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Earlier this week a gov tech colleague in Colorado shared a sharp provocation: “government is software"
That metaphor of government-as-software is certainly punchy. And it packs a kernel of truth. After all, the very word “computer” comes from banks of clerks doing calculations, and many of our bureaucracies are still evolutions of those clerical functions. Benefits programs today run on code, and in that sense the program is the software.
But the metaphor is also misleading. Government invests in infrastructure, holds monopolies on legitimate violence, and builds the civic commons. None of these are reducible to apps. Still, there’s something alive in the phrase. Years ago an advisor of ours at ARGO wrote The New City O/S, and lately through the Summer of Protocols I’ve been digging deeper into what that metaphor means.
At the large municipal utility where I manage the innovation program, we’ve been streamlining internal processes with a protocol-native approach, and I’ve been noodling on what protocols for adaptive, digitally native cities might look like. Our cities still are largely organized on an industrial logic in everything from how we budget to how organization charts to civil service are structured.
So what comes next?
Cities have long been living platforms for public services and each era upgraded its core protocols from colonial night watch patrols to the rise of professional police, from dirt roads to municipal waterworks. The table below sketches how those civic modules evolved, showing the shifting codebase of public life that any next generation city operating system will build upon.
Era | Public Safety & Health | Infrastructure & Utilities | Community & Education | Governance & Admin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1750 (Colonial America) | Night watch patrols; volunteer fire brigades; local militias; Almshouses for poor; no systematic sanitation | Public wells and cisterns; rudimentary dirt or cobblestone roads; a few oil lamps; no organized transit | Churches as primary centers for schooling and welfare; public markets | Town meetings or small councils; sheriffs and constables; basic local ordinances |
1850 (Industrializing City) | First professional police forces; volunteer or early professional fire departments; growing municipal courts; sanitation drives during cholera | Municipal waterworks and early sewers; cobblestone or plank roads; gas streetlights; horse-drawn streetcars and omnibuses | Common-school movement; first public libraries; early public parks and recreation grounds | Mayors and city councils with formal charters; property-tax systems; expanding administrative apparatus (see NY customs office) |
1950 (Postwar American City) | Full-time police, fire, and EMS services; traffic enforcement and civil defense offices; Public hospitals; vaccination campaigns; garbage collection | Widespread electricity and piped water; fully paved streets and traffic lights; robust bus and subway networks; suburban infrastructure build-out | Public school systems with high school graduation as norm; GI-Bill-driven universities; rapid suburban growth and recreation centers | Professional city managers and planning departments; modern budgeting and tax collection; formal zoning and land-use regulation |
Each period’s civic upgrades rested on its own information substrate, the implicit technology stack for storing, moving, and acting on knowledge. Here’s how information flows inside each era quietly set the limits and possibilities for the services above.
Era | Information-Technology Paradigm | How It Shaped City Services |
|---|---|---|
1750 – Colonial America | Manuscript & Oral Culture – handwritten records, church registers, town-meeting notes, word of mouth | Limited speed and reach of information; laws and ordinances enforced mainly through personal familiarity and local custom |
Notice Boards & Broadsides – single-sheet printed announcements | Enabled occasional citywide alerts (markets, ordinances) but still slow and uneven | |
Personal Networks as “Bandwidth” – kinship, guilds, congregations | Governance and service delivery depended on trust and informal coordination | |
1850 – Early Industrial City | Mass Print & Telegraph – newspapers, cheap pamphlets, telegraph lines | Allowed near-daily civic communication and the first near-instant urban news loops; sped up coordination of markets and emergencies |
Standardized Forms & Ledgers – carbon paper, printed permits, uniform record books | Enabled more complex taxation, policing, and transit operations | |
From the town-crier notices of 1750 to the telegraph clicks of 1850 and the radio dispatches of 1950, every leap in information technology has quietly rewritten the city’s operating code. Manuscript ledgers and church registers once set the rhythm of civic life; cheap print and the first instant messages of the telegraph widened the loop of markets and governance; broadcast networks and punched-card tabulators let postwar bureaucracies scale and standardize. Each era’s pipes for moving knowledge defined the city’s limits as surely as its roads or aqueducts.
