(i.e.: the ladle tasting itself while the soup remains bland)

He who serves a revolution is ploughing into the sea.

Simón Bolívar, quoted by Ted Kaczynski

The ladle and the pot (story of a misdiagnosis)

A man is preparing soup. To taste it, he fills a ladle, takes a sip and realises that it is bland. Holding the ladle full with one hand, he adds salt to the pot with the other and tastes again from the ladle. It is still bland. He adds more salt. Still bland. He repeats. Again. Then he gets tired, pours the contents of the ladle into the pot and leaves, cursing.

This story is Government 2.0.

Every now and then an article comes along – and there are many, all the same, all with the same quotes – promising the same thing: the state of the future will be smarter, more efficient, leaner. Just add a few technological ingredients: artificial intelligence, digital identity, smart contracts, public policy simulators. The problem is that they are salting the ladle. The diagnosis is correct: the fiscal foundations of the 20th century are creaking. For over a century, states have lived by taxing three very simple things:

– work,

– the property,

– enterprises.

These three pillars are crumbling together. Human labour is being replaced by automation. Businesses become taxable global platforms Economic value migrates to intangible assets: software, data, algorithms. So far so good. But then something curious happens. The huge problem in front of us is turned into an administrative issue. And here is Government 2.0: digital identity, algorithmic procurement, policy simulators, real-time budgeting. All very elegant. All perfectly useless. Because we are not updating the operating system of the state. We are updating the slides that tell the story.

Hal 9000 and tape drives (the visionary who cannot see himself)

There is one thing that has always struck me about the most visionary science fiction film in history. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick imagines HAL 9000: an artificial intelligence that reasons, manipulates, kills, has something resembling the fear of death. An extraordinary cognitive leap for 1968.Then HAL stores the data on tape drives. Basically,Kubrick could imagine a sentient machine but could not imagine a hard disk. The absolute visionary was a prisoner of the technology of his time just like everyone else.

Government 2.0 has the same problem. It imagines an intelligent, predictive, algorithmic state. But it imagines it with the categories of the present: taxes, services, procurement, budgets. It fails to imagine that the problem is not how to make the state we know more efficient, but what happens when the premises on which that state stands – taxable human labour – simply disappear.

And it is not a technical problem. It is civilisational.

The modern state is born in a world where human labour is the main source of value and tax revenue. If this assumption changes, we are not upgrading the operating system of public administration. We are changing the architecture of society. Nobody in the mainstream debate has the courage to say that. They prefer the Sovereign Loop, the compression dividend, dynamic consumption taxation. Beautiful words. Very clean ladle. Soup still bland.

Shinji Ikari and sony microcassettes (the reluctant pilot in the AI era)

There is another visionary that comes to mind. Hideaki Anno, the creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion, in 1995 imagines a future in which the integration of man and machine is the central theme of existence. Gigantic biological-mechanical combat units. Cosmic battles. The end of humanity in the balance. Then the protagonist, Shinji Ikari, listens to music on a microcassette Sony DAT.

The HAL paradox itself. The future imagined with the technology of the present. But Shinji has something extra that makes him impossible to forget. He is a reluctant pilot. He struggles with his self-esteem. He constantly questions his role. He repeats to himself like a mantra: I must not escape, I must not escape. Shinji hates himself so much that he cannot even commit suicide. In a world of absolute technology, Shinji is the unsolved human problem. The one element that does not upgrade, does not optimise, does not simulate.

Government 2.0 does not have Shinji in its model. It has officials. It has algorithms. It has KPIs. But it does not have the unsolved human problem. The one that won’t let itself be optimised. The one that tastes from the ladle and leaves cursing.

Who controls the state’s algorithm? When a decision is made by an official, we can contest it. When it is made by a predictive model the question becomes more complicated. Who designed the model? With what data? With what biases? And above all: who is responsible?

The real debate on artificial intelligence in the public sector is not about administrative efficiency. It is about power. AI can make the state smarter. But it can also make it more automatic, more centralised, and paradoxically less objectionable. An uncontroversial algorithmic state is not a better state. It is a more dangerous state.

The second bad master (the one no one wants to mention)

After Ellul, my second master villain is Ted Kaczynski. I know. The standard reaction is predictable. But stay for a moment, because the point is exactly this. Kaczynski was a mathematical genius – PhD at Michigan, professor at Berkeley at 25. He was also a man who, during his university years, was subjected to psychological experiments in manipulation that would be illegal today and that helped destroy him. Then he became a bomber. He did horrible things. He killed innocent people to make his manifesto public. All this is true. All this justifies nothing.

And it is also true that his manifesto – The Industrial Society and Its Future, later expanded into the Anti-Technological Revolution – contains an analysis of the technological society that policy makers and innovation gurus continue to ignore with surgical care. Just as they ignored Ellul. Kaczynski introduces the concept of the self-prop system: a system that tends to promote its own survival and spread independently of human will. And he wrote:

The world system is approaching a condition in which it will be dominated by a relatively small number of extremely powerful global systems. These systems will compete for power – as they are obliged to do to have any chance of survival – with little or no regard for the long-term consequences.

Ted Kaczynski, Anti-technological Revolution

Replace ‘global systems’ with ‘digital platforms’. Reread.

Want a concrete example of a self-prop system in action? I have one that I have been recounting for decades and still no one can disprove it. In the 1980s, the war of video formats was fought: VHS versus Betamax versus Video 2000. The technicians were unanimous: VHS was the worst. Inferior image quality. Mediocre colour rendering. The competitors were objectively better on every measurable parameter.

VHS still won. And overwhelmingly so. Why? Many scholars have made very profound speeches about network effect, standardisation, economies of scale. All true. But the simpler and more devastating truth is another: the VHS manufacturers’ consortium realised that people did not buy a video recording system for the technical quality. They bought it to watch porn at home, in private, without going to an X-rated cinema.

