Chapter 1 - the analogue state
Where we came from influences where we go
This is from the book proposal that I am circulating to literary agents in my quest to get published.
Pass a law and get a computer system.
Building digital systems in analogue ways isn’t optimal, and the modern state is optimised for analogue.
Going digital affects the relationship of the state to society, to citizens and to other states. It changes the state’s sense of self.
In old modernity states had hard boundaries - with checkpoints and border posts. These were replicated in cultures and markets. Here we read this newspaper, ate that food, watched these television programmes, were part of this national community. Over there they did otherwise. The people marched with national flags on their national holidays.
Digital flows through these boundaries like water and physical goods follow. As digital has dissolved and remade the music business, film and television and publishing, so it has dissolved and remade nationality. The gay rights movement is an international identity dressed in national clothes, with its own flag, culture and holidays.
This blurring came sharply into focus with the roiling of American. Suddenly their politics was ours too. We used to worry that our real time news sources were being poisoned by disinformation and attacked by hostile states. Now the call is coming from inside the house of Twitter. Local libraries, great departments of state and governments alike have built communication strategies around something which is now completely compromised.
Before we start thinking about this digital world and the digital state, it behooves us to understand the analogue one. Without clarity about the old way there can be no new. Habit and familiarity bring blindness to the how and why of the state, the historical forces that shaped our institutions and what is necessary and what just traditional.
With apologies to Socrates, the unexamined system is not worth improving. Self-knowledge is the key to self-development.
The state was laid down in layers. Structures for law, and war, social security and regulation have grown over time. Each has its own challenges and problems - and different countries have found solutions that rhyme.
Digital offers the potential for efficiency and effectiveness across them all. But it reopens old wounds and revives old, once-solved, problems too.
We see the impact of digitisation on services like health care, social security, transport, housing and planning, market and product regulation.
But it also impacts less tangible things like political culture, trust in institutions, democratic norms and conventions, conflict resolution and losers’ consent.
New versions of old problems need new versions of old solutions. History is our friend.
Our digital systems are built with the same structures and processes we used to build the analogue ones - which is fundamentally problematic.
In particular the processes that bind legislation, parliamentary process and the structure of government and oversight shape the states ability to build first class digital services. Those processes are analogue ones repurposed for digital tasks and must be systematically adapted to new ways.
All men know the difference between day and night, but none can tell where one starts and the other begins. We are scrabbling in the matutinal murk blindly attempting this transformation from analogue to digital. Before we can fully understand what we must do, there are technical issues to be discussed in the next chapter. Only once that is done can we move on to other topics.