Now look from the dirt up at today's obvious digital trends. Artificial intelligence shows up in everyday tools from translation to shopping recommendations and photo editing while cloud storage has replaced the old filing cabinet making files and photos available anywhere. Money itself is going digital as mobile payment apps and cryptocurrencies spread. Work and school blend boundaries through video calls and shared documents so people can collaborate or learn from almost anywhere. Below offers another GPT-ified table with four scenarios of future city services using the usual IFTF transformation / constraint / collapse / growth scenarios:
2050 Scenario | Public Safety + Health | Infrastructure & Utilities | Community & Education | Governance & Administration |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Transformed (deep shift) | Community-driven safety networks with AI mediators; climate-first disaster brigades; ubiquitous environmental health monitoring; bioengineered microbes cleaning air and water | Regenerative infrastructure—sponge cities, energy microgrids, fully circular waste systems | Learning webs that blur school–work–life; civic AI tutors fostering agency | Protocol-based governance; transparent ledgers of public trust; citizens co-write adaptive rules |
Constraint (austerity & limits) | Underfunded police/fire/EMS and public health; reliance on volunteer brigades and mutual aid; reactive disease control | Aging infrastructure patched together; rationed water and energy; car bans in dense cores | Schools overcrowded; libraries shuttered; widening digital divide | Shrinking municipal budgets; stripped-down bureaucracy; limited capacity to innovate |
Collapse (system breakdown) | Fragmented local militias and vigilante groups; privatized or absent emergency care; recurrent epidemics; unsafe water and waste | Blackouts and brownouts common; potable water scarce; transit unsafe; streets deteriorate |
Certain no regrets invariants include digitally native and adaptive approaches. What would it mean to develop protocols for the next city operating system? What are the new model city charters? What are the new template permitting mechanisms evolving from pdf-ed paper forms? What are the new machine legible standards for permitting fees? What are the paths for liquid data sharing so the public sector can operate efficiency, effectively and imaginatively?
Hit me up @patwater on the socials if you're interested exploring that frontier.
In the late 1960s Stewart Brand campaigned to have NASA release a photograph of the whole earth seen from space. He believed that a single image of the planet entire would shift human perspective. When the Apollo 17 crew finally captured the Blue Marble, that vision crystallized. It was not just a photograph.
The future of California housing planning and permitting The Problem in Brief "When developers can't even find an estimate of what their fees will be, what affordability requirements they must ...
Earlier this week a gov tech colleague in Colorado shared a sharp provocation: “government is software"
That metaphor of government-as-software is certainly punchy. And it packs a kernel of truth. After all, the very word “computer” comes from banks of clerks doing calculations, and many of our bureaucracies are still evolutions of those clerical functions. Benefits programs today run on code, and in that sense the program is the software.
But the metaphor is also misleading. Government invests in infrastructure, holds monopolies on legitimate violence, and builds the civic commons. None of these are reducible to apps. Still, there’s something alive in the phrase. Years ago an advisor of ours at ARGO wrote The New City O/S, and lately through the Summer of Protocols I’ve been digging deeper into what that metaphor means.
At the large municipal utility where I manage the innovation program, we’ve been streamlining internal processes with a protocol-native approach, and I’ve been noodling on what protocols for adaptive, digitally native cities might look like. Our cities still are largely organized on an industrial logic in everything from how we budget to how organization charts to civil service are structured.
So what comes next?
Cities have long been living platforms for public services and each era upgraded its core protocols from colonial night watch patrols to the rise of professional police, from dirt roads to municipal waterworks. The table below sketches how those civic modules evolved, showing the shifting codebase of public life that any next generation city operating system will build upon.
