The Beginning of Governance
Technology drives capability. Technical changes over the millenia have shaped governments capabilities, from agricultural revolutions allowing us to step out of the wilderness to automotive innovations revolutionizing supply chains to modern standards. Today, the largest technical change in our ever-growing mastery of the Bit has foisted modern society into a new epoch. Like many new innovations that rapidly impose themselves on society, early improvements in our use of technology to connect us more readily and easily gave way to the co opting forces of more powerful actors. Whether it’s the slew of recent electoral dramas, new social movements around the globe, the ability to peer into billionaires' addled brains, or simply the rising cataclysm of voices without direction, we have lost our understanding and belief in the positive transformational force of technology as a society. Technical innovators have not been helpful in this either, with web3.0 assets of Crypto and NFTs seemingly more inclined to build parlor trick wealth rather than to improve or even interact with ‘normal’ society at all.
But these developments do not change the underlying truth – technology & connectivity, recently largely through mobile devices, have expanded to every corner of America and revolutionized our collective capability. ‘The vast majority of Americans – 97% – now own a cellphone of some kind. The share of Americans that own a smartphone is now 85%, up from just 35% in 2011.’ This explosion has created a connective force of extreme power, seemingly dropped onto America all at once as mobile devices crossed the rubicon in the mid 2010s into the hands of every American.
In connecting us, one of the first large industries to get a makeover was Communications & Marketing. Mad Men style creative campaigns gave way to reams of data & analytics-driven efforts. The transition was extremely lucrative for those who understood the power of personalization through this new means. That ability to go from billboards-for-all to offers-just-for-you leading to drastically increased effectiveness of marketing. High impact creative campaigns (I’m on a Horse! Buy Old Spice!) still drive the most effective ROI, but as most organizations cannot rely on regularly producing zeitgeist-altering creative concepts, it’s personalization that acts as the workhorse of the modern media industry.
The backbone of personalized marketing starts with the excruciating work of mapping user journeys across disparate systems. Many major automakers today have worked tirelessly to join the often 900+ touchpoints users have with them before considering a purchase. Different systems track the same data differently, there's loss of data between systems, and attribution is the 900 pound gorilla behind each of those touchpoints. These few thorny technical issues drive the data behind most media conversations behind the scenes of a $330B+ industry in the US alone.
I draw this out to show you the underlying power of our newfound ecosystem and the extreme investment companies have put into these systems, all with a critical eye towards performance, and they saw the returns. Some academics have pushed back on this development, raising concerns of privacy while trying to show a questionable rate of return for most marketers leaning into digital media and/or personalization. This is an equivalent critique to one showing that training for running a 5K doesnt work, because the average American cant run under 30min. Personalization works wonders with commitment to tackle hairy technical issues, in the same way running training helps you only as much as you commit to it.
But this is a a series about Government, and with this backdrop these are seven precepts for our new era that will define the rest of my writing:
The new digital connection creates persistent, granular feedback from the impacted public to government policies, comms, or other actions.
The second accompanying rise in data – through connected sensors – also helps provide large scale & real timed data, which is transitioning policy making power away from economist-trained general consultants in favor of data scientists who can functionally use that data ‘in-production’ rather than in models alone.
Public sector services that have been traditionally defined by demographic and geographic breakdowns will reorient towards a more general approach to personalize interactions. This will happen slowly with top down structural change such as the White House Customer Experience Executive Order requiring agencies to map the foregoing user journeys, often across agencies.
Public sector services will then go from siloes of individual control to coalitions surrounding citizen needs, like Utah is doing to reform social services distribution
Over time, this new clustering will show deeper, persistent trends in human behavior. Trends across geographies, time, and space will emerge, showing patterns of human behavior that cross cultural lines and appear more basic tenets of humanity.
These trends will create the foundational layer for government programs and policy review, providing a critical & immediate check on the efficacy of program design in ways impossible even a few years ago.
This change represents a functional change in Governing systems unseen & functionally impossible until today, following a new political philosophy borne from experience rather than armchairs.
Whether or not we decide to change a single policy, this change will still occur. The economist and lawyer-driven policy era of the past created the foundation for evidence-based approaches across the US bureaucratic machine, who are all facing exploding data and systems that they are slowly organizing.
Marquee political issues barely touch the behemoth motions of the underlying bureaucracy, and in the triangle of balanced American powers it is time for our bureaucracy to emerge as powerful advocates of Truth, balancing the disinformation that is rampant across the political spectrum with their own revelatory use of these technical systems.
These changes transform the act of governance away from a primarily interest-group fighting for resources to primarily a data-first approach that will formalize the art & science of government going forward. In short, this era will forever be seen as the beginning of a system of government that intertwines the power of the Atom with the newfound power of the Bit.
In that dynamic, the race to Fukuyama’s End of History is misunderstood. Rather than Democracy emerging the victor in the bloody history of governance at its climax, it has simply helped us arrive at the starting line. What we do with this newfangled power is up to us.