Worldcoin’s Brutal ‘Mission’: Inside the Human-Combustion Engine at Tools for Humanity
An unflinching look at the 'your feelings are irrelevant' culture Sam Altman's orb project is built on, and why VCs are eating it up.
So the CPO, Tiago Sada, just leans into the skid. Goes on X, admits the Business Insider story is “absolutely correct,” and then—with a level of audacity that is almost performance art—posts a link to their jobs page. A real power move. Or maybe just completely tone-deaf. You decide.
And what he’s co-signing is a work culture that makes the boiler rooms of the dot-com bust look like a four-day work week. Because at Tools for Humanity, Sam Altman’s pet project for scanning the world’s eyeballs, the operating principle is simple. Brutal. The mission is everything. Your life is the job. The job is your life. Full stop.
Listen to the CEO, Alex Blania, at a January all-hands. A recording caught the whole thing. He lays it out, no ambiguity. “We will neither fail, nor will we be an average outcome, and that’s what we want, and that’s all I care about every day and all you should care about every day, and nothing else should matter.” Pure, unadulterated Stakhanovite zeal, but for building a crypto panopticon instead of mining coal. For the good of the state… I mean, for humanity.
Because this wasn’t just some off-the-cuff founder rant. They put this ideology on a damn TV screen in their (now closed) San Francisco office. A former employee says Blania himself wrote the company’s “team values,” which included these gems:
Your feelings are irrelevant.
The mission is all that matters.
Ego is the enemy.
We are an army, not a family.
Achieve escape velocity.
Look… that one. That right there. “Your feelings are irrelevant.” That’s not a value; it’s a legal liability with a god complex. It is a blank check for abuse, plain and simple. And Blania, who someone mentioned once attended a Trump inauguration (which suddenly explains a lot), just kept doubling down. He took the quiet part and screamed it through a megaphone. “We don’t care about politics, we don’t care about DEI, we don’t care about anything, we just care about how can we achieve the mission through merit, performance, and excellence.”
The mission.
Always the mission.
It’s the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card for this new breed of founder-king, a justification for the weekend work, the burnout, the utter disregard for the human cogs in the machine. And this grand mission? To build a global Proof of Personhood (PoP) protocol. A digital passport to prove you’re not a bot. A noble cause, they say. Their LinkedIn page bleats about creating a “more just economic system.” But the execution on the ground feels less like justice and more like a biometric land grab reminiscent of the Gilded Age railroad barons. They’ve already convinced 13 million people, many in developing countries, to stare into a shiny orb for a handful of WLD tokens. The whole thing is a glaring, blinding paradox.
A company for a “more just” world built on an internal system that’s fundamentally unjust. An absolutely unjust system.
And they’re not sorry. Not even a little bit. A spokesperson gave Fortune a perfectly crafted non-statement about how their “transparency about its values and operating principles has resulted in building a team that is passionate and focused.” Passionate and focused. Or just the ones who haven’t rage-quit yet. Tomato, to-mah-to.
But this is the playbook VCs are funding now, isn’t it? Find a messianic founder with a world-changing pitch, and then look the other way as they build a human-combustion engine to power it. It’s not a bug; it’s the entire feature. It filters for the obsessed, the ones willing to sacrifice everything. One of their values was literally about achieving “escape velocity.” But escape from what? Labor laws? Basic human decency? The reality is, this isn’t about saving humanity from AI. Frankly, this whole PoP narrative is a Trojan horse for the largest biometric KYC database ever assembled, and the VCs are just salivating at the TAM.
Let’s not forget the WLD token itself. The carrot dangled in front of employees and orb-gazers alike. Couldn’t even get clearance in its own backyard. It hit massive regulatory headwinds in the U.S., only limping onto the market in April 2024, a full year after its global debut. So you’re burning out your employees to build a system whose core economic incentive was, for the longest time, a no-go with the SEC. It’s like trying to win the Battle of Trafalgar after you’ve already scuttled your own ships. Just insane.
Seriously. You can’t make this up.
