On 23 August 2025, the New Zealand Government announced that it would
legislate to allow driver's licences, Warrants of Fitness (WoFs), andcertificates of fitness to be carried digitally on smartphones. For the
first time, drivers will no longer be legally bound to keep a physical
licence on them when driving. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon lauded
the change as "a common sense thing," while Transport Minister Chris
Bishop celebrated New Zealand's status as a global pioneer, boasting
that this country would be among the first in the world to embrace fully
digital licensing.
At face value, this appears to be a harmless modernisation - a reform
designed to make people's lives easier by reducing dependence on plastic
cards and paper certificates. It is framed as an update that reflects
the ubiquity of smartphones, the rise of digital wallets, and the
growing impatience of a society accustomed to instant services. Yet as
with many reforms dressed up in the language of efficiency and
convenience, there is far more at stake. The digitisation of licences
and WoFs is not a neutral step forward but a calculated extension of
surveillance, exclusion, and state control under the guise of modernisation.
Digital licences are part of a broader project of normalising
surveillance, deepening inequality, and further embedding capitalist and
statist domination in everyday life. Apparent "progress" in the realm of
digital governance must be treated with suspicion.
The Convenience Rhetoric - Efficiency Masking Control
The state's central justification for introducing digital licences rests
on convenience. Ministers speak of making life "easier," aligning New
Zealand with other technologically advanced countries, and saving
citizens from the supposed hassle of carrying physical cards. Yet
convenience has long been a rhetorical cloak for policies that in fact
increase state oversight.
Carrying a plastic card may be mildly inconvenient, but it grants a
measure of independence. A physical licence exists in your wallet,
outside the control of any network, app, or database. It is vulnerable
to being lost or stolen, but it is also tangible and self-contained. A
digital licence, however, is never entirely yours. It resides in an app
designed by the state in collaboration with private contractors, linked
to databases beyond your control. Every time it is accessed or
presented, a record can be generated, stored, and potentially
cross-referenced with other information about you.
We need to be suspicious of reforms that increase the visibility of
individuals to the state. As Michel Foucault's analysis of the
panopticon reminds us, surveillance does not need to be continuous to be
effective. The knowledge that one could be watched at any time is enough
to regulate behaviour. By moving licences and WoFs into digital systems,
the state extends its capacity to watch, to record, and ultimately to
discipline.
Surveillance in the Digital Age
The dangers of digital identity systems are not speculative. Across the
world, we see how centralised databases and digital credentials become
tools of authoritarianism. In India, the Aadhaar biometric ID system has
been used to deny welfare to those who fail fingerprint scans, while in
China, digital IDs integrate seamlessly into the wider "social credit"
apparatus that punishes dissent and rewards conformity.
New Zealand is not immune from these dynamics. Once the infrastructure
for digital licences is built, it becomes relatively simple to integrate
it with other state systems - benefit records, voting enrolments, even
health data. What begins as a "driver's licence on your phone" can
evolve into a full-spectrum digital ID. This is the logic of scope
creep, in which technologies introduced for limited purposes expand into
wider domains of control.
Supporters argue that digital systems increase security, but security
for whom? For the state, digital records create more reliable trails of
evidence, more opportunities to cross-check compliance, and more ways to
punish non-conformity. For citizens, however, they mean less privacy,
less autonomy, and a deepening sense that one's movements and activities
are permanently recorded.
The Digital Divide and Structural Exclusion
Another aspect neglected in the Government's triumphant rhetoric is the
question of access. Digital licences presume that every citizen owns and
can operate a smartphone capable of running government apps. Yet this is
far from true.
Low-income families, elderly people, rural Maori and Pasifika
communities, and those who simply cannot afford constant device upgrades
risk being excluded. While the Government insists that digital licences
will be an option, the reality of social expectation and bureaucratic
inertia is that physical licences will soon be sidelined. Once police
officers, rental agencies, or even nightclubs grow used to checking
digital credentials, those without them will find themselves
marginalised, regarded as backward, or even treated as suspicious.
From an anarcho-communist perspective, this reveals the class nature of
digital reforms. Technologies presented as universally beneficial often
reinforce existing inequalities. The wealthy, connected, and tech-savvy
gain additional convenience, while the marginalised are forced into new
layers of exclusion. This reflects the logic of capitalism itself -
reforms that appear progressive on the surface conceal their real
function of stratifying society and entrenching hierarchies.
Corporate Capture and the Commodification of Identity
No digital system operates in isolation from capitalism. Developing and
maintaining the infrastructure for smartphone licences will inevitably
involve private contractors, cloud providers, and app designers. The
state presents the rollout as a neutral act of governance, but in
reality it is another transfer of public dependence to private capital.
