Picture this: you walk into city hall and it feels like stepping back into the age of typewriters. The same rituals, the same paper piles, the same council meetings where “public comment” means showing up on a Tuesday night to speak into a microphone for three minutes before anyone actually makes a decision. Even with Zoom layered on top, it’s still the same old play. The camera just lets you beam in to watch the theater from your couch instead of a plastic chair.

You see it everywhere. Permitting in Los Angeles still runs on a labyrinth of paper forms and siloed offices — you apply to Public Works for one thing, the Fire Department for another, and Building & Safety for a third, all while juggling contradictory timelines. Water boards publish critical reports as scanned PDFs, locked away from the very engineers and citizens who could make good use of the data. Public comment means showing up at 2 p.m. on a weekday to a fluorescent hearing room, or now, if you are lucky, logging into Zoom to watch the same ritual play out.

That’s what I mean when I say our institutions were built for an analogue age. It’s the water we swim in. And the folks who have run these systems for decades don’t see it as outdated. To them, the report that no one reads and the talkerfest that goes on for hours are the work. To younger generations raised in a world of shared docs, APIs, and live dashboards, it looks like absurd theater.

And here’s where the generational tsunami comes in. The Boomers have held on to the reins of public institutions longer than any generation before them. They have kept the manure wagons running. But as they retire, millennials and Gen Z will inherit the keys to city hall, to agencies, to the boards that govern everything from housing to water. And when that transition finally hits, it will not be slow. It will be sudden. Think tsunami, not tide.

Mark Zuckerberg saw this coming in an internal memo a few years ago. He predicted that by the early 2030s, younger generations would run most of America’s institutions — and that the shift would feel abrupt because it has been delayed so long. His point was simple: institutions built for and by Boomers will not survive unchanged once millennials are in charge.

The real risk is that governments, in their rush to modernize, will just digitize dung management. In the 19th century, one of the greatest municipal challenges facing American cities was horse manure. In New York alone, more than 100,000 horses produced an estimated 2.5 million pounds of manure every single day. Cities deployed vast public resources to shovel, cart, and store that avalanche of waste. It was the defining crisis of the age — until the automobile arrived.

The lesson of the horse manure crisis is clear: you don’t solve tomorrow’s challenges by building dashboards for yesterday’s mess. You need courage to reimagine, not just to digitize. The water we swim in today is analogue. But the wave on the horizon is digital. The question before us is whether we will cling to the past, or whether we will build roads to the future.

Here's a post providing context on what I mean by "Written by the Patchwork Protocol."

Further Reading

• Don’t Digitize Dung Management — a Pioneer Spirit reflection on the trap of putting new tech on top of broken processes without daring to rethink them.

• The Zuckerberg Millennial Memo (2019) — an internal email where Mark Zuckerberg predicted millennials and Gen Z would soon run America’s institutions, and that the shift would come faster and harder than expected.