The Silicon Leviathan: How Digital Natives Will Transform Governance

By Justin Potisit

What does the digital revolution mean for the US Federal Government? Who is best fit to lead this transition? In what way will federal agencies need to meet the challenges of a new interconnected world? 

The Silicon Leviathan: How Digital Natives Will Transform Governance puts a critical lens on the process o

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637300800

Book preview

THE SILICON LEVIATHAN

THE SILICON LEVIATHAN

HOW DIGITAL NATIVES WILL

TRANSFORM GOVERNANCE

JUSTIN POTISIT

NDP Logo

NEW DEGREE PRESS

COPYRIGHT © 2021 JUSTIN POTISIT

All rights reserved.

THE SILICON LEVIATHAN

HOW DIGITAL NATIVES WILL TRANSFORM GOVERNANCE

ISBN     978-1-63676-912-7     Paperback

              978-1-63676-976-9     Kindle Ebook

              978-1-63730-080-0     Ebook

CONTENTS

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INTRODUCTION

PART 1.           THE SEA OF SILICON

CHAPTER 1.   THE DIGITAL NATIVE: WHO WE ARE

CHAPTER 2.   WASHINGTON’S TECH PROBLEM

CHAPTER 3.   THE DIGITAL CORPS

PART 2.           THE DIGITAL LANDSCAPE

CHAPTER 4.   DIGITAL NARRATIVES, PERFORMATIVE ACTIVISM, AND THE IMPORTANCE OF THE STORY

CHAPTER 5.   SOCIALIZED TRAUMA, IMPOSTER’S SYNDROME, AND THE OPAQUE NATURE OF A TRANSPARENT WORLD

CHAPTER 6.   COMMUNITY, IMPERMANENCE, AND THE SHIFTING IDENTITIES OF DIGITAL NATIVES

PART 3.           THE RISE OF THE LEVIATHAN

CHAPTER 7.   5G, THE INTERNET OF EVERYTHING, AND THE POWER OF CONNECTIVITY

CHAPTER 8.   REUSABLE ROCKETS, INNOVATION, AND THE FINAL FRONTIER

CHAPTER 9.   DIGITAL REALITY, REAL-TIME OUTREACH, AND THE IMPORTANCE OF AN ETHICAL VISION

CHAPTER 10. QUANTUM COMPUTING, CYBERSECURITY, AND THE LIMITS OF DIGITAL NATIVISM

CONCLUSION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

APPENDIX

NOTES

There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind… because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

For all young people who are working to improve the function of the federal government.

For my mother, who let me dress up as Jupiter’s moon Ganymede for Halloween.

For Sergey, my old friend, who left us too soon. For Mark, and the many others who we have lost during the pandemic.

INTRODUCTION

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The Internet is totally KEWL…

[1]

A colorful graphic of a turtle sitting back on a rolling chair, wearing a backward baseball cap, baggy jeans, and purple sunglasses. He has his head back and stares through the screen at me, like he’s judging me for chuckling at him.[2] I couldn’t help myself—how could NSA technology look so outdated and goofy?

Early in the process of writing this book during the summer of 2020, I invited Clara Ma, a friend whom I had met on the first day of classes at Georgetown and who, at the time, was working for the Federal Aviation Administration, to help me with a fun little website modernization idea I had been thinking about.

I jumped on a Zoom meeting—a teleconferencing app—with her, never predicting how much of a ball it would be.

Although I had heard some stories about how difficult it was to navigate some government websites, I had never really explored any of these sites before. Equipped with a moderate level of familiarity with JavaScript and HTML from time spent taking an online website design course together, we were both taken aback (and entertained) by what we found.

This one looks like the constitution in digital form, and not in a good way.[3]

We roared with laughter, our chortles ringing and annoying our families, all quarantined together with us.

After a while, we decided to take some notes on what we were seeing. There were some that looked a little dated and could use some love; there were others that our modern web browsers would not even let us view due to outdated security; still there were others that made us, as individuals from a generation well-equipped in using the Internet, have to work hard to suppress our cringe.

We found one website, restorethegulf.gov, a site designed for coordination efforts to clean up the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon Spill, especially egregious. Although mostly coded in dated HTML, the designers of the website had decided to throw in a little JavaScript to spice things up—but for some reason, if you go to the mobile version of the site, they placed a banner menu in the middle of the website’s header which opened upward. As a result, when accessing the site on mobile devices, users have to repeatedly scroll back up to navigate around the website, making the browsing experience very inconvenient.

