Government’s use of technology is abysmal. I wrote about this more than a year ago. I felt compelled to write about it again when a friend of mine who works on Capitol Hill sent me this article in which, among other things, he is quoted as saying that Evernote is blocked on House computers "because it holds data in the cloud."
Let me get this straight: in 2015, any software used by our nation’s lawmaking institution must store its data locally? No private institution operating under such rules could remain competitive for long.
That is one example; here’s another, and another, and another. Technology can help government institutions do their jobs better and faster. But a combination of restrictive purchasing rules and arcane cultural attitudes have made government like a stubborn sexagenarian who refuses to use an ATM and insists that she has no use for a smartphone.
I live in San Francisco and work at a tech company, so you can accuse me of lacking perspective. But I think I can safely assert that many people in my age group share the frustration I feel when older family members are so technologically inept that they must be refusing to learn for refusal’s sake.
This brings me to the fact that fewer Americans than ever trust government with their money and aspirations. It’s probably too late for anyone over the age of 50 to re-discover a Kennedy-esque belief in our collective possibility. But if government continues to be as unable to use technology as my dead grandmother, it will be too late for digital natives, too. Government needs to clear some bare-minimums to have any hope of a trust rating above 30% this century.
Optimist that I am, please indulge my fantasy: what if through some miracle, government could actually be ahead of the curve? If a government agency got written up on The Verge because they solved a problem with technology in a way nobody had thought of before, your Facebook friends would fawn about it all over your newsfeed.
Then, perhaps millennials and those that come after will not only overcome the distrust of government they inherited from their parents, but start to imagine the possibilities of what a well-equipped and responsive government can do.