Guys who get excited about this all share one characteristic: they see themselves as the high value ‘customers‘ cities should compete for, not the co-residents who need a functioning society.
I don’t know David, and I’m not saying he’s that guy —a prediction isn’t the same as an endorsement. But Snow Crash had this, too, and it wasn’t supposed to be the cool part.
The danger of spending all your time and energy in a Particular problem space is that everything starts To look like it — and without a lot of humility and care, the critical details of other domains become invisible to you. Your view of them becomes parody.
Working with the amazing digital services team at the state of Georgia was eye-opening in this regard. ”what do we call our users” is often a pointless exercise in semantics, but they explained very carefully that their job is to serve “residents.”
Not “citizens.” Not “taxpayers.” Not “workers.” Residents. If you live in Georgia, they said, helping you is our job and we have to build systems that see you, that serve you. Because that’s what a functioning society does.
So it’s particularly jarring to see the alternative spelled out as a “winning move” for states, cities, towns, municipalities. What’s being proposed isn’t “better service,” it’s the transformation of government to A Coworking Space That Can Arrest You.