Era | Public Safety & Health | Infrastructure & Utilities | Community & Education | Governance & Admin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1750 (Colonial America) | Night watch patrols; volunteer fire brigades; local militias; Almshouses for poor; no systematic sanitation | Public wells and cisterns; rudimentary dirt or cobblestone roads; a few oil lamps; no organized transit | Churches as primary centers for schooling and welfare; public markets | Town meetings or small councils; sheriffs and constables; basic local ordinances |
1850 (Industrializing City) | First professional police forces; volunteer or early professional fire departments; growing municipal courts; sanitation drives during cholera | Municipal waterworks and early sewers; cobblestone or plank roads; gas streetlights; horse-drawn streetcars and omnibuses | Common-school movement; first public libraries; early public parks and recreation grounds | Mayors and city councils with formal charters; property-tax systems; expanding administrative apparatus (see NY customs office) |
1950 (Postwar American City) | Full-time police, fire, and EMS services; traffic enforcement and civil defense offices; Public hospitals; vaccination campaigns; garbage collection | Widespread electricity and piped water; fully paved streets and traffic lights; robust bus and subway networks; suburban infrastructure build-out | Public school systems with high school graduation as norm; GI-Bill-driven universities; rapid suburban growth and recreation centers | Professional city managers and planning departments; modern budgeting and tax collection; formal zoning and land-use regulation |
Each period’s civic upgrades rested on its own information substrate, the implicit technology stack for storing, moving, and acting on knowledge. Here’s how information flows inside each era quietly set the limits and possibilities for the services above.
Era | Information-Technology Paradigm | How It Shaped City Services |
|---|---|---|
1750 – Colonial America | Manuscript & Oral Culture – handwritten records, church registers, town-meeting notes, word of mouth | Limited speed and reach of information; laws and ordinances enforced mainly through personal familiarity and local custom |
Notice Boards & Broadsides – single-sheet printed announcements | Enabled occasional citywide alerts (markets, ordinances) but still slow and uneven | |
Personal Networks as “Bandwidth” – kinship, guilds, congregations | Governance and service delivery depended on trust and informal coordination | |
1850 – Early Industrial City | Mass Print & Telegraph – newspapers, cheap pamphlets, telegraph lines | Allowed near-daily civic communication and the first near-instant urban news loops; sped up coordination of markets and emergencies |
Standardized Forms & Ledgers – carbon paper, printed permits, uniform record books | Enabled more complex taxation, policing, and transit operations | |
From the town-crier notices of 1750 to the telegraph clicks of 1850 and the radio dispatches of 1950, every leap in information technology has quietly rewritten the city’s operating code. Manuscript ledgers and church registers once set the rhythm of civic life; cheap print and the first instant messages of the telegraph widened the loop of markets and governance; broadcast networks and punched-card tabulators let postwar bureaucracies scale and standardize. Each era’s pipes for moving knowledge defined the city’s limits as surely as its roads or aqueducts.
Now look from the dirt up at today's obvious digital trends. Artificial intelligence shows up in everyday tools from translation to shopping recommendations and photo editing while cloud storage has replaced the old filing cabinet making files and photos available anywhere. Money itself is going digital as mobile payment apps and cryptocurrencies spread. Work and school blend boundaries through video calls and shared documents so people can collaborate or learn from almost anywhere. Below offers another GPT-ified table with four scenarios of future city services using the usual IFTF transformation / constraint / collapse / growth scenarios:
2050 Scenario | Public Safety + Health | Infrastructure & Utilities | Community & Education | Governance & Administration |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Transformed (deep shift) | Community-driven safety networks with AI mediators; climate-first disaster brigades; ubiquitous environmental health monitoring; bioengineered microbes cleaning air and water | Regenerative infrastructure—sponge cities, energy microgrids, fully circular waste systems | Learning webs that blur school–work–life; civic AI tutors fostering agency | Protocol-based governance; transparent ledgers of public trust; citizens co-write adaptive rules |
Constraint (austerity & limits) | Underfunded police/fire/EMS and public health; reliance on volunteer brigades and mutual aid; reactive disease control | Aging infrastructure patched together; rationed water and energy; car bans in dense cores | Schools overcrowded; libraries shuttered; widening digital divide | Shrinking municipal budgets; stripped-down bureaucracy; limited capacity to innovate |
Collapse (system breakdown) | Fragmented local militias and vigilante groups; privatized or absent emergency care; recurrent epidemics; unsafe water and waste | Blackouts and brownouts common; potable water scarce; transit unsafe; streets deteriorate |
Certain no regrets invariants include digitally native and adaptive approaches. What would it mean to develop protocols for the next city operating system? What are the new model city charters? What are the new template permitting mechanisms evolving from pdf-ed paper forms? What are the new machine legible standards for permitting fees? What are the paths for liquid data sharing so the public sector can operate efficiency, effectively and imaginatively?