However, the most shocking website we found was the National Security Agency’s (NSA) CryptoKids site. When we entered the site, it seemed as if we were entering a time capsule that transported us back to our earliest experiences on the Internet.

How Can I Work For NSA?[4]

It’s never too early to start thinking about what you want to be when you grow up![5]

I rolled my eyes and clicked on the cartoon characters. There was CryptoCat, the leading character, who grew up on a Navajo reservation; DecipherDog (or D-Dog for short), a cryptanalyst who played JV football; and Rosetta Stone, a foxy linguist. There was also T. Tops, the intelligence analyst turtle in hip jeans. However, the 1970s cereal box-like character that Clara and I settled on as our favorite was Cy, one of two CyberTwin snow leopards who were the first characters we saw on the website.[6]

Cy warns children who stumble onto the site that while the Internet is great, they should be careful about people out there who don’t have your best interests in mind. She advises kids to stop and think before sharing private information, especially on social networking websites.[7]

The Internet is totally KEWL…

It’s so ironic that it’s almost not funny, Clara remarked. We wondered who thought putting cringeworthy Brady Bunch-era cartoons on a clunky website might convince children to pursue a career in spying on their fellow citizens.

The NSA is not the only place where we see this concerning disconnect between higher-level technology policy and the new reality of the world.

Some of this can certainly be chalked up to technical capability.

The average IT system (websites, software, etc.) in the US Federal government is over twenty years old. That means even the youngest systems have been around as long as I have, and that doesn’t even include the most commonly used systems in the government.[8]

The systems that power Medicare and are in charge of processing over five hundred billion dollars in claims, almost 4 percent of the US GDP each year, are forty years old, run on sixteen million lines of a Sputnik-era computer language program called COBOL, and are shackled to fifteen different computers that take up entire rooms, looking more like an experimental concept computer from the 1940s rather than infrastructure that is critical to the function of a twenty-first century government.[9]

If these systems worked, it would be one thing. However, these kinds of systems, which the government has many of and rely heavily on, are not working.

In 2015, a system crash at the US Department of State prevented officials from issuing any new visas for two weeks, causing disruption for an estimated seven hundred thousand people. If a similar outage happened to the fragile Medicare system, over fifty-three million elderly Americans, 15 percent of the nation’s population, could lose their ability to access health care.[10]

What makes this issue even more concerning is it does not seem like it will get better any time soon. Eighty percent of the eighty-billion-dollar US government technology budget goes into funding legacy systems, when they really should be spending more money on the newest technology, processes, and methods.[11]

At this point, it may seem this is a purely political problem. Conventional wisdom would seem to say that all the government needs to do is replace the technology systems and, poof, problem solved. But I don’t think it’s that simple.

As a federal analyst for Ictect, a firm that works to develop AI for federal agencies, I became experienced with how the private sector addresses this specific issue of modernizing government websites. In the late summer of 2020, I was on a conference call with our CEO.

I asked him what I thought was a seemingly innocuous question at the time: Who decides what innovation these agencies want?

He told me, Their program managers.

I looked into the identities of program managers and found they were mostly mid-career public servants. Many of them looked like they could have kids my age. I switched tabs, curious how old they likely were, and pulled up the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. What I found shocked me.

It turns out, behind funeral home workers, federal public servants were, on average, the professionals with the oldest average age—45.6 years, with those in leadership positions likely older than the median.[12] The cutting-edge technology of the time for these professionals was Pong and Walkman.

The world they know and understand is different from mine—and the workforce of the future.

More than just adopting the newest technologies, it is even more important to do this in a way that considers the needs, wants, and experiences of digital natives. It is important that federal technology modernization functions in a way that takes into account the next generation of humans rather than just looking modern.

In 2020, in the US alone, there were about seventy million digital native Gen Zers, about as many people as the Baby Boomer generation. This group, born after 1997, makes up a quarter of the US population, and in 2020, accounted for 40 percent of all consumers.[13] Growing up immersed in the Internet, virtual reality, cloud computing, and 3D printing, Generation Z is considered the first truly digital generation, yet they are still underrepresented in modernization efforts.[14] Even in the broader category of young people, those under thirty-five account for less than 18 percent of the federal workforce.[15]

What may modernization miss if it had little or no input from those who will, presumably, inherit it?

I believe there must be a concerted effort to account for the needs, wants, and expectations of these digital natives in current technology modernization efforts—and I have confidence many would believe the same if they were given some ideas on how to operationalize this concept.

