The May elections are really heating up now and National Conversations have a lot of events lined up in Glasgow, Cardiff, Edinburgh and London.

We are trying to move digital technology and the issues and opportunities around it into the centre of political life - in a way that is practitioner and citizen-focussed.

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There is a lot of tech chat about - and a huge amount of it is vendor-led - and a digital politics of buy-my-stuff is a dead end.

We are also trying to be holistic - and recognise that the impact of digital is not just on the private sector, not just about public sector delivery but also has social consequences. We need to examine these issues in the round, as citizens.

We have hustings on the Digital Society in Glasgow and The Private Sector and the Economy in Edinburgh, talks on Institutionalising The Digital State in London, a community outreach event (also Glasgow) and The State and Public Sector in Cardiff. And that’s just the pre-election events, more to come.

If you are in the sector we would be delighted if you would sign our pledge and join a range of people from various sectors, startups, public servants, economic development, R&D and social and freedom orientated organisations (as well as all over the UK and around the world) in putting these important conversations at the heart of national life.

We are asking folk to sign as individuals.

We are volunteer-run and are not seeking corporate donations. Our work will cost us about £30 per MSP and MS and any help towards meeting that would be appreciated.

If you would like to organise any other events HMU. gordon.guthrie@foundationsofthedigitalstate.com

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My research fellowship at Scottish Government was the 3rd attempt in 20 years to get to the guts of pass a law, get a computer system - of really understanding how digital state administration emerges from a complex system of parliament and government, policy and law.

How nice, how interesting. Old Chuckie Marx wasn’t wrong when he said philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

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We are approaching the point where that change can be made - and I need your money to do it. There I said it.

My research fellowship meant I was unpaid for 2 years. Why? Caesar’s Wife, Peter Mandelson, take your pick. If you are proposing changes to parliamentary procedures and structure ya better be squeaky clean, and if you are a hack for the governing party, well take what steps ya need.

So there are elections coming up in Scotland and Wales and I have ganged up with Transform Wales to kick start National Conversations.

And after the elections we want the members of Parliament and Senedd alike to start the process of changing institutions, along with the new governments.

And that’s gonnae cost us money - and that’s why I am asking your for some. It will cost about £30 per MSP or MS - so if you like what you’ve read here and think its the way forward, now’s your chance to help change the world.

£30 would be appreciated

Tech policy is awash with Big Co tech money, if you believe in public service, if you support the practitioners who work on the ground, if you don’t think buy more surveillance tech is the only way for better public service, now’s your chance to strike a blow.

Fight the power!

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Parliaments and their political classes are the barriers to digital public services. Parliamentary reform is required, especially at Westminster.

Constitutional reform is framed in 2 ways – electoral nerd wonkery or fringe celt-pacification.

But administrative reform is the main historical thrust of constitutional change – from the industrial bourgeoise remaking landing-owing polities or proletarians seek to remake them in their turn.

The creation of the EU and the reconstruction of post-Soviet Eastern Europe have seen fundamental administrative reform on a Napoleonic scale.

The transition between analogue and digital state requires its own.

What needs to change? Back in the 1950s a social security act had 2 parts.

A functional specification - what the system should do - collect this information, make this calculation, disburse this money.

And the powers to do the necessary non-functional or infrastructural work – how the systems should do it - buy a building, employ staff.

But the 2020s equivalent has a 2^nd set of non-functional needs - sign-ons, APIs, integrations with other departments, digital powers of attorney – collectively joined-up government.

And these new non-functionals are tightly coupled to functionality.

Legislation continues to specify the functionality – but we lack a formal mechanism for making non-functional decisions for the state. The creation of these institutions is the required administrative reform.

Bold statement you say. I studied all 1,149 sections of all 76 pieces of Scottish Social Security legislation – 735 were functional specifications compared to 5 non-functional.

The state does make non-functional decisions – otherwise there would be no state computer systems. But where?

All over, service standards, departmental guidelines, blog posts, wish lists, disability legislation.

This is the problem – the functionality is a legal requirement and joining it up is only nice to have. When the inevitable delivery clashes happen, the legal requirement wins.

But even the functionality is badly done. We all agree that software programmes should be iterative. The UK government is spending £100m exploring ways of doing that. But this ignores the iteration that already exists. What are the 218 legislative instruments over 12 years in Universal Credit, or the 79 in 8 years of Scottish Social Security but iteration in action?

Legislation and ministerial orders do not have forms and processes adapted to software delivery although they are the primary mechanism for it. And change of parliamentary procedure is ultra vires of acceptable political opinion.

And the joined-up systems that have been made lack institutional form. Gov.UK Pay and Gov.UK ID are just departmental services. Common Legislative Solutions doesn’t have any recipes for digital infrastructure. They lack dedicated parliamentary oversight.

There is also an absence of recipes for data management. All systems need statements about who can write, who can read, how it is deleted, audit and what appeals processes there are. These should be written in standard language in standard structures to make data infrastructure technically and politically legible.

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Bref, there is no digital transformation without administrative constitutional reform.

In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland the necessary elements of political constitutional reform have already been done - so this round of administrative reform is much, much easier. Not so at Westminster.

Administrative constitutional reform there will open Ernest Bevin’s Pandora’s Box of Trojan Horses with the electoral system, the Lords, the crown in parliament and executive control of it, the prerogative out and cantering about.

This is what the Foundations of the Digital State is about - you should read the Executive Summary - and if you like that, dig in deeper.

It is also why we are staging National Conversations in Scotland and Wales this May.

If you want to start the conversation about better public services you can do two things:

Sign the pledge

If we don’t put digital issues on the election agenda, nobody will, but to do that costs money - about £30 per MSP or MS. You can help us with that too:

Donate

The Scottish Government, the Welsh Senedd and the internet age – unlikely triplets – were all born in 1999. Look at them now, all grown up.

The digital age has brough good and bad alike.

The good is music everywhere, communication, wider choice, better service, cheaper goods, access to art and film making, and windows on the world.

And the bad? industrialised child pornography, disinformation, persistent surveillance by private companies and the state alike, hybrid warfare, asymmetric markets and a winner-takes-all economy.

But good and bad are intertwined. The more the state knows about you, the better the service and the more intrusive the surveillance.

Making the trade-offs, balancing your good vs my bad, her opportunity vs their catastrophe is pure politics.

That’s why Digital Policy and Transform Wales have joined together to call for National Conversations – at the coming and future elections.

We don’t pretend there is a right answer but we need to talk – and are organising hustings and post-election events around digital society, the private sector and the economy and the state and public sector.

Here are 4 ways you can help.

1 sign the pledge

Join people like Stephen Coleman, Andy Williams and Karen Meechan, Brian Corcoran from the private sector, Richard Pope, Simon Roberts and Jerry Fishenden from the public sector, journalists like Anna Burnside and politicians like John McTernan and Susan Aitken and many more.

You don’t have to be from Scotland or Wales to sign - Derek Alton’s in Canada! These are global issues.

It only takes a second and you can withhold your name if you have to.

Sign here and help us send a signal to the political class.

2 give us £30

That’s the cost of the bookshelf we need to deliver to the newly elected MSPs and MSs.

You pass a law and you get a computer system –

one of the big things that needs to change is the recognition that the legislatures even more than the governments must raise their game.

Your £30 gets one newly elected member a copy of this bookshelf

You can donate here.

3 come to our hustings and events

You can sign-up to be notified of when and where they are.

Sign-up for notifications.

4 share this appeal

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Digital policy needs to be human centred - and it starts with you, here, now.

We need to have a national conversation about the state and digital systems. The digital age has brought great good and efficiencies, but we also sleepwalked ourselves into a surveillance society where our every action is recorded and tracked.

There are lots of urgent questions about the operations of the state in the digital age.

Some are very practical about the day-to-day work of government:

• How do the parliament and government make decisions about digital systems? Do our legal and parliamentary processes need reform?

• How do we fund our state digital infrastructure and oversee that spending?

• How are technical decisions taken? Are we sure there is the correct oversight?

• Why do big digital projects often fail? And how do we make them better?

• How do we provide services to those who can’t use digital channels: the old, the vulnerable, the damaged, the chaotic? How do we put people at the heart of the modern digital state?

• How do we join services up? How do we co-ordinate them?

Some touch on the state’s role as rule-maker for the country:

• How do we address the epidemic of online fraud? How do we stop the industrial production of Child Sexual Abuse Material. How can we free the digital world from online harassment - particularly of women?

• What does Trading Standards mean in the digital world?

• Where are crimes committed in the digital world? How do we get justice served? What are the implications for our relationships with other countries and international institutions?

• How do we ensure that digital markets are free markets - free of market abuse, manipulation, lies and deceit? How do we tackle monopolies and monosonies?

• What private companies and services have become utilities that ought to be appropriately regulated like their analogue counterparts?

• Are there investment models other than the Silicon Valley one? Is Silicon Valley over? Should our digital economy remain California-orientated?

• What limits are there on acceptable business models for new digital businesses?

The roiling of recent problems have made some critical:

• How do we protect the citizen from the new digital powers of the state?

• How do we make the state coup proof from internal enemies of democracy?

• Where should our data be stored?

• Is American and Chinese tech an existential threat? What we do if the Americans turned-off the government email system like they did the International Criminal Courts?

• Does the cross-border nature of digital technology require an international institutional response? And if so what institutions?

• Is ownership important in the modern world?

• How powerful are big tech companies anyway? Should governments be afraid of them?

• How do we build an appropriate defence posture in a world of hybrid warfare?

• How do we protect society and politics from bad actors, state operations, dirty money and corruption?

And the different impulses call for trade-offs that can only be political:

• To what extent is joined-up government a threat to liberty?

• What is just enough digital?

• What is freedom in the digital age? And how has it changed from our analogue notions?

• What do we mean by social trust? Is it possible in the digital age? And if it is, how do we build it?

• What are the trade-offs between encryption and security?

The internet makes foreign affairs of domestic and devolved affairs. What happens there, happens here, the international dimension cannot be escaped.

• What institutions above the UK are required to regulate the digital world and bring it inline with democratic norms?

• How do we need to internationalise our legal and criminal justice systems so that crimes committed here with victims there, and vice-versa, can be appropriately dealt with?

• What do we need so that devolved jurisdictions can meaningfully sanction global corporations?

