Jennifer Pahlka: observation

Transcript context

…What do you think you learned from that being such a big part of your life? That’s a good question. I went from working in essentially little bureaucracies — my first job out of college, I worked in a child welfare agency, and then at a healthcare think tank. Then I went away for a year and came back, and I got this job in tech. It was amazing to me how creative game developers are. They have this completely unconstrained ability to just imagine entirely different worlds, and of course, the economies of those worlds and build the systems that simulate all sorts of aspects of our lives. Then I moved from that into this Web 2.0 era, and then went back into government. I think what I kept with me is that you can imagine fundamentally different things. This is an imagination that is so powerful. The quote I chose for the book Recoding America is a David Graeber quote: “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.” I think I got that from the designers of Ultima Online. My first husband was on the game Spore. It was a Will Wright game. You can have a whole different world, and once you realize that, all these constraints in our daily lives — you realize they’re manufactured. I think we have a little bit of that right now. This is going to sound extremely boring compared to what I just said, but since we’ve been touching on federalism a little bit — you talk about the federal civil service and people are like, “It’s a thing. It can’t change. It hasn’t changed since 1978 really, little changes here and there.” But we don’t just have the federal civil service. We have 50 civil services in states that are wildly different. Some states have at-will employment. We can’t imagine that in the federal civil service, and I’m not advocating for that, but I am advocating for us getting out of the trap of “this is the only way it can be” when clearly, even in our own country, there are 50 different models that we could pull from. Which do you think is our best-run state?…

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