This country is the best place in the world to become a digital native
The
pandemic has seen a proliferation of digital bureaucracy, adding to the
inconveniences of everyday life and travel.
Perhaps
all the new apps, QR codes and endless clicking haven’t fazed the web wizards.
But what of the millions of digital dinosaurs like me who don’t worship our
gadgets? If even my nimble children stumbled down the rabbit hole of the
British government’s online Passenger Locator Form and failed to find the right
Covid PCR test providers due to badly designed IT, what chance do I have?
One
answer is go to Estonia, the Baltic republic with a tiny population (just more
than 1.3 million people), high-tech achievements and more vaulting
international ambitions. Here you can become a naturalized digital citizen,
with instant access to all the state’s services, without a geek’s expertise.
“For
everybody under the age of 35, digital comes naturally. For everybody else it
goes against nature,” says Kaja Kallas, Estonia’s prime minister, who I visited
in Tallinn, the capital of the Baltic’s “Digital Republic,” last week.
Kallas,
often compared to the unstuffy prime minister Birgitte Nyborg in the Danish TV
drama Borgen, answers questions in English more fluently than Boris Johnson at
the House of Commons Despatch box. Whereas the U.K. prime minister spouts
Churchill-isms, she quotes from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Although
her family played a leading role in both of Estonia’s independence movements
from neighboring Russia, in 1919 and 1991, Kallas has her eyes fixed firmly on
the future. She’s championing a national project to overcome the great digital
divides that arise from generational differences (my recently deceased mother
in her nineties couldn’t operate a mobile phone) as well as socioeconomic ones.
Her goal is to narrow the gap between the analogue oldies and digital youth.
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