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I am working with colleagues from Wales, England, Canada and all over Scotland to try and make these conversations happen in the run up to May. Stay tuned for further announcements…

Its time for a conversation about the state and society in the digital age.

The digital world needs to be brought into the political mainstream and not regarded as a rare and delicate thing that needs special technocratic management.

Elections are the time for conversations and we need to have them urgently. Here are some of the questions that we should be talking about in May:

• How do we get an independent digital news media?

• What ethical frameworks should we use in the digital world?

• What comes after the high nationalisms that existed in a world of national newspapers, national radio, national education, national television, national literature, now that those are gone? Particularly for the English speaking world?

• How do we expand the digital world in Welsh, Gaelic and other minority languages?

• Are we at risk of losing access to our cultural history with online and streaming? How do we preserve our digital patrimony?

• How do we tackle Child Sexual Abuse Material and harassment in the online world? Is it simply baked into the tools? Should employees have criminal liability?

• What are the consequences of digital society for social trust? What needs to happen to rebuild it?

• Will AI take all our jobs? Is it a problem if it does?

• How do we push back against the surveillance workplace, and the gigification of the economy and put people back at the centre?

• What forms of political organisation do we need for the new world? How should the political parties react and change?

• What is the relationship of the citizen and the state? How has it been changed by digitisation? Should we be worried? What are civil liberties in an all-digital, joined up state?

• What happens if anti-constitutional actors seize control of the state - as has happened in America?

• How do we make it possible for people who can’t or won’t be digital natives to live and thrive in society?

• What is ‘just enough’ internet?

• How has digital changed education? What effect is AI having?

• What needs to be done to protect childhood? Should children have phones in school? What restrictions should be placed on their online lives?

• How do we tackle the epidemic of crime and fraud?

I am working with colleagues from Wales, England, Canada and all over Scotland to try and make these conversations happen in the run up to May. Stay tuned for further announcements…

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Now all we need to do is see if the Super Furry Animals will record a new version of the Fall’s The North Will Rise Again in Welsh for us…

So I though at short interview with them for my readership would be in order.

What is Transforming Wales? Who are you?

Transform Wales is a collective of digital transformation and design experts with decades of experience leading change across Welsh public services, UK Government and government around the world. We’ve helped teams deliver transformation at every level.

We believe Wales can build digital public services that are not only efficient, but more inclusive, resilient and trusted.

Earlier this year, we launched Cymru Ddigidol, a growing online community for practitioners and leaders to share and learn together. And this summer we pooled our knowledge, experience and frustrations into a report about moving beyond short-term fixes and designing public services that truly meet the needs of Welsh communities.

Read the Transform Wales report.

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What is the situation in Wales wrt to Digital?

While technology has changed immeasurably over the 25 years of devolution, our ways of delivering it haven’t kept pace.

Wales still relies too heavily on large, external IT suppliers using outdated, waterfall-style delivery methods. These approaches demand heavy governance, long procurement cycles and rigid plans that leave little room for test and learn approaches. By the time projects finally launch, they’re often over budget, outdated, and irrelevant to people’s needs.

Public services must be designed with the people using them, by the people delivering them.

We continue to design around technology and policy, not people. We still mistake IT products for digital transformation, and pin hopes on quick fixes like AI rather than investing in the skills, teams and cultures that make real change possible.

Meanwhile, public bodies tackle the same problems in isolation, duplicating work that could be shared or reused. We lose time, talent and public trust.

What problems need solving?

The barriers to progress aren’t just technical — they’re systemic. We have a leadership gap where digital is still seen as an add-on, not a core part of how government works. Digital is still viewed as just a technology quick fix.

Too few senior leaders understand what modern digital delivery looks like or how to create the conditions for successful delivery to happen at pace. Those conditions include empowering multidisciplinary teams, funding work in smaller, testable increments, and creating a culture where learning and openness are valued over control and certainty. When leaders model these behaviours, digital transformation becomes possible, not just promised.

Skills remain concentrated in too few teams, with limited investment in building capability across user-centred design.

Funding cycles and governance models are still geared towards big, one-off projects or programmes, instead of small, test-and-learn teams that are focussed on outcomes, deliver value quickly and reduce risk. Together, these issues create a culture of dependency: on big suppliers, rigid processes and short-term thinking.

This stops Wales from developing its own sustainable digital ecosystem and is stifling the development of Welsh digital and technology businesses.

What are you trying to achieve? What does the future look like?

The real opportunity lies in how we work, not just what we build.

Modern, user-centred approaches are already proving their value across Wales, from the Welsh Revenue Authority’s open policy prototyping, to Sport Wales’ more inclusive grants service, and the shared digital unit emerging across Gwent councils. These examples show that when teams are empowered to test, learn and collaborate in the open, services improve and waste decreases.

We need to make this the standard, not the exception. That means a Digital Strategy for Wales that reconnects policy with delivery. And a Welsh Government that mandates and models modern, iterative, user-centred ways of working.

Wales isn’t short on talent or ideas. What we need now is the confidence and commitment to deliver differently, together.

What are the next steps?

We’re inviting anyone working in or around public services to join us. Whether you’re a politician, senior leader in the public sector, policy lead, delivery manager or UCD practitioner, this is a collective effort. The next step is simple: get involved, share what’s working, and help shape a digital Wales that delivers for everyone.

His latest is about iteration in the public sector which is a key interest of mine too.

Iteration is a hot topic at the moment – the magic technique de jour – Test’n’Learn will cure all that ails us. Well, cool yer jets.

Iteration is about feedback loops and always working systems. So far, so good. It matters, but so does when we iterate.

Government is government, and we need to be careful describing it using private sector language.

Tech startups begin as caterpillars and metamorphose into butterflies, after dissolving themselves into mulch in the cocoon.

This transition is called finding product-market fit, described by Marc Andreessen as:

Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.

Before it tech companies are scrappy, reactive, move fast and break things, pivoting, changing, ducking and diving.

After it they become system- and process-bound - making data-driven decisions. The focus switches to continuous improvement of existing services.

All tech origin stories are about caterpillars, but told by butterflies.

Government is government

Government mostly resembles post-P/MF tech companies – only rarely pre-P/MF.

In Foundations of the Digital State I used this model of the Scottish government lifecycle:

There are 3 channels for new or changed digital systems:

1 primary legislation (which goes through Parliament)

2 secondary legislation/Ministerial Orders (which touches Parliament)

3 work done under existing powers (which bypasses Parliament)

As a rule of thumb – the 1^st channel corresponds to pre-P/MF tech, the 3^rd to post P/MF continuous improvement and the 2^nd is a mixter-maxter. Holyrood takes 22 to 25 bills a year – but only 1 or 2 are digital.

The vast majority of government digital is continuous improvement. And here we start seeing problems.

The problems of continuous improvement

UK’s GDS created a problem of success. It transformed government by finding a solvable problem and solving it fast. The credibility of early success enabled it to build and expand a base and win the battle for thought leadership.

The problem is that the structure required to storm a beachhead is different from the structure required after victory.

Continuous improvement is operations-led and the challenge is now to move iteration from the centre to the edge – to institutionalise the practices of GDS not to copy them, to shrink the technical centre – not grow it ectopically.

It comes back to functional and non-functional (or infrastructural) requirements – the what and the how. The what of state digital is expressed in legislation – the how is smeared over service standards, blog posts, departmental guidance, what google does and what we did at my last job.

This is the central finding of Foundations of the Digital State.

Some of these hows are now systems – Gov.UK Pay and Gov.UK Notify. But the state lacks recipes to create non-functional (or cross-cutting) organisations – they are not in Common Legislative Solutions.

The debate about uptake of these services is still find internal customers and not identify and deploy central improvements.

Not all hows can become systems – some are ways of working and the challenge is to drive iteration of hows to the edge – which means giving the edge (departments, arms length bodies and local authorities) more autonomy.

This is a double institutional challenge.

Firstly the distributed hows need to be co-ordinated with technical standards – which implies a weak central co-ordinating body that can develop technical consensus across the entire landscape. Standards can be implemented without communication, without command and control.

And secondly institutions at the edge need control of money, timing, technology and procurement. This is a devolution of power.

Continuous improvement is iteration within lawful authority, but what if that is the problem? If the laws says X must sign the paper with a wet signature the process can’t be digitised. The Ontario digital programme needed 100 changes to primary legislation.

So what is the loop from edge to centre when a block is identified? And how can it be cleared without parliamentary gridlock?

The current loop is via the Scottish Law Commission – a new technical institution must rhyme with that.

The recommendation in Foundations of the Digital State is an Enabling Act – primary legislation amended by Ministerial Order on a like-for-like basis. This requires special and institutionalised parliamentary oversight.

These institutional proposals are discussed in more details in Working Paper 0 – The locus of change and Working Paper 8 – An Enabling Act.

Legislative iteration

Legislation has bedevilled digital reform since Gershon in 2004:

2.6 (…) In developing proposals the Review team was careful to avoid any which required new primary legislation or investment in large new ICT systems because of the uncertainty this would create over the delivery of the consequent savings within the 2004 Spending Review period.

The Gershon Report, Releasing resources to the front line: Independent Review of Public Sector Efficiency

Test’n’Learn dodges it too.

But passing legislation is an iterative software development process. Universal Credit had about one and a half Ministerial Orders a month for 12 years.

Scottish Social Security had 3 Acts and 76 Ministerial Orders over 6 years totalling 1,149 sections. I read and classified them all, section by section:

• Functional specification 725 – 63.1%

• Non-specification 419 – 36.5%

• Non-functional specification 5 – o.4%

Don’t believe me? (I wouldn’t) I wrote about in in Working Paper 9.1 - Reading legislation with a non-functional eye and Appendices. All the gory detail section by grim section in the appendices there.

Legislation is accidently iterative using mechanisms to hand – it should be designed to be so - and I explored this in Working Paper 7.3 – Experimental digital legislative processes.

Getting better iterative legislation is politically tricky, lots of moving parts, but conceptually quite easy - given that the legislative process for major systems is already iterative - just not explicitly in the way we want it to be.

We have a process that works (it produces digital systems) and has the properties we seek - it stands to reason that we should focus on, and improve, it in a systematic way.

Conway’s Law tells us that the architecture of a software system recapitulates the communication structure of the team that makes it.

