Ambassador poster for Zcash Zcon4.
 
The poster was inspired by the alarming trend of central governments, corporate interests and political elites combining state-sanctioned misinformation with 21st century technology to divide and control populations. While it is more than three decades since the Berlin Wall fell, the threat of centralising control is by no means consigned to the history books. 
 
The EU, along with all other major central banks, is quietly preparing its CBDC for deployment across Europe, and the stylised Soviet-era factory billowing a bilious cloud of CBDC laden smoke across the continent emblazoned with the words “Ministry of Truth” reminds us that the recipe of ‘nudges’, disinformation and insidious propaganda, perpetually deployed by the mainstream political class and complicit media, has become frighteningly Orwellian. Combined with a European CBDC, our democracy is at risk of being dismantled while we look the other way. 
 
While the smoke from the CBDC propaganda factory threatens to drown Europe in a deluge of authoritarian overreach, when the cloud does burst and the rains begin to pour, it is not Orwellian brute-force control that falls upon the world, but rather the prison-for-your-mind described by Huxley in Brave New World. Thus the raindrops spell out the word SOMA over and over again, numbing and intoxicating the global population with convenience and frivolity so that they do not notice the fences being erected around them, separating them from the freedoms they once enjoyed. 
 
The child, in robes adorned with the words “Dieu et mon ZEC”, combines the UK’s royal motto with the power of Zcash to protect Britons and Europe alike from the ravages of the SOMA CBDC flood. The child stands holding a ZEC Zebra Shield umbrella, utilizing the Italian “Scudo Zebrato” because Italy is at the heart of Europe both geographically and historically, and because Italian immigrants have had an outsized influence on global culture, music, art, food and lifestyle over the centuries. 
 
Fiercely proud, defiant and strong, the ZEC-Zebra child stands astride the UK and Europe, with one foot in each camp, referencing the UK’s historical and continuing position both inside and outside of Europe. Political opinions aside, the act of Britain withdrawing from the EU is undoubtedly the most emblematic act of decentralization that has taken place in Europe in at least three generations. In a world that seems increasingly bent towards the centralizing forces of technocrat elites and the CBDCs they will control us with, this great British act of decentralization may one day provide Europeans with a lifeboat to escape a SOMA-fuelled dystopian tomorrow. 
 
The Scudo Zebrato umbrella-wielding UK-European-Zcash-powered next generation offers the world a hopeful future which has yet to be written. 
 
This poster was a collaboration between Zcash Ambassador, ZecMec, The Zcash Foundation, and Steve Thomas Art.