If you could measure a country’s worth by the number of vapid start-ups it has produced, Italy would come up short. While Britain once produced half a million mostly obscure technology companies over the course of a single year, Italy has only just edged nine thousand in total.

So, when new Italian prime minister Mario Draghi promised to expand on his predecessor’s work of “digitalizing” Italian infrastructure and encouraging foreign investment, pundits foamed approvingly. Entrepreneur Matteo Berlucchi hailed the premiership of Draghi, the former chief of the European Central Bank, as an “incredibly exciting opportunity,” while Vittorio Colao, a former Vodafone executive and Italy’s new minister of innovation, had already spent pretty much the whole year tweeting breathlessly about innovation, or, as he puts it in his imported LinkedIn-ese, “#innovation.”

But while it is true that much of Italian life is blighted by technological inefficiencies — vendors don’t accept debit card, bus routes bear no earthly relation to their schedules on Google Maps, local government seems scarcely able to use email — the digitalizzazione trope has proven over the years to be an obscenely wasteful canard, a dead horse that has been beaten, exhumed, revived, and then beaten again.