When you build a major IT project you have a vertical organisation at the start – to build the smallest end-to-end working system. At the end you have a horizontal operational organisation – layers and specialist services.

The starting architecture is never fit for the purpose of mature operations.

It follows that in the middle you need to take a pause and rearchitect your software – your project has a natural puberty.

It will happen whether you like it or not – you can plan for year 3 to be a year of restructuring or you can have a political crisis with the ‘troubled programme’ being ‘not fit for purpose’ and the hero being sent in to ‘save’ it.

How would you do it?

Improving legislative iteration is constitutional – touching the format of legislation and parliamentary process.

In the report I recommended an iterative, constitutional approach – eating my own dogfood. An ad-hoc committee at Holyrood would define a new process with a temporary standing order. One of the 25 annual Bills would be diverted through it with the agreement of the government. The committee would write and introduce the necessary legislation to institutionalise the learnings of this practice run – or runs.

This approach would work in Wales which also has modernised institutions.

But it would not work at Westminster. That parliament has 2 separate weak governing bodies – and they can’t even fix the building which is crumbling.

That government controls the standing orders, the introduction of legislation and the timetabling – a proper constitutional process would need to be ginned up.

Its reviewing chamber, the Lords, has no legitimacy, seats in it are openly for sale, and most members don’t attend. During my research I tried to contact a number of peers by going to the website and following its instructions. None of my emails got an acknowledgement let alone a reply. It is a dead tooth.

On top of that Whitehall, as part of an unsystematised polity, has the problems of departmental lawful authority that I talked about in my previous response to James Plunkett.

In conclusion

Iteration is about course correction – improving it requires a deep understanding both of the machine we are driving and the road we are driving on and that basic administrative hygienic actions have been taken. Government is government.

Read the proposition, what the book is about and chapter 1.

Of functional and non-functional, or infrastructural, tasks

Trade jargon captures the essential aspects of a specialism. It’s time to talk of functional and non-functional (or infrastructural) things.

And understanding the trade jargon is critical because the distinctions it draws are necessary to understand the weaknesses in the constitutional architecture of the US that Elon Musk has exploited.

Non-functional here just means everything-that-isn’t-functional.

In terms of digital systems - the functionals are what the system does and the non-functionals are how it does it.

The function of a tap is that it delivers water when you turn it on. It doesn’t care where the water comes from. The non-functional (or infrastructural) things behind it are reservoirs and water pipes. The tap would work fine from a well or a rain butt.

The functional requirements of 1950s Social Security were that it collected your personal information, calculated your entitlement and paid out the money. What it does.

The non-functional requirements were a building with a bus stop in a big enough town, pens, papers and toilets, its how.

What and how are decoupled.

Social Security now still needs physical infrastructure - the how.

Its digital services collect, calculate and pay - the what.

But there are new hows - staff sign-ons, databases, data exchange with other departments - joined up government. The old non-functionals were decoupled from function. These new non-functionals aren’t - they are embedded in its very software.

This is the heart of the transition to the digital state.

Close reading shows administrative legislation talks in functionality. Parliament says what the government should do but not how it should do it. (Evidence Working Paper 9 - Reading legislation with a non-functional eye and Appendices)

Ministers are given functional titles over departments named after functionality, doing things specified as functionality in laws, overseen by parliamentary committees focused on function.

And the non-functional specifications are spread all over - in service standards, guidelines, best practice and even blog posts and other expressions of thought leadership.

Legislative functional specification has prestige, high visibility and political salience. The infrastructural side, not so much.

This misbalance is the centre of the problem. Software delivery is a series of trade-offs. Functionality is a legal requirement and must-haves. The non-functionals are only nice-to-haves. So functional always wins in any clash over resource or timing.

You can easily tell tax from social security in legislation. But infrastructure is shared across all departments. Tax and social security may well share the same systems to send you money or notifications. So digital government has a tension between the functional departments and the central shared infrastructure that was absent in the old days.

Building and running shared digital infrastructure and ensuring that departmental systems can and do use it requires different institutional and legal structures, both on the executive and legislative side.

At the heart of this tension is the question of data. We model things in data. Citizens-as-a-thing appearing in many laws implies that the models-of-citizens-in-data held in many departments overlap.

Sharing data increases efficiency, allows processes to be streamlined and can deliver better services. But it also trashes privacy and empowers the state against the citizen.

There is a tension between the will and the means of data sharing.

When managing infrastructure we want to make it technically easy to share any dataset between government departments by standardising the means.

But the will to share data is generally prohibited unless it is reasonably required.

Data is the foundation of joined-up government, proper data management, proper use of information, the free flow of it, is what makes the digital world so powerful and so compelling.

And data contains the duality problem. Data is tied to the functional and non-functional worlds alike, in what it models and how it is shared and flows.

The state must manage both functional and non-functional decisions about systems and data alike. It needs appropriate institutions to do so.

Legislation is at least clear about a system’s functionality, it is poor at managing data models and the power to create and share them. Data sharing is an institutional and constitutional problem in its own right.

The state lacks the constitutional and organisational architecture to manage its digital infrastructure. It is not a problem of people, their motivation and skills. Functional issues are prioritised over non-functional and infrastructural ones by the structure of the state. If you drive with the steering lock on, you end up in the ditch.

This is the root cause of silos and disjointed government.

Government decision making must be institutionally rebalanced to strengthen the non-functional or infrastructural side with stronger oversight by the legislature.

Standards are the way to do this.

But the state also lacks the constitutional architecture, the appropriate separation of powers, to protect itself against the Trump coup. It would have failed if 5 or 6 armed policemen had been at the correct digital agencies.

The Federal Reserve has its own police force, the US Treasury Payments system doesn’t. The head of the Fed was cheerfully telling reporters that he disagreed with Trump and had no intention of resigning. His appointment was by a statutory process with the confirmation of the Senate required. By contrast the head of the US Digital Services, the body that Musk took over, is just a presidential appointee.

The organisation weakness that prevents the state from excelling in digital infrastructure is the same weakness that Musk exploited. By storming poorly understood and supervised critical digital infrastructure, he was able to seize control of the flow of money. And the state and the rule of law fell.

There are good reasons the state lags the private sector in digital matters. But the problems are eminently fixable, with a proper understanding of how digital systems are made, and political will.

But while on the one hand we can and must improve state digital provision, on the other we must prioritise protecting the citizen from the state. Digitisation brings more power to the centre, and preventing that being captured by malign actors as in the US is an urgent problem.

This understanding of the 2 ways of specification and how they are intertwined is fundamental to the modern world.

Further reading

On the structural issues of how to organise state bodies to proper create and oversea standards see:

The Foundations of the Digital State

Working Paper 0.3 - The locus of change

Working Paper 11.1 - Jeff Bezos API mandate but for Government

Working Paper 12 - A theory of state

Working Paper 13 - The weak centre

In relation to will and means of data sharing please see:

Working Paper 5.1 - Law reform for data

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.

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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.

Agreement and disagreement – patterns, platforms, markets

I agree with James (and Richard Pope) on the importance patterns, platforms and markets in shaping the future, with some disagreement on how and why.

I engaged with Scottish Government teams working on reusable components and wrote about it in The Lego State.

Pattern making is a two-stage process: codification, and then institutionalisation by promotion.

Amazon Web Services was first an internal technology to support Amazon’s then core business, and then promoted to a product line.

The UK Government Design system was first a Service Standard and then promoted into code as Gov.UK frontend.

This involves a transformation – from patterns that we follow to components that other professions use.

The former are Endo-patterns, by and for us, and the latter are Exo-patterns, by us and them, for them. The former are in our comfort zone, the latter in nobody’s.

Where the us and them work closely (for example designers and code monkeys in GDS) this can be easy, -ish.

Parliamentary Counsel have a pattern book called Common Legislative Solutions – getting technical patterns promoted to there will be much harder.

Have a read and see what the state doesn’t have recipes for. All those infrastructure platforms? Gov.UK Pay? Gov.UK Notify? NHS Notify? Ain’t no recipes for them.

A modern digital state needs capacity in both kinds:

• to create and codify patterns

• to promote, and thereby institutionalise them

This requires a theory of the state and its internal construction, where we can build patterns and how we can promote them into components. And there are a lot of possible routes, some involving departmental promotion and some pan-government.

(Enabling the state to refocus is related and discussed in detail in The Remixable State).

The state shouldn’t aspire to be a platform but to recognise that it is one

On platforms, I think the state is, in and of its nature, a congeries of platforms. It needs to realise its true self in a series of digital forms.

Platforms are simply digital utilities.

Tech startups first seek Product Market Fit and then scale – and some become platforms. This is not a road state digital can follow.

We don’t need to ‘discover’ the platforms, we need to design them, iteratively for sure.

We have the prerequisites for the state-as-platforms (skilled workers, domain understanding, clear tested models) – but we lack the political will and institutions to do it.

A market is when products have prices and replacements

The next political front line was illuminated by Timothy Synder pointing out that Putin is wealthier than Elon Musk.

Utilities have enormous market power (that’s why America has so many billionaires). But a utility-state fusion generates even more wealth. Russia is, to use a technical term, an economic shithole with a smaller economy than Italy. But as the Angolan De Santis family and the Congo’s Mobutu proved, a country doesn’t need to be rich to have wealthy rulers.

US tech is pivoting to Putinismo – state-enforced tax farms – as we must for the now sup with these devils, it is the time of long spoons.

Free markets only exist under the liberal state, for they are free of misuse of market power, producer co-ordination, lies and deceit – not regulation.

Will and should the NHS continue to buy goods and services in the free market? Absolutely. In an unfree market? No. That is the ‘market-shaping’ we need.

So far so aligned (-ish), but…

I disagree fundamentally with this statement:

But it was prone to delivering the wrong thing, reliably, year after year. That is why, when we just optimise the bureaucracy, the best we can hope for is eking our way back to a local maximum.

and this:

This is not to say we have seen no improvements. Treatments have got better, as have diagnostics. But these improvements have aimed at a local maximum — better treatment, for example, as opposed to prevention.

Life expectancy is the north star measurement. Many of the ‘problems’ we have could be cured if people just dropped dead younger – we should embrace the problems of success for the problems of failure are much, much worse.

And there is plenty of evidence the recent slide in life expectancy is related to social and economic failings, not health failings.

Health professionals work across boundaries in a systematic manner, mixing treatment and prevention – alongside lots of local government employees, inspectors, sewage workers, and the unappreciated heroes of health and safety.