They made contracts with major adult content producers to distribute exclusively in VHS format. Within a short time, the technically worse format imposed itself irreversibly on the market.

The best did not win. What won was the one who understood what the real fuel of replication was: the desire that no one wanted to admit to having. Exactly as the self-prop model predicts: he who is best does not survive. The one who finds the most powerful dissemination mechanism survives.

So back to Government 2.0. The algorithmic state will not impose itself because it is more efficient. It will only impose itself – if it imposes itself – if someone understands what the citizens’ true desire is. Not the declared one. The real one. The one that no one admits to in the polls. And that someone, almost certainly, will not be the civil servant with the policy simulator.

The difference between Ellul and Kaczynski is not in the analysis. It is in the response. Ellul said: be aware of the danger. Kaczynski said: destroy the system. One was wise. The other was desperate. Both had seen the same thing.

Surgery, it is said, is the branch of medicine that cuts where it cannot cure. Kaczynski chose the scalpel. He cut in the wrong place. But the disease he diagnosed was real. And what about us? What should we cut? This is the question that Government 2.0 does not ask. Because cutting hurts. Updating software does not.

The knight, the dragon and a new question

In the previous article, I told you about the knight who returns to the king with the dragon in his arms instead of the maiden. The king shouts. The knight has optimised the process. But there is a variant of the story that I had not considered:

What if the knight took the dragon home because the dragon had already eaten the maiden?

In this case the horseman is even more efficient than we thought. He has recovered the only thing recoverable. He has optimised the impossible. And the king – who knows nothing of what happened there in the woods – continues to shout.

Here is government 2.0: the king shouting at the knight while he does not know that the maiden no longer exists. That work as he knew it will not return. That the fiscal foundations on which he builds his PowerPoint are crumbling. That the algorithm he wants to put in place to govern the state is a self-prop system that has already begun to optimise itself. We are not upgrading the software of the state. We are building the castle on the place where the maiden was.

Shiva and the right hemisphere

(or: because chaos is more honest than a PowerPoint)

There is an image that comes back often when I think about all this. Shiva dancing. In Hindu mythology, Shiva is the god of destruction and creation. Not one or the other: both together, in the same dance. The ring of fire surrounding him represents the universe with all its illusion, suffering and pain. Shiva stands over the demon of ignorance. And he dances. Shiva’s dance is not an algorithm. It is not a plan. It is not a policy simulator. It is a complex system that includes destruction as a necessary part of creation.

While the logical and rational style of the left hemisphere short-circuits in the face of extreme complexity, the non-linear and synthetic style of the right hemisphere is undaunted. Because it already knows that some things are not optimised. They cross over.

Government 2.0 is all about the left hemisphere. Linear, rational, citationist. Stiglitz, Acemoglu, Mazzucato. All perfect. All neat. All condemned to salt the ladle for eternity.

The real question is not how to make the state more efficient. The real question is what happens to a state when wealth no longer flows from human labour. This is the 21st century question. It has no technical answer. It only has political, cultural, philosophical answers. Answers that require the right hemisphere. The dance. Creative chaos.

Three possible scenarios, none of which is Government 2.0:

– One: the automated welfare state – technology-funded universal dividend, redistributed wealth, new form of social contract. Nice in theory. Who decides how much and to whom? Who controls the tap?

– Two: the technological oligarchic state – wealth concentrated in platforms, governments reduced to infrastructure providers for private systems. Already underway, for those who want to watch.

– Three: the distributed state – digital communities, new forms of governance, fragmented and recombined power. The possible adjacent that we cannot yet imagine, like Kubrick could not imagine the cloud while drawing HAL’s tape drives.

The rest is administrative rhetoric.

Tail: ploughing through the sea

Bolívar already knew this. He who serves a revolution is ploughing into the sea. Kaczynski quoted him at the beginning of his book. Not as surrender. As a warning. Before understanding what to build, one must understand what does not work. Before salting the pot, one must stop tasting from the ladle. Or salt only the ladle, only that bit, leaving out the rest.

Ellul told us that technology has become a self-prop system. Kaczynski told us that self-prop systems compete for survival regardless of consequences. VHS told us that he who intercepts true desire, not declared desire, wins. Shinji told us that the human problem is not solved by the best technology. HAL told us that even visionaries are prisoners of their time.

What do we say?

That Government 2.0 is a serious answer to a serious question. But it is the wrong answer. Or rather: it is the right answer to the wrong question. Like the ladle asking why the soup is still bland after he has put salt in it. The problem is not technological. It is political. It is civilisational. It is human and cannot be solved by a software update.

Shinji keeps telling himself: I must not run away. Perhaps this is the only right thing to do. Don’t run away from complexity. Don’t optimise it. Don’t simulate it. Stay within it. Dance around it. Like Shiva. Or at least, stop tasting from the ladle.

— — — — — — — — — —

P.S. – HAL 9000 in the film says, “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” The algorithmic state algorithm won’t even have the courtesy to apologise. It will only get an error screen.

P.P.S. – Shinji eventually pilots. Not because he solved his problems. Because he had no other choice. Maybe we don’t have a choice either. But at least we know we are piloting.

P.P.S. – The VHS won because of porn. The metaverse lost because it didn’t understand the same lesson. Someone in Government 2.0 should think about that. But he is probably busy making a policy simulator.

P.P.P.S. – The legendary baron of my academy used to say: copying from one source is a crime, copying from many is research. Take care: copy from the good ones. Ellul was among the good ones. Kaczynski also, in analysis. The difference between the two is that Ellul found wisdom. Kaczynski found the scalpel. We hope to find the dance.