With this sociological lens in hand, I will take you through some of the ways digital natives are unique—and what this may mean for the future of the US federal government.

This future should not look like the disastrous healthcare.gov rollout that shook the Obama Administration to the core. You will get a look into Henry Chao, the program manager for the technology around Obamacare, and how the failure contributed to a rethinking of the future of digital governance.

This future may look like Patrick Choquette, former Head of Innovation at the Peace Corps, and the success he found in his partnership with Duolingo. With the 2015 civil war preventing their operation in Ukraine, Patrick and his team of young digital natives cleverly turned their Ukraine office into ground zero for creating a lasting partnership between the language learning app and his agency. He turned the accessible, hip, and effective app used by millions of people into a primary instrument for language learning for his agency.

Regardless, this future will have to serve people like LeiLei Secor, founder of Designed By Lei, and how she, in just three years, turned a hobby of making jewelry into a six-figure e-commerce business on etsy.com. We will look at how digital natives like LeiLei will transform what future citizens expect from their government, and how current efforts to transform government websites might learn from early successes in order to better serve the digital natives of the future.

* * *

If you try to visit the NSA for Kids today, you won’t be able to. The NSA has realized how embarrassing that initiative was, and the site has long since been taken down. But I do think the reasoning behind why the NSA created a site to recruit children is worth exploring. Although it may be laughable, there were probably individuals who genuinely thought putting cereal box characters on the Web was the best way to reach out to children.

This book will lay out four core areas I see the federal government needing to transform over the next twenty years to serve a digital native citizenry. I hope it will answer the question of how we may liberate governance from its past—to slay the Leviathan, the creature of the old ways—and raise a new creature that is better capable of serving the new multitudes of future digital natives and the society they will function in.

PART 1

THE SEA OF SILICON

CHAPTER 1

THE DIGITAL NATIVE: WHO WE ARE

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Children born after 1997 are digital natives—they have only ever known a world inundated by the digital revolution’s innovations. Smartphones, computer microprocessors, the Internet, and the media and programs that populate them are fundamentally transforming the way digital natives process thoughts and information. While digital natives are not a monolithic group, they can be characterized by a set of shared experiences that differentiate them from generations born before the advent of the digital age.

Fish don’t realize they live in water.[16]

We are cursed to live in interesting times. Rarely in our history has humanity faced the shift as large as the one we encounter with technology today. Technological change, and the corresponding social adjustment brought on by the innovations of the digital revolution, draws a great, big, red line in the sand, separating us not only from ancestors almost forgotten, but even family still alive.

I remember very clearly the first time I came to understand the extraordinary nature of the world I was living in. On January 14, 2016, my high school English teacher asked me to stay after class. As the other kids filtered out of the room, she pulled out a flyer for a writing competition and asked me if I would be interested in entering a writing contest put on by the Irish Embassy.

Sure. I shrugged and glanced at the prompt printed in glossy letters across the top—A World Without Borders.

Two days later, twenty minutes before the deadline, I submitted my essay by e-mail. My piece, Ennui in Contemporary Society, followed my experience as someone growing up in an increasingly interconnected world. Comparing my generation to the lost generation of World War I, I imagined the youth today as self-obsessed koi fish alienated from the peace and solitude I saw, at the time, as the true state of humankind.

To my surprise, my essay took the national prize of fifteen hundred dollars, and my writing career took off. I got my short stories published and my piece featured beyond my native Thailand in magazines across the Asia-Pacific region.

The Irish Embassy flew me to Dublin to spend the summer of 2016 getting to know the Irish people, culture, and history, as well as have a little bit of a speaking tour.

At an event hosted at the Mansion House, the Lord Mayor of Dublin’s official residence, I had the opportunity to meet the American Ambassador to Ireland, Ambassador Kevin O’Malley. During our conversation, he asked me what my piece was about and how I had come up with the idea. I mentioned I had been thinking for a couple of years about the control technology had over people—how the digital world may be controlling us just as much as we control it, a concept popularized by political theorist Langdon Winner.

He chuckled a little bit and told me, That’s a good point, son. Us old people often don’t get the world the same way that the youth do. I gleamed.

Another dignitary quipped, I’ll make sure to put that on my Twitter.

Nervous, I absentmindedly took a glass off a nearby server and downed it in one go, thinking I could refresh myself with a glass of water.

I made a face. It was certainly not water. I looked at the Ambassador.

His face was a mixture of shock and humor. He remarked, Not what you think, huh? I shook my head, realizing I, an underaged teen, had downed a whole flute of champagne in front of all of these dignitaries.