Things that code female suffer from political invisibility. In health this includes health visitors, midwives, community nurses, social care and public health – deemed less important than male-coded surgeons and hospitals. We see it in the civil service too, Service Design is, if not coded female, certainly feminised compared to AI, Data Science and giant dashboard Nasa control rooms.

The debate on health too often returns to a demand for lower waiting times in an efficient health service. The political class doesn’t understand Little’s Law.

Amazon knows the answer to waiting times. Measure performance at the 99% percentile and add resources until it is acceptable. Sure, your computers are idle 70% of the time on average. We could do that in health. The percentage in health will be different – but a zero-waiting list world requires beds, operating theatres and clinics to be sitting unused, possibly the majority of the time. With stochastic inputs, absence of queues requires overcapacity.

You can have high utilisation (eg resource efficiency) or low queues, but not both. Pick one. This misunderstanding dominates political debate on health (not saying that James agrees with it mind, just that it must be faced down).

Devolution, death and the institutional context

The article comes across as self-contradictory:

Really, what digital has opened up is a new way of working and running organisations, which goes beyond software or the way we build software. This spans everything from an institution’s organising logic and operating model, to its management practices, control and assurance mechanisms, skills and disciplines, mentalities and culture. The unique power of organisations and systems that are run in this way is that they are capable of learning, and making progressive and cumulative improvements, and scaling those improvements quickly and cheaply.

but:

Notice how these operating patterns give us a wholly different way to talk about devolution. We are not talking about where things sit in a system. And we are not arguing about mandates vs. local variation. We are focusing instead on creating capacity, at multiple points in the system, to solve common problems on behalf of everyone. We shift the emphasis from static things — budgets, accountabilities, technologies — to the dynamics and relationships for learning, collaborating, and scaling.

Digital working practices need to be reified – and that means institutions, funding, budgets, mandates and that which flow from them: technologies, infrastructure and buildings.

These are also patterns, the ones that matter, the road to life and longevity for these ideas.

Digital capability is constitutional in the broadest sense:

Enacting a digital-era approach to devolution. Getting away from talking about ‘where things sit’, and arguing over mandates vs. discretion, and instead creating a series of operating patterns that allow us to do the right work, at the right level of the system, on behalf of everyone.

This needs structure. Constitutionality is the 3^rd rail of English politics (let’s be explicit the paper is about the English NHS - one of the 4 NHS’s in the UK - and English politics).

It’s time to talk devolution.

The lack of death in the British state – and the structural reasons for it

Why does devolution matter?

The besetting sin of socialism was optimism about capitalism. It was so intrinsically superior to craft production that it bedazzled the scientific socialists. Fredrick Engels knew whereof he spoke. Manchester was the Silicon Valley of the 1840s, and the MD of Bremen and Engels was a FANG CEO of his time. (Marx’s other funder was his uncle, the founder of the Dutch tech giant Phillips).

The socialists contrasted the internal organisation and order of a capitalist company with the chaos and disorder of the market. Running the market like a company would bring forth wonders! But it brought sclerosis and failure.

Death is the gardener of ecosystems, plucking weeds. Death’s bony finger summons companies to the bankruptcy courts and releases their workers and workshops, markets and raw materials for new endeavours.

Unregulated private utilities, monopolies, are death dodgers. Have you used Google recently? Or Facebook?

Political death – and inter alia public sector death – is elections. The post-socialists understood the need for death. Returning things that ought to have been provided by the free market to it was one part. But for the rest, the choice was to create pastiche markets with death-by-regulators.

These pastiche markets are tax farms and their undead (Thames Water, private prisons, private childrens homes et al) stalk the land.

The cult of the transformative Socialist Man was rewritten as Market Man – continuity Lysenkoism.

The centralised UK (including Scotland) lack death. How do we get more?

British (or more correctly English) politics is trapped in a tyranny of structurelessness – familiar to anyone who ever tangled with a ‘leaderless’ or ‘non-hierarchical’ political organisation.

Avoiding talking about structure and power doesn’t make constitutional and institutional issues go away. The leader of this ‘leaderless’ politics is always The Centre. By default, things centralise in the UK.

More death means:

• more elected bodies running more things

• more autonomy for the elected bodies, ie tax raising powers.

If the centre provides 85% of your funding you don’t really die on change of control.

Other countries have hundreds of health boards and a diversity of operational software. Ecosystem health comes from a healthy ecosystem.

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Lawful authority and the departmental state

25 years later it is clear that of the 3 great traditions of modern Labour, Bennery, Blairism and Brownism, it was Dewarism that won.

Reform your political institutions and let nature take its course. Scotland has gone from the poor relation to pole position. Per capita GDP in Edinburgh is higher than London, tech investment is twice the UK per capita. Median wages are up while house prices remain down.

Defeating Napoleon got the UK a Waterloo Station. Being defeated by him got codified modern state structures all across Europe. The UK Government has no statutory existence; the Prime Minister is a convention.

This isn’t constitutional navel gazing. It matters. Reality intrudes, and in typical British fashion we have a half-Napoleonic state. Let’s look at lawful authority.

Broadly for ‘old’ departments lawful authority is granted in legislation to a named Minister and not the government. In ‘new’ departments lawful authority goes to a class of unspecified Secretaries of State and is pooled (to a degree).

So far, so trainspotting. Anecdote sometimes gets to the heart. Here are 2 conversations from a single lunch queue at UK Gov Camp.

A pal mentioned that he had tracked down some data and emailed the relevant civil servant for it. “Sure” came the reply, “I’m drafting the Ministerial Order as we speak”. The pal needed lawful authority to get the spreadsheet and that required parliamentary approval.

Another pal talking about moving from one department to another, handing their laptop back-in, getting a new email address, losing access to the old shared file system, their notes, their contacts, their digital archive.

This was not bureaucratic stasis but lack of shared lawful authority.

The Scotland Office was an ‘old’ office, but in the Scotland Act the FM and the Scottish Government were codified in statute. Powers are granted collectively to Scottish Ministers.

Pundits love to fulminate about how <reform> in Scotland is falling behind Westminster.

But you get a different story when you interview people: Scottish government changes too quickly. The website says X, but X says Y according to the org chart and Y says its Z now. The information architecture can’t keep up with small continuous reorganisations.

Why so? Because reorganisation is cheap - alter a reporting line, move a budget line to a different roll-up.

Again, anecdote is revealing. Consider the small but symbolic Gaelic Language brief. Mike Russell (an adult learner) had it as Cabinet Secretary for Culture, then Alisdair Allan (a fluent speaker with a PhD) got it, (was he Transport then? Scottish gov changes so quickly…). Now Kate Forbes (a native speaker) is DFM and its with her.

The Whitehall equivalent would be a Cornish Language Unit going from DCMS to DoT to the Treasury – costing 4% of parliamentary time each move.

And confusion about lawful authority at Ministerial level is even worse in English local government with a myriad of local deals underpinned by MOUs. Nobody understands it – even the Professors at this years Political Science Association Conference in Glasgow.

Foundational codification of the state is critical and can no longer be avoided – however great the temptation to style yourself above this tarpit.

It directly speaks to Test and Learn (or Live, Laugh, Love as it was dubbed in one of my Signal Groups, a moniker it has struggled to shake off).

The Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster used to be a cheap and cheerful way to give Tory Party Chairmen access to the cabinet – a non-job with little lawful authority.

Now it is a key role in public sector reform.

Raw inter-departmental power in Whitehall (as opposed to the politesse) comes in two forms:

• “I’ll sack your minister” – the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster approach – based on convention

• “I’ll stop the money” – the Chancellor of the Exchequer – based on statute

This is how legally separate departments with their own lawful authority can be kept in line.

The granularity of money control drops out of a simple formula:

I was on some calls when Test and Trace was setup – alongside hundreds of other people. It has a budget of £100m. Later I was pitching a Scottish version based on my research with a proposed budget of £400,000.

£100m is the quantum of existence in the Treasury world - the antithesis of the founding thesis of Test and Learn – and with a smaller scope than my proposal – existing powers only, things that didn’t require primary or secondary legislation.

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Making laws

You pass a law, you get a computer system. We know this – legislation has a causal relationship to digital systems. And yet the legislative process, the structure of legislation, how we make it, the patterns it contains and the pattern books we use are all excluded from discussion about the digital state.

This is a mistake.

But it is a rational mistake.

Practitioners rightly say that legislation doesn’t affect the work required to make joined up government, to make digital age government, to do good work. Indeed the minister, Ivan McKee, said this to me when I interviewed him.

How to explain this paradox?

There are two types of specification: what systems should do and how they should do it. These map in software terms to the functional and non-functional (or infrastructural) requirements.

In 1950s social security both of these are specified in legislation – pay people social security under these criteria (the what) and set up a social security agency that can hire people, have bank accounts, own buildings and enter into commercial contracts (the how).

The how and the what are decoupled. In the digital age the physical how is joined by a digital how – databases, sign-ons, joined up government – and that new how is tightly coupled to the what.

In the 2020 the what and the old how are both covered in legislation – like in the 1950s. But the new how – well that’s a different story – it’s spread across Service Standards, departmental guidelines, government blogs, disability legislation, personal blogs, what we did at my last jobs, foreign Service Standards, the sort of things Google might do and every combination of the above. And they are just nice to have.

When there is tension in a delivery programme the legal requirement (what) always takes priority over the nice to have (how). Silos are structural and not accidental.

(I read all 79 pieces of Scottish social security legislation and coded them up section by section to be sure that this was evidence based).

So the secret of joined up digital health with a reasonable number of institutional players under local democratic control (hundreds not the scant 21 of current Scotland) is to find a way to make and enforce shared non-functional requirements.

6bn devices access 4bn websites on the internet. This ecosystem is co-ordinated without communication by technical standards created by a weak centre.

I wrote about the mechanism to do this in the Foundation of the Digital State – a government body, the Digital Services Reform Office, and a corresponding parliamentary supervisory body, the Digital Services Scrutiny and Audit Commission. A weak centre based on a theory of state.

So where to start

Start small. The Cabinet Office’s Guide To Making Legislation doesn’t say anything about digital. Fix that. Thinking about data and digital needs to be a first class activity.

