The new concept needed is the Platform State.
Take England. A year of pandemic lockdowns, exacerbated by a failed test and trace system and an underresourced NHS. For those of you who pay attention to the inherent logic of political narrative in England and how its plays out on the ground, you will be most familiar with it via Dominic Cummings. Recently he blamed the dire handling of the pandemic in the UK on the mindboggling plethora of institutions and organisations that make up healthcare in the UK. Therefore, his proposal and the Johnson government ideology he helped deliver, has been to effectively replace this mess with more direct control over different sectors mediated by GOV.UK. Conveniently they forget it was Johnson’s Eton class mates who created this mess of a design:
This Eton mess of people believe the problem is that they do not have more direct control over how things work. They see checks on their control and contextualisations of policy by local authorities as an annoying mess in the way of their brilliant thoughts. Simply put they think in command and control terms. Essentially they see the role of the government to be to host a platform that citizen-users can login into and acquire whatever they need. Where what they need is measured by algorithms and dictated by top-down equations decided by top government ministers, like the one that was used to generate school student’s results last year. And where a few companies deliver the dictated services.
The idea is something like this if say applied to youth education:
Based on mandatory census data the algorithm predicts there is demand for certification acquirement for 1019 pre-adult users in zone A the following year. 219 non-adult users have had their pre-adult certifications purchased. Microsoft supplies pre-adult certification training for remaining users. Tier level permitting Serco supplies secure training sites in zone B for users that can move between zones etc.
What this means is every one but the central government has to deal with the utter mess such a Platform State creates. Public servants who usually help mediate and negotiate the State, are few and far between and have much less training. Most are simply doing a form of policing. The corporate social media platforms harvest out most problem solving to their users and discipline ther communications and coral them when needed. And progressives, leftists and socialists in the UK just argue for better funding the State or something else as silly like more inclusive exams and schooling.
These are just some quick notes in response to the above tweet. I have written about the issues here in a bit more depth here and here and here
Avi 