Questions about China's acceleration of digital-currency issuance and the media's reactions to it
plus some self-Q&A musings (feat. #digital_democracy, #not_mydata_butmidata)
1. China calls it DCEP, but most domestic and foreign media and experts call it CBDC.
Question 1) Why do they insist on changing the name? This isn't like calling a person named Kim Cheol-min "Jeong-min's dad" or "Director Kim." It's more like the company's CEO named their company "Kakao" and someone insists on calling it "Banana."
So why is it CBDC(Central Bank Digital Currencies) and not DCEP(Digital Currency Electronic Payment)? As the names suggest, DCEP is more democratic. DCEP focuses simply on digitizing exchange value, whereas CBDC refers to the digitized control and management of a central bank.
Democratic countries actually can't accept DCEP, which is more democratic than their own currency. That's because most democracies don't choose socialism — they choose capitalism, and in capitalism at least, capital is more centralized and has a capitalist (establishment) cyclic structure, even more than communism does.
Capitalists use marketing and PR to stamp an image on products and services and sell them to consumers. The way various experts or media recently name DCEP — and the way they criticize it — seems to be nothing more than keeping a rival in check.
2. They say China's digital currency could be a human-rights issue.
Question) Personal data has been leaking out through insurance companies, credit cards, and recently through KakaoMap. Banks build each citizen's credit score from their finances and personal info, and then sell it to insurance and advertising companies. Recently, with big untact firms pivoting into finance and marketing channels, the use and exchange of personal data across services has been expanding in both scope and frequency. And in that expanded flow, apology emails and media reports about leaks pop up pretty regularly. But… is the use of personal data democracy when private companies do it, and communism when the government does it?
Answer) The way I see it, this isn't a rights or ideology issue — it's a turf war of frames among power groups (economic establishments) trying not to lose their sphere of influence. Because while each country's media and experts raise these criticisms and concerns, on the other side each government is busy building its own CBDC.
Which raises another question. The democratic nations voicing human-rights concerns about the digital currency communism is pioneering — their media and experts — don't use the name DCEP (Digital Currency Electronic Payment) for their own countries' digital currencies. They use CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currencies).
Communism ≠ socialism; democracy ≠ capitalism.
Citizens of democratic countries should know this. Communism and democracy are categories of political perspective. Capitalism and socialism are categories of economic perspective. As various economic policies show, capitalism tolerates a tilted playing field. That's the process by which capitalism on finance gets justified while political democracy is allowed. In a capitalist society, in monetary terms it's more anti-rights and anti-humane than communism. Once again: it's worth noting that capitalism is not the same as democracy.
China is a communist country with a capitalist system.
North Korea is a communist country with a socialist system.
The U.S. runs a capitalist system during booms and a socialist system during busts — and it is a democratic country.
Uncomfortable as it is… Korea and other emerging countries are democracies without a settled system. Their systems don't move based on the will of their own governments or citizens. They shift according to the weight of which country the internal experts, asset holders, and media are more tied to via influence and economic chains.
As the capitalist system's adoption, application, and operation accumulate over time, its side effects gradually surface. Whenever that happens, capitalists build a "anti-communism" frame. That frame spreads through mass media and settles in as familiar common sense. That's why "chain of command" for civil servants or military personnel in a democracy, and words like diligence, hard work, and loyalty in workplace life, don't feel the slightest bit awkward. Political freedom and capital freedom are not the same, and we need to recognize that political human rights and capital-level human rights are also not the same.
In the era of absolute monarchy, as nobles' influence weakened, commoners' lives grew more miserable. Who was oppressing the peasants wasn't the monarch but the yangban and nobles.
In the age of capitalism, as the value of capital falls, citizens' lives grow wearier. It's not the capitalists and government who are proposing individual lives and personal data and taking profit (money) from individuals' time and information.
What personally worries me most in all this is that — much as a communist regime does ideological education — a large part of individual perception has already been locked in by the services, industries, and consumer goods that capitalists run. The scope of freedom and responsibility for members of society has shifted substantially.
Individuals who earn their living belonging to capitalists who run companies for the primary benefit of shareholders are already clearly constrained in their actions and choices. Economic decision-making and value judgments have long been decoupled from human rights and human relationships. For their livelihood, individuals act against the common sense they've been taught. At first it's cognitive dissonance; the fatigue eventually turns into confirmation bias. Capitalists (employers) teach workers that this process is simply "becoming a seasoned pro" or "becoming part of society."
Well, up to here it's still watchable? The serious problem starts now.
Digital currencies being pushed as "Central Bank Digital Currencies" rather than a "Digital Currency Electronic Payment" concept is a genuine dead end. Because this is exactly the core backdrop for the keyword "digital democracy," on par with a physical or political civic revolution.
The birthplace of democracy, Europe, is where MyData was born. Midata (MyData), which started in Europe, is evolving in Korea through political forces or capitalists under the name Mydata (MyData) as a similar-yet-different concept. This kind of localization, "custom?" adulteration, is like how the global trend of social commerce, when it arrived in Korea, was morphed by capitalists into group buying and ticket deals — yet still swallowed the market by sheer capital force.
I just hope this time, with digital currency, we won't let it be adulterated too.
