Blink to Proceed

As I prepare for an upcoming trip, I recently found myself holding my phone at arm’s length, following instructions from an app.

“Look at the camera.”

“Turn your head slightly.”

“Blink.”

Within seconds, I had completed a proof of liveness check for my airline and, shortly afterwards, another for my entry permit. What struck me was not the technology itself, but how routine the process had become. Only a month earlier, I had gone through exactly the same exercise while requesting my late father’s death certificate online. There was something quietly profound about that moment. Before I could obtain a document confirming that someone else was no longer alive, I first had to prove that I was.

That experience prompted me to reflect on how dramatically our relationship with governments and technology has changed. For those of us born before the mid-1980s, applying for visas, permits and government licences usually meant proving our livelihood. We assembled employment letters, salary slips, tax returns, bank statements and sponsorship documents. The underlying concern was economic. Governments wanted reassurance that applicants could support themselves financially and that they were who their paperwork claimed them to be.

Those days also bring back vivid memories of my father preparing for international travel. Before each trip, the dining table would disappear beneath carefully organised stacks of documents. There were letters from his employer confirming his position and salary, bank statements, tax records and, on more than one occasion, proof of property ownership. Every document served the same purpose: to reassure the authorities that he had established roots, a stable livelihood and compelling reasons to return home.

Looking back, those rituals reflected the assumptions of their time. Stability was measured by permanence: where you worked, where you lived and what you owned. Employment was expected to be long-term, careers followed relatively predictable paths and property ownership demonstrated that one had every intention of returning home.

Today’s world looks remarkably different. Millions of people work remotely, build portfolio careers, run businesses entirely online or move between countries as digital nomads. Professional identity has become increasingly detached from physical location, and permanence is no longer defined by an office address or a title held for decades.

The requirement to demonstrate financial means has not disappeared, yet it has gradually been eclipsed by another question that would have sounded almost absurd a generation ago: Can you prove that you are alive?

Whether we are accessing banking services, applying for travel documents, using government portals or completing identity verification online, we are increasingly asked to prove that we are physically present. We blink, smile, turn our heads or follow a moving point on a screen while algorithms determine whether the face before the camera belongs to a living person rather than a photograph, a recording or an AI-generated impersonation.

What appears to be a minor procedural change is, in reality, a profound shift in the nature of trust. A generation ago (from my perspective), institutions were primarily concerned with economic security, forged documents and identity fraud. Today, they must also contend with synthetic identities, deepfakes, stolen credentials and artificial intelligence capable of replicating human faces and voices with astonishing realism. Technology has evolved in response to those threats, yet it has also reached a point where it no longer fully trusts what it can see. Frankly, neither can we.

Identity was once something we carried in our wallets and presented at the gate: a passport, a driver’s licence, corporate ID or a birth certificate. Increasingly, identity has become something we continuously demonstrate. Every login, biometric scan, facial movement, fingerprint or voice sample has become another act of proving that we are still ourselves and are indeed human.

There is undeniable convenience in this transformation. I can prepare for an international journey from my living room and request official records without standing in queues or visiting a government office. Tasks that once required folders of paperwork now take only a few minutes. That convenience, however, comes with an important trade-off. Our faces have become credentials, our movements have become passwords and trust is increasingly established not by another person looking us in the eye, but by an algorithm measuring whether our eyes blink naturally.

Daddy prepared for travel by assembling carefully ordered folders. Before my next journey, I will simply hold up my phone, look into a camera and blink.

Between those two rituals lies the story of how technology has transformed (dis)trust. We once proved that we had a place in the world. Increasingly, we are asked to prove that we are present in it.