In the Foundations of the Digital State I proposed using the tried and tested Temporary Standing Orders as a way to iterate on new processes and formats, one Bill at a time – and learn at a constitutional level.

There are plenty of simple hygienic measures that would drive understanding and which can be simply got on with.

In conclusion

The computering classes often bemoan the lack of interest from the political classes in our world. If only they would listen to us.

The change from the analogue to digital state is as profound as the early bourgeois revolutions, the (male) democratic revolutions of 1848 that overthrew oligarchy, the collapse of empires and rise of nation states or the entry of women into political life in the last half century.

We see digital fingerprints on the coup of Trump and Musk, the Moldovan elections and our own domestic politics.

It behooves the technical classes to engage comprehensively with constitutional and institutional change. A stance of technocratic distance is no more attractive in public service than it is in Silicon Valley.

We cannot just cling to our comfort zone and hope that if left to do our thing, in our world, all the good we want to see will magically happen.

It won’t.

Silicon Valley taught me to think big. Politics taught me to think institutionally, and so naturally I started thinking seriously about the relationship of technology and the state around 2004.

In 2023, half retired, I made my 3^rd attempt to address the issue properly. I nagged the government into appointing me a Research Fellow under the First Minister’s Digital Fellowship Programme and began a research project, interviewing civil servants, politicians and think-tankers in Scotland, the UK and around the world.

My report, The Foundations Of The Digital State, was published at the end of 2024. This is one of the biggest institutional questions of the day to my mind.

This book I am proposing is really the 3^rd part of a triptych.

At the bottom is a series of working papers - which are as technical as they need to be. They deal with a range of complex issues from parliamentary processes to the structure of legislation, from data structures and the rule of law to shared identity and permissions across state systems.

Above that is a report for the Scottish Government looking at the narrower issue of how the state should create and self-regulate its own digital systems. It makes a series of concrete recommendations covering parliamentary process, the format of bill packs, the structure of government, law reform and so on.

The technical thinking required to implement it is contained in the working papers.

This book proposal recapitulates some of that - in relation to the state and its digital systems. It is shorn of the particularism of Scotland, Holyrood’s parliamentary process, and Scots law. But it also extends that analysis to a range of other areas of state relations - state/economy and regulation, international state-to-state, war and society.

I spent time in Silicon Valley 25 years ago - and met future luminaries like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. I thought Peter Thiel’s ideas were mad and irrelevant. I was wrong. Now those ideas have moved centre stage and they threaten us directly.

The coup shows the flavour of the times, surly young men slouching into government offices toting laptops. The state reimagined by turning it off and maybe back on again.

Trump sows chaos: the world changes, and a black vein of digital technology runs through it. But there would be no Trump without the new world of the internet. There is no normality to return to, only a new world to build.

Networked computers gave us the ability to be more us, us at unimaginable scale. A singer, but world famous. An object of ridicule, on 5 continents. A disinformation monger, in 50 languages.

Societies are a delicate web of institutions, laws and social norms which balance off rights and obligations, via power and constraints. It’s been that way since Cain slew Abel and Jacob swindled Esau. But now Cain has a drone up to murder you in your bed and Jacob steals from across the world with a mouse.

Technology enables good as well as bad, and what Musk has been doing is only what Berlusconi did with terrestrial TV in the 1970s and 1980s. What is new is Berslusconiism on many fronts.

Modern politics is so exhausting because we just go from punch to punch: reel, react, reel, react, reel. Let’s get out of the boxing ring.

This is a book about now, and what’s next, the changed and changing world. The American crisis is also an opportunity. There are things to be done and the political will to do them.

Deep change should be approached circumspectly - with care, containment and isolation - one thing at a time. That is no longer an option because the rupture is so profound and so deep.

The cause of the political crisis is the collapse of trust, a human emotion, not encodable in bits and bytes. That collapse in turn was driven by social and economic change as well as deliberate human action. The crisis touches all aspects of human life because the black vein of technologies connects them, for better and for worse: Trump, Taylor Swift, taxes, TikTok, Gaza, shopping, Ukraine, streaming, Brexit.

This is a crisis of state, and change can only come from the state, so the solution starts there - how has the state and its capabilities changed from the analogue world?

A state that is not self-aware about how it develops itself digitally, how it needs to be regulated, cannot perform the digital governance of others.

Europe is not immune to the far right, the wolf’s breath has been felt in Germany, Italy, France and the UK. Understanding the nature of the Musk coup - and putting in place countermeasures - is the critical first step.

January 6th 2021 was a traditional coup, but January 20th 2025 was an innovative and very modern one.

Trump remains strategic knocking down alternative sources of power and authority, while Musk brought characteristic tactical innovation and brio.

Trump’s showmanship brings magicians’ misdirection to politics: simulation, dissimulation, interpretation, manoeuvre, pretence, ruse, anticipation, disguise, diversion, monotony, premature consummation, confusion, suggestion and more. He gestures to woke leftists, but targets the House, Senate and GoP.

Trump talks tariffs and Canada. He simultaneously telegraphs - and denies. He does and claims the opposite. The hand moves faster than the eye. Confusion is the point. And while he distracted, Musk flensed.

Musk’s innovation was brilliant in its simplicity. It was a RIF for the state. Reductions in Force, or layoffs, are internal corporate coups executed against staff by management. Central IT systems are used to turn off laptops, chats, emails and access cards. People are sacked and escorted out.

A target was announced. The civil servants were stunned by an abrupt vague and contradictory all-hands email, mixing sticks and carrots. Then senior management were fired to decapitate the organisation. Finally the money was switched off and the whole thing was fed into the woodchipper.

The abolition of USAID, a statutory body, gutted the constitution. Laws and Congress don’t matter, only Trump.

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On January 6th generals in the Pentagon watched the coup livestreamed from across the river and did nothing. But would a general even know where to start on 20th January.

There is a systemic weakness in the modern state. To make the state coup-proof we need to understand and fix it.

Analogue state functionality was paper forms. Analogue infrastructure was physical things like buildings - things the army knows how to defend. In the digital world there are online functional forms embedded in digital infrastructure - like payment systems.

In the analogue world functionality and infrastructure are decoupled, and in the digital coupled. Analogue infrastructure is distributed, but digital is centralised.

In the UK visible infrastructure is guarded by specialists like the British Transport Police and British Nuclear Police. If the US had a dedicated police force for its Treasury Payments Systems, as the Federal Reserve does, the coup would have failed. The US Digital Service’s leadership was simply replaced by Donald Trump. Musk was in unchallenged. The Fed’s chair needs confirmation hearings, and was even the last shred of the constitution defended by a captured Supreme Court.

The incoherence of the administration and DOGE, the collapse in trust and the economic misery to come don’t detract from the brilliance of the sichelschnitt.

The weakness that Musk exploited was caused by digitisation. Centralised systems enabled it, accidentally. The worst was not, but ought to have been, planned for. Remediation should have been done at the design stage and not now as a response after failure.

And it is a weakness that is universally shared. All states must coup-proof themselves. And that only follows from self-understanding.

The best place to start is the difference between functionality and infrastructure:

• A house has taps and water comes out of them.

• Behind that, there is a vast infrastructure of reservoirs and aqueducts.

Filling the kettle is functionality. Ensure all the kettles can be filled is infrastructure. In this case it’s is visible and tangible. You can walk round the reservoir.

This works for the administrative state too. Pretend it’s 1950:

• There is a social security office, the staff calculate and administer benefits payments with paper-based systems.

• But supporting it is a building, with a roof and a canteen and a bus stop and electricity.

In computer jargon, the first is the functionality of the system, and for historical reasons the second is called the non-functional requirements - but infrastructure is a better word.

Fast forward to the present day and look at a social security agency:

• There is a social security computer system, it calculates and administers benefits payments.

• But supporting it is a building, with a roof and a canteen and a bus stop.

• And also supporting it is a digital infrastructure of sign-ons and databases, data-sharing, e-government, APIs and cybersecurity.

Now there are two sets of infrastructure, digital and analogue. The analogue infrastructure remains decoupled from the functionality, but the digital infrastructure is intertwined with it.

And while software is hard to reason about, digital infrastructure is even more opaque.

The social security system at least has web pages, an interface, something you can get a handle on.

This book builds on research I did at the Scottish Government which identified why joined-up government and data sharing initiatives had consistently failed.

The misbalance and weakness comes from the position of infrastructure in the state. Functionality is defined in legislation and has prestige. We see a Social Security Act, Parliamentary Committee, Minister and Agency in Scotland - all organised around the functionality of the state.

Digital infrastructure lacks all of these - the lawful power for Scottish digital identity system derives indirectly from a state’s general administrative rights under GDPR. There is no Minister, no Parliamentary Committee, no agency. Digital infrastructure doesn’t even have a recognised structural form in the state, no equivalent to Social Security Agencies or arms-length bodies.

These weaknesses in building state digital systems are also weaknesses in defending them.

The unchanged legal and parliamentary processes that we use all assume that the functionality and infrastructure of state administration are decoupled. Without changing them we won’t get better digital government. And Musk showed us that without changing them we can’t protect ourselves from a rerun of Jan 20th.

Fixing this problem immediately presents us with some stark choices - joined up government brings a demon into the heart of the state. One road leads to a bleak future, social media and public behaviour are measured, shaped and monitored for compliance. Europe currently stands apart in this regard from the two blocs: China and America

The state is a self-regulating administrative organ - the mechanisms it uses are rights, separation of power and the rule of law under an elective democratic mechanism to change direction.

If we are to avoid the dystopian road we need to go back to first principles. Any use of networked computers is a potential threat to our rights, the separation of powers and the rule of law. Computers are neither good nor bad, nor is digitisation. Our state systems must be made to be hack, abuse and coup proof - and must be examined carefully with a constitutional eye.

Only once liberal democratic states are capable of reasoning about their own digital infrastructure, of understanding and articulating their own self-regulation, will they be in a position to seriously think about regulation of the digital private sector - a task which is already urgent. A fight with the Trump administration for control of the global digital economy cannot be avoided.

The home front must be secured, even as battles on the foreign front loom.

Once the state itself is properly understood, attention can be turned to those things that the state administers and regulates. These too are impacted by the collapse of trust - but perhaps not in ways quite expected.

