Most political candidates run on platforms promising change. And most of the time electorates are disappointed by what happens next.
That’s because governments are what economists would call “lagging indicators.” In other words, they typically change only after everything around them has moved on to what’s next. This could be because governments are designed to be deliberative and slow to react. It could be because entrenched special interests seek to cling to power by maintaining the status quo. Or it could be because real creativity has typically come from other quarters of society—from science and the arts, places where the status quo is seen as a force to be overcome and even rejected. All three of these things could, in fact, be part of the same phenomenon. But that does not mean that change cannot come to governments, nor does it mean that major changes are not needed now.
For all their generally glacial embrace of modernity and general lack of creative thinking, states and their bureaucracies are the primary actors changing the nature of governance and representation in the world. As philosophers and actors push the conversation about the nature of the social contract and the roles and responsibilities of government, these sleepy institutions must take their first lumbering steps to bring new ideas to fruition. Most countries, as you might imagine, are moving too slowly toward progress in the digital age.
Because our views on identity, the nature of society, and the nature of fundamental rights are changing, our view of the institutions upon which we rely needs to adapt, too. These institutions need to change in many ways, from how they view and measure their effectiveness to their structure. Profound questions also need to be asked. Do we still need government? Should governments still be defined by geography, as they were before? Should government services remain as they were before, or, ideally, can new technologies shift roles between public- and private-sector institutions and change for the better how those institutions operate? Clearly, it’s time to go back to the drawing board with our most basic ideas about governments and governing.
Let’s take something basic: voting via the Internet. What could be a more natural idea? It would make participating in democracy easier for many citizens. It would likely increase participation rates in elections and make elections more truly representative of the will of the public. It could be faster; tabulation could essentially be constant and in real time. For those worried about hacking or the security of their vote, the response should be straightforward: It’s a manageable issue. If you trust your bank account and your pension and your life savings, your most personal information and all the work you do professionally to the Internet, surely you can trust your vote. Giant financial institutions daily conduct trillions in transactions on the Internet, and those are secure enough to protect the totality of the global economy. Our nuclear secrets and the vital national security secrets of virtually every country in the world are in large part trafficked on networks accessible to the Internet, and we find satisfactory security for them. And, to complete the argument, as we have seen, existing systems for collecting votes have had their profound flaws—from stuffing ballot boxes to hanging chads to just plain old rigging the results.
Perhaps it is time, therefore, that we took people out of the process of counting the votes altogether and left it to secure, transparent computer systems.
That said, according to the National Democratic Institute (NDI):
It is fair to say that Internet voting is not a commonly used means of voting. Of the fourteen countries that have so far used it in any form, only ten currently have expressed any intention of using it in the future. . . . Internet voting seems to fit, for many countries, a niche corner of the electoral process.
Only four countries have used Internet voting through several election cycles: Canada, Estonia, France, and Switzerland. Again, trailblazing Estonia stands out as being, in the words of the NDI assessment of the subject, “the only country to offer Internet voting to the entire electorate. The remaining ten countries have either just adopted it, are currently piloting Internet voting, have piloted it and not pursued its further use, or have discontinued its use.”
Consider the alternatives: voting machines that are kept under lock and key by the parties in power, or paper ballots counted by hand in front of observers selected by the parties—or hybrid, hodgepodge systems where different standards and techniques are used by different agencies across a single country.
The failure to more fully embrace the Internet in the voting process results in the most basic mechanism of democracy being grossly out of step with the other changes that are rocking it to its core. Candidates campaign on social media, blogs and Web-based commentary fuel public debate, and live Internet-based polling or quasi-referenda via Twitter polls or other means shape views of who is up and who is down. Grassroots organizations have been empowered because the means of distributing views are so inexpensive. Modern presidential campaigns use data analysis to identify and target the people most likely to vote or to be swing voters, and, ultimately, to conserve resources. We use the same means to judge politicians while they are in office, and to shape the public debate around the great issues of the day (and the minor ones that gain public traction). Every aspect of democracy has been changed by the advent of new technology, except perhaps the most fundamental one: how citizens can directly influence the operations of our governments through the selection of our representatives. Voters could have much more power much more often. Technology could be used to reduce the costs of campaigns and help get big money out of politics. It could be used to make the operations of government more transparent. In short, it could help us produce a better answer to the question “Who rules us?” than we have today, whereby in many lands it is those who have co-opted the levers of power and used the opacity and antiquated structures of existing systems to maintain their hold on power.