Hit me up @patwater on the socials if you're interested exploring that frontier.
In the late 1960s Stewart Brand campaigned to have NASA release a photograph of the whole earth seen from space. He believed that a single image of the planet entire would shift human perspective. When the Apollo 17 crew finally captured the Blue Marble, that vision crystallized. It was not just a photograph.
The future of California housing planning and permitting The Problem in Brief "When developers can't even find an estimate of what their fees will be, what affordability requirements they must ...
Postal System as Civic Backbone – reliable mail routes |
Carried contracts, ballots, and citywide notices with predictable speed and regularity |
1950 – Postwar American City | Electromechanical & Broadcast Networks – telephone switchboards, radio dispatch, early television | Allowed real-time emergency response, public announcements, and coordination of large civic events |
Mechanized Data Processing – tabulators and mainframes | Standardized property-tax rolls, utility billing, and demographic statistics, supporting larger bureaucracies |
Mass-media Public Sphere – newspapers, radio, television | Created a shared civic narrative and helped coordinate infrastructure and urban planning |
Education collapses to family or religious enclaves; community care ad hoc |
Power held by strongmen, gangs, or corporations; formal city government hollowed out |
Growth (expansion & prosperity) | Fully integrated AI–human emergency and health networks; predictive disaster prevention; universal preventive care and sanitation | Ultra-efficient clean grids; water desalination ubiquitous; self-repairing roads; autonomous transit | Abundant free lifelong learning; universal cultural access; thriving civic commons | Cities as innovation platforms; citizen assemblies with global linkages; fiscal surpluses reinvested |
Postal System as Civic Backbone – reliable mail routes |
Carried contracts, ballots, and citywide notices with predictable speed and regularity |
1950 – Postwar American City | Electromechanical & Broadcast Networks – telephone switchboards, radio dispatch, early television | Allowed real-time emergency response, public announcements, and coordination of large civic events |
Mechanized Data Processing – tabulators and mainframes | Standardized property-tax rolls, utility billing, and demographic statistics, supporting larger bureaucracies |
Mass-media Public Sphere – newspapers, radio, television | Created a shared civic narrative and helped coordinate infrastructure and urban planning |
Education collapses to family or religious enclaves; community care ad hoc |
Power held by strongmen, gangs, or corporations; formal city government hollowed out |
Growth (expansion & prosperity) | Fully integrated AI–human emergency and health networks; predictive disaster prevention; universal preventive care and sanitation | Ultra-efficient clean grids; water desalination ubiquitous; self-repairing roads; autonomous transit | Abundant free lifelong learning; universal cultural access; thriving civic commons | Cities as innovation platforms; citizen assemblies with global linkages; fiscal surpluses reinvested |
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@patwater
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Exploring the innovative metaphor of "government as software," @patwater explains both its kernel of truth and limits. From discussing historical civic infrastructure to considering future city service scenarios rounded by digital advances, the concept draws intriguing parallels between governance and technology. Already, multi-faceted transformations are possible, raising questions about the protocols and models required for our next-generation cities. Dive into these thought-provoking insights and ideas on reconstructing civic realities.