If my social media timeline is any indication I would swear that the Estonian e-hype machine is running at full steam. Post after post attempts to convince the gullible reader who knows nothing about Estonia, that Estonia is some fucking e-walhalla. Admittedly only two years ago, I was fooled by it myself, believing Estonia was some wonderful e-riik aptly referred to as e-Estonia.
That was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. It turns out Estonia is not at all too keen on truly disruptive innovation, the instinct reaction of Estonian officials is to clamp down on it and scare people away from it. In their efforts to do so, it turns out they also have no qualms to violate basic human rights. Thankfully I have by now managed to bring my family and myself to safety in another country, but as I am trying to recover from the shock, it turns out I contracted an allergy, an allergy to overhyped Estonian e-bullshit.
Let’s start by analyzing some typical misplaced arrogance, like the slogan “e-Estonia: The land for unicorns”. Yeah, not just a land, it really says the land. For readers who are not aware, a unicorn is a startup valued at more than 1 billion Dollars based on fundraising. Since the term unicorn appears often in tech circles and sounds cool, someone working for an Estonian PR department probably thought: how can we reuse the unicorn thingy to promote Estonia? Man, aren’t we original!
The shameless copying and appropriation isn’t even the worst thing, it’s that the entire message is total and utter bullshit. Estonia doesn’t have the workforce to welcome a unicorn. Importing a workforce is also problematic, because of Estonia’s immigration policies, as well as the unfortunate, all too pervasive negative attitudes towards people with skin tones that differ even slightly from the local standard. Attitudes which have been strongly reinforced by a huge media led scare that Estonia might have to welcome a few hundred non-European refugees. Sorry, “welcome” is not the right word, but you know what I mean. A scare that was exaggerated to near biblical proportions by EKRE, who seem to believe these refugees spell the end of Estonian culture and way of life.
Thus we can start by narrowing the potential unicorns down to pure white unicorns, and while we’re at it also pure hetero unicorns. This problem in itself leaves us with approximately zero candidate unicorns according to my estimate.
That’s before we bring the 8 month long winters, and Tallinn’s high rate of potholes per sqaure meter of road, into the equation. That, must somehow compete with California’s near endless sunshine. Though on the plus side it can’t be denied that there aren’t positive sides for young foreign males, as well as several popular watering holes in Tallinn (some of which the city government is trying to run out of business as we speak). But I doubt any of that can really tip the scales.
Ah, but I hear you say, there could be local unicorns, just look at Transferwise, you fucker! Right, you mean that startup by two Estonians who wasted no time to get the fuck out and operate from London instead, where it is regulated under UK law?
Nah, sorry, Estonia is not a land for unicorns, and certainly not THE land for unicorns. Though it may occasionally give birth to a future unicorn, that will move to London or Silicon Valley before it is potty trained.
Next example. Do you know the tired old meme that goes something like this: Uber is the biggest taxi company but owns no taxis, Facebook is the largest publisher but creates no content, AirBnb is the largest hotelier but owns no property, etc… Jeez, yeah it’s so deep you can spend a whole 3 seconds pondering what it means.
Once the meme had been used more often than there are nodes on the Internet, someone in Estonia must have gotten the bright idea to appropriate the meme’s cool, or what remained of it, for the purpose of promoting Estonia.
The result was a slide with the same examples, but added to it was a claim that Estonia is “the world’s largest country, has 1.3 million physical residents”.
I am not kidding! Estonia’s so-called CIO has been showing this e-Apples and Oranges comparison at every presentation he gave since Microsoft dismembered Skype.
For starters I don’t need to tell anyone that Estonia is not, and never will be, the largest country in the world, secondly 1.3 million of something is not at all like no something. These facts in itself already break the consistency of the meme. Then I caught myself thinking that the logic of the meme would rather suggest something along the lines of: the largest country in the world, with no territory. Now, at this point, don’t say that Vladimir would gladly oblige to help make the meme more consistent, that’s not nice.
Of course, I get that it refers to the ID card program for non-residents, or “e-residency” in Estonian e-hype lingo. Of course non-residents aren’t really residents, and most of these card holders will rarely or never use it, but let’s pretend for a moment that holding a piece of plastic with a chip from Estonia makes you some sort of resident. Yes, I don’t doubt some non-residents might want to use an ID card to access Estonian state services, but let’s not over exaggerate the expected result to be bigger than the population of China or India!
Though I guess it must have felt good during circle jerk sessions.