The future is still here: it just isn't evenly distributed, as futurist William Gibson said. And so, dammit, is the past. In 1677, the Brits passed a law saying that contracts had to be signed (before that, people mostly used seals). Now, 350 years later, we're passing a new law saying that e-signatures are OK.
That's a good thing, because signatures have the problem that they only operate retrospectively. The courier doesn't look at what you've scribbled on their tablet and say "Hold on, that's not Denis Moriarty's signature! Give that Amazon package back!"
No, it's only when people are actually up on charges that the coppers start looking at the bottom of their documents to see if they've been forging names, and that's a little late.
So one historical relic is going the way of the dodo (which is an unfair idiom, as I have no principled objection to dodos and would rather like to have them back). What others should follow it?
- Cheques don't have far to go. They have all the troubles of signatures, and others that go with being physical pieces of paper that have to be packaged and transported and transcribed. Not-for-profits, which have fought to keep them because some of their older donors don't know how to give online, are just going to have to cope. (Bias warning: Our Community runs GiveNow, an online donation service, and a very good one.)
- Talking of physical pieces of paper, property title deeds are getting a bit long in the tooth. The central register should be the master copy, and the actual paper scroll no more than a memory aid. And yes, we'll need to tighten up e-security, here as elsewhere, and we should be getting right down to it now rather than pretending the old ways are still viable.
- Coincidentally, the 1660s was about the time when wigs became fashionable in England's Cavalier Parliament. They're still on display, little altered, in various Australian law courts, and they're well beyond their use-by date. They're said to depersonalise law folk so they don't attract personal hostility, but it would be cheaper and just as effective to use Groucho masks. Away with these historical clown costumes! Also other legal detritus such as King's Counsel as a title of honour for senior barristers.
- Also kings, while we're about it.
- Getting back to items of clothing, the Barbie movie has underlined the utter improbability of the high heel as an approximation to the human foot. Into the dustbin of history with it! Also ballet shoes. Toes want to splay!
- Business suits! The dress uniform of patriarchy.
- Among the things that have been utterly superseded by technological improvement, of course, is the watch. Any smartphone today can provide a degree of timekeeping accuracy that would have any previous generation weak at the knees. And the human race has reacted not by putting aside its old gewgaws but my converting them into pointless status symbols, tokens of conspicuous consumption to advertise the corruption of religious leaders and the arrogance of plutocrats. Let's see them hanging on pitchforks. (The watches, that is. In the first instance.)
- And internal combustion cars. Long overdue for transport museums.
- The Australian constitution. It didn't take the Voice debate to demonstrate that the white colonial agenda wasn't fit for purpose. I'd hoped that having Barnaby Joyce kicked out of the parliament on citizenship grounds might have convinced the Coalition that the constitution was out of date, out of touch, and deeply flawed, but no, they went right on pretending that it had been handed down from the mountain on stone tablets, if not from the hand of god then at least from that of Queen Victoria.
I'm not a fanatical reformer, mind you, iconoclastically ripping down ancient survivals wherever I see them. I think they should bring back urns on buildings, for instance. A touch of fun. I can't see why we gave up the hat - as a baldie, I worry a lot about melanomas of the scalp - and I feel sorry for the children of today, never to receive a snail mail letter from a pen-pal, with real stamps on it.
But Australians have got to get over this belief that everything old - our every fetter, every gag, every prejudice, every stain, every set of hobbles - is a token of national pride. Is it so hard to believe that we can do better? Let's start with dumping the signature and bringing in the Voice.
- Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise that helps Australia's 600,000 not-for-profits.