The people least prepared for the consequences of a Trump presidency where those who desired it most. Both the true believers and the unholy alliance of Silicon Valley and Wall Street that had rallied to Trump fervently believed that the economy would soar on his victory. Reality is hitting hard. Most obviously capital flight follows on from kleptocracy - and kleptocracy is the defining characteristic of the Trump administration.

The money that is leaving America has to go somewhere - that alone is an opportunity for European tech.

And Silicon Valley’s strategy of collaboration is forcing a flight from platforms by customers, mostly strongly from Twitter. People are looking for, and willing to pay for, alternatives. The flow of engineering talent towards America has reversed. Trump’s war on American Universities will not end well for the US - but it could be transformational for Europe - both for good and for ill. Taking a leading position in the tech sector is good, reproducing the American catastrophe would obviously not be.

The chaos machine searches out new targets. Trust in the US financial systems and the wide range of US Statistical publications was a soft super-power. All of that is being undermined. DOGE meddling in core systems threatens outages and further erosion of international trust.

After the White House signalled that the Chair of the Federal Reserve should take direction from the President, his reply was withering. The job is independently appointed and not beholden to the President by design, and in statute.

But as so often, the rot runs deep. A case is creeping towards the Supreme Court that might gut the Fed’s independence. The worry is that the justices who brought you legal presidential murder are poor guardians of the constitution.

Discretionary White House control of state financial systems is Fully Automated Luxury Peronism.

The old United Nations, the military command of the Allies in World War, became the dominant international political organisation afterwards. It survived the cold war, the collapse of the European empires, the redemption of the People’s Republic of China and the collapse of the Soviet system. It can’t survive the withdrawal of its sponsor and host - the US.

The whole infrastructure of international agreement and regulation sits under the umbrella of the UN. The only credible agency to sponsor a new international order is the European Union, but that will involve addressing the grievances of the global south, in particular the double standards over Russia, Ukraine and the occupied Crimea versus Israel, Palestine and its occupied territories in Syria and Lebanon. This reorganisation will touch the digital world in so many areas.

The design of the web and international payments presume a light and loving American government hand. Peter Thiel explained his plans for money to me 25 years ago in his office at PayPal. What was crazy then is a genuine threat now. The $3.5bn vig that the Trump family have reaped from crypto grifting this year alone is sign enough, both of the danger and the accelerationism that digital tech enables.

The EU needs to build payments and internet infrastructure that is both coup-resistant and attuned to our security and economic needs. This is also a generational opportunity to steal the global financial system from the US. As Trump dismantles the rule of law, international finance will have to go somewhere. If Europe can sponsor an institutional regeneration of the global order, then there are great rewards to be reaped.

All modern war is hybrid: troops and disinformation, political interference, sabotage, financial and physical blockages. And it’s digital: drones, smart bombs, satellite guidance and follow-the-phone.

Putin’s use of disingenuous narratives in support of a candidate with Russian mafia ties over 40 years is all enabled by unregulated social media. Israel does little to staunch the flow of the images from Gaza that are destroying its reputation because it needs the phone traffic to feed its targeting machine and the AI that manufactures plausible ‘probable cause’ to disguise civilian slaughter as mere collateral damage. Every call in Palestine is captured, decrypted, transcribed and stored. And in this a private company, Starlink, turns military services off and on over Ukraine. This is not a situation that can last.

Despair and hopelessness stalk the land. It is heard said that technology is too complicated to understand and too powerful to tame, and that big companies have the common person by the heels and have slipped the bounds of the mere state.

This is a condition we have made for ourselves and it reaches its apogee in the hoopla about AI. If there were truly people making intelligence beyond living beings, then they themselves would be gods walking among us. We would be helpless and at their mercy. But there are not. On that point we must stand. From that point we must fight.

Trump is intelligent and cunning, but not sophisticated. Tech companies are just companies. The claim of tech billionaires to be the new intellectual class is laid bare by their prostration at his feet.

From an ability to critically read the narratives, the marketing and self-marketing, pumped out by powerful figures in tech on their own platforms, we can build the necessary scepticism and immunity to their charms. We can only address what they are doing by spending less time interrogating what they are saying. The internet has sped everything up, and Trump and his acolytes have mastered ‘flooding the zone’. Our job, this book’s job, is to drain it, provide analysis and proposals to help society step off the carousel, to let the whirling dervishes whirl as they will, while we institutionally pinch off their power.

I was baptised in the milk of the lamb, programming in the 1970s, internet in the 1980s. A true believer, Silicon Valley boy. I met Elon Musk once 25 years ago while stalking Paypal where was he in/out as CEO. I watched his career closely, was impressed by my first ride in a Tesla. He was the future.

For me, the bubble burst with the cybertruck. Early Tesla’s were car-cars, this was a child’s drawing from a fridge door. Musk had obviously forced his engineers to build this monstrosity. And the talk of Mars, the baby ranch, the rhythmic drug-induced chewing came into focus and could no longer be unseen.

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You may have your personal moment when you realised Zuckerberg, Bezos or Andreessen were not gods, but the 2nd Trump term will be seen as the defining moment. Those who have the most, have the most to lose by the abolition of the rule of law, yet these self-styled great men lined up to abase themselves before a thief and a kleptocrat and allowed themselves to be walked into bondage. The piteous presentation of a tariff bribe in the shape of a gold bar by Apple’s Tim Cook in the White House itself brought the age of technology to an almost biblical end.

Breaking things is easy, rebuilding them is hard. Digital technology is the universal solvent that melts things and makes them fuse and merge. It has made of these disparate problems, a problem, and a problem that must be addressed. And the questions of the day are “if not now, when?” and” if not us, who?”. Nobody is coming to save us.

The task ahead of us is to spit on our hands and get down to the serious business of building new governmental and intergovernmental organisations that can restore order and democracy. That is what this book is about.

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

Social media, the ability to broadcast status updates to interested parties in near real-time is a new and important utility for modern governments.

The way the UK government <leaves> Twitter is not by flouncing off but by having a strategic communication policy that treats social media not as a problem for the press office at Downing Street but as part of the critical national infrastructure.

And it starts by saying these are the criteria by which you qualify to be a channel by which we communicate with our citizens.

And the criteria are fairly simple:

• do you have reach? you need a minimum number of users in the UK and to be on platforms with an appropriate distribution among the public

• are you free to use? can the public receive our messages without paying?

• do you have moderation policies? do you document threat vectors for your platform? are you a safe information environment?

In regards of the latter it is not the government jobs to say publish this, don’t publish that - but it is the companies job to explain and outline to the government what processes it has in place to protect its users and what resources it is dedicating to that.

As it happens, Twitter will not meet those criteria - it used to, but under Musk no longer does. Threads does, Facebook might, BlueSky does, Mastadon probably does (using federation and blocking).

Silicon Valley discovered a political ‘philosophy’ called Radical Free Speech, which has the blessèd side effect of reducing the costs of running major platforms. Much of the recent problems of policing in the UK have come from the fact that we expect the police to deal with accusation of harassment and not platform owners.

But be under no illusion adopting a policy of utilitising social media comms has political consequences.

Twitter continues to dominate the political space because of the Co-ordinated Action problem. No matter how many people want to leave it, the presence of others who have not yet left keeps its grip. The wanna-be leavers have no mechanism to co-ordinate.

Active users of Social Media fall into 2 parts:

• broadcasters who have desirable information but not desire for back and forth chit-chat

• conversationalists

The government can use its bully pulpit to force a co-ordinated leave because it is one of the biggest broadcasters - a publisher of information that others need to subscribe to. And it should use its heft to write and maintain an open source cross-posting app (with scheduling) for all its approved distribution social media.

A 2 month timetable is quite achievable:

• an announcement of policy

• a deadline to apply

• a date to come into force

But it also shouldn’t be the UK government. Benedict Anderson famously described high 19th century nationalism as Imagined Communities. National education systems, national newspapers and later national radio created a national community inside a states borders. We live in the post-Anderson world now. In particular the English-speaking world lives in a hybrid USUKCanAusNZSARoI world threaded with English-as-a-second-language.

The UK government should reach out other other states also suffering from this problem and try and establish a common timetable.

The UK government should not leave Twitter - Twitter has long left it.

That the spirit of revolutionary change, which has long been disturbing the nations of the world, should have passed beyond the sphere of politics and made its influence felt in the cognate sphere of practical economics is not surprising. The elements of the conflict now raging are unmistakable, in the vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the marvellous discoveries of science; in the changed relations between masters and workmen; in the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses; the increased self reliance and closer mutual combination of the working classes; as also, finally, in the prevailing moral degeneracy. The momentous gravity of the state of things now obtaining fills every mind with painful apprehension; wise men are discussing it; practical men are proposing schemes; popular meetings, legislatures, and rulers of nations are all busied with it - actually there is no question which has taken deeper hold on the public mind.

The Encyclical Rerum Novarum. Given at St. Peter's in Rome, the fifteenth day of May, 1891, the fourteenth year of Our pontificate.

LEO XIII

In the beginning, so they will tell you, was the networked computer. And proceeding from that are all the wonders and ills of the present age.

The wonders, we wish to preserve. Information, communication and convenience are no small things. The ills we must address: frankly, deliberately and consciously, with purpose.

And let us start at the beginning, with people, for whom we wish the wonders, and whom we will fain fight against the ills for.

People are the master, and tools and technology are the servant. Technology should be our key and not our jailer. People as families, friends, lovers and as workers, citizens should be at the heart of our relationship with technology, in all spheres.

Digital is the great universal solvent that melts all things into each other - a phone become policeman and a television and office furniture, the way you kiss your children and cheat on your spouse. But the lessons of the current age are it must be tamed, and we, the people, must tame it.

Digital technology is roilling the world, changing commerce, war, politics, culture, society.

If there were truly people making intelligence beyond living beings, then they themselves would be gods walking among us. We would be helpless and at their mercy. But there are not. On that point we stand. And we will fight and we will win.

Four horsemen ride: ignorance, authoritarianism, xenophobia and cruelty. They preach against science with technology, they spy and oppress with technology, they apply the mark with technology, and of technology they make their Colosseum, their spectacle.

What can't continue must stop, what can't be borne must be stopped. And there is none but us to do it.

We poisoned ourselves with lead pipes. We no longer do, but the water still flows. We poisoned ourselves with town gas and carbon monoxide. We no longer do, but still our tea gets cooked. We poison our society with these technologies. We will no longer. We chose to change things before, and we will so choose again.