At the same time, the recent US election and elections across Europe have forced us to ask other questions about what an updated system might look like. Does making democracy truly digital create new risks? Is it more open to hacking and manipulation? Does easy voting via smartphone raise the possibility of shifting more to direct democracy where all big questions are decided by e-referenda? Does this undercut the benefits of more deliberate representative democracy? Does it raise the likelihood that electoral decisions will be more driven by emotion than thought? (Or by thoughts clouded by news consumed via social media echo chambers and “fake news,” untruths accepted by large groups of people for dubious reasons?) It is almost certain that these risks are growing and must be assessed, and that we must resist the temptation to follow in every direction technology might offer to take us, especially when it strips us of checks and balances and filters that have proven to be beneficial throughout history.
The story of governments’ lagging on technology is all the more striking when you consider the degree to which technological change could transform the nature of governance. Technology can improve and simplify governance when properly harnessed. By streamlining and clarifying its functions, it can help it to better provide services to its people, dispose of unnecessary steps and secret costs, and even root out corruption. It has done away with intermediary industries like travel agencies, changed the way people shop for real estate and cars, and put an end to the brief life of video-rental outfits like Blockbuster. It can do the same thing for government bureaucracy and the headaches and obstacles it presents to basic citizen access to services. You can see signs of what is possible in different corners of the world already, experiments that hint at greater things to come.
You may personally be familiar with other benefits of e-governance from your daily life, such as the ability to pay traffic fines or municipal fees online or to get information about Social Security without having to deal with the bureaucracy directly. Singapore offers an eCitizen Portal to a whole range of government services via the Net, including applications for paid maternity leave and passports, online bill-paying tools, a directory of all government agencies, and a portal for collecting public feedback. South Korea ranked highest for e-government services for the third time in 2014. Its advanced telecommunications enable the government to develop strong online and mobile public interfaces, such as a Home Tax Service that offers 24/7 online access to a range of tax-payment and assessment-related services. India, like many other nations, has begun to lay the groundwork for offering a broader array of such services via its National e-Governance Plan.
In 2014, the United Nations ranked the top innovators in e-governance. Most of the leading countries are from the highly developed world. South Korea leads the list, followed by Australia, Singapore, France, and the Netherlands. The United States is seventh on the list with the United Kingdom eighth. Little Estonia now ranks fifteenth, while China does not crack the top twenty-five. Countries with poor infrastructure have lagged behind, but there have been signs of progress. Six countries in Africa, where “progress . . . remains relatively slow and uneven,” six countries—including Tunisia, Mauritius, Egypt, Seychelles, Morocco, and South Africa—have above-average ratings.
None of this may sound revolutionary; portals are old-think on the Internet, and doing business online is commonplace. But virtually every sector impacted by the information revolution has seen one powerful, transformational trend shift expectations, and thus it’s likely that the impending changes in governments will be profound.
Take the big bureaucracies of today. They are incredibly costly, making many of them ideal targets for disintermediation. It is not just payment processors at the Department of Motor Vehicles, either. Do governments need large embassy staffs when so many communications no longer pass person to person, and indeed, often bypass diplomats altogether (whose role, after all, was fundamentally that of go-betweens carrying outmoded forms of communication)? Governments once collected the best data on national economies. In the big-data era, that is a function that can much more easily be managed via machines and algorithms than rooms full of economists.
Government, in short, is poised to transform the way it interacts with citizens. It must. Which leads us to critical questions: Who should enact this change? Will changing metrics change the priorities of governments?
These questions extend beyond borders, not only within them. For instance, will the way richer countries help poor countries—like development programs—change? It might well be possible to rewire how national wealth is distributed to those in need of assistance while simultaneously cutting back on bureaucracy and making the entire process more transparent and significantly cheaper. There is a vast developmental bureaucracy in the world that works to guide the flow of funds and the implementation of programs intended to help the poor. That bureaucracy, for all its good intentions, is costly, and in key cases does not work as well as a direct and simple approach. As illustrated in a wonderful article in Foreign Policy by Rosa Brooks, there may be a better way:
One recent study looked at poor rural Kenyan households that were randomly selected to receive unconditional cash transfers from GiveDirectly, a US-based NGO. (The recipients were given amounts varying from the equivalent of at least two months’ worth of average household consumption expenditures to about three times that.) Over a period of two years, it found that those households that received the unconditional cash transfers increased both consumption and savings (in the form of durable goods purchases and investments in their self-employment activities). They increased food expenditures close to proportionally to overall nondurable expenditure . . . and health and education expenditures more than proportionally. Alcohol and tobacco expenditures did not increase.
Unsurprisingly, recipients of the cash transfers also reported higher rates of psychological well-being, and, when tested, had lower levels of stress hormones.
