From Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Cancer Ward:
Quote:
As every man goes through life he fills in a number of forms for the record each containing a number of questions. A man's answer to one question on one form becomes a little thread, permanently connecting him to the local center of personal records administration. There are hundreds of little threads radiating from every man, millions of threads in all. If these threads were suddenly to become visible, the whole sky would look like a spider's web
Identity-centric transformational government and the database state is about connecting all of those threads into large, aggregated databases at the expense of the local centres and making them visible to the state, with the result that our lives are becoming entangled in the resultant spider's web.