how’ of how their introduction is the biggest power-grab in history. It is a story, he tells us, of the biggest crime the world has ever seen and the future that both Yuri Besmenov and George Orwell tried to warn us of.

If the covid era taught us anything, it was that the age of authoritarianism is closer than most of us thought. Central to that experience has been the rise of digital censorship on a global scale, run by a mixture of tech giants, governments and NGOs. One of the best positioned people to tell the story of the censorship that controls the news cycle in the digital era is Australian independent journalist Andrew Lowenthal who worked with Matt Taibbi on ‘The Twitter Files’, and played a major part in breaking the story of Stanford university’s ‘The Vitality Project’.

Independent journalist James Corbett joins RCR Breakfast host Paul Brennan to talk all things CBDC – from the fears surrounding CBDCs, to the dystopian Operation Chokepoint, and Google’s “selfish ledger” which shows the potential for abuse on a global scale.