It is therefore likely that a passport will soon be considered less reliable than an identity certified by Apple. This example can easily be transposed to many other sectors, thus demonstrating the distinctive advantage of meta-platforms.
Health and education seem to be the latter’s next targets. The challenge here for meta-platforms is not to improve, but to rethink services from top to bottom. Indeed, it was partly because Estonia was almost destroyed under Soviet rule that it was able to rebuild a radically new type of administration after the fall of the Wall. In the health sector, regions of the world with recently deployed systems are generally ranked first: Israel, Singapore and Shanghai are regularly cited as examples for having built models where numerical data plays a key role in the management of care and in the epidemiological system. Estonia is also the leading European country in education in PISA. Is it sheer coincidence that digital technologies were used to rethink almost all of the country’s educational protocols?
Like the local lords at the end of the Renaissance, political actors and senior officials do not understand the upcoming paradigm
We are essentially discussing a fundamentally cultural issue: since senior officials and political actors do not understand that a new paradigm is underway, it is impossible for them to support a transformation of such magnitude. In the unlikely event that they do not oppose it to preserve their fields of expertise, their mere passivity could be enough to obstruct this transformation. Indeed, and it is important to emphasize this point, the digital revolution is not incremental in nature. It is a disruption, and the modalities of yesterday's world are often factors that play against the understanding and implementation of the new paradigm. Establishing a form of data governance that meets the challenges of a modern nation, creating an "antitrust doctrine", which, instead of being based on market shares, potentially focuses on data and touchpoint, or on the number of contact points, creating regulatory contexts conducive to innovation... These are some of the missions of the institutions of tomorrow.
States that do not understand this new context may well die, and their digital indigence does not help them to establish other alternatives. The inability of a large majority of nations, including France, to endorse the principle of a platform state, as Estonia is doing, is worrying. In such countries, the senior administration is often in charge of setting the pace for reforms. Naturally, the ones that directly target the administration are the least likely to be implemented.
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