| James N. Markels | ||||
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Personal
Information Constitutionalist
Party Political/Policy
Writing Creative
Writing Resume |
by
James N. Markels Two
weeks ago, Jeff Taylor over at Reason had a
piece bemoaning how our government was still stuck in the “Paper
Age” instead of getting itself into the digital world. Why couldn’t we be more like Estonia, he wondered, where
“cabinet meetings are plug-and-play,” and “[a]s policy is made it
is posted the government’s Web site so the public knows what is going
on”? Why endure the
“leisurely pace” of paper-pushing when the world moves at the speed
of text-messaging? At
first I wondered the same thing. Email
and Word documents are today’s paper, right?
No point living in the past.
But then I spied something on my bookshelf that made me realize
that paper is essential to good governance, if not the lifeblood itself.
That something is my copy of The Washington Post
from January 1, 2000. Above
the fold you have a color photo of the fireworks display over Sydney’s
Harbor Bridge, complete with the headline: “World Celebrates
Peacefully As Y2K Worries Dissipate.”
To the right is “Yeltsin Resigns, Admits Failures.”
Below the fold, a story titled: “Afghan Hijack Drama Ends
Peacefully.” Not even
five years old and these things already seem quaint.
But in a Google-ready digital world where even the
cell phones can tap into the Internet, what am I doing with a hard copy
of an old newspaper? Why
not just download what I’m interested in and save the space on my
bookshelf? The
main reason is authenticity. When
I show my future children this paper they will be able to see the
precise edition that came out when one millennium ended and another
began. They will ask me why
we were so nervous about “Y2K,” snicker at the obsolete product ads,
and stare blankly at the long-gone pop culture icons listed in the
“What’s In” and “Out” in the Style section.
The paper itself is a snapshot of history that couldn’t be
replicated by merely searching for clippings from January 1, 2000.
This isn’t some sterile rendering of the original information;
it is the original. The
authenticity that makes my copy of the Post special is something
that only paper can provide. And
this authenticity is something that government depends on to do its job.
As Taylor acknowledges, digital documents are far easier to
manipulate and forge than paper documents.
It’s no surprise that identity theft and plagiarism have
exploded with the advent of the Internet, after all.
That a particular document is “official” is all-important to
authority-based governance. The
ability of paper to convey a stamp or mark of authority that is
difficult to duplicate makes paper essential to figuring out whether
authority has been given to do a particular thing.
A digital-based government would be far more vulnerable to
falsified documents and orders, inevitably resulting in abuses of power. This
is precisely why there is a “best evidence” rule in our courts.
A court will not accept a Xeroxed copy or faxed version of a
document if the original document can be procured, the reason being that
only the original, the best evidence, is trusted to be accurate in its
contents. And if the
document was originally digital, you want it rendered to paper so that
you have a concrete version immune to future editing.
Paper
also comes with the built-in safety feature of leaving a “paper
trail” for future investigators to use to hold government officials
accountable for their actions. It’s
all too easy to simply delete digital files, while paper files are
easier to protect. Further,
creating a digital-age bureaucracy would not only mean a huge cost today
in order to upgrade everything and transfer paper-based files to
computer hard drives, but it would require a continuing cost to keep the
technology relatively up-to-date. As Taylor notes, Estonia is able to start off as a
“plug-and-play” government because it doesn’t have a history of
paper behind it. But even
Estonia will start to feel the bite in a few years as new technology
renders “plug-and-play” obsolete.
In an earlier
Reason piece, Taylor cited to a General Accounting Office
report in 2000 that found that “the FBI had over 13,000 desktop
computers that were four to eight years old and could not run basic
software packages.” A
digital-based government would need to stay fairly close to the
technological edge to maintain itself, and that would mean huge costs in
new computers, software, and training on a regular basis.
Just think of the computers that were top-of-the-line a mere
decade ago: 100 MHz Pentiums running Windows 3.1.
They’re little more than glorified paperweights today.
Imagine the cost of the entire government having to buy new
computers every ten years or less. And let’s not forget that digital networks are
vulnerable to viruses, electrical disruptions, and unauthorized access
in ways that paper files are not. The
only advantage that a digital government would have is speed, but
let’s not be so hasty in thinking that this is an advantage.
“The Paper Age assumes and requires a sort of leisurely
approach to governance perhaps reflecting a time when jousting with
government with still a relatively rare occurrence,” wrote Taylor, but
he seems to think this is a bad thing.
Personally, as someone who likes a government that does less and
at a slow pace, I’m not so sure that speeding up our bureaucrats would
improve governance. Estonia
can have its speedy digital meetings and updates; I’ll take slow,
secure paper accountability every time. |
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