SOS of the Luddites

I can see it now. The massing of the public service technophobes. They told us so, didn’t they? It took a cyberattack to remind us, hasn’t it?

Witness the Luddite recoil. The resort to the “good old days” when paper and files grew yellow in the cupboards. All it took were locks and keys and cautionary memos.

And by the way, colleagues, “ransomware” refers to a very specific category of cyberattack. I thought Mark Lyndersay and Celia Gibbings made some of these things clear, courtesy the TTPBA recently.

Anyway, stand by for the resurrection of systems that empowered and enriched some by slowing the march to modernity.

Even so, I am still not failing to remind people that at approximately 2.20 p.m. on Thursday September 23, 2021 – in his capacity as minister in the Office of the Prime Minister - Stuart Young announced the arrival of “digital vaccination cards” in “four to six weeks.”

This is not at all to knock Minister Young personally. I am pretty certain he understands the immense value of digital governance and is a private practitioner when it comes to those automated things in life that make things easier and more convenient.

In fact, he probably moans and groans each time some of us go back to those fateful days of pandemic misery and the false hope that, at last, politicians and bureaucrats had joined together to acknowledge new realities and were prepared to embrace a different set of solutions.

Of course, all of this goes way beyond digital vaccination cards and their inexcusable non-appearance. But it was a useful test case with strong relevance to the fact that both strenuously active and quiet, disruptive resistance to change are perpetual features of our exceedingly slow march to innovation.

As I have said before, this is not unique to the public service and state authorities. Shiny, new digital facades to conceal manual processes are evident throughout the private sector in key areas.

However, the resources of the state are, by definition, assets of the population intended to sustain human and social development and to ensure tolerable levels of existence in our spaces.

Yet, the official instinct to prohibit rather than to facilitate appears to dominate the drive to digitalise and to move forward. In some instances, the move has been backward rather than forward.

I noted, for instance, PM Roosevelt Skerritt’s lament regarding the continued use of paper ED (Embarkation and Disembarkation) Cards for intra-regional air and sea travel between Caricom states. This was during 50th anniversary celebrations. He quite diplomatically did not mention T&T, where he delivered his speech, and where the absolutely unnecessary practice of collecting and collating ED cards continues. The folks at CARICOM-IMPACS must be the most patient people on the planet.

But we don’t only insist on printing those silly pieces of paper that do not even have enough space to spell the name of our own country (I usually write “T&T”). That’s clearly not enough. Now, the airlines want you to write, at the back of the slips, the expiry date of your passport!

This adds insult to the emotional injury of passengers who know that for entering numerous countries of the world (including Dominica, Grenada, Barbados, Saint Lucia, St Kitts and Nevis, and Jamaica), the trees used to print those useless pieces of paper (in defiance of the benefits of the Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) and other technological platforms) are being saved.

Where are the airport kiosks on arrival in T&T, by the way? Could it be evidence of the agony occasioned by the relinquishing of authority and power? How come online payment for government services is being touted as some kind of modern, revolutionary marvel? Ditto downloadable PDF forms.

It cannot be that politicians and senior public servants do not know what is happening in so much of the rest of the world.

Now comes the cyber attack on the Attorney General’s office. I see several MPs (government and opposition) attended “a workshop” last week and some consequently claim to know all about the challenge being faced. Sigh.

Moving backward has a way of gaining momentum of its own. I see longer ED forms. Disappearing bar and QR codes. The return of the ledgers. Lines at the cashiers. Paper, paper everywhere.

Our souls would have been saved; I suppose. The Luddite SOS satisfied. The past embraced as a way of inching forward or, worse, standing still.