My book proposition
Help me get an editor
After 18 months as a Research Fellow at Scottish Government, I published my report The Foundations Of The Digital State, along with 2 volumes of working papers. The working papers were as technical as necessary, and their publication was an integral part of me working out exactly what I thought. The report it self was practical and focussed on an implementable plan for Scotland
They were always imaged as parts of a triptych - with the third being a book for the general reader, shorn of its Scotticisms.
The first step of getting that book out is getting an agent - and here we are.
I have written a book proposal and I am going to publish it section by section here on social media - and in the background I will continue sending to agents.
If you know agents in publishing and like what you read, you know what to do.
The proposition of my book
The proposition, and the paradox, of this book is that for the state: digital changes everything in the particular and nothing in the general.
The state still has its traditional duties - providing law and justice, discussing and resolving political disputes, letting election victors govern and ensuring the consent of the losers and wider citizenry. Its fundamental apparatus retains its architecture. There is a separation of power and a balance between rights and duties.
But the digital world seeps in. The mechanisms of the digital revolution - software systems and databases - are by their nature opaque and hard to reason about. They are also plastic and mutable. and they and the world mould themselves each to the other.
Every familiar structure is impacted - just not to the point of making it unrecognisable. It makes it necessary to rewire law and justice, politics and consensus, government and consent. And that requires constitutional and institutional adjustment to bring the digital world into the separation of powers.
And these changes bring with them both good and evil. On the one hand great benefits: of speed, of savings in time and money, of transparency and responsiveness. On the other untrammelled power and surveillance and the possibilities of industrialised injustice.
And this book has a renewed urgency. Elon Musk has exploited weaknesses in our understanding of digital technology to seize control of the US Government through its internal payment infrastructure - sidelining constitutional government as we understood it. The governance of the global internet and international digital payment systems is predicated on the US being a benign hegemon - which it no longer is. Parts of the commanding heights of the economy, the tech sector, have gone from being the victims of hybrid warfare, to active participants.
It is happening there, it could happen here.
Understanding the digital state, its contents and discontents, is one of the biggest questions of the age.
I will be publishing more extracts from my book proposal over the coming weeks, subscribe to get them or read my report for Scottish Government: Foundations of the Digital State