Our principles must be:

1. People First

2. Honesty First

3. Society First

4. Separation of powers

People matter more than technology, they are precious, it’s a tool.

Honesty matters more than sales and profitability. What we expect of people we expect of screens. Our devices shouldn't lie to us, and if they do their controllers should feel shame.

Society matters more than companies. No firm has a right to a business model.

People are good and people are bad. People make good decisions for bad reasons and terrible ones for good reasons. All society and institutions must be built to be stable in the presence of human fallibility and bad actors. Power will be abused, and power concentred will be abused with impunity.

Digital technology is a shape shifter. Its cheerleaders demand we respond to each adopted guise anew, that we master its deepest secrets before we dare address it. We should do no such thing. We, as people, have rights, and silicon does not. It behooves them to demonstrate to us that our rights are not infringed. We decide what privacy is, they comply. A genie that has escaped the bottle can be put back in.

One of the great and rotting conceits is that there is a cyberspace that transcends the physical world, that stands outside existing countries and from that, escapes the bounds of law. If current institutions cannot enforce the law, if scofflaws mock from foreign parts, or because they have accumulated private power, then new institutions, whether national or international must be built.

Networked computers are both a marvel and a banality, and their before times are unimaginable to the young. It may even turn out they are as socially transformative as the washing machine, the electric cooker, indoor plumbing, the telephone and the TV.

And this is the first of the ills. Politics, culture, experience and wisdom do not begin with what was written after the networked computer. That which has been indexed, ingested and made searchable is but the part of it and not the whole.

Lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride have long stalked the earth. They have merely been given their current form by the networked computer.

Let us begin with the first black vein, centralisation. When it surfaces uncontrolled, trouble ensues.

The protoplasm of the networked age were small clumps of engineers struggling with technical problems of computer interoperability. Through their work glimpses of a future world could be seen.

In that beginning the only central thing was the allocation of IP numbers without which networked computers are just computers. Then mechanisms to centrally allocate names for web sites and emails were introduced.

Money found that, and made the devil’s first bargain. Give us your email and we will create an identity for you on our service. And as always with the devil, it is a bargain indeed for the labourer is worthy of his hire. Paying a good price for a good service is a worthy thing.

But the 2nd unspoken price was that things that would have become engineering protocols became products and revenue streams.

Engineering protocols are centralised, they brook no deviation, there is no market in them. Money realised that products that can impose themselves as engineering protocols can be global, ubiquitous and irreplaceable.

These are again things we know, we have them. Electricity, roads, running water. We call them utilities and regulate them differently from other commercial products. Governments set their prices and practices because a ubiquitous, necessary and irreplaceable service with a revenue stream attached is a loaded gun in the hands of a private owner, the better to extract cash from the pockets of the populace.

We need institutions to fund and build protocols again, and legal mandates to use them.

And it is not just in utilities that we didn’t act. We allowed companies to create monopolies that weren’t regulated or broken up with all the predictable effects that followed.

If digital centralisation creates and concentrates power, then decentralisation is our lodestar. Would this company be better as these companies? Should this service migrate from the state to the city? Can this infrastructure be captured by a bad actor? Must it be remade robustly in a distributed fashion?

But not everything can be decentralised, there is a kernel of centralisation. When the state has reservoirs of raw power, of necessary force and compulsion, we treat it with the greatest circumspection, hedge it about with oversight and obligations.

So it must be with new institutions. If we need strong enforcing functions and we need them to be centralised, even internationalised, to be successful, then we will need new transparencies for them, new oversight, new circumspection. We must build the for good reasons but with suspicion and scepticism.

And amid the ruins of the old world order the European Union stands, however imperfectly, as the only rock and foundation of the new.

Citizens have explicit rights in the digital age:

• the right to privacy

• the right to control our data (and take it with us)

• the right to transparency, to know how decisions about us are made and on what grounds

• the right to challenge decisions when we disagree with them

• the right to expect that we are not being lied to by screens, that what is presented is as it seems or purports to seem

• the right to exercise these rights free of obfuscation, delay or discouragement

• the right to have the state (or states) to back us in the exercise of these rights with enforcement and punition if need be

and critically the right not to use digital technology if we so please.

And legislation embedded in digital systems needs to embody the rule of law as well.

The mediation of citizen-state via screens and automated decision making is a threat to justice. Computer systems are famously opaque, software is always buggy and the decisioning criteria are usually inaccessible.

If falls on the implementors of state systems to organise their factors of production, standards, process and development methodologies to make systems positively adhere to the rule of law.

Litigation should be a last resort in a quest for justice, not the first.

People are social creatures and there is a tension and a balance between individual and social rights. As the my right to swing my fist stops at your nose, my right to promulgate digital technology stops at the pollution of the social realm. Freedom of speech never stopped grifters, snake-oil salesmen and pattermongers from their blabber, but neither did it mandate laying on a venue for their medicine show.

To publish in a screen is to speak to the public realm and we can and should insist on standards of behaviour.

The very real challenge though is that in a centralised world the imposition of such standards can be indistinguishable from tyranny. The social realm must be policed and policeable, but by whom and how is a live question and a problem we have to learn to solve.

Self-policing is obviously best, but we should not be shy about forcing companies to be more transparent, making them publish their abuse and abuse mitigation modes, their moderation guidelines (and the resources allocated to their enforcement). Advertisers withdrawing was for many years a powerful normative tool after all.

Digital threatens the shared cultural patrimony of the world. Cultural works need to be preserved, curated and accessible. And they need to be created, and created in national and minority languages. Culture is the mirror we see ourselves in and we cannot let it be a monoglot screen.

But high culture isn't enough, low culture and the day to day commerce of live needs to be lived in national and minority languages, they are languages of shopping and Drs appointments as well as love and art.

People have to right to associate and the right to choose where to associate. And they own their conversations, chat history, photographs, contacts and all. The ability to leave one platform and take your discourse and associations to another one is a basic right. But that interoperability must be enforced.

Autonomy for individuals is a human right. But autonomy for different institutions of the state is a key mechanism of resilience, of providing a separation of powers in a world that tends unchecked to centralism. Software and systems should be shared between state organisation through openly available software and not via shared implementations. State bodies should co-ordinate via publicly shared and documented interfaces, not by deep cross-development.

A free market is not one free of government nor regulation. It is one free of information asymmetry, free of untrammelled market power, free of lies and deceit. Digital markets are not free and must be made so.

These unfree markets have channelled huge wealth into few hands, and that huge wealth has in turn made its recipients quite mad, as we can see.

People who ought to be merely well renumerated executives of successful, global businesses parade, pomp and rant as philosophers and astronomers, flesh-made-godhead and cultural icons. Sycophants hang on every word, hoping to take their touch, to get their path to riches funded.

We can offer these a road back to sanity, as we, the people, have done before. This is not the first gilded age, nor will it be the last.

There is a new world to be built, and we cannot at this stage know all the jots and commas of it.

But we can know what sort of world we want to live in, one with human values. Our demands are not new, but age old. It is our solutions and institutions that must be new because we live in the time of new things.

In building this new world technical skills will be needed, of course. Expertise will need to be drawn on, no doubt. But it is a political exercise, and will be conducted in parties and civil society, through elections and campaigns, in law and social norms. It behooves us all to be Narodniki, to return to the people, to integrate this politics into daily life.

The time of tweeting is over, the time of political work, of spitting on hands, is here.

Thriving and successful tech usage springs from an ecosystem spanning law and taxation, technical standards, education and training, finance as well as industry practices, networks of people built within and between other tech companies.

A lot of work has been done by a lot of people to build a great tech ecosystem in Scotland for commercial companies. It is integrated well with academic and research institutions. There is once again a nascent ecosystem for GovTech - and by GovTech I mean software systems designed, written, deployed and maintained by civil servants and other public servants who work for health boards, local authorities or agencies.

There are good reasons why GovTech stands apart from commercial tech. At one level there is a great deal in common, a data architect is a data architect, a server rack is a server rack. But there is a reason that Product Management in the private sector and Service Design in the public sector have different names - even though they are clearly related - cousins rather than siblings.

And the shared overlap means it’s time for GovTech to come in from the cold. The GovTech ecosystem needs to be more tightly connected to the others.

The map is not the territory, but it helps to have it

We can map them:

In Scotland the Economic Development ecosystem embraces organisations like:

• TechScalars

• CodeBase

• The Turing Festival

• Glasgow Innovation District

• EIE

• TechMeetup Glasgow/Edinburgh

• AdJam/Rookie Oven

• Code In The City

These support a myriad of companies large and small.

The research ecosystem involves a host of organisations, including:

• the universities

• Research Data Scotland

• The Bayes Institute (and its range of programmes)

• the Smart Data Foundry

• The National Robotarium

and in particular supports a range of accelerator and commercialisation programmes at Universities that aim to take research into new company formation and commercialisation.

The GovTech ecosystem is smaller, spanning:

• CivTech - the Scottish Government programme that brings the public, private and third sectors together to build things that make people’s lives better

• GovCamp Scotland

• OneTeamGov Scotland

• Internal government training events including things like Civil Service Live! and UK Cabinet Office training

• and Scotland-based activities of UK wide movements like Data Camp, Camp Digital, etc, etc

in addition to networks that never venture north of the border but which nonetheless Scots participate in.

Government is government, and civil servants have different needs, ethos, and internal culture to their private sector equivalents, but at the core there are shared elements across these ecosystems, in particular at the methods level: – iteration, testing, user research, product development/service design, organisational design, cloud infrastructure, security and so-on.

I spent 20 years in the EconDev ecosystem, speaking at tech meetup, founding the first iteration of Turing, working in CodeBase, organising events. I got my Research Fellowship at Scottish Government with help (in part) from folks from that world who can gone in to government. And during my time in VQ I met a lot of old faces - so the boundaries between public service and private enterprise are more porous than you might think.

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A small beginning

We took the first steps before the summer, gathering as much of the tech ecosystem as we could up the parliament:

Putting the case to Ministers:

But this has to be just the start. Digital technology as a sector needs to step up and we need to make our voice heard in the highest counsels of the land. This sort of thing is problematic for civil servants - being as they are creatures of the executive and not the parliament.

It is unambiguously the case that in matters of functional requirements (what state systems should do) the politicians are the masters and the civil servants are the, well servants, its says it right there.