Corporations benefit in two ways. First, through direct contracts to
design and maintain the systems. Second, and more insidiously, through
the monetisation of data. Once people's identities are digitised, the
temptation to link them with consumer behaviour, financial transactions,
and social media activity becomes immense. Even if New Zealand's
government swears to protect data, we know from countless international
examples that privatisation by stealth soon follows.
The commodification of identity, where our very capacity to move, drive,
or prove who we are becomes a profit centre, is utterly at odds with
anarcho-communist principles. Identity should be a common resource, held
in trust by communities, not a product managed by states and exploited
by corporations.
Fragility and Dependence
Proponents of digital licences often argue that they are "more secure"
than physical cards. Yet this overlooks the fragility of digital
systems. Smartphones run out of battery, apps crash, servers go offline,
and systems can be hacked. A plastic card does not depend on Wi-Fi, 4G
coverage, or the latest OS update.
Digital dependence is not resilience, it is vulnerability. By tying
essential credentials to devices and networks, the state makes citizens
more dependent on fragile infrastructures that can and do fail. This
fragility is often downplayed in the rush to appear modern, yet it will
be the public who bear the cost when outages or cyber-attacks occur.
Resilience lies in decentralisation, not in brittle centralised systems.
A physical licence, however imperfect, embodies a kind of autonomy that
digital systems cannot replicate.
The Myth of Technological Leadership
Minister Bishop boasted that New Zealand would be among the first in the
world to implement such a system. This pride in being an early adopter
is revealing. The state frames technological acceleration as inherently
virtuous, as though being first confers moral superiority. Yet being
first to adopt a flawed or authoritarian technology is not a triumph but
a danger.
Technological hubris leads governments to adopt systems before their
risks are fully understood. By the time negative consequences emerge,
the system is already embedded, and reversal becomes politically and
technically difficult. This is the path dependency of digital
governance, once society is locked into an infrastructure, it becomes
almost impossible to opt out.
Rather than rushing to be first, a genuinely emancipatory politics would
ask whether such systems are needed at all, and whether they truly
enhance human freedom.
Towards Alternatives: Community-Centred Identity
If society requires systems of identity and accountability, they must be
built from the ground up in ways that protect autonomy rather than erode
it. Community-issued credentials, overseen by local collectives rather
than centralised states, offer one possibility. Such systems could be
physical or digital but must remain open-source, transparent, and
non-commodified. Instead of being managed by corporations, identity
could be treated as a commons, owned and governed collectively.
Equally, communities could experiment with non-identitarian methods of
accountability. Rather than proving identity through documents,
individuals could be recognised through relationships of trust, mutual
responsibility, and local accountability. These may appear impractical
in the context of modern nation-states, but they remind us that
bureaucratic identity systems are not natural or eternal. They are
historical constructs that can be resisted, dismantled, or replaced.
Resistance and Praxis
How, then, should anarcho-communists respond to the rollout of digital
licences? Resistance must operate on multiple levels.
First, there is the work of education and agitation by exposing the real
dangers of digital IDs and challenging the narrative of convenience.
This means writing, speaking, and organising within communities to
ensure people see beyond the government's glossy rhetoric.
Second, there is the demand for genuine choice - that physical licences
remain permanently available, with no penalty or stigma for using them.
Any attempt to phase out physical options must be resisted as coercion.
Finally, we must connect this issue to the wider struggle against
surveillance capitalism and state power. Digital licences are not an
isolated reform but part of a continuum of control that includes facial
recognition, biometric passports, and algorithmic policing. Only by
linking these struggles together can we mount an effective resistance.
The Government's proposal to allow driver's licences and WoFs to be
stored on smartphones has been heralded as a pragmatic modernisation, a
step toward convenience in a digital world. Yet beneath this rhetoric
lies a far more troubling reality. Digital licences deepen surveillance,
reinforce inequality, transfer public functions to private capital, and
render citizens dependent on fragile technologies.
These developments are not neutral. They are extensions of a broader
system in which the state and capital collaborate to regulate and
commodify everyday life. The convenience narrative obscures the erosion
of autonomy, the deepening of exclusion, and the entrenchment of
hierarchical power.
We must therefore reject the framing of digital licences as a "common
sense" reform. Instead, we should see them as another frontier in the
struggle between liberation and control. Our task is not merely to
criticise but to resist, to imagine alternatives, and to build systems
rooted in community, autonomy, and mutual aid.
The state wants us to believe that progress lies in carrying our
identities in our pockets, ready to be displayed at the tap of a screen.
We must insist that true progress lies elsewhere - in dismantling the
apparatus of surveillance and building a society in which identity is
not a weapon of control but a shared resource of freedom.
https://awsm.nz/digital-licences-and-the-new-panopticon-the-move-to-smartphone-ids-in-aotearoa/
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