If governments actually employed most of the developers who build their products, and cut out most of the private middlemen consultants, managers, sales staff etc they could 1) build an engineering capability without surveillance capitalism, focused on data security and privacy 2) save money 4) create productivity multipliers by unifying and sharing code for common functions across governments around the world 5) return our tax dollars to us through FOSS software that benefit us, instead of enriching big tech corporations already richer and more powerful than most nation states.

For example, covid tracking apps — instead of every dumb cunt government paying tens/hundreds of millions for consultants to reinvent the wheel or reskin someone else’s code, they could have had in house devs coordinate common FOSS codebases and collectively saved 80% of the cost. This is the same for most services using proprietary software.

Politicians are criminally corrupt idiots though, so they’ll continue enriching big tech and surveillance capitalism at the expense of civilisation.