This is Tom's talk from the Code For America conference about 'Government As A Platform'. It's fantastic, you should watch it.
Tom is saying that it's no good trying to reform the old institutions of government, to make them digital. Instead, you need some new institutions, some natively digital ones, if you want to properly take advantage of the opportunities the internet presents us.
He's arguing for new institutions, new infrastructure.
Which makes this talk from James Fallows at the Long Now Foundation rather relevant and interesting. It's about 'Civilization's Infrastructure'.
Stewart Brand has summarised the talk rather well.
My summary of his summary is:
Societies tend to under-invest in their infrastructure because the benefits aren't clear, they take a long time to emerge and building infrastructure is often expensive, controversial and disruptive to the status quo.
And because it's easy to imagine the problems and hard to imagine the benefits.
Fallows suggests there are only three things that get infrastructure projects built:
Emergencies (ie Wars or Depressions)
Stealth (ie all the Cold War spending that led to the Internet or the Interstate Highway Network. Or right now, the military reaction to Climate Change which is making the US Navy a pioneer in energy conservation)
Story (he cites Manifest Destiny or the Space Race.)
Makes me wonder which we'd need to get Tom's vision built.
