Most states rely on paper bureaucracy to ensure that the state can function and provide services. Paper bureaucracy has been part and parcel of how we maintain states and corporations since the Chinese invented the first paper bureaucracy systems of management 3000 years ago. But as you all probably know, bureaucracy kinda sucks. It costs a lot to maintain, and in the worst cases bureaucracy can turn a state into a labyrinthian monstrosity that can be near to impossible to navigate.
Estonia is a Baltic country that in recent years has been embarking on reform programs that are intended to change this. Estonia is a “Paperless state” meaning a state that has effectively removed all paper from it’s bureaucracy and replaced it with a digital state structure. In this short video I would like to introduce you to the digital state and argue for it.
It’s just that I don’t want my own country to get any wild ideas. I mean, the ideal digital society utopia is an amazing thought experiment. But it feels very fragile for us at this time. We are still in our technological infancy as a species, even if we feel very advanced.
I don’t think any utopia is reachable, but closest to that would look like Star Wars EU computing, where proprietary formats and stuff like what we use today are limited to toys for very rich people, computer systems are produced by a lot of different processes in a lot of different places, even if not very computationally powerful, everything is modular and tunable, and vendor locks are too a thing only for expensive toys.
Formats and environments and interfaces are simple, because of the need for portability of everything in such an environment. It’s not impossible there to successfully integrate systems produced 100 years apart.
EDIT: What I meant is - it definitely won’t happen the way we are trying now with centralized very complex and fragile systems built after what normies imagine to be good. Normies want magic - all-powerful arcanely complex systems, a deus ex machina. This is the direction exactly opposite from what a good engineer wants. It’s scary actually how a lot of things around are attempts to replace the “wrong” humans. “Wrong” romantic partners, “wrong” employees, whole “wrong” professions (like many lawyers seem to hate engineers, and the other way around TBH), politicians try to replace “wrong” social responses with bot farms. Everybody is trying to use computers most of all to kill somebody else indirectly (or sometimes directly). I wonder when will it get to general conscience that this is not different from any other technological advancement.