Thursday 21 April 2016

E-stonia: Country Using Technology to Rebrand Itself as the Anti-Russia (The Guardian)

Here's a very good interview with President Ilves published in the Guardian today.


Excerpt:
It’s not often that a European head of state uses the “radical postmodernist philosophy” of Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard to bash a hostile superpower. But then Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Estonia’s defiantly erudite president of nearly 10 years, is no ordinary head of state.

Ilves is trying to reinvent Estonia as the brightly lit antithesis of Russia, and in today’s confessional age of Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks and the Panama Papers, claims he is baking transparency and accountability into a new kind of digital civic operating system.

Ilves is known for his controversial opinions on everything from Snowden and internet privacy to cyberwarfare and Vladimir Putin’s postmodernist state, which have apparently, transformed the 63-year-old into a “regional sex symbol”.

To read the full article, please click here: