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India is the same way. The oldest and largest democracies take gold and silver in the Covid-case-count Olympics. Not an accident. I’m currently struggling to not be in violation of some dumb-ass need-a-number regulations in both countries that are under Covid-distress.
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Everybody talks about how Covid has broken the economy. It hasn’t really. What it has broken is government. The economic stuff is symptoms. I think we’re only just beginning to realize his badly Covid has broken government. We still gave a functional economy. But not governance.
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Covid exposed the fragility of government by open-loop unaccountable processes and disempowered bureaucrats that is in the process of being half-ass eaten by software without adequate attention to its exception-handling nature. Under a stressor like Covid the scheme has blown up.
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Congrats Steve Bannon, Covid has done what you tried and failed to do. Dismantle the administrative state. The thing *looks* like it’s holding together but has actually fallen apart more than anyone has admitted.
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Continuing this train of thought, I'm beginning to suspect a software-eaten world is ungovernable. There may be no such thing as government 2.0, which means politics 2.0 will rest directly on community rather than institutions. ie pure gemeinschaft, little to no gesellschaft.
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The thing is, the private sector has a *natural* meritocratic mode. The talented people go build stuff designed for the mediocre people, there is potential for genuine opt-in and exit/voice choices in consumption, everybody wins so long as there's no must-have monopoly.
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It would be hard, but you *could* in principle live without dealing with Google, Amazon, Facebook etc. without breaking any laws. Life would just suck by my standards, and you might have to forgo many things, but maybe you'd enjoy it.
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Weirdly enough, despite all the talk of monopolies, the phone companies are still a sort of oligopoly that's a defacto monopoly because you do need a phone number for too many practical things. It would actually be hard to live a legal life without a phone number.
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It is no surprise that countries (often leapfrogging developing countries) build their e-governance on phones, not email addresses or web access. It is now increasingly unbelievably hard to conduct life in India without an aadhar number and phone number.
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