(by Alessandro Capezzuoli) Digitization, thanks to huge European funding destined for digital transformation, will soon become a catchphrase and will occupy the media spaces inevitably left empty by the pandemic. The words "contagions", "gatherings" and "social distancing" will be replaced by the word "digital", which will accompany any other word, including pastiera or ragù.

The digital defensive bureaucracy (BDD) does not belong to the profusion of terms and acronyms used to talk about digitization, perhaps because it would not be a boast to admit that, in Italy, one of the few things that has been successfully digitally transformed is it, the bureaucracy. defensive, that kind of widespread malpractice known from the Manzonian times of Don Abbondio.

The BDD, acronym of which I claim paternity, is a strategy that is implemented without real rules, but through a series of behaviors, procedures and practices designed specifically to protect an institution and its representatives through a set of slow, convoluted and ineffective mechanisms, but formally perfect, which allow, in case of need, to shift the responsibility onto someone else to the point of confusing the waters to the point that it is no longer possible to identify who is responsible for what.  

It is widespread everywhere and applied to any context: from public data dissemination policies to the provision of services to citizens. Anyone who "practices" the defensive bureaucracy contributes to transforming any logical flow into a kind of tortuous and illogical path that complicates processes, even the simplest ones, at the root. The defensive bureaucracy prevails over technology and in fact makes it difficult to talk about a real digitization of the country, because there is no technology that can change the collective malpractice. A criminal with the aim of cheating others can deceive others through the web or through a false uniform: the means change, but the goal remains the same.

To understand how BDD is implemented, it is worth reading a book written by Andrea Camilleri and entitled "The concession of the telephone". It is a novel in which the story of a merchant struggling with an innocent request is told: to obtain the concession of a telephone line to connect the warehouse of his business with the home of his father-in-law.

In the novel, what seemed to be a simple formality, thanks to a series of misunderstandings, mafia collusions, bureaucratic quibbles, inaccuracies in the documents exchanged between the protagonist and numerous ambiguous, unprepared and corrupt characters, turns into a grotesque farce. In the end, the only innocent, the one who had asked for the concession of the telephone, is accused of being a subversive and of having a clandestine relationship with the wife of the father-in-law (which is also true), who, having discovered the affair by chance and the real reason for the request to install the telephone line kills him. In all this, the carabinieri, previously punished for persecuting the victim, omitting some facts and inventing others, reconstruct the killing as they please, to prove that the protagonist's death was due to an awkward attempt to build a bomb to be used. in an attack, corroborating the charge of subversion.

This story, set at the end of the nineteenth century, is more relevant than ever and does not differ much from reality. Moreover, it allows you to imagine what would happen if a set of technological tools were replaced by paper documents, such as the SPID, the PEC or an application for archiving and digital conservation of electronic documents.

Nothing different would happen: the epilogue would be exactly the same because technology becomes ineffective if it is inserted into a patchy, murky and ungovernable process. Adapting the fictional theme to modern times, the concession of the telephone could be assimilated to the request for citizenship income, the request for a transfer of residence or the provision of any service, for example in public health.

A specialist visit can be requested through the CUP, but in some cases, to speed up the process, you can also ask the child of a friend at the same time, who knows a loophole and suggests filling out a separate form, to be digitally signed and send by pec to a certain address, but for security also to be printed and delivered by hand, after having duly signed it. If the paper copy of the document is accompanied by a nice Christmas basket, all the better, the important thing is that everything is formally regular.

One of the best results obtained from the digitization of the defensive bureaucracy is precisely this: the possibility of demonstrating to a judge or a hierarchical superior the formal regularity of the procedures adopted, through evidence to be shown, to place the blame on someone else. In most cases, the only means citizens have to survive BDD is connivance coupled with some loophole. The paradox is that those responsible for this situation do not exist.

To digitally transform Italy it would be necessary first of all to eliminate the bureaucracy. To eliminate the bureaucracy it is necessary to give confidence to the citizens. To give citizens trust it is necessary to make them responsible and aware through effective and long-term cultural investments. To make cultural investments it is necessary that the representatives of the state have a culture different from that of the citizens. But the citizens are the state ...

In short, to see a real digitization completed, you need to arm yourself with patience and irony, and, above all, you must never lose sight of that cultural aspect that distinguishes us and that Pirandello had masterfully described in the book “The old and the young”.
"And the Continentals had come down to civilize them: the new soldiers descended, that infamous column commanded by a renegade, the Hungarian Colonel Eberhardt, who came to Sicily for the first time with Garibaldi and then among his shooters in Aspromonte, and that another lieutenant Savoyardo Dupuy, the fireman; dropped all the rejects of the bureaucracy; and quarrels and duels and savage scenes; and the Medici prefecture, and the military courts, and the thefts, assassinations, robberies, plotted and executed by the new police in the name of the Royal Government; and falsification and theft of documents and ignominious political trials: the whole first government of the parliamentary Right! And then the Left came to power, and it too had begun with exceptional provisions for Sicily; and usurpations and frauds and extortions and scandalous favors and scandalous waste of public money; prefects, delegates, magistrates placed at the service of ministerial deputies, and shameless clienteles and electoral fraud; crazy spending, degrading courtesan; the oppression of the vanquished and the workers, assisted and protected by the law, and assured impunity for the oppressors ... "

Alessandro Capezzuoli, ISTAT official and manager of the Aidr professions and skills data observatory

The defensive digital bureaucracy