Alix: Around the world, governments are rolling out mega projects. We're not talking about highways or job programs. We're talking about digital IDs, payment systems, data exchange programs. So what comes to mind when you hear the phrase digital public infrastructure?

Astha: DPI is like a way of life. You just have to adopt it.

Mila: Each person needs a unique id. Each land parcel needs a unique id. Every student needs a unique id. It's called

Astha: an approach. It's

Alix: called a way of thinking.

Mila: That's not so different from like how surveillance technology works.

Alix: What happens when national IDs and payment processing gets centralized into one giant?

Government platform,

Beatriz: it's super easy. It's for free. Somebody else with her identity was opening telephone accounts, opening in bank accounts. If you transfer the money, it's gone and that's it. You doubt that this is reality and you doubt about yourself. You don't belong to yourself anymore.

Alix: How are big tech firms taking advantage of this interest from governments around the world?

Beatriz: Oracle is. In so many different government systems in Rwanda, when you introduce something as a public policy, which is somehow disguised as technology, they just abandon the Democratic approaches.

Astha: 85 to 90% of the payments in the India ecosystem were owned by an application. That is owned by Walmart and an application that is owned by Google.

Dan: You build an entire tech stack on big tech products and then you put a union jack on the top of it and you wave it intensely in the hope that nobody will look at what it's sitting on.

Alix: And why is it so hard to define what digital public infrastructure even is? More than anything, DPI is a vibe. It's not one thing, it's the Pantheon.

This is Vapor State. A new series from us here at Computer says maybe this is a series where we talk to the journalists, civil society organizations and lawyers who have been watching these rollouts with some mix of alarm and trying to keep up by better understanding what's happening. What are the implications for actual people in their everyday lives?