Similar programs from Uganda to South Africa have shown equally promising results. Think of that: more benefits, fewer intermediaries. This change might also mean less corruption, as it becomes possible to cut out the local government bureaucracies that often siphon away substantial amounts of aid dollars.
The same logic can apply in domestic US government programs. Indeed, it is in such programs that an even more disruptive idea lies. For example, two economists at MIT, Andrew McAffee and Erik Brynjolfsson, suggest that, in our future hyperproductive, machine-aided economies, there may be less and less work for people to do. If there is less work, there is a possibility that workweeks will shorten (much as they did from seven days to five over the past century). The question then becomes: How do those who work less make enough to survive? Companies will make the same amount and may make greater profits. In other words, those who possess technology and capital will gain greater and greater power and wealth, and those who have historically depended on working for other people’s enterprises will have less work to do and presumably will make less. It may already be that we are seeing signs of this phenomenon within the US and other big economies, like China, as growth keeps happening and corporate profits keep growing, but job growth is sluggish and wages have stagnated. (In the United States, this is compounded and reflected by the large growth in the numbers of those who have left the workforce altogether, making our relatively low so-called unemployment numbers questionable.) The traditional relationship between overall economic growth and the creation of new, growing, better opportunities for workers has broken down.
The consequence is that the rich grow richer while everyone else falls farther and farther behind. It’s hard to imagine, but without new measures, the gross inequality we see today (90 percent of the benefits of the most recent recovery went to the top 10 percent of the population) is likely to grow worse. It’s not far off from what largely discredited father of socialism Karl Marx predicted—but just because it came from Marx doesn’t mean it’s not true.
One possible answer to this problem, which also echoes Marx and therefore will trigger fierce resistance in places like the US, might be new redistributive mechanisms of taxation and social programs. Of course, such programs are disparaged for their inefficiencies and perceptions that they are unfair. However, what if new technologies enabled us to cut back on bureaucracy and have transparent, algorithm-driven systems for redistributing tax revenue not from company to government to citizen but direct from a machine-driven real- time tax collection mechanism to the end user? What if the algorithm could change the payments based on multiple variables associated with the performance of those paying in the taxes and those receiving them? New means of revenue generation are also on the horizon, as ubiquitous sensors make it possible to charge tiny, incremental taxes and usage fees in a fairer, more transparent, more progressive way. Oregon, for example, has experimented with charging driver usage fees for highways based on tracking GPS signals that let them know who was using the highways and who was not. With sensing systems everywhere in the big-data world to come, it will be much easier to create finely tuned tax policies that collect revenues in new ways—charging polluters with fees that ramp up based on how long norms were violated or by how much, for example, or making tax rates more progressive by allowing for more incremental fluctuation based on shifting economic circumstances within a year or from week to week, or targeting payments from the state to the needy in more effective ways.
Death and taxes may be the great unchanging certainties of life, but there is no doubt that the modalities of assessing taxes, collecting them, and distributing them will change dramatically in the years ahead.
As we’ve seen, among the big winners in hyperproductive economies are the biggest companies.
In my book Power, Inc., I explored why and how it had evolved that the world’s one thousand largest companies have greater economic resources at their disposal, and likely greater global influence, than more than half the countries in the world. One reason is that giant global companies can adapt better to change than political entities can. Governments are tied down to the land beneath their feet like Gulliver in Lilliput, while, to paraphrase author Tom Friedman, huge companies float above the countries that were once their domiciles. New technologies are, as we have discussed earlier, making it possible for communities to lift free of broken political systems. While governments are tied down, everything that impacts them—from the way economies operate to the way people interact—changes. Thus, big global corporations have been able to grow to the point at which the biggest companies are both more powerful and have greater international resources and influence than the vast majority of governments. And this is a disparity that will only grow as companies are empowered by technological changes, while many governments resist or lag behind them.
We must then ask: In the world of the future, where will the real power lie? Is the era of the predominance of the nation-state drawing to a close? What will replace it? Is it in the interests of the people of the world to let profit-motivated entities without any social mandate or obligation to the public interest gain the upper hand over those institutions that are created—in theory, at least—to look after the interests of society at large? (That’s a rhetorical question, hopefully.)
Answering those questions would be easier if the people in power understood the changes that are afoot and had the context, insight, and vocabulary to frame or answer the questions they need to be asking. For the most part, they do not.
In part, this is because precious few countries have elected or appointed computer scientists or technologists or people with any sort of meaningful training in these areas to top positions: the people who understand that there are big questions out there that need answering.
