Government is not an app. Government is not a website, or a chatbot. Why should government be anything like an app, or a website, or a chatbot? Government as an app, or as anything other than what it truly is, is too much of an imposition.
To stop paraphrasing Mark Weiser’s 1994 article The World Is Not A Desktop, and instead start quoting his phrases: ‘Are airplanes like birds, typewriters like pens, alphabets like mouths, cars like horses?’
Government as an app is, just as Weiser described a computer that users must have a relationship with, ‘too much the center of attention’. Or to paraphrase Sherry Turkle instead: given technology can block and filter our relationships, what might it do to people’s relationships with public institutions if we place an app in the middle of that relationship?
None of that is not to say public institutions should not have a presence on people’s phones, or publish information on the web, or accurately guess answers from a text-based question. Public institutions should, and anyone who knows 2024 me hopefully knows that I think they must.
But is digital healthcare really going to be like visiting a GP, only with a degraded version of the same experience, only with an app at the beginning? Or the welfare system a speeded up version of a jobcentre visit? Of course not. It will be different. Different and, hopefully, better.
We are approaching a post-app world, or a post-website world or a post-something world. We probably won’t know post-what until it’s gone, but it’s definitely in the post.
That world will bring choices. Among those choices are positioning, trust and quality of relationships. Where do we choose to situate technology and for what purpose? What of the relationship between the public and government and public services will we continue to value? What on earth do we really mean by ‘trust’? The ‘we’ in those sentences is society. Even in this fragmented digital world there is such a thing as society.
As a society, we can choose to place technology between the public and public services. Or we can place technology along side that relationship.
We can attempt to augment the relationship that people say they need from public services, or we can view it as a narrow financial cost.
We can choose the important, but narrow, connivance of defining trust in technical terms (do people trust this bit of technology) or we could expand it to include the trust in our public institutions to deliver the goods they are charged with.
Digital government and digital public services should never be about government as mediated by digital channels, it should be about a digital government on its own terms. Genuinely digital and genuinely public. Services that work harder for the public and public sector workers. That are more human, sitting alongside real human relationships, rather than getting in the way. That create public value and save money. That can scale connections between people on a way that only digital technology can, rather than assuming the individualism too often baked in to digital systems.
To circle back to Mark Weiser, above all, a digital government sector should aspire to a vision where it is always at hand, but never in the way. One that creates interactions that are calm, rather than adversarial or cluttered. Ready to explain itself, but never an imposition.
Surely that's worth aiming for?