Francis Maude seeks future in Estonia

Ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken poses
for the Brave New World Tourist Authority

Last time it was California, the Granola state, take away the nuts and the fruits and you're still left with the flakes.

Ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken trundled Francis Maude round the creators of the brave new world, including Google, where the unfortunate minister was walked through the new identity ecosystem, whatever that means, please see The behaviour of the Cabinet Office is infantile.

This time it's Estonia. In his blog post Estonia’s technology economy and online service provision- back to the future? the ex-Guardian man explains: "We saw how Estonia had devised an Identity system which works for them, and we left with a keen understanding of how all this underpins the culture and economic growth".

A delightful country by all accounts where everything is computerised and in the cloud. So much so that Estonia was brought to its knees in 2007 by nothing more than a DDoS attack, a distributed denial of service attack. (This fact is currently the subject of Guardian revisionism, How tiny Estonia stepped out of USSR's shadow to become an internet titan. It remains a fact.)

That is the glorious future envisaged for our knees by ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken, now a Colonel in the feared Kabinet Offiski's Government Digital Service (GDS), who tweets "I think I may stay in Estonia forever. Which may be good news at GDS....". Please ...

Has Francis Maude fallen for it?