But as to non-functional requirements (how the state systems do what they do) - in this aspect civil servants, as practitioners are peers of the politicians, in and out of government.

The political class cannot and will not develop a vision for APIs, meta data standards, service design protocols and so on. But the development and enforcement of things of this nature are essential for excellence in public service. And their implementation will have impact on the scale of a century and not a parliamentary term. They are too important to be left underground, undiscussed, in the realm of the techies. This work must be subject to public scrutiny by specialists and civic organisations. “But the ordinary citizen can’t understand this”, you cry. The ordinary citizen (and much of the political class) don’t understand the budget, but budgetary scrutiny, driven by experts, is key to our political life.

As we work across ecosystems we need to develop protocols and boundaries that allow civil servants to participate in debates where they are peers (non-functional matters) and step back into the shadows in debates where ministers should properly lead (functional matters).

A vision

One of the best sessions at the Turing Festival this year was Taavi Kotka - the first digital CIO of Estonia. He talked about how Estonia became the leading digital state and I sat there acutely conscious that lots of people I knew from the Economic Development ecosystem where there, and nobody from Gov Tech side of the house.

We need to take active steps to change that - and to recognise that ecosystems and technology don’t just support company foundation, but also state innovation. Moving to a world where there are more porous boundaries between government and the private sector will be awkward, if not painful.

Private sector people, used to asserting that they are the best, the most dynamic, will need to learn a bit of humility and recognise that they simply don’t understand government. The wrecking ball idiocy of DOGE in the US and its role in the coup and collapse of constitutional government should be a sobering moment for lots of people who drunk too much of the tech bro kool aid.

And the public sector will need to come out of their shell a bit, put their heads above the parapet and reach out.

When we launched the Turing Festival we did it in the Edinburgh Festival. Steve Wozniak came and spoke not because we had a 3rd rate tech festival but as an excuse to go the Edinburgh Festival.

Turing is now a major event in its own right and it makes sense to organise integrated ecosystem events in Turing week, so that speakers and attendees can bleed over between the different ecosystems. We can talk about what we have in common together, and what we have alone, apart.

An ecosystem of ecosystems

The EconDev, Research and GovTech ecosystems cannot, should not and will not ever merge. Government is government, it is not the commercial sector (and vice versa). Universities are places of learning not company formation, that is but a happy side-effect of their work. But there are places of overlap, and common interest, and it will be good for all of us to collaborate where it makes sense, and bleed our ecosystems, the one into the other.

Lets get to it!

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There is an argument that what we are seeing is capitalism unbounded and our response must be some other ideology - some mimsy form of socialism is the most popular option, presented half-heartedly.

The ideological core of socialism is the direct state control of the commanding heights of the economy, and the problem is that nobody believes in that any more. If you had asked a left-wing meeting in 1948 who in the audience was willing to step up and run a coal mine or a steel plant, a forest of hands would go up. Ask the same now about Britter, or a state-run online retail and video outfit called what, Thames I guess, given the UK’s chronic centralism, not so much.

Fundamentally, at the end of this crisis, the commanding heights of the economy will still remain wrapped in limited liability companies. It’s going to be capitalism all the way down.

What makes capitalism a more effective economic organisational form than state run industry is every ecosystem’s great gardener, death. And competition is what brings death. And competition runs on free markets.

There is a cottage misinformation industry dedicated to promoting the hokum that a free market is a market free of regulation. It is in fact free of information asymmetry, abuse of market power, lies and deceit. The free market does not exist outside of, or above the state. It doesn’t exist absent the state. One of life’s quiet pleasures this 30 years past has been asking Silicon Valley libertarians when they are relocating to Liberia (substitute your favourite poor country in civil war of choice here - Syria? DRC?).

The same misinformation gang spout conspiracy economics based around a sinister cult figure called the Rational Economic Man. In this voodoo economics profit margins tend to zero, supply chains spontaneously form, civil servants are stake- and crucifix-wielding golems conjured from garlic whose touch kills entrepreneurs (Peace Be Upon Them).

Well, them as actually run US companies are weeping, beating their breasts and rending their garments as the Trumpnado sweeps their supply chains away.

And profit margins ain’t tending to zero. Everything they learn ya at Silicon Valley Hoodlum High is about network effects, moats, market protection and margin increase. Increase, make ‘em go up. Apple takes 50% of money spent in apps on its phones.

Rational Economic Man is not a moral exemplar and people who run capitalist companies are strongly motivated to make money. Their job is to optimise the firm, and that’s ok. If they can offload costs to the state or someone else, they will always do that. The job of a liberal democratic government is to optimise the country, and the world.

I don’t want to disappoint long term readers who are expecting me to recommend Abby Innes’s Late Soviet Britain, Why Materialist Utopias Fail here, and there I have.

There is a direct clash between “optimise my firm by firing carbon up the lum for cheap energy” and “optimise the world by going to net-Zero”. That is not an ideological difference, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

The fantasy of cultists like Marc Andreeson, Peter Thiel and Balaij Srinivasan is that their big boy brains negate the power of the state. Well son, the state has clubs and bayonets, and if you don’t like the liberal democratic state with its checks and balances, rule of law and controlled monopoly of violence, let me introduce you to your new master, Johnny Warlord, he’s the one over in the next room raping your family while his pals beat you with hammers.

The US has upturned the global order and a new one must be built. Let us begin by dismantling American control of the internet and digital industries. And by us I mean the European Union which Scotland, and preferably the rUK also, should rejoin.

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Regulate play stores to cut Apple’s margins, stop Amazon being both a retailer and marketplace, split Android from Google, free AWS and break Google Ad Brokerage out from its search division. And more. Lets have some competition, Free Markets are back, baybeee.

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This blog will continue to drive discussion about the positive side of the digital state, how we do digital well and constitutionally and delivery for our citizens. But it must also start addressing some of these bigger questions.

I thought I would chuck down some of the things that I think we need to talk about, in no particular order:

• the disastrous impact of the Delaware Corporation and the cult of the founder that grants perpetual control of public companies to minority shareholders (looking at you Musk and Zuck)

• the need for new institutions to govern the internet, following the ongoing suicide of the <benign hegemon> - and yes these need to be based on the European Union - the last man standing in the free, democratic world (bye-bye Brexit, ya won’t be missed ya fannie)

• the need for a data bill of rights

• the long overdue cultural and political moment where we all agree that digital is just an industry, coders are not supermen or people endowed with magical skills, they work in just companies like other companies…

• the return of free markets, markets that are free of information asymmetries, abuse of market power, lies and deceit - yes Google Ads, and Amazon and Apple’s iPhone cut this means you

• coup-proofing - the concentration of power that digital technology enables puts us all at risk, lets fix it

• the return of the non-screen state, not everyone can use phones and computers you know. The state is on your screens because it has to go where the citizens go, but not everyone can go there…

• AI, yes its super useful, no its not a new life form, yes, it comes from the same hype stable as the metaverse and crypto, no, we shouldn’t bet the entire farm on it, yes I believe in technology, no, nobody is going to Mars anytime soon, yes it will be used in government, no its not going to fix broken Britain. Pill o’chill, Bill, FFS

• Killer robots are the dum-dum bullets and mustard gas of the modern age

Needless to say, and much, much more…

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Lets hear your thoughts, what’s on the table?

Lots of people fluttering about a UK DOGE - the Tories, Scottish Labour, Guido Fawkes, the BrewDog punk beer guy. It’s all a bit Taxpayers Alliance out there folks.

But the UK already has a DOGE. To understand what that means you first need to understand what Musk is doing.

What is Musk up to?

Musk has no lawful authority for much of what he’s doing - like closing USAID. Trump’s legal team have said so in legal pleadings.

His genius was to exploit new constitutional weaknesses in his coup.

In the Foundations of the Digital State I looked at the differences between functional and non-functional (or infrastructural) specification. The former is in law, and the latter in much more opaque and diffuse processes.

Digital infra is not under proper constitutional or organisational control

Musk’s innovation was to exploit that and get control of the money flow in government. With control of central government payment systems he had his hand on the jugular of government.

That’s how he fed USAID into the woodchipper.

The point of DOGE is to run around Congress - to trash the constitution, and to destroy the rule of law. Remember, the TikTok ban is still on the statute book. The law is what Trump says it is.

Musk first took over the US Digital Services - no Senate confirmation for its Director, unlike the Federal Reserve. His first target was the Treasury payment systems - unlike it, the Fed has its own police force.

The UK has the British Transport Police and the British Nuclear Policy but no British Digital Police. 6 coppers would have stopped the coup.

We have a UK DOGE, rly?

Pat McFadden runs digital and like Musk has no legal authority over the wider civil service. He’s the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster - a button man for the PM. Cross him and you sleep at the Min of Ag & Fish.

Whitehall civil servants get their lawful authority from their named Minister or collectively via Secretary of States. They do what McFadden wants if their Minister tells them to. The PM and Cabinet alike are conventional not statutory creatures.

(Different in Scotland, the FM and government are statutory and the Minsters get all powers collectively.)

And how does McFadden control the Minister? He works with the Treasury to turn the money pipes on or off - like Musk.

But Musk is a drug-fuelled putchist and McFadden is a democrat.

Note: one of my commentators points out that McFadden shares this stuff with Peter Kyle as DSIT who has formal responsibility.

Does the DOGE model work?

Up to a point. The GDS did great work showing us what can be done - under the duumvirate of Francis Maude and Danny Alexander.

It used standards for co-ordination without communication. Its word was law because Danny Alexander couldn’t be nobbled by Ministers for departmental interest - he was one of 2 LibDem Ministers.

The English ‘personal’ model needs to be institutionalised (read my damn report already).

The wrong road

The default mode of UK government is central-planning-by-the-Treasury. Autonomy for digital work, backed off with co-ordination without communication via standards, is just one of the many autonomies that English politics needs to get back - local government being another.

The UK government is a mish-mash of unsystematised powers granted in obscure and bizarre ways. There is a taboo on institutional and systems thinking.

Failure to institutionalise will mean a return to the norm. If the only two powers the PM has is sack the Minister and ask the Chancellor to turn the money off, you get central planning and a PM-Chancellor joint administration. Its not that they want to cosplay the Soviet Union.

The situation is very different in Scotland 25 years after institutional modernisation. Median wages here are higher than England now. Better government works.