Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
Parts of Silicon Valley want to live on Mars; real-time data streams and AI are the pulse of Shenzhen, China's smart city. In Germany, by contrast, the story of progress mostly ends in front of a device that, like no other, has become the coffin nail of our stagnation: the printer.
It is a local election in one of the wealthiest German states, and in the state capital you are responsible for your party’s nominations. The lists and candidate details are entered online, ready to be submitted. But the process breaks down on the last metre, because the digitisation of the administration comes to an abrupt halt. Submitting nominations at the electoral office requires physical paper: from data transfer at the speed of light to data transfer with an inkjet.
A classic digital media break? Possibly. But behind it lies more than a procedural weakness or an unwillingness to renew. It is the symptom of an institutional anxiety disorder. The necessity of a printer reveals a structure so driven by the worry of a legal formal error or a challenge that it pushes back the actual purpose: easing political participation through innovation.
Why is the preservation of what exists usually more important than possible progress? The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, founders of Prospect Theory, found in their studies that people feel losses much more strongly than equivalent gains. In this so-called loss aversion, the pain over what is lost weighs roughly twice as heavily as the joy over what is won. People therefore avoid situations that carry such a risk. Neuropsychological studies show that an expected loss triggers a heightened anxiety reaction in the amygdala, the centre for emotional processing in the brain.
The logics of administration act here as an accelerant of emotion. They amplify exactly the risk reactions people already have. This is not least because efficiency gains are barely rewarded, while (procedural) errors are punished disproportionately. In the head of the decision-maker, possible losses such as an electoral challenge are therefore much more present and weightier than advantages like citizen-friendliness and time savings. A status-quo bias arises: don’t know it, don’t need it, probably dangerous anyway.
The psychologist E. Tory Higgins took up this fixation on damage containment in his Regulatory Focus Theory. We operate almost without exception in the Higgins prevention focus. Safety, a sense of duty, and the avoidance of mistakes have top priority. The aim is „non-loss”, the absence of losses in the sense of Prospect Theory.
Against that stands the promotion focus, oriented toward growth and new achievements. Not freedom from error but progress is the measure. While Silicon Valley asks itself „what could we achieve?”, the German bureaucracy asks itself „what could we lose?”. The result is a learned, institutional paralysis. In the state capital one sticks with the status quo not because it is better, but because the possible risks of a change feel threatening. In complex organisations this leads to paralysis. Barely any actor has the authority to push innovations through against resistance. To postpone progress, by contrast, the misgivings of a single person suffice.
Loss aversion and the prevention focus have left deep traces not only in people, but also in political self-understanding. Especially in wide parts of German liberalism. The liberal idea once promised creativity and innovation. Today the battering ram of progress is merely a relic of what has been achieved. Current liberal thinking in Germany has retreated into a defensive posture of protection. Liberalism acts as a defence against impositions. Freedom exhausts itself in the rule that the state cannot prescribe anything new, while at the same time the protection of what has been achieved is treated as sacrosanct. It is a liberalism of safeguarding, not of renewal. We discuss data protection before we have determined the value of data. We invoke the risks of artificial intelligence before we have even written one line of code for a municipal project.
The Anglo-American discourse of Progress Studies, by contrast, is a discourse on freedom as enablement, as permission to experiment. „Trial and Error”, the promise of the freedom to fail. A promise that doubtlessly has its weaknesses. But also its strengths. Strengths that, in the German discourse of freedom as protection from risk and loss, are frowned upon, indeed appear almost illegal. Here, failure is no data point that could be used, no starting point for transformative success. Here, failure is the waste of tax money, a political failure. In Germany, caution counts as „responsible”, risk as „rash” and „reckless”.
Yet a liberalism that only defends the status quo loses its most important promise: the hope for a richer and more efficient future. To that also belongs a narrative of abundance. Without it, freedom remains only the freedom to choose among various shortages. In Progress Studies, preventing a progress that could create abundance counts as almost morally indefensible. We need, therefore, a liberalism that sets against the narrative of distributive justice a narrative of abundance. Where things are abundant, the price of error also falls.
The defensive conception of freedom flows into a typically German paradox: planning optimism. While wishful thinking and detachment from reality cheerfully ignore past experience at the drawing board and, out of worry about uncertainty, throw themselves into deceptive plans, progress has long been paralysed. We labour under the illusion that it can be worked out down to the last detail before it happens. Elsewhere, iteration, cycles of development, test, feedback, and adjustment, is the standard; here, the Eisenhower line „plans are nothing, planning is everything” is turned into the absurd. A project has to be finished before it has begun. But whoever cannot fail also cannot begin. Whoever cannot make mistakes also cannot dare anything new.
Progress, however, is not a linear process that can be planned from far in advance. Progress is dynamic, complex, situational, and above all: not foreseeable. It depends on feedback from practice. Without the readiness to correct the plan along the way, we stay on the side track, with an already stamped ticket in our hand, for a train that never runs.
How then do we heal a system, a structure, that has retreated behind its fear of risks and mistakes? Through institutional behavioural therapy: one that drops the prevention focus and switches to the promotion focus, so that the lens can capture the possibilities.
We have to create, without fuss, spaces in which risk is welcome and failure is desired. Spaces in which „Trial and Error” becomes the „ora et labora” of the creative and the brave. Spaces in which mistakes are no failure, in which the legal department has no veto. We need enclaves of innovation that bureaucracy has no right to enter. For business, work on regulatory sandboxes has been under way for some years; but the field for experimentation has to be opened up earlier, in the responsible authorities themselves. Their fear holds the process back.
The incentive structures in the administration require a reversal. Instead of feeding loss aversion through punishments for even the smallest mistakes, we need a reward procedure for successful accelerations. Administration as enabler, not as preventer. Actors as visionaries, not as hesitators. We need not only an institutional tolerance for error, but also a reversal of the burden of proof. It is not for the citizen to prove that her or his innovation is harmless; the authority has to prove that the innovation is harmful. Without objection within a short time, approval counts as granted.
These proposals, however, are only fruitful if they meet with a fundamentally changed understanding of progress.
Progress needs the courage for incompleteness. If we want to reconnect liberalism to its original promise of innovation, we have to replace the fear of risk. With appetite for shaping, with joy in the unfinished, with curiosity for the possible. We have to reprogram the system from „prevention” to „promotion”. Also, or precisely, because in the end it means having the courage to pull the plug on the printer. Even when the digital possibilities are not yet 100 percent free of risk.