Let’s take the US Congress, given that it is the top legislative body in the world’s most powerful country. Only 12 percent of Congress’s members have a background in science or technology, according to a 2011 study by the Employment Policies Institute. And, based on my conversations with tech executives who regularly interact with Congress, just a handful of people on Capitol Hill truly understand the implications of big data, cyber, and other technological revolutions.
It’s true that often, there are small pockets of designated whiz kids who are cited to show that the government is up to date (as in the Office of Science and Technology Policy or the recently created Chief Technology Officer’s office in the White House). But these are enclaves that deal with a few narrow issues and have neither the resources, the political profile, nor the inclination to work with every part of government to ask the question that is regularly asked in every business and most private homes around the world: What could we do differently or better thanks to new technologies?
Turn the subject to how other next-generation scientific developments, such as those in the areas of neuroscience and biotech, will raise critical questions about how we deal with mental health, crime, extended life expectancy, bioethics, and health-care costs, and the number of well-versed legislators falls even farther. “In many cases to zero,” a professor at one of America’s leading schools of public health said to me in early 2014. Think about that: the very underpinnings of government are dealing with issues like public safety and public health. And we have already seen what happens when we don’t understand or anticipate changes properly.
In the US, for example, we have a retirement health-care system based on life expectancies from the 1920s but involving cost structures (especially the heightened expenses associated with modern life-extending techniques in the very last months of our lives), and, as a result, our system is bankrupt and offers the lowest care of service of any developed country in the world in the vast majority of areas. Knowledge of medical science and a little related foresight could have avoided the systemic bankruptcy and failure of service we face today. However, bioscience is going to change treatments and extend lives further, and big data is going to change the way we monitor patients and provide care in profound ways. The most important step we can take to reduce health-care costs is to ensure that the elderly take their medications; in the past this was impossible to do, but with sensors today, it can be done remotely. Further, what if neuroscience could enable us to diagnose and treat behaviors that might lead to criminal activity or mental-health care costs, as it almost certainly will? Without a change in the knowledge level of our legislators and executive-branch officials on these issues, our laws and regulations and treatment programs will be obsolete. Indeed, many are.
To confirm this grim view, consider just this one example: at roughly the time this book was being written, Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, spent most of 2016 challenging a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study on climate change, claiming that those involved somehow doctored their results to confirm global warming. This is a level of reasoning and a disrespect for science worthy of those inquisitors who challenged Galileo, although lacking perhaps their sophistication and seriousness. It was echoed on the campaign trail by the Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, and the view that climate change might be a hoax. Although ridiculous, dangerous, and demonstrably wrong, this view was popular enough that, after he won, President-elect Trump picked an environmental team guided by a nonsensical view of the environment and committed to doing it further damage.
Besides its lack of depth, the thinking among Washington’s political power brokers also suffers from a lack of breadth. In researching my book National Insecurity, I looked at ten of the most prominent think tanks in Washington over a decade. These organizations produced almost twelve thousand events, papers, and research reports over that time. Of these, the majority concentrated on just a few topics—such as the Middle East, the War on Terror, and China—linked closely to whatever was in the headlines at the time. Other issues, deserving of focus but outside the buzz zone, got much less attention. The issues that got by far the least coverage? Science and technology. Never mind that they are responsible for the life-redefining changes ahead or many of the emerging threats with which humanity is grappling. The problem is then compounded by a system that discourages innovators from presenting big new ideas that confront traditional wisdom, because the resulting controversy could make it impossible for the so-called big thinkers to later be confirmed for top government jobs.
So, in Washington, DC, and in many other capitals around the world, you have the wrong people dealing with the wrong problems at the wrong time in a system that is designed to discourage them from doing any different.
Will change come to governments? Of course. But, as we have seen in the past, when governments failed to anticipate or respond to social upheavals, the changes that came were disruptive and often came at a high cost. Think of the revolutions that came during the Enlightenment (from America to France) or during 1848 or the rise of industrialization (and of reactions to it like communism). Can we avoid such turmoil? Will some states resist the inevitable transformation (like autocracies or theocracies that fear the new technologies)? For them, the question is not if they are made obsolete but, rather, what replaces them, and when. Who will lead such changes if government officials themselves do not and cannot?
The changes could bring great efficiencies, savings, and effectiveness if implemented properly, but they could also introduce new inequities or empower technological or other elites in dangerous ways. Is a new generation of revolutionaries on the horizon? Did we see the first stirrings during the tech-fueled flash protests of the Arab Spring? Or are they more subtle, working in places like Silicon Valley, where first they will remake society by changing the way we relate to one another, ourselves, our jobs, money, education, health, war, and peace, and then simply leave it to government officials to realize that they are relics of another era, their powers and prerogatives increasingly altered by events over which they had little say?