🔸Seventh Layer Podcast 62

🔸Life at the mercy of a SIM card; infrastructure at the service of punishment

🔸In this episode of “Seventh Layer,” we go back to the cutting off of city dwellers’ SIM cards; but this time from a broader angle: when a phone number is connected to a bank, insurance, work, judicial services, and identity verification, cutting it off is no longer just a missed call—it can disrupt a large part of a person’s life. In this episode, we examine how the government uses digital infrastructure to compel people to change their behavior, remove content, or fall silent; a mechanism that, even though it cannot yet be considered an official “social credit system,” moves along the same logic: access to services, conditioned on behavior accepted by the government.

🔸This episode is about a danger greater than cutting off a SIM card: when the smarting of services, without guaranteeing the right to access, turns into a tool for monitoring, punishment, and social control.

🔸Tomorrow, the podcast 🎧